The guy who wrote "the wellstone" is convinced that quantum dots can also be used to create programmable matter, something he came up with in one of his science fiction books.
I am just curious. Is this (programmable matter via quantum wells/dots) something that actual work is being done on anywhere, or that actual signs of progress can be seen in, or that Mr. McCarthy has the actual capacity to encourage actual science work to be done on? Or is this just a lone science fiction author running around trying to convince people to take him seriously?
But since when does Palm even have handwriting recognition software to license? Last I checked they only used that funky deformed-handwriting software.
Fuck those liberals who demand that America be the greatest country on earth. They should just sit down and learn to put up with mediocrity in all its forms.
True patriots understand that loving America means lowering your expectations of it. If lefties actually appreciated the things that made America great, they wouldn't try to protect them from being destroyed.
It's no where near exactly like right-wing radio in the 90s if you ask me, because right-wing radio still required a huge (and expensive) infrastructure that is no longer needed.
So what's up with all those donate/advertise/Paypal links on practically every blog page out there?
...that CBS's failure of journalistic integrity in the "Bush Memos" case wasn't a "big story" anywhere except in the blogosphere.
Also worth noting that this "big story" had no functional outcome whatsoever. CBS was in no way held accountable for what they did, they in no way had to answer to the public, they never even admitted fault. Even in the blogosphere, the story really didn't serve any purpose except as a tool for right-wing blogs to distract people from the real evidence concerning Bush's possible failure to fulfill his national guard duty; I would estimate that the vast, vast majority of the people who are aware 60 minutes ever broadcast those memos first heard of it through the blog backlash pointing out the memos were falsified. The entire thing was just a self-referential tempest in a teapot, a media source reporting on a media source which ran a story which only gained importance because another media source then reported on it.
Basically, the reason Gannon was exposed is because so many Bloggers (open source journalists) started writing about it, until there were so many articles about it on blogs that the mainstream media had no choice but to pick up the story.
Sounds exactly like how right-wing talk radio worked in the 90s.
Of course, the Gannon thing is actually true, as opposed to the stories about Bill Clinton shooting DNC chairman Ron Brown in the back of the head. But truth doesn't really matter here. What matters is that functionally, the exact same thing happened. A concentrated faction of non-mainstream media sources hammered on one specific issue until the very fact they were talking about it so much caused it to qualify as "news", at which point the mainstream media picked it up. The presence or absence of facts is entirely coincidental to the manner in which this mechanism works.
If this law passed, then this would mean that if you buy a CD from the store, you'd be able to use it only in CD players but not on your computer or portable mp3 player,
but if you buy music from the iTunes Music Store or a similar service you can use it in either location, since burning to CD is outright one of the advertised features.
In such a circumstance I can't imagine why anyone who owns a computer would ever buy CDs at all, except that the iTunes Music Store doesn't exist in Norway right now. If this passes and gets enforced and people are paying attention, the end result could just be the total cessation of CD sales in Norway.
Though, of course, the idea this law would be really enforced instead of just being selectively enforced against people the police and/or the recording industries arbitrarily want to throw in jail is pretty outlandish.
That thing I think is so absurd about this is the fact they have forgotten the most important reason for being able to transform media, obsolescence.
No, I think they have it very much in mind.
What happens when the CD format is gone and there are no more CD-players?
Then obviously you'll have to pay the recording industry for the privilege of continuing to listen to the music you previously bought.
And, of course, that's the entire point. You have to remember who these laws are being passed for the benefit of. This isn't about money, or about preventing piracy. It's about allowing the current form of the recording industry to dictate the terms under which people are and are not allowed to listen to music. Mp3 ripping represents the capacity for consumers to remove all limitations on how they use the music they have purchased; therefore it has to go.
Even it they industry argues they can resell it in the new form, who is to say they will still exist to do so?
I wouldn't worry about that. If further threats to the continued existence of the recording industry in its current form appear, then they'll just have those outlawed too.
Jobs reportedly told Karmazin he might change his tune if more interesting content were made available on satellite radio.
Sounds to me more like a not now than a no. So I have trouble seeing this as entirely unreasonable on Mr. Jobs' part. I'd say maybe it's too bad but, hey, I don't own an iPod so what do I care.:)
Nobody has intellectual property "rights". They have intellectual property privileges.
In the U.S. at least personal property rights-- you know, for "real" property-- are assumed to be a simple basic intrinsic right that exists outside of and regardless of the government, as codified by the fifth amendment's explicit observation that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
The execution and distribution rights to the non-property that go by the misnomer "intellectual property rights" are not intrinsic and in fact are granted by the government. This is a big deal. Unlike the intrinsic rights spoken of in the bill of rights-- which are not granted by the government and therefore cannot be limited or taken away by the government-- "IP" ownership is a privilege the government entrusts to certain people with the goal of benefiting the public, as part of Congress's empowerment "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Let's ignore for a moment the question of who "convinced" SCO to do this, or trying to guess people's motivations or other things we can't prove. Here's a statement that one can make flat-out, without theorizing, and simply based on publically available facts.
SCO chief Darl McBride has been up front about the importance of Microsoft's funding, direct or otherwise.
"A year ago we had $6 million. Now we have $60 million, with $50 million of that coming in through the investment. We have a war chest to defend our rights, to fight our claims in the courtroom," he said earlier this year, adding that the cash is enough for the long haul. "We think the legal battles we have won't even go through half that amount of cash, even played over a multiple number of years."
Most of that cash is now gone: SCO paid most to its law firms and to retire BayStar's preferred stock.
We obviously cannot know for absolute certain who or what inspired SCO to do all this. We can however make some interesting statements about who funded them.
If I'm not mistaken they don't even have to appeal the discovery order to the 10th circuit-- just to Judge Kimball. The way I understood it the discovery order against IBM was issued by Judge Wells, the magistrate (amusingly, with a justification of "to appease the rote objection by SCO"). IBM has the ability to appeal this order to Judge Kimball, the judge, and probably will at least for the purposes of receiving clarification (the order was a little vague). I believe they have not done this yet.
Do they assign 80 hours of homework a week to students? I mean, they want to make it realistic right?
The students training to make RPGs get 80 hours, the students training to make action games or platformers get about 20 hours, and the online FPS students seem to never do anything else
Hi.. so I am trying to take all of this in. Please help me understand. I am a Mac programmer and I have a relatively good understanding of what's happening in the PowerPC. I'm a bit confused about some elements of this Cell thingy though.
So the CPU is just a normal POWER, right?
But, from the article: "Along side these is a 64-bit Power processor capable of running two threads." "Capable of running two threads"? Is this the same as hyperthreading in the intel processor? I did not know IBM was working on their own implementation of that, have multithreading POWER CPUs been used in a product yet?
It says t*he vector unit is a "VMX", well, that's just the same thing as Velocity Engine / Altivec that Apple uses, it's just a different brandname, right? And that'll be just part of the POWER, like the Altivec unit would be on a PPC?
The SPEs/APUs/"stream processors" are in particular what's confusing me just a little. I can think of lots of circumstances for which these things would be useful. But what I don't get is why, if you have these things, you still need the VMX. For what purposes is the VMX more suited? Has it got better throughput for the applications to which it is suited? Does it work better with the main CPU than the SPEs? Or is the idea here just that you don't have to keep the SPEs busy doing stuff that a normal VMX could handle?
Here's my big concern: on the Mac, the big problem with altivec has been keeping the altivec units fed. A lot of the time the altivec isn't getting used for anything, and even when it is, prior to the G5 there were serious problems with pushing enough data through the bus to keep the Altivec constantly busy. Will the SPEs have this same starvation problem? From the article: Connecting up the processing units is the element interconnect bus (EIB), comprising four 128-bit rings and a 64-bit tag running at half the processor clock. The busses connect to the SPEs through local memory, 256kbyte for each SPE... What is this telling us? That each of the SPEs has 256k of private memory to work with? Can SPEs freely read other SPEs "local memory", or only their own? And who fills up this memory initially, and who deals with it once it's done? The main processor? I.E., do the SPEs have access to main or video memory or other hardware, or do they ever require for the CPU to shuttle data to keep them fed? It appears from the original patent overview that the SPEs can talk directly to the memory controller, so if I'm reading that right then that's good-- that seems to make them qualify as actual processing units and not just coprocessors like the VMX is. But then the article seems to be saying the is SPE access to memory is limited-- i.e. it can only be done in block load/stores. Well, are there other limitations, can the APUs talk to (for example) video memory?
But, crucially, who loads the instructions for all of this?? If we've got a CPU that can be running two threads, and 8 little APU/SPEs that are each effectively running as their own processor, and all of this is sharing one memory bus... that's like effectively ten instruction streams to be reading at the same time. Is that going to be a problem? Do each of the 8 SPEs actually independently load their own instruction streams? Or is the idea that they partially use that 256k "local memory" as effectively an instruction cache?
If you can help clarify some of this for me, thanks.
I find that every single product I could possibly use or buy has wonderful interoperability, except those Microsoft makes. I even find every operating system I could possibly buy-- from Apple, from Sun, from Redhat-- natively runs the same (POSIX) programs... except the ones Microsoft makes.
Bill Gates is right, of course, that switching away from all-Microsoft products makes interoperability with Microsoft products harder. After all, he specifically engineered things that way. It's too bad the antitrust "settlement" a couple years ago was an absolute sham; if something like that settlement's "document your protocols and formats" clause had actually been enforced, Gates wouldn't be able to engineer them that way anymore, and interoperability would no longer be a problem anywhere.
Anyway, this is a common tactic in advertising. Attack your competitor for flaws you have but they don't; that way you tie up your competitor's ability to attack you on that grounds because they're too busy defending themselves, and you lessen the impact when people point out your own flaws since there's a perception your competitor has those flaws as well. Like, say you're a political candidate with a disreputable and possibly illegal military history? Get your supporters to pay people to claim your opponent has a disreputable and possibly illegal military history. Works like a charm.
I think the next rung of lawsuits against search engines happens when Geico isn't the first search hit for "Geico" or if "State Farm" shows up second on the search results page
Maybe later.
What's immediately next though is Nintendo suing google because a google ad under the search term "Donkey Kong" saying "Buy imported Nintendo products here!" linked to a third-party site which, though legal, Nintendo doesn't quite approve of...
And then Wal-Mart suing google because a google ad under the search term "Wal-Mart" saying "find out the truth about Wal-mart's business practices" linked to an independent group saying negative things about Wal-Mart's business and employment practices...
And then George W. Bush suing because a google ad under the search term "George W. Bush" linked to a "why you shouldn't vote for George W. Bush" page...
Well, why not? In the first two cases at least Google is using google ads to make money off of someone else's trademark, just like in the France case. Do people really just not see how difficult things get once you decide it's okay for corporations to own speech?
Personally, I'd compare it to any of the various video players out right now.
Well, probably not the DVD players, since UMD doesn't have exactly a certain future.
But if you're right, and we shouldn't be comparing the PSP to the Game Boy, then the thing we should be comparing it to is the Tapwave Zodiac.
The Zodiac's original model costs about the same as the PSP (the newest model is $100 more), but the memory upgrades cost much less than the PSP's and both come with the same amount of memory, 32MB. The Zodiac plays games, mp3s and video that you load from your computer, it has a more centrally-positioned analog stick, and it seems to be slightly smaller than the PSP. It definitely doesn't seem to be as powerful for games as the PSP and the screen definitely isn't as nice, but it has a vastly larger feature set since it's a fully functional PalmOS PDA and the screen supports stylus input.
In this case the PSP doesn't at all compare poorly to the Zodiac but it doesn't seem it would be automatically be one's first choice of a buy between the two either.
Out of the three I think the PSP is the most likely to succeed. Sony's strategy is very similar to that of the first playstation, they don't want Nintendo's market, they want to open up handheld to a new more mainstream demographic.
The problem is when you say "mainstream" here you don't mean "mainstream", you just mean a different demographic niche than the SP targets. Specifically, XBox owners.
Meanwhile, the DS is targeting new groups of its own in the same sense. Did you actually read any of the mainstream media coverage when the DS was released? And no, I don't mean EGM or whatever, I mean the real mainstream, like USA Today. Almost all of them reacted in a very interesting way-- they said, "oh, ok, it's a PDA crossed with a game boy".
The look of the DS might not impress the group that, in my opinion at least, you have mistaken for "mainstream": 20somethings who are willing to buy appliances that make them feel cool. However, these people would very likely be buying video game systems anyway-- you aren't "opening up" the market one bit by appealing to them. However the DS's style does seem to be impressing the 30something set (at least the ones who work in the media), to whom the DS"s supposedly angular and clunky design just looks dignified and businesslike, and the stylus functionality seems natural and comforting. This is still a niche, but it's possibly something closer to the mainstream mainstream, and it's certainly a new market.
Sony might possibly have something on their hands with the whole "uh, it's a media device, really" thing, since lots of people who wouldn't be so interested in a video game system would be interested in a portable music player. But that doesn't really work since their "convergence" of an mp3 player and a handheld game system costs about as much as an equivalent mp3 player and a handheld game system would separately-- and isn't much physically smaller. This is why the price is a problem. For the $250 price of a PSP you could get a $150 Nintendo DS and a $100 iPod Shuffle-- and if you did, you'd actually be able to play mp3s, which you wouldn't with the PSP value pack (you'd have to shell out a nontrivial amount more for a memory stick, the value pack's 32MB stick won't cut it). I do not think the general market will fail to notice this.
Slashdot Mirror
to ask this...
The guy who wrote "the wellstone" is convinced that quantum dots can also be used to create programmable matter, something he came up with in one of his science fiction books.
I am just curious. Is this (programmable matter via quantum wells/dots) something that actual work is being done on anywhere, or that actual signs of progress can be seen in, or that Mr. McCarthy has the actual capacity to encourage actual science work to be done on? Or is this just a lone science fiction author running around trying to convince people to take him seriously?
But since when does Palm even have handwriting recognition software to license? Last I checked they only used that funky deformed-handwriting software.
Yeah.
Fuck those liberals who demand that America be the greatest country on earth. They should just sit down and learn to put up with mediocrity in all its forms.
True patriots understand that loving America means lowering your expectations of it. If lefties actually appreciated the things that made America great, they wouldn't try to protect them from being destroyed.
I can only hope that whoever moderated me "insightful" saw the sarcasm where you did not.
It's no where near exactly like right-wing radio in the 90s if you ask me, because right-wing radio still required a huge (and expensive) infrastructure that is no longer needed.
So what's up with all those donate/advertise/Paypal links on practically every blog page out there?
...that CBS's failure of journalistic integrity in the "Bush Memos" case wasn't a "big story" anywhere except in the blogosphere.
Also worth noting that this "big story" had no functional outcome whatsoever. CBS was in no way held accountable for what they did, they in no way had to answer to the public, they never even admitted fault. Even in the blogosphere, the story really didn't serve any purpose except as a tool for right-wing blogs to distract people from the real evidence concerning Bush's possible failure to fulfill his national guard duty; I would estimate that the vast, vast majority of the people who are aware 60 minutes ever broadcast those memos first heard of it through the blog backlash pointing out the memos were falsified. The entire thing was just a self-referential tempest in a teapot, a media source reporting on a media source which ran a story which only gained importance because another media source then reported on it.
Basically, the reason Gannon was exposed is because so many Bloggers (open source journalists) started writing about it, until there were so many articles about it on blogs that the mainstream media had no choice but to pick up the story.
Sounds exactly like how right-wing talk radio worked in the 90s.
Of course, the Gannon thing is actually true, as opposed to the stories about Bill Clinton shooting DNC chairman Ron Brown in the back of the head. But truth doesn't really matter here. What matters is that functionally, the exact same thing happened. A concentrated faction of non-mainstream media sources hammered on one specific issue until the very fact they were talking about it so much caused it to qualify as "news", at which point the mainstream media picked it up. The presence or absence of facts is entirely coincidental to the manner in which this mechanism works.
So is Rush Limbaugh "open source journalism"?
If this law passed, then this would mean that if you buy a CD from the store, you'd be able to use it only in CD players but not on your computer or portable mp3 player,
but if you buy music from the iTunes Music Store or a similar service you can use it in either location, since burning to CD is outright one of the advertised features.
In such a circumstance I can't imagine why anyone who owns a computer would ever buy CDs at all, except that the iTunes Music Store doesn't exist in Norway right now. If this passes and gets enforced and people are paying attention, the end result could just be the total cessation of CD sales in Norway.
Though, of course, the idea this law would be really enforced instead of just being selectively enforced against people the police and/or the recording industries arbitrarily want to throw in jail is pretty outlandish.
The Slashdot hivemind praises people when they uphold personal and consumer rights over large corporate interests, and attacks them when they don't.
WHAT A BUNCH OF HYPOCRITES!
That thing I think is so absurd about this is the fact they have forgotten the most important reason for being able to transform media, obsolescence.
No, I think they have it very much in mind.
What happens when the CD format is gone and there are no more CD-players?
Then obviously you'll have to pay the recording industry for the privilege of continuing to listen to the music you previously bought.
And, of course, that's the entire point. You have to remember who these laws are being passed for the benefit of. This isn't about money, or about preventing piracy. It's about allowing the current form of the recording industry to dictate the terms under which people are and are not allowed to listen to music. Mp3 ripping represents the capacity for consumers to remove all limitations on how they use the music they have purchased; therefore it has to go.
Even it they industry argues they can resell it in the new form, who is to say they will still exist to do so?
I wouldn't worry about that. If further threats to the continued existence of the recording industry in its current form appear, then they'll just have those outlawed too.
Jobs reportedly told Karmazin he might change his tune if more interesting content were made available on satellite radio.
:)
Sounds to me more like a not now than a no. So I have trouble seeing this as entirely unreasonable on Mr. Jobs' part. I'd say maybe it's too bad but, hey, I don't own an iPod so what do I care.
Nobody has intellectual property "rights". They have intellectual property privileges.
In the U.S. at least personal property rights-- you know, for "real" property-- are assumed to be a simple basic intrinsic right that exists outside of and regardless of the government, as codified by the fifth amendment's explicit observation that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
The execution and distribution rights to the non-property that go by the misnomer "intellectual property rights" are not intrinsic and in fact are granted by the government. This is a big deal. Unlike the intrinsic rights spoken of in the bill of rights-- which are not granted by the government and therefore cannot be limited or taken away by the government-- "IP" ownership is a privilege the government entrusts to certain people with the goal of benefiting the public, as part of Congress's empowerment "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
Just something to think about.
SCO almost certainly would not have been able to litigate their case this far were it not that Microsoft Co. donated $16.6 million dollars to SCO and their legal case, and arranged an investment of $50 million more through Baystar. We obviously cannot know for absolute certain who or what inspired SCO to do all this. We can however make some interesting statements about who funded them.
If I'm not mistaken they don't even have to appeal the discovery order to the 10th circuit-- just to Judge Kimball. The way I understood it the discovery order against IBM was issued by Judge Wells, the magistrate (amusingly, with a justification of "to appease the rote objection by SCO"). IBM has the ability to appeal this order to Judge Kimball, the judge, and probably will at least for the purposes of receiving clarification (the order was a little vague). I believe they have not done this yet.
In a loser pay system, wouldn't it be possible for SCO to spend all they have, lose the case and simply close shop?
Isn't that pretty much exactly what they're doing now?
Do they assign 80 hours of homework a week to students? I mean, they want to make it realistic right?
The students training to make RPGs get 80 hours, the students training to make action games or platformers get about 20 hours, and the online FPS students seem to never do anything else
The "standards be damned, we're going to do something cool our way".
I really have trouble seeing it as in any way Google's fault that the standards have failed to deliver browser compatibility.
Thank you for your responses!
If you can help clarify some of this for me, thanks.
Is there any advantage whatsoever to having a dual-core processor over just having two single-core processors?
Interesting, I didn't know that was free now. How does it compare in functionality and software compatibility to Cygwin?
I find that every single product I could possibly use or buy has wonderful interoperability, except those Microsoft makes. I even find every operating system I could possibly buy-- from Apple, from Sun, from Redhat-- natively runs the same (POSIX) programs... except the ones Microsoft makes.
Bill Gates is right, of course, that switching away from all-Microsoft products makes interoperability with Microsoft products harder. After all, he specifically engineered things that way. It's too bad the antitrust "settlement" a couple years ago was an absolute sham; if something like that settlement's "document your protocols and formats" clause had actually been enforced, Gates wouldn't be able to engineer them that way anymore, and interoperability would no longer be a problem anywhere.
Anyway, this is a common tactic in advertising. Attack your competitor for flaws you have but they don't; that way you tie up your competitor's ability to attack you on that grounds because they're too busy defending themselves, and you lessen the impact when people point out your own flaws since there's a perception your competitor has those flaws as well. Like, say you're a political candidate with a disreputable and possibly illegal military history? Get your supporters to pay people to claim your opponent has a disreputable and possibly illegal military history. Works like a charm.
I think the next rung of lawsuits against search engines happens when Geico isn't the first search hit for "Geico" or if "State Farm" shows up second on the search results page
Maybe later.
What's immediately next though is Nintendo suing google because a google ad under the search term "Donkey Kong" saying "Buy imported Nintendo products here!" linked to a third-party site which, though legal, Nintendo doesn't quite approve of...
And then Wal-Mart suing google because a google ad under the search term "Wal-Mart" saying "find out the truth about Wal-mart's business practices" linked to an independent group saying negative things about Wal-Mart's business and employment practices...
And then George W. Bush suing because a google ad under the search term "George W. Bush" linked to a "why you shouldn't vote for George W. Bush" page...
Well, why not? In the first two cases at least Google is using google ads to make money off of someone else's trademark, just like in the France case. Do people really just not see how difficult things get once you decide it's okay for corporations to own speech?
Personally, I'd compare it to any of the various video players out right now.
Well, probably not the DVD players, since UMD doesn't have exactly a certain future.
But if you're right, and we shouldn't be comparing the PSP to the Game Boy, then the thing we should be comparing it to is the Tapwave Zodiac.
The Zodiac's original model costs about the same as the PSP (the newest model is $100 more), but the memory upgrades cost much less than the PSP's and both come with the same amount of memory, 32MB. The Zodiac plays games, mp3s and video that you load from your computer, it has a more centrally-positioned analog stick, and it seems to be slightly smaller than the PSP. It definitely doesn't seem to be as powerful for games as the PSP and the screen definitely isn't as nice, but it has a vastly larger feature set since it's a fully functional PalmOS PDA and the screen supports stylus input.
In this case the PSP doesn't at all compare poorly to the Zodiac but it doesn't seem it would be automatically be one's first choice of a buy between the two either.
Out of the three I think the PSP is the most likely to succeed. Sony's strategy is very similar to that of the first playstation, they don't want Nintendo's market, they want to open up handheld to a new more mainstream demographic.
The problem is when you say "mainstream" here you don't mean "mainstream", you just mean a different demographic niche than the SP targets. Specifically, XBox owners.
Meanwhile, the DS is targeting new groups of its own in the same sense. Did you actually read any of the mainstream media coverage when the DS was released? And no, I don't mean EGM or whatever, I mean the real mainstream, like USA Today. Almost all of them reacted in a very interesting way-- they said, "oh, ok, it's a PDA crossed with a game boy".
The look of the DS might not impress the group that, in my opinion at least, you have mistaken for "mainstream": 20somethings who are willing to buy appliances that make them feel cool. However, these people would very likely be buying video game systems anyway-- you aren't "opening up" the market one bit by appealing to them. However the DS's style does seem to be impressing the 30something set (at least the ones who work in the media), to whom the DS"s supposedly angular and clunky design just looks dignified and businesslike, and the stylus functionality seems natural and comforting. This is still a niche, but it's possibly something closer to the mainstream mainstream, and it's certainly a new market.
Sony might possibly have something on their hands with the whole "uh, it's a media device, really" thing, since lots of people who wouldn't be so interested in a video game system would be interested in a portable music player. But that doesn't really work since their "convergence" of an mp3 player and a handheld game system costs about as much as an equivalent mp3 player and a handheld game system would separately-- and isn't much physically smaller. This is why the price is a problem. For the $250 price of a PSP you could get a $150 Nintendo DS and a $100 iPod Shuffle-- and if you did, you'd actually be able to play mp3s, which you wouldn't with the PSP value pack (you'd have to shell out a nontrivial amount more for a memory stick, the value pack's 32MB stick won't cut it). I do not think the general market will fail to notice this.