Source Fource? Sounds suspiciously similar to Source Forge... Could MS be poking fun at the OSS community , could the lame-ness is sarcastic and intentional ?
Sometimes though, even competent users will not go to Linux or MacOS X. I usually work with microscopes and other optical equipment. None of the major companies provides any linux drivers for the controllers of the 50 different optical components. Do I spend my time doing research , or do I bother reverse engineering the existing drivers to run those that work on Linux?
For people in the scientific community, running Linux when there is a need to is not a problem. In fact, most advanced computing is done on a Posix-based machines. On the desktop, however, people just don't want to spend the time tweaking Linux infinitely until it does things right. Not to mention that the open-source software available on Linux is still _not_ up to the mark, running multiple monitors on X is still a pain etc. As examples, GIMP is not Photoshop, OpenOffice.org does not compare with MS Office 2007 (esp. Powerpoint-wise). I was a blatant OpenOffice evangelist, but have had to eat my own words when MS Office 2007 came out. This is not about the UI, this is about capability.
I wanted to emphasize, that lack of competency is not the only reason people don't take up Linux. There people for whom computers are a tool/means to an end, and not the end itself. And they cannot be bothered to fix/tweak/expand Linux when Windows does the job perfectly well (yes, it does).
I propose a different perspective. Have any of you actually thought, that all instances of cooperation of the US with China or India may not necessarily involve the other two countries supplying the "cheap labour". If you RTFA, NASA is actually providing 11 instruments to be on board the moon vehicle. No doubt , it will provide its knowledgebase as well. ISRO and NASA have a long history of co-operation.
Satellites are not launched everyday, moon missions still more infrequently. The usual way to obtain access to space for whatever reasons is often to provide some payload to a party who's going to launch a vehicle anyway. Not too long ago, India launched a military satellite for Israel. What India is providing here, is the excellent satellite launching infrastructure it has due to an active space program. The US space program was always geared towards manned-missions.
Let me end this rant by saying that developments in all fields do not have to reflect the trends in IT (where India does provide a cheap back-office). It's time people got off the idea that the US always provides the money, the knowledge, while other countries are sources of cheap brainless workers. Appreciate the achievements of others.
The age old saying that goes with pilots, drivers and other sophisticated tool users : the way to get the best out is "to feel one with the machine". This seems to be scientific proof of what people already intuitively know!
Yes but the point is , we wont let the material burn itself and everything around it. The material would start to get hot, but we will couple it to a thermoelectric/sterling etc. engine to generate power from the absorbed energy. The tubes should reach some steady state temperature and we have theoretically much more efficient light-based power source.
Windows needs your permission to look at dark matter.
Allow or Cancel ?
If you do not trust this dark matter, do not run this operation. Dark Matter can potentially harm your computer.
While depicting the apparent linearity to show no "jump" in productivity, the article you mentioned is actually comparing US vs. non-US paper output, which is showing a linear relationship.
What is to say that non-US science contributors are also received similar hikes in funding ? Where are the numbers on that? Where are the error bars on the graph ? What methods did he use to arrive at the conclusion, first , that the 4 keywords he used correctly reflect the quantity of papers generated ? Is there a standard curve that shows these keywords are good measurement parameters? I reckon that if he would have used the "-omics" words, such as proteomics, he would seen an exponential increase far in excess of what the funding justifies. Buzzwords are a bad strategy to assess research output. Every scientist knows that.
I know you did not write that article, but the article appears under a website called "The Scientist" , is it only I who sees the irony here? The article makes a flawed argument based on flawed methods. You point may be valid, but let's see some other evidence.
RTFA. Its a prototype. HTC put it together. Take a look at other phones by HTC (people who manufacture the O2 XDA phones). They currently come with Windows Mobile on them. It will be great to have Android on them.
Actually, it depends what you're talking about. A species is defined *loosely* as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. However, more precise and increasingly quantitative definitions are possible when looking at molecular markers and such. It would depend on the degree of stringency required for the particular problem being addressed. Since in this case, the giraffe populations are reproductively isolated in the wild, even though there is presuably no geographic isolation, they could be classified as separate species.
For example, several members of the Canis genus can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. However, wolves and jackals are typically classified as separate species.
You do not need to "rip" flvs. Most multi-format players out there such as Mplayer, VLC Player, Media Player Classic, or Zoom Player already play FLVs. Downloading the FLV is simplified by Firefox extensions such as this, or websites such as this.
No seriously, the fact that obtaining FLVs give you trouble has to be an exceptional case, considering your credentials as a computer -friendly (at least) person.
So for example, you're not hard-coded to have X millimeter thick muscles, or a certain bone density, or exactly this pattern of capillaries. You're built to react to how much do you need.
While that may be correct in the sense that there are usually numerous feedbacks that regulate the nature of biological systems, there are several situations when average parameters such as the size of organs or density of tissues are merely a result of stochastic processes settling on some kind of local thermodynamic minima in terms of development.
For example, over-expression of human proteins in plants is possible. Hardly anyone will argue that the plants need it. They produce it only because the activity does not break the plants system.
More accurately , biology doesn't care what you need. Your particular biology is just one of many possible paths in a molecular or ecological parameter space - one of many paths that includes the organism "existing" for a duration of time that we call normal. Biology is what just works.
Turn the perspective around a bit. Life (biological, carbon-based, "wet") can be thought of as a system which has the property of maintenance and duplication of information for a defined duration - a region of lower entropy (if you will) that seeds other regions of lower entropy, in a background littered with existing complex and chaotic systems (the ecosystem around, if we are talking of one cell, or the geochemical cycles). The system is able to seed others like itself of course, because of the specific nature of its environment, and the properties of the environment are utilized just as much to do the seeding. This definition meshes the "living" and non-"living".
In that sense, tractors and aeroplanes are again regions of lower entropy (as opposed to chunks of metal and plastic from which they came), produced as a result of the environment they are in (human's being the last step in the formation of an attractor called the "tractor" system, lets say.) One could argue that tractors and aeroplanes cause such effects on the environment as to allow the creation of new tractors and aeroplanes. Mechanistically from a human-centric view, tractors and aeroplanes allow productivity to rise, causing humans to prosper, and to make *more* tractors and aeroplanes.
Whether information of the tractor's nature is trasnmitted to its seeded offspring (heredity) is not so hard to explain. When a design of a tractor or aeroplanes is especially suitable, it is likely that the next generation of tractors will follow the same trend. Again, from a human centric point of view, we might change the design true , but wouldn't that be "environmental factors scrambling the information"...a.k.a mutation.
The term life thus really has no meaning. It is a term that loosely defines complexity and presumed autonomy of a system. Any system complex enough to be beyond our understanding is magic. Could well be, that any system complex and invisible enough to be beyond our understanding and vision, is alive. Don't people always say "it has a mind of its own":)
While it is rather unfortunate for Mr.Abbas, Google and Yahoo are completely justified in not wishing to be part of his activism/propaganda (as they case may be depending on your interpretation and inclinations).
In this case, Mr. Abbas is just whining, but any serious activism on the Internet depends on hosting your own server. That Mr.Abbas claims to spend 3 years on the Internet, without noticing that his activities make him subject to various ejections from all kind of services, cast a doubt on his ability to notice what is happening in the real world in general. These kinds of ejections are not new and all of us have heard stories of piracy sites (illegal, in a different way)being taken down by their web hosts.
If companies chose to do this for services owned by them, it is NOT censorship. If some party arm-twists the companies into doing it, then that party is exercising censorship. Mr.Abbas' battle is with such a third-party. Google and Yahoo are hardly to be blamed for this.
No, downloading music is not like stealing cars. Because the commodity being sold in the case of music is , by its fundamental nature - information. Information is a fluid, constantly in flux. Provided that suitable social, electronic (etc.) systems exist, information will flow, morph, reproduce, give rise to new information. This is why the only way to ensure that your information is private is to keep it OFF such systems.
Now, when you buy a car, it is a physical object, and is not going to give rise to a new car on its own. Neither can your neighbour have access to that car and make an identical one in any case without buying parts on his own and with substantial investment.
In the age we have today, the cost of duplicating information of any kind is virtually nil. An analogy is in the use of language. Like MP3s, the cost of learning words other people have used is nil, and does not affect the information of the word as held by the original speaker. You don't see the Oxford dictionary or anyone for that matter trying to sell you words, or saying that if you use a certain word that they invented you must pay for it. (Trademarking is different because the fears there are not so much a semantic issue, but an issue of identity).
The same argument can be extended to IP Laws and such, and this is why the only real way to protect a patent is to keep some crucial bit of information or expertise out of the public domain (a.k.a proprietary).
Now music, is viral information that is intended to be used by the masses, and therefore releasing it is necessary for its existence. This requirement inherently implies that it will be duplicated. What the music industry is fighting, is a contradiction between what they want, and the nature of their product. Guess who's going to win?
You see, a clone is by definition a genetically identical organism. Anything else is an improvised version.
The way things are going :
1] your memory and information is your brain will one day be downloadable to an electronic databank
2] improvised biological versions of you will substantially enhance the genepool of the species and perform your functions more efficiently....well, then what do we need you for anymore?
PS: Excuse the sci-fi-ish nature of the post.
Is Miro completely pointless?
I hadn't heard of it, and just downloaded it at a mere 12 kbps (maybe it was the/. effect).
It didn't seem to do anything more than what my Feed aggregator/browser already did. Nor did I find the "plays any video" tagline impressive. Don't most people already have MPC/Codec Packs/MPlayer/VLC do "play any video" on their computers? It didn't look like it showed me too many videos either, most of the default loaded channels had only one video.
In the world of RSS, Ajax-enable video websites, what does Miro do that my browser with a proper extension set, can't ?
Am I missing something here?
There is only one problem. Ethics are a subjective matter - that change with time, place, society and so on. In that respect, ethical conformity is a very poor argument for or against performing any action. It's survival of the fittest, and ethics by themselves just don't cut it in this game - unless they provide a significant advantage to the group as a whole. This, is again, a matter of debate.
The only reason to use any software is if it does the job the individual wants it to do while being affordable to the said individual. If a user chooses a particular, in the long run they will bear the consequences or rewards of their judgment. Period.
In my view, Microsoft's failures have mainly been their _appearance_ as an abusive monopoly. Fitness demands that in the current environment of the world, they need to be discrete in whatever "underhanded" tactics they follow. Their failure to follow this premise, has caused a "ganging-up" effect on them by their competitors, who are no doubt doing-so because it is to their advantage.
Returning back the article, if a person wants to use a $200 PC and run $2500 worth of software on it, who are we to say that's stupid ? There are plenty of scenarios where that is the most efficient thing to do - for example, when gifting my grandfather a computer who writes text on a computer but has only ever managed to do that in MS Word. Even Wordpad feels alien to him. At his age, he doesn't give a rat's a*** about learning new stuff.
I presume your walled website is www.fishgame.com . I accessed the site, and it seems I can get through. I even almost ordered the Free Decals. I am definitely not based in North America.
So, is your website really walled? Or did you just want to get your website/.-ed.
I agree, with you completely, though, most research is not done by doctors, rather by biologists.
It's an extreme joke that "Doctors are to biologists, as Mechanics are to Engineers".:)
Slashdot Mirror
Source Fource? Sounds suspiciously similar to Source Forge... Could MS be poking fun at the OSS community , could the lame-ness is sarcastic and intentional ?
Sometimes though, even competent users will not go to Linux or MacOS X. I usually work with microscopes and other optical equipment. None of the major companies provides any linux drivers for the controllers of the 50 different optical components. Do I spend my time doing research , or do I bother reverse engineering the existing drivers to run those that work on Linux?
For people in the scientific community, running Linux when there is a need to is not a problem. In fact, most advanced computing is done on a Posix-based machines. On the desktop, however, people just don't want to spend the time tweaking Linux infinitely until it does things right. Not to mention that the open-source software available on Linux is still _not_ up to the mark, running multiple monitors on X is still a pain etc.
As examples, GIMP is not Photoshop, OpenOffice.org does not compare with MS Office 2007 (esp. Powerpoint-wise). I was a blatant OpenOffice evangelist, but have had to eat my own words when MS Office 2007 came out. This is not about the UI, this is about capability.
I wanted to emphasize, that lack of competency is not the only reason people don't take up Linux. There people for whom computers are a tool/means to an end, and not the end itself. And they cannot be bothered to fix/tweak/expand Linux when Windows does the job perfectly well (yes, it does).
Satellites are not launched everyday, moon missions still more infrequently. The usual way to obtain access to space for whatever reasons is often to provide some payload to a party who's going to launch a vehicle anyway. Not too long ago, India launched a military satellite for Israel. What India is providing here, is the excellent satellite launching infrastructure it has due to an active space program. The US space program was always geared towards manned-missions.
Let me end this rant by saying that developments in all fields do not have to reflect the trends in IT (where India does provide a cheap back-office). It's time people got off the idea that the US always provides the money, the knowledge, while other countries are sources of cheap brainless workers. Appreciate the achievements of others.
The age old saying that goes with pilots, drivers and other sophisticated tool users : the way to get the best out is "to feel one with the machine". This seems to be scientific proof of what people already intuitively know!
Yes but the point is , we wont let the material burn itself and everything around it. The material would start to get hot, but we will couple it to a thermoelectric/sterling etc. engine to generate power from the absorbed energy. The tubes should reach some steady state temperature and we have theoretically much more efficient light-based power source.
Windows needs your permission to look at dark matter.
Allow or Cancel ?
If you do not trust this dark matter, do not run this operation. Dark Matter can potentially harm your computer.
Except it's spelled "Gandhi".
But will the fence be white?
While depicting the apparent linearity to show no "jump" in productivity, the article you mentioned is actually comparing US vs. non-US paper output, which is showing a linear relationship.
What is to say that non-US science contributors are also received similar hikes in funding ? Where are the numbers on that? Where are the error bars on the graph ? What methods did he use to arrive at the conclusion, first , that the 4 keywords he used correctly reflect the quantity of papers generated ? Is there a standard curve that shows these keywords are good measurement parameters? I reckon that if he would have used the "-omics" words, such as proteomics, he would seen an exponential increase far in excess of what the funding justifies. Buzzwords are a bad strategy to assess research output. Every scientist knows that.
I know you did not write that article, but the article appears under a website called "The Scientist" , is it only I who sees the irony here? The article makes a flawed argument based on flawed methods. You point may be valid, but let's see some other evidence.
RTFA. Its a prototype. HTC put it together. Take a look at other phones by HTC (people who manufacture the O2 XDA phones). They currently come with Windows Mobile on them. It will be great to have Android on them.
Uh, I seem to have noticed that in India they look different because they are licensed and reprinted as a "sub-continental" or "indian edition.
Actually, it depends what you're talking about. A species is defined *loosely* as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. However, more precise and increasingly quantitative definitions are possible when looking at molecular markers and such. It would depend on the degree of stringency required for the particular problem being addressed. Since in this case, the giraffe populations are reproductively isolated in the wild, even though there is presuably no geographic isolation, they could be classified as separate species.
For example, several members of the Canis genus can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. However, wolves and jackals are typically classified as separate species.
Wishful thinking ?
No seriously, the fact that obtaining FLVs give you trouble has to be an exceptional case, considering your credentials as a computer -friendly (at least) person.
While that may be correct in the sense that there are usually numerous feedbacks that regulate the nature of biological systems, there are several situations when average parameters such as the size of organs or density of tissues are merely a result of stochastic processes settling on some kind of local thermodynamic minima in terms of development.
For example, over-expression of human proteins in plants is possible. Hardly anyone will argue that the plants need it. They produce it only because the activity does not break the plants system.
More accurately , biology doesn't care what you need. Your particular biology is just one of many possible paths in a molecular or ecological parameter space - one of many paths that includes the organism "existing" for a duration of time that we call normal. Biology is what just works.
Turn the perspective around a bit. Life (biological, carbon-based, "wet") can be thought of as a system which has the property of maintenance and duplication of information for a defined duration - a region of lower entropy (if you will) that seeds other regions of lower entropy, in a background littered with existing complex and chaotic systems (the ecosystem around, if we are talking of one cell, or the geochemical cycles). The system is able to seed others like itself of course, because of the specific nature of its environment, and the properties of the environment are utilized just as much to do the seeding. This definition meshes the "living" and non-"living". In that sense, tractors and aeroplanes are again regions of lower entropy (as opposed to chunks of metal and plastic from which they came), produced as a result of the environment they are in (human's being the last step in the formation of an attractor called the "tractor" system, lets say.) One could argue that tractors and aeroplanes cause such effects on the environment as to allow the creation of new tractors and aeroplanes. Mechanistically from a human-centric view, tractors and aeroplanes allow productivity to rise, causing humans to prosper, and to make *more* tractors and aeroplanes. Whether information of the tractor's nature is trasnmitted to its seeded offspring (heredity) is not so hard to explain. When a design of a tractor or aeroplanes is especially suitable, it is likely that the next generation of tractors will follow the same trend. Again, from a human centric point of view, we might change the design true , but wouldn't that be "environmental factors scrambling the information"...a.k.a mutation. The term life thus really has no meaning. It is a term that loosely defines complexity and presumed autonomy of a system. Any system complex enough to be beyond our understanding is magic. Could well be, that any system complex and invisible enough to be beyond our understanding and vision, is alive. Don't people always say "it has a mind of its own" :)
While it is rather unfortunate for Mr.Abbas, Google and Yahoo are completely justified in not wishing to be part of his activism/propaganda (as they case may be depending on your interpretation and inclinations).
In this case, Mr. Abbas is just whining, but any serious activism on the Internet depends on hosting your own server. That Mr.Abbas claims to spend 3 years on the Internet, without noticing that his activities make him subject to various ejections from all kind of services, cast a doubt on his ability to notice what is happening in the real world in general. These kinds of ejections are not new and all of us have heard stories of piracy sites (illegal, in a different way)being taken down by their web hosts.
If companies chose to do this for services owned by them, it is NOT censorship. If some party arm-twists the companies into doing it, then that party is exercising censorship. Mr.Abbas' battle is with such a third-party. Google and Yahoo are hardly to be blamed for this.
It seems like PloS One.org has been /.-ed.
No, downloading music is not like stealing cars. Because the commodity being sold in the case of music is , by its fundamental nature - information. Information is a fluid, constantly in flux. Provided that suitable social, electronic (etc.) systems exist, information will flow, morph, reproduce, give rise to new information. This is why the only way to ensure that your information is private is to keep it OFF such systems.
Now, when you buy a car, it is a physical object, and is not going to give rise to a new car on its own. Neither can your neighbour have access to that car and make an identical one in any case without buying parts on his own and with substantial investment.
In the age we have today, the cost of duplicating information of any kind is virtually nil. An analogy is in the use of language. Like MP3s, the cost of learning words other people have used is nil, and does not affect the information of the word as held by the original speaker. You don't see the Oxford dictionary or anyone for that matter trying to sell you words, or saying that if you use a certain word that they invented you must pay for it. (Trademarking is different because the fears there are not so much a semantic issue, but an issue of identity).
The same argument can be extended to IP Laws and such, and this is why the only real way to protect a patent is to keep some crucial bit of information or expertise out of the public domain (a.k.a proprietary).
Now music, is viral information that is intended to be used by the masses, and therefore releasing it is necessary for its existence. This requirement inherently implies that it will be duplicated. What the music industry is fighting, is a contradiction between what they want, and the nature of their product. Guess who's going to win?
You see, a clone is by definition a genetically identical organism. Anything else is an improvised version. The way things are going : 1] your memory and information is your brain will one day be downloadable to an electronic databank 2] improvised biological versions of you will substantially enhance the genepool of the species and perform your functions more efficiently. ...well, then what do we need you for anymore?
PS: Excuse the sci-fi-ish nature of the post.
Is Miro completely pointless? I hadn't heard of it, and just downloaded it at a mere 12 kbps (maybe it was the /. effect).
It didn't seem to do anything more than what my Feed aggregator/browser already did. Nor did I find the "plays any video" tagline impressive. Don't most people already have MPC/Codec Packs/MPlayer/VLC do "play any video" on their computers? It didn't look like it showed me too many videos either, most of the default loaded channels had only one video.
In the world of RSS, Ajax-enable video websites, what does Miro do that my browser with a proper extension set, can't ?
Am I missing something here?
The only reason to use any software is if it does the job the individual wants it to do while being affordable to the said individual. If a user chooses a particular, in the long run they will bear the consequences or rewards of their judgment. Period.
In my view, Microsoft's failures have mainly been their _appearance_ as an abusive monopoly. Fitness demands that in the current environment of the world, they need to be discrete in whatever "underhanded" tactics they follow. Their failure to follow this premise, has caused a "ganging-up" effect on them by their competitors, who are no doubt doing-so because it is to their advantage.
Returning back the article, if a person wants to use a $200 PC and run $2500 worth of software on it, who are we to say that's stupid ? There are plenty of scenarios where that is the most efficient thing to do - for example, when gifting my grandfather a computer who writes text on a computer but has only ever managed to do that in MS Word. Even Wordpad feels alien to him. At his age, he doesn't give a rat's a*** about learning new stuff.
I presume your walled website is www.fishgame.com . I accessed the site, and it seems I can get through. I even almost ordered the Free Decals. I am definitely not based in North America. So, is your website really walled? Or did you just want to get your website /.-ed.
Excuse me if I am wrong, but you developed aids vaccines along with a team comprising entirely of clinical medics(thats what Doctors are in Europe) ?
I agree, with you completely, though, most research is not done by doctors, rather by biologists. It's an extreme joke that "Doctors are to biologists, as Mechanics are to Engineers". :)