In mainstream culture he's an unknown. Gates they know. The rest? Nope. Linus is less relevant to the culture in general than, say, the designer of the Corvette.
Unless, of course, you build hot-rods. Which is precisely the place in our culture that Linux has taken up: now you soup-up computers instead of souping-up '57 Chevys. Growing up I knew and cared about Chrysler's hemi just like most here care about Linux or the latest Intel offering.
In typical fashion the administration looks for a solution in which military-style intervention will work.
It won't.
Until we can offer young people high quality mental-health treatment for their concerns we'll find more and more sinking into depression and despair.
I believe that our culture is a violent one and that the images in Doom and Marathon where violence is consequence-free matches that of our film world where its easy to see the whole-sale slaughter of thousands with no consequences at all for the person who caused it.
It's a pervasive message in our society.
Given this background, is it any wonder that young angry adolescents strike out in ways that are so destructive? They have been de-sensitized to violence! And it's not going to change soon.
So what we have to offer are ways for these deeply confused and possibly damaged young people to express what they are feeling and work through the terribly hurtful places so they can stand the social pressures (which are profound) without losing contact with the social fabric of society.
Guess what?
This is expensive. So is treating the drug problem at the demand side instead of the supply side.
We can't see that what we have are sick people who need to be cured...because you can't BLAME them if they are sick and you can't send in the police. Instead you have to treat them as individuals and cure them, one person at a time, person to person.
It's the only way we know, right now, that is proven to work.
Oh the whole the NY Times article is well-balanced and accurate. It's news reportage.
The site you would desire us to take on its face is, of course, pushing its own viewpoint.
I find the whole discussion on slash-dot to be laughable since, as a culture, few people here are willing to value the intellectual property of anyone: fair use is any use, should be this site's motto.
Re:In the tradition of Quincy and The Rockford Fil
on
C.S.I.
·
· Score: 1
Homicide: Life on the Street is anything but bland and was one of the few television shows to take a long hard unblinking look at race.
Crippled? What leads you to believe the DVD is crippled. Right now there is no support for it in OS X (that's to either play DVDs from the internal DVD player or to write them.)
One of Apple's primary markets is in video editing and production with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Both of these are $1,000 products and neither of them, at this time, runs on OS X. There's no announcement of when they will, although NAB would be about the right time-frame for Apple to release them.
There's nothing crippled about either of these products.
I can only assume that what you want is a drive which is capable of, somehow, doing a perfect bit for bit copy of a DVD. To my knowledge the hardware provided by Pioneer will not allow this. It is, after all, not possible to author a DVD on a computer with either CSS, Macrovision, or Region support. These are written by the folks who press the DVD.
What you can make on a Mac is a completely open DVD -- and that's ALL you can make.
It's important to remember that an engineering education has a certain breadth to it - and a philosophy of study. So do the sciences.
I'm an engineer and I value the training in group problem solving, the cross-discipline looks at civil and mechanical engineering as well as the courses in engineering law. I learned a lot about problem solving in a way that seems different from the computer science curriculums.
A couple of decades after "Mission of Gravity" Robert Forward wrote "Dragon's Egg", an excellent piece of hard-science extrapolation set on the surface of a neutron star.
The characters are engaging in about the same way that Vernor Vinge's are. The environment, of course, is the real hero - it's a novel of millieu.
This is one of those sites that makes me wonder if it passes the test about free lunches.
Clearly the full HDTV signal will have to be compressed up the ying-yang before it's going to fit into the FireWire pipe.
I'm not sure what a DV camcorder or VTR is going to do with material that is sent to it which isn't inreal DV format. Barf ismy guess. It's not like you're just sending a data stream over it. Otherwise we'd be backing up our systems to miniDV camcorders or DSR20s already.
If programs are simply objects manipulated by an OS which is, itself, an object, some of this problem goes away.
I don't think we have begun to explore the realm where we really begin to use computers to be smart assistants, we're still too hung up in the idea of THE GUI instead of letting form follow function.
The Superdrive is a single-layer drive. It also uses one of the proper subsets of DVD formatting and, as such, only records 60 minutes of video to the DVD.
The CSS and Region layers cannot be written by the software and possibly the hardware.
The short answer: you don't have access to that region of the DVD where CSS and region information is stored.
The superdrive will also only record 1 hour of MPEG2 onto the DVD: only one layer. I'm not sure if this is a function of the Panasonic mechanism.
It's my opinion that this is the equivalent of the LaserWriter for publishing video: now you have an output format that is of equal quality to the source so we're back to WYSIWYG in video for real.
I assume the article was whistfully thinking of the PUSH mowers. I grew up with one of those, but we also had an industrial mower made by Locke Steel Chain company. These mowers make those delightful striped lawns after they have done their clipping. These mowers had either a single reel or three, the outer two lifted to reduce the parked footprint. They ruled the lawns of many an estate in the 50s and 60s and perhaps still do.
Of course no decent baseball field, or putting green, would be without a reel mower for crafting those artful alternating bands.
We've heard a lot in the media the past couple weeks about how voting should be like an ATM machine.
But is this the case. Do you trust technology enough to have a paperless system? There are currently paper-based systems that will reject a ballot because it was not legally marked (voted too many times in a contest, what-have-you).
Is it possible to make a reliable and public election system which doesn't have a paper trail? Is it desirable?
I'd suggest not. At this point in the game making secure systems which can be validated is much more difficult task than reading votes from paper ballots.
What ARE the hurdles that an all-electronic balloting system would have to leap in order to make tampering nearly impossible and to fully preserve the integrity of the system.
My understanding of this weapon as it has been discussed in "Aviation Week and Space Technology" is that it isn't a "smart weapon" in so far as its targeting choices - it's simply a human-less vehicle for delivering ordinance to target.
Thus the decision to deploy a weapon on target will be made by its human flight controller using the vehicles sensor-array (have I slipped in Star Trek speak of what) and other suplimental information that might be available to the remote pilot.
This seems to me to be a Good Thing. Because the vehicle is not crewed it can operate at lower altitudes and take substantially greater risks than, say, an F-16. Consider the case in Kosovo where there was an alitude floor of 10,000 feet or so to keep the aircraft out of range of shoulder launched missles. This aircraft can get lower so target information can be better determined: less chance of tractors pulling wagons being identified from a couple of miles up as tanks.
Of course if the aircraft itself is too valuable the same sort of rules of engagement would apply and then not having a person's eyes in the airframe would be a detriment.
I think the sited report was filled with cheap shots.
There are a lot of checks and balances built into the election process. Now I'm in California not Florida, but I've been working on a documentary on the election process. There are a LOT of cross-checks built into the system. Signatures to cross-check with those on the voter reg cards. Serial numbers of ballots to verify the quantity issued to a polling place and the number of unused ballots balance with the number of entries.
It's not a trivial process. The people I have been around for the past 8 months care a lot about the integrity of their work.
As long as we're working with paper ballots there will be trails to follow. Should things go all electronic I'll have a lot less faith in the process. You can't walk into an electronic voting machine's memory and validate that what happened actually did. I can count physical votes and I can walk the paperwork to make sure there is consistance.
While it's all fun to believe in conspiracies I would assert that the US election process is, on the whole, on the up and up.
In the early days of the drug problems, under Nixon if you can believe it, there were substantial programs aimed at drug treatment and prevention.
The DARE program is insufficient because it doesn't fully recognize why people take drugs: It feels good and it meets some need that person has. Until we grapple with the reasons why people use drugs it's impossible to give young people the perspective they need to make positive choices for themselves.
So I'm definately in the camp that desires to see young people really understand the TRUE realities about drug use, not the hyped up versions that are often spread around.
It's certainly a place where communication between parents and their offspring can benefit eachother much more than propoganda.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium isn't a state institution. Just to correct an error in the article.
It's a fabulous place, however, and worth a visit, then a walk along the tidal pools to see in nature what you saw in the aquarium.
I have PB on two machines: a PowerBook G3/400 and a G4/450/MP. The difference is ASTOUNDING. The multi-threaded nature of X on a dual processor machinechanges the feel of the system completely.
Start up the CPU monitor and you'll get two displays, one for each CPU. Start moving things around, running different applications -- you'll find the ones where the designers really understood multi-threading. In the Mac world threads used to be slow and nasty. Not any more, they are the real thing, that Mach lives and breathes.
Find an MP machine and try one out. You'll have reason to smile.
Every nerd has to go for this show: how to make anything from nothing. Every engineer who thinks he has the Right Stuff should sit back and figure -- wow, cool.
Maybe there should be a slash-dot version of this show where you show up at some high-tech warehouse and have to assemble, say, a web server, from a left-over Apple ][, a high speed paper tape reader, and a 78 story building.
Left unchecked libraries can find themselves with caches full of pornography that, under many local laws, would get the owner arrested.
As a parent I am concerned about what my child might encounter. I'd like to be involved in guiding that exploration. Should an eight-year-old have full access to violent or pornographic sites? I don't think so. It would seem to me appropriate to have heavily filtered public access for children (libraries DO have children's departments) while maintaining open access for adults and children with adults or with adult permission.
Libraries themselves, by selecting the material they collect, routinely perform acts of censorship. I would suggest that a form of filtering on internet access for minors is appropriate as long as parents have a way of telling the library they will accept responsibility for what their child views. (And the youngster who is surfing accepts responsibility as well, I might add.)
I have serious problems with the assertion that "end to end" an electric vehicle is less efficient than a gasoline vehicle.
Powerplants are about the most efficient energy producers we have for converting fossil fuels to energy. The transmission of electric power is very efficient. Electric motors are highly efficient since they are not heat engines like an internal combustion engine.
We are famliar with the problems of gas storage but it's as dangerous as hydrogen or CNG. We've just develped the knowledge to use it relatively safely.
50 MB/sec is pretty slow these days for FireWire. Perhaps you're thinking about DV flowing OVER FireWire which is 720x480 4:1:1 compressed or about 5:1.
We'll have to see about who is sending any form of HDTV over FireWire, with or without compression. Life is very very young in the HDTV world
Slashdot Mirror
In mainstream culture he's an unknown. Gates they know. The rest? Nope. Linus is less relevant to the culture in general than, say, the designer of the Corvette.
Unless, of course, you build hot-rods. Which is precisely the place in our culture that Linux has taken up: now you soup-up computers instead of souping-up '57 Chevys. Growing up I knew and cared about Chrysler's hemi just like most here care about Linux or the latest Intel offering.
It was "2001 years of Space Idiocy" or something close. I was in college. I liked Hal who has never made a mistake...but forgets a lot.
In typical fashion the administration looks for a solution in which military-style intervention will work.
It won't.
Until we can offer young people high quality mental-health treatment for their concerns we'll find more and more sinking into depression and despair.
I believe that our culture is a violent one and that the images in Doom and Marathon where violence is consequence-free matches that of our film world where its easy to see the whole-sale slaughter of thousands with no consequences at all for the person who caused it.
It's a pervasive message in our society.
Given this background, is it any wonder that young angry adolescents strike out in ways that are so destructive? They have been de-sensitized to violence! And it's not going to change soon.
So what we have to offer are ways for these deeply confused and possibly damaged young people to express what they are feeling and work through the terribly hurtful places so they can stand the social pressures (which are profound) without losing contact with the social fabric of society.
Guess what?
This is expensive. So is treating the drug problem at the demand side instead of the supply side.
We can't see that what we have are sick people who need to be cured...because you can't BLAME them if they are sick and you can't send in the police. Instead you have to treat them as individuals and cure them, one person at a time, person to person.
It's the only way we know, right now, that is proven to work.
Oh the whole the NY Times article is well-balanced and accurate. It's news reportage.
The site you would desire us to take on its face is, of course, pushing its own viewpoint.
I find the whole discussion on slash-dot to be laughable since, as a culture, few people here are willing to value the intellectual property of anyone: fair use is any use, should be this site's motto.
Homicide: Life on the Street is anything but bland and was one of the few television shows to take a long hard unblinking look at race.
Currently playing on Court TV, I think.
Crippled? What leads you to believe the DVD is crippled. Right now there is no support for it in OS X (that's to either play DVDs from the internal DVD player or to write them.)
One of Apple's primary markets is in video editing and production with Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. Both of these are $1,000 products and neither of them, at this time, runs on OS X. There's no announcement of when they will, although NAB would be about the right time-frame for Apple to release them.
There's nothing crippled about either of these products.
I can only assume that what you want is a drive which is capable of, somehow, doing a perfect bit for bit copy of a DVD. To my knowledge the hardware provided by Pioneer will not allow this. It is, after all, not possible to author a DVD on a computer with either CSS, Macrovision, or Region support. These are written by the folks who press the DVD.
What you can make on a Mac is a completely open DVD -- and that's ALL you can make.
Is this, somehow, a bad thing? I don't think so.
I've been pondering this too.
Gee, do I have too much time on my hands or what?
Roman numerals have no sense of radix point so you really can't do a decimal there. Were they invented?
Perhaps a fraction:
Mac OS X I/X ??
Not elegant.
Maybe using lower case!
Mac OS Xi
With WHAT? Russia can hardly keep its lights going and they're going to build up for an arms race? Yeah,with Iran maybe.
Get a grip.
It's important to remember that an engineering education has a certain breadth to it - and a philosophy of study. So do the sciences.
I'm an engineer and I value the training in group problem solving, the cross-discipline looks at civil and mechanical engineering as well as the courses in engineering law. I learned a lot about problem solving in a way that seems different from the computer science curriculums.
The advice to ask questions of students is sound.
A couple of decades after "Mission of Gravity" Robert Forward wrote "Dragon's Egg", an excellent piece of hard-science extrapolation set on the surface of a neutron star.
The characters are engaging in about the same way that Vernor Vinge's are. The environment, of course, is the real hero - it's a novel of millieu.
Definately worth a look and still in print.
This is one of those sites that makes me wonder if it passes the test about free lunches.
Clearly the full HDTV signal will have to be compressed up the ying-yang before it's going to fit into the FireWire pipe.
I'm not sure what a DV camcorder or VTR is going to do with material that is sent to it which isn't inreal DV format. Barf ismy guess. It's not like you're just sending a data stream over it. Otherwise we'd be backing up our systems to miniDV camcorders or DSR20s already.
This just doesn't feel right to me.
I don't think we have begun to explore the realm where we really begin to use computers to be smart assistants, we're still too hung up in the idea of THE GUI instead of letting form follow function.
The Superdrive is a single-layer drive. It also uses one of the proper subsets of DVD formatting and, as such, only records 60 minutes of video to the DVD.
The CSS and Region layers cannot be written by the software and possibly the hardware.
The short answer: you don't have access to that region of the DVD where CSS and region information is stored.
The superdrive will also only record 1 hour of MPEG2 onto the DVD: only one layer. I'm not sure if this is a function of the Panasonic mechanism.
It's my opinion that this is the equivalent of the LaserWriter for publishing video: now you have an output format that is of equal quality to the source so we're back to WYSIWYG in video for real.
I think this is a BIG product for Apple.
I assume the article was whistfully thinking of the PUSH mowers. I grew up with one of those, but we also had an industrial mower made by Locke Steel Chain company. These mowers make those delightful striped lawns after they have done their clipping. These mowers had either a single reel or three, the outer two lifted to reduce the parked footprint. They ruled the lawns of many an estate in the 50s and 60s and perhaps still do. Of course no decent baseball field, or putting green, would be without a reel mower for crafting those artful alternating bands.
But is this the case. Do you trust technology enough to have a paperless system? There are currently paper-based systems that will reject a ballot because it was not legally marked (voted too many times in a contest, what-have-you).
Is it possible to make a reliable and public election system which doesn't have a paper trail? Is it desirable?
I'd suggest not. At this point in the game making secure systems which can be validated is much more difficult task than reading votes from paper ballots.
What ARE the hurdles that an all-electronic balloting system would have to leap in order to make tampering nearly impossible and to fully preserve the integrity of the system.
Thus the decision to deploy a weapon on target will be made by its human flight controller using the vehicles sensor-array (have I slipped in Star Trek speak of what) and other suplimental information that might be available to the remote pilot.
This seems to me to be a Good Thing. Because the vehicle is not crewed it can operate at lower altitudes and take substantially greater risks than, say, an F-16. Consider the case in Kosovo where there was an alitude floor of 10,000 feet or so to keep the aircraft out of range of shoulder launched missles. This aircraft can get lower so target information can be better determined: less chance of tractors pulling wagons being identified from a couple of miles up as tanks.
Of course if the aircraft itself is too valuable the same sort of rules of engagement would apply and then not having a person's eyes in the airframe would be a detriment.
I think the sited report was filled with cheap shots.
There are a lot of checks and balances built into the election process. Now I'm in California not Florida, but I've been working on a documentary on the election process. There are a LOT of cross-checks built into the system. Signatures to cross-check with those on the voter reg cards. Serial numbers of ballots to verify the quantity issued to a polling place and the number of unused ballots balance with the number of entries.
It's not a trivial process. The people I have been around for the past 8 months care a lot about the integrity of their work.
As long as we're working with paper ballots there will be trails to follow. Should things go all electronic I'll have a lot less faith in the process. You can't walk into an electronic voting machine's memory and validate that what happened actually did. I can count physical votes and I can walk the paperwork to make sure there is consistance.
While it's all fun to believe in conspiracies I would assert that the US election process is, on the whole, on the up and up.
The DARE program is insufficient because it doesn't fully recognize why people take drugs: It feels good and it meets some need that person has. Until we grapple with the reasons why people use drugs it's impossible to give young people the perspective they need to make positive choices for themselves.
So I'm definately in the camp that desires to see young people really understand the TRUE realities about drug use, not the hyped up versions that are often spread around.
It's certainly a place where communication between parents and their offspring can benefit eachother much more than propoganda.
The Monterey Bay Aquarium isn't a state institution. Just to correct an error in the article. It's a fabulous place, however, and worth a visit, then a walk along the tidal pools to see in nature what you saw in the aquarium.
Start up the CPU monitor and you'll get two displays, one for each CPU. Start moving things around, running different applications -- you'll find the ones where the designers really understood multi-threading. In the Mac world threads used to be slow and nasty. Not any more, they are the real thing, that Mach lives and breathes.
Find an MP machine and try one out. You'll have reason to smile.
Post no cute signatures.
Every nerd has to go for this show: how to make anything from nothing. Every engineer who thinks he has the Right Stuff should sit back and figure -- wow, cool. Maybe there should be a slash-dot version of this show where you show up at some high-tech warehouse and have to assemble, say, a web server, from a left-over Apple ][, a high speed paper tape reader, and a 78 story building.
As a parent I am concerned about what my child might encounter. I'd like to be involved in guiding that exploration. Should an eight-year-old have full access to violent or pornographic sites? I don't think so. It would seem to me appropriate to have heavily filtered public access for children (libraries DO have children's departments) while maintaining open access for adults and children with adults or with adult permission.
Libraries themselves, by selecting the material they collect, routinely perform acts of censorship. I would suggest that a form of filtering on internet access for minors is appropriate as long as parents have a way of telling the library they will accept responsibility for what their child views. (And the youngster who is surfing accepts responsibility as well, I might add.)
I have serious problems with the assertion that "end to end" an electric vehicle is less efficient than a gasoline vehicle. Powerplants are about the most efficient energy producers we have for converting fossil fuels to energy. The transmission of electric power is very efficient. Electric motors are highly efficient since they are not heat engines like an internal combustion engine. We are famliar with the problems of gas storage but it's as dangerous as hydrogen or CNG. We've just develped the knowledge to use it relatively safely.
50 MB/sec is pretty slow these days for FireWire. Perhaps you're thinking about DV flowing OVER FireWire which is 720x480 4:1:1 compressed or about 5:1. We'll have to see about who is sending any form of HDTV over FireWire, with or without compression. Life is very very young in the HDTV world