I found this site in ~2000 (about when India got TCP/IP in an affordable way) and I've been there ever since (though I only realised I could register much later). Its been the only site that I check every day for the last 10 years. That is amazing consistency for me!
Thanks and all the best with whatever you decide to do!
"All this matters to NASA because, by 2018 or so, astronauts are returning to the Moon. Unlike Apollo astronauts, who never experienced lunar sunrise, the next explorers are going to establish a permanent outpost. They'll be there in the morning when the storm sweeps by.
The wall of dust, if it exists, might be diaphanous, invisible, harmless. Or it could be a real problem, clogging spacesuits, coating surfaces and causing hardware to overheat.
Which will it be? Says Stubbs, "we've still got a lot to learn about the Moon."
Re:Hi- I'm the Author
on
Land of Lisp
·
· Score: 1
Hello Dr. Barski,
Thanks for taking part in this discussion - I appreciate it - it is always great to chat with the author of a book on a subject you like..! I have a problem that I am hoping you, as an author of a book that teaches a language, might have some insight into. Thanks for taking the time to read this:)
I've been on the internet in one way or another since the early 90's (I started out using bulletin board services, yahoo was a directory listing, and I used GOPHER/ARCHIE) on 14.4K and then 56K modems to start with - so I would like to think that I have some skill with technical stuff. However, I have tried and repeatedly failed over the years to learn any programming language -though I can hack together simple shell scripts and PERL scripts to get the job done in a pinch. I suspect this is might be because of two reasons:
a) Lack of a real problem to solve (i.e. lack of motivation)
b) Programming requires a completely different way of thinking that is alien to me. So I can never 'get it':/
Since I am now a biologist doing my PhD in molecular genetics, where I often work with large-scale datasets (RNA sequencing data, microarray data, genome-wide mRNA expression data, etc), good programming skills would allow me to ask questions that I cannot even consider because of lack of skill. This gives me my problem that I need to solve. However, I have spent lots of time trying to learn LISP/Scheme/Python and failed miserably. I am very tempted to get your book, and I recognize that you cannot ensure that I learn programming; however, I was hoping you had some tips or suggestions on how I could approach the topic and learning the/a language in general.
Mod parent up..
Seriously, the govt does the right thing, the company decides to do what it thinks is right (which seems to suggest an element of choice..) and 70% here is still whining....
The post header is a flamebait - and the mods have really screwed up for not having caught it.
If you read the TFA (yes yes, I know this is/.), the article headline says "Shell dumps wind, solar and hydro power in favour of biofuels"
They are saying that compared to investing in wind, solar and hydro, they want to invest in biofuel reseach, since they think it will be profitable (duh! they are a company - they exist to make a reasonable profit).
The impression I got from reading the slashdot post header was that shell has decided to go completely out of alternative energy (/non fossil fuels) entirely.
Posting sensationalist headlines is o.k. for mags - why do that here on/.?
Peltier elements are used to rapidly cool small surfaces (such as PCR racks, etc), and they use electricity and some trick of semiconductors to do it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect).
So this is a reverse peltier effect then?
cool...
The site is back up. And the 'openmac' is available for sale on their products page. So I think you were perhaps a little impatient./. effect, after all!
If MS threatens something that is vital for EU's or Europe's functioning (like, say, Servers), then the EU (or EU nations) can just pass a law saying all MS products 'belong' to the EU, and they can reverse engineer/do whatever they want with them. - popularly called nationalisation (e.g. what they are doing with the Northern rock bank)
This is obviously a bad idea in terms of property rights, etc, and Euro-US relationship. But it will scar MS for life, since which govt would trust MS if they do that?
hmm..correct and incorrect, imho.
Sure, there has been significant advances in the way sequencing works; the lastest being 454 sequencing http://www.454.com/, or Solexa http://www.illumina.com/pages.ilmn?ID=203 or SOLID http://www.illumina.com/pages.ilmn?ID=203, which has significantly reduced cost to sequencing.
However, with each of these new techniques come new challenges in statistics and data analysis that are not just technological problems - they require significant, real breakthroughs in algorithms and statistical methods - how do you identify genes? what statistical methods would you use to identify distant repeats separated by millions of years? How accurate and reliable are these identification methods?
We've come to a point where getting the data is now almost trivial and cheap - making sense of it, even being able to order it in the right way - we're just beginning to make headway there. So its not all tech - there is a lot of science there - only, it is difficult to argue it is biology any more - more chemistry and math and a bit of CS:)
I am a biologist - I often wonder how much longer I need to put up with imbeciles who don't even understand how the cells in their body work - or how the very brain that they use to think with is formed!
but we have to put up with you and your kind, who has never run a protein gel, read a DNA sequence, or solved a single biological problem of even the remotest significance for the good of humanity in the slightest inconsequential way; preaching the Gospel of how your Body works by your definitions spawned from everything you could glean from the National Enquirer and the Maury Povich show and the view out of the window of your single-wide mobile home, and delivered as if you were James Fucking Watson.
Speaking for 99.99999999 of humanity, go conduct a poll to back up those numbers and then get back to us, junior!
/rant: I know I am replying to an AC, but I feel too many people on/. think parent's argument is valid - I obviously believe it is not!
Worryingly, though, the report says that the broadband will be provided via Inmarsat's SwiftBroadband 432kbit/sec-per-channel service (yes, I RTFA)
I doubt if one could do more than check e-mail - As they say in the article, if everyone logs on, the flight 'll probably end before one can do any worthwhile browsing/e-mail work..
IMO, the power for laptops sounds more useful to me - on a long haul flight, it will allow me to finish more work in the flight itself..
Hope the other airlines also start something like this soon...
wow..you sound like you've had one hell of a crappy day!!
If, as a species, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot, so be it..
But while the journey lasts, I want to have somethig to dream of, something to look forward to.
I will do my best to deal with the challenges I face today - but if I know a grand, bright, bloody interesting future awaits me and my children (and my grand-children), I will be motivated to work harder.
If all I had to hold on to was a fear of all the crap that is happening in the world today (which I think is silly; we are better off as a species now then even 50 years ago), what hope would I have for my kids (and so on?)
What's so wrong about having sections for Intel and AMD? They are clearly MARKED (hell, they have their own sub-domains!).
This is a tech site - so what is so wrong if the top tech companies want to talk direct to the segment of the customer base that probably understands their products best?
We get to tell them what we like/feel/want/desire/whatever, they get to explain their stuff to us, and slashdot gets to make some cash to keep the whole thing going..
sorry.., are you suggesting that in the long lost days when there were no video/PC games whatsoever (yep, such dark, grim days did exist) people were more violent than after PC/video/console games were introduced? Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is the case?
Why has the parent been modded troll? Don't mod him up if you don't agree with his/her position; what the parent has said is aggressive, but it is hardly inflammatory..
sheesh!
science - noun
1 [U] (knowledge obtained from) the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, especially by observing, measuring and experimenting , and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities.
because you cannot experiment in political science the way we do in the 'regular' hard sciences.
what do ya know.., I was just about to post the same thing!
I have a 17" G4 now, and it is great for my 'off-server' grunt work. Having used Windows, OS X, and multiple versions of *nix, I really really want a tablet where I can use OS X.
Thinking of tablets, are there any successful implementations of linux on tablets, where the screen recognition/screen writing s/w works?
What I don't get is why this is Mac-only. Are Windows/Linux truely less able to perform these tasks or is it just a Mac promotional campaing under the guise of "research"? Because, X-grid is available only for Macs http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/xgrid. html, and all you need to do to set it up (i.e. allow your mac to be a part of the grid) is click on a few options in the system preferences panel - the end user does not need to work with scheduling and other details - the OS takes care of all that with a few options.
It really is damn convinient to use for many types of clustering applications. (and I have setup Linux clusters etc). To that end, yeah, it is a bit of a promotional campaign, but only because no other OS can do it out of the box the way Mac can!!
Also, there are a lot of indie labels ( such as Warp et al. ) who already sell DRM free MP3s - does iTunes offer these DRM free?
Look through the discussion before posting -a post suggests that if a group does not demand DRM on their music, then the itunes/apple store does not wrap the audio file (AAC codec) in DRM..
I am a researcher (biologist). Since I work in a university, all my experiments have been funded by the tax-payer - hell, even my salary is paid by the tax-payer! So I believe publicly funded research data must be public.
I think the primary problem with a model where everyone has acccess to such research has been the fact that scientific research is distributed in the form of peer-reviewed scientific journals - which required paid subscriptions. However, in the last 3-5 years,some very respectable and highly cited open access journals have come up - check out www.plos.org or Biomedcentralahref=http://www.biomedcentral.com/re l=url2html-28477http://www.biomedcentral.com/> - they are open access publishers who don't charge for access - instead, they charge the authors for the publication costs. If I remember correctly, NIH has stated that all research performed at NIH must be published in open access journals. Many grants now have specific amounts of money set aside for publication charges - supporting the open access model.
Hopefully, in a few years time, all significant and important research will be available publicly. Obviously, we could choose to voluntarily block public access to some forms of research - defence research,etc. But then again, what percentage of sensitive nuclear/defence research actually gets published in peer-reviewed literature in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
I found this site in ~2000 (about when India got TCP/IP in an affordable way) and I've been there ever since (though I only realised I could register much later).
Its been the only site that I check every day for the last 10 years. That is amazing consistency for me!
Thanks and all the best with whatever you decide to do!
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/07dec_moonstorms/
Nope, there are moonstorms. From the link:
"All this matters to NASA because, by 2018 or so, astronauts are returning to the Moon. Unlike Apollo astronauts, who never experienced lunar sunrise, the next explorers are going to establish a permanent outpost. They'll be there in the morning when the storm sweeps by.
The wall of dust, if it exists, might be diaphanous, invisible, harmless. Or it could be a real problem, clogging spacesuits, coating surfaces and causing hardware to overheat.
Which will it be? Says Stubbs, "we've still got a lot to learn about the Moon."
Thanks for taking part in this discussion - I appreciate it - it is always great to chat with the author of a book on a subject you like..! I have a problem that I am hoping you, as an author of a book that teaches a language, might have some insight into. Thanks for taking the time to read this :)
I've been on the internet in one way or another since the early 90's (I started out using bulletin board services, yahoo was a directory listing, and I used GOPHER/ARCHIE) on 14.4K and then 56K modems to start with - so I would like to think that I have some skill with technical stuff. However, I have tried and repeatedly failed over the years to learn any programming language -though I can hack together simple shell scripts and PERL scripts to get the job done in a pinch. I suspect this is might be because of two reasons:
a) Lack of a real problem to solve (i.e. lack of motivation)
b) Programming requires a completely different way of thinking that is alien to me. So I can never 'get it' :/
Since I am now a biologist doing my PhD in molecular genetics, where I often work with large-scale datasets (RNA sequencing data, microarray data, genome-wide mRNA expression data, etc), good programming skills would allow me to ask questions that I cannot even consider because of lack of skill. This gives me my problem that I need to solve. However, I have spent lots of time trying to learn LISP/Scheme/Python and failed miserably. I am very tempted to get your book, and I recognize that you cannot ensure that I learn programming; however, I was hoping you had some tips or suggestions on how I could approach the topic and learning the/a language in general.
Thanks!
Mod parent up.. Seriously, the govt does the right thing, the company decides to do what it thinks is right (which seems to suggest an element of choice..) and 70% here is still whining....
The post header is a flamebait - and the mods have really screwed up for not having caught it. If you read the TFA (yes yes, I know this is /.), the article headline says "Shell dumps wind, solar and hydro power in favour of biofuels"
They are saying that compared to investing in wind, solar and hydro, they want to invest in biofuel reseach, since they think it will be profitable (duh! they are a company - they exist to make a reasonable profit).
The impression I got from reading the slashdot post header was that shell has decided to go completely out of alternative energy (/non fossil fuels) entirely.
Posting sensationalist headlines is o.k. for mags - why do that here on /.?
I found this image from Nature magazine useful in imagining how 1 gm of graphene can have such a large surface area..
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6974/fig_tab/nature02311_F1.html
Joel Hruska at Ars Technia appears to have spoken to NVidia, and the article he's written says NVidia is not going to quit the chipset market anytime soon. Looks like its just a rumor... http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/08/01/nvidia-to-ars-were-not-leaving-the-chipset-market
Peltier elements are used to rapidly cool small surfaces (such as PCR racks, etc), and they use electricity and some trick of semiconductors to do it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect). So this is a reverse peltier effect then? cool...
The site is back up. And the 'openmac' is available for sale on their products page. So I think you were perhaps a little impatient. /. effect, after all!
yep,..damn page looks like barbie doll gave it a makeover..Bring back the old layout!!
If MS threatens something that is vital for EU's or Europe's functioning (like, say, Servers), then the EU (or EU nations) can just pass a law saying all MS products 'belong' to the EU, and they can reverse engineer/do whatever they want with them. - popularly called nationalisation (e.g. what they are doing with the Northern rock bank)
This is obviously a bad idea in terms of property rights, etc, and Euro-US relationship. But it will scar MS for life, since which govt would trust MS if they do that?
my 2 centshmm..correct and incorrect, imho. Sure, there has been significant advances in the way sequencing works; the lastest being 454 sequencing http://www.454.com/, or Solexa http://www.illumina.com/pages.ilmn?ID=203 or SOLID http://www.illumina.com/pages.ilmn?ID=203, which has significantly reduced cost to sequencing. However, with each of these new techniques come new challenges in statistics and data analysis that are not just technological problems - they require significant, real breakthroughs in algorithms and statistical methods - how do you identify genes? what statistical methods would you use to identify distant repeats separated by millions of years? How accurate and reliable are these identification methods? We've come to a point where getting the data is now almost trivial and cheap - making sense of it, even being able to order it in the right way - we're just beginning to make headway there. So its not all tech - there is a lot of science there - only, it is difficult to argue it is biology any more - more chemistry and math and a bit of CS :)
but we have to put up with you and your kind, who has never run a protein gel, read a DNA sequence, or solved a single biological problem of even the remotest significance for the good of humanity in the slightest inconsequential way; preaching the Gospel of how your Body works by your definitions spawned from everything you could glean from the National Enquirer and the Maury Povich show and the view out of the window of your single-wide mobile home, and delivered as if you were James Fucking Watson.
Speaking for 99.99999999 of humanity, go conduct a poll to back up those numbers and then get back to us, junior!
I doubt if one could do more than check e-mail - As they say in the article, if everyone logs on, the flight 'll probably end before one can do any worthwhile browsing/e-mail work..
IMO, the power for laptops sounds more useful to me - on a long haul flight, it will allow me to finish more work in the flight itself..
Hope the other airlines also start something like this soon...If, as a species, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot, so be it.. But while the journey lasts, I want to have somethig to dream of, something to look forward to.
I will do my best to deal with the challenges I face today - but if I know a grand, bright, bloody interesting future awaits me and my children (and my grand-children), I will be motivated to work harder.
If all I had to hold on to was a fear of all the crap that is happening in the world today (which I think is silly; we are better off as a species now then even 50 years ago), what hope would I have for my kids (and so on?)
This is my perspective ofcourse, YMMV.. cheers!What's so wrong about having sections for Intel and AMD? They are clearly MARKED (hell, they have their own sub-domains!).
This is a tech site - so what is so wrong if the top tech companies want to talk direct to the segment of the customer base that probably understands their products best?
We get to tell them what we like/feel/want/desire/whatever, they get to explain their stuff to us, and slashdot gets to make some cash to keep the whole thing going..
Everyone wins - so, where is the scam in that?I agree - but given that there is currently no similar technology, it does seem like a good idea to develop/design the enabling technology..
sorry.., are you suggesting that in the long lost days when there were no video/PC games whatsoever (yep, such dark, grim days did exist) people were more violent than after PC/video/console games were introduced? Do you have any evidence to suggest that this is the case?
Why has the parent been modded troll? Don't mod him up if you don't agree with his/her position; what the parent has said is aggressive, but it is hardly inflammatory.. sheesh!
because you cannot experiment in political science the way we do in the 'regular' hard sciences.
I have a 17" G4 now, and it is great for my 'off-server' grunt work. Having used Windows, OS X, and multiple versions of *nix, I really really want a tablet where I can use OS X.
Thinking of tablets, are there any successful implementations of linux on tablets, where the screen recognition/screen writing s/w works?
Thanks!Look through the discussion before posting -a post suggests that if a group does not demand DRM on their music, then the itunes/apple store does not wrap the audio file (AAC codec) in DRM..
I am a researcher (biologist). Since I work in a university, all my experiments have been funded by the tax-payer - hell, even my salary is paid by the tax-payer! So I believe publicly funded research data must be public.
I think the primary problem with a model where everyone has acccess to such research has been the fact that scientific research is distributed in the form of peer-reviewed scientific journals - which required paid subscriptions. However, in the last 3-5 years,some very respectable and highly cited open access journals have come up - check out www.plos.org or Biomedcentralahref=http://www.biomedcentral.com/re l=url2html-28477http://www.biomedcentral.com/> - they are open access publishers who don't charge for access - instead, they charge the authors for the publication costs. If I remember correctly, NIH has stated that all research performed at NIH must be published in open access journals. Many grants now have specific amounts of money set aside for publication charges - supporting the open access model.
Hopefully, in a few years time, all significant and important research will be available publicly. Obviously, we could choose to voluntarily block public access to some forms of research - defence research,etc. But then again, what percentage of sensitive nuclear/defence research actually gets published in peer-reviewed literature in the first place?