I have both a laptop and a desktop. I use my desktop probably 80-90% of the time. The desktop is more configurable, more powerful, and much more comfortable to use.
Interesting - I'm exactly the opposite. I probably spend 10% of the time on the desktop machine, and 90% of the time on the laptop. When I'm not on the move it has an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse plugged in so it's no different from sitting at the desktop.
I'd like to see laptops with VGA-in ports. It might be kind of cool to use a laptop as an LCD screen (this could be particularly useful as a second monitor).
This is exactly why I use the laptop more. It's a PowerBook, so can drive both the LCD and an external monitor out of the box.
It might also be interesting if you could hook up a laptop to a desktop so that the desktop sees the laptop as removeable storage
Hold down the T key when you restart, and the PowerBook goes into "FireWire Target Disk Mode". Run a FireWire cable between the PowerBook and a desktop (or another PowerBook), and the PowerBook disk appears as a regular FireWire drive on the other machine. It's also got an auto-sensing ethernet port, so you can plug it directly into the ethernet port of another machine without a cross-over cable.
At $3,499 it's not cheap, but I've found it's definitely a desktop replacement. In fact the only reason I keep the desktop machine around is for the odd game - laptop 3D hardware is still lagging behind a bit.
have finally delivered a product that requires a person to upgrade for $100 to OS 9.something in order to run their "Classic" applications, then spend $100 on the new OS
You realise that the Mac OS X box includes a copy of the Mac OS 9 CD as well? You can buy two copies if you want, but it's not a requirement...
The original code name for the machine was "Carl Sagan", but when this news got to the late Mr. Sagan, he sued Apple, and the code name was changed to BHA, or "Butt-Head Astronomer"
Although you can see his point - the other two machines in the same range were "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion", neither of which you would really want to be associated with as a scientist...
-dair (you've got to love the judge's conclusion though: "One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'Butt-Head'":-)
Actually it's "ken", and it's still slang today ("I dinnae ken" == "I don't know").
And in terms of why you would care, I don't think you would today - but if it takes off as MS hopes, you'll end up being locked out of services unless you're using an MS client (no change there then).
Perhaps you missed the fact that Berlin is a Vector-based GUI. You know, like Aqua?
Aqua isn't a vector based GUI. It's all just pixmaps, albeit it alpha blended in places. The CoreGraphics layer underneath isn't vector based either, it just has some support for PDF.
...that shoplifter caused tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage?
You missed out the bit where he says:
losses should only be allowed if such losses can actually be proven, unlike for example the Steve Jackson Games case where a 911 document which could be purchased for some US$30 was valued at US$79,449 for purposes of estimating damages.
Stealing some M&Ms is a self-contained and easily recognised (there's one less bag on the shelf) act, so the damage would be limited accordingly. A compromised system could have suffered any amount of changes - you need to spend the time to understand exactly what did change before you can be sure you've covered it all.
I'm not sure that it would matter to the courts whether the source code to descramble CSS was composed of 7 lines or 700... What really matters is that the MPAA scrambled the content on their DVDs and this code circumvents that.
That's an interesting point - on what basis do you draw the line? You could say that "obviously" rot-13 wasn't a serious attempt to control access but if 7 lines of Perl can be considered a circumvention device, then what about 5 lines? Or 3? Or 1?
I share your scepticism about the outcoming of trying to challenge things on that basis, but you would think there has to be some kind of definition as to how how simple a circumvention device is allowed to be while remaining "effective" (or do they intend every case to be ratified by a court? Wait, don't answer that...).
Pre-DeCSS, if you'd proposed a circumvention device that could be bypassed in 7 lines of Perl, who would have taken it seriously?
It runs over OpenGL (I think also DirectX, but I could be wrong.)
We only have an OpenGL renderer at the moment, but a Direct3D one may well happen (depending on OpenGL's status on Windows). Since the higher level scene-graph stuff is completely separate from the lower level renderers, you can plug in new renderers without disturbing any of the existing code (and the renderers don't have to be interactive - there's also a raytracing plug-in renderer).
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who has himself told interviewers he knows little about the issues involved ...
The appeal raises a host of complex issues, many of which fly well over my head
Right - so if Jackson can be discounted because he doesn't understand the issues, remind me again why I shouldn't discount this article?
Apparently you can only get cable modems or ADSL if you live in one of two cities, have a sister called Sue, an even number of vowels in your name and order on a Thursday.
It's not quite that bad - we've just moved to a fairly small town in the south west (here, population ~20K). Faxed an order to Madasafish two weeks ago, BT came round last Friday, I plugged the ADSL into the iBook and it's all working fine.
Given that an 0800-all-the-time ISP is about 15 quid a month, 40 quid for a much faster connection doesn't seem that bad a deal (particularly if you compare it to ISDN).
Granted the situation varies depending on where you are, but I was quite surprised that things went so smoothly given that we're fairly rural.
-dair (having said that, I did order on a Thursday, and I do have two vowels in my name...:-)
PatentPro creates a properly formatted, fully submittable patent application without the need for an expensive patent attorney. "PatentPro is the only product in the world that can claim to have patented itself," boasted Kernel CEO James Petruzzi, a patent attorney, in a press release.
Hmm, somebody took the "I'm going to patent patents!" joke seriously then...
I've found good companies and stuff I didn't know about through some of the ads.
I can honestly say I've never found anything remotely useful by clicking an ad - if I'm going to spend money on something, I'll go and check out Google/Deja and see what real people have to say (about the product, not about the ad).
From the article: we are debating internally what OSDN sites can do to stay competitive in the ad banner business
Well judging by cnet, you stick a massive image right in the middle of the story and annoy your readers even more... Honestly, if I was paying money to Slashdot it'd be because I wanted it to continue - not because I wanted to buy my way free of ads.
-dair
Re:Better technologies out there
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 1
The solar sale does *not* use the solar wind (the ejected ions and other debris from the sun) but rather the momemtum of individual photons of light.
Yep, sorry - the momentum does indeed come from photons.
However, the intensity of light falls off as 1/r^2 from the source, so you wouldn't accelerate too much before you were left floating in space.
I suppose the attraction is that as we're (relatively) close to the sun, it's a nice way to get a boost out of the inner solar system to send a probe to the outer planets. And potentially you could use an artificial source to finish the trip - once your acceleration tails off, keep pushing it with an orbital laser (or just leave it coasting along and accept it'll take longer to get there).
Why is that particular point made? Because its Russian, or because it's an ICBM?
Might be because it's being launched from a submarine? Apart from SeaLaunch, how common are satellite launches from sea? I don't know, but I would assume they're not that common (and particularly from a submarine).
-dair
Re:Better technologies out there
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 3
it's not that practical for planetary travel, or even interplanetary travel
This is exactly what it's good for - the speed builds up extremely slowly (it only has the pressure of the solar wind driving it), and so the further you need to travel the more effective it is.
You need a more maneuvourable (sp?), or faster reacting, engine for that when it comes to landing, emergency procedures, etc.
You certainly do, but that's not what you would use a sail for. They're intended as a replacement for the long slow burn you need to get to your destination, so you don't need to carry a huge mass of fuel just to get there (instead you can save most of it for the final manoeuvres).
Legalese not being my forte, I had imagined...
A CLI <-> Explorer <-> HTML browser <-> Finder
When selecting themes.
Going by the then planned OS (Copland, which is where this patent will have come from), I don't think so. The behavioural changes that were present in the build of Copland that was half-released were all pretty trivial - menus flipped over vertically like some kind of paddle when you moused over them, dragging windows around produced sounds, etc.
It's arguable if these are really 'behaviours' as such - but irrespective of the theme your buttons were still buttons, zoom boxes were still zoom boxes, etc.
I suspect this is a defensive patent. One of those "we should see if the PTO will grant this, cause if they give it to anyone else we are screwed" patents.
It does sound like it - this was definitely pitched as a big deal for Copland, and even when the Appearance Manager was spun off for Mac OS 8 themes were still being mentioned. One of the constant reminders when the Appearance Manager was introduced was that you shouldn't hand-roll your own UI components in case the look and feel changed again in the future (and if you must hand-roll them, to use the built in brushes and primitives so that you'll look somewhat right).
I seriously doubt it'd be resurrected today, but I guess it looked like a prudent idea at the time.
Ask the folks over at Kaleidoscope.net what Apple's attitude is to the theming of its OS?
Interestingly, one of the authors of the patent (Ed Voas) worked at one point with Greg Landweber, the author of Kaleidoscope, on Aaron. This was the precursor to Kaleidoscope, which restyled System 7 to look like the current Platinum appearance.
Do we really need gangs roving the streets with high-powered x-ray devices?
I think you'll be fairly safe - they also have to strap a large photographic plate to your back, then wait a couple of hours to have it developed. You'll probably notice.
Could someone please explain the premise behind Space 1999? Like are they from earth? Is there some sort of earth empire or what not?
Humans had colonised the moon, and were preparing to launch a mission in to deep space. Something went wrong prior to liftoff that caused a massive explosion, and the moon got thrown out of orbit.
You might think an explosion that big would blow the moon into pieces, but I guess not. So the moon drifted off through space, luckily running into a different set of aliens each week.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly why I use the laptop more. It's a PowerBook, so can drive both the LCD and an external monitor out of the box.
Hold down the T key when you restart, and the PowerBook goes into "FireWire Target Disk Mode". Run a FireWire cable between the PowerBook and a desktop (or another PowerBook), and the PowerBook disk appears as a regular FireWire drive on the other machine. It's also got an auto-sensing ethernet port, so you can plug it directly into the ethernet port of another machine without a cross-over cable.
At $3,499 it's not cheap, but I've found it's definitely a desktop replacement. In fact the only reason I keep the desktop machine around is for the odd game - laptop 3D hardware is still lagging behind a bit.
-dair
Unfortunately we cant get AOL in Europe
Perhaps not everywhere, but you can in the UK, France, and Germany at least.
-dair
I can find lots of references to it, including one in a book, but no solid record that he wrote this.
Dvorak makes a reference to it here, so it's probably safe to assume it's genuine.
-dair
have finally delivered a product that requires a person to upgrade for $100 to OS 9.something in order to run their "Classic" applications, then spend $100 on the new OS
You realise that the Mac OS X box includes a copy of the Mac OS 9 CD as well? You can buy two copies if you want, but it's not a requirement...
-dair
The original code name for the machine was "Carl Sagan", but when this news got to the late Mr. Sagan, he sued Apple, and the code name was changed to BHA, or "Butt-Head Astronomer"
:-)
Although you can see his point - the other two machines in the same range were "Piltdown Man" and "Cold Fusion", neither of which you would really want to be associated with as a scientist...
-dair (you've got to love the judge's conclusion though: "One does not seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrase 'Butt-Head'"
note: can == "know" in old Scottish
Actually it's "ken", and it's still slang today ("I dinnae ken" == "I don't know").
And in terms of why you would care, I don't think you would today - but if it takes off as MS hopes, you'll end up being locked out of services unless you're using an MS client (no change there then).
-dair
Perhaps you missed the fact that Berlin is a Vector-based GUI. You know, like Aqua?
Aqua isn't a vector based GUI. It's all just pixmaps, albeit it alpha blended in places. The CoreGraphics layer underneath isn't vector based either, it just has some support for PDF.
-dair
You missed out the bit where he says:
Stealing some M&Ms is a self-contained and easily recognised (there's one less bag on the shelf) act, so the damage would be limited accordingly. A compromised system could have suffered any amount of changes - you need to spend the time to understand exactly what did change before you can be sure you've covered it all.
-dair
Sure, it does document the legal case, but is there a way to actually find what you did ?
See the FAQ for the 3 claims, or the Intel report for their (non-legal) take.
-dair
I'm not sure that it would matter to the courts whether the source code to descramble CSS was composed of 7 lines or 700... What really matters is that the MPAA scrambled the content on their DVDs and this code circumvents that.
That's an interesting point - on what basis do you draw the line? You could say that "obviously" rot-13 wasn't a serious attempt to control access but if 7 lines of Perl can be considered a circumvention device, then what about 5 lines? Or 3? Or 1?
I share your scepticism about the outcoming of trying to challenge things on that basis, but you would think there has to be some kind of definition as to how how simple a circumvention device is allowed to be while remaining "effective" (or do they intend every case to be ratified by a court? Wait, don't answer that...).
Pre-DeCSS, if you'd proposed a circumvention device that could be bypassed in 7 lines of Perl, who would have taken it seriously?
-dair
But now someone has created a clone of Apple's QuickDraw3D called Quesa (LGPL)
Yep, it's at http://www.quesa.org/.
It runs over OpenGL (I think also DirectX, but I could be wrong.)
We only have an OpenGL renderer at the moment, but a Direct3D one may well happen (depending on OpenGL's status on Windows). Since the higher level scene-graph stuff is completely separate from the lower level renderers, you can plug in new renderers without disturbing any of the existing code (and the renderers don't have to be interactive - there's also a raytracing plug-in renderer).
-dair
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who has himself told interviewers he knows little about the issues involved
...
The appeal raises a host of complex issues, many of which fly well over my head
Right - so if Jackson can be discounted because he doesn't understand the issues, remind me again why I shouldn't discount this article?
-dair
you ain't living in the South West
;-)
Yeah, you're right - but as a Scot who moved down from Edinburgh, it's all the same to me...
-dair
Apparently you can only get cable modems or ADSL if you live in one of two cities, have a sister called Sue, an even number of vowels in your name and order on a Thursday.
:-)
It's not quite that bad - we've just moved to a fairly small town in the south west (here, population ~20K). Faxed an order to Madasafish two weeks ago, BT came round last Friday, I plugged the ADSL into the iBook and it's all working fine.
Given that an 0800-all-the-time ISP is about 15 quid a month, 40 quid for a much faster connection doesn't seem that bad a deal (particularly if you compare it to ISDN).
Granted the situation varies depending on where you are, but I was quite surprised that things went so smoothly given that we're fairly rural.
-dair (having said that, I did order on a Thursday, and I do have two vowels in my name...
PatentPro creates a properly formatted, fully submittable patent application without the need for an expensive patent attorney. "PatentPro is the only product in the world that can claim to have patented itself," boasted Kernel CEO James Petruzzi, a patent attorney, in a press release.
Hmm, somebody took the "I'm going to patent patents!" joke seriously then...
-dair
I've found good companies and stuff I didn't know about through some of the ads.
I can honestly say I've never found anything remotely useful by clicking an ad - if I'm going to spend money on something, I'll go and check out Google/Deja and see what real people have to say (about the product, not about the ad).
From the article: we are debating internally what OSDN sites can do to stay competitive in the ad banner business
Well judging by cnet, you stick a massive image right in the middle of the story and annoy your readers even more... Honestly, if I was paying money to Slashdot it'd be because I wanted it to continue - not because I wanted to buy my way free of ads.
-dair
The solar sale does *not* use the solar wind (the ejected ions and other debris from the sun) but rather the momemtum of individual photons of light.
Yep, sorry - the momentum does indeed come from photons.
However, the intensity of light falls off as 1/r^2 from the source, so you wouldn't accelerate too much before you were left floating in space.
I suppose the attraction is that as we're (relatively) close to the sun, it's a nice way to get a boost out of the inner solar system to send a probe to the outer planets. And potentially you could use an artificial source to finish the trip - once your acceleration tails off, keep pushing it with an orbital laser (or just leave it coasting along and accept it'll take longer to get there).
-dair
Why is that particular point made? Because its Russian, or because it's an ICBM?
Might be because it's being launched from a submarine? Apart from SeaLaunch, how common are satellite launches from sea? I don't know, but I would assume they're not that common (and particularly from a submarine).
-dair
it's not that practical for planetary travel, or even interplanetary travel
This is exactly what it's good for - the speed builds up extremely slowly (it only has the pressure of the solar wind driving it), and so the further you need to travel the more effective it is.
You need a more maneuvourable (sp?), or faster reacting, engine for that when it comes to landing, emergency procedures, etc.
You certainly do, but that's not what you would use a sail for. They're intended as a replacement for the long slow burn you need to get to your destination, so you don't need to carry a huge mass of fuel just to get there (instead you can save most of it for the final manoeuvres).
-dair
Legalese not being my forte, I had imagined...
A CLI <-> Explorer <-> HTML browser <-> Finder
When selecting themes.
Going by the then planned OS (Copland, which is where this patent will have come from), I don't think so. The behavioural changes that were present in the build of Copland that was half-released were all pretty trivial - menus flipped over vertically like some kind of paddle when you moused over them, dragging windows around produced sounds, etc.
It's arguable if these are really 'behaviours' as such - but irrespective of the theme your buttons were still buttons, zoom boxes were still zoom boxes, etc.
-dair
And Platinum was, in turn, based on a theme prepared for Apple's Copland OS
:-), and the name "Platinum" came along later.
Yep, I was a bit vague - Aaron was based on the then Copland look (since that was his name
-dair
I suspect this is a defensive patent. One of those "we should see if the PTO will grant this, cause if they give it to anyone else we are screwed" patents.
It does sound like it - this was definitely pitched as a big deal for Copland, and even when the Appearance Manager was spun off for Mac OS 8 themes were still being mentioned. One of the constant reminders when the Appearance Manager was introduced was that you shouldn't hand-roll your own UI components in case the look and feel changed again in the future (and if you must hand-roll them, to use the built in brushes and primitives so that you'll look somewhat right).
I seriously doubt it'd be resurrected today, but I guess it looked like a prudent idea at the time.
-dair
Ask the folks over at Kaleidoscope.net what Apple's attitude is to the theming of its OS?
Interestingly, one of the authors of the patent (Ed Voas) worked at one point with Greg Landweber, the author of Kaleidoscope, on Aaron. This was the precursor to Kaleidoscope, which restyled System 7 to look like the current Platinum appearance.
-dair
Do we really need gangs roving the streets with high-powered x-ray devices?
I think you'll be fairly safe - they also have to strap a large photographic plate to your back, then wait a couple of hours to have it developed. You'll probably notice.
-dair
Could someone please explain the premise behind Space 1999? Like are they from earth? Is there some sort of earth empire or what not?
Humans had colonised the moon, and were preparing to launch a mission in to deep space. Something went wrong prior to liftoff that caused a massive explosion, and the moon got thrown out of orbit.
You might think an explosion that big would blow the moon into pieces, but I guess not. So the moon drifted off through space, luckily running into a different set of aliens each week.
-dair