The Ananova article focuses solely on the implications for music storage. That will, no doubt, be a major application, but the important part of the story is: permanent, reliable storage with a data density of 1 GB/cm^3, for God's sake! This seems to me like a major breakthrough that will have implications far beyond whether we can or can't rip an MP3 of the latest disposable pop star of the week's manufactured hit single.
What are you doing here on slashdot? Better get yourself down there and edumicate some so-called scientists. Shit, if they were so daft to overlook this simple "fact", they don't deserve to call themselves scientists.
Thank you. It's too bad you posted as an AC, because your post deserves wider exposure than it's probably going to get. My kingdom for some mod points!
It seems like every story about any scientific controversy on/. brings out a bunch of trolls -- who don't even realize they're trolls -- who feel compelled to roll out some half-remembered fact from 8th-grade science class to "prove" that what these scientists are doing is clearly ridiculous and doomed to failure. Um... guess what, guys, the people working on the project in question already thought of your objection a looong time ago. For whatever reason, they've dismissed that objection -- and you can be sure that they had good reasons for doing so.
And even that lends too much credence to objections like the grandparent poster's. Saying, "there's no ice on the moon because it would have evaporated a long time ago" to a planetary scientist studying the possibility of lunar ice is roughly akin to someone with an elementary-school grasp of mathematics saying, "there's no such thing as the square root of a negative number, so what's with all these idiot mathematicians talking about i ?"
If you have a ramscoop capable of collecting any significant amount of hydrogen in deep space, that means you have propulsion technology that zips you around so fast that going to and from the Moon is child's play. We're talking about a significant fraction of c -- at such speeds, travel time between Earth and the Moon is measured in minutes. And honestly, though I'd love to be proven wrong, I don't expect to see such a thing any time soon.
I like the idea of scooping up chunks of Earth's upper atmosphere and taking it to the Moon, though. You still need an engine that's orders of magnitude more powerful and efficient than anything we have now, but something like that might at least be within reach.
Actually, if you double-click on this (or any).plist file -- or go there through the Terminal and type "open FILENAME" where FILENAME is the name of the.plist file -- it will open in Property List Editor, which is designed explicitly for this kind of management. It takes some playing around with this app to get comfortable in it (ALWAYS BACK UP!) but once you do, it's a powerful and convenient tool.
That definition of first/second/third world made sense during the Cold War, when the world was neatly divisible into three roughly equal blocs. I'm not sure it does any more. Russia is no longer communist*, but I think it's reasonable still to call it "second world," along with other nations that aren't desperately impoverished but are clearly not up there with the first world nations such as the US, Japan, and Germany -- a few examples that come to mind are India, Brazil, and the Phillipines, none of which were ever part of the Cold War communist bloc.
The fascinating thing about China, economically and politically, is how they're becoming something very like a capitalist country while retaining the "communist" name and governmental framework. I don't think anything like what they're attempting has ever been done before. They have clearly learned from Russia's mistake -- tearing down everything at once, especially in a big country, does not work. (Of course, they tried this in the other direction during the Cultural Revolution, which was also a failure.) Instead, in a very characteristically Chinese fashion, they're bringing in capitalism (and social freedoms) a bit at a time, and merging it with the existing structure rather than replacing things wholesale. I have no idea how successful this will be, but it's interesting to watch.
* Officially. Some of Putin's latest moves have more than a bit of the smell of Lenin about 'em. Of course, sadly, brutality and rule-by-fiat are grand Russian traditions that far predate the Revolution, so...
While I have no love for the idea of China or Saudi Arabia telling me what I can see on the net, nor do I have any love for the current situation of the *IAA or the enforcers of the DMCA and the PATRIOT Act telling me the same. So there are legitimate concerns on both sides, to say the least.
FWIW, colored file labels were one of the most-loved features in the old Classic Finder, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when they weren't included in OS X. I've done without them long enough that I don't usually miss them any more -- column view + lots of different folders takes care of one of their major uses, which was organizing groups of files for big projects -- but I'll be glad to have them back, and will probably get into the habit of using them again.
When people ask me what, honestly, IMO, makes MacOS better than Windows, it's lots of little things like that. There's no one dramatic advantage. (Well, okay, having Unix one click away is a pretty damn big advantage. But I'm talking about Classic as well as OS X.) It's a bunch of stuff that adds up into one slick whole. When you sit down with a well-designed interface, IMO, you don't have to think about why it works as well as it does. It... just... works.
Heh. I was talking about what you do with the toilet paper when you take it off the roll, actually...
Was the toilet paper tube patented when it first came out, do you know? If it was, I have no objection to that. I'm not saying all patents are bad; I'm saying patents on ways of doing things rather than the things themselves are bad, especially when those ways are blindingly obvious. "Business methods" are not technology, or inventions.
Neither, I would argue, are things that exist in the natural world -- thus the obscenity of, e.g., gene patents. You want to patent a drug you make as a result of research on a particular gene, fine, but not the gene itself.
Neither are algorithms. An algorithm is no more than a mathematical expression; and mathematical expressions are too damn important to be patented. Where would we be if you had to pay NewtonCorp. a royalty every time you used gravity or action-reaction? Code making use of the algorithms, BTW, already has a perfectly valid form of IP protection: it's called copyright.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The purpose of patents, and copyrights, and trademarks, is to encourage innovation, and I have no problem with that. But the instant it starts stifling innovation instead of encouraging it, then the whole system needs to be pared down drastically. And we are well past that point already.
It's not individual stupid patents we should go after; it's stupid patents in general. I'd rather see O'Reilly put his money into lobbying against the idea of patents on "business methods" and other vaguely defined ideas that simply shouldn't be eligible for any kind of IP protection, ever. And please don't trot out the line about, "Well then people won't innovate!" Somehow innovation seems to have done just fine for hundreds of years without people taking out patents like "A method for folding toilet paper so as to facilitate wiping your ass from front to back."
I'm always amused by people with no sense of history throwing around phrases like "200 years ago." Apparently you just picked a number that seemed like "a long time" and put it up on screen. If you'd said 500 years, I probably wouldn't have taken issue, but...
200 years ago. 1803. The US -- a nation which had come into existence, to a large degree, because of its large literate peasant population -- was just getting on its feet. The beginnings of reform (extension of the franchise, etc.) were taking shape in Britain, because for the first time, the farmers and the growing industrial working class were demanding it -- and they did so because they read. (It would take a few more decades for this to come to fruition, granted.) France was in the middle of the turmoil of the Napoleonic era; say what you will about the guy, but he tore down the ancien regime's policy of keeping the peasants ignorant, and set France on the road to democracy. In fact, of the great powers of the day, only Russia was able to stifle the urge of its unwashed masses for knowledge and freedom... and a large part of the reason why today, the US, Britain, and France are proseperous, stable democracies while Russia is essentially a giant Third World country with nukes can be traced back to this.
In short, the great story of the early 19th c., at least in the West, is the "rise of the demos," for the first time in history. And it happened because "a bunch of farmhands," all over the world, wanted to educate themselves. Never underestimate people's ability to see what it will take to build a better life for themselves and their children.
... of course, you can an even better view of the Milky Way on any clear night with a new moon. Not selling the experience of seeing the eclipse short, you understand.;) Just pointing out that the night of the new moon is pretty much always the best for looking at just about anything else in the night sky.
And location, location, location. I live in Colorado. High up in the mountains, you can go out on a night with a brilliant full moon and still see the Milky Way quite clearly, because there's no skyglow to speak of. Down in Denver, all the conditions can be perfect -- new moon, clear night, still air, etc. -- and you're still not going to see that much because the city lights drown most of it out. From what I remember of Cornwall, I'll bet there are lots of good viewing spots...
It's a historical accident. When the IBM PC came out, everyone just started using "PC" to mean "IBM PC." (In fact, didn't IBM try to trademark the name?) When the clones hit, "IBM-compatible" faded fairly quickly, to be replaced by "PC-compatible" or just "PC" -- which of course meant a machine with an Intel (or compatible) processor running MS-DOS. This usage has survived into the Windows era. I don't like it either, but I suspect it's too late to do anything about it.
Microsoft, of course, has proven far more successful than IBM at taking names that should be generic and turning them into trademarks: Windows, Word, SQL Server, etc. Hell, even "Microsoft" itself is about as generic a name for a software company as I can think of.
Oh yes, in some ways the reactions were very similar, and I won't deny it. But at least the reaction to the Gunpowder Plot was competent, if no less bloody-minded.
You know damn well that if Linux enjoyed the sort of desktop ubiquity that M$ has right now, we'd all be bitching about the latest exploit/virus/worm and complaining about how it takes so long to get them patched and why in $#%^&$%@#&* couldn't it have been written correctly in the first place!
Right. Which is why I'm bitching all the time about hbow insecure Apache is, and how long it takes to get it patched, and why the $#%^&$%@#&* it couldn't have been written right in the first place...
The Gunpowder Plot was essentially 9/11 in 1605, except that the plot was foiled.
Except that had it succeeded, the Protestant English of the time probably wouldn't have made a token effort at catching the killers, failed, and then gone off and started a war in Mesopotamia by way of covering up their failure.
The 100-ton test may have been the largest deliberate explosion up to that time. But here's the manifest for the ship that blew up in Halifax. Pretty impressive.
Yep. If I knew the world were going to end in a week, suddenly things like doing homework and getting to work on time would seem a whole lot less important.
I agree that a 4-year-old news piece, by itself, is not an adequate basis for assumptions. But the news of the switch and the fact that Netcraft still reports Army.mil running on WebStar/Mac should be enough to convince all but the most dedicated anti-Mac fanatic. If by "significant Web infrastructure" you mean back-end servers that don't talk directly to public browsers, I claim no knowledge of those.
It's pretty obvious to me that you are, in fact, a fanatic, so I suppose I'm wasting my time. 'Bye now.
Oh, for God's sake. The Army's switch to WebStar on Mac was reported all over the place when it happened four years ago. It's common knowledge. Here, here, and here are some links.
It's a usage that's more common in British than American English -- equivalent to "heating up" on this side of the Atlantic. Like "bloody" and a couple of other common British usages, it seems to be getting slightly more use in American English as well, though I suspect it will never be quite standard.
Then your employers are idiots... and not paying attention to what the Army is doing. (You say you're a DoD employee. Mind if I ask which branch, and what you do?) The other reply to your post gives a link that shows clearly that the grandparent poster is not a "dumbass troll," but just telling the truth. You really ought to check on things like this before you stick your foot in your mouth.
... and everyone else should too, if you can possibly afford it. This case is the tipping point for me. I've always admired the EFF's work, but most of it hasn't affected me personally. The voting machine issue affects everyone in the US, and given the importance of the US globally, everyone on Earth. Put your money where your mouth is.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't instantly recognize the word "ramscoop," what are you doing in a discussion of space travel?
The Ananova article focuses solely on the implications for music storage. That will, no doubt, be a major application, but the important part of the story is: permanent, reliable storage with a data density of 1 GB/cm^3, for God's sake! This seems to me like a major breakthrough that will have implications far beyond whether we can or can't rip an MP3 of the latest disposable pop star of the week's manufactured hit single.
Thank you. It's too bad you posted as an AC, because your post deserves wider exposure than it's probably going to get. My kingdom for some mod points!
It seems like every story about any scientific controversy on
And even that lends too much credence to objections like the grandparent poster's. Saying, "there's no ice on the moon because it would have evaporated a long time ago" to a planetary scientist studying the possibility of lunar ice is roughly akin to someone with an elementary-school grasp of mathematics saying, "there's no such thing as the square root of a negative number, so what's with all these idiot mathematicians talking about i ?"
If you have a ramscoop capable of collecting any significant amount of hydrogen in deep space, that means you have propulsion technology that zips you around so fast that going to and from the Moon is child's play. We're talking about a significant fraction of c -- at such speeds, travel time between Earth and the Moon is measured in minutes. And honestly, though I'd love to be proven wrong, I don't expect to see such a thing any time soon.
I like the idea of scooping up chunks of Earth's upper atmosphere and taking it to the Moon, though. You still need an engine that's orders of magnitude more powerful and efficient than anything we have now, but something like that might at least be within reach.
Actually, if you double-click on this (or any) .plist file -- or go there through the Terminal and type "open FILENAME" where FILENAME is the name of the .plist file -- it will open in Property List Editor, which is designed explicitly for this kind of management. It takes some playing around with this app to get comfortable in it (ALWAYS BACK UP!) but once you do, it's a powerful and convenient tool.
That definition of first/second/third world made sense during the Cold War, when the world was neatly divisible into three roughly equal blocs. I'm not sure it does any more. Russia is no longer communist*, but I think it's reasonable still to call it "second world," along with other nations that aren't desperately impoverished but are clearly not up there with the first world nations such as the US, Japan, and Germany -- a few examples that come to mind are India, Brazil, and the Phillipines, none of which were ever part of the Cold War communist bloc.
...
The fascinating thing about China, economically and politically, is how they're becoming something very like a capitalist country while retaining the "communist" name and governmental framework. I don't think anything like what they're attempting has ever been done before. They have clearly learned from Russia's mistake -- tearing down everything at once, especially in a big country, does not work. (Of course, they tried this in the other direction during the Cultural Revolution, which was also a failure.) Instead, in a very characteristically Chinese fashion, they're bringing in capitalism (and social freedoms) a bit at a time, and merging it with the existing structure rather than replacing things wholesale. I have no idea how successful this will be, but it's interesting to watch.
* Officially. Some of Putin's latest moves have more than a bit of the smell of Lenin about 'em. Of course, sadly, brutality and rule-by-fiat are grand Russian traditions that far predate the Revolution, so
A: When he eats his first Brownie!
While I have no love for the idea of China or Saudi Arabia telling me what I can see on the net, nor do I have any love for the current situation of the *IAA or the enforcers of the DMCA and the PATRIOT Act telling me the same. So there are legitimate concerns on both sides, to say the least.
FWIW, colored file labels were one of the most-loved features in the old Classic Finder, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when they weren't included in OS X. I've done without them long enough that I don't usually miss them any more -- column view + lots of different folders takes care of one of their major uses, which was organizing groups of files for big projects -- but I'll be glad to have them back, and will probably get into the habit of using them again.
... just ... works.
When people ask me what, honestly, IMO, makes MacOS better than Windows, it's lots of little things like that. There's no one dramatic advantage. (Well, okay, having Unix one click away is a pretty damn big advantage. But I'm talking about Classic as well as OS X.) It's a bunch of stuff that adds up into one slick whole. When you sit down with a well-designed interface, IMO, you don't have to think about why it works as well as it does. It
Heh. I was talking about what you do with the toilet paper when you take it off the roll, actually ...
Was the toilet paper tube patented when it first came out, do you know? If it was, I have no objection to that. I'm not saying all patents are bad; I'm saying patents on ways of doing things rather than the things themselves are bad, especially when those ways are blindingly obvious. "Business methods" are not technology, or inventions.
Neither, I would argue, are things that exist in the natural world -- thus the obscenity of, e.g., gene patents. You want to patent a drug you make as a result of research on a particular gene, fine, but not the gene itself.
Neither are algorithms. An algorithm is no more than a mathematical expression; and mathematical expressions are too damn important to be patented. Where would we be if you had to pay NewtonCorp. a royalty every time you used gravity or action-reaction? Code making use of the algorithms, BTW, already has a perfectly valid form of IP protection: it's called copyright.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The purpose of patents, and copyrights, and trademarks, is to encourage innovation, and I have no problem with that. But the instant it starts stifling innovation instead of encouraging it, then the whole system needs to be pared down drastically. And we are well past that point already.
It's not individual stupid patents we should go after; it's stupid patents in general. I'd rather see O'Reilly put his money into lobbying against the idea of patents on "business methods" and other vaguely defined ideas that simply shouldn't be eligible for any kind of IP protection, ever. And please don't trot out the line about, "Well then people won't innovate!" Somehow innovation seems to have done just fine for hundreds of years without people taking out patents like "A method for folding toilet paper so as to facilitate wiping your ass from front to back."
I'm always amused by people with no sense of history throwing around phrases like "200 years ago." Apparently you just picked a number that seemed like "a long time" and put it up on screen. If you'd said 500 years, I probably wouldn't have taken issue, but ...
... and a large part of the reason why today, the US, Britain, and France are proseperous, stable democracies while Russia is essentially a giant Third World country with nukes can be traced back to this.
200 years ago. 1803. The US -- a nation which had come into existence, to a large degree, because of its large literate peasant population -- was just getting on its feet. The beginnings of reform (extension of the franchise, etc.) were taking shape in Britain, because for the first time, the farmers and the growing industrial working class were demanding it -- and they did so because they read. (It would take a few more decades for this to come to fruition, granted.) France was in the middle of the turmoil of the Napoleonic era; say what you will about the guy, but he tore down the ancien regime's policy of keeping the peasants ignorant, and set France on the road to democracy. In fact, of the great powers of the day, only Russia was able to stifle the urge of its unwashed masses for knowledge and freedom
In short, the great story of the early 19th c., at least in the West, is the "rise of the demos," for the first time in history. And it happened because "a bunch of farmhands," all over the world, wanted to educate themselves. Never underestimate people's ability to see what it will take to build a better life for themselves and their children.
... of course, you can an even better view of the Milky Way on any clear night with a new moon. Not selling the experience of seeing the eclipse short, you understand. ;) Just pointing out that the night of the new moon is pretty much always the best for looking at just about anything else in the night sky.
...
And location, location, location. I live in Colorado. High up in the mountains, you can go out on a night with a brilliant full moon and still see the Milky Way quite clearly, because there's no skyglow to speak of. Down in Denver, all the conditions can be perfect -- new moon, clear night, still air, etc. -- and you're still not going to see that much because the city lights drown most of it out. From what I remember of Cornwall, I'll bet there are lots of good viewing spots
It's a historical accident. When the IBM PC came out, everyone just started using "PC" to mean "IBM PC." (In fact, didn't IBM try to trademark the name?) When the clones hit, "IBM-compatible" faded fairly quickly, to be replaced by "PC-compatible" or just "PC" -- which of course meant a machine with an Intel (or compatible) processor running MS-DOS. This usage has survived into the Windows era. I don't like it either, but I suspect it's too late to do anything about it.
Microsoft, of course, has proven far more successful than IBM at taking names that should be generic and turning them into trademarks: Windows, Word, SQL Server, etc. Hell, even "Microsoft" itself is about as generic a name for a software company as I can think of.
Oh yes, in some ways the reactions were very similar, and I won't deny it. But at least the reaction to the Gunpowder Plot was competent, if no less bloody-minded.
... oh, wait a minute, I'm not.
The 100-ton test may have been the largest deliberate explosion up to that time. But here's the manifest for the ship that blew up in Halifax. Pretty impressive.
Yep. If I knew the world were going to end in a week, suddenly things like doing homework and getting to work on time would seem a whole lot less important.
I agree that a 4-year-old news piece, by itself, is not an adequate basis for assumptions. But the news of the switch and the fact that Netcraft still reports Army.mil running on WebStar/Mac should be enough to convince all but the most dedicated anti-Mac fanatic. If by "significant Web infrastructure" you mean back-end servers that don't talk directly to public browsers, I claim no knowledge of those.
It's pretty obvious to me that you are, in fact, a fanatic, so I suppose I'm wasting my time. 'Bye now.
Oh, for God's sake. The Army's switch to WebStar on Mac was reported all over the place when it happened four years ago. It's common knowledge. Here, here, and here are some links.
It's a usage that's more common in British than American English -- equivalent to "heating up" on this side of the Atlantic. Like "bloody" and a couple of other common British usages, it seems to be getting slightly more use in American English as well, though I suspect it will never be quite standard.
Then your employers are idiots ... and not paying attention to what the Army is doing. (You say you're a DoD employee. Mind if I ask which branch, and what you do?) The other reply to your post gives a link that shows clearly that the grandparent poster is not a "dumbass troll," but just telling the truth. You really ought to check on things like this before you stick your foot in your mouth.
... and everyone else should too, if you can possibly afford it. This case is the tipping point for me. I've always admired the EFF's work, but most of it hasn't affected me personally. The voting machine issue affects everyone in the US, and given the importance of the US globally, everyone on Earth. Put your money where your mouth is.
A true patriot is one who never misses an opportunity to find fault with his country.