Re:But how stable is it?
on
MacOS X DP3
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· Score: 1
is OS X supposed to be more stable than OS 8/9?
Umm, yes. Keep in mind that OS X is not really a new version of the same OS as 8/9.
...or just a Mac OS with a BSD base...
Not really. As a matter of marketting, OS X is the successor to OS 9, but as a matter of code history, it's not really related to MacOS at all. It would be better named NeXTStep 6.0 than MacOS X.
Think of it this way: forget MacOS. OS X is NeXTStep using a BSD kernel instead of a Mach kernel.
A "quantum leap" forward is, literally, a miniscule advance.
Not to sound whiny, but that's incorrect.
A "quantum leap" is movement from one location to another without moving through the intervening space. Period. There's nothing in the definition of a quantum leap that puts any constraints on the distance, although it is true that most quantum leaps occur over a very tiny distance indeed.
If XFree86 4.0 includes many new features that weren't in the previous version, so we get them all at once rather than getting them one at a time, then the metaphor of a quantum leap is accurate and appropriate. Since I hope there is in fact more than one new feature in this upcoming version, I do indeed hope it's a quantum leap forward...
Well, RedHat 7.0 will be itself a "point oh" release, so it makes sense for it to include all the new major version numbers. Those who fear "point oh" releases will wait for RedHat 7.1...
All Redhat is doing is waiting for Microsoft to make every move and then they mirror the same move.
This is called keeping up with the competition. If a competitor makes a move, either you respond to it or you ignore it. Companies that do the latter tend to go out of business.
RedHat doesn't want to create anything new.
It's not RedHat's job to create anything new! RedHat is a distribution. They collect all kinds of software from various locations and put it together on one nice CD-ROM for you so you don't have to hunt all that junk down and compile it yourself. That's what distributions are for. Software developers come up with new things. Distributions just package it all up nice for you. If you want new things, write some new software! Don't expect distributions to, it's not their job, it's ours...
I don't know what sums up subjectivism better than "belief that reality is constituted by the mind".
Ummm, no. For something to be subjective would mean it could be true for one person and false for another. Example: Running 5 miles is hard. This statement is true for me, but may be false for someone else (a marathon runner may say, "What? Only 5 miles? That's easy!").
Note that whether reality is constituted by the mind or not has nothing at whatsoever to do with subjectivity. In the above example, running 5 miles is easy for one person but difficult for another due to physical stature. Things can be subjective while reality is not a mental phenomenon. Conversely, it may be that "physical objects" don't exist, simply mental phenomenon, and we're wrong to posit the existence of something physical "lying behind" and causing our sensations. This, however, does NOT imply subjectivism, since it may be that the same mental objects will cause the same sensations to all possible observers. Bishop Berkeley is (in)famous for such a theory, IIRC. The point being, "belief that reality is constituted by the mind" is NOT the same as, nor does it imply belief that reality is in any way subjective.
Take 20 or 30 people, and an application that requires that they have a CD, any CD, in their drive on load, and they can Beam register any of the 20 or 30 CDs online at the time, and as time goes by, they would rapidly build up a massive collection without a huge number of resources being tied up.
<P>The amount of resources required for this is roughly the same as the amount of resources required to keep <B>10 times</B> as much music online and available in mp3 format, and requires considerable coordination between the co-conspirators.
<P><I>The Beam It method is perhaps, because of this, even less secure, and more convenient than Napster, no long download times, no scratched, damaged or badly made recordings, all available for free on the condition that you have at least on CD you can share with everyone else.
<P>I have no doubt this concept has been picked up already by others. Game over mp3.com:/ </I>
Yeah, right. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that NO ONE is doing this. It's way more difficult and cumbersome than simply using Napster. If you think otherwise, gives us a URL/IRC nick or something where we can verify that this is indeed occuring...
- How does it protect against borrowing friends CDs?
The same way Best Buy protects against physical disc borrowing: they don't. There is no way to prevent that, and once I've physically borrowed your CD, I can easily make a copy of it myself. So this isn't any bigger a piracy issue for mp3.com than it is for Best Buy.
Besides which: - It challenges you for random blocks from each CD? Well... so you have to put the CD in your CD drive... which means, why not just listen to it from the CD drive? Its fair enough if you say "oh it means you dont have bother taking your CDs around", but eh? I'm confused. If it needs to grab info from teh CD, how does this mean you dont have to carry the CD around?
It only challenges you the first time. Once you've verified you have the CD, you can listen to it anywhere, even while you're at work and the CD is at home.
To do this Alice needs a big disc, or a lot of CD players in her computer.
She needs a smaller disk or less CD players if she just rips and encodes the CDs she wants to make available as mp3 files.
As for the rest, that's a lot of work to go through to get MP3s streamed to you. In fact, you could reduce the amount of work involved and the amount of online storage required by simply ripping all the CDs in question, keeping the mp3s online, and sending them to whoever requests them, leaving mp3.com out of the picture altogether!
So, in other words, you've really proven how mp3.com can't be effectively used for piracy. The same task can be accomplished much more cheaply and easily by NOT using mp3.com, so why would you go through all the extra effort?
What stops me from getting an account at MP3.com, uploading some CDs then sharing this account with ALL my friends?
The same thing that prevents you from buying a CD and sharing it with all your friends: nothing. Does that mean Best Buy should be shut down for promoting piracy?
Is that if you have the CD, and you're too lazy to rip it to your hard drive and would rather drag it across the net at some arbitrary speed, witherrors, and without knowing if the song is actually there, you've got issues.
Well, first of all, it's not that I'm too lazy to rip several hundred CDs onto my hard drive, it's more like no one has invented hard drives large enough to hold my CD collection. Secondly, I don't want to drag them across the net at some arbitary speed, if I did, Beam-It would be no good, since the speed is not at all arbitrary, it's a fixed 128kbps. Thirdly, what errors? I haven't seen any. And fourthly, I know exactly what songs are there and what ones aren't, so what the hell are you babbling on about?
If you own it, you're going to end up with a much better sounding song in about the same amount of time (or less)...
Umm, I guess this line of reasoning makes sense if you're an unemployed munchkin still in school or something, but I happen to have an office, and it's a heck of a lot more convenient being able to bring up my web browser and listen to my CD collection than it would be to drag my several hundred CDs back and forth from work.
Once you actually get a life yourself, you'll understand how useful Beam-It is...
First, if you want to divide the Net into continents, the cleanest, most logical way is to do it by either top level domains or by content types(essentially as defined by URLs).
This makes sense if you're trying to create a portal site for finding information. It makes no sense if you're trying to divide the net into continents. What made Europe and Asia seperate continents has nothing to do with seperation of land mass (which it isn't) but with the seperation of the people. Likewise with the other continents (the fact that a large expanse of ocean between them explains why the social seperation existed, but it's the societal seperation, not the physical seperation, that defines continents).
The most logical way to divide the Internet into continents would be to study which sites are visited by which people. I think you'll find if you do that the Internet does divide into continents nicely, and more or less along the lines that Katz suggests (although I think it's just a rough sketch, don't take it too seriosly).
Please note that the type of content a site has, or who owns it, etc, is irrelevant to this sort of classification. Neither TLDs nor content are at all meaningful in determining which continent any particular site falls on.
Also note that just like real life, continents do not prevent people from interactings with people from other continents, or being a part of communities on different ones. The fact that people can be a part of multiple communities, or that links can be made between different places, or that some sites are hard to classify into one of these categories, in no way invalidates or even detracts from this style of classification.
Actually, continents are usually one or more tectonic plates creating that land mass.
Actually, this is (1) false, and (2) beside the point.
(1) Consider that India is considered a part of Asia, despite being on a different tectonic plate. Australia is not considered to be on the same contintent as India, despite the fact that they are on the same plate. Whether something is part of one continent or another has nothing at all whatsoever to do with plate tectonics.
(2) Consider that the world was divided into the continents we know today hundreds of years before we discovered plate tectonics. Even if it were true that we had coincidentally managed to divide the world into continents such that it satisfied your definition, your
So while Africa is attached to Asia, it is a separate continent.
By your definition, Africa isn't really attached to Asia. In order to walk from the African plate to the Eurasian plate, you'd need to walk across the Arabian plate, which lies between them (and should be a seperate continent by your definition). Although this plates do touch, under the Mediterranean.
When continents and tectonic plates agree, it's only by historical accident. In no way does plate tectonics play a role in the definition of what is or isn't a continent.
radio stations and libraries have to pay for the right to distribute copyright works, even temporarily.
Well, radio stations broadcast music to people who may not have already paid for a copy of the music in question. There are two issues that make the mp3.com Beam-It program very different: (1) mp3.com does not broadcast the music (note the word "broad", as in many people can tune in at once), they do more of a "pointcast" (I hate that term, but it's appropriate in this case). (2) The listener has already paid for the music in question.
Also, it implies it recognizes handwriting but there's no stylus or place to keep one
What page are you looking at? The one linked to above shows a stylus in two pictures, one with it out and the other showing where it's placed when not in use.
Is it because not all libraries needed for Quake are available on Trillian (but they are for Doom), or is it because the Merced is just as bad as I think it is?
I would guess it's because many idiots would attempt to compare IA-64 software rendered Quake to IA-32 Quake with a 3D accelerator. Since software rendering often isn't even an option with more modern games, it's hard to use more modern games to demo processor performance since what you'll get is video card performance instead. Certainly a lot of people would look at it and go "Hey, my Pentium II runs Quake better than that!" missing the point that the IA-64 was actually doing the work while their Pentium II wasn't.
I don't know if any code from any of those ports was used directly, but I suspect they contributed indirectly a great deal. Before Alpha and SPARC64, I suspect there was quite a bit of Linux code that just didn't handle 64-bit processors well. After these ports were made, all that code had to be cleaned up. Once that's done, porting to any 64 bit architecture is much easier. So I suspect the main contribution of those ports was (to paraphrase an old Mac term) to make Linux 64-bit clean.
Actually, no. If it's time critical, it should *NOT* be in assembly, in all probability, because the chances are that the compiler will outsmart you or the chip will change.
If the chip changes in a way that makes your optimization suddenly less optimal, it makes no difference if the now less optimal machine code was generated by hand-coded assembly or by the C compiler. If you're trying to make some claim about what happens when you recompile the code, then you're missing the point of time critical code. If it's time critical, and I get a new processor that allows me to make it faster, rest assured I'll do so. Why sit around waiting for my compiler to be upgraded to be able to optimize for the new processor when I can do it right away?
<I>Assembly is like saying "Moore's Law doesn't apply to me".</I>
Err, huh? Sure, faster processors will eventually make my code faster without my needing to optimize it. If that's the case, why worry about optimizing at all?
I was talking specifically about time-critical code, where I'm trying to get every ounce of speed out I can. Moore's Law doesn't enter into it. I want it to be as fast as it can be <I>today</I>!
<I>Take your pick: Hand-optimized Pentium assembly, or EGCS code tuned for the Pentium II.:)</I>
Oooh look, it's everyone's favorite logical falacy, the false dilemma. Why would I choose either of these two when hand-optimized Pentium II assembly would beat both?
Stuff like polymorphism is a lot cleaner syntactically in C++ than in C.
I don't see how. I'd say the nice thing C++ gives you is true constructors (instead of having to roll your own), and it's nice how it automatically pushes the object pointer on the stack rather than having to explicitly declare a "this" parameter to your methods. Multiple inheritance is the third advantage. Beyond these, C++ has no real advantages over C for object oriented programming. And the first two of these are simply syntactic sugar.
Pascal semicolon use is consistent! In Pascal, a semicolon is a statement separator, not a statement terminator. You consistently put semicolons between statements.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, yes. Keep in mind that OS X is not really a new version of the same OS as 8/9.
Not really. As a matter of marketting, OS X is the successor to OS 9, but as a matter of code history, it's not really related to MacOS at all. It would be better named NeXTStep 6.0 than MacOS X.
Think of it this way: forget MacOS. OS X is NeXTStep using a BSD kernel instead of a Mach kernel.
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Not to sound whiny, but that's incorrect.
A "quantum leap" is movement from one location to another without moving through the intervening space. Period. There's nothing in the definition of a quantum leap that puts any constraints on the distance, although it is true that most quantum leaps occur over a very tiny distance indeed.
If XFree86 4.0 includes many new features that weren't in the previous version, so we get them all at once rather than getting them one at a time, then the metaphor of a quantum leap is accurate and appropriate. Since I hope there is in fact more than one new feature in this upcoming version, I do indeed hope it's a quantum leap forward...
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This is called keeping up with the competition. If a competitor makes a move, either you respond to it or you ignore it. Companies that do the latter tend to go out of business.
RedHat doesn't want to create anything new.
It's not RedHat's job to create anything new! RedHat is a distribution. They collect all kinds of software from various locations and put it together on one nice CD-ROM for you so you don't have to hunt all that junk down and compile it yourself. That's what distributions are for. Software developers come up with new things. Distributions just package it all up nice for you. If you want new things, write some new software! Don't expect distributions to, it's not their job, it's ours...
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Nope. Heck, nobody does that, not even Debian (hence the "non-free" category).
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Ummm, no. For something to be subjective would mean it could be true for one person and false for another. Example: Running 5 miles is hard. This statement is true for me, but may be false for someone else (a marathon runner may say, "What? Only 5 miles? That's easy!").
Note that whether reality is constituted by the mind or not has nothing at whatsoever to do with subjectivity. In the above example, running 5 miles is easy for one person but difficult for another due to physical stature. Things can be subjective while reality is not a mental phenomenon. Conversely, it may be that "physical objects" don't exist, simply mental phenomenon, and we're wrong to posit the existence of something physical "lying behind" and causing our sensations. This, however, does NOT imply subjectivism, since it may be that the same mental objects will cause the same sensations to all possible observers. Bishop Berkeley is (in)famous for such a theory, IIRC. The point being, "belief that reality is constituted by the mind" is NOT the same as, nor does it imply belief that reality is in any way subjective.
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Where did you get the idea that Brin said Extropians are modern-day subjectivists? It doesn't say that anywhere in his article.
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Take 20 or 30 people, and an application that requires that they have a CD, any CD, in their drive on load, and they can Beam register any of the 20 or 30 CDs online at the time, and as time goes by, they would rapidly build up a massive collection without a huge number of resources being tied up.
:/ </I>
<P>The amount of resources required for this is roughly the same as the amount of resources required to keep <B>10 times</B> as much music online and available in mp3 format, and requires considerable coordination between the co-conspirators.
<P><I>The Beam It method is perhaps, because of this, even less secure, and more convenient than Napster, no long download times, no scratched, damaged or badly made recordings, all available for free on the condition that you have at least on CD you can share with everyone else.
<P>I have no doubt this concept has been picked up already by others. Game over mp3.com
Yeah, right. There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that NO ONE is doing this. It's way more difficult and cumbersome than simply using Napster. If you think otherwise, gives us a URL/IRC nick or something where we can verify that this is indeed occuring...
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The same way Best Buy protects against physical disc borrowing: they don't. There is no way to prevent that, and once I've physically borrowed your CD, I can easily make a copy of it myself. So this isn't any bigger a piracy issue for mp3.com than it is for Best Buy.
Besides which: - It challenges you for random blocks from each CD? Well... so you have to put the CD in your CD drive... which means, why not just listen to it from the CD drive? Its fair enough if you say "oh it means you dont have bother taking your CDs around", but eh? I'm confused. If it needs to grab info from teh CD, how does this mean you dont have to carry the CD around?
It only challenges you the first time. Once you've verified you have the CD, you can listen to it anywhere, even while you're at work and the CD is at home.
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She needs a smaller disk or less CD players if she just rips and encodes the CDs she wants to make available as mp3 files.
As for the rest, that's a lot of work to go through to get MP3s streamed to you. In fact, you could reduce the amount of work involved and the amount of online storage required by simply ripping all the CDs in question, keeping the mp3s online, and sending them to whoever requests them, leaving mp3.com out of the picture altogether!
So, in other words, you've really proven how mp3.com can't be effectively used for piracy. The same task can be accomplished much more cheaply and easily by NOT using mp3.com, so why would you go through all the extra effort?
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The same thing that prevents you from buying a CD and sharing it with all your friends: nothing. Does that mean Best Buy should be shut down for promoting piracy?
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Well, first of all, it's not that I'm too lazy to rip several hundred CDs onto my hard drive, it's more like no one has invented hard drives large enough to hold my CD collection. Secondly, I don't want to drag them across the net at some arbitary speed, if I did, Beam-It would be no good, since the speed is not at all arbitrary, it's a fixed 128kbps. Thirdly, what errors? I haven't seen any. And fourthly, I know exactly what songs are there and what ones aren't, so what the hell are you babbling on about?
If you own it, you're going to end up with a much better sounding song in about the same amount of time (or less)...
Umm, I guess this line of reasoning makes sense if you're an unemployed munchkin still in school or something, but I happen to have an office, and it's a heck of a lot more convenient being able to bring up my web browser and listen to my CD collection than it would be to drag my several hundred CDs back and forth from work.
Once you actually get a life yourself, you'll understand how useful Beam-It is...
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This makes sense if you're trying to create a portal site for finding information. It makes no sense if you're trying to divide the net into continents. What made Europe and Asia seperate continents has nothing to do with seperation of land mass (which it isn't) but with the seperation of the people. Likewise with the other continents (the fact that a large expanse of ocean between them explains why the social seperation existed, but it's the societal seperation, not the physical seperation, that defines continents).
The most logical way to divide the Internet into continents would be to study which sites are visited by which people. I think you'll find if you do that the Internet does divide into continents nicely, and more or less along the lines that Katz suggests (although I think it's just a rough sketch, don't take it too seriosly).
Please note that the type of content a site has, or who owns it, etc, is irrelevant to this sort of classification. Neither TLDs nor content are at all meaningful in determining which continent any particular site falls on.
Also note that just like real life, continents do not prevent people from interactings with people from other continents, or being a part of communities on different ones. The fact that people can be a part of multiple communities, or that links can be made between different places, or that some sites are hard to classify into one of these categories, in no way invalidates or even detracts from this style of classification.
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Actually, this is (1) false, and (2) beside the point.
(1) Consider that India is considered a part of Asia, despite being on a different tectonic plate. Australia is not considered to be on the same contintent as India, despite the fact that they are on the same plate. Whether something is part of one continent or another has nothing at all whatsoever to do with plate tectonics.
(2) Consider that the world was divided into the continents we know today hundreds of years before we discovered plate tectonics. Even if it were true that we had coincidentally managed to divide the world into continents such that it satisfied your definition, your
So while Africa is attached to Asia, it is a separate continent.
By your definition, Africa isn't really attached to Asia. In order to walk from the African plate to the Eurasian plate, you'd need to walk across the Arabian plate, which lies between them (and should be a seperate continent by your definition). Although this plates do touch, under the Mediterranean.
When continents and tectonic plates agree, it's only by historical accident. In no way does plate tectonics play a role in the definition of what is or isn't a continent.
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Well, radio stations broadcast music to people who may not have already paid for a copy of the music in question. There are two issues that make the mp3.com Beam-It program very different: (1) mp3.com does not broadcast the music (note the word "broad", as in many people can tune in at once), they do more of a "pointcast" (I hate that term, but it's appropriate in this case). (2) The listener has already paid for the music in question.
I don't see how RIAA has a case here...
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Frat kids go to Napster. It's more old fogies like me who go to mp3.com...
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His posts are a joy to read
I think I like it
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What page are you looking at? The one linked to above shows a stylus in two pictures, one with it out and the other showing where it's placed when not in use.
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Perhaps not, but they could store hashes of every block on the CD, and see if the client's data hashes to the same value.
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I would guess it's because many idiots would attempt to compare IA-64 software rendered Quake to IA-32 Quake with a 3D accelerator. Since software rendering often isn't even an option with more modern games, it's hard to use more modern games to demo processor performance since what you'll get is video card performance instead. Certainly a lot of people would look at it and go "Hey, my Pentium II runs Quake better than that!" missing the point that the IA-64 was actually doing the work while their Pentium II wasn't.
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If the chip changes in a way that makes your optimization suddenly less optimal, it makes no difference if the now less optimal machine code was generated by hand-coded assembly or by the C compiler. If you're trying to make some claim about what happens when you recompile the code, then you're missing the point of time critical code. If it's time critical, and I get a new processor that allows me to make it faster, rest assured I'll do so. Why sit around waiting for my compiler to be upgraded to be able to optimize for the new processor when I can do it right away?
<I>Assembly is like saying "Moore's Law doesn't apply to me".</I>
Err, huh? Sure, faster processors will eventually make my code faster without my needing to optimize it. If that's the case, why worry about optimizing at all?
I was talking specifically about time-critical code, where I'm trying to get every ounce of speed out I can. Moore's Law doesn't enter into it. I want it to be as fast as it can be <I>today</I>!
<I>Take your pick: Hand-optimized Pentium assembly, or EGCS code tuned for the Pentium II.
Oooh look, it's everyone's favorite logical falacy, the false dilemma. Why would I choose either of these two when hand-optimized Pentium II assembly would beat both?
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I don't see how. I'd say the nice thing C++ gives you is true constructors (instead of having to roll your own), and it's nice how it automatically pushes the object pointer on the stack rather than having to explicitly declare a "this" parameter to your methods. Multiple inheritance is the third advantage. Beyond these, C++ has no real advantages over C for object oriented programming. And the first two of these are simply syntactic sugar.
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