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Biotech

Journal Journal: Aging, synthesizing, simplification

Lots of old respectable people seem to go on wild tangents. See: Tipler, Freeman Dyson, Linus Pauling.

As we age and learn, our brain culls unneeded neural connections. This is a natural and required process. Too many neural connections have been correlated to neural pathologies (autism?).

I wonder if too *much* culling makes people oversimplify their understanding of things, as their brain tries to fit new situations into their existing schemas?

Comment Re:Whatever happened to Wengo? (Score 1) 282

on a related note: whatever happened to Google's open-source VoIP thingy that incorporated with XMPP/Jabber? I think it was called 'Jingle', but I haven't heard a lot about it since then.

True, Jingle adoption has been very slow in other clients than GTalk, which is a crying shame. I expect it was for technical reasons: it isn't easy for client developers to easily integrate Jingle in their existing clients, and NAT-traversal (through the ICE method) drives people crazy.

But it's slowly getting there. The most popular Jabber-specific client, Psi, finally supports Jingle-Voice (though not video) in a cross platform way in the latest version 0.13, released a couple of days ago.

Programming

Journal Journal: Indirection

Each level of indirection added to a program makes it more generic, but also makes it twice as complicated to understand.

Make it too generic, and nobody will understand it.

Comment Re:Oh really? (Score 2, Interesting) 146

While the the summary is wrong on this subject, I can tell you that, yes, manual optimization is part of our work and can slow down the release of our product. If we told a customer that yes, we will be able to do VGA 30FPS H.264 encode. Code optimization on our custom core is going to take some time and effort. I work in the embedded multimedia field.

I think we're going to be very, very interested in this project.

Comment Re:Is Microsoft engaging in their 90s behavior? (Score 2, Interesting) 272

I was initially skeptical because of your abusive use of "unpatented" all over the place, as if this is solely about patents. You don't provide any clear links here, but 2 clicks away, I found this:

The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista.

Bug or on purpose? Who knows.

Comment Odd visualization, but not so bad (Score 5, Interesting) 85

My first reaction when browsing through the article was disgust about the measure being used. I couldn't see the value of graphs about the number of symbols used by different file-system modules. So vfat doesn't use kprintf, woo-fucking-hoo!

But then, the Hamming distance and hierarchical structure struck a chord. Huh, so NFS, uses a very different set of symbols than, ext3. (ok, this may be biased by NFS using a metric fuckton of external symbols where ext3 uses less), which implies that NFS is pretty different, internally, than ext3.

So now, I agree that such a visualisation, while very abstract from the implementation details, can be pretty useful to have a (very) rough overview of the filesystems and their code structure. And I think we need more abstract overviews like this.

Reminds me of Code Swarm, which creates a movie of commits to a repository.

Comment Link to the article's Front Page please? (Score 5, Informative) 85

Dear submitter,

A /. summary is a bit like a main page on a website. Make the organization clear. Don't pile on shortcuts to different parts of the website: the reader risks being discouraged trying to find out how best to get to the important part of your website. Less is better.
I actually clicked on one of the links that appeared to go to the "Expedition" website (based on its similarity to other links, as shown in my browser's statusbar!), then changed the address in the address bar to get to the front page.

You actually didn't include a link to your article's front page, for heaven's sake!

Hope this helps for the next time you write a summary.

Comment Re:HACKING (Score 4, Informative) 55

Actually, I think we're seeing a bit of a comeback. Hackerspaces are mushrooming around the world. (I like to believe the talk at the 24th Chaos Computer Congress in December 2007, Building a Hacker Space, helped provide impetus to this movement.) I also believe DIY culture is on the rise again, as spearheaded by Make.

So I'd say it's not so much that hacking is dying off rather than being handed over to the new generation, which has its own interests.

Computers Key To Air France Crash 911

Michael_Curator writes "It's no secret that commercial airplanes are heavily computerized, but as the mystery of Air France Flight 447 unfolds, we need to come to grips with the fact that in many cases, airline pilots' hands are tied when it comes to responding effectively to an emergency situation. Boeing planes allow pilots to take over from computers during emergency situations, Airbus planes do not. It's not a design flaw — it's a philosophical divide. It's essentially a question of what do you trust most: a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information. It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems. As passengers, we should have the right to ask whether we're putting our lives in the hands of a computer rather than the battle-tested pilot sitting up front, and we should have right to deplane if we don't like the answer."

Comment Making themselves a "persecuted minority" (Score 1) 567

I don't think anyone outside the CoS's cultists will take such a comment seriously. All the +5 comments I see here are variants of "Bwahaha! Fool." in discrediting Miscavige's analogy.

However, remember that one way the CoS keeps its claws on its cultists is by appearing to them as a persecuted minority. This /. comment is enlightening.

Hence, I believe this comment rather serves to get his troops to hang tough and together.

Comment Power factor of CFLs isn't new (Score 1) 859

Funny, I learned about the power factor problem of CFLs back when I was in high school, at least 10 years ago.

I thought the problem was solved since then, seeing how CFLs are taking over.

Huh, guess I was wrong, and it was just that the economics had overtaking the "minor technical problems" ...

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