I find it odd that someone like Apple is moving into the MP3 hardware market the same month that Universal Music is implementing the Cactus Datashield copy-protection on all their new CD's, making it impossible (or at least difficult and illegal) to rip CD's. Is the iPod going to be a white elephant within a year? How is Apple going to protect this product: go up face-to-face against the music industry?
The iBook is nice (look: computers meet Tupperware!) but it doesn't do CardBus. I have a Magma PCI card cage attached to my Pismo, which means that I can gig with the Pismo running something like MOTU Performer or Max/MSP, and use a PCI-based synth/effects processor like the OasysPCI. It makes a really powerful rig.
Since laptops depreciate in value so quickly, there's no point in selling them on. Accordingly, I have a shelf of old PowerBooks. I first bought a PB140 early in 1992 (for around $4000 here in the UK), primarily as a realtime MIDI processing engine for electronic composition. There was a known problem with the serial port hardware rendering the MIDI support buggy, but I was assured that Apple were "working on a fix."
Apple never delivered this fix (partly because Apple Corps. forced them to drop MIDI driver development), but by this time it became known that the PowerBook 100 would work fine for MIDI (different hardware design), and could also be fitted with a second serial port, making it the most MIDI-capable PowerBook around.
(Let us pause to remember the Outbound Portable, a third-party Mac laptop with a Mac Plus ROM and a funny rolling trackbar, predating the Apple machines by at least a year. At one stage Outbound were very interested in tackling the professional music market because their machine could do MIDI and the 140/170 could not; but the company folded soon after.)
I spent a while doing electronic music gigs with the PB100 and PB140 running in parallel, Opcode having fudged round the MIDI problems in the 140. I even had the 140 upgraded with a 170 processor board for higher speed. (I never wanted a 170; too many people were screaming at Apple over broken pixels in the active-matrix screen.)
It was a while before I moved on, buying a 520 Blackbird sometime around 1997 - my MIDI processing needs were growing, and I needed that 68040 performance! Greyscale was cool, too. Having to tighten the display hinges every six months was a small price to pay. But by this time, more and more Mac software required colour, and neither my SE/30 nor any of my three PowerBooks delivered it, so early in 2000 I bought a 540c for around $200, and I still use it for legacy MIDI applications (mostly those with copy-protection which can't be moved).
I was finally forced into the PowerPC world by a need to do realtime audio synthesis for the Frankfurt Ballett; at this stage the TiBook G4 had just come out, so I went straight to eBay and nailed a Pismo G3, deciding to let other Apple customers beta-test the TiBook hardware. I use the Pismo and 540c in tandem; the 100, 140 and 520 are mostly gathering dust but also serve as backup machines. The batteries in the 100 and 140 are dead; those in the 520 and 540c are dying.
Of course, the PPC PowerBook is pretty much part of the uniform for electronic sound and media performance. Our Frankfurt team has one each (a Wallstreet, a Lombard and a Pismo), and a recent arts/software conference at the Royal Opera House looked like an Apple product placement: a 50-50 mix of G3's and G4's. Almost all electronic music gigs will have a G3 or G4 onstage somewhere (listen out for those reboot chimes during the set...); Wallstreets are popular because they have serial ports, which still beat USB for MIDI applications.
I still have a soft spot for the 140. Ergonomically it comes out pretty much on top: the ruby-mount trackball beats any touchpad, and the machine itself is built like a tank: it was happy being strapped into a flightcase with piano wire for live gigs. But the Pismo (with an external Logitech Marble Mouse) is cool as well, especially since MacOS 9.1 is remarkably free from clutter and feature-creep compared to System 7.
My next PowerBook will probably be a second-hand G5 (the transparent one that glows in the dark).
Surely the first, most obvious symptom of these protection schemes to Joe Public is that the CD-ripping software for the MP3 players from Iomega, Rio et. al. is going to stop working. I can imagine the player vendors to start getting shirty about this (and I'm certainly not buying a HipZip until cdparanoia can deal with these CP schemes, thankyouveddymuch). Or will the vendors try and push us onto subscription services?
I heard a radio interview recently with one of the discoverers of Buckminsterfullerene (Robert Curl, I think) where he claims that Lego itself is detrimental to children's learning because it's too easy. Meccano required children to master basic engineering skills (tolerances, friction, tightness of joints) whereas Lego blocks just fit together with no further thought.
It's all relative, I guess. When I was young, I had this plan for a Meccano/Lego interfacing kit. Perhaps that's why I ended up doing software.
Open-source JXTA is all very well...
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 2
...but I'm going to be using Microsoft JXTA instead, because management tells me it's going to be better supported and more reliable, and it will contain all sorts of neat extensions which will link it up with MS Office and Exchange.
There's also The Planiverse by A. K. Dewdney (listed at Amazon - I just checked - although I can't paste the URL for the usual reasons). I read it many years ago; it's pretty good, as (as I recall) has some virtual/cyberspace tie-in.
Palindromic or not, it's certainly not news: it was winner of Best Layout in the 1987 Obfuscated C Contest. Why this unattributed copy deserves mention in Slashdot escapes me...
Now surely, somebody has used some kind of diagonalisation to implement the game of life on a Turing machine. How powerful does the hardware need to be to run a single Life->TM->Life stack at faster than glacial speed?
A lot of continuation-based research was done in the Standard ML project at AT&T and Princeton in the late 80's/early 90's. Andrew Appel (who wrote the native-code generator for this particular SML compiler) has a book, Compiling with Continuations, which goes into this stuff. Continuation-passing is odd at first but pretty easy to code up in a functional language.
The R380 (linked directly at the Ericsson site - I'm not typing in the stupidly long product-specific URL) is out already. The screen size issue is addressed by having the entire phone surface as display - the fold-in keypad operates by touching the surface.
The PDA platform is EPOC, as used in the popular Psion Series 5/5mx machines, although the UI is heavily streamlined. (For a start, there's obviously no keyboard.)
I've played with an R380 - it's very neat, if you want the all-in-one solution, but the unit is not quite powerful enough as a stand-alone PDA for me (it's about Palm-level, not Psion-level), so I prefer a full PDA plus a really small phone. That way you can talk and read/type at the same time.
For what it's worth, the 1-click store is US-only, with the small print saying that Apple products bought online may only be shipped to US addresses and may not be exported.
Clearly, Apple didn't see fit to pay Amazon for the full international version of 1-click featured at www.amazon.co.uk...
This completely removes any moral imperative to respect copyright laws or to ever go buy the
CD of an artist that you actually like.
You assume, of course, that musicians are going to see any of the fruits of this tax. I certainly won't be compensated by Bertelsmann (or whoever) if people make copies of my CD.
Nah, a nuclear explosion on the Moon's surface is mondo impressive - have you never seen the first episode of Space: 1999?
(On the other hand, I'm not sure quite how an Air Force General would explain to Congress who was going to take the blame for the Moon subsequently leaving orbit...)
...a physicist who gave the Royal Institution lectures years ago, messing around with linear-motor crossbows and the like, but was more recently dismissed as a crank for believing in gyroscopic propulsion systems (i.e. reactionless drives).
Her site is not bad, and I might bookmark the "safe web colours" table, but it's not really a lot to write home about, and she touts her course and books everywhere. This is graphic design she's into, which has very little to do with the web (for that, read Nielson.)
So what's the story with the Java 2 platform on PowerPC? I recall that Sun dumped it when they wrested the Linux Java efforts from Blackdown a few months ago...
There are perhaps a dozen languages using Milner-Hindley polymorphism (which is essentially what he has in mind - see this func tional programming intro) or later variants which get round some of the semantic drawbacks. I've implemented a few of them, so I'm pretty familiar with the typing semantics. Unfortunately, OO-style subclassing doesn't fit that well with type parameterisation - people (like Luca Cardelli) have been attacking this problem for years.
Oh: "Language of the Future"? This kind of typechecking dates back to the late 1970's.
(Btw. does anyone else see "functional" above? Some problem with SlashDot's breaking of long URL's?)
(They're my favourite consulting firm. Really. Very entertaining when there's nothing else to read.)
But without the popular code, Web sites become largely passive and unable to deliver the most basic interactivity.
I dunno: many of the sites I visit (and the ones I implement) seem to manage fine without any mobile code whatsoever.
Dave Plummer, a vice president for Internet and Java at the GartnerGroup consulting firm, noted that without any mobile code capabilities, DOD Web sites would become much more static than standard corporate Web sites.
This is a bad thing?
"Your sites will end up being less competitive overnight," Plummer said, adding that a complete ban on all mobile script capabilities could lead to a Web presence that does not permit online chats or the filling out and sending of online forms.
(a) Untrue; (b) Since when was the DOD competitive?
BTW: has anyone seen mention of any kind of class action lawsuit against MICROS~1 for their criminal negligence in design and implementation of security models in their internet and web tools?
For those that complain about "the good old days" of strictly command-line apps and how we don't need "no steenkin interface" I'd like to point out a simple fact: Most apps are there to get *work* done, not to make you spend all your productive time *learning* how to use them.
You're confusing two issues: good versus bad design, and command-line versus GUI implementation. I've come across simple, intuitive, easy-to-use command-line apps which don't need the clutter of graphics; conversely, the hall-of-shame contains GUI-based applications, not command-line ones, which rather invalidates your argument.
From my perspective, time is made more productive by typing, not navigating-and-clicking, and by automating and scripting text-based commands, not even more navigating-and-clicking.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it odd that someone like Apple is moving into the MP3 hardware market the same month that Universal Music is implementing the Cactus Datashield copy-protection on all their new CD's, making it impossible (or at least difficult and illegal) to rip CD's. Is the iPod going to be a white elephant within a year? How is Apple going to protect this product: go up face-to-face against the music industry?
The iBook is nice (look: computers meet Tupperware!) but it doesn't do CardBus. I have a Magma PCI card cage attached to my Pismo, which means that I can gig with the Pismo running something like MOTU Performer or Max/MSP, and use a PCI-based synth/effects processor like the OasysPCI. It makes a really powerful rig.
Apple never delivered this fix (partly because Apple Corps. forced them to drop MIDI driver development), but by this time it became known that the PowerBook 100 would work fine for MIDI (different hardware design), and could also be fitted with a second serial port, making it the most MIDI-capable PowerBook around.
(Let us pause to remember the Outbound Portable, a third-party Mac laptop with a Mac Plus ROM and a funny rolling trackbar, predating the Apple machines by at least a year. At one stage Outbound were very interested in tackling the professional music market because their machine could do MIDI and the 140/170 could not; but the company folded soon after.)
I spent a while doing electronic music gigs with the PB100 and PB140 running in parallel, Opcode having fudged round the MIDI problems in the 140. I even had the 140 upgraded with a 170 processor board for higher speed. (I never wanted a 170; too many people were screaming at Apple over broken pixels in the active-matrix screen.)
It was a while before I moved on, buying a 520 Blackbird sometime around 1997 - my MIDI processing needs were growing, and I needed that 68040 performance! Greyscale was cool, too. Having to tighten the display hinges every six months was a small price to pay. But by this time, more and more Mac software required colour, and neither my SE/30 nor any of my three PowerBooks delivered it, so early in 2000 I bought a 540c for around $200, and I still use it for legacy MIDI applications (mostly those with copy-protection which can't be moved).
I was finally forced into the PowerPC world by a need to do realtime audio synthesis for the Frankfurt Ballett; at this stage the TiBook G4 had just come out, so I went straight to eBay and nailed a Pismo G3, deciding to let other Apple customers beta-test the TiBook hardware. I use the Pismo and 540c in tandem; the 100, 140 and 520 are mostly gathering dust but also serve as backup machines. The batteries in the 100 and 140 are dead; those in the 520 and 540c are dying.
Of course, the PPC PowerBook is pretty much part of the uniform for electronic sound and media performance. Our Frankfurt team has one each (a Wallstreet, a Lombard and a Pismo), and a recent arts/software conference at the Royal Opera House looked like an Apple product placement: a 50-50 mix of G3's and G4's. Almost all electronic music gigs will have a G3 or G4 onstage somewhere (listen out for those reboot chimes during the set...); Wallstreets are popular because they have serial ports, which still beat USB for MIDI applications.
I still have a soft spot for the 140. Ergonomically it comes out pretty much on top: the ruby-mount trackball beats any touchpad, and the machine itself is built like a tank: it was happy being strapped into a flightcase with piano wire for live gigs. But the Pismo (with an external Logitech Marble Mouse) is cool as well, especially since MacOS 9.1 is remarkably free from clutter and feature-creep compared to System 7.
My next PowerBook will probably be a second-hand G5 (the transparent one that glows in the dark).
"Fuck off, I'm busy."
Surely the first, most obvious symptom of these protection schemes to Joe Public is that the CD-ripping software for the MP3 players from Iomega, Rio et. al. is going to stop working. I can imagine the player vendors to start getting shirty about this (and I'm certainly not buying a HipZip until cdparanoia can deal with these CP schemes, thankyouveddymuch). Or will the vendors try and push us onto subscription services?
It's all relative, I guess. When I was young, I had this plan for a Meccano/Lego interfacing kit. Perhaps that's why I ended up doing software.
...but I'm going to be using Microsoft JXTA instead, because management tells me it's going to be better supported and more reliable, and it will contain all sorts of neat extensions which will link it up with MS Office and Exchange.
There's also The Planiverse by A. K. Dewdney (listed at Amazon - I just checked - although I can't paste the URL for the usual reasons). I read it many years ago; it's pretty good, as (as I recall) has some virtual/cyberspace tie-in.
Palindromic or not, it's certainly not news: it was winner of Best Layout in the 1987 Obfuscated C Contest. Why this unattributed copy deserves mention in Slashdot escapes me...
Now surely, somebody has used some kind of diagonalisation to implement the game of life on a Turing machine. How powerful does the hardware need to be to run a single Life->TM->Life stack at faster than glacial speed?
A lot of continuation-based research was done in the Standard ML project at AT&T and Princeton in the late 80's/early 90's. Andrew Appel (who wrote the native-code generator for this particular SML compiler) has a book, Compiling with Continuations, which goes into this stuff. Continuation-passing is odd at first but pretty easy to code up in a functional language.
The PDA platform is EPOC, as used in the popular Psion Series 5/5mx machines, although the UI is heavily streamlined. (For a start, there's obviously no keyboard.)
I've played with an R380 - it's very neat, if you want the all-in-one solution, but the unit is not quite powerful enough as a stand-alone PDA for me (it's about Palm-level, not Psion-level), so I prefer a full PDA plus a really small phone. That way you can talk and read/type at the same time.
Clearly, Apple didn't see fit to pay Amazon for the full international version of 1-click featured at www.amazon.co.uk...
Prescience: this is exactly what Jakob Nielsen warned vendors against back in March: see the appropriate Alertbox.
You assume, of course, that musicians are going to see any of the fruits of this tax. I certainly won't be compensated by Bertelsmann (or whoever) if people make copies of my CD.
(On the other hand, I'm not sure quite how an Air Force General would explain to Congress who was going to take the blame for the Moon subsequently leaving orbit...)
Perhaps someone should have told them there's no air on the Moon (Flash Gordon notwithstanding).
satellite-13.iridium.orbit not responding still trying
...the book about the Clock of the Long Now, which is well worth a read.
...a physicist who gave the Royal Institution lectures years ago, messing around with linear-motor crossbows and the like, but was more recently dismissed as a crank for believing in gyroscopic propulsion systems (i.e. reactionless drives).
Not so much Diva as Prima Donna, perhaps?
So what's the story with the Java 2 platform on PowerPC? I recall that Sun dumped it when they wrested the Linux Java efforts from Blackdown a few months ago...
Oh: "Language of the Future"? This kind of typechecking dates back to the late 1970's.
(Btw. does anyone else see "functional" above? Some problem with SlashDot's breaking of long URL's?)
(They're my favourite consulting firm. Really. Very entertaining when there's nothing else to read.)
I dunno: many of the sites I visit (and the ones I implement) seem to manage fine without any mobile code whatsoever.
This is a bad thing?
(a) Untrue; (b) Since when was the DOD competitive?
BTW: has anyone seen mention of any kind of class action lawsuit against MICROS~1 for their criminal negligence in design and implementation of security models in their internet and web tools?
For those that complain about "the good old days" of strictly command-line apps and how we don't need "no steenkin interface" I'd like to point out a simple fact: Most apps are there to get *work* done, not to make you spend all your productive time *learning* how to use them.
You're confusing two issues: good versus bad design, and command-line versus GUI implementation. I've come across simple, intuitive, easy-to-use command-line apps which don't need the clutter of graphics; conversely, the hall-of-shame contains GUI-based applications, not command-line ones, which rather invalidates your argument.
From my perspective, time is made more productive by typing, not navigating-and-clicking, and by automating and scripting text-based commands, not even more navigating-and-clicking.