Oh, I remember DAK all right... I think they were more like Tiger Direct than Sharper Image, selling mostly audio, video and other electronic gizmos.
Their strategy was something like this:
1. Buy discontinued/remaindered junk at near cost
2. Rave about its quality in their catalog
3. Provide easy credit card ordering and shipping
4. ???
5. Profit!
Heh heh. They never did get any of my money. They're still around, apparently:
OS Opinion has an article (outdated) which covers this whole debate.
"[Open Group VP] Graham Bird explained that the Open Group actively pursues companies that use the UNIX trademark in a way that may confuse buyers. He mentioned that the company has a department that does nothing other than seek out violations and that this department has gone after "many" individuals who have allegedly infringed upon the trademark.
"Bird also mentioned that the Open Group is aware of Apple's usage of the term and would only go after the company for trademark violation if it (or any company for that matter) used the UNIX specification in such a way that may confuse buyers."
So there you have it. Mac OS X is not an official "UNIX," but Apple is justified in using the name in its marketing material.
...my reference is my foggy memory of some dusty Arthur C. Clarke books. It's not like it would be tough to figure it out.
In other words, you're too lazy to look it up or do the math before you post!;-)
The speed of light in a vacuum is 300,000 km/s (not meters), or 18,000,000 km/min.
So, here is the actual (approximately) factual information on Jupiter:
Distance to sun: 5.2 AU / 777,908,924 km / 43 light-minutes
Max. dist. from Earth: 6.2 AU / 927,506,794 km / 51.5 light-minutes
Min. dist. from Earth: 4.2 AU / 628,311,054 km / 35 light-minutes
Of course, all of these vary at apogee, perigee, etc. - but not by much, so cut me some slack! At any rate, you're only off by an order of magnitude or so.
So this new body, at a distance of 6 billion km from the sun, would be about 333 light-minutes or 5.5 light-hours away. Wow.
I checked this book out from our local library a while back. It details how to build a 'catalog Mac' of the 68k variety. You still need some genuine Apple parts, though.
They have a few copies for sale-- most of them overpriced, IMHO, since they deal with such outdated hardware. You might get inspired by it, but I doubt you'd actually want to build the machines he covers in the book.
In a sense, once we modify our own "germ line" i.e. the genes of our gametes, then we are indeed experiencing Lamarckian evolution.
I don't think the technology counts until it becomes part of our physical constitution. After all, we are discussing biological evolution, not cultural evolution....aren't we?:)
Why ? Is it that otherwise your self image suffers ? Not a scientific argument, nes pas?
It's what Dawkins termed the "argument from personal incredulity," i.e. "it boggles my mind so much that it just CAN'T be true!"
Yes, Dawkins does say that we are basically gene-preservation machines. But he doesn't claim that this invalidates all the socio-cultural things we have come to value in a subjective, personal way. He's not disturbed; he has simply pointed out a very pragmatic biological truth.
I mean, think about it-- pretty much everything we do is geared toward finding a mate and making babies. Even religion itself can be seen as a survival mechanism:
"Don't eat pork!" (you'll get trichinosis) "Don't mate outside of marriage!" (you'll prevent us from tracing our lineage) "Don't mate outside the tribe!" (you'll contaminate our gene pool) "Destroy the tribe across the river!" (they'll steal our land, food, and women) "Don't question the wisdom of the holy men!" (you'll divide the tribe) "Don't work on the sabbath!" (er... you stumped me there)
All our current religions are moribund. Humanity will outlive Christianity, and the earth will outlive humanity, and the universe will outlive the earth. The most amazing thing, really, is that having learned so much, we can still be so vain and shortsighted.
MacOS is not BSD. FreeBSD is BSD, OpenBSD is BSD, MacOS X is... well, MacOS.
Nah, you can call it Mac OS all you want, but it's really NeXT with an Apple 'skin' on it. So if NeXTStep was BSD, then Mac OS X is also. Personally, I think they merely plundered BSD, as did FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
The fact that they used large parts of FreeBSD and Linux...
I wasn't aware that they had used anything at all from Linux. Please enlighten me which bits are from Linux... things like gcc are GNU, but not necessarily Linux.
There are at least 4 times as many Linux desktop users as MacOS X users.
That's surprising to me, but if it's accurate it goes a long way toward showing that Linux is far from dead on the desktop.
like here's a tidbit I learned today... automatically zips up all files that haven't been touched in 30 days...now, I could have said (damn..windows had this cool little app that did this for me), but every now and then , we find tidbits that make our lives easier.
I was going to point out how easy it is to do this on the Mac, by doing a Sherlock for all files modified before 6/16/02 and dropping them on my Zip program. BUT...
Sherlock got up to 6832 files before it pooped out, complaining that "there is not enough memory to continue searching." This on a 512MB machine.
Of course, this violates two of Apple's own computer interface guidelines-- don't limit the user unnecessarily, and try to provide an alternative way to perform a given action. In this case, my only alternative would be to write an Applescript.
Technology changes so fast that in 10 more years, you WILL NOT be able to read 5.25" floppies unless you have some special equipment (or some really old equipment).
Of course, you've just pointed out the huge advantage that digital has-- lossless reproduction. Plus, the storage capacities just keep increasing.
Who needs to be able to read 5.25" floppies when you can just move the files onto a CDR? At my office we did this years ago. Most of our floppies fit onto one CDR.
And in 10 years, we'll move those CDRs onto a 30 terabyte chip or whatever is current.
I'm not sure that I would ever trust images I care about to analog archival.
Gallileo correctly determined that the acceleration of an object when acted on by a gravitational field is independent of its mass (air resistance not withstanding).
Okay, I'll feed the troll!:)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Galileo didn't determine this at all. He determined that falling objects are accelerated downward by the Earth's gravity at a constant rate, unrelated to their mass. Or did he?
What Galileo actually showed is that the mass of the Earth has a vastly greater part in the acceleration than the falling objects do. Objects of greater mass really do fall a bit faster. The ratio of the mass of one object to another is insignficant compared to the ratio of either object's mass to that of the Earth.
If they had guns, they would also have some sort of basic training. (and thus a better chance at defending themselves).
Look at the people who are carrying guns today. Most of them don't have concealed weapon permits, let alone training. Be realistic about this.
It doesn't matter if they knew they were part of a suicide mission or not. A terrorist is a terrorist.
It matters a lot whether they knew this, as you can tell by the Pennsylvania flight. Passengers resisted because they knew they had no hope of surviving otherwise.
We're talking about ordinary next-door U.S. citizens facing down terrorists who have been trained extensively for months with weapons and combat tactics. And now, at your suggestion, they can carry guns on the plane.
I think your only hope would be if an off-duty SWAT team happens to be on the plane and packing heat.
So, instead, we should be working to a single replacement for what we complain about being a (mono means one, you know) monopoly?
No, it means not having to re-invent the wheel for the sake of "choice!"
Right now, you can choose from lots of different wheels on Linux, they all work fine. The only problem is you have to change cars to use a different wheel. KDE developers and GNOME developers are duplicating efforts in a major way.
Interoperability is the goal, not uniformity of interface. Shells are a good example-- you can pretty much use whichever shell you like and not worry about its interface to the kernel.
And I think we wouldn't complain nearly so much about MS's monopoly if Windows and its applications were more open.
if the people on the planes were all armed, the terrorists wouldn't have been able to take them over with simple box cutters.
You're absolutely right.
Instead, the terrorists themselves would have had guns. They would have immediately killed the pilots and crew (they probably did anyway), and any passengers who resisted. They also would have forced the remaining passengers to give up their weapons by taking hostages.
Remember, none of the passengers on the WTC flights knew that they were part of a suicide mission.
The fundamental mechanism for evolution is a random process. What you call natural selection is a selection bias in this random process.
You're so close to the mark, and your point a good one. But... to nitpick, there are two "fundamental mechanisms" in evolution: variation and selection.
It's variation that is random, whether through genetic recombination or mutation. Selection is not random. If it were, it would be impossible to describe what selection pressure is and how it affects a population.
I don't mean to be argumentative, but your description of evolution as a "mean drift in the direction of 'better' organisms" makes it sound like you are the one who misunderstands the issues in a fundamental way. cp99 is correct when he says that random processes are only a part of evolution.
It may be chance that on a given day, a particular bird eats a particular insect, but the fact that birds eat insects is not chance, and certainly is not random.
Besides, no where in the Constitution does it say that persons are afforded free and clear access to any content or media they want.
The First Amendment says we have it by default. It is an unrestricted liberty until a law denies that access. "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press... "
It seems pretty simple to me. Congress is not allowed to make laws abridging these rights. In the courts' interpretation of the "spirit of the law," other media unforeseen by the framers may be considered as part of "the press." Notice the amendment says nothing along the lines of "except for dangerous speech and obscene books."
Previous courts may have ruled these exceptions as constitutional, but that doesn't mean the Constitution itself makes these exceptions. The Constitution says what it says; no more, no less.
That said, I agree with you that any such legislation belongs at the state level.
It turns out that the machine didn't simply "incorrectly calculate the amount of radiation" -- it was a design failure of a shielding subsystem that relied on microswitches and sensors for feedback. This sidebar explains it pretty well.
The last paragraph reads:
"Traditionally, electromechanical interlocks have been used on these types of equipment to ensure safety -- in this case, to ensure that the turntable and attached equipment are in the correct position when treatment is started. In the Therac-25, software checks were substituted for many traditional hardware interlocks."
Sounds like a good case for hardware safeguards. "Sure, they cost more, but aren't you worth it?"
Some finer points in design; I see some stuff like this a lot as well: function bob( varlist ) { $var = $joe + 12345; return $var; } You're wasting memory and such for the variable declaration and assignment, simply return $joe + 12345;
Well, compiling a 'C' equivalent in CodeWarrior for 68K, both versions come out something like this:
link a6,#0
move.l 8(a6),d0
addi.l #12345,d0
unlk a6
rts
As always, with your language and compiler, YMMV. But don't sweat the details until they really matter!
The movement has differentiated into the real wing, represented by among others the inventors of buckminsterfullerene...
I hate to break it to you, but buckminsterfullerene was not "invented," it was discovered. Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996 for the discovery.
Since no products have yet been created using C60 (or the related carbon "nanotubes"), I fail to see how that branch is any more "real" than the theoretical molecular-assembly branch.
Have you actually read "Nanosystems" by Drexler? There's a lot more meat there than the speculation offered in "Engines of Creation," which I assume is the "rather silly" book you're referring to. In fact, even though "Engines" was speculative, it certainly took the lead in trying to foresee the consequences, both beneficial and threatening, of pursuing nanotech. I would call the speculation measured, rather than wild. It strikes me as prudent to explore the boundaries of what might become possible through these developments.
IBM showed that it was possible to manipulate atoms one by one, giving an actual physical demonstration. Feynman originally theorized it (Feynman!) and Drexler and Merkle have pursued the theoretical branch through modeling and simulation.
It's not as if Drexler and Merkle are playing with this stuff in their garages. Drexler received his Ph.D in molecular nanotech, and it was awarded by MIT-- not exactly the Brooklyn School of Chemistry. Merkle has a Ph.D in electrical engineering, is a published researcher and is a member in good standing of ACM, ACS, APS, and IEEE.
A healthy skepticism is certainly justified, but I think you're being far too harsh calling them "crackpots" and "quacks."
I think the 'interface wars' are all becoming irrelevant. What is inevitable in the future, and what I would like to see being developed now, is a set of universal 'Desktop Settings' that you can put on a web site and access from anywhere.
Just think, you could sit down at your buddy's computer, click on a control panel, and type in the URL of your Desktop Settings.
Bing! the screen flashes. You're looking at your favorite desktop metaphor. And it behaves like your favorite desktop. You can have multiple desktops and serve window apps like X. You can have your menu bars in the windows like in Windows, or one menu bar at the top like the Mac.
Damn it, we need this capability. Like, now. And as I said, I think it's inevitable. There is no reason that our powerful machines (Pentium, A6, PPC, whatever) couldn't run any of these desktops or all of them.
I keep telling my co-workers who fight over which interface is better, "it's just software! It's supposed to be flexible!" You should be able to choose your desktop like you choose your wallpaper.
Is there an open-source project to do this? Let's start one. Let's stop complaining and make it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Digital cameras DO NOT work at all.
Could you elaborate on this? Why is it the case?
Thanks!
- MFN
Oh, I remember DAK all right... I think they were more like Tiger Direct than Sharper Image, selling mostly audio, video and other electronic gizmos.
Their strategy was something like this:
1. Buy discontinued/remaindered junk at near cost
2. Rave about its quality in their catalog
3. Provide easy credit card ordering and shipping
4. ???
5. Profit!
Heh heh. They never did get any of my money. They're still around, apparently:
DAK 2000
- MFN
OS Opinion has an article (outdated) which covers this whole debate.
So there you have it. Mac OS X is not an official "UNIX," but Apple is justified in using the name in its marketing material.
- MFN
In other words, you're too lazy to look it up or do the math before you post! ;-)
The speed of light in a vacuum is 300,000 km/s (not meters), or 18,000,000 km/min.
So, here is the actual (approximately) factual information on Jupiter:
Of course, all of these vary at apogee, perigee, etc. - but not by much, so cut me some slack! At any rate, you're only off by an order of magnitude or so.
So this new body, at a distance of 6 billion km from the sun, would be about 333 light-minutes or 5.5 light-hours away. Wow.
- MFN
I checked this book out from our local library a while back. It details how to build a 'catalog Mac' of the 68k variety. You still need some genuine Apple parts, though.
You might try Alibris - the author is Bob Brant.
They have a few copies for sale-- most of them overpriced, IMHO, since they deal with such outdated hardware. You might get inspired by it, but I doubt you'd actually want to build the machines he covers in the book.
In a sense, once we modify our own "germ line" i.e. the genes of our gametes, then we are indeed experiencing Lamarckian evolution.
...aren't we? :)
I don't think the technology counts until it becomes part of our physical constitution. After all, we are discussing biological evolution, not cultural evolution.
- MFN
Why ? Is it that otherwise your self image suffers ? Not a scientific argument, nes pas?
It's what Dawkins termed the "argument from personal incredulity," i.e. "it boggles my mind so much that it just CAN'T be true!"
Yes, Dawkins does say that we are basically gene-preservation machines. But he doesn't claim that this invalidates all the socio-cultural things we have come to value in a subjective, personal way. He's not disturbed; he has simply pointed out a very pragmatic biological truth.
I mean, think about it-- pretty much everything we do is geared toward finding a mate and making babies. Even religion itself can be seen as a survival mechanism:
All our current religions are moribund. Humanity will outlive Christianity, and the earth will outlive humanity, and the universe will outlive the earth. The most amazing thing, really, is that having learned so much, we can still be so vain and shortsighted.
- MFN
Of course, that's 'mock' in the sense of 'imitation,' not in the sense of 'to ridicule'! Heh heh...
"My name is Mok, thanks a lot."
(you think he's joking, but he's not)
But not homosexual women?
And of course, as every red-blooded x86-racing straight male knows, women and homosexuals have no business using a computer....
- MFN
MacOS is not BSD. FreeBSD is BSD, OpenBSD is BSD, MacOS X is ... well, MacOS.
Nah, you can call it Mac OS all you want, but it's really NeXT with an Apple 'skin' on it. So if NeXTStep was BSD, then Mac OS X is also. Personally, I think they merely plundered BSD, as did FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
The fact that they used large parts of FreeBSD and Linux...
I wasn't aware that they had used anything at all from Linux. Please enlighten me which bits are from Linux... things like gcc are GNU, but not necessarily Linux.
There are at least 4 times as many Linux desktop users as MacOS X users.
That's surprising to me, but if it's accurate it goes a long way toward showing that Linux is far from dead on the desktop.
- MFN
I'm still waiting for one that says,
.sig)
"How are you gentlemen! All your grain are belong to us!!"
- MFN
(move
like here's a tidbit I learned today ... automatically zips up all files that haven't been touched in 30 days...now, I could have said (damn..windows had this cool little app that did this for me), but every now and then , we find tidbits that make our lives easier.
I was going to point out how easy it is to do this on the Mac, by doing a Sherlock for all files modified before 6/16/02 and dropping them on my Zip program. BUT...
Sherlock got up to 6832 files before it pooped out, complaining that "there is not enough memory to continue searching." This on a 512MB machine.
Of course, this violates two of Apple's own computer interface guidelines-- don't limit the user unnecessarily, and try to provide an alternative way to perform a given action. In this case, my only alternative would be to write an Applescript.
- MFN
Technology changes so fast that in 10 more years, you WILL NOT be able to read 5.25" floppies unless you have some special equipment (or some really old equipment).
Of course, you've just pointed out the huge advantage that digital has-- lossless reproduction. Plus, the storage capacities just keep increasing.
Who needs to be able to read 5.25" floppies when you can just move the files onto a CDR? At my office we did this years ago. Most of our floppies fit onto one CDR.
And in 10 years, we'll move those CDRs onto a 30 terabyte chip or whatever is current.
I'm not sure that I would ever trust images I care about to analog archival.
- MFN
Gallileo correctly determined that the acceleration of an object when acted on by a gravitational field is independent of its mass (air resistance not withstanding).
Okay, I'll feed the troll! :)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Galileo didn't determine this at all. He determined that falling objects are accelerated downward by the Earth's gravity at a constant rate, unrelated to their mass. Or did he?
What Galileo actually showed is that the mass of the Earth has a vastly greater part in the acceleration than the falling objects do. Objects of greater mass really do fall a bit faster. The ratio of the mass of one object to another is insignficant compared to the ratio of either object's mass to that of the Earth.
Clear?
If they had guns, they would also have some sort of basic training. (and thus a better chance at defending themselves).
Look at the people who are carrying guns today. Most of them don't have concealed weapon permits, let alone training. Be realistic about this.
It doesn't matter if they knew they were part of a suicide mission or not. A terrorist is a terrorist.
It matters a lot whether they knew this, as you can tell by the Pennsylvania flight. Passengers resisted because they knew they had no hope of surviving otherwise.
We're talking about ordinary next-door U.S. citizens facing down terrorists who have been trained extensively for months with weapons and combat tactics. And now, at your suggestion, they can carry guns on the plane.
I think your only hope would be if an off-duty SWAT team happens to be on the plane and packing heat.
- MFN
So, instead, we should be working to a single replacement for what we complain about being a (mono means one, you know) monopoly?
No, it means not having to re-invent the wheel for the sake of "choice!"
Right now, you can choose from lots of different wheels on Linux, they all work fine. The only problem is you have to change cars to use a different wheel. KDE developers and GNOME developers are duplicating efforts in a major way.Interoperability is the goal, not uniformity of interface. Shells are a good example-- you can pretty much use whichever shell you like and not worry about its interface to the kernel.
And I think we wouldn't complain nearly so much about MS's monopoly if Windows and its applications were more open.
- MFN
But you are forgetting......
if the people on the planes were all armed, the terrorists wouldn't have been able to take them over with simple box cutters.
You're absolutely right.
Instead, the terrorists themselves would have had guns. They would have immediately killed the pilots and crew (they probably did anyway), and any passengers who resisted. They also would have forced the remaining passengers to give up their weapons by taking hostages.
Remember, none of the passengers on the WTC flights knew that they were part of a suicide mission.
- MFN
The fundamental mechanism for evolution is a random process. What you call natural selection is a selection bias in this random process.
You're so close to the mark, and your point a good one. But... to nitpick, there are two "fundamental mechanisms" in evolution: variation and selection.
It's variation that is random, whether through genetic recombination or mutation. Selection is not random. If it were, it would be impossible to describe what selection pressure is and how it affects a population.
I don't mean to be argumentative, but your description of evolution as a "mean drift in the direction of 'better' organisms" makes it sound like you are the one who misunderstands the issues in a fundamental way. cp99 is correct when he says that random processes are only a part of evolution.
It may be chance that on a given day, a particular bird eats a particular insect, but the fact that birds eat insects is not chance, and certainly is not random.
- MFN
Besides, no where in the Constitution does it say that persons are afforded free and clear access to any content or media they want.
The First Amendment says we have it by default. It is an unrestricted liberty until a law denies that access. "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ... "
It seems pretty simple to me. Congress is not allowed to make laws abridging these rights. In the courts' interpretation of the "spirit of the law," other media unforeseen by the framers may be considered as part of "the press." Notice the amendment says nothing along the lines of "except for dangerous speech and obscene books."
Previous courts may have ruled these exceptions as constitutional, but that doesn't mean the Constitution itself makes these exceptions. The Constitution says what it says; no more, no less.
That said, I agree with you that any such legislation belongs at the state level.
- MFN
There is some good information on the Web about the Therac cases, one example of which is here:
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/The rac_1.html
It turns out that the machine didn't simply "incorrectly calculate the amount of radiation" -- it was a design failure of a shielding subsystem that relied on microswitches and sensors for feedback. This sidebar explains it pretty well.
The last paragraph reads:
Sounds like a good case for hardware safeguards. "Sure, they cost more, but aren't you worth it?"
- MFN
Some finer points in design; I see some stuff like this a lot as well:
function bob( varlist ) { $var = $joe + 12345; return $var; }
You're wasting memory and such for the variable declaration and assignment, simply return $joe + 12345;
Well, compiling a 'C' equivalent in CodeWarrior for 68K, both versions come out something like this:
As always, with your language and compiler, YMMV. But don't sweat the details until they really matter!
than this proposal is the tired, predictable response of Slashdotters to it.
Just look at this "discussion" - hundreds of kB of hot air, making about 3 rather obvious points.
- MFN
The movement has differentiated into the real wing, represented by among others the inventors of buckminsterfullerene...
I hate to break it to you, but buckminsterfullerene was not "invented," it was discovered. Harold Kroto, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996 for the discovery.
Since no products have yet been created using C60 (or the related carbon "nanotubes"), I fail to see how that branch is any more "real" than the theoretical molecular-assembly branch.
Have you actually read "Nanosystems" by Drexler? There's a lot more meat there than the speculation offered in "Engines of Creation," which I assume is the "rather silly" book you're referring to. In fact, even though "Engines" was speculative, it certainly took the lead in trying to foresee the consequences, both beneficial and threatening, of pursuing nanotech. I would call the speculation measured, rather than wild. It strikes me as prudent to explore the boundaries of what might become possible through these developments.
IBM showed that it was possible to manipulate atoms one by one, giving an actual physical demonstration. Feynman originally theorized it (Feynman!) and Drexler and Merkle have pursued the theoretical branch through modeling and simulation.
It's not as if Drexler and Merkle are playing with this stuff in their garages. Drexler received his Ph.D in molecular nanotech, and it was awarded by MIT-- not exactly the Brooklyn School of Chemistry. Merkle has a Ph.D in electrical engineering, is a published researcher and is a member in good standing of ACM, ACS, APS, and IEEE.
A healthy skepticism is certainly justified, but I think you're being far too harsh calling them "crackpots" and "quacks."
- MFN
"Fox turned into a hardcore sex channel so gradually, I didn't even notice!"
- MFN
I think the 'interface wars' are all becoming irrelevant. What is inevitable in the future, and what I would like to see being developed now, is a set of universal 'Desktop Settings' that you can put on a web site and access from anywhere.
Just think, you could sit down at your buddy's computer, click on a control panel, and type in the URL of your Desktop Settings.
Bing! the screen flashes. You're looking at your favorite desktop metaphor. And it behaves like your favorite desktop. You can have multiple desktops and serve window apps like X. You can have your menu bars in the windows like in Windows, or one menu bar at the top like the Mac.
Damn it, we need this capability. Like, now. And as I said, I think it's inevitable. There is no reason that our powerful machines (Pentium, A6, PPC, whatever) couldn't run any of these desktops or all of them.
I keep telling my co-workers who fight over which interface is better, "it's just software! It's supposed to be flexible!" You should be able to choose your desktop like you choose your wallpaper.
Is there an open-source project to do this? Let's start one. Let's stop complaining and make it happen.
- MFN