There's way too much work on insect-level locomotion. Brooks was doing this stuff twenty years ago, and took it about as far as it's going to go.
I don't think that's true. There was an article in Discover a month or two ago (can't find it online, sorry, but I believe it parallels the linked article) where a researcher was trying to tease more information out of a cockroach's walk, discovering that it doesn't actually use a three-feet-down-all-the-time approach but wobbles side to side, remaining dynamically stable as it walks. This is not what you might intuit by simply watching insects walk.
As for "too much" being done, I must disagree. Walking robots aren't as good as they can be or it'd be perfected by now. Wheels are faster, but only over ideal terrain; complicated terrain that would confound the best wheels can often be navigated by legged animals. NASA's interplanetary rovers all use wheels, and all of them eventually encounter situations where they're useless, so if they could deploy a robot lander that could walk effectively (and efficiently), it'd be of tremendous value to them.
s has been pointed out, again and again, this is not about trademark. It is about an agreement that Apple Computers signed stating they would not get into the music business.
An agreement which was created and signed because of trademark issues over the word "Apple". Please don't muddle the issue with semantics.
the fact remains that Apple Computers are now, very firmly, in the music industry.
Depending on your definition of "music industry". Apple is reselling music online and building their own MP3 players, but that's a far cry from recording and distributing music in the way the "music industry" does. Likewise, Apple Records does not own its own stores either online or off, AFAIK. Apple is no more entering the "music industry" than, say, Best Buy.
Re:This is not right...
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
This is a scandalous money grab. Apple Records had absolutely no contribution to the success of Apple Computer and its iTunes store, or its iPod.
That is completely not the point. The issue is trademark confusion. Apple Records has been around much longer than Apple Computer, but as long as Apple Computer stayed out of the music business,there was no real risk of confusion and the law allows them both to be "Apple".
If, however, the iTunes Music Store is associated with Apple Computer, then there's a real risk of people assuming that "Apple Records" or "Apple Music" refers to the online iTMS, which it doesn't. Identity is a powerful force in industries of all kinds, which is why marketing departments exist at all.
My two cents: Apple's gone out of their way to refer to the music store as the "iTunes Music Store" and to avoid putting their company name on it unless absolutely necessary. This is good from a legal sense, and doubtless will work in their favor when courtroom proceedings are taking place.
Couldn't Apple just spin off the music part into a separate operating company like "iTunes, Inc." and be done with it?
They could, but they don't want to. However, you'll note that at no point in time did Apple ever refer to the iTunes Music Store as the "Apple Music Store" or even "Mac User Store". It's not just because of branding that they have taken pains to call it "iTunes" and distance the word "Apple" from the store as much as possible.
How can you call it a "straw man" when it's entirely accurate as an argument? The "stable" Wikipedia you mention does not yet exist, and therefore arguing that the article writer should have used it instead of the "bleeding edge" Wikipedia is silly.
01010010000110100100111010101010010110010101101010 1001001110100100001010101... Where's the structure in that, huh? But drag it into *Tableau*, and I'll betcha it gives you a pretty picture!
It sure does, and I wish you'd told us it was NSFW before posting it....
saying a person better have a PhD in Industrial Design before calling an Apple product ugly? That is ridiculous
If he just said it was ugly, that would be an opinion and I'd respond to it as such. But he said "couldn't they think of a better design?", which is less an opinion than a criticism to the professional skills of designers far more experienced.
1. You will now see a million wires coming out of the right side of the machine, hanging in mid-air and visible at all times.
They actually attach behind the right side, and can be threaded through the base to keep them out of sight. And if you don't like 'em, get it configured with Bluetooth and WiFi -- like the sidebar sez, all you'll need then is a power cord, which connects to the back center of the machine and is even harder to see.
2. All that white space at the bottom of the display makes it look like a waste of space (of course it's probably used for the internal electronics, but geez, couldn't they think of a better design?).
You'd better have a PhD in industrial design if you're criticizing Apple on those grounds. I think it looks just fine, and besides, they gotta put the Apple logo somewhere.
3. The display now only rotates in one single dimension (either tilts up or down) as opposed to the previous iMac multi-dimensions of fredom).
Well, yeah... you can just turn the whole base now, can't you? I imagine turning the monitor on the base would make it potentially unstable, but I'm certain it would make it uglier.
4. That base seems awefully inadecuate for so much weight on top of it. Seems like if it is very easy to drop the display sideways if you have a crouded desk and move things around a lot.
Yes, it's a convincing illusion, isn't it? C'mon, they have people to think of things like that.
5. This design has been created before by the big guys (IBM and Compaq/HP I think had/have something similar), why not come up with something as cool as the iPod? (it's a shame they say on the website "from the creators of iPod" - if I was one of the iPod designers I'd be shamed...).
Open your eyes, please... the design is supposed to remind you of the iPod, both from the front and the side views.
6. And how about a $999 model?
Want to have your cake and eat it too, don't you? Maybe next year when this year's models are on clearance.
I thought the original reason Apple put the CD/DVD drive in the base of the iMac and avoided a design like this was because their engineers said it was better to have the disc spinning while flat. Did they change their mind, or is the hardware just better now that they can mount the CD behind the monitor at an angle like this?
When I was moving out of the dorm my sophomore year, my brother was there helping. We left his Powerbook laptop in my unlocked dorm for not more than two minutes, and it was gone without a trace when we returned. This was on move-out day, when virtually nobody was in the building anyway. Obviously, one crook knew that and was taking advantage of it.
Like he said, NEVER leave your room open, no matter who you think is or isn't around.
Sorry, I just don't understand why the sequel consistently seems to rate higher with the general public.
From a sheer sci-fi/futurism perspective, it does a good job of taking the original's idea of a universe traversed by space "truckers" working for cynical corporations and adds space Marines, greedy corporate bastards and colonial families. In addition, it fleshes out the alien life cycle by asking and answering the obvious question: who's laying all the eggs?
Add that to the fact that Cameron expanded a cliche horror flick that happened to be set in space to a fairly novel horror/action flick set in... well, space, with characters you actually got interested in over time. (This was his strength in "Terminator 2" as well: taking what could be a by-the-numbers action/FX film and adding good, solid characterization to the ENTIRE cast.) "Aliens" may have played up the cliches itself, but it was a more-than-worthy successor, and a lot of sci-fi today owes tribute to it in some way, shape or form.
Direct Connect, for the three or four of you that don't already know, doesn't work like Napster or KaZaA. The hubs are sometimes public, but in these cases admission to the hub required you to share your own collection for free as well. So the hub owners are not only sharing music with a select membership, they require their members to share large amounts of music as well.
They were copying, trading, and encouraging others to do the same in large quantities. I don't like seeing people's hard drives raided for any reason, but it's pretty clear these five folks didn't have a leg to stand on.
The fact is that both sexes are equally promiscuous -- perhaps for different reasons, perhaps not, but everyone pretty much screws around equally.
Indeed? Is this before or after birth control was introduced to civilization at large? In parts of this country (and other countries) where victimization of women is far more widespread, birth control is nearly non-existent, abortion clinics are few and far between and HIV is epidemic, you'd be hard-pressed to find females who are as promiscuous as your average alpha male.
Men there have the power to take sex when they want it badly enough and then walk away from the consequences. Women don't. Even if they escape the baby and HIV, they risk being ostracized by their families in a way men just plain don't. It's really as simple as that.
Re:What a week for women's rights
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In one hundred years we've developed flight, space travel, nuclear physics, gene therapy, and global digital communications networks, but we still can't get past treating women like property instead of people.
There are some things that are simply built into the genes. Human men are compelled to have sex without commitment; women are compelled to form commitments. It's a broad generalization, but all of anthropology, sociology and natural biology boil down to this simple axiom.
You can try to deny it, argue it, or change it, but human nature will always defeat you in the end. The successful social institutions are the ones that use this nature to achieve good ends, the way democracy uses selfishness to achieve good government. Marriage, in essence, is a way of getting men to commit to a woman and her children by promising him an available sexual partner at all times.
Pornography in all its myriad forms, including "virtual girlfriends", is a way to give men (limited) sexual gratification without bothering with a relationship. Romance novels and movies do the same by giving women a relationship fantasy they can enjoy without an actual partner. Both businesses have been spectacularly successful over the decades because those principles are true.
For exactly which economic bracket is $20 considered "disposable"? I consider myself middle-class, and I'm not going to throw anything away unless it cost under $8, if I can help it.
OK, so somebody found two documents that have the same digest. This doesn't mean that they can construct a document to match any given digest. Even it did, the document so constructed would be gibberish.
IANACE (I Am Not A Crypto Expert), but the application here isn't encrypting documents, but passwords. If I have a password which, when encrypted, is identical to your encrypted password, then I can use it to log into your account whether I know your actual password or not.
The only time I've used crypto functions is in web development. It's foolish to store passwords in an Access database in plaintext, so you encrypt them in your code and then compare it to your encrypted password in the database. That way, nobody can use the passwords even if they steal the database -- unless it's possible to find a collision within a reasonable amount of time.
The only reason I spend big bucks in their music store is because the DRM has been broken through the Hymn project.
Psst... you could always burn your downloaded iTMS music to CD-RW and then rip it to MP3 again. If you're determined to break their DRM, why not do it the most obvious and non-hackable way possible?
only one tiny gripe
on
Broken Angels
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm partway through Altered Carbon right now, and I'm enjoying it for what it is, which is a cyberpunk-inspired thriller rather than what I consider "true" science fiction.
I found it interesting, and somehow disappointing, that the premise of this story relies on the "needlecast", which is just this author's renaming of the ansible, which is Ursule K. le Guin's/Orson Scott Card's method of transmitting data faster than light throughout the universe. With it, a digitized person can be transmitted from one colonized system to another instantaneously; without it, space travel is hardly improved.
Why is this a problem for me? I don't know, exactly. Ansibles are no more or less possible (based on known science) than digitizing the entire human mind. Maybe I just don't like my sci-fi to assume more than one impossible thing at a time.
How frigging arrogant would we have to be to honestly believe that in the ENTIRE universe, we are COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNIQUE?
Congratulations, you may be the first person I've ever known to argue for the existence of intelligent life on other planets solely by using an ad hominem attack.
Will Apple ever allow the Mac line to be made outside the company again, as it was in the Jean Louis Gassée days?
When Apple licensed clones of their computers, it was intended to broaden the MacOS userbase. What happened instead was the MacOS userbase remained the same size, and Apple lost money to the clonemakers. Thus they soon rescinded the licenses and went back to doing what they always did.
Doubtless this is part of the reason Apple's reluctant to license FairPlay. As long as they control both it and the iPod hardware, they can keep the iPod/iTunes experience Insanely Great(TM) and make more money to boot. But until the iPod and iTMS actually reach monopoly levels of domination, licensing FairPlay would just decrease the quality of that experience without increasing Apple's marketshare.
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There's way too much work on insect-level locomotion. Brooks was doing this stuff twenty years ago, and took it about as far as it's going to go.
I don't think that's true. There was an article in Discover a month or two ago (can't find it online, sorry, but I believe it parallels the linked article) where a researcher was trying to tease more information out of a cockroach's walk, discovering that it doesn't actually use a three-feet-down-all-the-time approach but wobbles side to side, remaining dynamically stable as it walks. This is not what you might intuit by simply watching insects walk.
As for "too much" being done, I must disagree. Walking robots aren't as good as they can be or it'd be perfected by now. Wheels are faster, but only over ideal terrain; complicated terrain that would confound the best wheels can often be navigated by legged animals. NASA's interplanetary rovers all use wheels, and all of them eventually encounter situations where they're useless, so if they could deploy a robot lander that could walk effectively (and efficiently), it'd be of tremendous value to them.
s has been pointed out, again and again, this is not about trademark. It is about an agreement that Apple Computers signed stating they would not get into the music business.
An agreement which was created and signed because of trademark issues over the word "Apple". Please don't muddle the issue with semantics.
the fact remains that Apple Computers are now, very firmly, in the music industry.
Depending on your definition of "music industry". Apple is reselling music online and building their own MP3 players, but that's a far cry from recording and distributing music in the way the "music industry" does. Likewise, Apple Records does not own its own stores either online or off, AFAIK. Apple is no more entering the "music industry" than, say, Best Buy.
This is a scandalous money grab. Apple Records had absolutely no contribution to the success of Apple Computer and its iTunes store, or its iPod.
,there was no real risk of confusion and the law allows them both to be "Apple".
That is completely not the point. The issue is trademark confusion. Apple Records has been around much longer than Apple Computer, but as long as Apple Computer stayed out of the music business
If, however, the iTunes Music Store is associated with Apple Computer, then there's a real risk of people assuming that "Apple Records" or "Apple Music" refers to the online iTMS, which it doesn't. Identity is a powerful force in industries of all kinds, which is why marketing departments exist at all.
My two cents: Apple's gone out of their way to refer to the music store as the "iTunes Music Store" and to avoid putting their company name on it unless absolutely necessary. This is good from a legal sense, and doubtless will work in their favor when courtroom proceedings are taking place.
Couldn't Apple just spin off the music part into a separate operating company like "iTunes, Inc." and be done with it?
They could, but they don't want to. However, you'll note that at no point in time did Apple ever refer to the iTunes Music Store as the "Apple Music Store" or even "Mac User Store". It's not just because of branding that they have taken pains to call it "iTunes" and distance the word "Apple" from the store as much as possible.
Another straw man argument exposed for what it is
How can you call it a "straw man" when it's entirely accurate as an argument? The "stable" Wikipedia you mention does not yet exist, and therefore arguing that the article writer should have used it instead of the "bleeding edge" Wikipedia is silly.
Grab an article out of a "real" encyclopedia, and compare it to the Wikipedia article. Do they factually match?
Yes, sometimes it's even word-for-word....
01010010000110100100111010101010010110010101101010 1001001110100100001010101...
Where's the structure in that, huh? But drag it into *Tableau*, and I'll betcha it gives you a pretty picture!
It sure does, and I wish you'd told us it was NSFW before posting it....
saying a person better have a PhD in Industrial Design before calling an Apple product ugly? That is ridiculous
If he just said it was ugly, that would be an opinion and I'd respond to it as such. But he said "couldn't they think of a better design?", which is less an opinion than a criticism to the professional skills of designers far more experienced.
1. You will now see a million wires coming out of the right side of the machine, hanging in mid-air and visible at all times.
They actually attach behind the right side, and can be threaded through the base to keep them out of sight. And if you don't like 'em, get it configured with Bluetooth and WiFi -- like the sidebar sez, all you'll need then is a power cord, which connects to the back center of the machine and is even harder to see.
2. All that white space at the bottom of the display makes it look like a waste of space (of course it's probably used for the internal electronics, but geez, couldn't they think of a better design?).
You'd better have a PhD in industrial design if you're criticizing Apple on those grounds. I think it looks just fine, and besides, they gotta put the Apple logo somewhere.
3. The display now only rotates in one single dimension (either tilts up or down) as opposed to the previous iMac multi-dimensions of fredom).
Well, yeah... you can just turn the whole base now, can't you? I imagine turning the monitor on the base would make it potentially unstable, but I'm certain it would make it uglier.
4. That base seems awefully inadecuate for so much weight on top of it. Seems like if it is very easy to drop the display sideways if you have a crouded desk and move things around a lot.
Yes, it's a convincing illusion, isn't it? C'mon, they have people to think of things like that.
5. This design has been created before by the big guys (IBM and Compaq/HP I think had/have something similar), why not come up with something as cool as the iPod? (it's a shame they say on the website "from the creators of iPod" - if I was one of the iPod designers I'd be shamed...).
Open your eyes, please... the design is supposed to remind you of the iPod, both from the front and the side views.
6. And how about a $999 model?
Want to have your cake and eat it too, don't you? Maybe next year when this year's models are on clearance.
I thought the original reason Apple put the CD/DVD drive in the base of the iMac and avoided a design like this was because their engineers said it was better to have the disc spinning while flat. Did they change their mind, or is the hardware just better now that they can mount the CD behind the monitor at an angle like this?
When I was moving out of the dorm my sophomore year, my brother was there helping. We left his Powerbook laptop in my unlocked dorm for not more than two minutes, and it was gone without a trace when we returned. This was on move-out day, when virtually nobody was in the building anyway. Obviously, one crook knew that and was taking advantage of it.
Like he said, NEVER leave your room open, no matter who you think is or isn't around.
Sorry, I just don't understand why the sequel consistently seems to rate higher with the general public.
From a sheer sci-fi/futurism perspective, it does a good job of taking the original's idea of a universe traversed by space "truckers" working for cynical corporations and adds space Marines, greedy corporate bastards and colonial families. In addition, it fleshes out the alien life cycle by asking and answering the obvious question: who's laying all the eggs?
Add that to the fact that Cameron expanded a cliche horror flick that happened to be set in space to a fairly novel horror/action flick set in... well, space, with characters you actually got interested in over time. (This was his strength in "Terminator 2" as well: taking what could be a by-the-numbers action/FX film and adding good, solid characterization to the ENTIRE cast.) "Aliens" may have played up the cliches itself, but it was a more-than-worthy successor, and a lot of sci-fi today owes tribute to it in some way, shape or form.
Direct Connect, for the three or four of you that don't already know, doesn't work like Napster or KaZaA. The hubs are sometimes public, but in these cases admission to the hub required you to share your own collection for free as well. So the hub owners are not only sharing music with a select membership, they require their members to share large amounts of music as well.
They were copying, trading, and encouraging others to do the same in large quantities. I don't like seeing people's hard drives raided for any reason, but it's pretty clear these five folks didn't have a leg to stand on.
The fact is that both sexes are equally promiscuous -- perhaps for different reasons, perhaps not, but everyone pretty much screws around equally.
Indeed? Is this before or after birth control was introduced to civilization at large? In parts of this country (and other countries) where victimization of women is far more widespread, birth control is nearly non-existent, abortion clinics are few and far between and HIV is epidemic, you'd be hard-pressed to find females who are as promiscuous as your average alpha male.
Men there have the power to take sex when they want it badly enough and then walk away from the consequences. Women don't. Even if they escape the baby and HIV, they risk being ostracized by their families in a way men just plain don't. It's really as simple as that.
In one hundred years we've developed flight, space travel, nuclear physics, gene therapy, and global digital communications networks, but we still can't get past treating women like property instead of people.
There are some things that are simply built into the genes. Human men are compelled to have sex without commitment; women are compelled to form commitments. It's a broad generalization, but all of anthropology, sociology and natural biology boil down to this simple axiom.
You can try to deny it, argue it, or change it, but human nature will always defeat you in the end. The successful social institutions are the ones that use this nature to achieve good ends, the way democracy uses selfishness to achieve good government. Marriage, in essence, is a way of getting men to commit to a woman and her children by promising him an available sexual partner at all times.
Pornography in all its myriad forms, including "virtual girlfriends", is a way to give men (limited) sexual gratification without bothering with a relationship. Romance novels and movies do the same by giving women a relationship fantasy they can enjoy without an actual partner. Both businesses have been spectacularly successful over the decades because those principles are true.
Take the urine testing/saliva testing devices. Personally, I wouldn't sweat over it.
Because they'll be testing that, too.
For exactly which economic bracket is $20 considered "disposable"? I consider myself middle-class, and I'm not going to throw anything away unless it cost under $8, if I can help it.
OK, so somebody found two documents that have the same digest. This doesn't mean that they can construct a document to match any given digest. Even it did, the document so constructed would be gibberish.
IANACE (I Am Not A Crypto Expert), but the application here isn't encrypting documents, but passwords. If I have a password which, when encrypted, is identical to your encrypted password, then I can use it to log into your account whether I know your actual password or not.
The only time I've used crypto functions is in web development. It's foolish to store passwords in an Access database in plaintext, so you encrypt them in your code and then compare it to your encrypted password in the database. That way, nobody can use the passwords even if they steal the database -- unless it's possible to find a collision within a reasonable amount of time.
I looked up hash collision (e2) and hash function (e2) at Wikipedia and Everything2, which clarified the summary quite a bit.
The only reason I spend big bucks in their music store is because the DRM has been broken through the Hymn project.
Psst... you could always burn your downloaded iTMS music to CD-RW and then rip it to MP3 again. If you're determined to break their DRM, why not do it the most obvious and non-hackable way possible?
I'm partway through Altered Carbon right now, and I'm enjoying it for what it is, which is a cyberpunk-inspired thriller rather than what I consider "true" science fiction.
I found it interesting, and somehow disappointing, that the premise of this story relies on the "needlecast", which is just this author's renaming of the ansible, which is Ursule K. le Guin's/Orson Scott Card's method of transmitting data faster than light throughout the universe. With it, a digitized person can be transmitted from one colonized system to another instantaneously; without it, space travel is hardly improved.
Why is this a problem for me? I don't know, exactly. Ansibles are no more or less possible (based on known science) than digitizing the entire human mind. Maybe I just don't like my sci-fi to assume more than one impossible thing at a time.
How frigging arrogant would we have to be to honestly believe that in the ENTIRE universe, we are COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY UNIQUE?
Congratulations, you may be the first person I've ever known to argue for the existence of intelligent life on other planets solely by using an ad hominem attack.
Will Apple ever allow the Mac line to be made outside the company again, as it was in the Jean Louis Gassée days?
When Apple licensed clones of their computers, it was intended to broaden the MacOS userbase. What happened instead was the MacOS userbase remained the same size, and Apple lost money to the clonemakers. Thus they soon rescinded the licenses and went back to doing what they always did.
Doubtless this is part of the reason Apple's reluctant to license FairPlay. As long as they control both it and the iPod hardware, they can keep the iPod/iTunes experience Insanely Great(TM) and make more money to boot. But until the iPod and iTMS actually reach monopoly levels of domination, licensing FairPlay would just decrease the quality of that experience without increasing Apple's marketshare.
...does it meet the minimum hardware specs for Doom3?
...unless someone posts the photos on the Internet the next day.