by being appalled by it. by communicating how appalling it is to others in a way that they will understand how apalling it is. by voting. politicians will do what they are allowed to do. if you are appalled by this, you apparently are pretty disconnected, and should take a trip to some inner city schools to see how the foundation of our democracy is being maintained.
in addition to drives like this, Lacie intends to have a NAS storage head or unit in the future (http://www.lacie.com/technologies/technology.cfm? id=F8B7B736-7F7A-11D6-98090090278D3ED0). their AIT2 is also pretty nifty!
japanese architecture, or many east asian forms of architecture, or many ethnic european forms of housing... good modular architecture is not obviously modular. this would be like saying, i want custom code. why is your problem so unique that it deserves a unique solution?
we all want something unique, which winds up being unlivable. christopher alexander (http://www.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/Chris.te xt.html) spent most of his career talking about the validity of non-professional architecture. his books, a pattern languge, have had far reaching effects on many professions including computer science.
shake me down, rattle, and roll...
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road."
it just so happens that i really like the music that tends to be made in garages, or basements, or lofts... isn't this as much about access to choices, as paying for those choices? and, don't you think that these musicians might actually like to make money on their first recordings, as opposed to "waiting" for the labels to bequest riches? not to mention that rarely does money equate with artistic vision--second albums generally blow.
Somebody has to pay, somebody has to be paid, but where does that leave the RIAA?
i just ordered a fujitsu, primarily for the screen and wacom stylus. maxed out the ram (768) and hard drive (40), and am ordering some software. as a mac user, i really wanted something light which i could connect a monitor and keyboard to in order to use as a desktop when necessary. i am curious what software you are running and what your experience has been speed-wise. thanks.
so i've donated. not that there's anything wrong with lazy unskilled idealists.
but, what about the ultimate irony--setting up an account on amazon and other services through which we can buy our cd's (if we choose to do so any longer), dvd's (getting less and less likely), and books (i do know there are libraries, damn them for making me buy books, more books, lovely books...)! this would be like automatic donations.
well, i just dropped for a Fujitsu table, since it is light enough to carry around, actually has a real screen, and functions as a full computer. the oqo (http://oqo.com/) sounded cool, but is likely vaporware. and, the ibm version is nifty (http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/200202 06_metapad.shtml). i did have a newton, and would have loved a more capable machine with a bigger and better screen, though it wasn't all that useful when syncing is such an error prone process. i do not get syncing! i want a machine that is fully functional, portable--light, and useful as a desktop when docked. for now this (http://www.fujitsupc.com/www/products_pentablets. shtml?products/pentablets/st4000a) is what i got.
music is no longer about scarcity, even special editions seem to remain on the market forever. look around for that short run boxed set you wished you had purchased. i bet it is still on the shelf.
music is now a service, like a cell phone. and, like cell phone service, the cost is going to continually decrease, while the traffic continually increases. the music undustry wishes this were not the case. but, progress marches on, and over those who refuse to acknowledge it. songs for a nickel, hosted song lists, and shared song lists, like iCal. the data is disposable, and will be treated as such. but, the information--the lists and sound tracks, the songs are not. if i could download an album to my hard drive, listen to it, and when i need room, toss it or move it, i would likely stop buying cd's. perhaps they are also trying to protect their cash cows.
is that the reason that "republicans" are generally against efforts to improve voter participation, such as the motor-voter bill? no this was another election with low turn-out and a definite lack of interesting discussion. sad! but, numbers-wise the winning candidates generally won with small majorities, so perhaps this supports the idea that a true democracy will be nearly evenly split. what the idea likely does not intend is that the parties will basically be spouting the exact same ideas.
they are betting on Mpeg 4 not ignoring the issue. and frankly, isn't this what the discussion surrounding a trusted computer is all about--trusted in the sense of freedom. will we essentially have separate systems for media and for liberty? it's getting wierd ladies and gentlemen!
the linux desktop certainly has a ways to go, but some of the most basic applications are nearly ready for popular consumption. my son uses osx on an ibook, so the games are not really there either. but, appleworks is great for his needs. i am surprised however, that there is not a basic installation suitable for the education market. with the arrival of cheaper tablets--with a usb keyboard--this may be something worth delivering. is anybody aware of education distributions in the k-12 market?
one hand giveth, whilst the other taketh away!
on
Film Gimp
·
· Score: 1
the actual irony here is that the studios cannot accept the idea of fair use for their own products, but are more than willing to take from open source. sure they will contribute code, but how about contributing "code?" what a bunch of jerks! i don't have a tv, and i have come across the first movie that will not play in my tibook, since the matrix on my old powerbook: loves of a blonde.
here is a description of firewire from the IEEE (http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/1394bapp. html). it is not simply a serial port, and is more like scci or ethernet, and i believe it is based on pieces of each standard. (?--comments) the first clue would be peer connections--up to 63. i can not beleive that people would actually prefer usb 2.0 over, as opposed to in addition to, 1394. it has really great advantages over that technology. the article also diswcusses other cabling methods such as fiber and cat5--very cool!
at least osx is getting adopted! they used to only have a 3% market share. or, perhaps this is another example of nobody using or reading what they are commenting on. for me it's fast enough, though of course it could be more speedy. i don't expect this to happen until either the g5 or 970 ships... so, until then, hey it works.
each processor consumes a reasonable amount of elecricity. why have these never been used in anything other than sgi boxen, and cobalt raqs?... neat processors along with arms of course. too bad the world is stuck in the "my processor is faster than thou" mind set. i had thought some years ago that apple would have been well off buying sgi since they have similar markets at the low end of sgi and at the high end of apple.
the service providers guarantee a certain speed, but should you be near a tower, they can often get better transfer rates. verizon has two services: one mobile ip which is 19k or so, and two express network, which can burst up to 144k (http://www.verizonwireless.com/express_network/in dex.html). i was told by a verizon person, though i doubt his tech skills, that the mobile ip will also burst to nearly the same speed. read the fine print!
but likely not really ethical or truly legal. but i am surprised that apple does not allow this to work with an ftp server or servers other than.mac. if the.mac service is worth it, people will pay, though i doubt that $99 is the correct price. a business.mac service with realistic amounts of storage would be really worth a good chunk of change.
nor does it sound as if it was engineered for speed. your lucky to get a tweaked ducati up to 180 let alone a boat. lots-o-power! and, 50 in a boat is quite fast. i think my friend's does 70 with a 454 big block. most of the racing boats of that ilk use two engines.
The Noah's Ark of the Web, 7,000 Characters at a Time By JEFFREY SELINGO
IT'S one of the most frustrating problems encountered when passing documents back and forth electronically: the little square boxes that mean a font someone else used to create the file cannot be rendered on your computer. While Portable Document Format, or PDF, files, which essentially are copies of printed pages, have helped mitigate the problem for most computer users, that solution has not satisfied scientists and mathematicians, whose formulas and equations contain many symbols.
Using those symbols on the Web has been particularly inconvenient. Most publishers use the symbol-friendly PDF format, but then researchers cannot easily embed links to other files or background information within those documents as they can with HTML files. But HTML documents have their own drawbacks. For instance, they often display equations as separate graphic images that cannot be resized or searched and greatly increase the size of the file.
Now a new set of fonts being developed by six publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals promises to contain every character - more than 7,000 in all - that might be needed in a technical article published in any scientific discipline. When complete, sometime next fall, the fonts will be shared freely with publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition that they not be altered.
"This work is a breakthrough for publishers and scientists," said Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development at the American Institute of Physics, one of the publishers working on the project, called the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange, or STIX (www.stixfonts.com). "The display of math symbols in publishing has always been difficult, but those problems have only become worse with the Web."
The set of STIX fonts will work very much like the Symbol or Zapf Dingbats fonts in most applications, where users choose from a grid of dozens of characters. The STIX font will have the appearance of a Times font, but the characters will not look any different if a user switches to a different font, like Courier or Helvetica, Mr. Ingoldsby said. "The symbols will work with pretty much any font," he said.
Mr. Ingoldsby said most scientific characters lack "flavor" - they are quite plain to look at - so adding one of those symbols to a document composed using, for instance, a serif font, which has fine lines projecting from the main strokes of the letter, will not make the scientific character stand out. Designers are also adding the alphabet, numbers and other common characters to the STIX font, so, Mr. Ingoldsby said, there will be no need to switch between fonts.
"This is meant to replace the font which people use today called New Times Roman," he said.
About 200 characters of the STIX fonts are being finished each month, Mr. Ingoldsby said. So far, about half of the 7,000 characters have been completed.
With so many symbols, however, the STIX fonts could be cumbersome to use. The developers are working to come up with a method that will make it relatively easy for users to find the symbols they want. Symbols will probably be organized by type or subject, with the user selecting a category (and possibly a subcategory) from drop-down menus. A grid of symbols in that category will then appear, from which the user can choose the appropriate one.
Creating a new font set is a complicated process. First, developers must correctly copy the shape of each character. Then they must adjust its metrics, or how the character is positioned in the space in which it is supposed to fit. And finally, they must make another set of adjustments to be sure the character looks good on a computer screen.
William H. Mischo, head of the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the STIX project had the potential to solve a problem that dates back to the 1400's, when Gutenberg first conceived of movable type.
"The two biggest problems since then for properly rendering intellectual works have been tables and mathematics," Mr. Mischo said. "Here we are in the digital age and we're still having these problems."
Because math equations have been included in Web pages mostly as static images, as either a PDF or a graphics file, scholars have not been able to take advantage of many of the Web's distinctive research capabilities, Mr. Mischo said. For example, a mathematician cannot just plug a particular equation into Google and expect to find other scholars working on a similar problem, since the symbols in a graphic will probably not turn up in a search.
"For someone trying to read a scholarly publication, the current way of doing things presents difficulties," Mr. Mischo said. "You can't enlarge, you can't pull it apart and you can't search it."
The lack of a comprehensive font for math symbols presents aesthetic problems as well. The text in math publications is usually unattractive because publishers are often forced to cobble together a variety of fonts to create complex equations.
"Courier may have one set of math characters and Bookman may have another set of characters, but they are not going to look good together," said Paul Topping, president of Design Science, a company in Long Beach, Calif., that makes an equation editor for Microsoft Word. "STIX will be a coordinated set of fonts that are meant to work together."
Of course, new ideas are always being developed in math and science, and some require new symbols. Mr. Ingoldsby, of the American Institute of Physics, said STIX will be updated when new characters are created.
"We're trying harder to work with authors so they come up with something new only when there absolutely has to be something new," he said.
i just downloaded chimera for osx and this damn thing is fast! i have never seen pages render so quickly! mouse button suport--thank you, thank you! very nice job!
Slashdot Mirror
by being appalled by it. by communicating how appalling it is to others in a way that they will understand how apalling it is. by voting. politicians will do what they are allowed to do. if you are appalled by this, you apparently are pretty disconnected, and should take a trip to some inner city schools to see how the foundation of our democracy is being maintained.
welcome to the lethargic US of A! and good luck!
in addition to drives like this, Lacie intends to have a NAS storage head or unit in the future (http://www.lacie.com/technologies/technology.cfm? id=F8B7B736-7F7A-11D6-98090090278D3ED0). their AIT2 is also pretty nifty!
this is an open source board. running open source software. in an alienware caes!? i want green!
if this architecture allows for the ibm 970, a really nice open platform will be available.
japanese architecture, or many east asian forms of architecture, or many ethnic european forms of housing... good modular architecture is not obviously modular. this would be like saying, i want custom code. why is your problem so unique that it deserves a unique solution?
e xt.html) spent most of his career talking about the validity of non-professional architecture. his books, a pattern languge, have had far reaching effects on many professions including computer science.
we all want something unique, which winds up being unlivable. christopher alexander (http://www.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/Chris.t
"But the same is not true for records. This is simply because technology has reached the point where amateurs can make as good a recording as the professionals. The next Christina Aguilera CD could be as easily recorded at her house (or mine) as at some big recording complex out on Abbey Road."
it just so happens that i really like the music that tends to be made in garages, or basements, or lofts... isn't this as much about access to choices, as paying for those choices? and, don't you think that these musicians might actually like to make money on their first recordings, as opposed to "waiting" for the labels to bequest riches? not to mention that rarely does money equate with artistic vision--second albums generally blow.
Somebody has to pay, somebody has to be paid, but where does that leave the RIAA?
i just ordered a fujitsu, primarily for the screen and wacom stylus. maxed out the ram (768) and hard drive (40), and am ordering some software. as a mac user, i really wanted something light which i could connect a monitor and keyboard to in order to use as a desktop when necessary. i am curious what software you are running and what your experience has been speed-wise. thanks.
so i've donated. not that there's anything wrong with lazy unskilled idealists.
but, what about the ultimate irony--setting up an account on amazon and other services through which we can buy our cd's (if we choose to do so any longer), dvd's (getting less and less likely), and books (i do know there are libraries, damn them for making me buy books, more books, lovely books...)! this would be like automatic donations.
well, i just dropped for a Fujitsu table, since it is light enough to carry around, actually has a real screen, and functions as a full computer. the oqo (http://oqo.com/) sounded cool, but is likely vaporware. and, the ibm version is nifty (http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/news/200202 06_metapad.shtml). i did have a newton, and would have loved a more capable machine with a bigger and better screen, though it wasn't all that useful when syncing is such an error prone process. i do not get syncing! i want a machine that is fully functional, portable--light, and useful as a desktop when docked. for now this (http://www.fujitsupc.com/www/products_pentablets. shtml?products/pentablets/st4000a) is what i got.
music is no longer about scarcity, even special editions seem to remain on the market forever. look around for that short run boxed set you wished you had purchased. i bet it is still on the shelf.
music is now a service, like a cell phone. and, like cell phone service, the cost is going to continually decrease, while the traffic continually increases. the music undustry wishes this were not the case. but, progress marches on, and over those who refuse to acknowledge it. songs for a nickel, hosted song lists, and shared song lists, like iCal. the data is disposable, and will be treated as such. but, the information--the lists and sound tracks, the songs are not. if i could download an album to my hard drive, listen to it, and when i need room, toss it or move it, i would likely stop buying cd's. perhaps they are also trying to protect their cash cows.
is that the reason that "republicans" are generally against efforts to improve voter participation, such as the motor-voter bill? no this was another election with low turn-out and a definite lack of interesting discussion. sad! but, numbers-wise the winning candidates generally won with small majorities, so perhaps this supports the idea that a true democracy will be nearly evenly split. what the idea likely does not intend is that the parties will basically be spouting the exact same ideas.
per processor!
they are betting on Mpeg 4 not ignoring the issue. and frankly, isn't this what the discussion surrounding a trusted computer is all about--trusted in the sense of freedom. will we essentially have separate systems for media and for liberty? it's getting wierd ladies and gentlemen!
the linux desktop certainly has a ways to go, but some of the most basic applications are nearly ready for popular consumption. my son uses osx on an ibook, so the games are not really there either. but, appleworks is great for his needs. i am surprised however, that there is not a basic installation suitable for the education market. with the arrival of cheaper tablets--with a usb keyboard--this may be something worth delivering. is anybody aware of education distributions in the k-12 market?
the actual irony here is that the studios cannot accept the idea of fair use for their own products, but are more than willing to take from open source. sure they will contribute code, but how about contributing "code?" what a bunch of jerks! i don't have a tv, and i have come across the first movie that will not play in my tibook, since the matrix on my old powerbook: loves of a blonde.
here is a description of firewire from the IEEE (http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/1394bapp. html). it is not simply a serial port, and is more like scci or ethernet, and i believe it is based on pieces of each standard. (?--comments) the first clue would be peer connections--up to 63. i can not beleive that people would actually prefer usb 2.0 over, as opposed to in addition to, 1394. it has really great advantages over that technology. the article also diswcusses other cabling methods such as fiber and cat5--very cool!
at least osx is getting adopted! they used to only have a 3% market share. or, perhaps this is another example of nobody using or reading what they are commenting on. for me it's fast enough, though of course it could be more speedy. i don't expect this to happen until either the g5 or 970 ships... so, until then, hey it works.
by reading our strategy against open source software you, the developer, agree to not use gpl'ed tools against the beast, 'er microsoft, inc.
each processor consumes a reasonable amount of elecricity. why have these never been used in anything other than sgi boxen, and cobalt raqs?... neat processors along with arms of course. too bad the world is stuck in the "my processor is faster than thou" mind set. i had thought some years ago that apple would have been well off buying sgi since they have similar markets at the low end of sgi and at the high end of apple.
the service providers guarantee a certain speed, but should you be near a tower, they can often get better transfer rates. verizon has two services: one mobile ip which is 19k or so, and two express network, which can burst up to 144k (http://www.verizonwireless.com/express_network/in dex.html). i was told by a verizon person, though i doubt his tech skills, that the mobile ip will also burst to nearly the same speed. read the fine print!
but likely not really ethical or truly legal. but i am surprised that apple does not allow this to work with an ftp server or servers other than .mac. if the .mac service is worth it, people will pay, though i doubt that $99 is the correct price. a business .mac service with realistic amounts of storage would be really worth a good chunk of change.
nor does it sound as if it was engineered for speed. your lucky to get a tweaked ducati up to 180 let alone a boat. lots-o-power! and, 50 in a boat is quite fast. i think my friend's does 70 with a 454 big block. most of the racing boats of that ilk use two engines.
The Noah's Ark of the Web, 7,000 Characters at a Time
By JEFFREY SELINGO
IT'S one of the most frustrating problems encountered when passing documents back and forth electronically: the little square boxes that mean a font someone else used to create the file cannot be rendered on your computer. While Portable Document Format, or PDF, files, which essentially are copies of printed pages, have helped mitigate the problem for most computer users, that solution has not satisfied scientists and mathematicians, whose formulas and equations contain many symbols.
Using those symbols on the Web has been particularly inconvenient. Most publishers use the symbol-friendly PDF format, but then researchers cannot easily embed links to other files or background information within those documents as they can with HTML files. But HTML documents have their own drawbacks. For instance, they often display equations as separate graphic images that cannot be resized or searched and greatly increase the size of the file.
Now a new set of fonts being developed by six publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals promises to contain every character - more than 7,000 in all - that might be needed in a technical article published in any scientific discipline. When complete, sometime next fall, the fonts will be shared freely with publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition that they not be altered.
"This work is a breakthrough for publishers and scientists," said Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development at the American Institute of Physics, one of the publishers working on the project, called the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange, or STIX (www.stixfonts.com). "The display of math symbols in publishing has always been difficult, but those problems have only become worse with the Web."
The set of STIX fonts will work very much like the Symbol or Zapf Dingbats fonts in most applications, where users choose from a grid of dozens of characters. The STIX font will have the appearance of a Times font, but the characters will not look any different if a user switches to a different font, like Courier or Helvetica, Mr. Ingoldsby said. "The symbols will work with pretty much any font," he said.
Mr. Ingoldsby said most scientific characters lack "flavor" - they are quite plain to look at - so adding one of those symbols to a document composed using, for instance, a serif font, which has fine lines projecting from the main strokes of the letter, will not make the scientific character stand out. Designers are also adding the alphabet, numbers and other common characters to the STIX font, so, Mr. Ingoldsby said, there will be no need to switch between fonts.
"This is meant to replace the font which people use today called New Times Roman," he said.
About 200 characters of the STIX fonts are being finished each month, Mr. Ingoldsby said. So far, about half of the 7,000 characters have been completed.
With so many symbols, however, the STIX fonts could be cumbersome to use. The developers are working to come up with a method that will make it relatively easy for users to find the symbols they want. Symbols will probably be organized by type or subject, with the user selecting a category (and possibly a subcategory) from drop-down menus. A grid of symbols in that category will then appear, from which the user can choose the appropriate one.
Creating a new font set is a complicated process. First, developers must correctly copy the shape of each character. Then they must adjust its metrics, or how the character is positioned in the space in which it is supposed to fit. And finally, they must make another set of adjustments to be sure the character looks good on a computer screen.
William H. Mischo, head of the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said that the STIX project had the potential to solve a problem that dates back to the 1400's, when Gutenberg first conceived of movable type.
"The two biggest problems since then for properly rendering intellectual works have been tables and mathematics," Mr. Mischo said. "Here we are in the digital age and we're still having these problems."
Because math equations have been included in Web pages mostly as static images, as either a PDF or a graphics file, scholars have not been able to take advantage of many of the Web's distinctive research capabilities, Mr. Mischo said. For example, a mathematician cannot just plug a particular equation into Google and expect to find other scholars working on a similar problem, since the symbols in a graphic will probably not turn up in a search.
"For someone trying to read a scholarly publication, the current way of doing things presents difficulties," Mr. Mischo said. "You can't enlarge, you can't pull it apart and you can't search it."
The lack of a comprehensive font for math symbols presents aesthetic problems as well. The text in math publications is usually unattractive because publishers are often forced to cobble together a variety of fonts to create complex equations.
"Courier may have one set of math characters and Bookman may have another set of characters, but they are not going to look good together," said Paul Topping, president of Design Science, a company in Long Beach, Calif., that makes an equation editor for Microsoft Word. "STIX will be a coordinated set of fonts that are meant to work together."
Of course, new ideas are always being developed in math and science, and some require new symbols. Mr. Ingoldsby, of the American Institute of Physics, said STIX will be updated when new characters are created.
"We're trying harder to work with authors so they come up with something new only when there absolutely has to be something new," he said.
...math and science fonts! these are designed to go along with the various versions of times. reading is hard work!
but, 7000 different hearts and telephones and arrows would be fun too!
i just downloaded chimera for osx and this damn thing is fast! i have never seen pages render so quickly! mouse button suport--thank you, thank you! very nice job!