We in HPLabs do still try and do leading edge research. Its just really hard to get your stuff into products where there's more and more emphasis on buying prepackaged stuff from VC-funded startups.
SOunds like you're saying that HP is in the printer ink business and runs HP Labs (is that what used to be DECWRL?) for the PR, no?
Or my second (after "my god, how much trailer are they going to run?")... this looks cool but I'd be MUCH more interested in a view that tracked the cars and showed them behaving like a fluid...
When you have the exact hardware and Native Intel applications and they consistently run faster under Windows than OSX, Apple has a problem.
The extra layers of code between the application and the hardware do extract their toll, yes. Just as they did on Windows NT before Microsoft gave up on the strong separation of components in the system and started running GDI (Microsoft's core graphics code) inside the kernel in NT 4.0.
But the flipside of this is that the stability of NT took a big dive with NT4, and it really hasn't recovered.
I've already posted about my experience with switching my daughter to Mac, and how the same kind of abuse that led to me reinstalling Windows for her multiple times a year didn't produce any obvious problems on the Mac... and where she did do things like removing random "big files" she "wasn't using" they really were files she wasn't using, and I was able to restore them over the network without difficulty.
And security and stability go hand-in-hand. Microsoft has always put performance above security and stability, and the result is that even Apple's less-than-stellar approach to security has produced a system that's far less susceptible to attacks at all levels. Half the security alerts about OS X are problems in internal firewalls that Microsoft doesn't even bother to implement in any usable way, and could only be exploited if the system was already compromised.
No, the minor performance cost of OS X is well worth it to the average user. The big exception is gamers, and of course they won't be considering a Mac in the first place.
Apple are and always have been a hardware company,
Apple, like Cisco, are a software company that makes their money off hardware sales. It's the software that sells the hardware.
But this is a minor issue here: for this discussion there's not much difference, and while there is some it doesn't really change the point. People aren't going to pay the Mac Tax to get a box running Windows, so they have to make sure running Windows is clearly secondary... not the normal and expected way to use the system. Boot Camp does that in a way that a more transparent virtualization solution wouldn't.
But when we were looking more into it, she asked why we were thiking about paying much more for a Mac when she is onlyy ever going to run Windows on it.
My answer: "What makes you think you're only ever going to run Windows on it?"
What Apple needs to work on is the ability to run Windows apps *inside OSX* without rebooting.
Parallels Desktop is $80 and lets you do exactly that. But that doesn't really change the answer.
When I switched my daughter to a Mac after reinstaling Windows for her for the third time that year, she begged me to let her keep her Windows PC... so I bought and installed a KVM, so she could switch easily between the two.
A month later she hadn't even booted Windows. And she didn't have to take down OS X to do it. The fear of switching to Mac OS is real, but the experience itself is not as traumatic as people seem to think.
Boot Camp is a way to reassure people that they have a way back if they can't deal with Apple's operating system, and to give business users the ability to say "yes, I'll be able to run Windows on it" to the IT Nazis. That's all.
"Server not found" or some timeout message doesn't tell me a goddamned thing.
Then switch to a browser that tells you something useful, or install a plugin or local proxy that does the same thing. Then YOU get to choose whether you'll use Earthlink's search page or Microsoft's or Yahoo's or Google's. You may be using Amazon's A9 service as your default search engine, which means this service could actually be costing you a discount on Amazon.
This is different from what VeriSign did because VeriSign had a monopoly in the market
This is less serious but not different in any fundamental way. Both break working applications and reduce your ability to choose how you want your errors handled.
Well, for one thing, if you're using a modern web browser your web browser is already doing this for you, and you may even be able to pick and choose which search engine to use.
For another, DNS results are cached by browsers and operating systems, so if someone's DNS servers are temporarily down then anyone who gets sent to earthlink-help.net will continue to see the site as "down" for longer than necessary.
For another, many applications need to know if a domain is not found. If they start getting valid results for unknown domains they'll break.
The system is specifically configured to handle only NXDOMAIN HTTP traffic...
There is no way for the DNS server to know that whether request that follows the domain lookup will be an HTTP request, so this is not actually technically possible.
The same technologies used to build a space elevator from earth would be usable for building other things: space elevators for other planets, for one, since every body in the system that could use a space elevator has a shallower gravity well than Earth; inter-orbital elevators; rotating tether slingshots;...
Also, whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls. -- makali
I fully support your proposed audio-cock technology. -- jwz
It's bad enough that iTunes isn't using Apple's standard toolkits, let alone Cocoa, so it'll run on Windows... make it skinnable and I'd be forced to fetch the diesel oil and shredded fiberglass.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'the original patent'
A patent may be amended. For example, there's a gentleman by the name of Warman who had a patent on attaching a protective screen to a curved CRT monitor, using adhesive tabs. Some time later... allegedly after seeing people using screen protectors, he was awarded an amendment to the patent that covered screen protectors on PDAs that basically replaced the original patent. Google for "warman screen protector patent" and read your fill.
That's why I'm asking, because my memory of this when it first came up was that Contois' patent did not actually say anything about playing music from the interface... it covered selecting a playlist to download to an electronic instrument. Was the patent you were quoting from his original patent or an amended version?
Dominates is such a specific and unambiguous term, too!:)
How does Pluto not "dominate" its orbit? Neptune isn't the reason why, because those orbits don't actually intersect. The "Pluto grazer" objects may be orbiting in sync with Pluto, or not, there's not a whole lot of observations of any of them, and I don't think we know any of their masses other than Charon's.
I read your comment, and it does quote the patent (that's informative) but doesn't go further than that. Since you have experience in patents, perhaps you can comment on it in a bit more detail? Also, is that the original patent or an amended one? The original patent, as I recall, only involved downloading the file to a music player... not playing it directly.
To me, that patent seems to be based on applying IBM's old "Query By Example" to a relational database containing track information. That's prior art dating back to the '70s.
This is as frivolous a patent as the one on applying the well-known principle of the crank to steam engines that led to James Watt playing around with his "sun and planet" gear scheme.
should past mistakes in classifications remain just because of their age?
This is a picayune problem compared to the ones in zoological taxonomy.
Well, you know, if you applied the same standards for defining a species across the board... on the one hand half the species listed would become variants, and we'd have to consider making genus "Pan" part of genus "Homo". On the other hand, if we want to maintain the majority of the species listed as separate species then we'd have to deal with whether different races of man should be considered subspecies. And what a can of worms THAT would open up. All the racists in the world would come squirming out from under their rocks with their pet theories... but the fact is there's more difference between celts and saxons than between Urocyon Cinereoargenteus and Urocyon Littoralis.
In addition... it's not like astronomers actually need a definition of "planet". It's not a distinction that actually matters scientifically... the textbooks you're so dismissive of are probably the biggest reason there's a debate at all.
In fact, Earth and some of the giant planets have not cleared their paths--asteroids cross the planetary orbits frequently and in some cases orbit in lockstep with the planets.
What did I tell you? I asked "Why's an Earth-grazer OK, and a Pluto-grazer isn't?" and answer came there none, because there is none.
Let Pluto be a planet, let Ceres and the Moon be planets, let a thousand planets bloom...
The Mac has the video camera integrated, with no drivers to install.
I'd rather save the money and complexity and buy my own video camera... one that isn't pointing at me all the time, but is rather pointing at whatever I want it to... like, for example, the view outside my window.
Video chat? As bad an idea as "videophones". You'll note, but the way, that cameras on cellphones are aimed AWAY from the user, towards whatever they are filming.
I wonder if anyone makes a "periscope" for the Macbooks to let people actually USE those cameras?
Each brick can communicate with three others? Well, those three don't need to communicate with the same three, do they? You should be able to create a cube topology by forwarding messages to set up an 8-way system, or even set up a hexagonal mesh or a binary tree for an n-way topology. For example, you could have a forebrain-hindbrain "backbone" with two intelligent "limb" processors off each "brain"... or even build a version of Bob Forward's "Christmas Bush".
it doesn't virtualze... it does not run on IBM/HP/DELL blades
Those should only be major issues for operating systems that don't have strong internal trust boundaries. The majority of virtual server and blade installations I've seen have been on Windows, rather than UNIX or Linux, or in hosting centers... not in general IT. When the only way to run two copies of IIS (or any other service built using Microsoft's model on Windows) on a server, bound to separate addresses and/or operating under separate trust domains, is to run two copies of Windows in virtual hosts or in Blade servers... of course that's going to be a big deal.
UNIX doesn't need that, and OS X is UNIX. There's a whole spectrum of tools from simply running two site trees to running two instances chrooted or in jails (or the equivalent) that make almost every deployment of virtualization or blade servers look like the stopgap it is. If it wasn't for Microsoft abandoning their real server class OS in the '80s and trying to turn a relentlessly single-instance (single-user, single-domain, single-service, single-everything) desktop operating system into something they can use for the timesharing and server applications they used to pooh-pooh.
So they look at what people are doing outside Microsoft to deal with their limitations, coopt and promote them, and eventually (as they did with Citrix, to solve the single-user problem) buy them. This is just more of the same...
Getting back to OS X, the main reason I can see for wanting to virtualise it are to make up for the complex library environment that makes chroot hard, and because they didn't import jails from FreeBSD when they had the chance.
I suppose the key phrase from my quote would be "the musice I want"
You didn't say "all the music you want", and based on your choices (and your missing the Coldplay tracks) you didn't look very hard for music you wanted.
And, look... eMusic carries music that the artists themselves make available DRM-free. That's obviously going to be a lot smaller selection than any DRMed site, but if you've got a beef with that, talk to the artists. Nobody can possibly create a legal site that carries DRM-free music without their say-so, so this is as good as it gets.
Simon and Garfunkel- Only covers by violin players I've never heard of.
I don't know how you'd get in touch with Paul Simon, but if you care whether Simon and Garfunkel is available without encryption, I'd start there. That's the only way you're ever going to get the music you want DRM-free, if that's "the music you want".
Coldplay- Nothing
Coldplay - Brothers and Sisters
1. Brothers and Sisters 4:05 2. Easy to Please 3:02 3. Only Superstition 3:48
Help - A day in the Life (compilation)
22. How You See The World #2 (War Child) 4:04
Artist(s): Coldplay
Winton Marsalis- Nothing
There's no Winton Marsalis, but there's Lee Rittenour and John Coltrane and Django Reinhardt and Dizzy Gillespie. Surely at least one of them has created music you like. I guarantee you Winton Marsalis would agree.:)
So if that's an option, why would you buy from ITMS in the first place if you're going to go through pains to de-DRM it?
Because people don't want to buy an album at a time, and they've been burned by DRM in the past, and the "with some amount of difficulty" is almost sure to be a short-term problem anyway.
Me, I'll keep using "Mix, Rip, Burn" as well, but I think you're being wilfully blind here.
Slashdot Mirror
We in HPLabs do still try and do leading edge research. Its just really hard to get your stuff into products where there's more and more emphasis on buying prepackaged stuff from VC-funded startups.
SOunds like you're saying that HP is in the printer ink business and runs HP Labs (is that what used to be DECWRL?) for the PR, no?
Or my second (after "my god, how much trailer are they going to run?")... this looks cool but I'd be MUCH more interested in a view that tracked the cars and showed them behaving like a fluid...
How did they do it, OGLE?
When you have the exact hardware and Native Intel applications and they consistently run faster under Windows than OSX, Apple has a problem.
The extra layers of code between the application and the hardware do extract their toll, yes. Just as they did on Windows NT before Microsoft gave up on the strong separation of components in the system and started running GDI (Microsoft's core graphics code) inside the kernel in NT 4.0.
But the flipside of this is that the stability of NT took a big dive with NT4, and it really hasn't recovered.
I've already posted about my experience with switching my daughter to Mac, and how the same kind of abuse that led to me reinstalling Windows for her multiple times a year didn't produce any obvious problems on the Mac... and where she did do things like removing random "big files" she "wasn't using" they really were files she wasn't using, and I was able to restore them over the network without difficulty.
And security and stability go hand-in-hand. Microsoft has always put performance above security and stability, and the result is that even Apple's less-than-stellar approach to security has produced a system that's far less susceptible to attacks at all levels. Half the security alerts about OS X are problems in internal firewalls that Microsoft doesn't even bother to implement in any usable way, and could only be exploited if the system was already compromised.
No, the minor performance cost of OS X is well worth it to the average user. The big exception is gamers, and of course they won't be considering a Mac in the first place.
Apple are and always have been a hardware company,
Apple, like Cisco, are a software company that makes their money off hardware sales. It's the software that sells the hardware.
But this is a minor issue here: for this discussion there's not much difference, and while there is some it doesn't really change the point. People aren't going to pay the Mac Tax to get a box running Windows, so they have to make sure running Windows is clearly secondary... not the normal and expected way to use the system. Boot Camp does that in a way that a more transparent virtualization solution wouldn't.
But when we were looking more into it, she asked why we were thiking about paying much more for a Mac when she is onlyy ever going to run Windows on it.
My answer: "What makes you think you're only ever going to run Windows on it?"
What Apple needs to work on is the ability to run Windows apps *inside OSX* without rebooting.
Parallels Desktop is $80 and lets you do exactly that. But that doesn't really change the answer.
When I switched my daughter to a Mac after reinstaling Windows for her for the third time that year, she begged me to let her keep her Windows PC... so I bought and installed a KVM, so she could switch easily between the two.
A month later she hadn't even booted Windows. And she didn't have to take down OS X to do it. The fear of switching to Mac OS is real, but the experience itself is not as traumatic as people seem to think.
Boot Camp is a way to reassure people that they have a way back if they can't deal with Apple's operating system, and to give business users the ability to say "yes, I'll be able to run Windows on it" to the IT Nazis. That's all.
When it started to cost more for the electricity to power a server for a year than it cost for the server.
"Server not found" or some timeout message doesn't tell me a goddamned thing.
Then switch to a browser that tells you something useful, or install a plugin or local proxy that does the same thing. Then YOU get to choose whether you'll use Earthlink's search page or Microsoft's or Yahoo's or Google's. You may be using Amazon's A9 service as your default search engine, which means this service could actually be costing you a discount on Amazon.
This is different from what VeriSign did because VeriSign had a monopoly in the market
This is less serious but not different in any fundamental way. Both break working applications and reduce your ability to choose how you want your errors handled.
Well, for one thing, if you're using a modern web browser your web browser is already doing this for you, and you may even be able to pick and choose which search engine to use.
For another, DNS results are cached by browsers and operating systems, so if someone's DNS servers are temporarily down then anyone who gets sent to earthlink-help.net will continue to see the site as "down" for longer than necessary.
For another, many applications need to know if a domain is not found. If they start getting valid results for unknown domains they'll break.
The system is specifically configured to handle only NXDOMAIN HTTP traffic...
There is no way for the DNS server to know that whether request that follows the domain lookup will be an HTTP request, so this is not actually technically possible.
The same technologies used to build a space elevator from earth would be usable for building other things: space elevators for other planets, for one, since every body in the system that could use a space elevator has a shallower gravity well than Earth; inter-orbital elevators; rotating tether slingshots; ...
Also, whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls. -- makali
I fully support your proposed audio-cock technology. -- jwz
It's bad enough that iTunes isn't using Apple's standard toolkits, let alone Cocoa, so it'll run on Windows... make it skinnable and I'd be forced to fetch the diesel oil and shredded fiberglass.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'the original patent'
A patent may be amended. For example, there's a gentleman by the name of Warman who had a patent on attaching a protective screen to a curved CRT monitor, using adhesive tabs. Some time later... allegedly after seeing people using screen protectors, he was awarded an amendment to the patent that covered screen protectors on PDAs that basically replaced the original patent. Google for "warman screen protector patent" and read your fill.
That's why I'm asking, because my memory of this when it first came up was that Contois' patent did not actually say anything about playing music from the interface... it covered selecting a playlist to download to an electronic instrument. Was the patent you were quoting from his original patent or an amended version?
Port 4 doubles as a 921.6 Kbit/s RS485 link, multidrop, see http://www-p-net.org/
... yesno?
ITYM http://www.p-net.org/
Dominates is such a specific and unambiguous term, too! :)
How does Pluto not "dominate" its orbit? Neptune isn't the reason why, because those orbits don't actually intersect. The "Pluto grazer" objects may be orbiting in sync with Pluto, or not, there's not a whole lot of observations of any of them, and I don't think we know any of their masses other than Charon's.
I read your comment, and it does quote the patent (that's informative) but doesn't go further than that. Since you have experience in patents, perhaps you can comment on it in a bit more detail? Also, is that the original patent or an amended one? The original patent, as I recall, only involved downloading the file to a music player... not playing it directly.
To me, that patent seems to be based on applying IBM's old "Query By Example" to a relational database containing track information. That's prior art dating back to the '70s.
This is as frivolous a patent as the one on applying the well-known principle of the crank to steam engines that led to James Watt playing around with his "sun and planet" gear scheme.
should past mistakes in classifications remain just because of their age?
This is a picayune problem compared to the ones in zoological taxonomy.
Well, you know, if you applied the same standards for defining a species across the board... on the one hand half the species listed would become variants, and we'd have to consider making genus "Pan" part of genus "Homo". On the other hand, if we want to maintain the majority of the species listed as separate species then we'd have to deal with whether different races of man should be considered subspecies. And what a can of worms THAT would open up. All the racists in the world would come squirming out from under their rocks with their pet theories... but the fact is there's more difference between celts and saxons than between Urocyon Cinereoargenteus and Urocyon Littoralis.
In addition... it's not like astronomers actually need a definition of "planet". It's not a distinction that actually matters scientifically... the textbooks you're so dismissive of are probably the biggest reason there's a debate at all.
From The Fine Article:
In fact, Earth and some of the giant planets have not cleared their paths--asteroids cross the planetary orbits frequently and in some cases orbit in lockstep with the planets.
What did I tell you? I asked "Why's an Earth-grazer OK, and a Pluto-grazer isn't?" and answer came there none, because there is none.
Let Pluto be a planet, let Ceres and the Moon be planets, let a thousand planets bloom...
The Mac has the video camera integrated, with no drivers to install.
I'd rather save the money and complexity and buy my own video camera... one that isn't pointing at me all the time, but is rather pointing at whatever I want it to... like, for example, the view outside my window.
Video chat? As bad an idea as "videophones". You'll note, but the way, that cameras on cellphones are aimed AWAY from the user, towards whatever they are filming.
I wonder if anyone makes a "periscope" for the Macbooks to let people actually USE those cameras?
Bluetooth uses a (politically incorrect) master/slave topology.
So it's just Wireless USB? Bah, humbug. Haven't the beggers figgured out that peer networking is so much more useful?
(PS: to the anonymous AC - my major, a quarter of a century ago, was EE... not CS)
Each brick can communicate with three others? Well, those three don't need to communicate with the same three, do they? You should be able to create a cube topology by forwarding messages to set up an 8-way system, or even set up a hexagonal mesh or a binary tree for an n-way topology. For example, you could have a forebrain-hindbrain "backbone" with two intelligent "limb" processors off each "brain"... or even build a version of Bob Forward's "Christmas Bush".
it doesn't virtualze ... it does not run on IBM/HP/DELL blades
Those should only be major issues for operating systems that don't have strong internal trust boundaries. The majority of virtual server and blade installations I've seen have been on Windows, rather than UNIX or Linux, or in hosting centers... not in general IT. When the only way to run two copies of IIS (or any other service built using Microsoft's model on Windows) on a server, bound to separate addresses and/or operating under separate trust domains, is to run two copies of Windows in virtual hosts or in Blade servers... of course that's going to be a big deal.
UNIX doesn't need that, and OS X is UNIX. There's a whole spectrum of tools from simply running two site trees to running two instances chrooted or in jails (or the equivalent) that make almost every deployment of virtualization or blade servers look like the stopgap it is. If it wasn't for Microsoft abandoning their real server class OS in the '80s and trying to turn a relentlessly single-instance (single-user, single-domain, single-service, single-everything) desktop operating system into something they can use for the timesharing and server applications they used to pooh-pooh.
So they look at what people are doing outside Microsoft to deal with their limitations, coopt and promote them, and eventually (as they did with Citrix, to solve the single-user problem) buy them. This is just more of the same...
Getting back to OS X, the main reason I can see for wanting to virtualise it are to make up for the complex library environment that makes chroot hard, and because they didn't import jails from FreeBSD when they had the chance.
Of course if record companies are getting paid, but artists still getting screwed, it's "OK" to use iTunes too?
:)
There's always eMusic.
You didn't say "all the music you want", and based on your choices (and your missing the Coldplay tracks) you didn't look very hard for music you wanted.
And, look... eMusic carries music that the artists themselves make available DRM-free. That's obviously going to be a lot smaller selection than any DRMed site, but if you've got a beef with that, talk to the artists. Nobody can possibly create a legal site that carries DRM-free music without their say-so, so this is as good as it gets.
Simon and Garfunkel- Only covers by violin players I've never heard of.
I don't know how you'd get in touch with Paul Simon, but if you care whether Simon and Garfunkel is available without encryption, I'd start there. That's the only way you're ever going to get the music you want DRM-free, if that's "the music you want".
Coldplay- Nothing Winton Marsalis- Nothing
There's no Winton Marsalis, but there's Lee Rittenour and John Coltrane and Django Reinhardt and Dizzy Gillespie. Surely at least one of them has created music you like. I guarantee you Winton Marsalis would agree.
The best solution would be a convenient service through which I could buy the music I want unencumbered by DRM. I don't know of one.
That reminds me, I just got a refresh on eMusic, time to download some legal MP3s for 25c each.
What were you saying?
It's really awesome.
Also illegal unless you're in Russia, and if you think iTMS is ripping off the artists... oy veh.
So if that's an option, why would you buy from ITMS in the first place if you're going to go through pains to de-DRM it?
Because people don't want to buy an album at a time, and they've been burned by DRM in the past, and the "with some amount of difficulty" is almost sure to be a short-term problem anyway.
Me, I'll keep using "Mix, Rip, Burn" as well, but I think you're being wilfully blind here.