computers

Our (mostly) benevolent but unfortunately all-too-uncommunicative Seed Overlords have finally bestowed upon us another report regarding the ongoing DDoS attack. Believe me, I know many of you can't access ScienceBlogs and, most important of all to me, this blog, the better to read every word of Insolence, Respectful and otherwise, that pours from my keyboard. I can even see it reflected in my traffic over the last week or so. Here is the latest on the explanation: Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating…
You, my readers, have been complaining about flakiness in Sb that goes above and beyond the usual technical flakiness of the site. So have many other readers, in particular PZ's. After a couple of days where the blog loaded slow as the proverbial molasses in Minnesota in January, our benevolent but not particularly communicative overlords have finally revealed to us the reason for our problems: We have been forwarding reports from bloggers and users to our hosting service, Rackspace, over the past few days. After monitoring our traffic and these reports, Rackspace has determined that…
It's a little bigger than an iPhone. A while back, I came across this Wall Street Journal article about the Computer Museum. I found this handy-dandy computer to help housewives cook a delicious meal! It's very practical: (from here) Sure, it takes up half the kitchen, but look at what the Neiman-Marcus catalog of 1969 says about it: "The mini-computer was specially programmed to select meals fit for royalty. It appeared in the Neiman-Marcus Christmas catalog in 1969." Fit for royality! See how useful it is: It does put smart phones in perspective....
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) recently announced that it will shut down the Short Read Archive (SRA). The SRA stored the semi-processed data for genomics projects, so researchers could examine the raw data for a genomics project. The reason given by NCBI is "budget constraints." While I'm saddened by this, I'm not surprised, since the volume of data produced by a single genome center is tremendous, to the point where the storage and data upload are prohibitive: when several centers were collaborating to test new sequencing technologies, the data were so large,…
Matthew Yglesias writes regarding Moore's Law, which states that CPU transistor counts double every two years: My pet notion is that improvements in computer power have been, in some sense, come along at an un-optimally rapid pace. To actually think up smart new ways to deploy new technology, then persuade some other people to listen to you, then implement the change, then have the competitive advantage this gives you play out in the form of increased market share takes time. The underlying technology is changing so rapidly that it may not be fully worthwhile to spend a lot of time thinking…
In 2007, my friends at m ss ng peces and I started work on a new Internet-television show called RESET, for the Sundance Channel. The idea was to make a show designed for computers to watch, that could teach them what it was like to be human -- a show that, while ostensibly made for human beings, would also nourish our computers' circuit boards with generous descriptions of the richness of human experience. Obviously this is just an artistic conceit, and not, as far as I know, a practicable reality, but it does raise a lot of interesting questions. You probably spend your entire day within…
Has it really been six years? Six years ago today, on a dim and dreary Saturday in December, almost on a whim I sat down, went to Blogspot, and started up the first version of Respectful Insolence with an introductory post with the cliched title, Please allow me to introduce myself. Here it is, six years later. On this cold December Saturday, I still find it difficult to his blog is considered one of the "top" medical blogs by one measure, and some actually--shockingly--consider me somewhat of a "famous" skeptic. I know, I know, I still can't wrap my head around the concept myself. At least,…
Remember Elyse? She's one of the Skepchicks, and a couple of weeks ago she did a most excellent skeptical thing. She organized a campaign to complain to the theaters that had, according to the anti-vaccine propaganda group SafeMinds and the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism, accepted the advertisements, which SafeMinds were "framing" to be public service announcements. Her campaign met with considerable success. AMC Theaters, in particular, put the kibosh on the anti-vaccine "PSA." This is not the only time Elyse has been a thorn in the side of the anti-vaccine movement. Back in May…
Forgive me if I'm feeling a little schadenfreude right now. My current blog location has been criticized in the past for a variety of things, including, most recently, Pepsigate. One of the things that we've been criticized for is our on-again off-again use of Google Adsense, where the content of the page dictates which ads pop up. For skeptical blogs, this sometimes has some rather embarrassing consequences. For instance, when I write about vaccines, sometimes the ad server would serve up ads for chelation therapy or anti-vaccine quack nostrums. Ditto when I wrote about homeopathy, which…
The exciting thing about the recent technological advances in genomics is that we have a massive amount of data. The terrifying thing about the recent technological advances in genomics is that we have a massive amount of data. A while ago, I brought this up in the context of bacterial genomics: Most of the time, when you read articles about sequencing, they focus on the actual production of raw sequence data (i.e., 'reads'). But that's not the rate-limiting step. That is, we have now reached the point where working with the data we generate is far more time-consuming... So, from a…
The Force remains strong in Darth Jobs, even after antennagate. I actually love my iPhone 4 and haven't had any problems with it. Even so, I found the above video about Steve Jobs' infamous Reality Distortion Field to be hilarious, even though it comes from Taiwan and I can't understand a word of it. It doesn't surprise me in the least that Jobs' power derives from the dark side of the Force. ADDENDUM: Here's the same video with English subtitles. Well, it's not the greatest as far as English subtitles go, but you get the message I think.
tags: David Kassan Paints a Live Model on his iPad, technology, computers, iPad, Apple, art, fingerpainting, portrait painting, documentary, time-lapse video, streaming video This video is a time-lapse rendering of an Apple ipad fingerpainting demo that was streamed live from artist David Kassan's Brooklyn studio on Monday, 21 June 2010. The model sat for 3 hours as Mr Kassan painted and answered questions on how he uses the iPad and the Brushes applications. Learn more about David Kassan.
Now that I've had my new iPhone 4 for nearly four days, I need to know what to do with my old iPhone. One has to wonder: Will it blend? Clearly the iPhone 4 blends.
...is because I lucked out and my iPhone 4 arrived a day early. Gadget geek that I am, I couldn't resist taking the time I'd normally spend blogging last night to set it up the way I like it. Yes, whenever I get a new smartphone, just as whenever I get a new computer, I like to start from scratch. What? Did you think it had something to do with something else, like a certain college student from Brandeis? Perish the thought! In fact, here's my response: More later. Maybe. I was too busy testing out the new phone to bother with such petty concerns. Queue the Apple haters to battle the…
Genome Biology recently published a review, "The Case for Cloud Computing in Genome Informatics." What is cloud computing? Well: This is a general term for computation-as-a-service. There are various different types of cloud computing, but the one that is closest to the way that computational biologists currently work depends on the concept of a 'virtual machine'. In the traditional economic model of computation, customers purchase server, storage and networking hardware, configure it the way they need, and run software on it. In computation-as-a-service, customers essentially rent the…
This list popped up on my screen this morning, and I thought it was an interesting window into a worldview. The article lists ten things that despite the economy, we aren't cutting back on: Portable computers. The iPad might be the latest must-have gizmo, but the power of computers transcends trendiness. Brianna Karp, for instance, discovered lots of homeless people online, many logging in through their own laptops, like her. Shipments of notebooks have skyrocketed over the last three years, with sales in 2010 likely to be double what they were in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics…
Markos Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of DailyKos, the world's largest political blog. He travels quite a bit and is dependent on his laptop and the internet. So I read his first experience with the iPad with a great deal of interest. Go read it (like they need the traffic; on a quiet Sunday night they are running 35,000 visits an hour!). Bottom line: overwhelmingly positive for someone who has a few, routine but critical functions handled by email and Microsoft Office level programs. I've already written about my own plans to get one later in the year, after the kinks are worked out…
Will it blend? Personally, I doubt I'll be getting in iPad. I have an iPhone, after all, and I don't see where I would use something like the iPad rather than my laptop. Most of the stuff I need to do with a computer that I can't do on my iPhone requires Microsoft Office and various graphics programs. There just doesn't seem to be a niche in my computing habits that isn't already filled by my laptop or iPhone. That could change as the iPad evolves, but for now this Apple fanboy is going to abstain. On the other hand, I wonder where you get a job like this guy's, where I'd get to blend…
Add milk and ice cream:
I haven't bought myself an iPad yet, but I'll probably do it before heading off on vacation in August. By that time it will have passed its shakedown phase and we'll know the best and worst. But from what I see and hear it looks pretty good, especially if you travel a lot. My trusty MacBook Pro weighs about 6 lbs with everything and this is less than 2 lbs (if I spring for the docking keyboard). One knock on it is price: $499 (and more if I go for the 3G version at $630. But it's all relative. Relative to what? In 1981 I bought my first computer, an Apple II+. It had no monitor, 48K of RAM (…