Um, if she's interested in chemistry, she's already taken the bait and is entering a scientific(if not technical) field...
So she's actually not that great a counterexample, except in the specific field of computers, for example.
The general meme is that women are discouraged from science and technology; your friend, if she wants to go into chemistry, is not one of these women...
And it's difficult to base our perception of potential on a set of the population that has already determined, through past actions, their future potential. Can you say, boldly, that a large percentage of women 5 years from now won't be talented in that way, because of your personal experience with the people you knew who made their decisions 5 years ago?
Since I'm an Asian(Chinese) and where I went to school(Caltech) we weren't a minority(in technical and scientific fields)
If you were to count us in, perhaps, the cinema majors of other schools, we would count as a minority. And perhaps even if you were to do a general population count in the US. But not in engineering/science fields =)
That there are not enough people in technical fields. Women, which make up 50% of the population, are therefore an untapped resource. As are minorities, who also don't get into the technical fields(as compared to Caucasian or Asian)
I ask why it is immoral to manipulate people to shift demographic trends? If a person has an infinite number of options open to them; even if it is a finite number of options, for the example, why is it wrong to try to get them to chose a particular option?
And what does this have to do with 'trend'? It's just a job, a career, work, and nothing to do with life, or personality, or behavior!
Your title just seemed to invite people to attack you =)
How can an individual with only individual experiences determine that what they see is common or uncommon?
Of course it's a pretty common meme/concept that women are discouraged subtly, implicitly, and explicitly from technical fields. I can't say that it is the truth, just a prevailing idea. So I can't discredit your opinion, and I will admit I am being influenced by this meme.
Disclaimers aside, then, I will claim a very practical and pragmatic argument. If women weren't being discouraged in some way, shouldn't they be entering these fields on parity with men? It can be said another way; that we are encouraging men to enter these fields, and not women.
It doesn't mean that it is explicit or by design, that men are encouraged. Maybe there's too much baggage with the word, encouraged. Perhaps if we just said that the system favors males. What can we do then, to increase the focus on women?
Which has nothing at all to do with your point on your friend. There are guys like her too, at HP. It didn't stop them from going into a technical field. So a better question for your friend then is why does going into a technical field interfere with her desire to communiate with her friends?
But you do have a decent point in your post. Where are the women going to, instead? I have an idea that, in such a hot employment market, women actually may just be opting out of work(is this a possibility, or totally wack?) and college entirely and going into marriage!
It's known that as the economy gets good or bad that students either tend to go to school or go to work. At least, it's a common meme, if not a fact. I would wonder if women followed a similar pattern.
And about recruiting men into those majors, the society we live in would laugh at the guys who go into those fields(not manly or macho or whatever). Just like women are made fun of as being stupid or not capable, when trying to enter some male dominated professions.
Off topic question; do people leave the subject lines to be filled last, after they finish writing their post?
Anyway, several thoughts do occur on this topic:
By the time you focus/target 'women', it may already be too late. They will have been left behind and ignored for too many years, I suspect. In which case any change you effect now, won't be visible for at least a handful of years.
What can be done? The problem is so complex, I don't know that it can be characterized. We're trying to change the social structure in very many places if we want more women in technology and the sciences; we either grow girls more like men(which I suspect men don't want, otherwise selective pressure would have already done this), we change the social model in which women can contribute(a top down approach? Grassroots? I dunno), or we change the way girls see and interact with technology and science. The problem with the third option is that there is no visible path, just a visible endpoint. More women in the field.
How do we deal with the fact that girls get different treatment? Can family support overcome that? How about the way we raise our girls? Can we modify it so that they remain uniquely female but still fit into the current structure of society, at least until social changes force society to adapt? Or do we create an role for the females that they currently do not occupy, but can fit in very easily with very little change, again until society adapts to allow more opportunities for girls?
Am I being to shortsighted here? Or perhaps my view is to narrow? Are there other options and paths we can look at and pursue?
Apple pushed USB to the forefront by not including a floppy and adding the USB port to their iMacs.
Was this only a year ago? Two years? Before then, good luck finding USB peripherals, I don't know that it was such a big thing on PCs. and only *now* are Compaq(iPaq), IBM(EON devices), etc. pushing USB and dropping a bunch of the older legacy devices.
Think the same, but now insert FireWire. A year from now, I expect FireWire to be everywhere for the high speed devices.
And look at what they're doing with IEEE 802.11, aka AirPort, WaveLan, whatever.
You question how Apple is producing products which define personal computing; the answer is that with wireless, our portables are truly portable while being connected to the network. With USB and FireWire, our devices gain the PnP capabilities that is traditionally associated with SCSI, but without such a price or complexity hit since both are serial standards(less complex cabling, IDs, connectors, and chaining).
What else is Apple going to do that will redefine personal computing? Adopting BSD/NeXT in MacOS X, giving the common man the power and reliablitity of Un*x, with the svelte and suave dress of the Mac UI.
I actually can't think of many other companies trying to do similar. Sony, for one, with their Memory Sticks, FireWire, camcorders, etc.
Palm, perhaps, with their PDAs and stuff.
So perhaps Apple isn't as exciting(to you), but they haven't stopped 'innovating'.
Just by using the term 'dumbed down' you defeat the point of a Newbie's Linux. It shouldn't be dumbed down. Either it has a very smooth and gradual learning curve, which is one thing that Linux, CLI, and Unix in general doesn't deal with, or it has a flawless level of useability.
As an example, Apple's OS and hardware have demonstrated levels of proficiency in both tasks. As much as people criticize the design decisions, a single user interface is ideal for people who are figuring out information flow, computers, tasks, etc. A single mouse button, so people don't have to fear that if they do an incorrect action, something irrecoverable can happen because there is only one action. A single menu bar, so people *always* know where to look for info and stuff, without having to figure out what app has the focus.
Now here's the problem, if you want to be a Linux advocate.
Apple will be releasing MacOS X. It will feature all of the above useability functions. I don't know if it will also feature a gradual learning curve for newbies, but it will definitely have all the power features Linux has touted over Win9x and WinNT. The CLI, the GNU tools, the scripting and networking and robustness, unless Apple screws up majorly. If they do throw in a gradual learning curve, all the Newbies will be flocking to Apple because of their strengths, and Linux's weakness
Consistent, useable, useful UI. I'm not talking about themes or skins. Consistent drag and drop functionality. Patterned interfaces among all applications. Their menu bar. Their single window mode, for new users. The graphical interface for system management. Consistent behaviors among all applications. Transparent windows, for example, to indicate which windows own which dialogs. Animated minimization and maximization so people know where the windows go, that they don't disappear.
Advertising, focus, and attention for the new users. They will have the nifty industrial design, the nifty desktop graphics, the nice effects possible through display PDF.
Control. Because Apple hardware is under Apple control, they can design the software and the OS to just work. If they haven't in the past, it's their bad, but they have the resources to provide excellet support and coverage.
A lot of these things Linux just cannot control. At least until someone does a Linux box, akin to the iMac. Plug in, power up, and use. Until people start focusing on UI, instead of themes and skins. Until we stop thinking of new users as 'dumb', and things for them to be dumbed down. New users are just that, new, and they have their own ramp up and their own distinct needs. We can ignore them, of course, and that would just leave the door open for Apple, or Be, or someone else.
Until the term was coined, idea was one of the words used to characterize the concept of a meme. However, ideas are also used to describe the solutions to problems, far fetched concepts, and other things. In a way, the word is an overloaded operator, and to encapsulate a specific concept into a precise term with a defined context, we use the word meme.
The idea(more overuse of the word) that thoughts can infect and spread virally is associated with memes.
In the same way, in the near future, we may need another term to denote free software vs open source free software vs open source non-free software. Or maybe not.
I dunno about the layer selection problem you mentioned.
If each layer flouresces at a different frequency, such that all layers flouresce at once, you get a single beam that is the sum/product/total of every layer. All that needs be done is that the piece of hardware reading the beam demultiplex it into component signals; a decent prism will split it into it's respective signals, to be read(in parallel). You would not select one layer at a time, then, but all n layers at once!
So a 40x CD becomes 320x, read, because you can read 8 bits at once, rather than 1 bit at a time.
Notice this is not nearly as simple using pits, because one can not encode frequency selection in a passive medium; phase, maybe, and polarity, but not frequency.
And I agree that there is no need to reinvent the wheel
So I got to thinking that one could also encode chirality into the 'pit'.
I dunno if phase can actually be encoded; anyone with a better grounding in optics able to correct me?
Anyway, intensity can be encoded via size of a pit.
Can phase be encoded by the depth of the pit? Changes of a quarter wavelength will change what phase bounces back; it can either constructively interfere or destructively interfere with the original beam... that might work.
Then one can also encode chirality into the pit, as well, so that the light gets reflected as either right or left handed... thus we can actually get 3 bits of info into 1 CD sized pit; That still gets us, with an 8 layer disc, 3 bytes of data at a time, or only about 200mb/s throughput.
I guess FCD pits can be smaller than CD pits, because they actively flouresce? This affects the areal density, but it seems I can't think of any real way to increase the throughput beyond 200 mb/s...
The article mentions transfer speeds of 1 gb/s, which I don't believe, actually. What is driving this? There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes me thing of how this is possible; by having 8 layers, for example, one can multiply a CD's transfer speed by 8;
So if they can push CD transfers to something like 100 mb/s, I'll believe that this FCD can be pushed to 1 gb/s...
Actually, I can think of some nifty tricks one could try, but then it wouldn't be backwards compatible with CDs...
There's nothing saying that a 'pit' in the FCD needs only store one bit of info; each pit could, for example, store 2 bits of info, intensity and phase.
So I shine a laser at a pit, and get back 2 bits of info; it can be reflected at intensity 0 or intensity 1, as well as be returned in the same phase, or opposite phase as the original laser. 4 different signals can be returned, which can be mapped onto a 2 bit value.
Then, with 8 layers, I can get 16 times the throughput of a similar CD, which is still only going to be 97.6 mb/s... Great, but nowhere near 1 gb/s!
Some of what is mentioned in the article makes sense, and a lot of it really is just hype and excitement.
For example, if you get a nine layer disc that flouresces at 9 different frequencies, one laser could then do a read on a byte + some sort of parity at once; feed the combined signal into a fast enough demodulator, and you can effectively increase the speed of the drive by a factor of 8 over the current top of the line; a 40x CD becomes a 320x FCD. That's about 46.8 mb/s, on the assumption that the hardware demodulator can keep up with the data stream. A 5 layer disc of the same type would only be 23.4 mb/s, but that's still plenty =)
This, however, saturates the SCSI bus, excepting for the fastest/widest standards, I think.
However, this isn't all that great, as the author expects. Latency/seek on the disk would be the same, so even if you can stream data at this tremendous rate, except for linear reads, as in music, movies, or copying, it wouldn't be all that useful(any more than standard CDs and DVDs)
It is to note, however, that I can't see how one could make a writeable version of this technology; Would one need an N laser system, one for each layer? Or would we have to wait for semiconductor lasers that could adapt and change it's own active frequency based on current or voltage?
Anyway, all the FCD proposes is to apply towards CDs what has already been done for HDs; by placing disks in parallel, increase the speed of read or write, ala RAID, though in this case because it is optic, you can crowd all the data into one channel(fibre optic) until it needs to be demodulated or something...
There have been some evocative counter-posts about how the emulator hurts Sony from a control standpoint, and this is true. An emulator will be a point of control *not* under Sony's thumb, of it's released by Connectix or something.
The point I'm making though is that as a consumer, I don't care about Sony's control of the market, except if it's hurting me, and only if it actually is a benefit to me. Sure, sucks for Sony, but isn't that what innovation and competition is about? If Sony wants control, using legal tactics and such isn't the best way. Good products, good PR, good technolgy, good sales is the way, no?
Otherwise, isn't it the same argument for why M$ has done nothing wrong? It just wanted control of the market and it's various directions! Consumers have rights too, and corporations making money, no matter how many lobbiests(sp?) or lawyers they have, do not have more fundamental right than the consumer or individual; both are entities under the law, and have some set of rights.
Monopolies are not one of them, except perhaps earned through good business, and even then, if you get *too* good, the DOJ can give you a visit.
Um, developers can already sidestep Sony, if they wish, and make PC/Mac games, with better graphics, already, without the emulator. The emulator doesn't make the sales of a console less likely, because the console itself offers a different set of advantages than a PC; simplicity, compactness, and guarantee of operation(to a point) and this is true for both the consumer and the developer.
The emulator itself affects none of those points, and just increases the options available for the consumer who don't necessarily value the above three values of a console, else they would buy a console, I think.
To address your points more succintly:
<em>Anyway, this is clearly not about short term financial profits, but future control.</em>
Obviously; I don't disagree this is why Sony objects to CVGS.
<em>If no one were to buy playstations anymore, because they can play the games on there computers, the PSX would becomes irrelevant.</em>
Are you suggesting that the CVGS and emulators will be replacing the PSX, making the PSX irrelevant? The PSX2 would replace the PSX as well, making it irrelevant. Even so, this brings up a question; Why would people stop buying PSXs with the advent of the emulator? A PSX is still cheaper, simpler, and easier to use than a PC/Mac + emulator.
<em>Game companies could sidestep the middleman and just make PC/Mac games. With better graphics to boot.</em>
They can already do this; the presence or lack of an emulator does not prevent them for designing for the PC; the console is just a simpler platform(stable and consistent) to design and release for than a PC or Mac. About the only threat I can really acknowledge and think of is that if the PSX got reverse engineered, then people could start writing games to the console platform and emulator *without* licensing from Sony, diminishing the overall quality perhaps, or profits/royalties to Sony, whatever. But this is only a threat from the Open Source people anyway =)
<em>Without the emulator, Sony controls the market absolutely. With it, they do not.</em>
This I grant. As far as their plans and future, control of the market makes it easier for them to forcast, predict, and rake in profit.
But isn't this an argument about the consumer's rights as well? That we should be able to play the game on an alternative platform if it's available? Isn't this the same argument as DeCSS?
On the corporate side, it's about control, and on the consumer side, it's about freedom. Balancing the two is pretty difficult, I guess.
It's scads easier to reverse engineer Connectix's software to create, say, a GPLed Linux/BeOS/whatever version of the PSX than it is to actually reverse engineer a PSX itself...
So when you do you think this will happen, and will Connectix just sit idly by as it happens? And will Sony actually encourage a 'free' version, if it were to pop out, to spite Connectix, especially as their PSX2 rapidly approaches ground zero?
Essentially/especially since after the next reverse engineering session, it will be porting of PSX from platform to platform, much the same way MAME or Ataris or Commodore 64s or Apple IIs have been emulated for years now?
I'm not sure you make good sense here =) You buy a console from Sony; they make their money (let's say the market is 10,000 people; at $50 profit a console, they will make $500k)
Sony has now licensed the schematics and libraries and tools for this console to 10 game manufacturers, at $40k each; just to be stupid, let's say they only get $10,000 out of each licensee as profit; that's another $100k for Sony.
Each licensee makes 10 games; each consumer buys 2 games from 3 licensees during the lifetime of the system, at $50 each; 10,000 consumers then buy 6 games; 60,000 games at $50 each is $3,000k right off the bat; if each game only gives $10 profit to Sony and $10 to the licensee, then Sony has made $600k from hardware sales and such, and $600k from the games, while the licensees have each made $560k.
Now, lets say a company makes a clone/emulator/whatever.
A few cases for good measure: Consumer owns both Sony PSX + Emulator Consumer owns PSX only Consumer owns Emulator only
We already show that Sony makes money if the only device on the market were PSXs. A good $1,200k. If there exists an emulator only, should we assume the same profit level, because it would/should/could be a perfect substitute?
So what happens when we get both PSXs and emulators? If the market doubles in size because there is no overlap, and the nature of the consumer stays roughly the same, statistically, doesn't Sony make, instead of $1,200k, $1,800k? And in the case where there is overlap, Sony of course makes less money than $1,800k; lets say that of the consumer market, 1 out of 10 people who own a PSX compatible system own an emulator; That means only 1,111 people own emulators but not a PSX. If they follow similar gaming habits, and buy 6 games each, that means Sony gets an additional $67k a year from them... Which doesn't hurt Sony at all!
And if there is signficantly more people buying the emulator, say 3 out of 10 people who play PSX games... 4,286 buyers, or 25,714 more games, or $257k more profit for Sony... So the more systems out there, it seems, the more money Sony can make. Why doe this hurt them, except that it may slow down the adoption of the PSX2?
And don't forget, if you took that last statement seriously, that the PSX2 outclasses most notebooks, PCs, and Macs, so adopters of the PSX2 would not be substituting it with PCs or Macs in the first place!
It's cheaper to get a modded PSX to play pirate games than to get the buy a Mac of sufficient power + VGS to play a pirate game; I don't think the reverse engineering effort changed the landscape *except* to broaden the user base, make the pie bigger, so to speak, for the market of PSX games!
Here's the logic: Without VGS we can already pirate PSX games via Hotline or IRC, burn them, and play them on modded PSXs. Reverse engineering has nothing to do with this situation, because VGS doesn't exist.
With VGS, and the ability to reverse engineer, we can now play PSX games on the Mac(and maybe PC). It enables the user to play a PSX game on the Mac/PC. Whether the game itself is pirate or not is another question; but if even 1/10 of the buyers of Bleem or VGS buy PSX games, than that's more sales to Sony than would otherwise occur; how does this hurt Sony?
As for whether reverse engineering promotes piracy, I don't see how this reasonably or logically(two different threads) falls out of the system.
Maybe I'm constrained by my understanding of technology...
If you had a flourescent gas encased between two plastic sheets, and activated it via a combination of RGB lasers and priming lasers, you could conceiveable get infinite resolution displays, assuming the motors and laser pulses could accomodate the speed, and that the data bus could feed the device high enough.
And there is no reason for the lasers not to fire paralle to the surface of display; just use two intersecting lasers to 'activate' the gas.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, if she's interested in chemistry, she's already taken the bait and is entering a scientific(if not technical) field...
So she's actually not that great a counterexample, except in the specific field of computers, for example.
The general meme is that women are discouraged from science and technology; your friend, if she wants to go into chemistry, is not one of these women...
And it's difficult to base our perception of potential on a set of the population that has already determined, through past actions, their future potential. Can you say, boldly, that a large percentage of women 5 years from now won't be talented in that way, because of your personal experience with the people you knew who made their decisions 5 years ago?
-AS
Since I'm an Asian(Chinese) and where I went to school(Caltech) we weren't a minority(in technical and scientific fields)
If you were to count us in, perhaps, the cinema majors of other schools, we would count as a minority. And perhaps even if you were to do a general population count in the US. But not in engineering/science fields =)
-AS
Apple was charging a $1/port as of Jan 991 5/firewire.html
e wfirewirelincensing.html
http://www.macobserver.com/news/99/january/9901
Then it went to a $0.25/system as of May 99
http://www.macobserver.com/news/99/may/990512/n
How much more do you want it dropped, btw?
Does this mean Intel is charging nothing for it's USB implementations? Or that it's hidden in the costs of their chipsets, CPUs, etc?
-AS
That there are not enough people in technical fields. Women, which make up 50% of the population, are therefore an untapped resource. As are minorities, who also don't get into the technical fields(as compared to Caucasian or Asian)
I ask why it is immoral to manipulate people to shift demographic trends? If a person has an infinite number of options open to them; even if it is a finite number of options, for the example, why is it wrong to try to get them to chose a particular option?
And what does this have to do with 'trend'? It's just a job, a career, work, and nothing to do with life, or personality, or behavior!
-AS
Your title just seemed to invite people to attack you =)
How can an individual with only individual experiences determine that what they see is common or uncommon?
Of course it's a pretty common meme/concept that women are discouraged subtly, implicitly, and explicitly from technical fields. I can't say that it is the truth, just a prevailing idea. So I can't discredit your opinion, and I will admit I am being influenced by this meme.
Disclaimers aside, then, I will claim a very practical and pragmatic argument. If women weren't being discouraged in some way, shouldn't they be entering these fields on parity with men? It can be said another way; that we are encouraging men to enter these fields, and not women.
It doesn't mean that it is explicit or by design, that men are encouraged. Maybe there's too much baggage with the word, encouraged. Perhaps if we just said that the system favors males. What can we do then, to increase the focus on women?
Which has nothing at all to do with your point on your friend. There are guys like her too, at HP. It didn't stop them from going into a technical field. So a better question for your friend then is why does going into a technical field interfere with her desire to communiate with her friends?
-AS
Or looking for attention?
But you do have a decent point in your post. Where are the women going to, instead? I have an idea that, in such a hot employment market, women actually may just be opting out of work(is this a possibility, or totally wack?) and college entirely and going into marriage!
It's known that as the economy gets good or bad that students either tend to go to school or go to work. At least, it's a common meme, if not a fact. I would wonder if women followed a similar pattern.
And about recruiting men into those majors, the society we live in would laugh at the guys who go into those fields(not manly or macho or whatever). Just like women are made fun of as being stupid or not capable, when trying to enter some male dominated professions.
-AS
Off topic question; do people leave the subject lines to be filled last, after they finish writing their post?
Anyway, several thoughts do occur on this topic:
By the time you focus/target 'women', it may already be too late. They will have been left behind and ignored for too many years, I suspect. In which case any change you effect now, won't be visible for at least a handful of years.
What can be done? The problem is so complex, I don't know that it can be characterized. We're trying to change the social structure in very many places if we want more women in technology and the sciences; we either grow girls more like men(which I suspect men don't want, otherwise selective pressure would have already done this), we change the social model in which women can contribute(a top down approach? Grassroots? I dunno), or we change the way girls see and interact with technology and science. The problem with the third option is that there is no visible path, just a visible endpoint. More women in the field.
How do we deal with the fact that girls get different treatment? Can family support overcome that? How about the way we raise our girls? Can we modify it so that they remain uniquely female but still fit into the current structure of society, at least until social changes force society to adapt? Or do we create an role for the females that they currently do not occupy, but can fit in very easily with very little change, again until society adapts to allow more opportunities for girls?
Am I being to shortsighted here? Or perhaps my view is to narrow? Are there other options and paths we can look at and pursue?
-AS
?
Because tab-whitespace is different than space-whitespace?
Again, unless tab = 8 spaces and you always uses 8 space indents...
-AS
Um, actually, why are you using tabs alternated with spaces in the first place?
But no, I don't think tabs are treated the same as spaces(unless your editor automagically converts tabs to spaces...)
-AS
Um... what do you want to see, then?
Apple pushed USB to the forefront by not including a floppy and adding the USB port to their iMacs.
Was this only a year ago? Two years? Before then, good luck finding USB peripherals, I don't know that it was such a big thing on PCs. and only *now* are Compaq(iPaq), IBM(EON devices), etc. pushing USB and dropping a bunch of the older legacy devices.
Think the same, but now insert FireWire. A year from now, I expect FireWire to be everywhere for the high speed devices.
And look at what they're doing with IEEE 802.11, aka AirPort, WaveLan, whatever.
You question how Apple is producing products which define personal computing; the answer is that with wireless, our portables are truly portable while being connected to the network. With USB and FireWire, our devices gain the PnP capabilities that is traditionally associated with SCSI, but without such a price or complexity hit since both are serial standards(less complex cabling, IDs, connectors, and chaining).
What else is Apple going to do that will redefine personal computing? Adopting BSD/NeXT in MacOS X, giving the common man the power and reliablitity of Un*x, with the svelte and suave dress of the Mac UI.
I actually can't think of many other companies trying to do similar. Sony, for one, with their Memory Sticks, FireWire, camcorders, etc.
Palm, perhaps, with their PDAs and stuff.
So perhaps Apple isn't as exciting(to you), but they haven't stopped 'innovating'.
-AS
Just by using the term 'dumbed down' you defeat the point of a Newbie's Linux. It shouldn't be dumbed down. Either it has a very smooth and gradual learning curve, which is one thing that Linux, CLI, and Unix in general doesn't deal with, or it has a flawless level of useability.
As an example, Apple's OS and hardware have demonstrated levels of proficiency in both tasks. As much as people criticize the design decisions, a single user interface is ideal for people who are figuring out information flow, computers, tasks, etc. A single mouse button, so people don't have to fear that if they do an incorrect action, something irrecoverable can happen because there is only one action. A single menu bar, so people *always* know where to look for info and stuff, without having to figure out what app has the focus.
Now here's the problem, if you want to be a Linux advocate.
Apple will be releasing MacOS X. It will feature all of the above useability functions. I don't know if it will also feature a gradual learning curve for newbies, but it will definitely have all the power features Linux has touted over Win9x and WinNT. The CLI, the GNU tools, the scripting and networking and robustness, unless Apple screws up majorly. If they do throw in a gradual learning curve, all the Newbies will be flocking to Apple because of their strengths, and Linux's weakness
Consistent, useable, useful UI. I'm not talking about themes or skins. Consistent drag and drop functionality. Patterned interfaces among all applications. Their menu bar. Their single window mode, for new users. The graphical interface for system management. Consistent behaviors among all applications. Transparent windows, for example, to indicate which windows own which dialogs. Animated minimization and maximization so people know where the windows go, that they don't disappear.
Advertising, focus, and attention for the new users. They will have the nifty industrial design, the nifty desktop graphics, the nice effects possible through display PDF.
Control. Because Apple hardware is under Apple control, they can design the software and the OS to just work. If they haven't in the past, it's their bad, but they have the resources to provide excellet support and coverage.
A lot of these things Linux just cannot control. At least until someone does a Linux box, akin to the iMac. Plug in, power up, and use. Until people start focusing on UI, instead of themes and skins. Until we stop thinking of new users as 'dumb', and things for them to be dumbed down. New users are just that, new, and they have their own ramp up and their own distinct needs. We can ignore them, of course, and that would just leave the door open for Apple, or Be, or someone else.
-AS
Meme is also an example of a meme =)
Until the term was coined, idea was one of the words used to characterize the concept of a meme. However, ideas are also used to describe the solutions to problems, far fetched concepts, and other things. In a way, the word is an overloaded operator, and to encapsulate a specific concept into a precise term with a defined context, we use the word meme.
The idea(more overuse of the word) that thoughts can infect and spread virally is associated with memes.
In the same way, in the near future, we may need another term to denote free software vs open source free software vs open source non-free software. Or maybe not.
-AS
!100 means not 100;
If you're in a binary system, say 8 bit, then you actually have 11111011 = !100
=)
-AS
Oh, well, I use UWScsi anyhoo, so I'm not as worried about bandwidth...
But I don't particularly want 1 gb/s; I just don't believe it unless they have other tricks up the sleeve to increase throughput.
-AS
I dunno about the layer selection problem you mentioned.
If each layer flouresces at a different frequency, such that all layers flouresce at once, you get a single beam that is the sum/product/total of every layer. All that needs be done is that the piece of hardware reading the beam demultiplex it into component signals; a decent prism will split it into it's respective signals, to be read(in parallel). You would not select one layer at a time, then, but all n layers at once!
So a 40x CD becomes 320x, read, because you can read 8 bits at once, rather than 1 bit at a time.
Notice this is not nearly as simple using pits, because one can not encode frequency selection in a passive medium; phase, maybe, and polarity, but not frequency.
And I agree that there is no need to reinvent the wheel
-AS
So I got to thinking that one could also encode chirality into the 'pit'.
I dunno if phase can actually be encoded; anyone with a better grounding in optics able to correct me?
Anyway, intensity can be encoded via size of a pit.
Can phase be encoded by the depth of the pit? Changes of a quarter wavelength will change what phase bounces back; it can either constructively interfere or destructively interfere with the original beam... that might work.
Then one can also encode chirality into the pit, as well, so that the light gets reflected as either right or left handed... thus we can actually get 3 bits of info into 1 CD sized pit; That still gets us, with an 8 layer disc, 3 bytes of data at a time, or only about 200mb/s throughput.
I guess FCD pits can be smaller than CD pits, because they actively flouresce? This affects the areal density, but it seems I can't think of any real way to increase the throughput beyond 200 mb/s...
-AS
The article mentions transfer speeds of 1 gb/s, which I don't believe, actually. What is driving this? There is nothing inherent in the technology that makes me thing of how this is possible; by having 8 layers, for example, one can multiply a CD's transfer speed by 8;
So if they can push CD transfers to something like 100 mb/s, I'll believe that this FCD can be pushed to 1 gb/s...
Actually, I can think of some nifty tricks one could try, but then it wouldn't be backwards compatible with CDs...
There's nothing saying that a 'pit' in the FCD needs only store one bit of info; each pit could, for example, store 2 bits of info, intensity and phase.
So I shine a laser at a pit, and get back 2 bits of info; it can be reflected at intensity 0 or intensity 1, as well as be returned in the same phase, or opposite phase as the original laser. 4 different signals can be returned, which can be mapped onto a 2 bit value.
Then, with 8 layers, I can get 16 times the throughput of a similar CD, which is still only going to be 97.6 mb/s... Great, but nowhere near 1 gb/s!
Any other ideas?
-AS
Some of what is mentioned in the article makes sense, and a lot of it really is just hype and excitement.
For example, if you get a nine layer disc that flouresces at 9 different frequencies, one laser could then do a read on a byte + some sort of parity at once; feed the combined signal into a fast enough demodulator, and you can effectively increase the speed of the drive by a factor of 8 over the current top of the line; a 40x CD becomes a 320x FCD. That's about 46.8 mb/s, on the assumption that the hardware demodulator can keep up with the data stream. A 5 layer disc of the same type would only be 23.4 mb/s, but that's still plenty =)
This, however, saturates the SCSI bus, excepting for the fastest/widest standards, I think.
However, this isn't all that great, as the author expects. Latency/seek on the disk would be the same, so even if you can stream data at this tremendous rate, except for linear reads, as in music, movies, or copying, it wouldn't be all that useful(any more than standard CDs and DVDs)
It is to note, however, that I can't see how one could make a writeable version of this technology; Would one need an N laser system, one for each layer? Or would we have to wait for semiconductor lasers that could adapt and change it's own active frequency based on current or voltage?
Anyway, all the FCD proposes is to apply towards CDs what has already been done for HDs; by placing disks in parallel, increase the speed of read or write, ala RAID, though in this case because it is optic, you can crowd all the data into one channel(fibre optic) until it needs to be demodulated or something...
Or am I missing something else?
-AS
There have been some evocative counter-posts about how the emulator hurts Sony from a control standpoint, and this is true. An emulator will be a point of control *not* under Sony's thumb, of it's released by Connectix or something.
The point I'm making though is that as a consumer, I don't care about Sony's control of the market, except if it's hurting me, and only if it actually is a benefit to me. Sure, sucks for Sony, but isn't that what innovation and competition is about? If Sony wants control, using legal tactics and such isn't the best way. Good products, good PR, good technolgy, good sales is the way, no?
Otherwise, isn't it the same argument for why M$ has done nothing wrong? It just wanted control of the market and it's various directions! Consumers have rights too, and corporations making money, no matter how many lobbiests(sp?) or lawyers they have, do not have more fundamental right than the consumer or individual; both are entities under the law, and have some set of rights.
Monopolies are not one of them, except perhaps earned through good business, and even then, if you get *too* good, the DOJ can give you a visit.
2 cents.
-AS
Um, developers can already sidestep Sony, if they wish, and make PC/Mac games, with better graphics, already, without the emulator. The emulator doesn't make the sales of a console less likely, because the console itself offers a different set of advantages than a PC; simplicity, compactness, and guarantee of operation(to a point) and this is true for both the consumer and the developer.
The emulator itself affects none of those points, and just increases the options available for the consumer who don't necessarily value the above three values of a console, else they would buy a console, I think.
To address your points more succintly:
<em>Anyway, this is clearly not about short term financial profits, but future control.</em>
Obviously; I don't disagree this is why Sony objects to CVGS.
<em>If no one were to buy playstations anymore, because they can play the games on there computers, the PSX would becomes irrelevant.</em>
Are you suggesting that the CVGS and emulators will be replacing the PSX, making the PSX irrelevant? The PSX2 would replace the PSX as well, making it irrelevant. Even so, this brings up a question; Why would people stop buying PSXs with the advent of the emulator? A PSX is still cheaper, simpler, and easier to use than a PC/Mac + emulator.
<em>Game companies could sidestep the middleman and just make PC/Mac games. With better graphics to boot.</em>
They can already do this; the presence or lack of an emulator does not prevent them for designing for the PC; the console is just a simpler platform(stable and consistent) to design and release for than a PC or Mac. About the only threat I can really acknowledge and think of is that if the PSX got reverse engineered, then people could start writing games to the console platform and emulator *without* licensing from Sony, diminishing the overall quality perhaps, or profits/royalties to Sony, whatever. But this is only a threat from the Open Source people anyway =)
<em>Without the emulator, Sony controls the market absolutely. With it, they do not.</em>
This I grant. As far as their plans and future, control of the market makes it easier for them to forcast, predict, and rake in profit.
But isn't this an argument about the consumer's rights as well? That we should be able to play the game on an alternative platform if it's available? Isn't this the same argument as DeCSS?
On the corporate side, it's about control, and on the consumer side, it's about freedom. Balancing the two is pretty difficult, I guess.
-AS
It's scads easier to reverse engineer Connectix's software to create, say, a GPLed Linux/BeOS/whatever version of the PSX than it is to actually reverse engineer a PSX itself...
So when you do you think this will happen, and will Connectix just sit idly by as it happens? And will Sony actually encourage a 'free' version, if it were to pop out, to spite Connectix, especially as their PSX2 rapidly approaches ground zero?
Essentially/especially since after the next reverse engineering session, it will be porting of PSX from platform to platform, much the same way MAME or Ataris or Commodore 64s or Apple IIs have been emulated for years now?
Just a random thought =)
-AS
I'm not sure you make good sense here =)
You buy a console from Sony; they make their money (let's say the market is 10,000 people; at $50 profit a console, they will make $500k)
Sony has now licensed the schematics and libraries and tools for this console to 10 game manufacturers, at $40k each; just to be stupid, let's say they only get $10,000 out of each licensee as profit; that's another $100k for Sony.
Each licensee makes 10 games; each consumer buys 2 games from 3 licensees during the lifetime of the system, at $50 each; 10,000 consumers then buy 6 games; 60,000 games at $50 each is $3,000k right off the bat; if each game only gives $10 profit to Sony and $10 to the licensee, then Sony has made $600k from hardware sales and such, and $600k from the games, while the licensees have each made $560k.
Now, lets say a company makes a clone/emulator/whatever.
A few cases for good measure:
Consumer owns both Sony PSX + Emulator
Consumer owns PSX only
Consumer owns Emulator only
We already show that Sony makes money if the only device on the market were PSXs. A good $1,200k. If there exists an emulator only, should we assume the same profit level, because it would/should/could be a perfect substitute?
So what happens when we get both PSXs and emulators? If the market doubles in size because there is no overlap, and the nature of the consumer stays roughly the same, statistically, doesn't Sony make, instead of $1,200k, $1,800k? And in the case where there is overlap, Sony of course makes less money than $1,800k; lets say that of the consumer market, 1 out of 10 people who own a PSX compatible system own an emulator; That means only 1,111 people own emulators but not a PSX. If they follow similar gaming habits, and buy 6 games each, that means Sony gets an additional $67k a year from them... Which doesn't hurt Sony at all!
And if there is signficantly more people buying the emulator, say 3 out of 10 people who play PSX games... 4,286 buyers, or 25,714 more games, or $257k more profit for Sony... So the more systems out there, it seems, the more money Sony can make. Why doe this hurt them, except that it may slow down the adoption of the PSX2?
And don't forget, if you took that last statement seriously, that the PSX2 outclasses most notebooks, PCs, and Macs, so adopters of the PSX2 would not be substituting it with PCs or Macs in the first place!
-AS
It's cheaper to get a modded PSX to play pirate games than to get the buy a Mac of sufficient power + VGS to play a pirate game; I don't think the reverse engineering effort changed the landscape *except* to broaden the user base, make the pie bigger, so to speak, for the market of PSX games!
Here's the logic:
Without VGS we can already pirate PSX games via Hotline or IRC, burn them, and play them on modded PSXs. Reverse engineering has nothing to do with this situation, because VGS doesn't exist.
With VGS, and the ability to reverse engineer, we can now play PSX games on the Mac(and maybe PC). It enables the user to play a PSX game on the Mac/PC. Whether the game itself is pirate or not is another question; but if even 1/10 of the buyers of Bleem or VGS buy PSX games, than that's more sales to Sony than would otherwise occur; how does this hurt Sony?
As for whether reverse engineering promotes piracy, I don't see how this reasonably or logically(two different threads) falls out of the system.
-AS
Can you answer another question, hypothetically?
Can windows support WMF images instead of BMPs and ICOs in the dlls that generate all the desktop/widget icons?
-AS
Maybe I'm constrained by my understanding of technology...
If you had a flourescent gas encased between two plastic sheets, and activated it via a combination of RGB lasers and priming lasers, you could conceiveable get infinite resolution displays, assuming the motors and laser pulses could accomodate the speed, and that the data bus could feed the device high enough.
And there is no reason for the lasers not to fire paralle to the surface of display; just use two intersecting lasers to 'activate' the gas.
Just a random thought
-AS