One of the prime uses for radio astronomy is earth weather. Water vapor has a spectrl line at 22.235 GHz and 117 GHz (and up). Oxygen has a complex of lines around 50 GHz. By picking your frequencies carefully and being clever with your processing, you can tell the vertical temperature distribution of the atmosphere as well as water content. Also, the microwave emission quality of the ocean varies with wind speed. Again you can tell something about it. Snow pack depth is also something that you can monitor in the spectral region. Since most of the earth is covered by water, and infra-red does not penetrate cloud tops well, remote sensing by microwaves has help immensely with the ability to forcast weather in the past 20 years. All we need is for some commercial interests to blow the spectrum out of the water in order to broadcast a bazzilion channels of the latest WWF tag team.
My problem is that Divx is a crib on MPEG-4 with the usual M$ intention of letting other folks do the work and we will make the money. For all of that, though if it could be hacked/reverse-engineered/etc into something more reasonable for general use, it has some promise. Severe lack of encoders (hey what else only for M$ platorms), but the ones there are seem to run a lot faster than my favorite of Sorenson for Quicktime. A couple of nice links for divx are 405 the movie which is a interesting effort by a couple of guys, here for Wintel encoders and here for a sort of general purpose site.
As a Rambus manufacturer, these folks get Rambus stock warrents when the reach a certain level of manufacturing. Toshiba has met this hurdle. Just call me paranoid, but I really wonder how much this entered into their thinking given that this arrangement was not court ordered.
Gee let me see, I will take a gun, hold it to nmy head, take the money out of my left pocket and put it in my right pocket...
Stupid is spelled RIAA or LAWYER (take your pick)
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 1
I am constantly amazed to see these folks try and play "wack a mole" with this stuff. Except for the lawyers who are making a nice hourly rate, they are acheiving nothing of import and quite a bit to detriment of their own cause. If they were truely interested in the control of the MP3 format to assure a stream of revenues to their artists, they would try and work with established entities like Napster and MP3.COM to create a means generating it rather than forcing these folks out of business to be replaced with even more hard to control/monitor/exploit. Never let it be said that RIAA act in either their best own interest, the artist's best interest or (gasp) the customer's best interest.
Please excuse me now, I have to eat my grits made from next year's seed corn...
The M$ software is some of the first software that I know of that was "closed source". If you wanted the complete source to IBM's OS or DEC's VMS in the late 70's, all you had to do was to pay the appropriate amount and they would furnish the full thing on fiche. Spent many a "happy hour" reading PL/M and Bliss code not to mention the down and dirty assembler back then. If you wanted it in a machine readable form, it cost you more, but even that was possible. Neither DEC nor IBM worried about infringement, since the copyright protection was enforcable. I think that Grill Bate's concience is bothering him ever since they did the knockoff of CPM. Why anyone would want a knockoff of an inferior OS is beyond me anyway. I guess WINE must be a threat to the poor boy.
I find the logic used by "Paranoid Bill" to be interesting: If we are put in the position of our competetors then we will be unable to innovate. Ergo, only we can innovate and our competitors can't. Sounds like a real good reason to be to bust em up and make the APIs public if there ever was one.
"Truth is what works" Standards are monitored and enforced through usage. Id does not matter what some piece of paper says, it is what works in the context. A bit like language that. The dictionary is sort of a backstop, but new words and new contexts can be added to the language at any time. The will survive iff they are useful and used. As an example, consider what happened when I wrote a perfectly good perl script that did a number of things and then mailed the results using mime in accordance to the published standards. Outlook did not want to understand the enclosure. Netscape, Quickmail, etc. had no problem, but Outlook displayed a pile of base64 garbage. Needless to say, M$ enforced their standard on me, rather than the published standards being enforced on M$. A bit Darwinian, but standards are what works in the context of people trying to use them. This is actually one of the problems with the evil empire. Since they are large enough, they get the chance to define unpublished standards and then enforce them through their actions.
How long does this haev to go on before M$ can get sued for defective products. Can you image having a defibrulator running on CE that gets spammed by a virus? Outlook is the Tobacco of computing.
You are indeed correct and may now "xerox" you comment. However, by doing it this way, they are being more than a bit foolish. A more enlightened approach would have been to contact the folks involved in the sites and granted them a free license to use the material in the context of the non-commercial website. By granting the license, they would legally have retained control (thus insuring a profit when small plastic parts are given away with every meal by small plastic people selling small plastic burgers), while generating extra free exposure to their product. Alas, this is what happens when the legal departments engage in running things. Foolish responses to real problems.
When all you ever have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When you BUY a box from them, it has to be new, they can't be selling you one that someone sent back. Yes, on in warrenty exchange they can send these out again, but that's about all. These are machines that they will have on their hands otherwise, since I doubt that they would start liquidating thru ONSALE or such.
This company has a serious problem. Nice concept, lousy implementation. They have managed to totally blow their retail channels apart (first CC now COMPUSA). They are quite backlogged on their site as to new units (roughly 4 weeks) so their retail channels will go hang for a long time. This is because they will serivce their own site first since they can enforce their TOS there before they provide the retail channel where they can't/won't/or are unsure of.
I wish them luck, they will need it...
Re:A tough case of reality is setting in...
on
TurboLinux Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
To be sure, but the biz types that do the hiring want it. If you want to get hired then away you go. Silly, but there it is...
A tough case of reality is setting in...
on
TurboLinux Layoffs
·
· Score: 1
After their failed merger with Borland, Corel is having a tough time, and now TurboLinux is feeling the pinch. I wonder how long it is going to be before some of the others are going to have some problems with their business models too. Not to belabor the obvious, but its a tough sled to run a business around software that is otherwise free. Unless you can bring some value added to the equation with proprietary software or certification (like Redhat), trying to survive on just services is not too viable for a large number of companies all selling what is considered by the outside world, the same product. I wish them well, but there are more versions and vendors than demand.
What M$ has done here is both slander against the individuals involved and a restraint of trade, not to mention a breach of contract with the folks that bought their stuff. I am sure there are knockoffs for sale and these folks should be closed down, but to do this in this way just re-enforces the fact that M$ should be terminated at the first opportunity. A class action against ebay and M$ uner ricco for treble damages would not be out of order. The first page of their feedback page read as follows:
User: pocky220 (73) (not a registered user) Date: Mar-03-00 21:55:59 PST Neutral: I have the right to sell the Windows 98 I BOUGHT.. this is BULL SHIT............
User: cellar (476) (not a registered user) Date: Mar-03-00 13:38:29 PST Neutral: Hmmm....Gulty to proven innocent? Microsoft is Un-American...Break them up...
The Register also vends stuff of theirs. Personally I'm saving up for my very own dust puppy...
But which Intel Architecture???
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
x86, merced, etc. sorry, but machine optimized operating systems leave me a little cold. anyone that has been contributing to the global warming situation over the past couple of years by emitting co2 through metabolic means must have noticed that the development cycle for new processors has been getting a bit shorter lately. today's optimization could be tomorrows downfall. not to say that you shouldn't compile a kernal with something that knows about the complete instruction set, but writing around an architecture is likely to be a losing proposition going forward. any guess how long it will be before you have wider machine to work with? how about some of the powerpc machines with multi-processor on die? and so on. just write a good kernal without regard to the particular platform and tweak your compiler to make the best of it.
Now if they powered it with a single spud that would be something. Each Zn/Cu cell is 1.5V if I remember my high school chemistry. So 5 sets of electrodes in 5 spuds gives them 7.5 volts to play around with. Now if they had taken a Rio 500, converted it, and powered it with a single spud and then taken the output through the USB port to a hub THAT would habe been an accomplishment.
However, as it is, my hat is indeed off to them anyway. May their web server spudder along for a long time to come...
Alas, my impression of DR3 when I tested it on some of mancines was that the interface was one that was not going to fly anywhere. The average Mac user was going to get sick and then boot OS9 under OSX. Which of course basically states that the average Mac user is not going to run OSX at all until they do something to make it feel a bit more familiar, or even worse, dump Apple for the Gates of Hell OS. It is a shame that with all their long standing expertise in this area, we find Apple taking a leap backward in the user interface, it need not be.
I personally have a nice FBI file on me, but that is because I have had a secret security clearance. For that there was a justified "need to know". For the average citizen to have any documentation on file anyplace in a manner like this is an open invatation to abuse. Well, lets just round up all the........ (among your choices are blacks, gays, gun owners, catholics, gypsies, japanese, etc. etc.). Before you say it can't happen, please remember that even stateside native american people of japanese descent were interred during WW2, and all the above have been rounded up by a government within the last 50 or so years someplace. Maybe the NRA isn't so paranoid after all?
For anyone that has played with any of the developer releases, it is obvious that OSX is not ready for the "plug and play" crowd. The look and feel of it are so radically different that the average mac user will vomit. Its a nice OS, it needs some more drivers for non-Apple hardware, but most of all it needs to provide the user with a look and feel that they are used to. The docking hooha is not a desktop and running os9 in a compatibility mode is a loser...
It will be interesting to see where the price point on this comes in. The current DVD-R drives arearound 4k$+. A bit pricey for anyone doing any casual authoring. I would not expect that the 30$/blank price will come down too much. The industry will have to protect itself against duplication and the one way to make sure that happens is to keep the price of the media above the price of the finished item.
If these guys are smarth though, the should push on cost reduction for this one. Tape didn't make much headway until the price of the decks came down to something that a consumer could afford. It will be nice for the average joe to shoot his DV on the handycam and then make a nice DVD of it.
Can't say but that I agree with you. There is more hope for quicktime for Linux given OSX than there is for Mpeg-4 for Linux. Don't expect Apple to open source it, but if they are serious about making a dent in streaming media with the OSX servers, then they probably could be convinced to produce binaries. The worst thing that could happen is for Microsquish to co-opt Mpeg-4 and bring out a crappy product like their windows media product. We would all then be stuck with whatever "Unka Bill and the Balmer" decide to give us. Yuk!!!
While I will agree with you that most Microsquish employees are probably ok folks, I will disagree with you as to their culpability in this. When you work for, or own stock in a company that is devoid of morals and honor, you help further the ends of that company and are guilty of those qualities yourself. The exception to this is only if you are actively trying to change the behaviour of that company. The defence of "I was only a small guy in a big machine and I was just following orders when I gassed those folks" has been ruled to be a non-defence. The only thing that will make the "evil empire" come to its senses is a loss of its human capital and an erosion of its market value. If you disagree with the the stand that Microsoft has taken, then please don't
work for them
own their stock
use their products
It is not always the easiest thing to do, but a moral rather than expedient stand is time well spent.
Thank you for your re-freshing "breeze from the north". It is nice to have someone from Canada espose such opinions. I hope you will also prevail on your government also.
The problem is one of generations. Fortunately (for all of us), there has not been a government like Nazi Germany around for moxt folks to have experienced it. Most folks don't understand that the basis of defence is to have a credible deterent available for use that can inflict a resoanably strong "negative utility function" when their liberty, property or person is threatened by some armed thug (either in or out of uniform). Also more folks have been watching the "Simpsons" rather than reading things like Aesop's Fables. Thus the wisdom collected in those things such the tale of the Man, the Horse and the Wolf totally escape them. Ah well..
Personally I say if a Glock is good for Janet Reno, its good enough for me. (Acutally the Secret service decided that Glocks are not good enough, they need 357 Magnums and the Uzis are not good enough either, they need H&K). I would like to be free nough to be as well armed as my government when they protect themselves...
The mission critical nature of any problems that come about
My organization had a shop run on the Apple & DEC VMS platforms a while back in which one person supported a community of about 80 naive users. The machines ran, the software ran and the users didn't have any problems. Then some "wunderkind" (as in you wonder about such people) convinced them that they should go to a wintel platform. There is now a harried group of about 7 people supporting around 150 users. Further, a lot of problems never do get solved, such as why when these turkeys run Outlook, does it not understand perfectly good mime enclosures constructed and mailed by my perl programs. (of course anything else deals with them just fine like Netscape, or even Quickmail...).
My experience is best summarized by:
sub NumberOfSupportStaff { my $OS = shift; my $Staff = 1; if (OS == 'Wintel') { $Staff = $Staff*20; } $Staff; }
Slashdot Mirror
One of the prime uses for radio astronomy is earth weather. Water vapor has a spectrl line at 22.235 GHz and 117 GHz (and up). Oxygen has a complex of lines around 50 GHz. By picking your frequencies carefully and being clever with your processing, you can tell the vertical temperature distribution of the atmosphere as well as water content. Also, the microwave emission quality of the ocean varies with wind speed. Again you can tell something about it. Snow pack depth is also something that you can monitor in the spectral region. Since most of the earth is covered by water, and infra-red does not penetrate cloud tops well, remote sensing by microwaves has help immensely with the ability to forcast weather in the past 20 years. All we need is for some commercial interests to blow the spectrum out of the water in order to broadcast a bazzilion channels of the latest WWF tag team.
My problem is that Divx is a crib on MPEG-4 with the usual M$ intention of letting other folks do the work and we will make the money. For all of that, though if it could be hacked/reverse-engineered/etc into something more reasonable for general use, it has some promise. Severe lack of encoders (hey what else only for M$ platorms), but the ones there are seem to run a lot faster than my favorite of Sorenson for Quicktime. A couple of nice links for divx are 405 the movie which is a interesting effort by a couple of guys, here for Wintel encoders and here for a sort of general purpose site.
As a Rambus manufacturer, these folks get Rambus stock warrents when the reach a certain level of manufacturing. Toshiba has met this hurdle. Just call me paranoid, but I really wonder how much this entered into their thinking given that this arrangement was not court ordered.
Gee let me see, I will take a gun, hold it to nmy head, take the money out of my left pocket and put it in my right pocket...
Please excuse me now, I have to eat my grits made from next year's seed corn...
I find the logic used by "Paranoid Bill" to be interesting: If we are put in the position of our competetors then we will be unable to innovate. Ergo, only we can innovate and our competitors can't. Sounds like a real good reason to be to bust em up and make the APIs public if there ever was one.
"Truth is what works" Standards are monitored and enforced through usage. Id does not matter what some piece of paper says, it is what works in the context. A bit like language that. The dictionary is sort of a backstop, but new words and new contexts can be added to the language at any time. The will survive iff they are useful and used. As an example, consider what happened when I wrote a perfectly good perl script that did a number of things and then mailed the results using mime in accordance to the published standards. Outlook did not want to understand the enclosure. Netscape, Quickmail, etc. had no problem, but Outlook displayed a pile of base64 garbage. Needless to say, M$ enforced their standard on me, rather than the published standards being enforced on M$. A bit Darwinian, but standards are what works in the context of people trying to use them. This is actually one of the problems with the evil empire. Since they are large enough, they get the chance to define unpublished standards and then enforce them through their actions.
How long does this haev to go on before M$ can get sued for defective products. Can you image having a defibrulator running on CE that gets spammed by a virus? Outlook is the Tobacco of computing.
When all you ever have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This company has a serious problem. Nice concept, lousy implementation. They have managed to totally blow their retail channels apart (first CC now COMPUSA). They are quite backlogged on their site as to new units (roughly 4 weeks) so their retail channels will go hang for a long time. This is because they will serivce their own site first since they can enforce their TOS there before they provide the retail channel where they can't/won't/or are unsure of.
I wish them luck, they will need it...
To be sure, but the biz types that do the hiring want it. If you want to get hired then away you go. Silly, but there it is...
After their failed merger with Borland, Corel is having a tough time, and now TurboLinux is feeling the pinch. I wonder how long it is going to be before some of the others are going to have some problems with their business models too. Not to belabor the obvious, but its a tough sled to run a business around software that is otherwise free. Unless you can bring some value added to the equation with proprietary software or certification (like Redhat), trying to survive on just services is not too viable for a large number of companies all selling what is considered by the outside world, the same product. I wish them well, but there are more versions and vendors than demand.
(when the chips are down you know, there is always something fishy...)
What M$ has done here is both slander against the individuals involved and a restraint of trade, not to mention a breach of contract with the folks that bought their stuff. I am sure there are knockoffs for sale and these folks should be closed down, but to do this in this way just re-enforces the fact that M$ should be terminated at the first opportunity. A class action against ebay and M$ uner ricco for treble damages would not be out of order. The first page of their feedback page read as follows:
User: pocky220 (73) (not a registered user) Date: Mar-03-00 21:55:59 PST
Neutral: I have the right to sell the Windows 98 I BOUGHT.. this is BULL SHIT............
User: cellar (476) (not a registered user) Date: Mar-03-00 13:38:29 PST
Neutral: Hmmm....Gulty to proven innocent? Microsoft is Un-American...Break them up...
User: ni-dan (45) Date: Mar-02-00 04:54:11 PST Neutral: NEGATIVE!!! HITLERSOFT ENDS ANOTHER LEGAL AUCTION!!!
User: boatman9 (222) Date: Feb-29-00 19:57:57 PST Neutral: End my legal auction. Hope Justice Dept. socks it to ya in the Anti-Trust Suit!
User: booktrapper (41) Date: Feb-29-00 01:36:48 PST Neutral: Why can't you at least inquire about the item? You are only hurting yourselves..
User: jlindsay (92) Date: Feb-24-00 18:20:12 PST
Neutral: 268283455 another auction ended @ the hands of Micro$oft
User: carydixon (29) Date: Feb-24-00 12:12:07 PST Neutral: I own this software. It is mine to sell. F- - ck you.
User: dbx (19) Date: Feb-23-00 15:13:32 PST
Neutral: Ended my perfectly legit sale.. This is-un american. Guilty.....NOT
User: totaltickets (41) Date: Feb-23-00 13:30:44 PST Neutral: A STABLE OPERATING SYSTEM IS A NO-WIN(TM) SITUATION - FCUK MICROSOFT
User: bill.p (10) Date: Feb-21-00 18:03:41 PST
Neutral: NEGATIVE: You have blocked legitimate sale of new software and slandered me
User: mikeps (10) Date: Feb-17-00 20:26:11 PST
Neutral: MS killed off my legitimate auction; no wonder so many hate Micro$oft & windoZe
User: pronoblem (271) Date: Feb-16-00 16:04:28 PST
Neutral: I was forced to buy it from Dell, I should be able to sell it. www.linux.org
User: peter0175 (1) Date: Feb-15-00 22:18:55 PST
Neutral: M.S. NAZI -- Ended a TOTAL legit auction. NEGATIVE COMMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
User: kak268 (40) Date: Feb-15-00 22:08:37 PST
Neutral: ended 2 of my legit auctions. won't respond to emails. you suck monkey balls MS!
User: bruce2816 (103) Date: Feb-09-00 21:38:49 PST
Neutral: Emailed my high bidder, told him copyright violation - on unopened retail box!
User: biiin (private) Date: Feb-04-00 20:49:48 PST
Neutral: Ebay was once cool till they became Microsoft B*tches.. Legit auction canceled.
User: jt325i (98) Date: Feb-03-00 17:15:40 PST
Neutral: 25240347Will respect wishes and not relist, however the product was legitimate.
User: chrisandro (56) Date: Feb-02-00 05:03:14 PST
Neutral: Anal Retentive Microsoft wants more money & people to pay retail !!!!!
User: dhacker1 (253) Date: Jan-30-00 10:24:05 PST
Neutral: NEGATIVE! MS & Ebay Cancelled my perfectly legit auction.
User: pb3623 (11) Date: Jan-30-00 06:21:07 PST
Neutral: Anyone want to buy my LEGITIMATE NT 4.0 CD, come to my garage sale.. plain wrong
User: magnacomp (166) Date: Jan-26-00 03:02:48 PST
Neutral: Assumed guilty until proven innocent? This is a blatant constitutional violation
User: andy.888 (14) Date: Jan-17-00 15:00:37 PST
Neutral: die microsoft you suck
User: ratkins@x-networks.net (0) Date: Jan-17-00 10:21:32 PST
Neutral: Greedy 6asterds want you to pay retail! Anti-Trust - I think so!
User: mchstech (18) Date: Jan-14-00 17:10:22 PST
Neutral: Ended my Auction for a perfectly LEGAL copy of MS Publisher 98.
User: recycledelectrons (58) Date: Jan-14-00 15:54:14 PST
Neutral: email me (aba3600@omega.uta.edu) about a class action suit for slander!
Under normal circumstances a score of -3 gets you kicked out of ebay. ebay should apply this to M$ as well as anyone else.
The Register also vends stuff of theirs. Personally I'm saving up for my very own dust puppy...
x86, merced, etc. sorry, but machine optimized operating systems leave me a little cold. anyone that has been contributing to the global warming situation over the past couple of years by emitting co2 through metabolic means must have noticed that the development cycle for new processors has been getting a bit shorter lately. today's optimization could be tomorrows downfall. not to say that you shouldn't compile a kernal with something that knows about the complete instruction set, but writing around an architecture is likely to be a losing proposition going forward. any guess how long it will be before you have wider machine to work with? how about some of the powerpc machines with multi-processor on die? and so on. just write a good kernal without regard to the particular platform and tweak your compiler to make the best of it.
However, as it is, my hat is indeed off to them anyway. May their web server spudder along for a long time to come...
Alas, my impression of DR3 when I tested it on some of mancines was that the interface was one that was not going to fly anywhere. The average Mac user was going to get sick and then boot OS9 under OSX. Which of course basically states that the average Mac user is not going to run OSX at all until they do something to make it feel a bit more familiar, or even worse, dump Apple for the Gates of Hell OS. It is a shame that with all their long standing expertise in this area, we find Apple taking a leap backward in the user interface, it need not be.
Many thanks for this ref. An interesting article. Alas, all the feeble minds will ignore it. When it comes to courage, few IS managers have any...
I personally have a nice FBI file on me, but that is because I have had a secret security clearance. For that there was a justified "need to know". For the average citizen to have any documentation on file anyplace in a manner like this is an open invatation to abuse. Well, lets just round up all the ........ (among your choices are blacks, gays, gun owners, catholics, gypsies, japanese, etc. etc.). Before you say it can't happen, please remember that even stateside native american people of japanese descent were interred during WW2, and all the above have been rounded up by a government within the last 50 or so years someplace. Maybe the NRA isn't so paranoid after all?
For anyone that has played with any of the developer releases, it is obvious that OSX is not ready for the "plug and play" crowd. The look and feel of it are so radically different that the average mac user will vomit. Its a nice OS, it needs some more drivers for non-Apple hardware, but most of all it needs to provide the user with a look and feel that they are used to. The docking hooha is not a desktop and running os9 in a compatibility mode is a loser...
If these guys are smarth though, the should push on cost reduction for this one. Tape didn't make much headway until the price of the decks came down to something that a consumer could afford. It will be nice for the average joe to shoot his DV on the handycam and then make a nice DVD of it.
Can't say but that I agree with you. There is more hope for quicktime for Linux given OSX than there is for Mpeg-4 for Linux. Don't expect Apple to open source it, but if they are serious about making a dent in streaming media with the OSX servers, then they probably could be convinced to produce binaries. The worst thing that could happen is for Microsquish to co-opt Mpeg-4 and bring out a crappy product like their windows media product. We would all then be stuck with whatever "Unka Bill and the Balmer" decide to give us. Yuk!!!
It is not always the easiest thing to do, but a moral rather than expedient stand is time well spent.
The problem is one of generations. Fortunately (for all of us), there has not been a government like Nazi Germany around for moxt folks to have experienced it. Most folks don't understand that the basis of defence is to have a credible deterent available for use that can inflict a resoanably strong "negative utility function" when their liberty, property or person is threatened by some armed thug (either in or out of uniform). Also more folks have been watching the "Simpsons" rather than reading things like Aesop's Fables. Thus the wisdom collected in those things such the tale of the Man, the Horse and the Wolf totally escape them. Ah well..
Personally I say if a Glock is good for Janet Reno, its good enough for me. (Acutally the Secret service decided that Glocks are not good enough, they need 357 Magnums and the Uzis are not good enough either, they need H&K). I would like to be free nough to be as well armed as my government when they protect themselves...
My organization had a shop run on the Apple & DEC VMS platforms a while back in which one person supported a community of about 80 naive users. The machines ran, the software ran and the users didn't have any problems. Then some "wunderkind" (as in you wonder about such people) convinced them that they should go to a wintel platform. There is now a harried group of about 7 people supporting around 150 users. Further, a lot of problems never do get solved, such as why when these turkeys run Outlook, does it not understand perfectly good mime enclosures constructed and mailed by my perl programs. (of course anything else deals with them just fine like Netscape, or even Quickmail...).
My experience is best summarized by:
sub NumberOfSupportStaff {
my $OS = shift;
my $Staff = 1;
if (OS == 'Wintel') {
$Staff = $Staff*20;
}
$Staff;
}