Oh don't worry, I'm sure as soon as this doesn't pan out, they'll issue an RFID tag implanted in your skin to 'hold your DNA information' in a more readily accessible format.
It costs a LOT more than $5 to hire someone. If you count the cost of the name/rfid badge in the newhire cost, it doesn't look nearly so bad anymore, either.
I put my Dreamcast in the closet for a while. I pulled it out the other day to play Reel Fishing Wild and I couldn't find the video cord. I've actually paid $2 for the cable and like $20+ for shipping (I ordered other stuff too, to mask the pain) just so I could play that game.
So yeah, good games will keep a console alive long after they leave retail.
I have always bought Intel because of the stability. I never have to wait for an app or game to release a patch to fix the AMD issues. (Not that there's actually been a problem with that for a while, though.)
But 'AMD Cheaper' is NOT a myth. You can't say 'X isn't true because in Y area it isn't true.'
You are only looking at major computer manufacturers, and then, only a few of them.
Build your own rig. AMD is quite a bit cheaper than Intel if you do.
Major manufacturers have many political and legal hoops to jump through, and that skews their prices crazily. (If you don't believe that, research why computers with Windows installed are the same price as ones with a free linux distro installed.) You can't base your entire analysis of cost on how they price their computers.
Instead, price the components individually or check prices at a 'Mom and Pop' computer shop. You'll see that AMD is consistantly lower in price. (You'll also see that they still manage to sell the higher priced Intel machines as well.)
This has already been done. Everyone remembers the ECS Desknote. A laptop that was 'barebones' and you had to add a processor, memory and hard drive.
Oh wait. No, nobody remembers them. They were WAY WAY too expensive and with the limitations on upgrades that a desktop also has, it was pointless. Face it, by the time you are ready to upgrade the CPU on your desktop, you also need to upgrade the motherboard. And the memory. And some of the time, even the video card was due.
I found some Desknotes being dumped on Geeks.com, but sadly, you can't buy the necessary processors anywhere except EBay or some horribly overpriced stores online. See, it maxes out at an Athlon XP 1800 or Duron 1300.
So in the end, the answer is that 'it's too expensive and pointless to upgrade a laptop'. With the exception of the currently upgradeable bits, of course... But then, those are the bits that people normally upgrade in desktops, too. (Except video.)
My problem is that you can't have percentages like that from only 2 repetitions of the experiment.
I'm not talking about individual cells that mutated, but the whole thing. They aren't measured each little cell individually, they are looking at the collection as a whole. (As you have to, when you are talking about a community, even of bacteria. Each one affects the others, like it or not.)
And mutation IS a random thing. You can't point to a single cell and say 'it'll have x mutation' unless you engineer that mutation yourself, which is not what this experiment was about.
And as for likelihoods... Nobody KNOWS what the likelihood of a cell mutating to X is. So they can't say with any reasonable accuracy how likely this is to happen a third time.
Now, they may in fact be performing more trials of this. But it was WAY too early to release their statements to the community with ANY sure-sounding predictions. They should have kept their mouths shut until they knew something, instead of blindly babbling about what they THINK is the case.
Although 40% of PSP owners claimed UMD media was a big reason why they plopped down a few hundred on Sony's pixel-spurting game brick
I think if you check with those people again, the REAL reason those 40% bought a PSP was PORTABLE media, not UMD specifically. DVD's are a bit unwieldy to carry and you certainly can't get a dvd player that small. It's about the convenience of a media device that size, not the format.
If there were an open media format with a multitude of player in that size, I think you'd find a LOT more takers.
Add in the ability to write that media at will and you've got a hit on your hands. (After the teething phase, of course.)
As a side note, DVD format suffered from other teething problems like 'low volume' and such. The real 'feature' was an amazing audio range, but that translated into 'too low/too high' audio when played back in any normal setting.
I also disagree. Users are generally not the lifeblood of an open source project.
I have never written any free program for anyone but myself. I always get paid when someone else is the target.
I have, however, given the program away for free while and after using it myself. I felt SOME obligation to them to fix bugs as the appeared, but nothing like I would feel for a paying project. I only felt that way because I genuinely like to help others.
Pretending I know NOTHING about spheres rotating, revolving, etc, and nothing about circles travelling across the sky...
I watch as a color-changing (red/orange/yellow/white) circle makes its way over the horizon. After ~12 hours, it gets to the other horizon and sinks the same way.
I'm going to be pretty sure it could happen again.
I watch it happen again the next day. I'm going to be pretty sure it happens repeatedly, but no idea how often it really happens.
I watch it several more times and I'm pretty sure it keeps the exact same cycle each time.
From that, 2 reps only guaranteed the barest information, and asked quite a few more questions. More reps answered questions, but there's still how and why, and such.
2 reps can HINT to a pattern. They do not MAKE a pattern. It's still WAY too likely it would happen by chance.
Think back to highschool math. When you did the probability stuff, did they let you just flip the coin twice? No, even if you get your 50% odds from the first 2 trials, that's not enough to prove anything. If you were lucky, you got to stop at 50. If not, you did hundreds.
The odds are a lot different, I agree, but the same principle applies. You cannot just assume that because the odds dictate something that it is true. Occam's Razor is a guideline, not a rule.
No, I fully get the point. And that they were not simply demonstrating evolution IS my point. If they had said 'we've proven evolution happens' I wouldn't have bothered posting.
If they want to PROVE 'evolution is predictable', they need more than 2 reps. That could SO easily be coincidence. It appears to be reproduceable so far, but that's not actually proven until they do more reps AND others do, too. Others aren't going to bother if it appears their experiment was sloppy (they don't bother to follow procedures, like doing the proper reps) or if their logic was faulty. Assuming 2 reps proves anything is sloppy logic, as well.
You have to look at the whole experiment in regards to the hypothesis. They are stating that given those bacteria and those conditions, the same 6 major populations will evolve from the experiment.
They only did that twice.
If the question was 'Will they evolve?' then yes, it was done many, many times.
You have got to be kidding. To even have a BASIC understanding of evolution you have to know that it means species evolve to fit new environments. This, at its very basic, means that if the climate is hotter, the species adapts to the extra heat. DUH. When a new predator comes along, the prey... adapts to defend/hide from that predator. DUH.
They didn't need to perform their silly experiments to come up with this hypothesis. It's built in to the basic nature of the idea.
Now, as for the article... They perform and experiment TWICE and said that was enough to produce this theory. Because out of 2 million possible mutations, the same 6 occurred both times in large numbers.
Uhh... Don't forget CHANCE you fools. Twice is not very conclusive.
They're making ANOTHER movie from one of his books? I'm in heaven! I'll join in!
Hey, my arm itches now after reading that... and there's all these funny black dots. (I haven't taken a shower yet this morning, but I'm not going to remember that on purpose.)
But seriously, his books are amazing and so far they have ALL translated into amazing movies. Even without him around! It takes REAL talent to write a book so well that they can't screw it up when they make a movie out of it.
Wow, my mistake. I definitely got bad advice there, then.
So I change my advice to: If your wife has problems with the porn ads that appear when you go to shady sites, don't go to Second Life at all.
I haven't found any way to be reasonably sure the neighborhood you are about to enter will be porn-free. On the web, you can at least avoid sites that have questionable content (free illegal stuff, just sign up for our newsletter, etc!) and only have to worry about misspelled domain names.
If she's not squeemish, there'll be no problem though. She can just turn around walk away, because if you've found a little smut there, the whole rest of the area will be covered in it.
I sound totally negative on it, but that's not really true. There are some truly neat items there. I saw a jet-port with quite a few different models of jets you could buy or fly, and parachute jumps you could rent. There are bazaars with a TONS of a medieval/fantasy costumes and items. Most of them are actually fairly well done. (Enough so that they make the surroundings look like a high school science exhibit.)
I even stopped and made my own butterfly wings. I experimented for a while on making them flap, but that turned out to be too big a hassle.
I did all of this for free. Not a real penny spent.
Sure, they DO respect your IP rights. But you have to abide by the terms of service. He exploited the system and violated those terms. He won't win this one. Same as if he cheated a real auction.
BTW, this is off-topic, but if you wife is even a little squeemish on the porn front, she's going to want to join the teen server. It's porn/bdsm heaven out there in the rest of the world. (I didn't join the teen server, but I hear they are pretty serious about keeping it clean.)
I was also very interested in creating items in game, but just like real life, having a storefront is location, location, location and getting your items in front of people that will buy them isn't all that easy.
In short: Don't invest much money until you are SURE you have a handle on the whole business.
When I first used my Pilot to read books, this was the process that was required. You had to convert from whatever it was to PDB format. I'm a basically lazy person and I read a LOT of books. The extra time spent doing this was very annoying to me, so I eventually just spent the money to get a device that didn't need the transformation.
If I were going to go the translation route, I would probably look for an ebook reader that read OEB format and write a automagical translater for that. (My definition of lazy allows me to work if it will allow me to be MUCH lazier later.) I might even attempt to WRITE an ebook reader than handled it.
Unfortunately, I can still limp along with my current reader, so I never quite get the motivation to do that.
Actually, I dumped my Palm/Pilot handhelds long ago. I've used a Jornada for the last few years and it's dying. I use a program called ubook (pronounced microbook, but I'm too lazy to go look for the funny u) thta used to be freeware. I've got the last freeware version installed and it handles txt, rtf, html, pdb and I think a few others fairly well.
If there was a free reader for a decently priced palm, I would probably be tempted to go back.
Does 'Palm Fiction' do screen rotation? And what're the minimum reqs? I scanned the russian page, but there isn't enough there for me to figure those out. It DOES look like it'll do zipped files, which is good. I use that a lot, too.
I seem to be the odd one here. When I was young, I read a TON of paper books. But I hated 1 thing about them: Losing my page.
For a long time, I used a bookmark that clipped to the back of the book and used an arm to mark the page. The only way to lose the page with this was to drop it from quite a height while it was near the start of the book. So it worked fairly well for my problem.
But then, when I was about 18 or so, I installed an ebook reader on a Pilot. (Yes, before they adopted the name Palm.) After the initial discomfort, the fact that I NEVER lost my place in the book had me hooked. I've used a Palm device and 2 different Pocket PC devices since then, and I definitely prefer electronic reading. I would actually be willing to spend $500 on an ebook reader that does what -I- want. That means reading any format I throw at it, including LIT, Palm, RTF, HTML, anything. (IT doesn't have to support DRM tho. I won't be buying any books with DRM.) I think it'll be a while before I find this.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh don't worry, I'm sure as soon as this doesn't pan out, they'll issue an RFID tag implanted in your skin to 'hold your DNA information' in a more readily accessible format.
And when that gets hacked, they'll...
Some days I REALLY wish I had mod points. That's hilarious.
It costs a LOT more than $5 to hire someone. If you count the cost of the name/rfid badge in the newhire cost, it doesn't look nearly so bad anymore, either.
I put my Dreamcast in the closet for a while. I pulled it out the other day to play Reel Fishing Wild and I couldn't find the video cord. I've actually paid $2 for the cable and like $20+ for shipping (I ordered other stuff too, to mask the pain) just so I could play that game.
So yeah, good games will keep a console alive long after they leave retail.
I have always bought Intel because of the stability. I never have to wait for an app or game to release a patch to fix the AMD issues. (Not that there's actually been a problem with that for a while, though.)
But 'AMD Cheaper' is NOT a myth. You can't say 'X isn't true because in Y area it isn't true.'
You are only looking at major computer manufacturers, and then, only a few of them.
Build your own rig. AMD is quite a bit cheaper than Intel if you do.
Major manufacturers have many political and legal hoops to jump through, and that skews their prices crazily. (If you don't believe that, research why computers with Windows installed are the same price as ones with a free linux distro installed.) You can't base your entire analysis of cost on how they price their computers.
Instead, price the components individually or check prices at a 'Mom and Pop' computer shop. You'll see that AMD is consistantly lower in price. (You'll also see that they still manage to sell the higher priced Intel machines as well.)
This has already been done. Everyone remembers the ECS Desknote. A laptop that was 'barebones' and you had to add a processor, memory and hard drive.
Oh wait. No, nobody remembers them. They were WAY WAY too expensive and with the limitations on upgrades that a desktop also has, it was pointless. Face it, by the time you are ready to upgrade the CPU on your desktop, you also need to upgrade the motherboard. And the memory. And some of the time, even the video card was due.
I found some Desknotes being dumped on Geeks.com, but sadly, you can't buy the necessary processors anywhere except EBay or some horribly overpriced stores online. See, it maxes out at an Athlon XP 1800 or Duron 1300.
So in the end, the answer is that 'it's too expensive and pointless to upgrade a laptop'. With the exception of the currently upgradeable bits, of course... But then, those are the bits that people normally upgrade in desktops, too. (Except video.)
Give me a new macbook and I'll make that video. Hell, I'll even wear a cape. or wookie ears or something. (You'll have to provide that, too.
My problem is that you can't have percentages like that from only 2 repetitions of the experiment.
I'm not talking about individual cells that mutated, but the whole thing. They aren't measured each little cell individually, they are looking at the collection as a whole. (As you have to, when you are talking about a community, even of bacteria. Each one affects the others, like it or not.)
And mutation IS a random thing. You can't point to a single cell and say 'it'll have x mutation' unless you engineer that mutation yourself, which is not what this experiment was about.
And as for likelihoods... Nobody KNOWS what the likelihood of a cell mutating to X is. So they can't say with any reasonable accuracy how likely this is to happen a third time.
Now, they may in fact be performing more trials of this. But it was WAY too early to release their statements to the community with ANY sure-sounding predictions. They should have kept their mouths shut until they knew something, instead of blindly babbling about what they THINK is the case.
I think if you check with those people again, the REAL reason those 40% bought a PSP was PORTABLE media, not UMD specifically. DVD's are a bit unwieldy to carry and you certainly can't get a dvd player that small. It's about the convenience of a media device that size, not the format.
If there were an open media format with a multitude of player in that size, I think you'd find a LOT more takers.
Add in the ability to write that media at will and you've got a hit on your hands. (After the teething phase, of course.)
As a side note, DVD format suffered from other teething problems like 'low volume' and such. The real 'feature' was an amazing audio range, but that translated into 'too low/too high' audio when played back in any normal setting.
I also disagree. Users are generally not the lifeblood of an open source project.
I have never written any free program for anyone but myself. I always get paid when someone else is the target.
I have, however, given the program away for free while and after using it myself. I felt SOME obligation to them to fix bugs as the appeared, but nothing like I would feel for a paying project. I only felt that way because I genuinely like to help others.
I have to disagree about the sun.
Pretending I know NOTHING about spheres rotating, revolving, etc, and nothing about circles travelling across the sky...
I watch as a color-changing (red/orange/yellow/white) circle makes its way over the horizon. After ~12 hours, it gets to the other horizon and sinks the same way.
I'm going to be pretty sure it could happen again.
I watch it happen again the next day. I'm going to be pretty sure it happens repeatedly, but no idea how often it really happens.
I watch it several more times and I'm pretty sure it keeps the exact same cycle each time.
From that, 2 reps only guaranteed the barest information, and asked quite a few more questions. More reps answered questions, but there's still how and why, and such.
2 reps can HINT to a pattern. They do not MAKE a pattern. It's still WAY too likely it would happen by chance.
Think back to highschool math. When you did the probability stuff, did they let you just flip the coin twice? No, even if you get your 50% odds from the first 2 trials, that's not enough to prove anything. If you were lucky, you got to stop at 50. If not, you did hundreds.
The odds are a lot different, I agree, but the same principle applies. You cannot just assume that because the odds dictate something that it is true. Occam's Razor is a guideline, not a rule.
No, I fully get the point. And that they were not simply demonstrating evolution IS my point. If they had said 'we've proven evolution happens' I wouldn't have bothered posting.
If they want to PROVE 'evolution is predictable', they need more than 2 reps. That could SO easily be coincidence. It appears to be reproduceable so far, but that's not actually proven until they do more reps AND others do, too. Others aren't going to bother if it appears their experiment was sloppy (they don't bother to follow procedures, like doing the proper reps) or if their logic was faulty. Assuming 2 reps proves anything is sloppy logic, as well.
You have to look at the whole experiment in regards to the hypothesis. They are stating that given those bacteria and those conditions, the same 6 major populations will evolve from the experiment.
They only did that twice.
If the question was 'Will they evolve?' then yes, it was done many, many times.
That's the mechanism. I'm talking about the result.
You have got to be kidding. To even have a BASIC understanding of evolution you have to know that it means species evolve to fit new environments. This, at its very basic, means that if the climate is hotter, the species adapts to the extra heat. DUH. When a new predator comes along, the prey ... adapts to defend/hide from that predator. DUH.
They didn't need to perform their silly experiments to come up with this hypothesis. It's built in to the basic nature of the idea.
Now, as for the article... They perform and experiment TWICE and said that was enough to produce this theory. Because out of 2 million possible mutations, the same 6 occurred both times in large numbers.
Uhh... Don't forget CHANCE you fools. Twice is not very conclusive.
They're making ANOTHER movie from one of his books? I'm in heaven! I'll join in!
Hey, my arm itches now after reading that... and there's all these funny black dots. (I haven't taken a shower yet this morning, but I'm not going to remember that on purpose.)
But seriously, his books are amazing and so far they have ALL translated into amazing movies. Even without him around! It takes REAL talent to write a book so well that they can't screw it up when they make a movie out of it.
If I have to start turning my Windows PC on AND off with a 3-finger salute, I'm going to be VERY pissed at you for holding that patent.
Wow, my mistake. I definitely got bad advice there, then.
So I change my advice to: If your wife has problems with the porn ads that appear when you go to shady sites, don't go to Second Life at all.
I haven't found any way to be reasonably sure the neighborhood you are about to enter will be porn-free. On the web, you can at least avoid sites that have questionable content (free illegal stuff, just sign up for our newsletter, etc!) and only have to worry about misspelled domain names.
If she's not squeemish, there'll be no problem though. She can just turn around walk away, because if you've found a little smut there, the whole rest of the area will be covered in it.
I sound totally negative on it, but that's not really true. There are some truly neat items there. I saw a jet-port with quite a few different models of jets you could buy or fly, and parachute jumps you could rent. There are bazaars with a TONS of a medieval/fantasy costumes and items. Most of them are actually fairly well done. (Enough so that they make the surroundings look like a high school science exhibit.)
I even stopped and made my own butterfly wings. I experimented for a while on making them flap, but that turned out to be too big a hassle.
I did all of this for free. Not a real penny spent.
Sure, they DO respect your IP rights. But you have to abide by the terms of service. He exploited the system and violated those terms. He won't win this one. Same as if he cheated a real auction.
BTW, this is off-topic, but if you wife is even a little squeemish on the porn front, she's going to want to join the teen server. It's porn/bdsm heaven out there in the rest of the world. (I didn't join the teen server, but I hear they are pretty serious about keeping it clean.)
I was also very interested in creating items in game, but just like real life, having a storefront is location, location, location and getting your items in front of people that will buy them isn't all that easy.
In short: Don't invest much money until you are SURE you have a handle on the whole business.
When I first used my Pilot to read books, this was the process that was required. You had to convert from whatever it was to PDB format. I'm a basically lazy person and I read a LOT of books. The extra time spent doing this was very annoying to me, so I eventually just spent the money to get a device that didn't need the transformation.
If I were going to go the translation route, I would probably look for an ebook reader that read OEB format and write a automagical translater for that. (My definition of lazy allows me to work if it will allow me to be MUCH lazier later.) I might even attempt to WRITE an ebook reader than handled it.
Unfortunately, I can still limp along with my current reader, so I never quite get the motivation to do that.
It's probably copyrighted. Gotta watch those lawsuits.
Thanks for the info. I'll have to look into Palm again.
Is it just me, or is that an empty page? Or maybe I missed the joke...
Actually, I dumped my Palm/Pilot handhelds long ago. I've used a Jornada for the last few years and it's dying. I use a program called ubook (pronounced microbook, but I'm too lazy to go look for the funny u) thta used to be freeware. I've got the last freeware version installed and it handles txt, rtf, html, pdb and I think a few others fairly well.
If there was a free reader for a decently priced palm, I would probably be tempted to go back.
Does 'Palm Fiction' do screen rotation? And what're the minimum reqs? I scanned the russian page, but there isn't enough there for me to figure those out. It DOES look like it'll do zipped files, which is good. I use that a lot, too.
I seem to be the odd one here. When I was young, I read a TON of paper books. But I hated 1 thing about them: Losing my page.
For a long time, I used a bookmark that clipped to the back of the book and used an arm to mark the page. The only way to lose the page with this was to drop it from quite a height while it was near the start of the book. So it worked fairly well for my problem.
But then, when I was about 18 or so, I installed an ebook reader on a Pilot. (Yes, before they adopted the name Palm.) After the initial discomfort, the fact that I NEVER lost my place in the book had me hooked. I've used a Palm device and 2 different Pocket PC devices since then, and I definitely prefer electronic reading. I would actually be willing to spend $500 on an ebook reader that does what -I- want. That means reading any format I throw at it, including LIT, Palm, RTF, HTML, anything. (IT doesn't have to support DRM tho. I won't be buying any books with DRM.) I think it'll be a while before I find this.