I know, I larned that in 12th grade. I just respectfully disagree.
what part of the Mac architecture is not open?
As I understand the term, 'architecture' refers to the design, not the components used to realize the design.
"What is Computer Architecture? "Conceptual structure and functional behavior, rather than the organization of data flow and controls, logic design, and physical implementation..." G. Amdahl
On the large, you might describe the Mac as open. But the devil lies in the details. There is a lot of difference in the documentation for the Mac as opposed to, for example, the Apple II. A great deal of information is not readily available, if at all.
Maybe the definition of "open" has shifted, but in my mind it will always mean "available for complete scrutiny". That is simply not the case for Apple software.
it could be argued that such important work should be done by the human hand, the human mind and the human heart... rather than by a computer. Computers excel at quantity, not quality.
Gandhi didn't have to resort to statistics to stop British brutality in India. Statistics don't remind us of the humanity of the people we oppress -- their faces do.
"What it comes down to -- again -- is money, pure and simple. If an LPFM station takes a slot on the FM dial, then it's one less corporate FM station that can make money off of that allotted frequency. Another argument posed by NAB was that, with the appearance of digital FM, corporate radio stations need all the bandwidth they can get because digital FM takes twice the amount of bandwidth needed by conventional FM broadcasting [emphasis added]. Corporate FM wants to give you, the listener, "CD quality" sound. Digital FM has failed to produce the desired effect, thus making "hogging the FM dial" another groundless NAB contention.
"With Kennard out of the way, the current FCC Chairman Michael Powell is considerably less tolerant of LPFM. And why not, since the NAB is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, DC, and can pretty much whip out its wallet and buy whomever they want."
1. "With the FCC action, IBOC technology is the approved digital broadcast AM/FM system for the U.S. market...."
The really cool part is that this is one company's technology that's been approved for use on the Public Airwaves (TM).
2."The Federal Communications Commission... approved the digital broadcasting technology of iBiquity Digital, which allows digital broadcasting in the AM and FM bands."
So look... it's not just FM.
3. "IBiquity's investors include 15 of the nation's top radio broadcasters, including ABC, Clear Channel and Viacom; financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan Partners, Pequot Capital and J&W Seligman; and strategic partners Ford Motor Company, Harris, Texas Instruments and Visteon...."
With investors like that, clearly we're going to get better and better quality music. We should Pequot happy. The Harris standing up on the back of my neck.
4. "one of the most sweeping advancements in broadcasting in nearly a century...."
Translation: same old crap will now come in clear as a bell. A big tolling Bell of Death.
Keeping a standard user interface makes it easier for people to move from computer to computer
That's fine for "community" machines... and 'standard interface' does make Macs easier to use. But that should be a separate, administrative lock-down. That should be Apple's problem, not mine.
As the only user of a machine, you shouldn't be restricted in such ways. When you just can't stand how the system font sucks any more, it should be changeable.
When you can't stand the bottleneck around startups any more, or where the disk icons are, or lack of heirarchical menus, or how you have to mouse all the way up to the menubar to do something over and over, you need to be able to fix that -- for your sanity, and to save time.
I'm an artist and I've tweaked my Mac (mmmm!) for a decade. Not all the time, but for an hour or so now and then (oooooh!)
For example, it was easy to install Kaleidoscope, and look at some far out windows.
Many creativity and production programs used to include preferences that let you customize backgrounds and keystrokes. When you're using "productivity" software (a pox on the name) all day long, day after day, some variety was the spice.
The Wired article sucked. Especially funny was the part where they described the Mac as having "open architecture".
In my view, using the internet has become needlessly complex and clumsy for the average user. Browsers are huge, unweildy, swiss-army beasts that are hard to set up and maintain. Many if not most web pages are awful. E-mail is clumsy, increasingly bandwidth-wasting, overly complex.
I could go on but... is there any reason to think that in the future of the internet, reason will prevail?
Oh yeah, how could I forget about AM?;-> It's harder to get antenna gain at AM frequencies. Some stations used (damn, I talk like AM is dead or something) "directional" antennas. You drive by the transmitter site and see three vertical antennas all in a row, that's the equivalent of a "beam" antenna. But most relied on lots of radials buried in the ground under the antenna to keep the signal hugging the ground.
The old "clear-channel" AM stations maxed out at 50KW, so 10KW (signal strength is logarithmic) was still serious power. At night that can be heard over much of the country because of the way AM propagates. FM is mostly line-of-sight with some signal bending over the earth's surface, but it never goes more than a hundred miles give or take... unless it's bouncing off temporarily ionzed patches in the ionosphere...
A 100KW station probably isn't really using a 100KW transmitter. That's a little hokey thing called ERP (effective radiated power)... which is the power measured at a distance from a gain antenna, and converted to the transmitter power you'd need to get the same signal strength from a piece of wire (dipole). Then they get to brag about huge broadcast power.
So let's say the station has a lousy antenna and transmitter and everything together pulls 20KW. That's 20KWH per hour of operation. At 8 cents per KWH that's $1.60 an hour, something like $34 a day, something like $1000 per month.
But you don't need to run such a big transmitter... lots of small stations run 1000 watts ERP or less. The electrical bill is quite manageable. It's keeping personnel around to keep it on the air that's expensive... that and staying clean for the FCC.
Technically and financially, starting a radio station is not all that difficult. You would definitely need someone familiar with the FCC rules and someone technical enough to keep the station within the regs.
Other than paying for personnel, turntables and a music collection, a decent alternative-style station these days could be built for quite low cost. A hundred-watt station with a vertical gain antenna could be done for under a thousand with some scrounging.
But as an individual, the odds of obtaining a license are almost nil.
If you were to create an organization you'd stand a better chance at a low-power license, the next time that window comes around. But a rock station? that wouldn't help your chances.
> The university here has around 10,000 students, but in my opinion, not a single decent radio station.
Your best chance of getting on the air is working with the university/faculty. If the school's not on the air, they have the pull to possibly get a license. If they're already on the air, you could 1) get hired and work your way up the ladder and try to change programming. Or 2), quicker still, you could go to work for an existing station as a volunteer DJ, in return for a chance to put what you want to hear on the air.
Lots of people would like the chance to become a broadcaster, but the doors for that closed for most of us a long time ago. Bandwidth is scarce, and the winners were already decided before most people here were born.
Most modern music is just recycled chords, lyrics, and beats.
Most of *all* music is just recycled chords and beats. Drummers have always recycled each other. Beethoven and Mozart recycled Haydn, Stravinsky recycled Tchaikovsky. The middle ages troubadors recycled each other. Gregorian chants recycled elements of other Gregorian chants. Jazz players float improvisations on familiar phrases from other tunes.
All of this was once *fluid and free*. Sometimes major ideas got recycled. Sometimes that was subconscious, sometimes not. The point is, it was *accepted practice*. How many famous classical pieces are titled "Variations on a theme by...".
*A degree of familiarity is an essential element of the music most people like.* That familiarity comes from the recycling of musical elements created by other musicians.
The corporations fighting sampling are trying to control artistic expression to maximize profits. This attempt is seen by many as a direct attack on the musical tradition. The idea of "fair use" was supposed to protect such creativity bottlenecks.
What's really obscene are the pages that wrap 50K or 100K of crap... to be gentle... around the content you're really interested in.
For example: Do I really need to be sent 50K of crap every time I want to read an e-mail with one or two sentences in it?
Google Groups uses frames to present archived Usenet materials... that makes sense. Yahoo sends *every* e-mail embedded in a load of crap. Guess what folks? I'm on a dial-up connection, and you are severely wasting my time.
And then there's all the 'helpful' stuff embedded in those pages. They insist on sending you cookies that you just wind up deleteing. Okay, since these are so important to *them*, where are the preferences to turn off the 'helpful' stuff?
And on and on. The insanity is endless. Pages that crash 5.x browsers... they can't even protect themselves against *scripts*?
All of this is another argument for open source and community involvement. And a way for end-users to *instantly* register their unhappiness with outrageous volume and insanely mediocre coding.
Solar electricity is ideal for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. There's plenty of it available in deserted areas in the US, where there are vast amounts of sunshine, and from whence it could be piped hither and thither.
The (reported) $50 billion bill for Yucca Mountain suggests we should limit further nuclear production, because generations of our children will have to pay to keep the wastes safe. Had that sum been invested in solar arrays, vast amounts of hydrogen would already be flowing.
the ASCII coded BASIC programs were pre-compiled into calls for ROM based tokens.
The BASIC for the Rat Shack Trash-80 similarly used tokens. Today someone might say "who stole what from whom", but back then copying what other people did was almost always acceptable -- because "microcomputers" (they weren't PC yet) were a hobby thing, not a mega-business-empire thing. The one person who complained loudest was -- Bill Gates. But then, of course, he didn't use tokens in his BASIC.
All right class: who knows where the Trash-80 BASIC came from?
Wow, what an insanely great explanation of bidding. I may not agree with some of the reasoning, but after Brian's explanation I finally understand bidding for the first time.
I do have a problem with the idea that some lower bidders are losing jobs JUST because there isn't time to evaluate more closely. If a bid runs 40 percent higher than another in a price range where that involves significant dollars (74K v 55K) that "saved time" is costing a lot of money. In many cases TWO crackerjack programmers may be way more productive than FIVE run-of-the-mill programmers. Not only might they meet the deadline, but the code will be better and easier to maintain. The potential savings in such a case ($20K), it seems to me, warrants closer evaluation.
Brian? How'd you *know* it was worth the extra $20K?
Heck I'd rather not rely on a company at all. See that thing last week about a community-ISP? You and your neighbors are the ISP.
But rather than relying on some big company like Covad for the big pipe, you rely on several and switch between them... and let them fight it out for your permanent business.
I've always said: why would anyone want to watch television on their computer screen? The idea of turning the net into another mass medium is so insane, I now have another reason to ask the same old question. Who would *ever* want to go back to a one-way medium? With content created & controlled by 3 networks?
CBS/NBC/ABC was an ideal propaganda machine. So might the internet be. But I'd rather know what people think than what governments think. If that's really what's at stake here, then this is indeed a crucial decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense.
In what sense does Microsoft "own" a copy of page published publicly?
You misplaced your punctuation mark.
I know, I larned that in 12th grade. I just respectfully disagree.
what part of the Mac architecture is not open?
As I understand the term, 'architecture' refers to the design, not the components used to realize the design.
"What is Computer Architecture?
"Conceptual structure and functional behavior, rather
than the organization of data flow and controls, logic
design, and physical implementation..." G. Amdahl
On the large, you might describe the Mac as open. But the devil lies in the details. There is a lot of difference in the documentation for the Mac as opposed to, for example, the Apple II. A great deal of information is not readily available, if at all.
Maybe the definition of "open" has shifted, but in my mind it will always mean "available for complete scrutiny". That is simply not the case for Apple software.
I shouldn't have to explain that in *this* forum.
I too am getting a little sick and tired of all this 'preaching to the converted
/. are already converted?
What makes you think that the only people who read
"You can prevent your opponent from defeating you through defense, but you cannot defeat him without taking the offensive."
- Sun Tzu
it could be argued that such important work should be done by the human hand, the human mind and the human heart ... rather than by a computer. Computers excel at quantity, not quality.
Gandhi didn't have to resort to statistics to stop British brutality in India. Statistics don't remind us of the humanity of the people we oppress -- their faces do.
What's Digital FM really about?
Here's all you need to know:
(Yes, the article is about LPFM.)
"What it comes down to -- again -- is money, pure and simple. If an LPFM station takes a slot on the FM dial, then it's one less corporate FM station that can make money off of that allotted frequency. Another argument posed by NAB was that, with the appearance of digital FM, corporate radio stations need all the bandwidth they can get because digital FM takes twice the amount of bandwidth needed by conventional FM broadcasting [emphasis added]. Corporate FM wants to give you, the listener, "CD quality" sound. Digital FM has failed to produce the desired effect, thus making "hogging the FM dial" another groundless NAB contention.
"With Kennard out of the way, the current FCC Chairman Michael Powell is considerably less tolerant of LPFM. And why not, since the NAB is one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, DC, and can pretty much whip out its wallet and buy whomever they want."
Since everyone's feeling lazy today, I guessed it was my turn to find a URL.
A check here reveals that:
1. "With the FCC action, IBOC technology is the approved digital broadcast AM/FM system for the U.S. market...."
The really cool part is that this is one company's technology that's been approved for use on the Public Airwaves (TM).
2."The Federal Communications Commission
So look
3. "IBiquity's investors include 15 of the nation's top radio broadcasters, including ABC, Clear Channel and Viacom; financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan Partners, Pequot Capital and J&W Seligman; and strategic partners Ford Motor Company, Harris, Texas Instruments and Visteon...."
With investors like that, clearly we're going to get better and better quality music. We should Pequot happy. The Harris standing up on the back of my neck.
4. "one of the most sweeping advancements in broadcasting in nearly a century...."
Translation: same old crap will now come in clear as a bell. A big tolling Bell of Death.
Keeping a standard user interface makes it easier for people to move from computer to computer
That's fine for "community" machines... and 'standard interface' does make Macs easier to use. But that should be a separate, administrative lock-down. That should be Apple's problem, not mine.
As the only user of a machine, you shouldn't be restricted in such ways. When you just can't stand how the system font sucks any more, it should be changeable.
When you can't stand the bottleneck around startups any more, or where the disk icons are, or lack of heirarchical menus, or how you have to mouse all the way up to the menubar to do something over and over, you need to be able to fix that -- for your sanity, and to save time.
I'm an artist and I've tweaked my Mac (mmmm!) for a decade. Not all the time, but for an hour or so now and then (oooooh!)
For example, it was easy to install Kaleidoscope, and look at some far out windows.
Many creativity and production programs used to include preferences that let you customize backgrounds and keystrokes. When you're using "productivity" software (a pox on the name) all day long, day after day, some variety was the spice.
The Wired article sucked. Especially funny was the part where they described the Mac as having "open architecture".
In my view, using the internet has become needlessly complex and clumsy for the average user.
... is there any reason to think that in the future of the internet, reason will prevail?
Browsers are huge, unweildy, swiss-army beasts that are hard to set up and maintain.
Many if not most web pages are awful.
E-mail is clumsy, increasingly bandwidth-wasting, overly complex.
I could go on but
Oh yeah, how could I forget about AM? ;-> It's harder to get antenna gain at AM frequencies. Some stations used (damn, I talk like AM is dead or something) "directional" antennas. You drive by the transmitter site and see three vertical antennas all in a row, that's the equivalent of a "beam" antenna. But most relied on lots of radials buried in the ground under the antenna to keep the signal hugging the ground.
... unless it's bouncing off temporarily ionzed patches in the ionosphere...
The old "clear-channel" AM stations maxed out at 50KW, so 10KW (signal strength is logarithmic) was still serious power. At night that can be heard over much of the country because of the way AM propagates. FM is mostly line-of-sight with some signal bending over the earth's surface, but it never goes more than a hundred miles give or take
A 100KW station probably isn't really using a 100KW transmitter. That's a little hokey thing called ERP (effective radiated power)... which is the power measured at a distance from a gain antenna, and converted to the transmitter power you'd need to get the same signal strength from a piece of wire (dipole). Then they get to brag about huge broadcast power.
... lots of small stations run 1000 watts ERP or less. The electrical bill is quite manageable. It's keeping personnel around to keep it on the air that's expensive ... that and staying clean for the FCC.
So let's say the station has a lousy antenna and transmitter and everything together pulls 20KW. That's 20KWH per hour of operation. At 8 cents per KWH that's $1.60 an hour, something like $34 a day, something like $1000 per month.
But you don't need to run such a big transmitter
Technically and financially, starting a radio station is not all that difficult. You would definitely need someone familiar with the FCC rules and someone technical enough to keep the station within the regs.
Other than paying for personnel, turntables and a music collection, a decent alternative-style station these days could be built for quite low cost. A hundred-watt station with a vertical gain antenna could be done for under a thousand with some scrounging.
But as an individual, the odds of obtaining a license are almost nil.
If you were to create an organization you'd stand a better chance at a low-power license, the next time that window comes around. But a rock station? that wouldn't help your chances.
> The university here has around 10,000 students, but in my opinion, not a single decent radio station.
Your best chance of getting on the air is working with the university/faculty. If the school's not on the air, they have the pull to possibly get a license. If they're already on the air, you could 1) get hired and work your way up the ladder and try to change programming. Or 2), quicker still, you could go to work for an existing station as a volunteer DJ, in return for a chance to put what you want to hear on the air.
Lots of people would like the chance to become a broadcaster, but the doors for that closed for most of us a long time ago. Bandwidth is scarce, and the winners were already decided before most people here were born.
Perfect example of tradition restraining new culture.
Innovation comes from the young. Restraint comes from the old.
Most modern music is just recycled chords, lyrics, and beats.
Most of *all* music is just recycled chords and beats. Drummers have always recycled each other. Beethoven and Mozart recycled Haydn, Stravinsky recycled Tchaikovsky. The middle ages troubadors recycled each other. Gregorian chants recycled elements of other Gregorian chants. Jazz players float improvisations on familiar phrases from other tunes.
All of this was once *fluid and free*. Sometimes major ideas got recycled. Sometimes that was subconscious, sometimes not. The point is, it was *accepted practice*. How many famous classical pieces are titled "Variations on a theme by...".
*A degree of familiarity is an essential element of the music most people like.* That familiarity comes from the recycling of musical elements created by other musicians.
The corporations fighting sampling are trying to control artistic expression to maximize profits. This attempt is seen by many as a direct attack on the musical tradition. The idea of "fair use" was supposed to protect such creativity bottlenecks.
What's really obscene are the pages that wrap 50K or 100K of crap ... to be gentle ... around the content you're really interested in.
... that makes sense. Yahoo sends *every* e-mail embedded in a load of crap. Guess what folks? I'm on a dial-up connection, and you are severely wasting my time.
... they can't even protect themselves against *scripts*?
For example: Do I really need to be sent 50K of crap every time I want to read an e-mail with one or two sentences in it?
Google Groups uses frames to present archived Usenet materials
And then there's all the 'helpful' stuff embedded in those pages. They insist on sending you cookies that you just wind up deleteing. Okay, since these are so important to *them*, where are the preferences to turn off the 'helpful' stuff?
And on and on. The insanity is endless. Pages that crash 5.x browsers
All of this is another argument for open source and community involvement. And a way for end-users to *instantly* register their unhappiness with outrageous volume and insanely mediocre coding.
Solar electricity is ideal for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. There's plenty of it available in deserted areas in the US, where there are vast amounts of sunshine, and from whence it could be piped hither and thither.
The (reported) $50 billion bill for Yucca Mountain suggests we should limit further nuclear production, because generations of our children will have to pay to keep the wastes safe. Had that sum been invested in solar arrays, vast amounts of hydrogen would already be flowing.
If I am making low-budget flick - sure!
And you probably would be!
simply listing "backup" programmers in the bid may be enough to reassure the client that the project will be finished if a primary coder quits.
Yeah, but a small shop may only *have* one really good programmer, and the other guys may be *cough* dogs *cough*.
Wow an extra 34 percent just on the chance that it helps the deadline. Hope that wasn't *public* dollars you were betting.
the ASCII coded BASIC programs were pre-compiled into calls for ROM based tokens.
The BASIC for the Rat Shack Trash-80 similarly used tokens. Today someone might say "who stole what from whom", but back then copying what other people did was almost always acceptable -- because "microcomputers" (they weren't PC yet) were a hobby thing, not a mega-business-empire thing. The one person who complained loudest was -- Bill Gates. But then, of course, he didn't use tokens in his BASIC.
All right class: who knows where the Trash-80 BASIC came from?
Too easy? How about the Heathkit BASIC?
you get what you pay for
Often. Of course, sometimes you get royally screwed. And sometimes you get what you pay for for less because you shopped around.
So it's a good rule of thumb for the indolent, but in the long term shopping pays nice dividends.
Wow, what an insanely great explanation of bidding. I may not agree with some of the reasoning, but after Brian's explanation I finally understand bidding for the first time.
I do have a problem with the idea that some lower bidders are losing jobs JUST because there isn't time to evaluate more closely. If a bid runs 40 percent higher than another in a price range where that involves significant dollars (74K v 55K) that "saved time" is costing a lot of money. In many cases TWO crackerjack programmers may be way more productive than FIVE run-of-the-mill programmers. Not only might they meet the deadline, but the code will be better and easier to maintain. The potential savings in such a case ($20K), it seems to me, warrants closer evaluation.
Brian? How'd you *know* it was worth the extra $20K?
the highest and lowest bids were thrown out at the beginning
Wow. Well maybe that makes sense in the construction industry, but throwing out the highest bidder where creativity is involved seems really dumb.
Would you want to throw out the bid of Industrial Light and Magic to do FX for your movie because it was the highest bid?
The fact is that economic and racial minorities produce a disproportionately high volume of criminals.
True. They also produce a high volume of poor and disadvantaged.
Hmmmm. Now why would HUNGRY people be more likely to commit crime?
Heck I'd rather not rely on a company at all. See that thing last week about a community-ISP? You and your neighbors are the ISP.
... and let them fight it out for your permanent business.
But rather than relying on some big company like Covad for the big pipe, you rely on several and switch between them
I've always said: why would anyone want to watch television on their computer screen?
The idea of turning the net into another mass medium is so insane, I now have another reason to ask the same old question. Who would *ever* want to go back to a one-way medium? With content created & controlled by 3 networks?
CBS/NBC/ABC was an ideal propaganda machine. So might the internet be. But I'd rather know what people think than what governments think. If that's really what's at stake here, then this is indeed a crucial decision.