Mathematicians define "even" as an integer that has no remainder when divided by two. Therefore 0%2 = 0 must make zero even, right?
Want to bet? Don't try to explain with mathematician's logic about even and odd to Vito and Johnny at the roulette wheel. They consider a bet on "Even" to be a loss if you come up with 0.
Their logic is based on an inductive argument rather than an arbitrary definiton. A 6 pack of beer can be evenly halved without sharing a can. If Vito has no six packs of beer, how can he give half of that to Johnny? Vito has the same amount that he had before halving as Johnny does afterwards so by this logic, declaring zero as neither odd nor even is just as intuitive as declaring a countable infinity as both odd and even.
I realize it's convenient for mathematicians to use the shorthand that zero is even because most of the properties they'd observe would have to make an exception for zero otherwise when most "work" just fine with zero. But that doesn't mean that theirs is the only definition in use today.
Yeah, I'm optimistic too. Our friend Mr. Gates has said that in the future, hardware will be free or almost free. I'm wondering how or in what world that is reasonable.
In the Gates world it's completely reasonable. After his personal liquidity reaches the next magnitude of billions, the cost of a new computer will be just about the same as a rounding error.
Contrary to what others may think, there are plenty of sentences where the terms "Clippy" and "Trusted Computing" can be combined and not sound inappropriate.
The first one that comes to my mind is "Eight to Twelve Years at Hard Labor" but I'm perhaps a little too quick to rule out capital measures.
Apple should pay some licensing fees and make a DVD promotional item. It should include:
Tron, Wargames, or other computer movie
DVD commercials for Mac OS X Tiger
iTunes & Quicktime installers if run on Win or Mac
Full versions of a few Mac OS X only games
Pay the Kellogg's Cereal Company to include these discs on all of it's kids cereals including Frosted Flakes (with the Tony the Tiger mascot) and Apple Jacks.
Of course, the movie's will probably have to be censored to get them down to the G rating that parents assume such things will be.
If these requirements aren't really needed then it's just a marketing plan to encourage adoption. If the accounting department budgets for these massive upgrades an IT department will upgrade more machines (rather than tell accounting "No we really don't need all that money") which of course will lead to faster and wider adoption than just the "cutting edge" which they budgeted for. It will make Microsoft and everyone's IT department's look like they are saving massive amounts of money.
If these requirements are really used, it'll be to support the huge DRM encryption and decryption lock-ins at all levels of the computer hardware. This makes things like DVD's and CD's lower cost on Windows. But If everything is encrypted, your data will be locked in as well and you'll be glad to pay whatever "protection fee" MS markets (in the form of service plans and OS upgrades) because you'll have no other way to get use your own data.
Apple has a lot of superstition about it's version numbers of anything. It used to be bad to number something 3 because of the bad reception that the Apple/// computer got. I think the even / odd started when Apple released System 7.5 and of the various updates 7.5.3 and 7.5.5 were the most stable. (Was 7.5.4 even officially released?) One thing that contributed to this was that Apple didn't start working on bug fixes for a product until after the product was released. (That also made the release date harder to set because they tried to fix all beta-tester reports before it went "gold".)
Today, Apple seems to take a different approach so I'd argue that much of the even / odd quality issues are simply superstition. (Note that mathematically zero is neither even nor odd).
It seems that a release date is set based on marketing forces (NAB conference, back to school sales season, etc). From this a final development date is determined and set (two or three weeks prior? who knows). If they find show-stopper bugs, the release date turns into an announce date and they ship the product ASAP after that.
Other bugs (non-showstoppers) exist in all software though some are more obvious than others. The known minor bugs have Apple Knowledge Base articles written about them. They describe the remaining bugs and give work-arounds if known and are made public when the software is released. Though initial releases will still have bugs (and always will) at least they are better documented than in the old Apple.
Apple appears to start a bug fix version immediately after the development version is finalized, but before it's released. To old Apple watchers, it probably seems strange to be working on the bug fix release before the original version is put in boxes and made public, but it helps spot the unforgivable show-stopper bugs, document the workarounds for the minor bugs, and have things in full motion for when the end-user bug reports start coming in.
Perhaps Apple has picked up more habits from the open software development community than we knew.
I have some comments looking at some of the wish lists others have posted about what they'd like to be in Mac OS X v 10.4 ("Tiger"):
User Interface changes / updates
Be careful what you ask for, you may get it. Improvements to some people may be vast setbacks to others. Some people love the flashy metal interface. Some people ignore Expose (until they panic after accidentally hit the F11 key when reaching for backspace). There will undoubtedly be changes in interface (it's what's Apple is known for) but I'd make any complaints you have now as constructive as possible.
Free Price
If there are flashy new additions, significant speed increases, or some new technology enabled this will not be a free upgrade. Apple's earnings recently show significant revenue from software that just about equals their hardware sales. (Although this doesn't hold true with the latest earnings due to the iPod platform sales skewing things). Apple will continue to milk an annual OS sale unless the OS just isn't something they feel is worth the money.
Carbon Cocoa Parity
This is already on-going and has been for several years in the form of Core* libraries like CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics establishing a common, procedural implementation underneath both. It's a slow process to do it well and we've gone through a couple of WWDC's where they say it's still in progress. As long as they don't give up on these efforts, I think this extra layer of abstraction to truly support their object-oriented and procedural libraries is the "right thing to do". I know it's slow to do it right, but I still hope they make significant progress for 10.4.
Windows/Linux Support
Unless Apple actually moves Mac OS X to Intel hardware, binary compatability isn't going to happen. What would be good is building more support for other API's on top of the Mac OS Core* libraries so that it's very simple to port many Windows and Linux apps to Mac OS X. I never thought they'd reconcile Carbon and Cocoa, but what if these teams start working to move a COM or GTK higher level library? As long as the ports are one-way (to Apple products) I think it stands a possibility.
Non-Apple Hardware Intel Support
Technically, with Darwin and the cleaner Core* libraries, the process would be much easier than in the past. Financially, Apple isn't "just a hardware company" anymore so it may make sense. But is there a market for their software on non-Apple hardware? Look at Shake for a case study. From an Apple accountant perspective they don't care if you buy the Mac or Linux version. You'll buy a G5 ($2K) and Shake for Mac ($3K) or get Shake for Linux ($5K). To the accountant, it's like selling a Shake+G5 bundle for $5K, and simply removing the G5 for the Linux bundle (still at $5K). Heck, if it weren't for the development costs, the Linux version would be even more profitable. So what about a Mac OS port? The $130 Mac OS X version would sell zero copies if priced at $2,130 (no matter what hardware), but Mac OS X Server ($3K) might sell to a few businesses if ported to Intel even at $5K. The price seems high to me, but then again there are businesses who pay similar sums for the Windows Server products so who can say.
Communications Improvements
IPv6? iChat updates? QuickTime Conferencing revival? The version number is 10-4 after all. (A common term in old CB slang):-)
Apple (Computer, Inc.) has had a thing for codenames even back to the days of the Apple ][e (Diana) and Apple/// (Sara). They were ignored by the general public and simply enabled engineers to communicate about their project without having to have the legal and marketing departments involved.
During the exile of Steve Jobs, Apple had many more projects under development than were being released. Apple started talking about projects in their R&D department (like WildCard) before they were made into a product (like Hypercard) and before these names were run by legal and marketing. This certainly fit in the Scully|Spindler|Amelio philosophy of letting the world see and smell what you have baking even if they can't actually taste it yet. It was during this time that the general public was exposed to the anticipation and delight of a good codename can inspire.
After Steve Jobs returned, Apple's internal kitchens were closed. But they still used codenames to talk about future products. They started by naming runs of things similarly. Operating Systems were named after types of music (Allegro, Sonata, Rhapsody). When the huge division developed between Mac OS 9 and X, codenames changed to be various versions of twilight for Classic Mac OS (starlight, moonlight, etc.) and various big cats for Mac OS X (Cheetah, Puma). About the time that Puma was getting ready for release people started to specualte what was next (Jaguar and then ?).
Because of this public scruity, Apple has taken what was just a sassy internal form of communication ("The Ric Ford Release", "7-up", etc) and turned it into a term that had to have legal and marketing approval. People were now looking at what the codenames meant. At this point, now that the terms are carefully scrutinized before the public ever hears them, they don't mean anything other than a tarted-up pointer to a project. Reading anything into them today merely gives insight into the marketing (and maybe legal) department rather than engineering.
Take for example the codename Merlot. According to different people this was a codename for Mac OS X v 10.2.x+, v 10.3, and now 10.4. What does it mean? People have speculated endlessly. It's not the name of a cat so it must be a change in direction for Apple, right? Maybe it's the name of a secret technology or UI enhancement that Apple just keeps delaying because it's not quite ready, maybe? Forget the speculation on the term Merlot. It may have been a codename and in fact may still be a codename, but it doesn't mean anything anymore.
While Apple's codenames used to be clever, sassy, inside jokes in many cases, today that aspect of Apple culture has been stopped because of too much public scrutiny. You don't get trademarks on real codenames, yet Tiger and some other cat names have already been registered for Apple. Though at one time these were clever bits of insight on Apple's internal thinking, today they are meaningless marketing labels.
In the early 1990's, Mac's ruled my university's computer labs. Though I used vector programs for my engineering studies, my roommate was Industrial Design major so he was always talking about the paint apps.
The hot "paint" program back then was something called "PixelPaint" and it seriously grabbed the Architecture and Industrial Design students of the day. Everyone wanted it because of it's large pallete size, gradiant fills, and razor-like precision.
One day, a program called PhotoShop showed up in the labs (legally installed by a student who forgot to delete it before s/he left). It was cool, but PixelPaint still out classed it. Every line you drew was "fuzzy". The pallete size was so big, that it was hard to select a particular color. And overall, things just seemed blurry even when printing or copy/pasting to another app.
The designer's names were in the about box and I actually saw the lead developer post to the comp.sys.mac.* usenet newsgroups so I wrote him some email to complain about this horrible little app in both it's interface and ability.
He actually responded to my critiques and spent some time explaining just how programs like "PixelPaint" could really only make good-looking "on-screen" graphics due to low colors and resolutions. His app "PhotoShop" was aiming at photographic images where razor-sharp lines looked fake. He even replied about my suggested interface improvements and told me what they had planned for the next version which was even better than what I suggested.
This really impressed me. I know that this type of interaction between commercial programmer and user doesn't exist anymore, but it was amazing the patience that he used to point out my misunderstandings (and I wasn't even a real customer at the time).
The interaction I've had with the GIMP community hasn't impressed me. I'm a little more technically savvy than some of the Mac users out there, but getting the GIMP installed and usable is a pain. The GIMP is capable of a lot of things, but its defaults really don't impress me. I feel like I really have to work to get it out of PixelPaint mode into Photoshop mode (and I'm not really knowledgeable enough to say that I get those changes right). The online communities just aren't as open or friendly to answer the questions that I've asked even if I've tried reading TFM and FAQ.
If I were tight for money, I think I'd pay my bucks for GraphicConverter (a Mac shareware app that has a similar PixelPaint feel) rather than waste the time on the GIMP.
I'm a big supporter of Open Source software, but I've thought for a while that a group of people really need to decouple the engine from the interface and produce a "better" photo manipulation software in the way that Camino (and later Firefox) successfully rebuilt alternative user experiences on the Mozilla web-browsing engine.
First, the value of pi isn't directly stated. It's calculated (by a reader) from the statement is II Chronicles 4:2 of Solomon's temple having a circular fountain of 30 cubits around by 10 cubits in diameter.
It bothers me because the unit of measure was a cubit. This is a measure that they are comfortable working with and I believe stating approximate half or quarter values of a cubit. I can see understand that they may not have said the fountain was 31.4 units in diameter but it's harder to overlook a measurement rounding of 31 instead of 31 and 1/2 cubits. It's even more silly that they were off by almost 1.4 units.
And it's not just because they are ancient. The Greeks had a value of pi to at least five decimal places. Of course they understood what pi was. The writers of the bible were just trying to observe reality.
I appreciate your willingness to overlook such errors when trying to rationalize these discrepencies, but I'm not as patient. This is the same compilation of ancient scrollwork that says we should kill homosexuals, that we should mutilate our genitals, that we should burn animal sacrifices, that we should kill rather than understand each other. If such a basic truth as trying to observe a temple that was built is in error, I have much more grave reservations about the less verifiable truths that I'm supposed to accept without question.
But I only started with pi because this is a geeky board. There are so many other places in the Bible which just scream out to me that it's either inconsistent with my understanding of reality or it's inconsitent with itself. But without going into another long, off-topic, and unwelcome diatribe on all of these things that hit me personally as "why does this seem wrong?"
Christians believe that they do have a personal, first hand relationship with Jesus Christ.
When people say this it reminds me of the Douglas Adams quote about "safe" being a new use of the word which his main character was previously unaware.
The Shakers believed that the only people who had a first hand relationship with the divine were those who had what appeared to be epileptic seizures. Some scholars believe that St. John was a very pious man but with a respect for an era he did not live and a particular taste for strange mushrooms which created his perception of a first hand relationship with God.
I have enormous respect for the work of Harry Houdini, though I don't think I will ever have a first hand relationship with him. (Even though he has said he will try to contact this world from the afterlife). I think that many people mistake total respect for their beliefs and the beliefs of their parents as faith or even a first hand relationship with a divine power.
This isn't even including the superstar phenomenon. Many people (as evidenced by the weekly world news and national enquirer) feel they encounter a superstar in their supermarket or laundromat. It may not even really be the person they think it is, but suddenly because they think they encountered Harry Connick Jr, Ginger Lynn, or Tony Randall they become this person's biggest fan espousing the brilliance of the superstar's work even if they were oblivious to the person's work previously.
What's even more deceptive (and I really only see this in religion, politics, and tv infomercials) are those people who can't build the trust in something for themselves so they try to convince everyone else of the veracity even though they don't believe it themselves. After they've convinced enough people, they may start believing what they are so heavily evangelizing themselves even though they have no more reason to believe it other than all these other people do.
While I believe that you may have a significant faith in Jesus Christ. You may trust in the beliefs of your parents. You may even dream or meditate or feel you've been touched by Jesus. You won't build a first hand relationship with Jesus unless Jesus is able to speak to you the same way your milkman does. And barring your being the wandering jew or this being the start of the apocolypse, that isn't going to happen.
All I'm saying is that it's much easier to trust in science since I can verify geometric proofs and repeat many of the foundation experiments with a chemistry set, wheels, inclined planes, and so forth. As I get older, I can go back and verify some of the foundational assumptions that our teachers handed to us on faith. True, I personally haven't seen the veracity of the double slit experiment or of measuring mercury's odd orbit, but it's much easier to put my faith in a group of independent people who've reached similar results than it is something like the Bible which seems to undermine its own truth the further along one reads.
I'm not a religion hater. As I said before, I know that science doesn't attempt to answer the same questions as theology. But I find a theology that can't adapt to reality (explanations of the earth's surface, ratio of a circle's diameter to circumference, and understanding of people's bodily functions) to be incompatible with reality and no more relevant to my personal theological questions than the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
But I hear people say that if religion is taken to be so fluid that there is no unwavering foundation like the Bible or God that the whole just falls apart. That's true if you are trying to manipulate people and subjugate them, but it's not true if you are trying to find answers (and heck sometimes even the questions) in theology. Where do we start to look for truth if the Bible has errors? That's probably the first question to ask ourselves.
Of course original homosexuality was wiped out with Noah's genetic and behaviorial bottleneck, right? Any gay man (whether due to genetics or whatever) wouldn't have reproduced to carry on such behaviors beyond the flood.
Therefore more modern forms of homosexuality must have been based on influences from those reading the sacred texts about homosexuality. So homosexuality must be a way to express devotion to God?
Of course, no religion on earth would side with this interpretation
And the political leaders can claim that gay people aren't excluded from getting married today, as long as they marry someone of the opposite sex and are miserable for the rest of their lives -- an eternal hell no doubt.
The story of Noah's ark is only ridiculus if you dont believe in an omnipotent God.
Which version of the Biblical flood myth are you referring? There are two in the Bible.
The one quite similar in many details to the Babylonian polytheistic flood myth and which God's motives seem almost schizophrenic
... or the one where it appears he's just an overzealous boss who keeps changing the project requirements without telling any of the people working on the project then decides to fire almost everyone and start over?
Please note that both biblical accounts are quite vicious and horrible. If you're only recollection of the flood is of a noble Noah picking all the animals and the glory of the dove and the promise of the rainbow, then you probably read (or were read) a sanitized version of the story that's "safe" for kids. If the flood story were made into a movie today, it'd be more accurately made by Quentin Tarintino than Disney.
We studied Ur in the 1970's in fifth grade ancient history class along with the Egyptians and others so it wasn't just a few years ago. There was even a board game from Ur. They sumerians didn't leave rules how to play it though, so the maker included the rules to Parchesi which was pretty cheesy.
You should refer to Jewish texts being a good resource. Christian editors changed the order of the scrolls when compiled into a codex and changed the meaning by translating to Greek, Latin, and then local languages. The changes aren't significant, but for an infallible source, something like the King James version has significant changes. (Look at the Ten Commandments versus the Jewish Decalogue; which one does everyone want to post in courthouses?)
Getting back to the subject of the ark, I do find it funny how some of these expeditions will find additional "historical facts" about their goal selectively drawn from polytheistic mythology (in this case of Marduk fighting Tiamat) yet they don't acknowledge that these myths offer no theological truth.
Finding the Ark might create a resurgence in the followers of the goddess of water and chaos rather than simply the Judeo Christian monotheistic diety.
Trying to establish biblical tales in the chronology of actual history is usually an attempt to "prove the truth" or "expose the fraud" of the bible. I find this tiring. Suppose they find a boat sealed with pitch? Suppose they find what looks to be a still nearby? There's no context other than what the expedition is trying to impose. History doesn't give the satisfactory answers to the questions that theology is trying to answer.
Trust is built from a person's knowledge and experience with someone else. (Your parents, friends, teachers, etc.) Faith, on the otherhand, is at best only second-hand trust for most people. You trust in the bible, God, Allah, Jesus, because someone else that you trust has said they trust in it. It's very hard to evaluate and build that trust first-hand yourself. With the different translations and interpretations of the bible, even RTFB doesn't always build trust. Trying to somehow "verify" the Bible with science is so sought after because people trust science more than they actually trust the bible (their faith may prevent them from admitting this though).
I have to say that it more than bugs me when I see the bible refer to pi as 3.0. This one mistake really blows my trust, but not my faith. Seeing more and more contradictions really makes me start to question how my parents reconciled these discrepencies. After reading enough of them it really makes me question my faith.
I don't pretend to give answers. But I recently started to read one of the best "intellectual examinations" on the Jewish version of the Old Testament. It's called God, A Biography and it's "agenda" is to explain God as an evolving character in a book. Quite deservedly, it won the pulitzer prize in biography because its quirky title is more than just a marketing effort. It really does try to be a good biography of God.
It doesn't try to explain away contradictions in the bible other than saying that God can change just as man can (and yes, I know some people who will find that fact alone to be sacrilege). The author doesn't seem to push either a pro or anti religious agenda. God is just a character. If you want, you can read it like you'd read the Cliff's Notes version of Hamlet strictly for a deeper understanding of the character portrayed in this book whether you "beleive" the book is the truth or not.
Having been nastily betrayed by two life long friends in the name of Christianity, I still don't feel that I'm ready to accept most churches as anything other than as organized political organizations. But I still have theological questions myself and this biography has been able to make more sense of the Bible and God. No clue where this will lead me in my spiritual journey (heck, I may even go back to agnosticism or athiesm), but it was a very helpful read.
No expeditions to Mt. Arrarat or carbon datings of the pollen found in the shroud of Turin is really going to come up with as satisfactory an answer. My apologies in advance if this is considered off-topic.
Caveats: Xcode's distributed compiling is fantastic. It was an unexpected gift and I know a number of people who have networks to make great use of it. But...
There is latency added to the compile process by having to distribute things out over the network. I think there was an Apple white paper or tech note that talked about these issues in more detail.
It needs a speedy network. Apple engineers recommend Gigabit Ethernet but 100baseT will due in a pinch. They don't see much speed savings over 10BaseT or Airport.
It needs fast processors. G5's are the recommended platform. Be wary of sub-Gigahertz G4's. Forget the G3's.
The distributed compilation feature is a GREAT addition to XCode, but I still see a place for this project among those who are really on a tight budget (like me) but who still want to support Macs when feasible.
This mascot is aimed at the effort to attract greater use of OpenOffice in the schools. I like the use of the bird and fish together to give a sense of "flocking" to "schools":-)
We're the ones who run the machinery here during this all-important war effort. What are they going to do if we won't work, for free, conscript us>
The air traffic controllers had a very similar attitude when they went on strike in the early eighties. All were fired immediately and replaced with under qualified scabs. No apologies. No negotiation. Of course today, these tactics have also been expanded to terrorists as well as cash thirsty employees trying to unionize.
Note: if these rules are being written with absoulute numbers like ($100,000) instead of relative numbers (like 10.45% over median standard white collar income) then this is bad news. This may sound generous now and not effect too many people, but the trend is that inflation goes up each year and politicians won't adjust absolute numbers unless there's a large, organized political outcry (e.g. minimum wage). Whatever the political motivations (libertarian, democrat, or republican) if the numbers are absolute, the writers know that by default the real cost of IT work is going to shrink. I think that this is bad no matter what party is backing this.
The new rules will greatly enhance worker protections and employer compliance, while modernizing these badly outdated regulations for the 21st century workplace.
--Senator Judd Gregg
This is taking the organizing mantras of unions and worker protection organizations and, in essence, using the government to unionize the employers. Of course, instead of working on suggested or required minimum wages like the unions demand, these rules appear to be setting the maximum wages that's of more concern to the bosses. Basically, these rules are still voluntary, but if everyone comes together and follows them, IT employees earning more than middle class wages will become the standard.
The IT employee will have three options:
Fall in line with these salary limits
Give up health and other benefits by working as a contracter
Start your own business
People who opt for Case 1 are good little workers (they probably aren't organized to make any complaints if these rules are changed or tightened in the future
People who opt for option 2 will still have to fight these maximums as the standards and even if bosses are still raked over the coals with high salaries, at least there's a huge cost savings by not having to pay benefits. Right now most people in this category aren't really independent anyway, they have a negotiator/pimp (like EDS, DiData, or others) that look on these rules as setting their profit margins. "Okay, looks like bosses are willing to pay three times the max salary for an Oracle programmer. We'll pay our programmers at just over 25% of the legislated max, and keep the remainder as profit."
Case three always an option, but it's likely anyone starting a business is going to be in for some hard free market realities. More than likely they'll be anxious to go back to the legal maxes if their business fails, and try and undercut the legal maxes just to get their business established.
Overall, whatever the numbers are. These organized maximums are a very bad idea if you're a programmer, no matter which political party is touting this idea.
If you bring the vector of politics into this research, the results are almost guaranteed to be unexpected.
If the experiment goes as planned and detects measurable precession, the specific data could be promoted as a valuable piece of military inteligence to make aiming devices, tracking weapons, and positioning systems just a bit more accurate than anyone else on earth (One press release did say that the results weren't being publicly released; just the general findings). Which of course leads to more funding of similar experiments.
If the experiment produces an unexpected result, but not due to obvious failure of the devices then the loudest voices arguing will be the scientests favoring a revolutionary overhaul to Einstenian physics. The more conservative scientests who say that devices just aren't sensitive enough to detect it will be lost in the noise. And the noise will lead to a call for more funding for more experiments.
If the experiment fails due to gross component problems, NASA can argue that they need much more money to fund even their most basic experiments. Not a good situation with all of the failures in recent history, but if people still want to go back into space the justification for more funding would be strong.
I haven't heard anything from this last group, but if you start hearing any codenames in the project or popular explanations for frame dropping using terms from like Isaiah or Joshua from the Bible (and their ability to apparently have an unexpected effect on solar gravity) then you'll know there's a strong political effort to win the appeal of the religious statesmen in our government... and by extension, win more funding.
Let's hope that my attitude about political vectors in funding this experiment now is far more cynical than the reality.
3d searching used to be tedious, boring, and made your eyeballs itch. Today I can search the google.com for "ddd" and get lightning fast results. We don't need yet another tool to make it even easier.
The two astounding accomplishments the article talks about are its look and sense of balance. I'm not at all impressed by the "look". The parts of the look that aren't engineered byproducts of function or construction seem to be design survey results of what a robot is expected to look like. Perhaps a Sony marketing group put in a lot of research into such a survey but it personally doesn't interest me.
The sense of balance does seem to be a well engineered accomplishment that they should be given high kudos for. Is the 5th symphony the best to demo this? Some Ravel or Tchicovsky would seem to have more of the challenging wild hand movements that this is being touted for.
Where I think they are being slightly misleading is that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is so well known for it's expressiveness over it's dynamics that it's implying that the robot understands and is putting forth this subtlety. Is it? That's not stated anywhere. The robot may be impressive but it probably no more understands it's goals beyond "wave hands" "compensate for balance" than Dirk the Daring understood the creepy dynamics of the Dragon's Lair video game.
Did they have audio sensors in different parts of the building? Was it recognizing tones tones of the trombone as overpowering the feeling of the strings (not just the volume) and try to suggest in it's movements? Could it tell if the drums were out of tempo? Could it respond if the woodwinds seemed flat? If it was able to do these things that would be far more impressive than merely demonstrating "balance" but I think most people hearing about the robot on their "soft news" shows will incorrectly assume that this thinking was what's being demoed by the robot.
Of course, a dynamic and emotional conductor could be even more interesting if done by a robot. The Brittish Trombone Society recounts some stories of that debut night (of works prior to the 5th) that would be even wilder if one could imagine a Terminator or RoboCop like individual conducting:
Another commentator, Ferdinand Ries, described the calamity of the Choral Fantasia, when a clarinettist made an eight-bar repeat by mistake. "Beethoven leapt up in a fury, turned around and abused the orchestra players in the coarsest terms and so loudly that he could be heard throughout the auditorium. Finally he shouted 'From the beginning!'. When the concert was over, the artists... fell into a great rage. They swore they would never play again if Beethoven were in the orchestra".
If you haven't passed your misery tolerance level yet, read on. These were the days when conductors lead from the piano, and according to Ignaz von Seyfried, in the Piano Concerto, "forgetting that he was soloist, he jumped up and down and began to conduct in his own peculiar fashion. At the first sforzando, he threw his arms so wide that he knocked over both lamps from the music stand of piano. The audience laughed and Beethoven was so beside himself that he stopped the orchestra and made them start again." Two choirboys held the lamps this time. "When the fatal sforzando burst forth, one poor boy received from Beethoven's right hand such a sharp slap on the face that, terrified, he dropped the lamp to the floor. The other boy succeeded in avoiding the blow by ducking in time. If the audience laughed the first time, they now indulged in a truly bacchanalian riot. Beethoven broke out in such a fury that when he struck the first chord of the solo, he broke six strings."
I'd certainly pay for a robotic conductor to shout "You have 10 seconds to comply!" or to see a choir boy be knocked across the hall with the emotive fury of the conductor:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Mathematicians define "even" as an integer that has no remainder when divided by two. Therefore 0%2 = 0 must make zero even, right?
Want to bet? Don't try to explain with mathematician's logic about even and odd to Vito and Johnny at the roulette wheel. They consider a bet on "Even" to be a loss if you come up with 0.
Their logic is based on an inductive argument rather than an arbitrary definiton. A 6 pack of beer can be evenly halved without sharing a can. If Vito has no six packs of beer, how can he give half of that to Johnny? Vito has the same amount that he had before halving as Johnny does afterwards so by this logic, declaring zero as neither odd nor even is just as intuitive as declaring a countable infinity as both odd and even.
I realize it's convenient for mathematicians to use the shorthand that zero is even because most of the properties they'd observe would have to make an exception for zero otherwise when most "work" just fine with zero. But that doesn't mean that theirs is the only definition in use today.
The first one that comes to my mind is "Eight to Twelve Years at Hard Labor" but I'm perhaps a little too quick to rule out capital measures.
- Tron, Wargames, or other computer movie
- DVD commercials for Mac OS X Tiger
- iTunes & Quicktime installers if run on Win or Mac
- Full versions of a few Mac OS X only games
Pay the Kellogg's Cereal Company to include these discs on all of it's kids cereals including Frosted Flakes (with the Tony the Tiger mascot) and Apple Jacks.Of course, the movie's will probably have to be censored to get them down to the G rating that parents assume such things will be.
If these requirements aren't really needed then it's just a marketing plan to encourage adoption. If the accounting department budgets for these massive upgrades an IT department will upgrade more machines (rather than tell accounting "No we really don't need all that money") which of course will lead to faster and wider adoption than just the "cutting edge" which they budgeted for. It will make Microsoft and everyone's IT department's look like they are saving massive amounts of money.
If these requirements are really used, it'll be to support the huge DRM encryption and decryption lock-ins at all levels of the computer hardware. This makes things like DVD's and CD's lower cost on Windows. But If everything is encrypted, your data will be locked in as well and you'll be glad to pay whatever "protection fee" MS markets (in the form of service plans and OS upgrades) because you'll have no other way to get use your own data.
Apple has a lot of superstition about it's version numbers of anything. It used to be bad to number something 3 because of the bad reception that the Apple /// computer got. I think the even / odd started when Apple released System 7.5 and of the various updates 7.5.3 and 7.5.5 were the most stable. (Was 7.5.4 even officially released?) One thing that contributed to this was that Apple didn't start working on bug fixes for a product until after the product was released. (That also made the release date harder to set because they tried to fix all beta-tester reports before it went "gold".)
Today, Apple seems to take a different approach so I'd argue that much of the even / odd quality issues are simply superstition. (Note that mathematically zero is neither even nor odd).
It seems that a release date is set based on marketing forces (NAB conference, back to school sales season, etc). From this a final development date is determined and set (two or three weeks prior? who knows). If they find show-stopper bugs, the release date turns into an announce date and they ship the product ASAP after that.
Other bugs (non-showstoppers) exist in all software though some are more obvious than others. The known minor bugs have Apple Knowledge Base articles written about them. They describe the remaining bugs and give work-arounds if known and are made public when the software is released. Though initial releases will still have bugs (and always will) at least they are better documented than in the old Apple.
Apple appears to start a bug fix version immediately after the development version is finalized, but before it's released. To old Apple watchers, it probably seems strange to be working on the bug fix release before the original version is put in boxes and made public, but it helps spot the unforgivable show-stopper bugs, document the workarounds for the minor bugs, and have things in full motion for when the end-user bug reports start coming in.
Perhaps Apple has picked up more habits from the open software development community than we knew.
User Interface changes / updates
Be careful what you ask for, you may get it. Improvements to some people may be vast setbacks to others. Some people love the flashy metal interface. Some people ignore Expose (until they panic after accidentally hit the F11 key when reaching for backspace). There will undoubtedly be changes in interface (it's what's Apple is known for) but I'd make any complaints you have now as constructive as possible.
Free Price
If there are flashy new additions, significant speed increases, or some new technology enabled this will not be a free upgrade. Apple's earnings recently show significant revenue from software that just about equals their hardware sales. (Although this doesn't hold true with the latest earnings due to the iPod platform sales skewing things). Apple will continue to milk an annual OS sale unless the OS just isn't something they feel is worth the money.
Carbon Cocoa Parity
This is already on-going and has been for several years in the form of Core* libraries like CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics establishing a common, procedural implementation underneath both. It's a slow process to do it well and we've gone through a couple of WWDC's where they say it's still in progress. As long as they don't give up on these efforts, I think this extra layer of abstraction to truly support their object-oriented and procedural libraries is the "right thing to do". I know it's slow to do it right, but I still hope they make significant progress for 10.4.
Windows/Linux Support
Unless Apple actually moves Mac OS X to Intel hardware, binary compatability isn't going to happen. What would be good is building more support for other API's on top of the Mac OS Core* libraries so that it's very simple to port many Windows and Linux apps to Mac OS X. I never thought they'd reconcile Carbon and Cocoa, but what if these teams start working to move a COM or GTK higher level library? As long as the ports are one-way (to Apple products) I think it stands a possibility.
Non-Apple Hardware Intel Support
Technically, with Darwin and the cleaner Core* libraries, the process would be much easier than in the past. Financially, Apple isn't "just a hardware company" anymore so it may make sense. But is there a market for their software on non-Apple hardware? Look at Shake for a case study. From an Apple accountant perspective they don't care if you buy the Mac or Linux version. You'll buy a G5 ($2K) and Shake for Mac ($3K) or get Shake for Linux ($5K). To the accountant, it's like selling a Shake+G5 bundle for $5K, and simply removing the G5 for the Linux bundle (still at $5K). Heck, if it weren't for the development costs, the Linux version would be even more profitable. So what about a Mac OS port? The $130 Mac OS X version would sell zero copies if priced at $2,130 (no matter what hardware), but Mac OS X Server ($3K) might sell to a few businesses if ported to Intel even at $5K. The price seems high to me, but then again there are businesses who pay similar sums for the Windows Server products so who can say.
Communications Improvements :-)
IPv6? iChat updates? QuickTime Conferencing revival? The version number is 10-4 after all. (A common term in old CB slang)
Apple (Computer, Inc.) has had a thing for codenames even back to the days of the Apple ][e (Diana) and Apple /// (Sara). They were ignored by the general public and simply enabled engineers to communicate about their project without having to have the legal and marketing departments involved.
During the exile of Steve Jobs, Apple had many more projects under development than were being released. Apple started talking about projects in their R&D department (like WildCard) before they were made into a product (like Hypercard) and before these names were run by legal and marketing. This certainly fit in the Scully|Spindler|Amelio philosophy of letting the world see and smell what you have baking even if they can't actually taste it yet. It was during this time that the general public was exposed to the anticipation and delight of a good codename can inspire.
After Steve Jobs returned, Apple's internal kitchens were closed. But they still used codenames to talk about future products. They started by naming runs of things similarly. Operating Systems were named after types of music (Allegro, Sonata, Rhapsody). When the huge division developed between Mac OS 9 and X, codenames changed to be various versions of twilight for Classic Mac OS (starlight, moonlight, etc.) and various big cats for Mac OS X (Cheetah, Puma). About the time that Puma was getting ready for release people started to specualte what was next (Jaguar and then ?).
Because of this public scruity, Apple has taken what was just a sassy internal form of communication ("The Ric Ford Release", "7-up", etc) and turned it into a term that had to have legal and marketing approval. People were now looking at what the codenames meant. At this point, now that the terms are carefully scrutinized before the public ever hears them, they don't mean anything other than a tarted-up pointer to a project. Reading anything into them today merely gives insight into the marketing (and maybe legal) department rather than engineering.
Take for example the codename Merlot. According to different people this was a codename for Mac OS X v 10.2.x+, v 10.3, and now 10.4. What does it mean? People have speculated endlessly. It's not the name of a cat so it must be a change in direction for Apple, right? Maybe it's the name of a secret technology or UI enhancement that Apple just keeps delaying because it's not quite ready, maybe? Forget the speculation on the term Merlot. It may have been a codename and in fact may still be a codename, but it doesn't mean anything anymore.
While Apple's codenames used to be clever, sassy, inside jokes in many cases, today that aspect of Apple culture has been stopped because of too much public scrutiny. You don't get trademarks on real codenames, yet Tiger and some other cat names have already been registered for Apple. Though at one time these were clever bits of insight on Apple's internal thinking, today they are meaningless marketing labels.
In the early 1990's, Mac's ruled my university's computer labs. Though I used vector programs for my engineering studies, my roommate was Industrial Design major so he was always talking about the paint apps.
The hot "paint" program back then was something called "PixelPaint" and it seriously grabbed the Architecture and Industrial Design students of the day. Everyone wanted it because of it's large pallete size, gradiant fills, and razor-like precision.
One day, a program called PhotoShop showed up in the labs (legally installed by a student who forgot to delete it before s/he left). It was cool, but PixelPaint still out classed it. Every line you drew was "fuzzy". The pallete size was so big, that it was hard to select a particular color. And overall, things just seemed blurry even when printing or copy/pasting to another app.
The designer's names were in the about box and I actually saw the lead developer post to the comp.sys.mac.* usenet newsgroups so I wrote him some email to complain about this horrible little app in both it's interface and ability.
He actually responded to my critiques and spent some time explaining just how programs like "PixelPaint" could really only make good-looking "on-screen" graphics due to low colors and resolutions. His app "PhotoShop" was aiming at photographic images where razor-sharp lines looked fake. He even replied about my suggested interface improvements and told me what they had planned for the next version which was even better than what I suggested.
This really impressed me. I know that this type of interaction between commercial programmer and user doesn't exist anymore, but it was amazing the patience that he used to point out my misunderstandings (and I wasn't even a real customer at the time).
The interaction I've had with the GIMP community hasn't impressed me. I'm a little more technically savvy than some of the Mac users out there, but getting the GIMP installed and usable is a pain. The GIMP is capable of a lot of things, but its defaults really don't impress me. I feel like I really have to work to get it out of PixelPaint mode into Photoshop mode (and I'm not really knowledgeable enough to say that I get those changes right). The online communities just aren't as open or friendly to answer the questions that I've asked even if I've tried reading TFM and FAQ.
If I were tight for money, I think I'd pay my bucks for GraphicConverter (a Mac shareware app that has a similar PixelPaint feel) rather than waste the time on the GIMP.
I'm a big supporter of Open Source software, but I've thought for a while that a group of people really need to decouple the engine from the interface and produce a "better" photo manipulation software in the way that Camino (and later Firefox) successfully rebuilt alternative user experiences on the Mozilla web-browsing engine.
It bothers me because the unit of measure was a cubit. This is a measure that they are comfortable working with and I believe stating approximate half or quarter values of a cubit. I can see understand that they may not have said the fountain was 31.4 units in diameter but it's harder to overlook a measurement rounding of 31 instead of 31 and 1/2 cubits. It's even more silly that they were off by almost 1.4 units.
And it's not just because they are ancient. The Greeks had a value of pi to at least five decimal places. Of course they understood what pi was. The writers of the bible were just trying to observe reality.
I appreciate your willingness to overlook such errors when trying to rationalize these discrepencies, but I'm not as patient. This is the same compilation of ancient scrollwork that says we should kill homosexuals, that we should mutilate our genitals, that we should burn animal sacrifices, that we should kill rather than understand each other. If such a basic truth as trying to observe a temple that was built is in error, I have much more grave reservations about the less verifiable truths that I'm supposed to accept without question.
But I only started with pi because this is a geeky board. There are so many other places in the Bible which just scream out to me that it's either inconsistent with my understanding of reality or it's inconsitent with itself. But without going into another long, off-topic, and unwelcome diatribe on all of these things that hit me personally as "why does this seem wrong?"
The Shakers believed that the only people who had a first hand relationship with the divine were those who had what appeared to be epileptic seizures. Some scholars believe that St. John was a very pious man but with a respect for an era he did not live and a particular taste for strange mushrooms which created his perception of a first hand relationship with God.
I have enormous respect for the work of Harry Houdini, though I don't think I will ever have a first hand relationship with him. (Even though he has said he will try to contact this world from the afterlife). I think that many people mistake total respect for their beliefs and the beliefs of their parents as faith or even a first hand relationship with a divine power.
This isn't even including the superstar phenomenon. Many people (as evidenced by the weekly world news and national enquirer) feel they encounter a superstar in their supermarket or laundromat. It may not even really be the person they think it is, but suddenly because they think they encountered Harry Connick Jr, Ginger Lynn, or Tony Randall they become this person's biggest fan espousing the brilliance of the superstar's work even if they were oblivious to the person's work previously.
What's even more deceptive (and I really only see this in religion, politics, and tv infomercials) are those people who can't build the trust in something for themselves so they try to convince everyone else of the veracity even though they don't believe it themselves. After they've convinced enough people, they may start believing what they are so heavily evangelizing themselves even though they have no more reason to believe it other than all these other people do.
While I believe that you may have a significant faith in Jesus Christ. You may trust in the beliefs of your parents. You may even dream or meditate or feel you've been touched by Jesus. You won't build a first hand relationship with Jesus unless Jesus is able to speak to you the same way your milkman does. And barring your being the wandering jew or this being the start of the apocolypse, that isn't going to happen.
All I'm saying is that it's much easier to trust in science since I can verify geometric proofs and repeat many of the foundation experiments with a chemistry set, wheels, inclined planes, and so forth. As I get older, I can go back and verify some of the foundational assumptions that our teachers handed to us on faith. True, I personally haven't seen the veracity of the double slit experiment or of measuring mercury's odd orbit, but it's much easier to put my faith in a group of independent people who've reached similar results than it is something like the Bible which seems to undermine its own truth the further along one reads.
I'm not a religion hater. As I said before, I know that science doesn't attempt to answer the same questions as theology. But I find a theology that can't adapt to reality (explanations of the earth's surface, ratio of a circle's diameter to circumference, and understanding of people's bodily functions) to be incompatible with reality and no more relevant to my personal theological questions than the Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
But I hear people say that if religion is taken to be so fluid that there is no unwavering foundation like the Bible or God that the whole just falls apart. That's true if you are trying to manipulate people and subjugate them, but it's not true if you are trying to find answers (and heck sometimes even the questions) in theology. Where do we start to look for truth if the Bible has errors? That's probably the first question to ask ourselves.
Therefore more modern forms of homosexuality must have been based on influences from those reading the sacred texts about homosexuality. So homosexuality must be a way to express devotion to God?
Of course, no religion on earth would side with this interpretation
And the political leaders can claim that gay people aren't excluded from getting married today, as long as they marry someone of the opposite sex and are miserable for the rest of their lives -- an eternal hell no doubt.
The one quite similar in many details to the Babylonian polytheistic flood myth and which God's motives seem almost schizophrenic
Please note that both biblical accounts are quite vicious and horrible. If you're only recollection of the flood is of a noble Noah picking all the animals and the glory of the dove and the promise of the rainbow, then you probably read (or were read) a sanitized version of the story that's "safe" for kids. If the flood story were made into a movie today, it'd be more accurately made by Quentin Tarintino than Disney.
Adobe did (finally) Carbonize Photoshop for Mac OS X. :-)
You should refer to Jewish texts being a good resource. Christian editors changed the order of the scrolls when compiled into a codex and changed the meaning by translating to Greek, Latin, and then local languages. The changes aren't significant, but for an infallible source, something like the King James version has significant changes. (Look at the Ten Commandments versus the Jewish Decalogue; which one does everyone want to post in courthouses?)
Getting back to the subject of the ark, I do find it funny how some of these expeditions will find additional "historical facts" about their goal selectively drawn from polytheistic mythology (in this case of Marduk fighting Tiamat) yet they don't acknowledge that these myths offer no theological truth.
Finding the Ark might create a resurgence in the followers of the goddess of water and chaos rather than simply the Judeo Christian monotheistic diety.
Trust is built from a person's knowledge and experience with someone else. (Your parents, friends, teachers, etc.) Faith, on the otherhand, is at best only second-hand trust for most people. You trust in the bible, God, Allah, Jesus, because someone else that you trust has said they trust in it. It's very hard to evaluate and build that trust first-hand yourself. With the different translations and interpretations of the bible, even RTFB doesn't always build trust. Trying to somehow "verify" the Bible with science is so sought after because people trust science more than they actually trust the bible (their faith may prevent them from admitting this though).
I have to say that it more than bugs me when I see the bible refer to pi as 3.0. This one mistake really blows my trust, but not my faith. Seeing more and more contradictions really makes me start to question how my parents reconciled these discrepencies. After reading enough of them it really makes me question my faith.
I don't pretend to give answers. But I recently started to read one of the best "intellectual examinations" on the Jewish version of the Old Testament. It's called God, A Biography and it's "agenda" is to explain God as an evolving character in a book. Quite deservedly, it won the pulitzer prize in biography because its quirky title is more than just a marketing effort. It really does try to be a good biography of God.
It doesn't try to explain away contradictions in the bible other than saying that God can change just as man can (and yes, I know some people who will find that fact alone to be sacrilege). The author doesn't seem to push either a pro or anti religious agenda. God is just a character. If you want, you can read it like you'd read the Cliff's Notes version of Hamlet strictly for a deeper understanding of the character portrayed in this book whether you "beleive" the book is the truth or not.
Having been nastily betrayed by two life long friends in the name of Christianity, I still don't feel that I'm ready to accept most churches as anything other than as organized political organizations. But I still have theological questions myself and this biography has been able to make more sense of the Bible and God. No clue where this will lead me in my spiritual journey (heck, I may even go back to agnosticism or athiesm), but it was a very helpful read.
No expeditions to Mt. Arrarat or carbon datings of the pollen found in the shroud of Turin is really going to come up with as satisfactory an answer. My apologies in advance if this is considered off-topic.
Caveats: Xcode's distributed compiling is fantastic. It was an unexpected gift and I know a number of people who have networks to make great use of it. But...
There is latency added to the compile process by having to distribute things out over the network. I think there was an Apple white paper or tech note that talked about these issues in more detail.
It needs a speedy network. Apple engineers recommend Gigabit Ethernet but 100baseT will due in a pinch. They don't see much speed savings over 10BaseT or Airport.
It needs fast processors. G5's are the recommended platform. Be wary of sub-Gigahertz G4's. Forget the G3's.
The distributed compilation feature is a GREAT addition to XCode, but I still see a place for this project among those who are really on a tight budget (like me) but who still want to support Macs when feasible.
This mascot is aimed at the effort to attract greater use of OpenOffice in the schools. I like the use of the bird and fish together to give a sense of "flocking" to "schools" :-)
The air traffic controllers had a very similar attitude when they went on strike in the early eighties. All were fired immediately and replaced with under qualified scabs. No apologies. No negotiation. Of course today, these tactics have also been expanded to terrorists as well as cash thirsty employees trying to unionize.
The IT employee will have three options:
- Fall in line with these salary limits
- Give up health and other benefits by working as a contracter
- Start your own business
People who opt for Case 1 are good little workers (they probably aren't organized to make any complaints if these rules are changed or tightened in the future People who opt for option 2 will still have to fight these maximums as the standards and even if bosses are still raked over the coals with high salaries, at least there's a huge cost savings by not having to pay benefits. Right now most people in this category aren't really independent anyway, they have a negotiator/pimp (like EDS, DiData, or others) that look on these rules as setting their profit margins. "Okay, looks like bosses are willing to pay three times the max salary for an Oracle programmer. We'll pay our programmers at just over 25% of the legislated max, and keep the remainder as profit."Case three always an option, but it's likely anyone starting a business is going to be in for some hard free market realities. More than likely they'll be anxious to go back to the legal maxes if their business fails, and try and undercut the legal maxes just to get their business established.
Overall, whatever the numbers are. These organized maximums are a very bad idea if you're a programmer, no matter which political party is touting this idea.
If the experiment goes as planned and detects measurable precession, the specific data could be promoted as a valuable piece of military inteligence to make aiming devices, tracking weapons, and positioning systems just a bit more accurate than anyone else on earth (One press release did say that the results weren't being publicly released; just the general findings). Which of course leads to more funding of similar experiments.
If the experiment produces an unexpected result, but not due to obvious failure of the devices then the loudest voices arguing will be the scientests favoring a revolutionary overhaul to Einstenian physics. The more conservative scientests who say that devices just aren't sensitive enough to detect it will be lost in the noise. And the noise will lead to a call for more funding for more experiments.
If the experiment fails due to gross component problems, NASA can argue that they need much more money to fund even their most basic experiments. Not a good situation with all of the failures in recent history, but if people still want to go back into space the justification for more funding would be strong.
I haven't heard anything from this last group, but if you start hearing any codenames in the project or popular explanations for frame dropping using terms from like Isaiah or Joshua from the Bible (and their ability to apparently have an unexpected effect on solar gravity) then you'll know there's a strong political effort to win the appeal of the religious statesmen in our government... and by extension, win more funding.
Let's hope that my attitude about political vectors in funding this experiment now is far more cynical than the reality.
With my sketching abilities I'd probably have a wealth of pictures in the genre of:
- various forms of penile-nasal insertion
- lesbian ear lobe on ear lobe action
- sexual situations with diamondbacks replacing the penis
And don't forget the shock photos held on that infamous caprine-named site that would be returned just by being a bit too loose with one's sketch.3d searching used to be tedious, boring, and made your eyeballs itch. Today I can search the google.com for "ddd" and get lightning fast results. We don't need yet another tool to make it even easier.
The sense of balance does seem to be a well engineered accomplishment that they should be given high kudos for. Is the 5th symphony the best to demo this? Some Ravel or Tchicovsky would seem to have more of the challenging wild hand movements that this is being touted for.
Where I think they are being slightly misleading is that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is so well known for it's expressiveness over it's dynamics that it's implying that the robot understands and is putting forth this subtlety. Is it? That's not stated anywhere. The robot may be impressive but it probably no more understands it's goals beyond "wave hands" "compensate for balance" than Dirk the Daring understood the creepy dynamics of the Dragon's Lair video game.
Did they have audio sensors in different parts of the building? Was it recognizing tones tones of the trombone as overpowering the feeling of the strings (not just the volume) and try to suggest in it's movements? Could it tell if the drums were out of tempo? Could it respond if the woodwinds seemed flat? If it was able to do these things that would be far more impressive than merely demonstrating "balance" but I think most people hearing about the robot on their "soft news" shows will incorrectly assume that this thinking was what's being demoed by the robot.
Of course, a dynamic and emotional conductor could be even more interesting if done by a robot. The Brittish Trombone Society recounts some stories of that debut night (of works prior to the 5th) that would be even wilder if one could imagine a Terminator or RoboCop like individual conducting:
I'd certainly pay for a robotic conductor to shout "You have 10 seconds to comply!" or to see a choir boy be knocked across the hall with the emotive fury of the conductor