Check out the Harvard Medical School Surgical Planning Lab for instance. They're working on (among other things) a system that allows doctors to perform surgery while the patient is inside an MRI machine, so that the surgeons can literally see what's under their knife before they make the next incision. (Right now it's done on a CRT, eventually they want some sort of HUD overlay.) Very, very cool stuff. If unenclosed holographic projection ever happens, they'll be first in line to use it.
There is no German operating system that I know of.
Untrue. Siemens-Nixdorf has had their own version of SVR4 for a long time now. It's called "Reliant UNIX" these days, but was known as "SINIX" for most of its history. It runs on the old Pyramid/Siemens workstations and servers. Not very well known in the states, but you can usually tell sysadmins who've touched it by the way they start cringing when it's mentioned.
When sites can provide their advertisers with target demographics and an equivilant to television ratings, the current web models will work. Just give them time.
Dream on, marketroid. Hate to burst your bubble, but that is exactly what all of the major ad network players do, or at least purport to do. Companies like Accrue and NetGravity made millions of dollars selling ad-tracking, targeting and reporting software to various portals (now all dead or dying) in order to ensure the delivery of that information.
Guess what? All the targeted demographic information in the world doesn't do a damn thing to change some very basic facts:
Nobody (ie: not enough people to make it worth anybody's time in a sober business environment) was clicking on the damn ads.
Nobody (ibid) was buying what the ads were selling.
Most of the ads were being bought by over-capitalized dot-com startups which are now DOA. Minus that money, placement prices are finding their natural level: somewhere underneath newspaper classifieds.
Add it all up and you have Game Over for the ad banner market. For now, and for the forseeable future. And I for one will not miss it at all. Bad people, bad money, good riddance.
Speculation is welcome as to why NT sysadmins don't install service packs for known vulnerabilities...
Right. So the thousands of unpatched RedHat systems that the ramen worm (not to mention billions of script kiddies) has been exploiting are being run by, what...NT Sysadmins?
People who live in glass houses should exercise care when beating their heads against the walls.
Yes, you have the right to make copies for personal use.
No, you do not have a guaranteed right to have it made easy for you to do so. Stop bitching.
The Betamax case (Sony v. Universal City) says nothing about voluntarily adopted copy protection schemes such as Macrovision and Safemedia. Indeed, they could be seen as a direct consequence of the Betamax decision. And they are infinitely preferable to legislatively adopted copy-protection schemes such as the DMCA.
For the longest time I was sure that illiad was Berke Breathed. The artistic styles often matched far too well, the style of the humor and stories so close.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. Artistic styles match? Excuse me, but call me when Illiad learns how to draw his characters in anything but 90-degree profile. And when he learns how to draw backgrounds to perspective. And when he learns how to shade. And don't forget...when he learns how to actually tell a joke.
3dfx, nVidia, Matrox and ATI have seen their profit margins bloated beyond any reasonable proportion by the PC gaming craze. There was no reason that any sane human being would ever need to shell out $300 for a GeForce2 or V5-6000 except to satisfy the ever-increasing hardware demands of the 3d gaming scene.
Well, now that gaming scene is evaporating just as fast and as spectacularly (and even more deservedly) than the dot-coms, and suddenly all of those billions of dollars plowed into developing features that nobody other than hardcore gamers wanted were the millstone around more than one company's neck. Mark my words: S3 is next, followed by ATI.
nVidia's exit strategy is clear: a broad base of budget products, and a migration of its high-end technology to the XBox, where it stands a chance in hell of making a profit. But even that's not guaranteed: the console gaming market is looking every bit as glutted and oversubscribed as the PC side. If Dreamcast, Xbox and PS2 end up becoming the 5200, ColecoVision and SMS of the 21st century, expect nVidia to be doing a little implosion of its own.
Fandom.com appears to have the same basic business and revenue model that is being used by IGN, UGO, Gamespy, Bla-Bla, and about a dozen or so others.
That being the case, I wouldn't worry, since every single last one of the companises named above is either already bankrupt or heading that way at full speed. The entire "ad network" concept was nothing more than a ponzi scheme to begin with (usually fueled by page impressions driven by either porn, pirated content or both), and is currently in the process of crashing down like all pyramid scams eventually do. If fandom.com exists as anything more than a legal footnote a year from now, I would be shocked.
Since when was corporate backing vital to the success of an open source project?
If by "success" you mean "used and enjoyed by other OSS enthsiasts", then of course none at all.
If, however, by success you mean "displaces mp3 as the dominant internet music encoding standard and withstands a barrage of patent-infringement lawsuits from a panoply of huge corporate interests", which were pretty much the stated goals of the OggVorbis project, then the answer is: pretty goddamn critical. The former requires some concentrated, full-time attention of the kind of coders who don't grow on trees. The latter is going to require some very, very expensive lawyers. Both will require some significant cash investment. Got a million or two dollars to spare?
You have to wonder if either the submitter or the editors actually read this article.
Sure, Thompson Multimedia is doing some entirely predictable sabre-rattling. Anybody who didn't see that coming a mile off should see an optometrist.
The important thing mentioned in there is that CMGI has pulled the plug on Vorbis development. That's a far more important, and ominous development. Corporate backing was allowing progress to be made very quickly on Vorbis, and will be critical when the inevitable patent infringement suit comes. If someone else with deep pockets doesn't step in soon, we can just resign ourselves to paying Frauenhoffer's license fees for the forseeable future.
(And please, let's not delude ourselves that the mythical Open Source Community will magically step in and finish the project: enthusiasm and spirit are no replacement for in-depth knowledge of signal processing.)
Mozilla isn't just a browser; It's a new development platform that happens to have a powerful HTML,CSS,XML,etc rendering engine at its core.
This statement neatly encapsulates everything that is completely wrong-headed and broken about the mozilla project.
It's not a browser, it's an operating system! Guess what? Netscape tried that trick once before. It didn't work, and the developers who were burned then have long memories. If Netscape couldn't pull that off when they were an independent company with 90% market share, only a religious adherant would believe that they could do it now, with 30% and dropping market share and a corporate overlord (AOL) who is utterly uninterested in the project. Hell, they can't even seem to communicate their API changes to the few remaining developers who do still support them, or did you fail to notice how broken Shockwave is under NS6?
Meanwhile, IE, which has primarily concentrated on being a "mere" web browser, while leaving the business of being the operating system to the, uh, operating system (just providing copious hooks to tempt developers into using the OS' functions), has successfully eaten netscape's lunch.
IBM's enterprise server sales reps have been pushing these vapor-boxes (and the equally vaporous AIX 5L) really hard for the last six months, I guess to draw everyone's attention away from the fact that their low- and mid-range RISC boxes are getting roundly smacked by sun, and are basically stalled speed-wise. (They're still using the 604e in many models.)
I managed to make one turn a fascinating shade of puce by asking him "So, are you actually confident that you'll be able to ship ia64 boxes in quantity by the end of Q1?" He managed to choke out something along the lines of "well, obviously we're somewhat constrained by other vendors here" before changing the subject back to how nice AIX5L was going to be.
If I were Scott McNealy, I would not be overly concerned.
I was thinking... gopher would be great for accessability and wireless.
Heh. If you ever use one of the wireless web browsers in Motorola's StarTac and TimePort phones, you'll notice that the interface is basically indistinguishable from gopher. Considering just how many millions of dollars and man-years of wrangling went into finalizing and building the WAP spec, I can't find this anything but amusing. Forward...into...the past!
And that's what both Open Source and Free Software are... philosophies that pay back later. Some of it pays off now (gimp, Konqueror, qmail), but it's the potential that, once it hits critical mass, will pay off in the future.
Qmail is NOT open source software, by any definition of the term. The author has never accepted patches that I know of, explicitly forbids the distribution of modified versions, and will never, ever permit a fork.
And frankly, that's probably a good thing, as it's the reason why qmail is not the horrid mess that sendmail is and that postfix seems hell-bent on becoming.
Slashdot readers will believe anything, as long as it has the word "linux" in it at least once.
Re:Altivec optimizations in core graphics.
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How do you know the native core graphics drivers aren't also written in assembly language for Altivec?
Because (a) QuickDraw has been around a lot longer than the G4 units, (b) Apple still needs to support non-G4 macs, (c) graphics-intensive programs other than Photoshop tend not to exhibit the same gains (Quake III comes to mind instantly), and (d) I follow Apple's OS announcements pretty closely and haven't seen them announce any such thing for MacOS 9. Nor have ATI or 3dfx made any mention of re-tuning their device drivers for Altivec that I'm aware of. (Proof to the contrary will be happily accepted, on both counts.)
Let me re-emphasize that first point: QuickDraw is really, really old. Re-writing the thing to be optimized for altivec when they've known for over a year now that they're going to be throwing it away in favor of Quartz would be a nonsensical waste of effort on Apple's part.
The good news is that they are apparently optimizing quite a bit of the "Quartz" (aka "DisplayPDF") rendering engine for Altivec in OS X -- most reviews of the public beta have commented on how much snappier screen operations are on the G4 than even on higher-clock G3 machines.
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
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even though PPC clock speeds are slower, programs run faster because the processor can do more per clock cycle.
That is true. (It's also true of sparc, alpha, MIPS and pretty much any non-x86 architecture.)
I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.
That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.
The "twice as fast as Wintel" claim is based on a small number of Adobe Photoshop operation benchmarks; usually filters that have been painstakingly optimized for the G4's "Altivec" vector processing unit. This isn't necessarily "cheating", since Photoshop is still one of the primary reasons to buy a mac, but if you are not a graphics professional, you are simply never ever going to see that kind of speed benefit using a Mac.
In "regular use" applications, the scenario at the moment is even worse than you might guess based on the SPEC numbers: MacOS 9 is such a turgid, inefficient piece of crap, and the device drivers for 3rd-party Mac hardware so shoddily implemented, that MacOS applications will often run significantly slower than their Windows counterparts on similar hardware: just ask anybody if they're getting the same kind of Quake III framerates out of a G4/500 with a Radeon card as they would from a PIII/800 with the same graphics card.
You just don't buy Macs for world-beating performance (Photoshop being the exception). You buy them for nice industrial design, an OS that for all of its architectural ugliness still offers a more compelling user experience than Windows, and more often than not just to maintain an existing investment in MacOS software.
that is why audiophiles arent as crazy as some people make them out to be. I recall reading a review on a $65000(!) turntable where the listener could correctly identify which brand of skins where on the drums.
Let's get this straight. You read a review of an insanely overpriced piece of equipment in a magazine dedicated to selling insanely overpriced pieces of audio equipment to idiots with $65,000 to spend on a turntable (a magazine funded entirely by ad revenues from the companies which make those $65,000 turntables), in which it was asserted that a nameless one of those idiots was able to use that $65,000 turntable to perform some god-like feat of auditory recognition, and you believed it?!
Did you know that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?
Obviously, I missed the boat with this whole "tech startup" thing. If I really wanted to be raking in the cash for zero effort, I should have gone into "high-end audio design"...just find some old warehouse full of 1930s tube amps, slap `em inside some shiny cases, hire some hack "reviewer" to tell a bunch of nouveau riche idiots that it'll make their penises 0.00000021mm longer, and then just sit back and wait for the cash to roll in.
From Dark Side Of The Moon to Led Zeppelin 4, the audio that's been best balanced, most extended in frequency (note: doesn't mean just 'boosted frequency extremes' but genuine extension for a broader passband) and cleanest in the time domain (no ringy EQ crud) has _sold_ better than its competition.
Oh, yeah, that explains why Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" outsold Nirvana's "Nevermind" two to one... oh wait, that didn't happen.
Question: What would make all the audiophiles happy for frequency ranges of a cd?
Answer: quintuple the price, trace the edges with a green magic marker, slap a bunch of pseudoscientific gibberish on the front and then congratulate them on having a more "well-trained ear" than the rest of those damn hoi-polloi.
The best way to deal with "audiophiles" is to consider them a form of free entertainment, and proof that cocaine isn't god's only way of telling you that you have too much money.
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Check out the Harvard Medical School Surgical Planning Lab for instance. They're working on (among other things) a system that allows doctors to perform surgery while the patient is inside an MRI machine, so that the surgeons can literally see what's under their knife before they make the next incision. (Right now it's done on a CRT, eventually they want some sort of HUD overlay.) Very, very cool stuff. If unenclosed holographic projection ever happens, they'll be first in line to use it.
The "FTP" in "FTP Software" did not stand for "file transfer protocol." It stood for "Fun That Pays." (Seriously.)
Untrue. Siemens-Nixdorf has had their own version of SVR4 for a long time now. It's called "Reliant UNIX" these days, but was known as "SINIX" for most of its history. It runs on the old Pyramid/Siemens workstations and servers. Not very well known in the states, but you can usually tell sysadmins who've touched it by the way they start cringing when it's mentioned.
Dream on, marketroid. Hate to burst your bubble, but that is exactly what all of the major ad network players do, or at least purport to do. Companies like Accrue and NetGravity made millions of dollars selling ad-tracking, targeting and reporting software to various portals (now all dead or dying) in order to ensure the delivery of that information.
Guess what? All the targeted demographic information in the world doesn't do a damn thing to change some very basic facts:
- Nobody (ie: not enough people to make it worth anybody's time in a sober business environment) was clicking on the damn ads.
- Nobody (ibid) was buying what the ads were selling.
- Most of the ads were being bought by over-capitalized dot-com startups which are now DOA. Minus that money, placement prices are finding their natural level: somewhere underneath newspaper classifieds.
Add it all up and you have Game Over for the ad banner market. For now, and for the forseeable future. And I for one will not miss it at all. Bad people, bad money, good riddance.Right. So the thousands of unpatched RedHat systems that the ramen worm (not to mention billions of script kiddies) has been exploiting are being run by, what...NT Sysadmins?
People who live in glass houses should exercise care when beating their heads against the walls.
Yes, you have the right to make copies for personal use.
No, you do not have a guaranteed right to have it made easy for you to do so. Stop bitching.
The Betamax case (Sony v. Universal City) says nothing about voluntarily adopted copy protection schemes such as Macrovision and Safemedia. Indeed, they could be seen as a direct consequence of the Betamax decision. And they are infinitely preferable to legislatively adopted copy-protection schemes such as the DMCA.
You have got to be fucking kidding me. Artistic styles match? Excuse me, but call me when Illiad learns how to draw his characters in anything but 90-degree profile. And when he learns how to draw backgrounds to perspective. And when he learns how to shade. And don't forget...when he learns how to actually tell a joke.
Note that "cerebral" is not a synonym for any of those qualities.
The second great videogame wipeout.
3dfx, nVidia, Matrox and ATI have seen their profit margins bloated beyond any reasonable proportion by the PC gaming craze. There was no reason that any sane human being would ever need to shell out $300 for a GeForce2 or V5-6000 except to satisfy the ever-increasing hardware demands of the 3d gaming scene.
Well, now that gaming scene is evaporating just as fast and as spectacularly (and even more deservedly) than the dot-coms, and suddenly all of those billions of dollars plowed into developing features that nobody other than hardcore gamers wanted were the millstone around more than one company's neck. Mark my words: S3 is next, followed by ATI.
nVidia's exit strategy is clear: a broad base of budget products, and a migration of its high-end technology to the XBox, where it stands a chance in hell of making a profit. But even that's not guaranteed: the console gaming market is looking every bit as glutted and oversubscribed as the PC side. If Dreamcast, Xbox and PS2 end up becoming the 5200, ColecoVision and SMS of the 21st century, expect nVidia to be doing a little implosion of its own.
That being the case, I wouldn't worry, since every single last one of the companises named above is either already bankrupt or heading that way at full speed. The entire "ad network" concept was nothing more than a ponzi scheme to begin with (usually fueled by page impressions driven by either porn, pirated content or both), and is currently in the process of crashing down like all pyramid scams eventually do. If fandom.com exists as anything more than a legal footnote a year from now, I would be shocked.
If by "success" you mean "used and enjoyed by other OSS enthsiasts", then of course none at all.
If, however, by success you mean "displaces mp3 as the dominant internet music encoding standard and withstands a barrage of patent-infringement lawsuits from a panoply of huge corporate interests", which were pretty much the stated goals of the OggVorbis project, then the answer is: pretty goddamn critical. The former requires some concentrated, full-time attention of the kind of coders who don't grow on trees. The latter is going to require some very, very expensive lawyers. Both will require some significant cash investment. Got a million or two dollars to spare?
You have to wonder if either the submitter or the editors actually read this article.
Sure, Thompson Multimedia is doing some entirely predictable sabre-rattling. Anybody who didn't see that coming a mile off should see an optometrist.
The important thing mentioned in there is that CMGI has pulled the plug on Vorbis development. That's a far more important, and ominous development. Corporate backing was allowing progress to be made very quickly on Vorbis, and will be critical when the inevitable patent infringement suit comes. If someone else with deep pockets doesn't step in soon, we can just resign ourselves to paying Frauenhoffer's license fees for the forseeable future.
(And please, let's not delude ourselves that the mythical Open Source Community will magically step in and finish the project: enthusiasm and spirit are no replacement for in-depth knowledge of signal processing.)
This statement neatly encapsulates everything that is completely wrong-headed and broken about the mozilla project.
It's not a browser, it's an operating system! Guess what? Netscape tried that trick once before. It didn't work, and the developers who were burned then have long memories. If Netscape couldn't pull that off when they were an independent company with 90% market share, only a religious adherant would believe that they could do it now, with 30% and dropping market share and a corporate overlord (AOL) who is utterly uninterested in the project. Hell, they can't even seem to communicate their API changes to the few remaining developers who do still support them, or did you fail to notice how broken Shockwave is under NS6?
Meanwhile, IE, which has primarily concentrated on being a "mere" web browser, while leaving the business of being the operating system to the, uh, operating system (just providing copious hooks to tempt developers into using the OS' functions), has successfully eaten netscape's lunch.
I managed to make one turn a fascinating shade of puce by asking him "So, are you actually confident that you'll be able to ship ia64 boxes in quantity by the end of Q1?" He managed to choke out something along the lines of "well, obviously we're somewhat constrained by other vendors here" before changing the subject back to how nice AIX5L was going to be.
If I were Scott McNealy, I would not be overly concerned.
Heh. If you ever use one of the wireless web browsers in Motorola's StarTac and TimePort phones, you'll notice that the interface is basically indistinguishable from gopher. Considering just how many millions of dollars and man-years of wrangling went into finalizing and building the WAP spec, I can't find this anything but amusing. Forward...into...the past!
Pardon me while I fail to be impressed.
Five crashes. Ten lockups. SSL does not work at ALL. One complete kill of my X server. Better luck next time, kids.
XBox not real? We'll never see it?
I don't suppose you'd be willing to wager actual cash money on that statement, sir?
Qmail is NOT open source software, by any definition of the term. The author has never accepted patches that I know of, explicitly forbids the distribution of modified versions, and will never, ever permit a fork.
And frankly, that's probably a good thing, as it's the reason why qmail is not the horrid mess that sendmail is and that postfix seems hell-bent on becoming.
Slashdot readers will believe anything, as long as it has the word "linux" in it at least once.
Because (a) QuickDraw has been around a lot longer than the G4 units, (b) Apple still needs to support non-G4 macs, (c) graphics-intensive programs other than Photoshop tend not to exhibit the same gains (Quake III comes to mind instantly), and (d) I follow Apple's OS announcements pretty closely and haven't seen them announce any such thing for MacOS 9. Nor have ATI or 3dfx made any mention of re-tuning their device drivers for Altivec that I'm aware of. (Proof to the contrary will be happily accepted, on both counts.)
Let me re-emphasize that first point: QuickDraw is really, really old. Re-writing the thing to be optimized for altivec when they've known for over a year now that they're going to be throwing it away in favor of Quartz would be a nonsensical waste of effort on Apple's part.
The good news is that they are apparently optimizing quite a bit of the "Quartz" (aka "DisplayPDF") rendering engine for Altivec in OS X -- most reviews of the public beta have commented on how much snappier screen operations are on the G4 than even on higher-clock G3 machines.
That is true. (It's also true of sparc, alpha, MIPS and pretty much any non-x86 architecture.)
I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.
That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.
The "twice as fast as Wintel" claim is based on a small number of Adobe Photoshop operation benchmarks; usually filters that have been painstakingly optimized for the G4's "Altivec" vector processing unit. This isn't necessarily "cheating", since Photoshop is still one of the primary reasons to buy a mac, but if you are not a graphics professional, you are simply never ever going to see that kind of speed benefit using a Mac.
In "regular use" applications, the scenario at the moment is even worse than you might guess based on the SPEC numbers: MacOS 9 is such a turgid, inefficient piece of crap, and the device drivers for 3rd-party Mac hardware so shoddily implemented, that MacOS applications will often run significantly slower than their Windows counterparts on similar hardware: just ask anybody if they're getting the same kind of Quake III framerates out of a G4/500 with a Radeon card as they would from a PIII/800 with the same graphics card.
You just don't buy Macs for world-beating performance (Photoshop being the exception). You buy them for nice industrial design, an OS that for all of its architectural ugliness still offers a more compelling user experience than Windows, and more often than not just to maintain an existing investment in MacOS software.
Let's get this straight. You read a review of an insanely overpriced piece of equipment in a magazine dedicated to selling insanely overpriced pieces of audio equipment to idiots with $65,000 to spend on a turntable (a magazine funded entirely by ad revenues from the companies which make those $65,000 turntables), in which it was asserted that a nameless one of those idiots was able to use that $65,000 turntable to perform some god-like feat of auditory recognition, and you believed it?!
Did you know that the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary?
Obviously, I missed the boat with this whole "tech startup" thing. If I really wanted to be raking in the cash for zero effort, I should have gone into "high-end audio design"...just find some old warehouse full of 1930s tube amps, slap `em inside some shiny cases, hire some hack "reviewer" to tell a bunch of nouveau riche idiots that it'll make their penises 0.00000021mm longer, and then just sit back and wait for the cash to roll in.
Oh, yeah, that explains why Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" outsold Nirvana's "Nevermind" two to one... oh wait, that didn't happen.
Answer: quintuple the price, trace the edges with a green magic marker, slap a bunch of pseudoscientific gibberish on the front and then congratulate them on having a more "well-trained ear" than the rest of those damn hoi-polloi.
The best way to deal with "audiophiles" is to consider them a form of free entertainment, and proof that cocaine isn't god's only way of telling you that you have too much money.