Good luck. A few weeks ago Philadelphia City Councilman introduced a bill to ban small children from theaters in the city after 7PM, and (though it doesn't say it in the article) the MPAA is threatening lawsuits over it and screaming about unconstitutionality.
City residents have begun flocking to suburban theaters in search of disturbance-free viewing, and besides the quality-of-life issue the city is losing quite a bit of tax revenue from this.
If the MPAA doesn't like it, they can kiss my ass. People who don't want to employ common sense and hire a friggin' babysitter make things like this necessary.
From the article: First, create incentives and opportunities for parties to challenge the novelty and nonobviousness of an invention before the PTO grants a patent.
Prior art 'bounty hunters' and adding some common sense to the patent process sound like great ideas. Too bad they'll never be implemented, due to expensive lobbying efforts by those who stand to lose the most (i.e. the megacorps).
It's been known for years that sitting in an too-hot hot tub for a while or wearing overly-restrictive underwear can cause a short-term decrease in sperm count. It is any real stretch of the imagination to determine that putting a different heat source near the crotch and sitting in a way that confines the testicles in that heat would have the very same effect?
Your balls need to be somewhat cool to function properly... why the hell else do you think they have to dangle outside of the body in their own little storage pouch-- for ornamental purposes?
The TiVo does show Lost ending at 9:01 in the onscreen schedule. I start watching it at about 9:20 so I can speed through the ads, so I have never noticed if the episodes actually end before the TiVo's record light goes out at 9:01.
Fortunately, Lost is popular, so torrents are available. The one time I missed an episode I quickly found a copy of it in HD, with the commercials edited out.
It would be nice if people would provide torrents of the last five minutes of the shows that are oddly scheduled, so those of us who get it chopped off by our PVRs don't have to download the whole episode if we don't want to.:-)
Because probably 90-95% of the people who will buy this book will be new to the Mac, and probably don't even have a Classic System Folder on their hard drive (since it no longer comes preinstalled on new machines), much less any legacy files that have resource forks.
The History Channel (IIRC) just ran a special about that last week. A team set out to prove or disprove the single bullet theory. They constructed two very realistic torsos, placed them the way Kennedy and Connally were seated and oriented in the car, and fired a bullet exactly like Oswald used from a rifle just like Oswald's from Oswald's relative position to the limo.
The result? They almost got a single bullet to produce all the wounds. The only difference was they broke an extra rib in "Connally's" torso-- that deformed the bullet more than apparently happened in the real assassination, and took away the energy it needed to penetrate a block of gel meant to represent Connally's thigh-- it just bounced off, instead. I thought the single bullet theory was a bunch of shit, but after seeing their recreation it certainly seems plausible.
The show was fascinating, and I'm sure it will see another airing or two this week for anybody who's interested. I think it was "Investigating History," and if so then it's on tonight (Monday night 11/22) at 10PM ET.
For one, how do they know if you're using your seat belt or not?
Most if not all fairly new cars have a seat belt light that constantly blinks if the engine is running and the driver's seat belt isn't fastened. When the seatbelt is fastened, the light goes out. It's a simple matter to run an extra wire to the black box that records a 1 or 0 based on whether the seatbelt light is on. One of my cars (a 2001 model) has a pressure switch in the passenger seat cushion and does the same thing for the passenger seat belt.
Is the CD-MP3 player out of style or just overlooked?
I think the CD-MP3 player is more of a transitory product whose time is more or less over now. A few years ago everyone had CDs and cheap portable CD players, and people were just starting to get accustomed to the idea of ripping their CDs to MP3. Also, hard drive-based players were large and unwieldy or small but expensive. It made sense to enable the players people were already buying to play the new format.
The downside is, CDs only hold so much data-- you've still got to carry more than one around if you want a really large variety of music available to you at any given moment. You also have to burn new ones constantly, depending on what you're in the mood to listen to and/or if you acquire additional music.
Since then, hard drive-based players have gotten cheaper and their capacities have gone up as well. Additionally, it's much easier to manage the music on them. My 30GB iPod holds my entire music collection (about 6700 songs currently and still growing) with room to spare, and fits in my shirt pocket. My standard playlist changes so often I'd be going through CD-Rs like water. Even if my car stereo read MP3 CDs, I wouldn't use them. It's much more convenient to connect my iPod to the CD changer port and hear any song in my collection at a moment's notice.
And let's not forget when they explored the idea of coding stuff into Windows 3.1 so that it displayed error messages if it was run on top of DR-DOS, for the sole purpose of making people who wanted to run Windows go out and buy MS-DOS as well.
And what about the spurious "improvements" they make to the.doc format with practically every new version of Word? That's just to screw everyone who wants to use competing word processing apps and to keep Word users upgrading to the newest version to avoid file-format hassles.
If his stereo has a CDR MP3 player function, it likely has support for a CD jukebox - go to Precision Interface Electronics and order the appropriate adapter, it will be much better.
Or go to DensionUSA and see if their ICElink product is supported on your car's stereo-- then you can keep the iPod out of sight and control it (to a degree) with your head unit's controls.
I was using a PIE cable for a while along with a RemoteRemote RF remote, but the remote would often miss keypresses and/or I couldn't tell if I had pushed the mushy buttons sufficiently for the command to be sent. It was a distraction I didn't want to deal with while driving-- I want to hit a button, know I hit it, and have the command register, all without thinking about it or looking away from the road.
Don't forget GOP shenanigans in Philadelphia
on
Pre-Election Discussion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A couple weeks ago, the Republicans tried at the last minute to relocate 63 polling places in Philadelphia, mostly in areas where voters are predominantly non-white (read: likely to vote Democrat). This was clearly a ploy to create confusion in the hopes that people would not receive word of the relocation and in time and just give up after going to their normal polling place and finding they could not vote there.
Much to the chagrin of the Republicans, their attempt was foiled and all those pesky brown people will be able exercise their constitutional right to vote in their usual polling places.
Isn't Bush supposed to be done in by an assasins bullet? I mean, the 0 year "curse" has been responsible for the deaths of US Presidents longer than the Redskin election "prophecy" has been around.
Reagan broke that curse-- elected in 1980, survived through two terms.
Apple is setting their sights too high (the original iPod was only bought by the most diehard Apple fans)
Uh, no.
First of all, the original iPod was only meant to work with Macs, so your attempt to denigrate it by saying that "only diehard Apple fans bought them" is completey asinine-- Mac users were 100% of the target market!
Second, your assertion is also completely wrong. The original iPod was a huge hit, and plenty of Windows users were quickly clamoring for Apple to provide a Windows-compatible model. Some Windows users bought Mac-only iPods and went to work getting them to talk to their PCs. There were quite a few apps written to accomplish this, like EphPod and xPod (later renamed xPlay, IIRC).
Sure, the Mac was doing well (the total of all known viruses was under a hundred, compared to those for DOS/Windows, which exceeded 22,000.) But the number was certainly not zero.
Not zero, but close enough-- I believe it was barely more than 20 or 25. The most popular Mac antivirus program back then, Disinfectant, listed them all in its "about" box, scrolling them onscreen one at a time in the time it took the theme from "Monty Python" to play.
The Disinfectant guys gave up when Word/Excel macro viruses appeared on the scene and became ridiculously prevalent practically overnight. Probably 98% of them were harmless to the Mac, but the Mac could be a carrier, so it was good sense to make Mac antivirus software detect and remove them. The Disinfectant guys quickly realized they couldn't keep up, so they resigned the game and left it in the hands of Norton, McAfee, et al.
Since then, the primary reason for Mac antivirus software has been "use this as a courtesy to the Windows users of the world." Well, unless you're Intego. Speaking of which, where's their press release about how 'Opener' will spell doom for all Mac users who don't buy their full line of security software immediately? Their PR department must have been off yesterday.
Nelson: "Copyright infringement is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark!"
Also, from the pamphlet, "So You've Decided to Download a Leaked Copy of GTA: San Andreas": Myth: Unreleased video game piracy is wrong. Fact: Video game companies are big faceless corporations, which makes it okay.
If you're looking at used Macs on eBay, any desktop with dual G4 processors would be fine for running OS X, though you'd probably want to stuff it full of RAM if it doesn't come that way. Make sure the onboard video card has at least (IIRC) 16MB of RAM so you'll get the benefits of Quartz Extreme. If you go for a 15" CRT-based iMac, make sure it's a slot-loader with at least a 500MHz G3, and try to find one with enough VRAM for Quartz Extreme.
Check prices for completed auctions of machines that meet the above specs to get a feel for the price you're likely to pay. Used Macs hold their value extremely well and auction prices tend to be high. For what you'll be paying for a used machine, plus shipping, it might be worth it to just get a brand-new eMac at your local Apple Store, which will be much faster and have a full warranty.
That would explain why I see so many IBM PDAs in the corporate world.
You might not have seen them, but they existed for a time. IBM sold rebranded Palm organizers under the "WorkPad" brand. They sold about 181,000 of them in 2001. They were discontinued in early 2002. IBM didn't really do much in the way of a value-add, which is why they weren't huge sellers. I'm willing to bet that most of them that were sold went to lazy Corporate IT types who wanted to minimize the vendors they dealt with and/or the brands they purchased.
I've wondered if hard science or technology programming will ever catch on with the general public. What do you think?"
The general public (at least in the U.S.) doesn't like anything remotely educational. For proof, look to The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel. There used to be very good shows on both, all the time. In the last couple of years, their programming has taken a drastic downturn. I ask you, what's so educational about a family of foul-mouthed neanderthals building gaudy motorcycles? Or a bunch of idiots redoing each other's houses? The only decent, interesting show left on either network that I can think of right now is Mythbusters-- but even they sort of pander to the idiots by staying light on the science behind their experiments and blowing shit up all the time (Ooooh! Explosions!).
It seems the public may be beginning to tire of reality shows, but it's still too early to be certain. Perhaps once the reality fad blows over, TLC and Discovery will resume programming for people smarter than the average turnip. One can only hope.
Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "Those are the sort of things where you get more capability out of a processor by designing specific silicon solutions as opposed to just keep turning the clock faster." In the meantime, Intel is planning on releasing a 3.8 Ghz chip with 2mb of cache."
So to sum up:
1) We've realized it's dumb to just keep increasing the clock speed. 2) Buy our new Pentium 4! It's going to have a higher clock speed!
A little while ago Apple announced their quarterly financial results. Check out this tidbit:
Apple said it shipped 836,000 Macs and 2,016,000 iPods during the quarter, representing a 6 percent increase in CPU units and a 500 percent increase in iPods over the year-ago quarter. (Emphasis mine)
For the three months those numbers cover, Apple sold nearly one thousand iPods per hour. I'd say all the pretenders to the throne have their work cut out for them.
it's a shame that Apple doesn't release OS-X for x86 hardware..
Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
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No babies. period.
Good luck. A few weeks ago Philadelphia City Councilman introduced a bill to ban small children from theaters in the city after 7PM, and (though it doesn't say it in the article) the MPAA is threatening lawsuits over it and screaming about unconstitutionality.
City residents have begun flocking to suburban theaters in search of disturbance-free viewing, and besides the quality-of-life issue the city is losing quite a bit of tax revenue from this.
If the MPAA doesn't like it, they can kiss my ass. People who don't want to employ common sense and hire a friggin' babysitter make things like this necessary.
~Philly
From the article:
First, create incentives and opportunities for parties to challenge the novelty and nonobviousness of an invention before the PTO grants a patent.
Prior art 'bounty hunters' and adding some common sense to the patent process sound like great ideas. Too bad they'll never be implemented, due to expensive lobbying efforts by those who stand to lose the most (i.e. the megacorps).
~Philly
It's been known for years that sitting in an too-hot hot tub for a while or wearing overly-restrictive underwear can cause a short-term decrease in sperm count. It is any real stretch of the imagination to determine that putting a different heat source near the crotch and sitting in a way that confines the testicles in that heat would have the very same effect?
Your balls need to be somewhat cool to function properly... why the hell else do you think they have to dangle outside of the body in their own little storage pouch-- for ornamental purposes?
~Philly
The TiVo does show Lost ending at 9:01 in the onscreen schedule. I start watching it at about 9:20 so I can speed through the ads, so I have never noticed if the episodes actually end before the TiVo's record light goes out at 9:01.
:-)
Fortunately, Lost is popular, so torrents are available. The one time I missed an episode I quickly found a copy of it in HD, with the commercials edited out.
It would be nice if people would provide torrents of the last five minutes of the shows that are oddly scheduled, so those of us who get it chopped off by our PVRs don't have to download the whole episode if we don't want to.
~Philly
How could you not go indepth in Resource forks?
Because probably 90-95% of the people who will buy this book will be new to the Mac, and probably don't even have a Classic System Folder on their hard drive (since it no longer comes preinstalled on new machines), much less any legacy files that have resource forks.
~Philly
I stand corrected. I wasn't sure about the channel and made my best guess.
Or is that damn Magic bullet bullshit true?
The History Channel (IIRC) just ran a special about that last week. A team set out to prove or disprove the single bullet theory. They constructed two very realistic torsos, placed them the way Kennedy and Connally were seated and oriented in the car, and fired a bullet exactly like Oswald used from a rifle just like Oswald's from Oswald's relative position to the limo.
The result? They almost got a single bullet to produce all the wounds. The only difference was they broke an extra rib in "Connally's" torso-- that deformed the bullet more than apparently happened in the real assassination, and took away the energy it needed to penetrate a block of gel meant to represent Connally's thigh-- it just bounced off, instead. I thought the single bullet theory was a bunch of shit, but after seeing their recreation it certainly seems plausible.
The show was fascinating, and I'm sure it will see another airing or two this week for anybody who's interested. I think it was "Investigating History," and if so then it's on tonight (Monday night 11/22) at 10PM ET.
~Philly
For one, how do they know if you're using your seat belt or not?
Most if not all fairly new cars have a seat belt light that constantly blinks if the engine is running and the driver's seat belt isn't fastened. When the seatbelt is fastened, the light goes out. It's a simple matter to run an extra wire to the black box that records a 1 or 0 based on whether the seatbelt light is on. One of my cars (a 2001 model) has a pressure switch in the passenger seat cushion and does the same thing for the passenger seat belt.
~Philly
Is the CD-MP3 player out of style or just overlooked?
I think the CD-MP3 player is more of a transitory product whose time is more or less over now. A few years ago everyone had CDs and cheap portable CD players, and people were just starting to get accustomed to the idea of ripping their CDs to MP3. Also, hard drive-based players were large and unwieldy or small but expensive. It made sense to enable the players people were already buying to play the new format.
The downside is, CDs only hold so much data-- you've still got to carry more than one around if you want a really large variety of music available to you at any given moment. You also have to burn new ones constantly, depending on what you're in the mood to listen to and/or if you acquire additional music.
Since then, hard drive-based players have gotten cheaper and their capacities have gone up as well. Additionally, it's much easier to manage the music on them. My 30GB iPod holds my entire music collection (about 6700 songs currently and still growing) with room to spare, and fits in my shirt pocket. My standard playlist changes so often I'd be going through CD-Rs like water. Even if my car stereo read MP3 CDs, I wouldn't use them. It's much more convenient to connect my iPod to the CD changer port and hear any song in my collection at a moment's notice.
~Philly
I really don't think Microsquish intentionally "breaks" other software.
.doc format with practically every new version of Word? That's just to screw everyone who wants to use competing word processing apps and to keep Word users upgrading to the newest version to avoid file-format hassles.
Some would disagree.
And let's not forget when they explored the idea of coding stuff into Windows 3.1 so that it displayed error messages if it was run on top of DR-DOS, for the sole purpose of making people who wanted to run Windows go out and buy MS-DOS as well.
And what about the spurious "improvements" they make to the
~Philly
things will get better or we will be living in a non Microsoft world.
I think you misspelled "and."
~Philly
If his stereo has a CDR MP3 player function, it likely has support for a CD jukebox - go to Precision Interface Electronics and order the appropriate adapter, it will be much better.
Or go to DensionUSA and see if their ICElink product is supported on your car's stereo-- then you can keep the iPod out of sight and control it (to a degree) with your head unit's controls.
I was using a PIE cable for a while along with a RemoteRemote RF remote, but the remote would often miss keypresses and/or I couldn't tell if I had pushed the mushy buttons sufficiently for the command to be sent. It was a distraction I didn't want to deal with while driving-- I want to hit a button, know I hit it, and have the command register, all without thinking about it or looking away from the road.
~Philly
I'm saying that we really need AOL to get their act together to keep their current customer base from running rampant on the net!
Too late.
~Philly
A couple weeks ago, the Republicans tried at the last minute to relocate 63 polling places in Philadelphia, mostly in areas where voters are predominantly non-white (read: likely to vote Democrat). This was clearly a ploy to create confusion in the hopes that people would not receive word of the relocation and in time and just give up after going to their normal polling place and finding they could not vote there.
Much to the chagrin of the Republicans, their attempt was foiled and all those pesky brown people will be able exercise their constitutional right to vote in their usual polling places.
~Philly
Isn't Bush supposed to be done in by an assasins bullet?
I mean, the 0 year "curse" has been responsible for the deaths of US Presidents longer than the Redskin election "prophecy" has been around.
Reagan broke that curse-- elected in 1980, survived through two terms.
~Philly
Apple is setting their sights too high (the original iPod was only bought by the most diehard Apple fans)
Uh, no.
First of all, the original iPod was only meant to work with Macs, so your attempt to denigrate it by saying that "only diehard Apple fans bought them" is completey asinine-- Mac users were 100% of the target market!
Second, your assertion is also completely wrong. The original iPod was a huge hit, and plenty of Windows users were quickly clamoring for Apple to provide a Windows-compatible model. Some Windows users bought Mac-only iPods and went to work getting them to talk to their PCs. There were quite a few apps written to accomplish this, like EphPod and xPod (later renamed xPlay, IIRC).
~Philly
Sure, the Mac was doing well (the total of all known viruses was under a hundred, compared to those for DOS/Windows, which exceeded 22,000.) But the number was certainly not zero.
Not zero, but close enough-- I believe it was barely more than 20 or 25. The most popular Mac antivirus program back then, Disinfectant, listed them all in its "about" box, scrolling them onscreen one at a time in the time it took the theme from "Monty Python" to play.
The Disinfectant guys gave up when Word/Excel macro viruses appeared on the scene and became ridiculously prevalent practically overnight. Probably 98% of them were harmless to the Mac, but the Mac could be a carrier, so it was good sense to make Mac antivirus software detect and remove them. The Disinfectant guys quickly realized they couldn't keep up, so they resigned the game and left it in the hands of Norton, McAfee, et al.
Since then, the primary reason for Mac antivirus software has been "use this as a courtesy to the Windows users of the world." Well, unless you're Intego. Speaking of which, where's their press release about how 'Opener' will spell doom for all Mac users who don't buy their full line of security software immediately? Their PR department must have been off yesterday.
~Philly
Nelson: "Copyright infringement is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark!"
Also, from the pamphlet, "So You've Decided to Download a Leaked Copy of GTA: San Andreas":
Myth: Unreleased video game piracy is wrong.
Fact: Video game companies are big faceless corporations, which makes it okay.
~Philly
If you're looking at used Macs on eBay, any desktop with dual G4 processors would be fine for running OS X, though you'd probably want to stuff it full of RAM if it doesn't come that way. Make sure the onboard video card has at least (IIRC) 16MB of RAM so you'll get the benefits of Quartz Extreme. If you go for a 15" CRT-based iMac, make sure it's a slot-loader with at least a 500MHz G3, and try to find one with enough VRAM for Quartz Extreme.
Check prices for completed auctions of machines that meet the above specs to get a feel for the price you're likely to pay. Used Macs hold their value extremely well and auction prices tend to be high. For what you'll be paying for a used machine, plus shipping, it might be worth it to just get a brand-new eMac at your local Apple Store, which will be much faster and have a full warranty.
~Philly
That would explain why I see so many IBM PDAs in the corporate world.
You might not have seen them, but they existed for a time. IBM sold rebranded Palm organizers under the "WorkPad" brand. They sold about 181,000 of them in 2001. They were discontinued in early 2002. IBM didn't really do much in the way of a value-add, which is why they weren't huge sellers. I'm willing to bet that most of them that were sold went to lazy Corporate IT types who wanted to minimize the vendors they dealt with and/or the brands they purchased.
~Philly
For the average person [$250] is way too much.
In just the last three months, over two million "average people" have apparently disagreed with you.
~Philly
I've wondered if hard science or technology programming will ever catch on with the general public. What do you think?"
The general public (at least in the U.S.) doesn't like anything remotely educational. For proof, look to The Discovery Channel and The Learning Channel. There used to be very good shows on both, all the time. In the last couple of years, their programming has taken a drastic downturn. I ask you, what's so educational about a family of foul-mouthed neanderthals building gaudy motorcycles? Or a bunch of idiots redoing each other's houses? The only decent, interesting show left on either network that I can think of right now is Mythbusters-- but even they sort of pander to the idiots by staying light on the science behind their experiments and blowing shit up all the time (Ooooh! Explosions!).
It seems the public may be beginning to tire of reality shows, but it's still too early to be certain. Perhaps once the reality fad blows over, TLC and Discovery will resume programming for people smarter than the average turnip. One can only hope.
~Philly
Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said, "Those are the sort of things where you get more capability out of a processor by designing specific silicon solutions as opposed to just keep turning the clock faster." In the meantime, Intel is planning on releasing a 3.8 Ghz chip with 2mb of cache."
So to sum up:
1) We've realized it's dumb to just keep increasing the clock speed.
2) Buy our new Pentium 4! It's going to have a higher clock speed!
~Philly
A little while ago Apple announced their quarterly financial results. Check out this tidbit:
Apple said it shipped 836,000 Macs and 2,016,000 iPods during the quarter, representing a 6 percent increase in CPU units and a 500 percent increase in iPods over the year-ago quarter. (Emphasis mine)
For the three months those numbers cover, Apple sold nearly one thousand iPods per hour. I'd say all the pretenders to the throne have their work cut out for them.
~Philly
it's a shame that Apple doesn't release OS-X for x86 hardware..
/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on
~Philly