that is quite possibly the worst layout for the store I could imagine. No, no... there's no blinking text or animated icons.
"Let's throw one of every product line on the main screen. Make sure there are at least 30 images so modem users have to wait as long as possible. Use a low contrast color set of light blue text on a light gray background. And oh yea, let's really confuse everyone: instead of showing you the one product you click on, lets just show them all the products in the family in case they spontaneously change thier mind. And just so things are harder to find, be sure the page is at least three "screens tall so people have to do a lot of scrolling to find what they want."
Okay.. so it's too expensive for PCs, and it has a niche market in large dataset systems of antiquity. The main use he describes on those older systems is as a substitute for installable RAM. So my question is this: If all your putting on this SSD is a swap file, why on Earth do you care if the media is erased between reboots? Just use standard, PC66 DRAMs for the unit.
That's an interesting idea, but I'll say again... there's nothing they can do to completely stop piracy this way. If human eyes can see the film fine, there's a way to make a camera see it fine also, or to fix the images in a computer. Putting Infrared LEDs or lamps behind the screen that cause annoying white spots to camcorders is easily circumvented by infrared filters on the camera lens. Interstingly, if they did that, then a common photographic component may instantly be transformed in to an instrument that violated the DMCA. As for the first idea, these people don't seem to understand that you can set a camcorder to different shutter speeds.
More importantly in the long run, the Martian solar year is significantly different in length than the Earth solar year. I know sci-fi authors have dealt with this, but if you live on a planet where the solar years are shorter, you age faster. You could, for example, go to Mercury for a a quick 21 local years, get an ID and come back to United States and be legally able to consume alcohol even though locally you are only 8 years old. Converely, you could spend a few local months on Neptune and be dead of old age.
As others have pointed out, we need to come up with some reliable and universally accepted method of time keeping for future space travel. We WILL be changing our calandars/watches at some point, so resisting the change is pointless. People living on the Moon,Mars or interstellar spacecraft will not enjoy local time not coinciding with apparent solar time, and more than you would like to go to sleep at 8pm today in the dark, and tomorrow 8pm would be sunrise, and the day after solar noon, etc.
OR when you recieve a bounce like this you could just use your ISP's email server. I've run in to 0 DLS connections that don't come with at least one email account. When AOL (or anyone else) bounces your mail because of it being DLS, or not having proper reverse lookup, you simpy re-send your message through your ISP's non DSL and properly DNSed server. Problems solved. The AOL persoan can still send you large attachments to your personal server.
Actually, the largest ship ever built was (or could be) the "Heart of Gold", stolen by the (ex)President of the Galaxy: Zaphod Beeblebrox.
This simply has to be the case, as the ship would be any size you wanted or needed or didn't want or didn't need as the case may be. All you would need is to calculate just how improbable it would be to have a ship the size you wanted, feed the result in to the computer and fix up a good hot cup of tea for the infinite improbibility drive; brownian motion and all, don't you know?
The TPV isn't a space ship, but a device you are subjected to. It collapses small minds by forcing the realization of just how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of the life, the universe and everything. Coincidentally, that is the title of one of the five books in the trilogy.:)
Funny... they had all that. We could have just left them alone and saved a lot of money.
Other than that. do the original story's comment: why don't we let Iraqi companies make money by selling domain names ending with.iq? I mean, seriously, haven't the British made enough money from Iraq in the previous three invasions they (the Brits) staged? They even made the Iraqis PAY for two of them via taxes.
More importantly.... find out how much time and money are alloted before you accept the job. If their goals are unreasonable (in your opinion), tell them so in a letter declining the assignment.
I've actually been hired several times because I was the only consultant honest enough to tell the company that the goals where unrealistic and that I would not do the job as stated. Upon reflection they agreed with me and hired me to do the job at the higher cost/longer time line.
In my book it's not about doing "the best job given the time and money alloted", it's about doing the best job that fills the actual requirements of the client. That takes time and consultation with those responsible for the project, and those are all too often not the ones writing the specs or doing the hiring.
IBM didn't "LET" people clone their system. IBM had copyrights and patents on the BIOS chip that was the core of the system. Compaq managed to reverse engineer the code on the chip (there really wasn't that much), and produce a clone. Compaq then sold those cloned BIOS chips and that's when the PC clone market started.
This whole Mac "clone" thing the article speaks of is not really the case if you read the source article. This guy is going to buy older equipment/parts and re-assemble them in to a new case. He's using the Apple ROMS (without which you can NOT have a Mac). This means these clones will be made from systems at least a year or two old (the only systems plentiful enough to be sold off as parts).
So Yea... you can spend $600 for an iBox, or you could go to eBay and spend $300 for a dual processor B&W G4 system that was built and supported by Apple.
As for the p[rofitability thing, Apple consistently has the highest profit margins of the (PC hardware) industry. Profitability isn't the issue, market share is.
Does it appear to me that Iraq disarmed? If Iraq had an entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it would read simply "Mostly Harmless". Of all the arms the country had, the inspectors could only find 12 points of contention/uncertany. Of those, only two (IIRC) where actually of any real signigicance.
There certainly was nothing in any U.N. resolution that enabled the U.S.A. to enforce "no-fly zones", or to deploy 300,000 troops in to the country for the purposes of removing Saddam's government.
As another poster so poigniently stated... isn't it ironic, that the U.S.A. is direspecting the U.N. in order to prove that the U.N. must be respected?
If you think that crimes against humanity is a valid reason for the U.S.A to act (mostly) alone to invade a soverign nation, oust it's current leadersip, and install one to the liking of the U.S.A., then perhaps we should also invade: Cuba, China, India, Russia, most of the African Continent, and oh yea.... the U.S.A (we are after all the only industrial nation that still uses the death sentence).
Re:Just because ...
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Exactly what would constitute a case for war? How about solid proof of capability to, or inmminent intent to commit an act of agression.
As for the whole "violations of the Iraqi people's basic human rights", that is an internal affair of a sovreign nation. I don't see that we have invaded any other countries that have in that past commited random acts of agression, have weapons of mass distruction and/or commited acts of human rights abuse against their own people, and that list is quite long: China, Japan, Russia (the entire USSR and Soviet block), India, USA, Colombia, Cuba, the list goes on.
The "How does this compare to Apple's TTS" is really a two part question (at least, I may have missed something).
The one you probably want answered is which sounds better. At this point the IBM voices sound better than the Apple TTS, but not by very much. Especially when you consider that Apple hasn't improved the voices in over 7 years IIRC (Of course given the option of better voices of having OS X, I'll forgo the voices). Playing several phrases from IBM's and Apple's TTS systems yields the opinion that IBM's rendered voices sound more natural but not perfect by any means. Scoring them I'd say Apple's TTS is about a 7 and IBM's result is about an 8. The Apple versions have some strange amplitude problems at the start of some words, as thought the model is adding too much emphesis. The IBM models lack the sophistication of understanding and reading punctuation (like quotes) with appropriate pauses so that the context is understood without seeing the text.
The other way you could ask the question is who's technology is better? With Apple's you can actually synthesize the entire speech process, changing the voice is a matter of changing the model (they also had sampled voices and some older synth types). I wish Apple still had their page about the technology up, but I can't locate it. IBM requires tens of thousands of samples of each phonem to later stitch together when speech is formed.
The differences are much akin to a synthesizer versus a sampler. You can either create the sound of a piano from scratch, or you can sample it and play the tones back when required. In the former you can make the artificial piano do anything a real piano can do. In the latter, you may get a more "true" sound, but are limited in what varioations you can apply.
Witness this in Apple's technology being the only TTS system I know of that comes with a Mexican accent.
I recall that Apple canned the TTS and several other research departments (or severely rediuced them) during one of the dark eras though. I'm guessing that if the Apple engineers had been working on and improving the system od voice modeling over the past 7 years, that IBM's voices would seem ancient and childish.
Because we don't live in a Democracy in the United States, and the will of the people at large is irrelevant to the workings of government. You can just as easily apply your thoughts to other laws like speed limits: most drivers will exceed the posted speed limit at some point during a trip and not feel guilty about it. Most will probably go over by 5mph or more. Why then, if the VAST majority of drivers think that driving faster than the speed limit is okay, is it still illegal? Who really gets hurt by speeders? Why is it still illegal when the majority consider it to be okay? Because majority doesn't rule here, money does, and the "people" collectively can't throw money at politicians like large corporations can.
I think You're confusing APIs with target processor. The APIs can be written for any computer in any language. The whole point of an API is that you don't care what's in the middle. you get to treat it as a black box. You know you put in X and get out Y. For example, a ficticicious "create window" API. The app just needs to know what the API expects from it, in this case let's say, location, size and color of the new window to draw (overly simple I know). When the app asks the OS to call that API, the app doesn't know what CPU that API will execute on, what language it was written in, or anything else. Likewise, the API doesn't care who called it or how; as long as it gets the proper parameters it will draw a new window on the screen.
When you double-clicked a windows app sitting on your machine, OS X know the app was not a Coco or Caarbon or Classic app and would pass the x86 code through an x86/PPC translator for execution on the PPC just like VPC does now(or this could be done in advance like I said). System calls within that code would be identified and passed on to the native PPC Windows APIs within the box. The windows apps would never run any native OS X APIs, they have no way of knowing such APIs exist. If there where no native.
Simply... instead of the BigBlueBox emulating only the machine, the box emulates the OS partially and the machine partially, and as such can take advantage of more features of the host OS and CPU. For example, the "create window" mentioned above would simply take the Windows parameters and translate them to what the Mac's "create window" one expects, and then call the CoCoa API to create the window. It would be MUCH faster than what we've got now.
This is what those extensions are that OS X places in your OS 9 System Folder. The inits replace OS 9's APIs with translators that simply re-direct the calls to the OS X native versions. The OS 9 apps have no idea that happens.
The version of Yahtzee that I just ran was compiled in 1987 from Pascal. It has no idea what Carbon or Cocoa are, yet via API interception and redirection the app runs fine. through at least two levels of emulation (OS X to classic and PPC to 68K). Replace 68K with x86 and classic with Windows and you'll see this is VERY possible to do. In fact, it's being done now.:)
Still missing the two GREAT features
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Virtual PC 6 Review
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· Score: 4, Interesting
1. Getting rid of the Windows desktop all together. I REALLY look forward to the day when VPC can go rootless like an X windows server can and the Windows apps appear directly on the Mac desktop. In eccessence VPC would be just another code execution path just like CoCoa(yellow box), Carbon and Classic(blue box). Maybe the VPC emulator would be called "bigblue box". This would eliminate many of the system redundancies of running a fully isolated emulator (like mainatining two system clocks, device configurations, display spaces, etc) and dramatically speed things up.
2. Code optimization and restructuring. There was an app/addition to Windows for Alpha (iX32 I think)that would do this. It would look through all your executable 16/32bit X36 code one the machine and pre-optimize it and create a cache of native code that would run on the 64bit Alpha. Given today's HD space and the Mac's concept of "packages", this daemon on the Mac could periodically scan for new Windows apps, and re-write the core portions of them to run natively on PPC, making system calls in to the appropriate VPC section of OS X.
The article's writer ponders the end of Office for Mac. With these two features, there's a distinct possibility that would become reality. MS would simply bundle the VPC emulation "box" along with the Office installer, or any other software you purchase from them.
I didn't pronounce anything, I pondered. I didn't say "suddenly" and I never engaged in pseudoscience. Having no evidence for a theory or idea based in scientific pricipals is not pseudoscience, it's pure hypothetical science. Or do you consider the work on Super String Theory pseudoscience? If not, please provide me with the proof of there being at least ten dimensions. Pseudoscience is the mis-application of science to further one's own agenda, and usually used in an attempt to prove something that the 'scientist' wants to be true (ghost reports for example).
And have all the questions been asked and answered? Then perhaps you should stop studying geology if we already know everything. All those astronomical physicists should just change their line of work because we have all the answers. Damn, it sure was nice to close the book on all that stuff, what do we solve next?
Fact is we don't KNOW anything about this event. We have hypothesis and expectations that we've piece together from circumsantial evidence. Until the experiment(Earth's magnetic poles swapping) is actually conducted, measured and observed, we have no hard data. Computer modeling has been wrong before and it will be wrong again when new events and unexperienced/measured phenomena are simulated.
Al we can do is sit back, try to prepare and hope for the best, oh... and hope that there's some other method of reliable and accurate navigation for aircraft besides a magnetic compass and GPS.
Perhaps you should fire up Sherlock and head over to Ebay. I've seen several Beige G3s sell there for under $100 in the past weeks. $150 will get you a nice little box capable of running a file/web/mail server system or even playing some less demanding 3D games (with an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI installed of course).
There's a retail site near me that sells used G3 boxes pretty cheap, like $200 for a 333Mhz mini tower.
I am quite aware of the tidal lock issue and was not even taking that in to account. I'm talking about the other compendium of forces that act upon the earth.
I have a hard time taking someone seriously when they consider an unexplained theory as "idiocy". That's pretty much how most of todays most useful inventions and discoveries were initially reffered to as idiocy.
As for how the switch in the Earth's magnetic poles can affect the axis of rotation? Well: Doesn't the Sun have a magnetic field? How will an Earth field flip interact with the Sun's field, and any flip it may experience during the same period? Has anyone measured the strength and alignment of any magnetic fields that may be present solar-system and perhaps galaxy wide?
Perhaps whatever mechanism shifts the field within Earth's core wil cause a physical torque or change in center-of-mass that causes the axis to change. If the event lasts 50 years, that might significantly change the weather patterns on the planet. Causing a redistrobution of mass (like polar caps). If the ice-caps shifted 100 miles they might cause the axis to change, or a wobble in the planet's rotation.
The point here is there are a lot of variables. Many of which we can't directly measure. Certainly nobody's instrumented such an event for direct observation yet. And I'm not suggesting that the Earth would suddenly start rotating 90 degrees relative to the Sun. But a change of even one or two degrees of tilt could cause significant change to the system.
And please note that I use "might" and "could" in many places. These are hypothoses and mental musings on my part; ones which I have neither the time, money or equipment to test to any degree. It may be that everything will either cancel out, or the forces involved are so small as to be insignificant on a planetary scale in the timeframe of the event. But I think the questions should still be asked (and answered if possible).
Maybe not for the reasons sited, but lets look at some of the most basic laws of physics (or corrolaries thereof):
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by another force. For a given mass and given energy, an object will spin at some calculated rate Every force has an opposite and equal force
From that is seems we can plainly draw these conclusions:
There are forces slowing it down: gravity from the Moon and Sun, friction from the gasses that surround the planet (atmosphere and cosmic). It may take time for those minute forces to stop the Earth, but the eventually should.
Each year the Earth is bombarded by massive amounts of dust, particles and meteors from extraterrestrial sources. This all adds to the mass of the planet. Since there is not external force to add more rotational energy, it makes sense that the planet would need to slow down as it gets both more massive and larger in diameter from the addition of this material.
There's also the known fact that the Earth's magnetic field changes (swaps) every 250,000 years or so. North becoms South, and vice verca. This change may very well have a significant impact on rotation and orientation of the axis of the planet. (Some scientists say there is evidence that we are in the midst of such a swap now and the event could occur during this millenium)
Whether these effects will lead to significant changes in rotation during human's habitation of the planet, or the sun will die out and engulf the inner planets first, I don't know. In either case, I'd say it's high time we (as a species, not as a country or countries) stop finding reasons and ways to hate and kill each other, and try to find ways off this little rock.
Ahhh, but you analoy doesn't look at hte whole picture:
If this large group of people starts clogging up your infrastructure at the Mall, you can call the police and have them arrested for tresspassing, or tow their cars away. Both solutions cost the offenders money and are free, or included as part of a public service. There is no corrolary in the network world. the network/infrustructure has no-one to turn to, and must pay all corrective and cleanup costs.
There's also the idea that those loiterers may very well decide that you have a nice mall and return at a later date to spend lots of money. There is no bad traffic that later turns in to good traffic on my network. A hacker doesn't port scan all my machines just to start improving my database performance later.
How? Apple records produces records/albums/cds/tapes/whatever. As in produce, I mean they find talent, get it material, put the band in aa studio, record performances, mix down tracks, produce a final product, then market and find distributors for that end product.
Given that Apple Computer's music purchasing service would (could) be a distributor of Apple Record's products, I don't see how Apple Records would be in any way bothered by this.
Then again... maybe Steve/Apple Comp. should just buy Apple Records, sell off the catalog/archives and end the entire issue once and for all.
Well, you'll have to settle for "super high quality", because the simple fact is that any time you convert an analog medium (sound, light) to digital, you loose quality. The analog to digital conversion is itself lossy, before you even get in to the whole compression issue.
Now as for your ear not being able to discerne the changes between a high-quality digital and an original analog... that's a horse of a different color all together.
Slashdot Mirror
that is quite possibly the worst layout for the store I could imagine. No, no... there's no blinking text or animated icons.
"Let's throw one of every product line on the main screen. Make sure there are at least 30 images so modem users have to wait as long as possible. Use a low contrast color set of light blue text on a light gray background. And oh yea, let's really confuse everyone: instead of showing you the one product you click on, lets just show them all the products in the family in case they spontaneously change thier mind. And just so things are harder to find, be sure the page is at least three "screens tall so people have to do a lot of scrolling to find what they want."
Okay.. so it's too expensive for PCs, and it has a niche market in large dataset systems of antiquity.
The main use he describes on those older systems is as a substitute for installable RAM. So my question is this: If all your putting on this SSD is a swap file, why on Earth do you care if the media is erased between reboots?
Just use standard, PC66 DRAMs for the unit.
That's an interesting idea, but I'll say again... there's nothing they can do to completely stop piracy this way.
If human eyes can see the film fine, there's a way to make a camera see it fine also, or to fix the images in a computer.
Putting Infrared LEDs or lamps behind the screen that cause annoying white spots to camcorders is easily circumvented by infrared filters on the camera lens.
Interstingly, if they did that, then a common photographic component may instantly be transformed in to an instrument that violated the DMCA.
As for the first idea, these people don't seem to understand that you can set a camcorder to different shutter speeds.
More importantly in the long run, the Martian solar year is significantly different in length than the Earth solar year.
,Mars or interstellar spacecraft will not enjoy local time not coinciding with apparent solar time, and more than you would like to go to sleep at 8pm today in the dark, and tomorrow 8pm would be sunrise, and the day after solar noon, etc.
I know sci-fi authors have dealt with this, but if you live on a planet where the solar years are shorter, you age faster. You could, for example, go to Mercury for a a quick 21 local years, get an ID and come back to United States and be legally able to consume alcohol even though locally you are only 8 years old.
Converely, you could spend a few local months on Neptune and be dead of old age.
As others have pointed out, we need to come up with some reliable and universally accepted method of time keeping for future space travel. We WILL be changing our calandars/watches at some point, so resisting the change is pointless. People living on the Moon
OR when you recieve a bounce like this you could just use your ISP's email server. I've run in to 0 DLS connections that don't come with at least one email account.
When AOL (or anyone else) bounces your mail because of it being DLS, or not having proper reverse lookup, you simpy re-send your message through your ISP's non DSL and properly DNSed server. Problems solved. The AOL persoan can still send you large attachments to your personal server.
Actually, the largest ship ever built was (or could be) the "Heart of Gold", stolen by the (ex)President of the Galaxy: Zaphod Beeblebrox.
:)
This simply has to be the case, as the ship would be any size you wanted or needed or didn't want or didn't need as the case may be. All you would need is to calculate just how improbable it would be to have a ship the size you wanted, feed the result in to the computer and fix up a good hot cup of tea for the infinite improbibility drive; brownian motion and all, don't you know?
The TPV isn't a space ship, but a device you are subjected to. It collapses small minds by forcing the realization of just how insignificant you are in the grand scheme of the life, the universe and everything. Coincidentally, that is the title of one of the five books in the trilogy.
"Who know Apple had that kind ($6B)?"
Um... I thought it was popular knowledge that Apple had over $4B in cash sitting around. That means they'd only need to do $2B of that in stock swap.
I guess the answer to "who knew", is anyone who keeps occasional tabs on the financial health of their favorite computer company.
Funny... they had all that. We could have just left them alone and saved a lot of money.
.iq?
Other than that. do the original story's comment: why don't we let Iraqi companies make money by selling domain names ending with
I mean, seriously, haven't the British made enough money from Iraq in the previous three invasions they (the Brits) staged? They even made the Iraqis PAY for two of them via taxes.
More importantly.... find out how much time and money are alloted before you accept the job.
If their goals are unreasonable (in your opinion), tell them so in a letter declining the assignment.
I've actually been hired several times because I was the only consultant honest enough to tell the company that the goals where unrealistic and that I would not do the job as stated. Upon reflection they agreed with me and hired me to do the job at the higher cost/longer time line.
In my book it's not about doing "the best job given the time and money alloted", it's about doing the best job that fills the actual requirements of the client. That takes time and consultation with those responsible for the project, and those are all too often not the ones writing the specs or doing the hiring.
I would rather not do a job, than do it poorly.
IBM didn't "LET" people clone their system. IBM had copyrights and patents on the BIOS chip that was the core of the system. Compaq managed to reverse engineer the code on the chip (there really wasn't that much), and produce a clone. Compaq then sold those cloned BIOS chips and that's when the PC clone market started.
This whole Mac "clone" thing the article speaks of is not really the case if you read the source article. This guy is going to buy older equipment/parts and re-assemble them in to a new case. He's using the Apple ROMS (without which you can NOT have a Mac). This means these clones will be made from systems at least a year or two old (the only systems plentiful enough to be sold off as parts).
So Yea... you can spend $600 for an iBox, or you could go to eBay and spend $300 for a dual processor B&W G4 system that was built and supported by Apple.
As for the p[rofitability thing, Apple consistently has the highest profit margins of the (PC hardware) industry. Profitability isn't the issue, market share is.
"God helps those who help themselves."
That is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever read.
Does it appear to me that Iraq disarmed? If Iraq had an entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it would read simply "Mostly Harmless". Of all the arms the country had, the inspectors could only find 12 points of contention/uncertany. Of those, only two (IIRC) where actually of any real signigicance.
There certainly was nothing in any U.N. resolution that enabled the U.S.A. to enforce "no-fly zones", or to deploy 300,000 troops in to the country for the purposes of removing Saddam's government.
As another poster so poigniently stated... isn't it ironic, that the U.S.A. is direspecting the U.N. in order to prove that the U.N. must be respected?
If you think that crimes against humanity is a valid reason for the U.S.A to act (mostly) alone to invade a soverign nation, oust it's current leadersip, and install one to the liking of the U.S.A., then perhaps we should also invade:
Cuba, China, India, Russia, most of the African Continent, and oh yea.... the U.S.A (we are after all the only industrial nation that still uses the death sentence).
Exactly what would constitute a case for war? How about solid proof of capability to, or inmminent intent to commit an act of agression.
As for the whole "violations of the Iraqi people's basic human rights", that is an internal affair of a sovreign nation. I don't see that we have invaded any other countries that have in that past commited random acts of agression, have weapons of mass distruction and/or commited acts of human rights abuse against their own people, and that list is quite long: China, Japan, Russia (the entire USSR and Soviet block), India, USA, Colombia, Cuba, the list goes on.
The "How does this compare to Apple's TTS" is really a two part question (at least, I may have missed something).
The one you probably want answered is which sounds better. At this point the IBM voices sound better than the Apple TTS, but not by very much. Especially when you consider that Apple hasn't improved the voices in over 7 years IIRC (Of course given the option of better voices of having OS X, I'll forgo the voices). Playing several phrases from IBM's and Apple's TTS systems yields the opinion that IBM's rendered voices sound more natural but not perfect by any means. Scoring them I'd say Apple's TTS is about a 7 and IBM's result is about an 8. The Apple versions have some strange amplitude problems at the start of some words, as thought the model is adding too much emphesis. The IBM models lack the sophistication of understanding and reading punctuation (like quotes) with appropriate pauses so that the context is understood without seeing the text.
The other way you could ask the question is who's technology is better? With Apple's you can actually synthesize the entire speech process, changing the voice is a matter of changing the model (they also had sampled voices and some older synth types). I wish Apple still had their page about the technology up, but I can't locate it. IBM requires tens of thousands of samples of each phonem to later stitch together when speech is formed.
The differences are much akin to a synthesizer versus a sampler. You can either create the sound of a piano from scratch, or you can sample it and play the tones back when required. In the former you can make the artificial piano do anything a real piano can do. In the latter, you may get a more "true" sound, but are limited in what varioations you can apply.
Witness this in Apple's technology being the only TTS system I know of that comes with a Mexican accent.
I recall that Apple canned the TTS and several other research departments (or severely rediuced them) during one of the dark eras though. I'm guessing that if the Apple engineers had been working on and improving the system od voice modeling over the past 7 years, that IBM's voices would seem ancient and childish.
Because we don't live in a Democracy in the United States, and the will of the people at large is irrelevant to the workings of government.
You can just as easily apply your thoughts to other laws like speed limits: most drivers will exceed the posted speed limit at some point during a trip and not feel guilty about it. Most will probably go over by 5mph or more.
Why then, if the VAST majority of drivers think that driving faster than the speed limit is okay, is it still illegal?
Who really gets hurt by speeders? Why is it still illegal when the majority consider it to be okay?
Because majority doesn't rule here, money does, and the "people" collectively can't throw money at politicians like large corporations can.
I think You're confusing APIs with target processor. The APIs can be written for any computer in any language. The whole point of an API is that you don't care what's in the middle. you get to treat it as a black box. You know you put in X and get out Y. For example, a ficticicious "create window" API. The app just needs to know what the API expects from it, in this case let's say, location, size and color of the new window to draw (overly simple I know). When the app asks the OS to call that API, the app doesn't know what CPU that API will execute on, what language it was written in, or anything else. Likewise, the API doesn't care who called it or how; as long as it gets the proper parameters it will draw a new window on the screen.
:)
When you double-clicked a windows app sitting on your machine, OS X know the app was not a Coco or Caarbon or Classic app and would pass the x86 code through an x86/PPC translator for execution on the PPC just like VPC does now(or this could be done in advance like I said). System calls within that code would be identified and passed on to the native PPC Windows APIs within the box. The windows apps would never run any native OS X APIs, they have no way of knowing such APIs exist. If there where no native.
Simply... instead of the BigBlueBox emulating only the machine, the box emulates the OS partially and the machine partially, and as such can take advantage of more features of the host OS and CPU. For example, the "create window" mentioned above would simply take the Windows parameters and translate them to what the Mac's "create window" one expects, and then call the CoCoa API to create the window. It would be MUCH faster than what we've got now.
This is what those extensions are that OS X places in your OS 9 System Folder. The inits replace OS 9's APIs with translators that simply re-direct the calls to the OS X native versions. The OS 9 apps have no idea that happens.
The version of Yahtzee that I just ran was compiled in 1987 from Pascal. It has no idea what Carbon or Cocoa are, yet via API interception and redirection the app runs fine. through at least two levels of emulation (OS X to classic and PPC to 68K).
Replace 68K with x86 and classic with Windows and you'll see this is VERY possible to do. In fact, it's being done now.
1. Getting rid of the Windows desktop all together. I REALLY look forward to the day when VPC can go rootless like an X windows server can and the Windows apps appear directly on the Mac desktop.
In eccessence VPC would be just another code execution path just like CoCoa(yellow box), Carbon and Classic(blue box). Maybe the VPC emulator would be called "bigblue box".
This would eliminate many of the system redundancies of running a fully isolated emulator (like mainatining two system clocks, device configurations, display spaces, etc) and dramatically speed things up.
2. Code optimization and restructuring. There was an app/addition to Windows for Alpha (iX32 I think)that would do this. It would look through all your executable 16/32bit X36 code one the machine and pre-optimize it and create a cache of native code that would run on the 64bit Alpha. Given today's HD space and the Mac's concept of "packages", this daemon on the Mac could periodically scan for new Windows apps, and re-write the core portions of them to run natively on PPC, making system calls in to the appropriate VPC section of OS X.
The article's writer ponders the end of Office for Mac. With these two features, there's a distinct possibility that would become reality. MS would simply bundle the VPC emulation "box" along with the Office installer, or any other software you purchase from them.
I didn't pronounce anything, I pondered. I didn't say "suddenly" and I never engaged in pseudoscience. Having no evidence for a theory or idea based in scientific pricipals is not pseudoscience, it's pure hypothetical science.
Or do you consider the work on Super String Theory pseudoscience? If not, please provide me with the proof of there being at least ten dimensions.
Pseudoscience is the mis-application of science to further one's own agenda, and usually used in an attempt to prove something that the 'scientist' wants to be true (ghost reports for example).
And have all the questions been asked and answered? Then perhaps you should stop studying geology if we already know everything. All those astronomical physicists should just change their line of work because we have all the answers. Damn, it sure was nice to close the book on all that stuff, what do we solve next?
Fact is we don't KNOW anything about this event. We have hypothesis and expectations that we've piece together from circumsantial evidence. Until the experiment(Earth's magnetic poles swapping) is actually conducted, measured and observed, we have no hard data. Computer modeling has been wrong before and it will be wrong again when new events and unexperienced/measured phenomena are simulated.
Al we can do is sit back, try to prepare and hope for the best, oh... and hope that there's some other method of reliable and accurate navigation for aircraft besides a magnetic compass and GPS.
Perhaps you should fire up Sherlock and head over to Ebay. I've seen several Beige G3s sell there for under $100 in the past weeks. $150 will get you a nice little box capable of running a file/web/mail server system or even playing some less demanding 3D games (with an ATI Radeon 7000 PCI installed of course).
There's a retail site near me that sells used G3 boxes pretty cheap, like $200 for a 333Mhz mini tower.
I am quite aware of the tidal lock issue and was not even taking that in to account. I'm talking about the other compendium of forces that act upon the earth.
I have a hard time taking someone seriously when they consider an unexplained theory as "idiocy". That's pretty much how most of todays most useful inventions and discoveries were initially reffered to as idiocy.
As for how the switch in the Earth's magnetic poles can affect the axis of rotation? Well:
Doesn't the Sun have a magnetic field? How will an Earth field flip interact with the Sun's field, and any flip it may experience during the same period? Has anyone measured the strength and alignment of any magnetic fields that may be present solar-system and perhaps galaxy wide?
Perhaps whatever mechanism shifts the field within Earth's core wil cause a physical torque or change in center-of-mass that causes the axis to change.
If the event lasts 50 years, that might significantly change the weather patterns on the planet. Causing a redistrobution of mass (like polar caps). If the ice-caps shifted 100 miles they might cause the axis to change, or a wobble in the planet's rotation.
The point here is there are a lot of variables. Many of which we can't directly measure. Certainly nobody's instrumented such an event for direct observation yet. And I'm not suggesting that the Earth would suddenly start rotating 90 degrees relative to the Sun. But a change of even one or two degrees of tilt could cause significant change to the system.
And please note that I use "might" and "could" in many places. These are hypothoses and mental musings on my part; ones which I have neither the time, money or equipment to test to any degree. It may be that everything will either cancel out, or the forces involved are so small as to be insignificant on a planetary scale in the timeframe of the event. But I think the questions should still be asked (and answered if possible).
Maybe not for the reasons sited, but lets look at some of the most basic laws of physics (or corrolaries thereof):
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted on by another force.
For a given mass and given energy, an object will spin at some calculated rate
Every force has an opposite and equal force
From that is seems we can plainly draw these conclusions:
There are forces slowing it down: gravity from the Moon and Sun, friction from the gasses that surround the planet (atmosphere and cosmic). It may take time for those minute forces to stop the Earth, but the eventually should.
Each year the Earth is bombarded by massive amounts of dust, particles and meteors from extraterrestrial sources. This all adds to the mass of the planet. Since there is not external force to add more rotational energy, it makes sense that the planet would need to slow down as it gets both more massive and larger in diameter from the addition of this material.
There's also the known fact that the Earth's magnetic field changes (swaps) every 250,000 years or so. North becoms South, and vice verca. This change may very well have a significant impact on rotation and orientation of the axis of the planet. (Some scientists say there is evidence that we are in the midst of such a swap now and the event could occur during this millenium)
Whether these effects will lead to significant changes in rotation during human's habitation of the planet, or the sun will die out and engulf the inner planets first, I don't know. In either case, I'd say it's high time we (as a species, not as a country or countries) stop finding reasons and ways to hate and kill each other, and try to find ways off this little rock.
Ahhh, but you analoy doesn't look at hte whole picture:
If this large group of people starts clogging up your infrastructure at the Mall, you can call the police and have them arrested for tresspassing, or tow their cars away. Both solutions cost the offenders money and are free, or included as part of a public service. There is no corrolary in the network world. the network/infrustructure has no-one to turn to, and must pay all corrective and cleanup costs.
There's also the idea that those loiterers may very well decide that you have a nice mall and return at a later date to spend lots of money. There is no bad traffic that later turns in to good traffic on my network. A hacker doesn't port scan all my machines just to start improving my database performance later.
So that's where M.S. gets all the code for their new operating systems.
How? Apple records produces records/albums/cds/tapes/whatever. As in produce, I mean they find talent, get it material, put the band in aa studio, record performances, mix down tracks, produce a final product, then market and find distributors for that end product.
Given that Apple Computer's music purchasing service would (could) be a distributor of Apple Record's products, I don't see how Apple Records would be in any way bothered by this.
Then again... maybe Steve/Apple Comp. should just buy Apple Records, sell off the catalog/archives and end the entire issue once and for all.
Well, you'll have to settle for "super high quality", because the simple fact is that any time you convert an analog medium (sound, light) to digital, you loose quality. The analog to digital conversion is itself lossy, before you even get in to the whole compression issue.
Now as for your ear not being able to discerne the changes between a high-quality digital and an original analog... that's a horse of a different color all together.