I can't post the ASCII graphics because slashdot says "Please use fewer 'junk' characters", but you can search for "Don Woods Commemerative stamp" in the Zork source code here, near the end of the file. Also check out the One Hundred Royal Zorkmids and the portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead!
One Lousy Point
GUE Postage
f.m.l.c.
Donald Woods, Editor
Spelunker Today
100 GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE 100
B30332744D
IN FROBS WE TRUST
DIMWIT FLATHEAD
Series 719GUE
LD Flathead
Treasurer
One Hundred Royal Zorkmids
I had the honor of working with Don Woods on the NeWS window system at Sun Microsystems, back in 1990. He's a great guy, and a kick-ass PostScript programmer!
Zork was the reason I got on the ARPANET, back around 1980 or so. I was using Bruce's Northstar BBS that had an adventure game that Bruce had written in Basic, and he told me how to play Zork: first, dial up the NBS TIP, connect to MIT-AI (the command was "@L 134", because the ARPANET had 8 bit host numbers, and AI was 134), and apply for an account to learn Lisp. Once that was granted, I connected to MIT-DM ("@L 70"), and logged in as URANUS, password RINGS, used:CHUNAME to change my user name, and waited until one of the two people playing Zork quit, to take their slot. Later somebody told me the magic words to use to get an account on DM, so I applied for my own account on DM, claiming that I wanted to "Learn MDL for calculus and algebraic applications". The source code to Zork was well hidden. DM ran a weird version of ITS that had some kind of file security or cloaking, it was rumored. I was always looking for the Zork sources, but never found it on DM.
Years later I googled for a unique phrase that was only in the original DM version of Zork, and this URL popped up: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/
The original MDL source to Zork is really beautiful code that's almost as fun to read as it was to play. I had discovered a bug in the InfoCom version of Zork, which turned out to be in the original sources. When you're fighting the troll who's wielding an Axe, you can give anything to the troll and he will eat it. So I tried "give axe to troll" and he ate his axe, then cowered in the corner! Better yet you can go "give troll to troll" and he will eat himself and disappear, unfortunately not clearing the troll flag that is required to leave the room, so if you try to leave it prints a message saying the troll fends you off with a menacing gesture, and stops you from leaving. Sure enough, in the original sources, there is a troll flag!
In Washington's more 'discreet' gay bars Karl Rove is well-known as a frequent visitor. Witty gays have given him the nickname 'Miss Piggy, after the character on 'The Muppets'. Whether this refers to his appearance ['the doughboy'] or his sexual preferences is open to speculation.
KARL ROVE & THE GAY REPUBLICAN MAFIA
The Gay Republican Mafia is evidently in control of the Party, even as they spin hard to avoid the obvious questions. How did so many closeted "conservative" gay men wind up in the upper echelons of the GOP? Should the GOP be called the Gay Old Party now?
With gay RNC chairman Ken Mehlman and the latest outing of fake reporter Jeff Gannon, a GOPUSA/ Talon News shill, the issue of Karl Rove has come out as well, so to speak.
"The thing I never understood about Karl Rove," writes Al Martin, author of The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider, "is that he's not married, and I used to know this guy in the mid-1980s.
He doesn't look all that much different now than he did 20 years ago. But here's a guy that looks like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and the Pillsbury Doughboy. I never saw him with a woman. He was never friendly with any women and never seemed to have any girlfriends or go out on a date or anything.
Martin continues his recollections -- "Karl would always hang around at the Rooftop Bar at the Mayflower, which is directly across the street from the White House where all the DOJ pretty boys, as they used to call them, would go after work for a drink.
And that's always where Karl was...It's odd that this guy has never married. He's a bachelor. Usually in Bushonian circles, particularly when you're close to the religious right, which Karl is and raises money from them, it's almost obligatory that you be married and have kids.
In his column called "The Fairy Godmother Rules: Karl Rove and the Gay Republican Mafia," political analyst Al Martin examines the confluence of high ranking gay Republicans and their control of the Republican Party, especially when the Religious Right must be aware of this irony, as they continue to support the Bush-Cheney Regime.
"Fake journalist Jeff Gannon was outed last week," Martin writes. "'Jeff Gannon' is not his real name, yet he was able to get inside the White house press pool. How's that for 'security'? Being a fake Bushonian journalist shill means never having to say you're sorry.
"And so we have another story of another gay Republican so-called journalist, just like Armstrong Williams. Gannon, who real name is J.D. Guckert, finally admitted that Gannon wasn't his real name and that Talon News Service was nothing more than a shill for another Bush front called GOPUSA."
What's important about all this is that it was nothing more than a shill organization for GeorgeBush.com, which is financed from a Texas-based Republican Christian group associated with Karl Rove.
We are finally learning how extensive this is now. He said that there are hundreds of bogus news services and bogus newsletters that have been organized around GeorgeBush.com.
In fact, he also noted how well coordinated Karl Rove (now the new Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove) has gotten it so there is now an entire industry to subvert news and to spin it.
The story gets even more intriguing when it becomes clear that "the White House credentialized fake news reporter Jeff Gannon from fake news agency Talon News and this was cited by the Washington Post as having the only access to the internal CIA memo that names Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert agent. Gannon referred to the memo, to which no other news outlet had access, according to the Post."
Supposedly Gannon has also been subpoenaed by the Federal Grand Jury looking into the Plame outing, though Gannon himself denies it.
Yes or No: Can you use ANY MP3 file you want as a ringtone on your iPhone, or not?
If the answer is no, that you have to buy special ring tones from iTunes, then you're screwed. THAT is my point. The fact that you can't get iPhone ring tones from Apple or AT&T yet only reinforces my point. If you can't see that, then you're the one who's totally brainwashed.
My PocketPC phone can play ANY audio file as a ring tone, and you iPhone can't. Why can't your iPhone do something as simple as that, which any PocketPC phone can do? Afraid it will take down the phone network??? (You don't actually believe Job's load of bullshit excuse do you?) No, it's because the PocketPC platform is fundamentally better than the iPhone because it's OPEN, and it doesn't restrict you from doing anything that would cut into AT&T's or Apple's business model.
Does your iPhone have built-in GPS like my iPAQ phone? If not, then you have to carry around an external Bluetooth GPS device to know where you are. Now that you know where you are, does your iPhone run navigation software like TomTom to tell you where to go? No, because it's impossible for TomTom or any other software developer to port their applications to the iPhone. And even if some super-hacker managed to write some AJAX GPS navigation software in JavaScript and DHTML that ran in the web browser, it still could not communicate with the Bluetooth GPS device, because the code running the browser is sandboxed with no access to any of the phone's features or devices. You're screwed all ways around.
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and AT&T?
A: AT&T!
Oh, come on now. Don't tell me that not only did you believe that big load of crap, but now you're hoping that people breaking into the iPhone and developing applications against Apple's will is going to convince Apple to change their mind???
Apple lied to you when they claimed they didn't want third parties to develop applications out of fears of taking down the network. You can already develop applications on PocketPC's, Blackberries, Java phones, Symbian phones, and many other devices, and the network has not gone down. Apple's claim that iPhones will bring down the network if they let people program them is a bald faced lie.
If you think Apple is going to change their policy because it turns out their lie was exposed by people developing third party apps, and the network not going down, you're delusional. Apple lied to you for their own reasons (to manipulate you), not for the reasons they're telling you (because they're nice and looking out for you). The reasons Apple lied about that should be obvious, and have been gone over in great detail in other postings, so I won't review them here. But it's extremely foolish to think Apple would forget that they were purposefully lying to you in order to manipulate you, and suddenly change their mind about third party developers out of the kindness of their hearts, after third party developers showed them the true light.
Oh come on, that's bullshit and you know it. The iPhone is absolutely targeted at and designed for the needs (or whims) of carriers, specifically AT&T, at the (extreme) expense of the user.
Are you claiming that end users do not want the ability to use free MP3 or $0.99 iTunes songs as ring tones, and would rather buy and use $6.99 ring tones from the carrier instead? Or will you admit that maybe the phone is locked up specifically to make that impossible, because of the carrier's desire to make money, not because of the needs of the user? Or are you so brainwashed by Steve Job's reality distortion field that you can't see that fact?
Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song. Download or listen to Mitch Bradley singing the Open Firmware Song (278k).
So why can't I halt the iPhone into the OpenFirmware boot ROMs and hack around with the device registers in Forth? Maybe there's a way to hack OpenFirmware to use a $0.99 iTunes song instead of a $6.99 ring tone.
This is a great example of the unbridled and unrealistic enthusiasm of Mac fan-boys, projecting their wildest fantasies and assumptions onto the sparse reality distorted by Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field.
Of course he wants you to think he has a TTS engine already installed on the iPhone, but he never actually claimed that himself, so technically he's not a liar. But in reality, there is no such TTS engine on the iPhone. But the Turing Completeness Argument demands that you point out that it would be POSSIBLE for that to happen. But so what? It would also be possible that you could get a free Bluetooth enabled talking pony with every iPhone, so you would not need a speech synthesizer.
Naturally Jobs wants you to think you can write "Web 2.0" JavaScript AJAX applications that take advantage of the multi touch input screen, but actually there is no way you can do that from JavaScript. He never claimed it was possible, but many people jumped to that conclusion, without checking the facts. I actually bothered to ask an Apple employee who was working on the iPhone, and he admitted that no, you can't take advantage of the multi touch input device from JavaScript/AJAX/DHTML in the web browser.
I use Cepstral's speech synthesizer on the Pocket PC, so my iPAQ phone can talk, and I'm quite happy with it. I licensed the Cepstral Swift SDK, which came with a bunch of voices, and binaries to run them on Linux, PocketPC and Mac. It works quite well and the voices are great (although I had some problem understanding the barking dog voice -- maybe it's a different dialect that I'm used to).
But since the iPod is a closed platform, what are the chances that Cepstral will port (and support) Swift and their library of voices on the iPhone? Sure it might be possible for somebody to port the open source Flite (the light weight version of Festival) or even Festival itself to the iPhone. But what about the voices, which are MUCH harder to create than simply porting a bunch of portable software, and proprietary.
A speech synthesizer without voices in the languages you need is not much use. Sure you can theoretically develop your own voices with the open source festvox tools, but that's a huge amount of difficult tedious production work (Cepstral charges on the order of $10,000 for the labor of creating a new English voice) that requires expert voice talent, data wranglers and programmers. So there are very few good open source voices available, and the good proprietary ones are well worth paying for, if you're developing a product that requires speech (especially speech in multiple languages).
There's really no point in trying to develop a product on the iPhone if it's not really open and officially supported by Apple, and SDKs like Cepstral's Swift API are not available for it. There are many of things my iPAQ can do (like GPS, run TomTom Navigator, speak with Cepstral voices, run Flash, Java, Lua, Python, JavaScript, and C++ code, etc.), that the iPhone is incapable of doing, because it's a closed system.
The TSA Took My Lighter Away!
(with apologies to The Ramones)
She went away for the holidays
Said she's going to Amsterdam
But she never got there
She never got there
She never got there, they say
[Chorus: x2]
The TSA took my lighter away
They took her away
Away from me
Now I don't know
Where my lighter can be
They took her from me
They took her from me
I don't know
Where my lighter can be
They took her from me
They took her from me
Ring me, ring me, ring me
Up the President
And find out
Where my luggage went
Ring me, ring me, ring me
Up the FBI
And find out if
My lighter's alive
Yeah, yeah, yeah
The iSmell so deserved to die the horrible death that it did.
Like the ink jet printer profit model, they planned on selling the smell imaging device for cheap, and then totally gouging you on the scent cartridges.
The iSmell or iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer was a computer peripheral device developed by DigiScents. The prototype connects to a personal computer via USB or serial port, and is designed to emit a smell when a user visits a certain web site or opens an email. The device contains a cartridge with 128 "primary odors," which can be mixed to replicate natural and manmade odors. DigiScents has indexed thousands of common odors, which can then be coded, digitized, and embedded into web pages or email.
3.8.2 Computer-controlled systems
3.8.1.1 Digiscents
Digiscents deserve much of the credit for bringing ideas about computer-controlled scent systems to the foreground, for which at least some of the credit goes to an enthusiastic article in Wired Magazine (Platt 1999). The reporter was presented and evidently impressed with a sequence of smell enhanced movie clips ('Scentracks TM'), ranging from the Wizard of Oz and a cedar forest or the smell of wood fire as the Wicked Witch cooks up a potion, to a banana-scented Donkey Kong and incensed Orient - a sequence designed and presented by thesis reader Marc Canter, who was working with Digiscents at the time.
The article gives extensive background into Digiscents' founders' backgrounds, and their business plan: to license their 'ScentRegistry TM', an index of smells, rather than to build hardware devices (such as their prototype iSmell TM) themselves. However, the article raises some questions.
Firstly, the article, as with much Digiscents' marketing material, talks of combining 100 to 200 "smell primaries" -- which, as the previous discussion on smell classification schemes, Lawless's analyses (1989) and Amoore's specific anosmia work question, may or may not exist. "Digiscents plans to begin taking beta-user orders by Christmas, and aims to make the gadgets generally available by Spring," states the article; as of April 2001, hardware devices were not available even to developers, despite extensive exhibiting by Digiscents of their device at trade fairs, the release of a software development kit, and a projected "developer's suite" at Digiscents head offices in Oakland, where developers could test their programs. (www.digiscents.com 2001)
Digiscents declared bankruptcy in April 2001; it is currently unclear what, if anything, will come of their work to date. However, some fundamental flaws in their strategy seem clear, in hindsight, at least.
Their fundamental problem, as with so many companies in the 'dot.com boom', was the absence of a product. Setting up a standard was all very well, but in the absence of any products to use it is was worth nothing. It was incumbent upon them to ensure that the first thousand or ten thousand or fifty thousand aromatrons were built, and they failed to do so. (Canter 2001)
They had what I believe are the right ideas about eventually giving users the opportunity to create their own smelltracks to existing DVDs and CDs, encouraging them to share their creations, and furthermore creating utilities so users could blend their own scents. (Canter 2001) Despite their marketing and other mistakes, Digiscents deserves credit for bringing the concept of computer-controlled scent output to the attention of the world.
Hacking open the phone and developing applications in spite of Apple is a FAR CRY from having an official well documented and supported SDK from Apple. Especially when updates to the phone will blow away your changes. It's ridiculous to think there's a business model in selling illegal software for the iPhone.
As horrible as it is, Microsoft's PocketPC Windows CE platform kicks the iPhone's ass, because it is officially supported, documented, and legally available to developers.
What does San Francisco have to do with this discussion? Everybody knows RMS lives in Boston, not San Francisco. Where did you reading comprehend that SF had anything to do with it? What does having babies have to do with being a lefty? Are you just afraid of those scary homosexuals? That means you may be one too, but not know it yet. Normal people aren't homophobic, just closet cases like Ted Haggard.
OpenLB is a beautiful piece of C+ code. Hard core C++ templates used for and how templates were really designed to be used. After looking at several other LB implementations, this was the nicest designed and by far and easiest to read to figure out what was going on.
OpenLB: A library for lattice Boltzmann numerics
Computational framework
* C++ library for fluid flow simulations
* Implementation of lattice Boltzmann dynamics
* Modular, extensible code
* Platform independent development
Free source code
* Gnu General Public License (GPL)
* Open contributions from CFD community thankfully accepted
And more
* Straightforward coupling to external tools for pre- and postprocessing
* Teaching support (CFD basics and programming)
The project was created and is supervised by Jonas Latt, former member of the University of Geneva and by Prof. Dr. Vincent Heuveline, Professor at the Supercompuing center of the University of Karlsruhe.
What is the Lattice Boltzmann Method?
The lattice Boltzmann method is a powerful technique for the computational modeling of a wide variety of complex fluid flow problems including single and multiphase flow in complex geometries. It is a discrete computational method based upon the Boltzmann equation. It considers a typical volume element of fluid to be composed of a collection of particles that are represented by a particle velocity distribution function for each fluid component at each grid point. The time is counted in discrete time steps and the fluid particles can collide with each other as they move, possibly under applied forces. The rules governing the collisions are designed such that the time-average motion of the particles is consistent with the Navier-Stokes equation.
Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song. Download or listen to Mitch Bradley singing the Open Firmware Song (278k).
America's Dictator cost billions of dollars and the intervention of a packed Supreme Court to elect, against the will of a majority of American voters. I'll take a freely elected dictator over George W Bush, any day.
Apparently I was already pretty disgusted with Apple Computer by 1985.
So you can guess how excited I was by the iPhone when Jobs announced there would be no software development kit and developers would not be allowed to write code for it.
Apple still wants to discourage "overzealous hackers", but they're fine with overzealous fan-boys, as long as they're not programmers.
Newsgroups: net.micro
From: A2DEH@MIT-MC.ARPA (Donald E. Hopkins)
Date: Wed, 14-Aug-85 09:32:22 EDT
Local: Wed, Aug 14 1985 6:32 am
Subject: Times have changed at Apple Computer...
From the Apple IIe Owner's Manual, page 115:
"About Kids and Computers: Most kids are fearless about computers
and think nothing of popping the top off of the Apple IIe and
rearranging the circuitry just to see what will happen. To discourage
these overzealous hackers, there are screw holes on the Apple IIe
cover so classroom computers can be bolted shut."
I think we had a discussion on the info-apple mailing list in 1985 about your experiences with shareware vis a vis your CMS software (written in Applesoft and machine code on ProDos 1.1.1), and I asked you how well giving away the software and selling the manual worked.
I used to be a big Apple fan back then in 1985, but they've really disappointed me in the intervening years.
A very old joke, that I heard years before I worked at Kaleida Labs, a joint venture of Apple and IBM.
At Kaleida I experienced the full impact of being the butt of that joke.
The funny thing about the joke is that it's actually true, and applies to AT&T now as much as it did to IBM in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't post the ASCII graphics because slashdot says "Please use fewer 'junk' characters", but you can search for "Don Woods Commemerative stamp" in the Zork source code here, near the end of the file. Also check out the One Hundred Royal Zorkmids and the portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead!
One Lousy Point
GUE Postage
f.m.l.c.
Donald Woods, Editor
Spelunker Today
100 GREAT UNDERGROUND EMPIRE 100
B30332744D
IN FROBS WE TRUST
DIMWIT FLATHEAD
Series 719GUE
LD Flathead
Treasurer
One Hundred Royal Zorkmids
I had the honor of working with Don Woods on the NeWS window system at Sun Microsystems, back in 1990. He's a great guy, and a kick-ass PostScript programmer!
-Don
Zork was the reason I got on the ARPANET, back around 1980 or so. I was using Bruce's Northstar BBS that had an adventure game that Bruce had written in Basic, and he told me how to play Zork: first, dial up the NBS TIP, connect to MIT-AI (the command was "@L 134", because the ARPANET had 8 bit host numbers, and AI was 134), and apply for an account to learn Lisp. Once that was granted, I connected to MIT-DM ("@L 70"), and logged in as URANUS, password RINGS, used :CHUNAME to change my user name, and waited until one of the two people playing Zork quit, to take their slot. Later somebody told me the magic words to use to get an account on DM, so I applied for my own account on DM, claiming that I wanted to "Learn MDL for calculus and algebraic applications". The source code to Zork was well hidden. DM ran a weird version of ITS that had some kind of file security or cloaking, it was rumored. I was always looking for the Zork sources, but never found it on DM.
Years later I googled for a unique phrase that was only in the original DM version of Zork, and this URL popped up: http://retro.co.za/adventure/zork-mdl/
The original MDL source to Zork is really beautiful code that's almost as fun to read as it was to play. I had discovered a bug in the InfoCom version of Zork, which turned out to be in the original sources. When you're fighting the troll who's wielding an Axe, you can give anything to the troll and he will eat it. So I tried "give axe to troll" and he ate his axe, then cowered in the corner! Better yet you can go "give troll to troll" and he will eat himself and disappear, unfortunately not clearing the troll flag that is required to leave the room, so if you try to leave it prints a message saying the troll fends you off with a menacing gesture, and stops you from leaving. Sure enough, in the original sources, there is a troll flag!
-Don
Karl Rove: Known in Gay Circles as 'Miss Piggy'
In Washington's more 'discreet' gay bars Karl Rove is well-known as a frequent visitor. Witty gays have given him the nickname 'Miss Piggy, after the character on 'The Muppets'. Whether this refers to his appearance ['the doughboy'] or his sexual preferences is open to speculation.
KARL ROVE & THE GAY REPUBLICAN MAFIA
The Gay Republican Mafia is evidently in control of the Party, even as they spin hard to avoid the obvious questions. How did so many closeted "conservative" gay men wind up in the upper echelons of the GOP? Should the GOP be called the Gay Old Party now?
With gay RNC chairman Ken Mehlman and the latest outing of fake reporter Jeff Gannon, a GOPUSA/ Talon News shill, the issue of Karl Rove has come out as well, so to speak.
"The thing I never understood about Karl Rove," writes Al Martin, author of The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider, "is that he's not married, and I used to know this guy in the mid-1980s.
He doesn't look all that much different now than he did 20 years ago. But here's a guy that looks like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and the Pillsbury Doughboy. I never saw him with a woman. He was never friendly with any women and never seemed to have any girlfriends or go out on a date or anything.
Martin continues his recollections -- "Karl would always hang around at the Rooftop Bar at the Mayflower, which is directly across the street from the White House where all the DOJ pretty boys, as they used to call them, would go after work for a drink.
And that's always where Karl was...It's odd that this guy has never married. He's a bachelor. Usually in Bushonian circles, particularly when you're close to the religious right, which Karl is and raises money from them, it's almost obligatory that you be married and have kids.
In his column called "The Fairy Godmother Rules: Karl Rove and the Gay Republican Mafia," political analyst Al Martin examines the confluence of high ranking gay Republicans and their control of the Republican Party, especially when the Religious Right must be aware of this irony, as they continue to support the Bush-Cheney Regime.
"Fake journalist Jeff Gannon was outed last week," Martin writes. "'Jeff Gannon' is not his real name, yet he was able to get inside the White house press pool. How's that for 'security'? Being a fake Bushonian journalist shill means never having to say you're sorry.
"And so we have another story of another gay Republican so-called journalist, just like Armstrong Williams. Gannon, who real name is J.D. Guckert, finally admitted that Gannon wasn't his real name and that Talon News Service was nothing more than a shill for another Bush front called GOPUSA."
What's important about all this is that it was nothing more than a shill organization for GeorgeBush.com, which is financed from a Texas-based Republican Christian group associated with Karl Rove.
We are finally learning how extensive this is now. He said that there are hundreds of bogus news services and bogus newsletters that have been organized around GeorgeBush.com.
In fact, he also noted how well coordinated Karl Rove (now the new Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove) has gotten it so there is now an entire industry to subvert news and to spin it.
The story gets even more intriguing when it becomes clear that "the White House credentialized fake news reporter Jeff Gannon from fake news agency Talon News and this was cited by the Washington Post as having the only access to the internal CIA memo that names Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert agent. Gannon referred to the memo, to which no other news outlet had access, according to the Post."
Supposedly Gannon has also been subpoenaed by the Federal Grand Jury looking into the Plame outing, though Gannon himself denies it.
Will there be a special inv
Yes or No: Can you use ANY MP3 file you want as a ringtone on your iPhone, or not?
If the answer is no, that you have to buy special ring tones from iTunes, then you're screwed. THAT is my point. The fact that you can't get iPhone ring tones from Apple or AT&T yet only reinforces my point. If you can't see that, then you're the one who's totally brainwashed.
My PocketPC phone can play ANY audio file as a ring tone, and you iPhone can't. Why can't your iPhone do something as simple as that, which any PocketPC phone can do? Afraid it will take down the phone network??? (You don't actually believe Job's load of bullshit excuse do you?) No, it's because the PocketPC platform is fundamentally better than the iPhone because it's OPEN, and it doesn't restrict you from doing anything that would cut into AT&T's or Apple's business model.
Does your iPhone have built-in GPS like my iPAQ phone? If not, then you have to carry around an external Bluetooth GPS device to know where you are. Now that you know where you are, does your iPhone run navigation software like TomTom to tell you where to go? No, because it's impossible for TomTom or any other software developer to port their applications to the iPhone. And even if some super-hacker managed to write some AJAX GPS navigation software in JavaScript and DHTML that ran in the web browser, it still could not communicate with the Bluetooth GPS device, because the code running the browser is sandboxed with no access to any of the phone's features or devices. You're screwed all ways around.
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and AT&T?
A: AT&T!
-Don
Oh, come on now. Don't tell me that not only did you believe that big load of crap, but now you're hoping that people breaking into the iPhone and developing applications against Apple's will is going to convince Apple to change their mind???
Apple lied to you when they claimed they didn't want third parties to develop applications out of fears of taking down the network. You can already develop applications on PocketPC's, Blackberries, Java phones, Symbian phones, and many other devices, and the network has not gone down. Apple's claim that iPhones will bring down the network if they let people program them is a bald faced lie.
If you think Apple is going to change their policy because it turns out their lie was exposed by people developing third party apps, and the network not going down, you're delusional. Apple lied to you for their own reasons (to manipulate you), not for the reasons they're telling you (because they're nice and looking out for you). The reasons Apple lied about that should be obvious, and have been gone over in great detail in other postings, so I won't review them here. But it's extremely foolish to think Apple would forget that they were purposefully lying to you in order to manipulate you, and suddenly change their mind about third party developers out of the kindness of their hearts, after third party developers showed them the true light.
-Don
Oh come on, that's bullshit and you know it. The iPhone is absolutely targeted at and designed for the needs (or whims) of carriers, specifically AT&T, at the (extreme) expense of the user.
Are you claiming that end users do not want the ability to use free MP3 or $0.99 iTunes songs as ring tones, and would rather buy and use $6.99 ring tones from the carrier instead? Or will you admit that maybe the phone is locked up specifically to make that impossible, because of the carrier's desire to make money, not because of the needs of the user? Or are you so brainwashed by Steve Job's reality distortion field that you can't see that fact?
-Don
Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song. Download or listen to Mitch Bradley singing the Open Firmware Song (278k).
So why can't I halt the iPhone into the OpenFirmware boot ROMs and hack around with the device registers in Forth? Maybe there's a way to hack OpenFirmware to use a $0.99 iTunes song instead of a $6.99 ring tone.
-Don
This is a great example of the unbridled and unrealistic enthusiasm of Mac fan-boys, projecting their wildest fantasies and assumptions onto the sparse reality distorted by Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field.
Of course he wants you to think he has a TTS engine already installed on the iPhone, but he never actually claimed that himself, so technically he's not a liar. But in reality, there is no such TTS engine on the iPhone. But the Turing Completeness Argument demands that you point out that it would be POSSIBLE for that to happen. But so what? It would also be possible that you could get a free Bluetooth enabled talking pony with every iPhone, so you would not need a speech synthesizer.
Naturally Jobs wants you to think you can write "Web 2.0" JavaScript AJAX applications that take advantage of the multi touch input screen, but actually there is no way you can do that from JavaScript. He never claimed it was possible, but many people jumped to that conclusion, without checking the facts. I actually bothered to ask an Apple employee who was working on the iPhone, and he admitted that no, you can't take advantage of the multi touch input device from JavaScript/AJAX/DHTML in the web browser.
-Don
I use Cepstral's speech synthesizer on the Pocket PC, so my iPAQ phone can talk, and I'm quite happy with it. I licensed the Cepstral Swift SDK, which came with a bunch of voices, and binaries to run them on Linux, PocketPC and Mac. It works quite well and the voices are great (although I had some problem understanding the barking dog voice -- maybe it's a different dialect that I'm used to).
But since the iPod is a closed platform, what are the chances that Cepstral will port (and support) Swift and their library of voices on the iPhone? Sure it might be possible for somebody to port the open source Flite (the light weight version of Festival) or even Festival itself to the iPhone. But what about the voices, which are MUCH harder to create than simply porting a bunch of portable software, and proprietary.
A speech synthesizer without voices in the languages you need is not much use. Sure you can theoretically develop your own voices with the open source festvox tools, but that's a huge amount of difficult tedious production work (Cepstral charges on the order of $10,000 for the labor of creating a new English voice) that requires expert voice talent, data wranglers and programmers. So there are very few good open source voices available, and the good proprietary ones are well worth paying for, if you're developing a product that requires speech (especially speech in multiple languages).
There's really no point in trying to develop a product on the iPhone if it's not really open and officially supported by Apple, and SDKs like Cepstral's Swift API are not available for it. There are many of things my iPAQ can do (like GPS, run TomTom Navigator, speak with Cepstral voices, run Flash, Java, Lua, Python, JavaScript, and C++ code, etc.), that the iPhone is incapable of doing, because it's a closed system.
-Don
A sad but true story:h eTSATookMyLighterAway.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex= 1
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/gallery2/v/tsa/T
The TSA Took My Lighter Away!
(with apologies to The Ramones)
She went away for the holidays
Said she's going to Amsterdam
But she never got there
She never got there
She never got there, they say
[Chorus: x2]
The TSA took my lighter away
They took her away
Away from me
Now I don't know
Where my lighter can be
They took her from me
They took her from me
I don't know
Where my lighter can be
They took her from me
They took her from me
Ring me, ring me, ring me
Up the President
And find out
Where my luggage went
Ring me, ring me, ring me
Up the FBI
And find out if
My lighter's alive
Yeah, yeah, yeah
oh oh oh oh oh oh
oh oh oh oh oh oh
The iSmell so deserved to die the horrible death that it did. Like the ink jet printer profit model, they planned on selling the smell imaging device for cheap, and then totally gouging you on the scent cartridges.
iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer:
Symbolic Olfactory Display:
-Don
Hacking open the phone and developing applications in spite of Apple is a FAR CRY from having an official well documented and supported SDK from Apple. Especially when updates to the phone will blow away your changes. It's ridiculous to think there's a business model in selling illegal software for the iPhone.
As horrible as it is, Microsoft's PocketPC Windows CE platform kicks the iPhone's ass, because it is officially supported, documented, and legally available to developers.
-Don
Less expensive than one day of Bush's war.
-Don
What does San Francisco have to do with this discussion? Everybody knows RMS lives in Boston, not San Francisco. Where did you reading comprehend that SF had anything to do with it? What does having babies have to do with being a lefty? Are you just afraid of those scary homosexuals? That means you may be one too, but not know it yet. Normal people aren't homophobic, just closet cases like Ted Haggard.
-Don
Never use an even numbered web.
-Don
OpenLB is a beautiful piece of C+ code. Hard core C++ templates used for and how templates were really designed to be used. After looking at several other LB implementations, this was the nicest designed and by far and easiest to read to figure out what was going on.
What is the Lattice Boltzmann Method?
Really cool stuff!
-Don
Sure, but have you ever seen RMS holding a gerbil wrapped in duct tape? He's really smiling at it -- I think they made a connection!
-Don
Just because you're right, doesn't mean you're not paranoid!
-Don
Open Firmware is the only firmware standard in existence to have its own song. Download or listen to Mitch Bradley singing the Open Firmware Song (278k).
-Don
Is it because Torvalds disagrees with Stallman's anti-natalism stance, and his pledge not to reproduce?
-Don
America's Dictator cost billions of dollars and the intervention of a packed Supreme Court to elect, against the will of a majority of American voters. I'll take a freely elected dictator over George W Bush, any day.
-Don
Apparently I was already pretty disgusted with Apple Computer by 1985. So you can guess how excited I was by the iPhone when Jobs announced there would be no software development kit and developers would not be allowed to write code for it.
Apple still wants to discourage "overzealous hackers", but they're fine with overzealous fan-boys, as long as they're not programmers.
-Don
Times have changed at Apple Computer ...
Newsgroups: net.micro ...
From: A2DEH@MIT-MC.ARPA (Donald E. Hopkins)
Date: Wed, 14-Aug-85 09:32:22 EDT
Local: Wed, Aug 14 1985 6:32 am
Subject: Times have changed at Apple Computer
From the Apple IIe Owner's Manual, page 115:
I am too disgusted to comment.
-Don
I think we had a discussion on the info-apple mailing list in 1985 about your experiences with shareware vis a vis your CMS software (written in Applesoft and machine code on ProDos 1.1.1), and I asked you how well giving away the software and selling the manual worked.
I used to be a big Apple fan back then in 1985, but they've really disappointed me in the intervening years.
-Don
BTW are you nsayer as in the phrase "crash bang nsayer"?
-Don
A very old joke, that I heard years before I worked at Kaleida Labs, a joint venture of Apple and IBM. At Kaleida I experienced the full impact of being the butt of that joke. The funny thing about the joke is that it's actually true, and applies to AT&T now as much as it did to IBM in the past.
-Don