Posts by Chemist 2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
"I'm still waiting for printer manufacturers to develop printer drivers for Linux!"
I'm suprised. I've had 3 lasers (Epson, Brother and Samsung) since ~1998 - all worked with Linux without any issues. I also have a second-hand, cheap Epson inkjet scanner/printer which also works without any probs.
"as it's getting easier to install applications in Linux (still a bit of a ball ache though, compared to windows)"
Don't recognize the problem. For my distro of choice (OpenSUSE) just select from the vast array of progs in YAST2 GUI and install as many as you want in 1 go or from SUSE software webpage install with 1-click install. For Raspberry pi fairly similar process using the (GUI) Synaptic manager.
"One needs to block the catabolic processes breaking down muscle/bone."
Good luck with that !
I know that you put it as 'simply' however having spent a modest amount of my life working in the area of osteoporosis I can say that it's horribly complicated. For example, under normal conditions bone is constantly re-worked by specialized cells working in series to attach to bone, dissolve calcium salts by pumping in acid, cleave collagen fibers with enzymes and then the whole process ireversed to lay down new collagen and fresh calcium salts. My guess at the time I worked in this area was that it looked like constant repairs to remove micro-damage before it became serious and therefore stopping this process could well lead to weak bones - many people were trying to stop it as it was thought by some that osteoporosis might well be a result of the 'dissolving' process predominating over the replacement.
"the very properties that make a substance a good refrigerant also make it a greenhouse gas?"
Any substance that has a bond capable of absorbing infra-red is going to be a greenhouse gas of some level of potency. A further important factor is the substance's half-life in the atmosphere & indeed the potency & half-life of the break-down products.......
"'m confused how protein molecules know how to fold themselves up in a picosecond without having access to 100,000 PS3s running day and night for a week."
One answer is that they are an analogue computer. Alternatively they are a quantum computer.
Incidentally they don't always get it right - Google "Chaperone (protein)" and "heat shock proteins"
"Silly or not, the numbers are clear."
Do you have a ref. to that ?? AFAIK there is no hard evidence for % by population only for turnout and certainly no hard statistics that I've seen.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/how-did-different-demographic-groups-vote-eu-referendum.
AFAIK no-one has strong evidence only conjecture and anecdote. In any case there seems to be no evidence that the vast majority of each age group voted as you suggested
"From the ones who REALLY VOTED for this. Which is not the under 50 generation."
That comes across as rather silly. Certainly a larger percentage of older people probably voted exit and a larger percentage of younger voted remain but it's not that clear cut. Even worst is this dammed line "a clear majority voted for exit" - I'd say a small majority - its the rest of us feeling sorry ( for the moment)
" latest atheros chipset which is in practically all the latest generation of laptops."
Apart from all the new ones with Intel chipsets.
As I mentioned before £7 USB dongles the size of a fingernail are available for Pis and work fine in all the Linux laptops I've tried assuming you are unlucky enough to have problems with the built-in adaptor
"Broadcom WiFi"...."require proprietary firmware that's only supported in Windows"
Ah, ah.
I must tell my wife - she's using a Lenovo laptop running OpenSUSE 13.2 with Broadcom WiFi. It obviously shouldn't be working !!
(I've had 7-8 laptops over the last ~15-20 years and Linux has installed on all of them. Most of the recent ones have had Ralink, Realtek or Intel WiFi . Indeed 2 of the very cheap USB WiFi dongles for some Pis plug into the laptops and work without any issues.
My Huawei mobile dongle also works without any issues.
"but if we have some scientists who think it can't be completely ruled out yet then it can't hurt to try."
Whilst I agree in principle in practice there are an awful lot of possibilities - without some framework to prioritize where the effort goes it remains up to those keen on the idea to show some evidence ( real or even theoretical) to support what, in most cases, is speculative.
Unfortunately there is a a view that "anything is possible " - no, sorry it's not. Just because human imagination can visualize something doesn't mean the physics of this universe allow for it. ( Ask Scottie if you don't believe me ).
( Nothing, BTW, would give me more pleasure than for there to be a way to travel far & fast but .....
"It was impossible that stomach ulcers in humans were caused by a virus ? Hello Heliobactor pylorii !"
Not quite - no-one knew but some clues were were there in the literature. Cases often appeared in clusters and especially in immunosupressed groups. Munition workers exposed to certain chemicals is the example I recall.
When I started work on H2-blockers ~40 years ago some people might have said that it was impossible for the disease to be caused by an infection but really nobody knew the cause although there were a number of pet ideas.
BTW H. Pylorii is a bacterium. not a virus.
As regards your comment on gravity -definition of gravity was "a force which distorts spacetime."
it's rather " a distortion of spacetime is perceived as an apparent force we call gravity
From Softpedia :
"The good news is that Umbreon's installation is not automated, and attackers need to break into a system first, and then manually install the rootkit on the hacked device."
http://news.softpedia.com/news/pokemon-themed-umbreon-rootkit-targets-linux-x86-and-arm-platforms-507970.shtml
"Lots of positions with dubious futures due to either lack of, or difficulty of securing funding"
This is usual for lots of academic and institutional research and has be for years. I'm certainly not saying it good, far from it. It's often funded very short term, people exist on poor living grants, poor funding grants and a lot of chopping and changing. Generally much better in Pharma companies but there the research has to be directed to areas with greater potential returns.
Why, why, why in the centre of London though ?
"Look at the windows or any residence at night "
They'd have to come up half a mile of unmade road, then go on foot in the dark through thick woodlands for another half a mile because our TV is at the back of the house and the nearest road in that direction is a mile away with half a mile of woodland in-between.
So just to be sure we dim the screen & just listen to the sound ( with headphones).
Load of nonsense
( I do have a TV license 'cos you can't be too careful !)
"Its too low powered for most proper computing tasks "
Can't agree I'm afraid - it's certainly limited but for running one or 2 applications i can't fault it.
I'm running 4 routinely and 6 in all. All running Debian desktops via VNC
1. is a web/motion-sensitive/streaming cam - also running a web-server for domestic use - addresses, recipes, notes etc.
2. is a backup fileserver and sshd portal - ethernet connected to the router and also used as a web-proxy back to the UK when traveling.
3. is for hardware experiments with a break-out connection board
4. spent the summer (May-Aug) in Saas-Fee taking a photo every 5 minutes & joining them into a .mp4 file.
5. Travels with the laptop. An ethernet cable and USB/USB cable to power it from the laptop works great.
I don't stress them but I find they've been completely reliable Even running a desktop and streaming from the webcam (800x600, wifi, 3 fps) I find Pi1 ( a Pi B) is using little memory (~140MB) and running at ~8% cpu usage, for example.
A test spreadsheet (which recalculates 400000 sines ) which takes < 0.5 secs on this i7 takes ~7 seconds on a Pi.
I don't suppose I'll be doing any video editing but I'd certainly use it for developing a directory of RAW images in the background.
"that businesses don't use Linux."
Years ago (~~2003) the large Pharma that I worked for at the time moved gradually from SGI to Linux workstations (~200) mainly for cost reasons at the time. This was for the scientific groups involved in computational chemistry & protein structure determination etc.. All the workstations were dual Xenons with frighteningly expensive 3D graphics/ LCD specs and backed with IBM fileservers and compute servers and several large Linux farms (1024-4096 nodes).
So certainly the business of science did use Linux even in the early 2000s
"Unless the support's SIMPLY NOT THERE...like there is for SO MANY USB WiFi devices out there..."
IF you have trouble ( I never have BTW ) then as it's a USB device - just plug one in that is supported.
(I've got several for Raspberry Pis that cost almost nothing, are ~ 1 cm long and work with all my LInux desktops and laptops)
"Linux installs in minutes" - quite
On this i7 laptop even a heayweight like OpenSUSE took just 15 mins to install from a slowish USB stick (complete of course with a goodly selection of office/graphics/photo/multimedia/internet progs. and admin tools). After that it depends on how much updating your distro needs and how fast your connection is. But it's all usable whilst it does this.
As to whether you need Windows - well I don't and my interests are photography including developing RAW , video editing, and all the usual office stuff + a vast array of scientific software most of which is developed on or compiled for Linux.
"The average person who is not a developer who tries to install Linux on an average box usually fails, because there is no working graphics driver, or mouse driver, etc. for some part of their machine.
I have worked in IT for years, and installing Linux on any platform/brand has always been a crap shoot. It either works, or it wont and there is no fix for it, unless you develop it yourself."
I note that you are anonymous presumably because you are telling porkies !
"Er, wasn't the weak and electro-magnetic forces unified into the electro-weak force upon the discovery of the W & Z vector bosons at CERN back in the 1980s? Which would mean that there are now thought to be 4 forces, namely gravity, strong, electro-weak, and this new one?"
AFAIK it depends on the temperature of the systems you are considering. The weak & electromagnetic appear to be indistinguishable above a certain energy/temperature and indeed I think the strong nuclear force can also be unified above an even higher temperature.
"Linux doesn't have a CLI reliance as any number of people here will tell you."
A liitle example BTW - I needed to install a network printer on one of my Raspberry Pis. Using a VNC client on my laptop to get the Pi's desktop I installed the CUPS package on the Pi from the GUI package manager, went to the web-based management page to install the network laser printer but didn't need to as it had already found it and it was already appearing in the print menus of anything that needed to print. And this on a Pi (which often does need CLI use purely due to the lightweight distro installed.)
"I wonder if maybe this CLI reliance is one of the reasons why Linux struggles to get mainstream desktop adoption?"
Any sane, modern (post 2005 ?? ) Linux doesn't have a CLI reliance as any number of people here will tell you. I use it all the time for everything ( since the early 90's, exclusively since ~2008) and when I use the CLI it's because I want to not because I have to. Sometimes it's quicker because I can just copy/paste from a note on the desktop, sometimes it's much quicker because I'm calling a script to process 1000's of files but it could all be done by a GUI if necessary .
"Puzzled. We have a 3% marked share by end users in Windows phone as a failure. But a 2% market share on the desktop for Linux is a success.."
It's not that hard really - people can go out and buy a Windows phone but they don't. People have to get off their butts and install Linux
"So how do they know which flavour they were when they left Illinois?"
The experiment produces mostly muon neutrinos. A detector at the experiment confirms this and the remainder are detected after traveling the ~740km to the main detector.
"By the time Intel's bods wake up in America, the deal will likely be done here in the UK, so they'll miss out."
Not really - the shareholders have to decide in the end and could easily be open to a bigger offer. It's the board's job to get the best value for the owners.
On the other hand it would be great pity if this company was damaged in any way. I see Softbank are suggesting doubling the (UK) workforce.
"As it applies equally to a collision between two photons"
I'm not sure it actually does - this might seem like heresy - thermodynamics does deal with bulk properties - averaged over a reasonable number of pairs of photons it will surely be true but just 1 pair? I'm desperately trying to remember my statistical thermodynamics lectures from nearly fifty years ago* (which I had a lot of trouble with then). In a gas at a fixed temperature there will be a distribution of particle velocities. The gas will have a 'temperature' but any atom/molecule will have it's own (and changing) velocity.
*I would welcome views
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