Having skimmed the text of the patent claim, it appears to me that using an LCD monitor would be completely outside the scope of the patent:
The satellite facilities are sales
and information terminals, each equipped with a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) for receiving and displaying requested customer information from the
computer's data sources at the data processing center.
So I guess all the web retailers have to do is add a disclaimer that only customers using LCDs or OLEDs are allowed to access the system!
Nah, that's not it. I got that same message but I use a web proxy that forges referring URLs. It does break some web pages in funny ways, but I find the idea of littering server logs with references to fuckedcompany.com quite amusing. How's -that- for geek humor?
Well, I suppose the simple answer is that you can go against popular standards, but ya gotta be prepared for the difficulties you'll face.
For example, I store my digital music with lossless compression (formats like Shorten or FLAC). Hardly anyone does that, so obviously there is much less support for such things. But hey, what do I care? As long as there are a couple of good players out there, I'm gold. And, as it happens, there are XMMS plugins for both formats.
Personally, I would like to see an environment where all the major media players support all the free codecs, and as many of the commercial ones as they care to. Let me have a mixed collection of OGGs, MP3s, WAVs, FLACs, etc., and don't make me worry too much about which is which.
A more realistic comparison might be to the current crop of DVD players, for example APEX players. Most of them play DVD, SVCD, CD, CD/R, and CD/RW, including MP3s on CDR. And they still only cost about $100 new. The reason is simply that for the cost of a little extra logic you can support lots of different (but similar) media.
Digital music players are even easier. There's no physical carrier to worry about, so once you build a machine capable of playing MP3s, you already have the hardware to play WAV, OGG, WMA, VQF, whatever. The hardest part is the licensing, and since OGG is free, no biggie there.
I believe that many people on/. look at the Apache numbers as some sort of "is Microsoft dead?" meter.
Actually, I think of it as more of a "has Microsoft taken over everything in the known universe?" meter... or maybe a "is the idea of Free Software in the business world actually tenable" meter.
Apache, much like the old BSD TCP/IP, is one of those shining success stories in the Free Software world, so I think it's all right if people cheer when it does well in a fluffy survey with pretty graphs. Of course I guess it would be pretty damn silly to have a Netcraft-style survey of networking protocol suites, but I would still cheer to see that TCP went from 99.87% to 99.88% this month:)
I was Mac junkie for years, before finally being converted to GNU/Linux a couple of years ago. I think OS X is cool, but it has the worst GUI to ever come out of Cupertino. It's sluggish, many things don't have keyboard shortcuts that should, and in general Aqua is lacking in places where X Window Managers excel.
For example, why is there no support for virtual desktops? In a perfect world I'd have a monitor bigger than Rhode Island, but in reality I'm often using 15-inch Apple Studio Displays. I'd like to be able to have more than one window open without having a messy pile-up on my desktop.
In general, I find that I just can't work very fast in OS X, so until such work-flow issues get resolved, there's no chance of me using OS X as my primary desktop.
One of my major complaints about the teaching of science in western academia is that it is taught without any reference to the history of science.
As an undergraduate, I was in a class that was mostly full of astrophysics grad students. One day in class, the topic of Galileo's confrontation with Rome came up. An astro student in the class raised her hand and asked "so, are you saying that there was some sort of conflict between religion and science?" Now, maybe I'm just being elitist, but shouldn't someone who is well along the road to becoming a professional scientist be aware of some of the basic history of the field?
Really, though, that's exactly the problem. Not only is the history of science not taught at the high school level, but it is unusual for working scientists to have any knowledge of the history of their own discipline, except perhaps from the last 25 or so years.
Unfortunately, when you have such a near-sighted understanding of science, you tend not to realize that there have been big scientific mis-steps (many within our own century), or that scientific laws get modified or thrown out quite frequently.
Without knowing the history, you can't really understand the method, and without understanding the method, you can't discriminate between good science, bad science, pseudo-science, and fantasy.
Good! Now they can get back to work on CDParanoia!
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
·
· Score: 2
March 27, 2001
Things on hold for now: No, that doesn't mean the project is dead, just that active development is on hold while we throw all the time we have available to get OggVorbis to 1.0 in a reasonable amount of time. Once Vorbis hits 1.0, we'll get back to Paranoia.
'Bout damn time! Lossy encoding I could give a rat's ass about, but byte-perfect audio extraction... now that's real software!
Although the super-small d/l size and it's availability across a wide range of platforms is nice also.
Wide range of platforms compared to what? Mozilla? Nope. Netscape 4? Nope? Lynx? Nope. I think IE is about the only browser I know of with worse platform support.
Case in point, Linux/PPC is my main platform. Guess Opera just isn't an option for a lot of us.
unfortunately -- the intelligent advice of scientists was disregarded by the rulers were blinded by visions of wealth and power and the Queen funded Columbus' journey
Actually, from what I remember, the "intelligent advice of scientists" in the 15th century was that Ptolemy was the authority on matters of the celestial bodies. If Ptolmey said that the Earth was 12,000 miles around, then anybody in the know would have said that the Earth was 12,000 miles around.
Etree uses the Shorten codec, which in my experience will compress hi-fi audio to about 3/5 of its original size. A Phish show is typically about 1 GB compressed.
Personally I'd like to see FLAC getting used... in my most recent tests, FLAC blew Shorten out of the water in both speed and compression ratio. Plus FLAC is free as in speech but Shorten is free only as in beer.
Losing connections is less of a problem than you might think... many siteops run *NIX FTP servers, which as a rule are quite reliable. Some of the Win9x servers are less reliable, but that's when you thank god for FTP Resume.
After 16 years of publishing a proprietary, difficult-to-hack OS, it appears that UNIX hacking culture is catching Apple off-guard. It's quite true that whoever put together that CD seriously miscalculated the possible repercussions, but it's also very possible that they've done the same sort of thing in the past without incident.
The difference here being that, upon hearing that OS X is *NIX, about a million people cry out at once, "Cool! Lemme hack it!"
This is going to require a major shift in corporate thinking over in Cupertino. We can only hope that the outcome of this shift is hacker-friendly, instead of the user-hostile solutions that the folks in Redmond have come up with.
What sort of "modifications" did you make? It sounds pretty cool, and I've got lots of old Macs kicking around... I keep thinking of making a Macquarium, but haven't ever gotten 'round to it.
My first comment is that "performance" means different things to different people. To some it means "throughput", that is, the amount of work that the system can do just prior to being overloaded. To some it means how well it can handle overload. To some it means low latency, that is, that the system can respond to an important event quickly. Which one is important for you depends on what you're doing.
Indeed. Latency is a critical issue in many kinds of processing, especially multimedia. MacOS X, a Mach-based system, delivers superior audio latency under stress. There's a really good whitepaper on this topic here (in PDF... sorry)
I guess my point wasn't that a theory that is clearly unfalsifiable can be scientific, but rather that the criterion of falsifiability isn't a good test for how scientific a theory is. Any theory can be protected from falsification by the introduction of ad-hoc hypotheses, but just because a theory contains ad-hoc hypotheses doesn't make it unscientific.
Let's take for example the criticism of Lakatos. When the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus was conclusively demonstrated, one might have said that the Newtonian theory of gravity had been falsified. To wit, an auxilliary hypothesis was introduced: "perhaps there is another, unseen, body causing the perturbation". In this particular case, the offending body (Neptune) was discovered shortly thereafter. But what if, for some reason, Neptune continued to evade terrestrial observation? Would that invalidate the entire Newtonian program? Not at all, it would merely have remained an ad-hoc ancilliary hypothesis.
Obviously, when a theory becomes too full of such ad-hoc hypotheses we become doubtful of its viability as a working scientific model. And rightly so -- the Copernican model of the cosmos replaced the Ptolemaic model for exactly this reason. But does that mean that the Ptoemaic model was unscientific?
I think the principle of falsifiability has gone out of vogue almost entirely. Karl Popper, who popularized the principle of falsifiability, shifted to a weaker form of the principle in his own lifetime, and post-modern critiques of the principle have eroded its popularity greatly.
The main critique against the principle is that scientific propositions require auxilliary hypotheses to have any predictive value. When a specific prediction is falsified, it is possible to "get around" the problem by modifying the auxilliary hypotheses. Since such modification to auxilliary hypotheses is considered a normal part of the scientific process, falsifiability doesn't really work very well.
Or something like that... it's been a couple of years since I studied this stuff.
While it's not common to see CD titles referred to as "software" in consumer-speak, it's pretty common in HI-FI parlance. I thing it's probably a UK-ism.
I mean think about it... any digital media player is basically a computer, and any media it plays is software. Trying to draw a distinction is a bit silly.
The key difference here is that that CD players offered high sound quality along with their other features (random access, small size, etc). People were willing to dish out a grand for the latest HI-FI miracle... they're not going to be as excited about the latest LO-FI miracle. It's like spending big bucks on an AM radio... why bother?
ADSM is now known as TSM, the "Tivoli Storage Manager". While it's nice in principle, in practice it has many flaws.
It's almost useless for a complete backup, since the client can't handle restoration of system-critical files (at least on platforms I've used)
Platform support isn't very good, and it's getting worse. You can only get the clients in binary, and the list isn't very long. Want Linux/PPC? Tough.
Authentication/xfer is entirely clear-text. This makes the system pretty much useless for backing up sensitive files.
Reliability seems dubious, and getting worse. I've seen both backups and restores mysteriously time-out or fail for some other reason, and it's NOT the network. Maybe it's just our setup here, but I sure don't trust it.
So, for certain limited uses I'm sure it's swell, but it's hardly a panacea. It's also absurdly expensive, but I suppose that's par for the course.
this is the mothership of aleoric glitch wastelands. 1/4" output, speaker/1/4" switch, external clock power on/off (w/ blue led). use pen to create intensly painful screetching sounds!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Having skimmed the text of the patent claim, it appears to me that using an LCD monitor would be completely outside the scope of the patent:
The satellite facilities are sales and information terminals, each equipped with a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) for receiving and displaying requested customer information from the computer's data sources at the data processing center.
So I guess all the web retailers have to do is add a disclaimer that only customers using LCDs or OLEDs are allowed to access the system!
Nah, that's not it. I got that same message but I use a web proxy that forges referring URLs. It does break some web pages in funny ways, but I find the idea of littering server logs with references to fuckedcompany.com quite amusing. How's -that- for geek humor?
Hmmm... it appears that clothes that fit are out of fashion!
Not so fast... Apple did indeed include a pure software 68LC040 emulator in their operating systems. They even documented it in the usual place:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/mac/PPCSoftwar e/PPCSoftware-13.html#MARKER-9-29
It was a very good emulator, though not without some omissions.
Well, I suppose the simple answer is that you can go against popular standards, but ya gotta be prepared for the difficulties you'll face.
For example, I store my digital music with lossless compression (formats like Shorten or FLAC). Hardly anyone does that, so obviously there is much less support for such things. But hey, what do I care? As long as there are a couple of good players out there, I'm gold. And, as it happens, there are XMMS plugins for both formats.
Personally, I would like to see an environment where all the major media players support all the free codecs, and as many of the commercial ones as they care to. Let me have a mixed collection of OGGs, MP3s, WAVs, FLACs, etc., and don't make me worry too much about which is which.
A more realistic comparison might be to the current crop of DVD players, for example APEX players. Most of them play DVD, SVCD, CD, CD/R, and CD/RW, including MP3s on CDR. And they still only cost about $100 new. The reason is simply that for the cost of a little extra logic you can support lots of different (but similar) media.
Digital music players are even easier. There's no physical carrier to worry about, so once you build a machine capable of playing MP3s, you already have the hardware to play WAV, OGG, WMA, VQF, whatever. The hardest part is the licensing, and since OGG is free, no biggie there.
I believe that many people on /. look at the Apache numbers as some sort of "is Microsoft dead?" meter.
Actually, I think of it as more of a "has Microsoft taken over everything in the known universe?" meter... or maybe a "is the idea of Free Software in the business world actually tenable" meter.
Apache, much like the old BSD TCP/IP, is one of those shining success stories in the Free Software world, so I think it's all right if people cheer when it does well in a fluffy survey with pretty graphs. Of course I guess it would be pretty damn silly to have a Netcraft-style survey of networking protocol suites, but I would still cheer to see that TCP went from 99.87% to 99.88% this month :)
I was Mac junkie for years, before finally being converted to GNU/Linux a couple of years ago. I think OS X is cool, but it has the worst GUI to ever come out of Cupertino. It's sluggish, many things don't have keyboard shortcuts that should, and in general Aqua is lacking in places where X Window Managers excel.
For example, why is there no support for virtual desktops? In a perfect world I'd have a monitor bigger than Rhode Island, but in reality I'm often using 15-inch Apple Studio Displays. I'd like to be able to have more than one window open without having a messy pile-up on my desktop.
In general, I find that I just can't work very fast in OS X, so until such work-flow issues get resolved, there's no chance of me using OS X as my primary desktop.
One of my major complaints about the teaching of science in western academia is that it is taught without any reference to the history of science.
As an undergraduate, I was in a class that was mostly full of astrophysics grad students. One day in class, the topic of Galileo's confrontation with Rome came up. An astro student in the class raised her hand and asked "so, are you saying that there was some sort of conflict between religion and science?" Now, maybe I'm just being elitist, but shouldn't someone who is well along the road to becoming a professional scientist be aware of some of the basic history of the field?
Really, though, that's exactly the problem. Not only is the history of science not taught at the high school level, but it is unusual for working scientists to have any knowledge of the history of their own discipline, except perhaps from the last 25 or so years.
Unfortunately, when you have such a near-sighted understanding of science, you tend not to realize that there have been big scientific mis-steps (many within our own century), or that scientific laws get modified or thrown out quite frequently.
Without knowing the history, you can't really understand the method, and without understanding the method, you can't discriminate between good science, bad science, pseudo-science, and fantasy.
March 27, 2001
Things on hold for now: No, that doesn't mean the project is dead, just that active development is on hold while we throw all the time we have available to get OggVorbis to 1.0 in a reasonable amount of time. Once Vorbis hits 1.0, we'll get back to Paranoia.
'Bout damn time! Lossy encoding I could give a rat's ass about, but byte-perfect audio extraction... now that's real software!
Although the super-small d/l size and it's availability across a wide range of platforms is nice also.
Wide range of platforms compared to what? Mozilla? Nope. Netscape 4? Nope? Lynx? Nope. I think IE is about the only browser I know of with worse platform support.
Case in point, Linux/PPC is my main platform. Guess Opera just isn't an option for a lot of us.
unfortunately -- the intelligent advice of scientists was disregarded by the rulers were blinded by visions of wealth and power and the Queen funded Columbus' journey
Actually, from what I remember, the "intelligent advice of scientists" in the 15th century was that Ptolemy was the authority on matters of the celestial bodies. If Ptolmey said that the Earth was 12,000 miles around, then anybody in the know would have said that the Earth was 12,000 miles around.
Etree uses the Shorten codec, which in my experience will compress hi-fi audio to about 3/5 of its original size. A Phish show is typically about 1 GB compressed.
Personally I'd like to see FLAC getting used... in my most recent tests, FLAC blew Shorten out of the water in both speed and compression ratio. Plus FLAC is free as in speech but Shorten is free only as in beer.
Losing connections is less of a problem than you might think... many siteops run *NIX FTP servers, which as a rule are quite reliable. Some of the Win9x servers are less reliable, but that's when you thank god for FTP Resume.
Gotta love it when header files reference other headers that don't exist! Specifically, there isn't:
include/asm-ppc/thread_info.h
...only for i386 and sparc64. Dammit!
Universal owns it all now. For a good list of who owns who, see this page.
After 16 years of publishing a proprietary, difficult-to-hack OS, it appears that UNIX hacking culture is catching Apple off-guard. It's quite true that whoever put together that CD seriously miscalculated the possible repercussions, but it's also very possible that they've done the same sort of thing in the past without incident.
The difference here being that, upon hearing that OS X is *NIX, about a million people cry out at once, "Cool! Lemme hack it!"
This is going to require a major shift in corporate thinking over in Cupertino. We can only hope that the outcome of this shift is hacker-friendly, instead of the user-hostile solutions that the folks in Redmond have come up with.
What sort of "modifications" did you make? It sounds pretty cool, and I've got lots of old Macs kicking around... I keep thinking of making a Macquarium, but haven't ever gotten 'round to it.
What about Fiasco? It claims to be a "Real-Time" kernel.
And is BeOS really a real-time OS? I've never heard it described that way. If so then it's a damn shame that Apple nixed it for a Mach-based system.
My first comment is that "performance" means different things to different people. To some it means "throughput", that is, the amount of work that the system can do just prior to being overloaded. To some it means how well it can handle overload. To some it means low latency, that is, that the system can respond to an important event quickly. Which one is important for you depends on what you're doing.
Indeed. Latency is a critical issue in many kinds of processing, especially multimedia. MacOS X, a Mach-based system, delivers superior audio latency under stress. There's a really good whitepaper on this topic here (in PDF... sorry)
I guess my point wasn't that a theory that is clearly unfalsifiable can be scientific, but rather that the criterion of falsifiability isn't a good test for how scientific a theory is. Any theory can be protected from falsification by the introduction of ad-hoc hypotheses, but just because a theory contains ad-hoc hypotheses doesn't make it unscientific.
Let's take for example the criticism of Lakatos. When the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus was conclusively demonstrated, one might have said that the Newtonian theory of gravity had been falsified. To wit, an auxilliary hypothesis was introduced: "perhaps there is another, unseen, body causing the perturbation". In this particular case, the offending body (Neptune) was discovered shortly thereafter. But what if, for some reason, Neptune continued to evade terrestrial observation? Would that invalidate the entire Newtonian program? Not at all, it would merely have remained an ad-hoc ancilliary hypothesis.
Obviously, when a theory becomes too full of such ad-hoc hypotheses we become doubtful of its viability as a working scientific model. And rightly so -- the Copernican model of the cosmos replaced the Ptolemaic model for exactly this reason. But does that mean that the Ptoemaic model was unscientific?
I think the principle of falsifiability has gone out of vogue almost entirely. Karl Popper, who popularized the principle of falsifiability, shifted to a weaker form of the principle in his own lifetime, and post-modern critiques of the principle have eroded its popularity greatly.
The main critique against the principle is that scientific propositions require auxilliary hypotheses to have any predictive value. When a specific prediction is falsified, it is possible to "get around" the problem by modifying the auxilliary hypotheses. Since such modification to auxilliary hypotheses is considered a normal part of the scientific process, falsifiability doesn't really work very well.
Or something like that... it's been a couple of years since I studied this stuff.
While it's not common to see CD titles referred to as "software" in consumer-speak, it's pretty common in HI-FI parlance. I thing it's probably a UK-ism.
I mean think about it... any digital media player is basically a computer, and any media it plays is software. Trying to draw a distinction is a bit silly.
The key difference here is that that CD players offered high sound quality along with their other features (random access, small size, etc). People were willing to dish out a grand for the latest HI-FI miracle... they're not going to be as excited about the latest LO-FI miracle. It's like spending big bucks on an AM radio... why bother?
- It's almost useless for a complete backup, since the client can't handle restoration of system-critical files (at least on platforms I've used)
- Platform support isn't very good, and it's getting worse. You can only get the clients in binary, and the list isn't very long. Want Linux/PPC? Tough.
- Authentication/xfer is entirely clear-text. This makes the system pretty much useless for backing up sensitive files.
- Reliability seems dubious, and getting worse. I've seen both backups and restores mysteriously time-out or fail for some other reason, and it's NOT the network. Maybe it's just our setup here, but I sure don't trust it.
So, for certain limited uses I'm sure it's swell, but it's hardly a panacea. It's also absurdly expensive, but I suppose that's par for the course.this is the mothership of aleoric glitch wastelands. 1/4" output, speaker/1/4" switch, external clock power on/off (w/ blue led). use pen to create intensly painful screetching sounds!!!