spartango

The NYT is saying that some Malaysian government officials are confused about how ACARS works, leading to the confused reporting.

The above comment is accurate: the last ACARS message was received at 107, and the next one was expected at 137. The voice communication was logged at 119.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlin...

It's being reported[1 - NYT] that the 107 "turn off time" is inaccurately quoted. It wasn't that the system was turned off at 107, as much as the next expected report at 137 was not received. This leaves a 30 minute window during which the system was disabled. Note also that the last voice communication was at 119, so it could have been disabled after that. We simply do not know.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/asia/malaysia-airlin...

Please, please do not suggest treatments for your friend, especially those suggested by people on the internet.

People on the internet may mean well and show you interesting things, but your friend's medical care is best managed by his oncologist/primary care physician. Interfering with their work will likely do more harm than good.

Definitely encourage your friend to ask any and all questions about his care; communication between doctors and patients is helpful for everyone involved.

Self-medication, whether by diet or drugs, is a terrible idea. People die doing this.

Vertex 3 with the latest firmware seems relatively stable.

It's hard to judge your situation from across the internet, but I'll point out two things I've learned over the years:

1. Personal responsibility varies from person to person, related to such as personality and maturity. I enjoy maintaining a functional and orderly living environment, where some people don't particularly mind slightly more disorder if it means less work.

That's ok, in itself. But problems like yours arise where people are mismatched on responsibility. Living alone guarantees that this never happens, but is not the only way. If you can find peers who share your sense of responsibility, then living with many others can still work out.

With that said, I know my priorities bias me to optimize for responsible people first, so I opt to live with the small number of people I can find.

2. I've found Hacker Houses intellectually frustrating environments in surprising ways. I realized over time that I enjoy living with people doing vastly different things, well outside of technology or science. Living with people who are thinking about the same things leads me to tunnel vision and eventual irritation/cynicism. Maybe that's just me.

This blanket characterization of an entire continent's people and leadership strikes me as borderline racist.

Yes, there are corrupt governments in some African countries, and yes, there is a history of corruption in many of these countries. But to group all of Africa's governments together and judge them with such prejudice is hardly just.

Petty politics aside, it seems to me that the comparisons between Systemd and Upstart are analogous to those between launchd and Solaris' SMF.

The crux of the comparison is whether init should explicitly follow a dependency tree or resolve dependencies dynamically.

The other complaints fall out of that concern: in following the launchd model of dynamic resolution, systemd is forced to bundle in complex features. On OSX launchd serves as a hub from day one, so coordinating IPC and mount-watching is not so foreign. Similarly, this hub functionality restricts modularity, although launchd doesn't subsume autofs fully.

The reality here is that we're looking at a philosophical difference. While religious wars start over which is the "right" view, I'm unconvinced there is one. Much as SMF and launchd are comparably functional, so will upstart and systemd be.

There's a performance comparison in the wiki:

https://github.com/zeromq/jeromq/wiki/Perfomance

Not all the cards will be nice and fluffy, but the subset that are might still make her happy.

For religious/political/belief oriented cards, you can imagine filtering them, too. With that said, sometimes it's the thought that counts. Even if you don't believe in someone else's god, the fact that they wish you well is uplifting.

If you are interested in getting your hands dirty around the world, you might checkout Engineers without Borders[1] or the Peace Corps[2], or one of many similar non-profit organizations that employ skilled people to help others around the world. You might even volunteer with the Red Cross to help victims of the typhoon in the Philippines.

On the less philanthropic end of things, there are a host of organizations solving problems in the biomedical world. From hospitals to biotech companies, there are many possibilities. I've found working in this space incredibly fulfilling, especially given that I've had a chance to see patient cases where we can make a difference.

[1] http://www.ewb-usa.org [2] http://www.peacecorps.gov

While this would be interesting as a matter of engineering curiosity, Everpix's AWS bill was not close to the #1 hurdle between them and profitability. It seems like low hanging fruit, but you'd be optimizing away something small relative to, say, their employee costs or per user revenue.

While this is a fun--and potentially useful--idea, can I recommend you spend some time hanging around/working for small businesses? You'll find the experience pretty useful.

On one hand, you may discover (as I fear) that mom-and-pop don't need an API or don't have the resources to pay for one. Perhaps even if they did, nobody would use it.

On the other, you may conveniently find yourself with the first few customers you'll need. They'll already know and trust you, and you'll have very clear idea of what their challenges are.

The medical community is working on systems that are far superior to this one, and they are brilliant. Some are already on the market:

* Pacemakers / Artificial hearts (Heart diseases)

* Cochlear implants / Bone anchored hearing aids (Deafness)

* Insulin pumps (Diabetes)

* Deep brain stimulators (Parkinson's)

* Wireless gastrointestinal probes (GI disease/cancer)

They don't sound sexy, but these devices are now wireless sensor nodes with years of battery life. There are some next generation devices that are making their way onto the market as well, such as the Proteus Digital sensor[1] which was approved by the FDA last year.

I'm excited about progress in implantable technologies and also understand why their progress is seems slow--it takes a lot of work to ensure these devices are safe. That safety also necessitates a level of closedness for now: devices are only validated under carefully controlled conditions.

Efforts like this one, however, are incredibly unsafe. They endanger individuals while also making the DIY community look stupid.

[1] http://www.proteus.com/proteus-digital-health-announces-fda-...

To be specific about it, iOS has APIs that notify the application (rather than the user) about the device's network state, whether its cellular/wifi/absent. Application developers are expected to control app behavior given this information, but only some subset do.

I'll agree with this, but in that case I would tend to judge competency by other, finer criteria. I'd rather judge someone by their own efforts and decisions rather than factors beyond their control.

You can also judge an idea around which a startup is built, but that's a tricky game. Should you do so, however, you would not be criticizing this man's strategy or MBA insights.

This is extremely harsh. Nearly all startups fail, technology or otherwise. I'm sure you're aware of how difficult starting and running a company is, and how many factors are well outside of your control.

His startups could have failed for any number of reasons, and even the best strategy and implementation and ideas and people cannot guarantee a success. Nothing can.

Regardless of what I think of his opinions or ideas, I respect this man's attempts at starting his own endeavors, as I know firsthand how difficult that is.

While as a Bostonian I would love gigabit, I do think that fighting crime remains a substantial priority in this city. It's not totally backwards, but there's room to improve.

Indeed, I generally think that there are many priorities a mayoral candidate for this city should have, and alas, super-speed internet access is not at the top of that list. Gigabit is a problem ranking far under crime, poverty, and infrastructural issues in Boston.

Coming from the world of biophysics and structural bio, I wholeheartedly agree. Multidisciplinary approaches answer many more questions, but can be quite challenging to wrap your head around.

Thinking like this is awesome when it happens: a lab I worked in would combine structures of motor proteins with single molecule studies, targeted mutation work, and even in-vivo studies. The result? You could take specific loops and helices within the motor and not only understand where and how they interact with a microtubule, but also how that affected the motor's mechanical action and cellular behavior.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22997337

While I definitely agree that the software around synthetic biology is weak, I think this is not actually the problem bottlenecking the field. Ultimately, most efforts in synthetic biology are gated foremost by a lack of underlying biological knowledge. Automation may aid discovery, but the number of components and complexity of biological systems leaves many unanswered questions.

Yes, There have been demonstrators of biological computing and circuits, but from a functional perspective they are extremely limited, especially compared to in vivo systems. Put a different way, even if we can do complex "computation" in a cell, our understanding of the "I/O" is too superficial to design systems to treat diseases or act as devices. The failure of rational drug design over the last 20 years has taught the pharmaceutical community this lesson quite harshly.

Understanding the interfaces and mechanisms that our "biological computers" will work with will require more research in fields like structural and molecular biology, and this work will take time.

With that said, there are some useful systems we can engineer in the meantime; for example, biosynthesis pathway work is well underway. Just realize that these systems don't require substantial engineered computation.

NEC has 21.5" 5MP (2048 x 2560) displays[1], and Barco[2] and EIZO have 30" 10MP (4096 x 2560) displays. These come out to 154 and 161 PPI respectively; you're right that it's not the 180-200ppi target listed, but it's still higher than anything consumer grade.

[1] http://www.necdisplay.com/p/medical-diagnostic-displays/md21...

[2] http://www.barco.com/en/Products-Solutions/Displays-monitors...

Graduation rates for pathologists are stagnant or falling, and case loads are rising as people get old and cancerous.

Hopefully CAD tools will speed you up, rather than put you of a job. Having worked with pathologists, I think digital has a ways to go before it replaces you entirely.

Heh, you caught me. Barco is trying to market these fancy monitors for pathology as the slide scanner wave rises. Really these are rebranded versions of the displays they sell for mammography/radiology applications.

There are a few deployments of these things, but mostly the smaller (cheaper) displays[1]. I think Ventana (formerly Bioimagene) also used to ship Barco displays with their Virtuoso package[2]

Nobody says that the display vendors have been successful with this marketing so far; the people I've worked with are also not buying these things. 17-19" Dell 2MP will do...

[1] http://www.barco.com/en/News/Press-releases/barco-delivers-c...

[2] http://www.barco.com/en/News/Post/2013/6/4/barco-and-ventana...

Amusingly, this feature has utility for people in the US who work in defense areas (or anything covered under ITAR).

Planning to travel but got ITAR data on your disk? Better swap that disk unless you like fines and jail time.

In the medical monitor world there are higher pixel density displays at a a much higher price: the 5-10MP (21-30") displays from Barco and NEC cost between $12,000 and $20,000, and slightly more for 510(k) approved models. Some of them are grayscale only (mammography), but increasingly we're seeing good IPS displays with 30bit color for pathology.

It's not that the technology doesn't exist, but the device yields for these parts are so low that only people who absolutely need the pixel density (life or death decisions) are actually able to afford them.

Would you drop $20,000 on a monitor?

This reminds me of the PayPal mobile application, both in terms of organization and information priority. Both this concept and the mobile app headline account balance, simplify actions to four items, and allow the transaction log to make up the body of the content.

Look-and-feel aside, I think this concept aligns with the intent to bring parity between the mobile experience and desktop. I do worry, however, that the use cases for the desktop application may differ (particularly for bigger sellers) from the mobile, and this flow may fall apart for them.

That's good to hear. This policy seems to come from a well-intentioned place; it would be a shame if it had some unintended consequences.

While I wouldn't so hastily accuse Weebly of age discrimination, I think this raises an interesting discussion around hiring practice:

The logistics of certain hiring practices may be themselves biased in terms of age (or other factors), which is questionably ethical. This trial week seems to discriminate against those who cannot trivially sacrifice vacation time (employees with families, for example). There are others, too; I've heard other founders scheduling interviews with candidates late into the evening or night, even on weekends. With kids to tend to, that would be an incredibly frustrating situation.

Nothing is quite so black and white that these acts are themselves evil, but I do hope companies aren't becoming culturally biased. If you're flexible with your policies, then perhaps you'll do fine. With that said, there's something to be said to sticking to some conventions in the interest of not alienating candidates

This is a cute application that ties many services together and even looks nice. Standing alone, it's almost like having a timeline for the tangible things in your work; I'd actually love to have this summarized, but for no particular reason.

And that's the problem. It's not clear at all what problem this fun application solves. It clearly doesn't capture the flow of work in a team or any individual, simply because it only captures the tangible/digital artifacts of work. You can imagine adding self-reporting or something (ala Yammer), but it's still an incomplete record.

And as other commenters point out, an incomplete dataset is prone to faulty reasoning. An overzealous user might micromanage based only on these tangible artifacts...

In any case, I'd encourage the developers here to think about what specific problem is being solved, and whether this app communicates that well. The information captured might be useful, but I'm unconvinced a timeline presents it properly.

My gut says something about summaries and aggregation, looking not at what's in-flight but what has been done so far.

Somewhere between my main interests in molecular+systems biology and my work in microscopy and software(building and using), I gained an appreciation for biomedical imaging techniques.

From there, much hard work learning from oncologists, radiologists, pathologists, and technicians to figure out what we could do to enhance their work with imaging technologies.

Under Xen, your instance is not quite a process in the conventional sense. The Xen hypervisor lives underneath all the OSes on the host, both those allocated to customers (domUs in Xen-speak) and the one allocated to manage the customers (dom0). Xen starts up before the dom0 kernel, and then loads the dom0 OS as a privileged instance.

This is quite different from KVM, where the hypervisor is built as kernel modules in the linux kernel, and the host linux OS acts as the management instance.

Functionally, however, the results of this setup are similar to being a process: the hypervisor may schedule your instance's CPU time, and your kernel is specialized so that when it needs memory, it calls into Xen for the appropriate mapping (similar to VM in kernel).