That crack about eighteenth century laws annoys me somewhat. First off, the Sherman Antitrust Act is from the 19th century. Second, yes, the Federal Judiciary is from the 18th century, as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Would you call the Bill of Rights "hopelessly outdated" for that reason?
There's a heck of a lot of good law from the 18th and 19th century; the first state without an official religion, the abolition of slavery...
I don't think anyone would call that obsolete.
Also, doesn't Katz protest a bit about media consolidation? It sounds to me like the Sherman Antitrust Act would be relevant there too.
"It seems like not many people wanted to pay Apple one dollar per port..."
I'm pretty sure that that licensing situation has been altered for a while now. Of course, that probably won't stop USB-2 from coming preattached to motherboards, and I'm betting that the implementation will always use more CPU cycles than Firewire, because that's probably what Intel designed it for.
BTW, I just found an interesting figure on the net about that 18 million; 18 million dollars is what Mircorp got charged by the Russians for three Progress or Soyuz capsules; they charge NASA 65 million for _one_ Progress or Soyuz. This seems to further bolster the argument that the Soyuz/Progress were a couple originally meant for use at ISS (and paid for by NASA) but then reassigned for the task of deorbiting Mir, before being sold...
Re:It's definitely not for PPC
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BeOS For Linux!
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· Score: 1
Actually, it's silly for Apple not to allow BeOS on their hardware, because Apple makes much more money from hardware sales than from OS sales.
So they conceivably gain an OS upgrade sale, at the expense of losing a much bigger profit on their hardware (which they would have gotten had they not forced BeOS to intel).
Please stop rationalizing Jobs' petty little ego trips and passing them off as logic, OK?
That 18 million is the total cost Mircorp paid for the soyuz and progress vehicles. However, NASA had already paid some money for those vehicles because they were supposed to be used to deorbit MIR. Again, if you want to argue either side of the issue, head on over to sci.space.policy. I agree the shuttle's a lousy vehicle, but I doubt a soyuz cost that little in real life.
Re:existing, profitable LEO satellite constellatio
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A Eulogy for Iridium
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· Score: 1
Could whatever Anonymous Coward produced this kindly consider hopping on over to sci.space.policy and going into the "mind numbing detail" on Iridium's failure? I think they might appreciate it.
OK, so I guess Bruce Sterling feels the need to declare rockets and space as "uncool" on behalf of computer geeks everywhere, and some who want other people to do their thinking for them have taken them up on the offer.
Still, in spite of the fact that he's picked Iridium as proof of the end of the space age, nevertheless, GEO comsat use is booming, and terrestrial cellphone use, when you're not in a major metropolitan area, still sucks.
However, just because an implementation of an idea is bad doesn't necessarily mean the idea is bad in and of itself. The Great Eastern was declared one of the biggest boondoggles in history at the time; however, after that it proved to be very useful in laying the first transatlantic cable. (Which was done by Lord Kelvin, and was one of the reasons he became Lord Kelvin. (Apropos to this discussion, he once said there was no future in heavier-than-air flight, and that X-rays were a hoax.)
I guess all this goes to show that in this context, "Coolness" is a property based on how much some media personality (or personalities) want you to think something's neat. Do we really need that?
"Sure, I'd LOVE to have an Alpha in my pocket calculator..."
Actually, many pocket calculators these days are probably about an order of magnitude faster than my first two computers. I wouldn't be suprised if the latest HP's were faster than stock IBM PC's were when they came out. They do have a lot more ram, after all.
Bullshit. Don't accuse someone of knowingly delivering a defective component if you can't back it up with evidence.
I'm sorry, I don't have any written sources on it handy, but they either did that or they were grossly incompetent when testing the mirror, which you'd probably say is another charge I shouldn't say without proof. However, the fact is, the mirror was defective, and NASA spent a half-billion dollars plus fixing the thing. From what I heard, Perkins-Elmer performed a number of tests, some of which said it worked, some of which said it didn't, and decided the ones that said it didn't (and were right) must be wrong, because the mirror must be right...
Boeing owns McDonnel Douglas and Rockwell these days. Boeing and Lockheed together do do space stuff, but in a lot of ways they're more like Soviet Design bureaus than private companies; they make a heck of a lot of money being cost-plus contractors for NASA in the good old-fashioned bureaucratic way.
BTW, there was a report on UPI last week that said that NASA apparently found out that the probe would have blown up long before landing, because the engine was too cold to work right... check the usenet group sci.space.policy for info on this. Basically, it seems a Lockheed manager had some tests with the engines rigged (i.e. heating of the catalyst bed) to get the engine to pass the test. NASA found out about this shortly before the probe reached Mars, said they found a fix (which probably wouldn't have worked), and are now ignoring that cause in favor of this last one. Hmmph.
Currently I'm using both siag and Gnumeric at work to deal with spreadsheets imported from PC programs. Bear with me, this isn't a user question. I've found siag better at 1-2-3 files, and gnumeric better at excel (which siag doesn't do). Gnumeric's interface seems a lot more polished. However, I like some of the concepts behind siag. Once upon a time, before gnumeric, there was a project called maxwell's lemur or something like that. (Hey, even back then they were using primate names:-). From what I've heard, it was supposed to be a siag-inspired spreadsheet for gnome.
I don't know how much of Maxwell went into Gnumeric; my question, however, is with all the fancy Corba stuff and the like, how hard would it be to put the gnumeric interface onto siag? (And if I want to try myself, is source for gnome-stuff available in tarballs instead of srpm's and cvs?)
I guess MacOS X has to move to X86 because of the physical laws of the universe that dictate that the standard be the worst possible instruction set in existance. I suspect we'll still be stuck with it (or some ungodly VLIW/x86 kludge) until someone comes up with a chip for interpreting intercal bytecode.
Please excuse me for following up on my own post, but I missed a close blockquote symbol after the first paragraph. The first paragraph was someone else's, the rest mine.
In that case I'm sorry. However, if that was what you were trying to put across, what got quoted from the press release was badly worded. As for Apple, I'm sorry, I've just had bad experiences with them.
Funny you should mention Dave Matthews; didn't they encourage a lot of bootlegging of their music early in their career, and that's why they started becoming popular?
You're right that you don't have a right to ask for Win2000 in whatever media you want, but even Microsoft will allow you the right to back it up on whatever media you want once you own it.
The people who think that the RIAA and individual recording labels are big, bad, and evil for opposing mp3's are just freeloaders, they're not even close to revolutionary. They want something for nothing. They're spoiled, and chances are, they've never actually released a product where they have tried to earn a profit from its sales.
Well, I can't speak for others, but as for myself (who is credited as the inventor in one, maybe two patents, I forget about the second one), I think the RIAA is full of bull puckey, and you are too. There are a lot of uses for mp3's that don't involve piracy that the RIAA wants to stop ANYWAY, but most of us would consider fair use. The fact that the fair use statutes are a lot more strict under the DMCA than previously should be disturbing to a lot of us.
I think the companies of the RIAA are interested strongly in making eveyrone pay an upgrade fee for their music. What am I talking about? Let me give an example: my dad has a record collection with a lot of stuff I don't think you're gonna find on CD. Checking CDNow, I recognize one of the two CD's as matching one of his Papa Celestin records. You have trouble finding CD players any more.
I suspect they'd like to do to CD's the same thing they've done to records. Come out with an exciting new media, get it entrenched as the standard, and if you have to buy everything in the new format, tough.
If I sell you a piece of hardware, would I be right to say that by buying, you've implicitly agreed to never have anyone try to repair it? But that is exactly analagous to the situation the RIAA wants us to be in.
If I make a cassete tape of my dad's rare albums, that's covered under fair use. Why is it considered piracy under the DMCA for me to make high-quality mp3's of them, even if I never put them on the internet or anything?
And on the few Papa Celestin CD's in existance, who do you think makes more money from the CD? Papa Celestin's heirs, the retailer, or Mr. Sony's heirs (and his stockholders and their heirs?)
These are all important questions, and I doubt you'll ever see the answers in a press release by the RIAA.
I don't have to prove you wrong, Patrick. I just have to read a history book from the British point of view rather than the relatively biased one put out by the Americans.:-)
No, I don't actually believe that, but a hell of a lot of British "subjects" (and people from Canada and the like) do. Some of them believe stuff that's even more detached from reality, that I won't go into here. My point? That any social phenomenon can be mischaracterized as "a bunch of selfish jerks who want something for nothing;" even the space program. Don't let them get you angry, because then it looks even more like what they're saying is true.
One hopes that they get a performance increace just by writing certain standard libraries like the x libs and mesa.
One also hopes these people remember that all of those products, and gcc, are under the gpl, and that they're not the only ones with the right to use it. (Although if they have finished products now, this implies that Apple's been letting them fool around with it for longer than they've had the modifications public. Yet more fodder for the idea that they had more help from Apple, because they tend to stick more to Linux as a server rather than a desktop OS).
You mean you people never figured out that L. Bob Rife was a parody of (among other people) H. Ross Perot? I think he probably also works for L. Ron Hubbard and maybe Ted Turner... hmm, I'll ahave to think about that one.
The movie made from Eaters of the Dead was The Thirteenth Warrior. It was good, but the fact that they went through three directors trying to make it showed. They had one guy who ran up a huge budget, then had two other people trying to fix it up, one of whom was Crichton himself. IMHO if Crichton had the job of doing it all the way through it might have been better; he's done some directoral work, and has a good reputation at actually bringing stuff in without bloating the budget.
The only thing I can remember, however, is the movie Runaway...
I think Neal Stephenson said he imagines Hiro as looking like that guy whose name I can't remember, but was the lead singer of Fine Young Cannibals. He was even on Highlander a couple times, but I don't know how well he handled a sword... (his character got an arm chopped off, though.)
I saw one picture; it seemed to look too blade-runner-esque to be the world of Snow Crash, which is much more of a topsy-turvy version of the real world (it actually seemed to accomplish Max Headroom's motto of "Fifteen minutes into the future!").
It didn't seem to be like the Metaverse to me either; for some odd reason, I imagine the Metaverse as being lower res than that, unless you're in a building.
Slashdot Mirror
That crack about eighteenth century laws annoys me somewhat. First off, the Sherman Antitrust Act is from the 19th century. Second, yes, the Federal Judiciary is from the 18th century, as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Would you call the Bill of Rights "hopelessly outdated" for that reason?
There's a heck of a lot of good law from the 18th and 19th century; the first state without an official religion, the abolition of slavery...
I don't think anyone would call that obsolete.
Also, doesn't Katz protest a bit about media consolidation? It sounds to me like the Sherman Antitrust Act would be relevant there too.
I'm pretty sure that that licensing situation has been altered for a while now. Of course, that probably won't stop USB-2 from coming preattached to motherboards, and I'm betting that the implementation will always use more CPU cycles than Firewire, because that's probably what Intel designed it for.
BTW, I just found an interesting figure on the net about that 18 million; 18 million dollars is what Mircorp got charged by the Russians for three Progress or Soyuz capsules; they charge NASA 65 million for _one_ Progress or Soyuz. This seems to further bolster the argument that the Soyuz/Progress were a couple originally meant for use at ISS (and paid for by NASA) but then reassigned for the task of deorbiting Mir, before being sold...
Actually, it's silly for Apple not to allow BeOS on their hardware, because Apple makes much more money from hardware sales than from OS sales.
So they conceivably gain an OS upgrade sale, at the expense of losing a much bigger profit on their hardware (which they would have gotten had they not forced BeOS to intel).
Please stop rationalizing Jobs' petty little ego trips and passing them off as logic, OK?
That 18 million is the total cost Mircorp paid for the soyuz and progress vehicles. However, NASA had already paid some money for those vehicles because they were supposed to be used to deorbit MIR. Again, if you want to argue either side of the issue, head on over to sci.space.policy. I agree the shuttle's a lousy vehicle, but I doubt a soyuz cost that little in real life.
Could whatever Anonymous Coward produced this kindly consider hopping on over to sci.space.policy and going into the "mind numbing detail" on Iridium's failure? I think they might appreciate it.
OK, so I guess Bruce Sterling feels the need to declare rockets and space as "uncool" on behalf of computer geeks everywhere, and some who want other people to do their thinking for them have taken them up on the offer.
Still, in spite of the fact that he's picked Iridium as proof of the end of the space age, nevertheless, GEO comsat use is booming, and terrestrial cellphone use, when you're not in a major metropolitan area, still sucks.
However, just because an implementation of an idea is bad doesn't necessarily mean the idea is bad in and of itself. The Great Eastern was declared one of the biggest boondoggles in history at the time; however, after that it proved to be very useful in laying the first transatlantic cable. (Which was done by Lord Kelvin, and was one of the reasons he became Lord Kelvin. (Apropos to this discussion, he once said there was no future in heavier-than-air flight, and that X-rays were a hoax.)
I guess all this goes to show that in this context, "Coolness" is a property based on how much some media personality (or personalities) want you to think something's neat. Do we really need that?
"Sure, I'd LOVE to have an Alpha in my pocket calculator..."
Actually, many pocket calculators these days are probably about an order of magnitude faster than my first two computers. I wouldn't be suprised if the latest HP's were faster than stock IBM PC's were when they came out. They do have a lot more ram, after all.
I'm sorry, I don't have any written sources on it handy, but they either did that or they were grossly incompetent when testing the mirror, which you'd probably say is another charge I shouldn't say without proof. However, the fact is, the mirror was defective, and NASA spent a half-billion dollars plus fixing the thing. From what I heard, Perkins-Elmer performed a number of tests, some of which said it worked, some of which said it didn't, and decided the ones that said it didn't (and were right) must be wrong, because the mirror must be right...
Boeing owns McDonnel Douglas and Rockwell these days. Boeing and Lockheed together do do space stuff, but in a lot of ways they're more like Soviet Design bureaus than private companies; they make a heck of a lot of money being cost-plus contractors for NASA in the good old-fashioned bureaucratic way.
BTW, there was a report on UPI last week that said that NASA apparently found out that the probe would have blown up long before landing, because the engine was too cold to work right... check the usenet group sci.space.policy for info on this. Basically, it seems a Lockheed manager had some tests with the engines rigged (i.e. heating of the catalyst bed) to get the engine to pass the test. NASA found out about this shortly before the probe reached Mars, said they found a fix (which probably wouldn't have worked), and are now ignoring that cause in favor of this last one. Hmmph.
Currently I'm using both siag and Gnumeric at work to deal with spreadsheets imported from PC programs. Bear with me, this isn't a user question. I've found siag better at 1-2-3 files, and gnumeric better at excel (which siag doesn't do). Gnumeric's interface seems a lot more polished. However, I like some of the concepts behind siag. Once upon a time, before gnumeric, there was a project called maxwell's lemur or something like that. (Hey, even back then they were using primate names :-). From what I've heard, it was supposed to be a siag-inspired spreadsheet for gnome.
I don't know how much of Maxwell went into Gnumeric; my question, however, is with all the fancy Corba stuff and the like, how hard would it be to put the gnumeric interface onto siag? (And if I want to try myself, is source for gnome-stuff available in tarballs instead of srpm's and cvs?)
I guess MacOS X has to move to X86 because of the physical laws of the universe that dictate that the standard be the worst possible instruction set in existance. I suspect we'll still be stuck with it (or some ungodly VLIW/x86 kludge) until someone comes up with a chip for interpreting intercal bytecode.
To me it would be irritating if Apple were to kill the PowerPC platform now after killing the clones because they couldn't take a little competition.
Please excuse me for following up on my own post, but I missed a close blockquote symbol after the first paragraph. The first paragraph was someone else's, the rest mine.
Only the decoys. Why?
In that case I'm sorry. However, if that was what you were trying to put across, what got quoted from the press release was badly worded. As for Apple, I'm sorry, I've just had bad experiences with them.
Funny you should mention Dave Matthews; didn't they encourage a lot of bootlegging of their music early in their career, and that's why they started becoming popular?
You're right that you don't have a right to ask for Win2000 in whatever media you want, but even Microsoft will allow you the right to back it up on whatever media you want once you own it.
I don't think the RIAA feels the same way.
I don't have to prove you wrong, Patrick. I just have to read a history book from the British point of view rather than the relatively biased one put out by the Americans. :-)
No, I don't actually believe that, but a hell of a lot of British "subjects" (and people from Canada and the like) do. Some of them believe stuff that's even more detached from reality, that I won't go into here. My point? That any social phenomenon can be mischaracterized as "a bunch of selfish jerks who want something for nothing;" even the space program. Don't let them get you angry, because then it looks even more like what they're saying is true.
One hopes that they get a performance increace just by writing certain standard libraries like the x libs and mesa.
One also hopes these people remember that all of those products, and gcc, are under the gpl, and that they're not the only ones with the right to use it. (Although if they have finished products now, this implies that Apple's been letting them fool around with it for longer than they've had the modifications public. Yet more fodder for the idea that they had more help from Apple, because they tend to stick more to Linux as a server rather than a desktop OS).
You mean you people never figured out that L. Bob Rife was a parody of (among other people) H. Ross Perot? I think he probably also works for L. Ron Hubbard and maybe Ted Turner... hmm, I'll ahave to think about that one.
The movie made from Eaters of the Dead was The Thirteenth Warrior. It was good, but the fact that they went through three directors trying to make it showed. They had one guy who ran up a huge budget, then had two other people trying to fix it up, one of whom was Crichton himself. IMHO if Crichton had the job of doing it all the way through it might have been better; he's done some directoral work, and has a good reputation at actually bringing stuff in without bloating the budget.
The only thing I can remember, however, is the movie Runaway...
I think Neal Stephenson said he imagines Hiro as looking like that guy whose name I can't remember, but was the lead singer of Fine Young Cannibals. He was even on Highlander a couple times, but I don't know how well he handled a sword... (his character got an arm chopped off, though.)
I saw one picture; it seemed to look too blade-runner-esque to be the world of Snow Crash, which is much more of a topsy-turvy version of the real world (it actually seemed to accomplish Max Headroom's motto of "Fifteen minutes into the future!").
It didn't seem to be like the Metaverse to me either; for some odd reason, I imagine the Metaverse as being lower res than that, unless you're in a building.