Until we get universal television stations...
on
Kazaa to be shut down?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This will just keep happening.
Ok, maybe people will always want something for free, but the Internet file-sharing phenomenon is the single best argument for having simultaneous worldwide release of as many products as possible.
Now, to you North Americans, this isn't such a big issue, and you've probably never given it much thought. But to a native New Zealander and resident Australian like myself, who knows the pain of waiting a year or two to see episodes of Buffy (etc, etc, etc) that you could easily download for free, it is of paramount importance!
And another thing: a buddy of mine is a technical director on LOTR, and it's supposed to be a simultaneous worldwide release on December 19th. How is it then, that in Austalia, it's being released on December 26th? Was he wrong, or is the Australian Motion Picture League of Bastards screwing us again??
Well here's the thing: errors in DNA are an acceptable thing (in many instances) in a living cell. There is redundancy in the genetic codon -> amino acid translation which makes for acceptable losses in DNA integrity over time. Admittedly, they're just using DNA or RNA bases in these devices, but there is ssDNA binding which doesn't need to be 100% accurate either. In fact, there's a possibility for regular expression matching / diffs: The entirety of the two strings needn't match completely - some 'loops' where the two opposing bases don't match due and repel each other are normal. So the difference between two molecules (files) can be measured as a function of how well the fragments mate to each other. The regular expression stuff is easier: just synthesise the string you want to match and chuck it in (a la RAPDs - not a good technology).
I'm totally gonna get painted a troll for this, but while I really like the direction they've taken with their new videos et al, I haven't heard anything inspirational from Daft Punk since one of them went off and did 'music sounds better with you'. Strange that a vital, interesting band that produced 'revolution 909' and the excellent 'around the world' then ended up producing a parody of a cheesy hands-in-the-air house track, only to then recreate themselves based on a parody of that one track!
Anyway, goodbye Karma. But I'd urge any fans of the new album that don't know the first to go and get it right now! It will change your mind about how good they really are.
I'm not entirely sure if this is still the case, but my buddy working on the FX for this was saying that alot of the stuff in the previous trailers was made specially for them. So the spoilage would be kept to a minimum and guys like me who saw the Phantom Menace trailer and wish we hadn't seen the movie won't be disappointed.
I totally agree with this. There are proper geeks out there running the show in some places. They're not easy to find, and now probably isn't the right time to uncautiously jump into unemployment, but there's the odd place you can get away with quality work.
If all else fails, go earn shit money for a while, working in a place where you learn and can do quality work, then in a few years come back with a title like 'architect' and you can *decide* to do quality work.
The fourth rule (which will probably piss people off more than solve anything) might be to do with orbital paths. For instance, Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit, which looks as though it was ejected from something (like Neptune) or incorporated from something (like the Kuiper belt). Perhaps if you think about the formation of an object, planets are generally assumed to have been a combination of material along a path around a new star in the accretion disk. Therefore, their orbits are more-or-less circular. They're elliptical, but not wildly so like Pluto's.
Pluto's orbit seems to point to its history either being interrupted by an orbit-changing event like a collision or capture by the Sun. It's possible it was a normal planet to start with, but that seems less likely than the possibility it was just made to look like one by the event. Hence the debate.
People write for and against organizations and corporations all the time, let 'the people' speak, MS. Believe it or not, quite a few will speak in your favor.
Uh.. don't you think they would have by now? Surely Microsoft did this because the public *wasn't* defending them??
Hm. So then there's only ever a dark side in the time that the moon's behind the mother planet and you're facing away from it. THe other 3/4 of the time, you've got a sun on one side and a gas giant heating the 'night' side. It's still not stable, and 'winter' (behind the giant) would be a shitload colder than summer. Bugger, eh?
Here's a thing not really talked about. If a moon of a large planet harbours life, they'd have to be orbiting in a perpindicular plane to the rest of the solar system to sustain it. Pretty unlikely. And if they weren't, they'd disappear behind the planet every 'night' for long periods. Hence, you've got a moon with huge long nights, freezing the planet, and long hot days. The only way round it is an incredibly fast orbit, which would stuff everything up. Am I missing something here?
Actually gets on hobby horse, having baited the unwary slashdotters) Guinness is drunk mainly by the Irish, but was originally made in England. Well, the story goes that they accidentally burnt a batch and decided it was worth selling on the docks. The Irish folk down there loved it, so they started burning it on purpose!
And if you like Guinness, you should be drinking Mac's Black! A fine, fine beverage. And the humble DB Draught is a much-maligned drink, which should be drunk before a single chemically-permeated Lion product is allowed to pass the lips!
I'm in Sydney now. Took me about a year to get used to the beer. Went home for a week and drained the hotel minibar of Monteiths every day. Bliss!
I could mod this up, but I'd prefer to add my agreement to it. Sorry, karma whores:)
One of the things people have done a little too often in the past is assume that an exported species will be similar in activity in its new environment. Not true. Look at the opossum prolem in New Zealand: they've devastated native forests and contributed to the death of many indigenous species of flaura and fauna. Here in Australia, they're protected, I believe. Over there, they've reproduced like there's no tomorrow. They were introduced for an early fur trade which never really made it.
Now, on Mars, if there's something alive (I doubt it) then we have a specialised organism used to living in low atmospheric density and cold. The possibilities are that it's either going to thrive in a warmer, more rewarding and oxygenated environment or it will die out. Of course, anyone that's tested for antibiotic resistance on a plate knows how fast mutations occur and how easily bacteria can evolve to suit their environs. So which is more likely? Given a large enough sample, I'm pretty sure there would be enough mutants that a population would make it through the bottleneck. And there's no telling what they might do. Remember, small organisms are not just the bottom of the food chain, they're also the base upon which everything else is founded. They also draw from the top of the chain for food.
Lets not forget that the majority of protocols used on the ip stack are not propriety, but standards decided on by the IETF. OSPF, BGP4, RIP, etc. No matter how good EIGRP gets, most networks don't want to implement it because of the lack of interoperability. Standards are good. There is one Internet-native language, and it's BGP4. You can strike deals with other networks to use proprietary protocols, I'm sure. By why on earth would anyone do so, when the expense and difficulty associated with doing so far outweigh the protocols already available on the ubiquitous platform?
In short, I don't think that provider-vendor deals are going to be very easy to strike. One network is one thing, but the Internet is another. Achieving critical mass among all the providers on the globe has been done with hardware, but that was in a virtual vacuum. The thought of actually replacing protocol stacks is really hard. Look for this when IP6 rolls around. It's gonna be one big mess and I'm sure it'll be years in the repercussions.
Telstra's claiming that the 96 passwords published represented the entire list, not a sample. They've cancelled all the accounts concerned and re-provisioned (translation: re-generated random passwords) and contacted everyone concerned. They're saying it was the result of a trojan, which they've found installed on every one of the users' devices.
On some of the Australian mailing lists, we've had individuals claiming that whatever it is, it must be Telstra's fault. Come on, they're not particularly nice guys as far as responsible corporations go, but poor security must be the fault of the software vendors and lack of vigilance on the users' parts.
Just trying to install some sanity before all of this stuff gets repeated here once again....
They have Microsoft in the US, and lawsuits or no it isn't going anywhere
IANAMSE (I am not a Microsoft Employee) but I've heard (which makes it absolute fact) that MS now has major programmer plants (yes, you're all rooted) in India, if not other countries. WHat makes you think they're not going anywhere?
God dammit, I want one of those! It says it has a 600MHz proc, but not what that proc is. Frankly, if you're going to go all the way to making it a notebook like this, I'd really like to see a weighty brain in there. There's really no excuse to sell underpowered devices when all the hardware's there. Anyhow, if Apple brought out the TiBook (or even iBook) replacement with this kind of incredible ergonomics, I'd jump on it in seconds!
The key for me has always been the ability to incorporate (or ebtter yet, built-in) ethernet ports as well as abillity to run a shell. This stuff is perfect for telco and isp engineers. I'm so sick of lugging heavy laptops around. If I could take the screen off and use it as a terminal, then plug back into the base and have a proper high-powered machine, that's all I'd ever ask for.
Hm. That was more confused than I thought when I wrote it. Teach me not to use the Preview button inadvertedly. Ok, the point was that all reactions make sense if you talk amino to amino and dna to dna. Not mixing stuff up strangely. Though you could use this to monitor introns and exons in gene expression as well..
I suppose there's not too much we can spot with the naked eyes that we can't find with a couple thousand computer years these days, but it's be really nice to visualise complex protein interactions with these. Could be the visualisation tool that allows DNA-computer design to take on new dimensions.
Think about it: Massive numbers of ddNTPs radioactive markers on dna molecules (bear with me - especially if I've got the acronym wrong) all flashing when the nucleotides bind to other molecules. By inferring where those markers are and projecting the rest of the molecule accordingly, you could get a slowed down real-time picture of multiple molecules interacting at massive numbers of points at once! Not just poxy small fragments like RAPDs, but mystery proteins released beside a suspended target cell with marked cell receptors. Yes, I know these are amino acid chains as opposed to DNA molecules.
Ok maybe this doesn't take a 69 MegaPixel monitor, but it'd be fun, wouldn't it? Maybe better than crystallography, which normally breaks the protein..
So you're saying no science should be published until it satisfies a need you see as useful? This is why there's so much bad science: people insisting that there's an industrial need for the product of all research. How do you think arseholse like Monsanto got the idea to patent genes and screw us all out of the benefits of our own genetic heritage? Through narrow-minded thinking like yours.
Anyway, now I'm done with you, I'd like to point out that identifying a 'use' for every gene is NOT the best goal of genomics. There's a great line of thinking which says that mobile gene fragments may have transported modular portions of genes around the genome all the way from intracellularly to inter specially. If common structures can be found throughout the genome, particularly in functional gene exons, it might prove that the path of evolution is alot more interesting and perhaps short than we thought.
Patterns of punctuated equilibrium dominate modern theories of special evolution. For instance, the mammalian radiation after the death of the dinosaurs. We went from a few small rodent-types to a gigantic variety of fauna in a few million years. Identifying links between these species on modular gene and non-encoding DNA fragments can tell us about geography, nationality, immunity, evolution - damn near everything.
The genome is a fascinating place. Don't get trapped into thinking that the genes are the only interesting part. Maybe the uses above aren't the single most important right now, but the more we know about the genome, the more ways we have to exploit it and stop the onslaught of terrible genetic disease. Many great inventions occur by accident, so you should never limit science to what you see as strictly 'useful.'
Here's something that's been annoying me slightly recently. No matter how much Ben Affleck charges for a planes-and-boats flick, the average actor isn't as expensive as one generated by teams of monkeys on octanes.
ALso, they can never compete in terms of 'realness.' You can't get much realer than a real thing.
SO there's no good reason to 'replace actors' the way so many people seem to think. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Every animator would love to be able to build the perfect human, but it's simply not cost effective, and it's just not the same.
Because he was lying. The simplicity of this argument is only reflective of the way in which Apple has fused itself around the core of Steve Jobs - even when Steve wasn't necessarily at the centre. It's the Apple Myth. Just because Steve said it's so doesn't mean it's gospel. Alot of people who were there say different - it just took them months to convince Steve, so he decided it was all his idea.
God, here we go again. Bill Atkinson and Jef Raskin deserve alot of credit. In fact, I seem to recall Bill had been doing research on GUIs at university. The best book I've read on it was Infinite Loop, which says that they were already set on a GUI, and took Steve over to PARC to convince him, too. He wasn't the guy who 'stole' it, nobody was. It's all Official Apple History, not actual history.
Slashdot Mirror
This will just keep happening.
Ok, maybe people will always want something for free, but the Internet file-sharing phenomenon is the single best argument for having simultaneous worldwide release of as many products as possible.
Now, to you North Americans, this isn't such a big issue, and you've probably never given it much thought. But to a native New Zealander and resident Australian like myself, who knows the pain of waiting a year or two to see episodes of Buffy (etc, etc, etc) that you could easily download for free, it is of paramount importance!
And another thing: a buddy of mine is a technical director on LOTR, and it's supposed to be a simultaneous worldwide release on December 19th. How is it then, that in Austalia, it's being released on December 26th? Was he wrong, or is the Australian Motion Picture League of Bastards screwing us again??
Well here's the thing: errors in DNA are an acceptable thing (in many instances) in a living cell. There is redundancy in the genetic codon -> amino acid translation which makes for acceptable losses in DNA integrity over time. Admittedly, they're just using DNA or RNA bases in these devices, but there is ssDNA binding which doesn't need to be 100% accurate either. In fact, there's a possibility for regular expression matching / diffs: The entirety of the two strings needn't match completely - some 'loops' where the two opposing bases don't match due and repel each other are normal. So the difference between two molecules (files) can be measured as a function of how well the fragments mate to each other. The regular expression stuff is easier: just synthesise the string you want to match and chuck it in (a la RAPDs - not a good technology).
Damn limited titles.
I'm totally gonna get painted a troll for this, but while I really like the direction they've taken with their new videos et al, I haven't heard anything inspirational from Daft Punk since one of them went off and did 'music sounds better with you'. Strange that a vital, interesting band that produced 'revolution 909' and the excellent 'around the world' then ended up producing a parody of a cheesy hands-in-the-air house track, only to then recreate themselves based on a parody of that one track!
Anyway, goodbye Karma. But I'd urge any fans of the new album that don't know the first to go and get it right now! It will change your mind about how good they really are.
What about Bombadil?
I'm not entirely sure if this is still the case, but my buddy working on the FX for this was saying that alot of the stuff in the previous trailers was made specially for them. So the spoilage would be kept to a minimum and guys like me who saw the Phantom Menace trailer and wish we hadn't seen the movie won't be disappointed.
Tolkien had his own symbol, composed of the J, R, R and T, which looked like a candle. You'd think that'd be the obvious choice.
I totally agree with this. There are proper geeks out there running the show in some places. They're not easy to find, and now probably isn't the right time to uncautiously jump into unemployment, but there's the odd place you can get away with quality work.
If all else fails, go earn shit money for a while, working in a place where you learn and can do quality work, then in a few years come back with a title like 'architect' and you can *decide* to do quality work.
The fourth rule (which will probably piss people off more than solve anything) might be to do with orbital paths. For instance, Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit, which looks as though it was ejected from something (like Neptune) or incorporated from something (like the Kuiper belt). Perhaps if you think about the formation of an object, planets are generally assumed to have been a combination of material along a path around a new star in the accretion disk. Therefore, their orbits are more-or-less circular. They're elliptical, but not wildly so like Pluto's.
Pluto's orbit seems to point to its history either being interrupted by an orbit-changing event like a collision or capture by the Sun. It's possible it was a normal planet to start with, but that seems less likely than the possibility it was just made to look like one by the event. Hence the debate.
Uh.. don't you think they would have by now? Surely Microsoft did this because the public *wasn't* defending them??
Hm. So then there's only ever a dark side in the time that the moon's behind the mother planet and you're facing away from it. THe other 3/4 of the time, you've got a sun on one side and a gas giant heating the 'night' side. It's still not stable, and 'winter' (behind the giant) would be a shitload colder than summer. Bugger, eh?
Here's a thing not really talked about. If a moon of a large planet harbours life, they'd have to be orbiting in a perpindicular plane to the rest of the solar system to sustain it. Pretty unlikely. And if they weren't, they'd disappear behind the planet every 'night' for long periods. Hence, you've got a moon with huge long nights, freezing the planet, and long hot days. The only way round it is an incredibly fast orbit, which would stuff everything up. Am I missing something here?
Actually gets on hobby horse, having baited the unwary slashdotters) Guinness is drunk mainly by the Irish, but was originally made in England. Well, the story goes that they accidentally burnt a batch and decided it was worth selling on the docks. The Irish folk down there loved it, so they started burning it on purpose!
And if you like Guinness, you should be drinking Mac's Black! A fine, fine beverage. And the humble DB Draught is a much-maligned drink, which should be drunk before a single chemically-permeated Lion product is allowed to pass the lips!
I'm in Sydney now. Took me about a year to get used to the beer. Went home for a week and drained the hotel minibar of Monteiths every day. Bliss!
Why is he not cooling DB Draught or Monteiths, or better yet, Speights?? Having a small British mum is no excuse.
I could mod this up, but I'd prefer to add my agreement to it. Sorry, karma whores:)
One of the things people have done a little too often in the past is assume that an exported species will be similar in activity in its new environment. Not true. Look at the opossum prolem in New Zealand: they've devastated native forests and contributed to the death of many indigenous species of flaura and fauna. Here in Australia, they're protected, I believe. Over there, they've reproduced like there's no tomorrow. They were introduced for an early fur trade which never really made it.
Now, on Mars, if there's something alive (I doubt it) then we have a specialised organism used to living in low atmospheric density and cold. The possibilities are that it's either going to thrive in a warmer, more rewarding and oxygenated environment or it will die out. Of course, anyone that's tested for antibiotic resistance on a plate knows how fast mutations occur and how easily bacteria can evolve to suit their environs. So which is more likely? Given a large enough sample, I'm pretty sure there would be enough mutants that a population would make it through the bottleneck. And there's no telling what they might do. Remember, small organisms are not just the bottom of the food chain, they're also the base upon which everything else is founded. They also draw from the top of the chain for food.
Lets not forget that the majority of protocols used on the ip stack are not propriety, but standards decided on by the IETF. OSPF, BGP4, RIP, etc. No matter how good EIGRP gets, most networks don't want to implement it because of the lack of interoperability. Standards are good. There is one Internet-native language, and it's BGP4. You can strike deals with other networks to use proprietary protocols, I'm sure. By why on earth would anyone do so, when the expense and difficulty associated with doing so far outweigh the protocols already available on the ubiquitous platform?
In short, I don't think that provider-vendor deals are going to be very easy to strike. One network is one thing, but the Internet is another. Achieving critical mass among all the providers on the globe has been done with hardware, but that was in a virtual vacuum. The thought of actually replacing protocol stacks is really hard. Look for this when IP6 rolls around. It's gonna be one big mess and I'm sure it'll be years in the repercussions.
Telstra's claiming that the 96 passwords published represented the entire list, not a sample. They've cancelled all the accounts concerned and re-provisioned (translation: re-generated random passwords) and contacted everyone concerned. They're saying it was the result of a trojan, which they've found installed on every one of the users' devices.
On some of the Australian mailing lists, we've had individuals claiming that whatever it is, it must be Telstra's fault. Come on, they're not particularly nice guys as far as responsible corporations go, but poor security must be the fault of the software vendors and lack of vigilance on the users' parts.
Just trying to install some sanity before all of this stuff gets repeated here once again....
IANAMSE (I am not a Microsoft Employee) but I've heard (which makes it absolute fact) that MS now has major programmer plants (yes, you're all rooted) in India, if not other countries. WHat makes you think they're not going anywhere?
God dammit, I want one of those! It says it has a 600MHz proc, but not what that proc is. Frankly, if you're going to go all the way to making it a notebook like this, I'd really like to see a weighty brain in there. There's really no excuse to sell underpowered devices when all the hardware's there. Anyhow, if Apple brought out the TiBook (or even iBook) replacement with this kind of incredible ergonomics, I'd jump on it in seconds!
The key for me has always been the ability to incorporate (or ebtter yet, built-in) ethernet ports as well as abillity to run a shell. This stuff is perfect for telco and isp engineers. I'm so sick of lugging heavy laptops around. If I could take the screen off and use it as a terminal, then plug back into the base and have a proper high-powered machine, that's all I'd ever ask for.
Hm. That was more confused than I thought when I wrote it. Teach me not to use the Preview button inadvertedly. Ok, the point was that all reactions make sense if you talk amino to amino and dna to dna. Not mixing stuff up strangely. Though you could use this to monitor introns and exons in gene expression as well..
I suppose there's not too much we can spot with the naked eyes that we can't find with a couple thousand computer years these days, but it's be really nice to visualise complex protein interactions with these. Could be the visualisation tool that allows DNA-computer design to take on new dimensions.
Think about it: Massive numbers of ddNTPs radioactive markers on dna molecules (bear with me - especially if I've got the acronym wrong) all flashing when the nucleotides bind to other molecules. By inferring where those markers are and projecting the rest of the molecule accordingly, you could get a slowed down real-time picture of multiple molecules interacting at massive numbers of points at once! Not just poxy small fragments like RAPDs, but mystery proteins released beside a suspended target cell with marked cell receptors. Yes, I know these are amino acid chains as opposed to DNA molecules.
Ok maybe this doesn't take a 69 MegaPixel monitor, but it'd be fun, wouldn't it? Maybe better than crystallography, which normally breaks the protein..
So you're saying no science should be published until it satisfies a need you see as useful? This is why there's so much bad science: people insisting that there's an industrial need for the product of all research. How do you think arseholse like Monsanto got the idea to patent genes and screw us all out of the benefits of our own genetic heritage? Through narrow-minded thinking like yours.
Anyway, now I'm done with you, I'd like to point out that identifying a 'use' for every gene is NOT the best goal of genomics. There's a great line of thinking which says that mobile gene fragments may have transported modular portions of genes around the genome all the way from intracellularly to inter specially. If common structures can be found throughout the genome, particularly in functional gene exons, it might prove that the path of evolution is alot more interesting and perhaps short than we thought.
Patterns of punctuated equilibrium dominate modern theories of special evolution. For instance, the mammalian radiation after the death of the dinosaurs. We went from a few small rodent-types to a gigantic variety of fauna in a few million years. Identifying links between these species on modular gene and non-encoding DNA fragments can tell us about geography, nationality, immunity, evolution - damn near everything.
The genome is a fascinating place. Don't get trapped into thinking that the genes are the only interesting part. Maybe the uses above aren't the single most important right now, but the more we know about the genome, the more ways we have to exploit it and stop the onslaught of terrible genetic disease. Many great inventions occur by accident, so you should never limit science to what you see as strictly 'useful.'
Here's something that's been annoying me slightly recently. No matter how much Ben Affleck charges for a planes-and-boats flick, the average actor isn't as expensive as one generated by teams of monkeys on octanes.
ALso, they can never compete in terms of 'realness.' You can't get much realer than a real thing.
SO there's no good reason to 'replace actors' the way so many people seem to think. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Every animator would love to be able to build the perfect human, but it's simply not cost effective, and it's just not the same.
Because he was lying. The simplicity of this argument is only reflective of the way in which Apple has fused itself around the core of Steve Jobs - even when Steve wasn't necessarily at the centre. It's the Apple Myth. Just because Steve said it's so doesn't mean it's gospel. Alot of people who were there say different - it just took them months to convince Steve, so he decided it was all his idea.
God, here we go again. Bill Atkinson and Jef Raskin deserve alot of credit. In fact, I seem to recall Bill had been doing research on GUIs at university. The best book I've read on it was Infinite Loop, which says that they were already set on a GUI, and took Steve over to PARC to convince him, too. He wasn't the guy who 'stole' it, nobody was. It's all Official Apple History, not actual history.