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Slashback: Embed, Dougal, FireWire
Reality is just an illustrator's concept. In regards to the speculative piece about what animals will look like in the future, Ken Colangelo writes: "The author of After Man was Dougal Dixon, not Dougal Adams. He's got a pretty long track record as an amazing bio-illustrator.
He had, at one point, spoken of a book he was working on called "Man After Man" I believe. This would discuss what man would evolve into. In any case, I am probably his biggest (only?) fan and would appreciate it if you'd tell slashdot to correct his name ... This guy clearly needs to be working in speculative evolution again, now that computer graphics have caught up to his abilities. Animal Planet just doesn't seem to be that great at it."
A bit more on that secret FireWire, since it's no longer secret. cwill1004 writes "As was speculated yesterday, it turns out that Apple is indeed including a new higher-speed FireWire on its new laptops. Dubbed IEEE1394b, it appears to be primarily for external storage devices. One article on the Storage Supersite says that LaCie, Maxtor, SmartDisk, and Indigita have already hopped on board. The best part: IEEE1394b is backwards compatible, and available on both Mac and PC."
Perl undoes simplicity itself.
ljb writes " I've re-written Tom Murphy's
'embed' bit-flipping program
in Perl. At 76 characters (shorter than a standard
80-character width terminal line),
I believe this qualifies as a Perl "one-liner". Heck, you could even fit this on an old IBM punchcard
(ignoring character set limitations). Here's the Perl script --
$/=\4;map{?OS/2?|$f&&$f++==2?$c-=2+vec($_,0,32)/4: ++$c||s/../\0\0/s;print}<>"
So get distributed crackin' ... scubacuda writes "On. Off. Now it's on again? According to PC World (et al), The Neo Project again tackles the challenge of cracking Microsoft's encryption key."
I find closed systems distasteful, too, but wouldn't it help out a lot with cheating?
How in the world does the perl interpreter allow for such obfuscated code? With something like C or even Python it's impossible to produce such horrible code.
Compact form, sure, but not exactly understandable.
Only Apple would put forth a "revolutionary" new product which offers a measly 2x improvement. Note to technologists: please offer an order of magnitude (give or take) before making us by everything over again.
The bandwidth of firewire is extremely high, especially compared to other competing technologies like USB1.0. I think doubling the bandwidth is pretty impressive.
I do agree with you however that they should have tried to keep the original plugs for compatibility, but who knows, they probably had a good reason to use a new style.
Besides, how much would it cost to go out and get a new IEEE1394b daughterboard for your computer? A USB2.0 card can be had for under $50, so I would imagine the new IEEE1394b will be around there pretty soon anyways. It's not like you will have to go replace your entire computer and perephials to use the new technology.
Firewire would be nice if more devices supported it. Unfortunately, Firewire is looking like SCSI, and USB is looking like IDE/ATA.
Sure, no one who knows what they are talking about would argue that USB is better, but they will say that USB comes with more computers, and is cheaper for device manufacturers because of it's compatibility modes. eg. You won't see a firewire mouse with a $1 tranciever that allows it to plug right into PS/2--or a Firewire to Parallel & Serial adapter.
I really think Firewire missed the boat on making it easy and cheap for device manufactuers to add Firewire support to their devices... USB obviously didn't.
Firewire's main advantage is it's speed (which still doesn't come close to Ethernet--which further narrows Firewire's market) over USB, but I suspect, if they don't do a better job enticing device makers, Firewire could just as well disappear in favor of USB everywhere.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Now that's what I'm talkin' about. 3.2 Gb/s is a worthwhile number. I can see this as a potentially useful tool for memory-based photoshop swap-files, or truly fast portable downloads.
For those who might question that there isn't a soft spot in my heart for Apple, ya'll should know that I cut my digital teeth hand assembling 6502 machine code one summer...just for fun.
And for those who scoffed at my 10E+1 requirement, or used physical comparisons (my folks brand new Audi has a CD player which can't read a CD-R, how can I expect revolutionary results anywhere in the auto industry?) it is typical for a factor or 8 or 10 to go by before most folks upgrade.
Network speeds are nicely partitioned - 10, 100, gigabit. Cds to DVDs are about 8x in storage. Blu-ray, or HD-DVD, or whatever takes over will probably have to see another 6x-10x to be really useful. I'll admit that most processor jumps are in 2x increments, but - I'll be honest - I rarely buy each iteration, preferring to skip two at a time (6502+64kB to 8086+640kB to P75+8MB to K6-350+128MB to P4-2.4+384MB...soon to be a gig... being my upgrades) with minor tweaks along the way. 33.6 to 56k modems? Yawn - I got at 56 'cause my 33.6 broke ant there was no price difference. I bypassed starband and waited for DSL.
There may be very few applications for 3.2Gb transfers right now, but they will come. I paid $110 for my first firewire card, and it was a bargain at that price. It still serves me well for DV transfers. I'll worry about FW2 when I have to stream uncompressed HD @ 1920p around the house.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If it's their box, what exactly did I pay $200 for? The nifty packing material?
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