Big or Little Endian?
on
Binary Watch
·
· Score: 1
You would think that anyone who is geek enough to make a binary watch would be geek enough to understand that the numbers are useless unless you say if they are big or little endian.
Of course, confusion over the format could lead to some funny times...
Good questions. This really comes down to an issue of epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge, or how it is that we can know things).
A quick answer is that blind people can visualize some things that exist in the world. For example, they could visualize what a cube looks like if they have touched it and felt the edges. Blind people can visualize reality because they exist in it and participate in it. For example, they can (and must) be able to visualize the layout of their houses because they will be walking around in them.
What they can not do is visualize the less empirical things, for example the color blue. "Blue" is defined to be the range of colors whose wavelengths are slightly above the ultraviolet spectrum. If you tell a blind person that a cube is blue, they will catch the cube part but not understand what you *really* mean by blue because they have never experienced blue. A blind scientist would know that electromagnetic radiation with a certain wavelength is considered to be "blue", but wouldn't really know what blue is because it is something that really isn't understood until it is seen. When I visualize blue, I get a little bit of red, a little bit of green, and alot of blue. For a blind person who has never seen blue, they get a schematic of wavelengths.
It would be interesting if we had the ability to give someone who was blind from birth the ability to see. How they perceive reality would change dramatically! They would have to learn to associate the words we have given to colors as well as quite a few other things.
It is important to remember that quicktime was in existence well before the internet was popular. Apple developed quicktime as a mac based system extension back in the day when processors were chugging along at 25MHz. Frankly, I think that Apple was pretty bold to develop a system extension that was easily five years ahead of the current hardware. Give Apple some kudos for having the guts to do something that seemed absurdly insane. Given the timing of Apple's release, it predates the open source/open standard software distrubition paradigm. The internet adopted the standard because it had been in use for years as the defacto standard for movies on the desktop platform and it provided a way to incorporate different codecs (so it could use mpeg as well). It was a well thought out and well balanced standard.
Additionally, in the past, there was a UNIX version of quicktime available, but it is no longer produced because the codec that Apple redistributes is for Mac and Windows only.
Get over the "I hate QT" thing. If you want an open source version, write it yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, confusion over the format could lead to some funny times...
Good questions. This really comes down to an issue of epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge, or how it is that we can know things).
A quick answer is that blind people can visualize some things that exist in the world. For example, they could visualize what a cube looks like if they have touched it and felt the edges. Blind people can visualize reality because they exist in it and participate in it. For example, they can (and must) be able to visualize the layout of their houses because they will be walking around in them.
What they can not do is visualize the less empirical things, for example the color blue. "Blue" is defined to be the range of colors whose wavelengths are slightly above the ultraviolet spectrum. If you tell a blind person that a cube is blue, they will catch the cube part but not understand what you *really* mean by blue because they have never experienced blue. A blind scientist would know that electromagnetic radiation with a certain wavelength is considered to be "blue", but wouldn't really know what blue is because it is something that really isn't understood until it is seen. When I visualize blue, I get a little bit of red, a little bit of green, and alot of blue. For a blind person who has never seen blue, they get a schematic of wavelengths.
It would be interesting if we had the ability to give someone who was blind from birth the ability to see. How they perceive reality would change dramatically! They would have to learn to associate the words we have given to colors as well as quite a few other things.
It is important to remember that quicktime was in existence well before the internet was popular. Apple developed quicktime as a mac based system extension back in the day when processors were chugging along at 25MHz. Frankly, I think that Apple was pretty bold to develop a system extension that was easily five years ahead of the current hardware. Give Apple some kudos for having the guts to do something that seemed absurdly insane. Given the timing of Apple's release, it predates the open source/open standard software distrubition paradigm. The internet adopted the standard because it had been in use for years as the defacto standard for movies on the desktop platform and it provided a way to incorporate different codecs (so it could use mpeg as well). It was a well thought out and well balanced standard.
Additionally, in the past, there was a UNIX version of quicktime available, but it is no longer produced because the codec that Apple redistributes is for Mac and Windows only.
Get over the "I hate QT" thing. If you want an open source version, write it yourself.