For years now a certain company has been delivering data to the company I work for on CD-R's. And every time, it's a crapshoot finding a drive that can read the thing. Sometimes I can, but my colleague in the next cube can't. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes I can read it in my Mac but not in my PC. Sometimes in my PC but not in my Mac.
This seems to be par for the course. And it's even worse with CD-RW's. And worse yet with DVD media.
Yes, I've heard all the usual folklore. "If you have a reasonably MODERN drive, it SHOULD read MOST CD media--if it's of high quality."
And how can you tell if the blanks are good enough? With gasoline, I glance at the octane number printed on the pump; with motor oil, the API rating.
With CD-R media? Well, some folks say "just use Verbatim," some say "use anything BUT Verbatim," some say "the green dye is best," some say "I just buy the cheapest I can find and never have any problems..." Some say "Just keep testing different brands and stick with the one you find that works best." Right. I have better things to do with my time than QA media.
And if you have problems and complain, the media companies say "sounds like your drive is the problem" and the drive companies say "sounds like you have bad media."
Meanwhile, this company keeps sending us CD's and when one comes in, it's time to spend an hour finding who has a PC that will read THIS one.
We've asked the company to please use high quality media and they assure us that they do.
The LAST, absolutely the LAST thing we need is some harebrained nonstandard compression scheme, and idiots sending us compressed CD's and telling us, "Well, they work fine in MY drive."
Anyone remember "K.I.S.S." (Keep It Simple Spreadsheet?) A failure, to be sure, but a noble one. Spreadsheets got completely ossified around, oh, 1992 or so. Various innovative ideas were tried (MUSE, Javelin, oh heck what was the NeXTstep-based one? Improv. Even Wingz had some interesting ideas in it).
K.I.S.S. had a really bad name. I bought it at MacWorld. I'm just geeky enough to be intimidated by attractive women ten years younger than me, so I couldn't bring myself to say something like "I want a KISS" or anything like that. It took about twenty seconds of stammering and pointing to convey my meaning. "Uh, the um spreadsheet with the, acronym, kay, eye, ess, ess, back there..."
And the product was interesting--but it WASN'T a spreadsheet. And it wasn't easy to use.
But, darn it all, it was so nice to see people trying to apply some fresh thinking.
Around the days when Context MBA and Lotus 1-2-3 were slugging it out, the trade press was filled with dozens of stories about a hot new software product named "Ovation." It was one of the first big products to be managed and launched by MBA's, and it almost literally fits the above description. The MBA's were simply brilliant at lining up venture capital, getting press attention, making sure the product had the right features, doing absolutely everything right. The press raved about the screen shots. Everyone was sure it was going to be the biggest success in PC history up to that time. Because, for the first time, you had real business people on board and in charge from day one.
..."Harriman was shown into te office of the president of the Moka-Coka Company.... Harriman took out a large sheet of paper and spread it on Grigg's desk. 'You see, the equipment is set up anywhere ner the center of the Moon, as we see it. Eighteen pyrotechnics rockets shoot out in eighteen directions, like the spokes of a wheel, but to carefully calculated distances. They hit and the bombs the carry go off, spreading finely divided carbon black for calculated sitances. There's no air on the Mooh, you know, Pat--a fine powder will throw out just like a javelin. Here's your result.' He turned over the paper and an the back there was a picture of the Moon, printed lightly. Overlaying it, in black, heavy print was: 6+.
'People will never stand for it. It's sacrilege.' Harriman looked sad. 'I wish you were right. But they stand for skywriting--and video commercials.' 'Griggs chewed his lip. "You know the damn well the name of my product won't go on the face of the Moon. The letters would be too small to be read.'"
--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Man who Sold the Moon" (1950)
The first three Star Wars movies were good, the first three James Bond movies were good, even the first three Rocky pictures were good...
To a true fan, nothing is sadder than the beloved series that goes on and on, becoming less good, then mediocre, then embarrasingly bad self-parody.
Because the true fan just has to keep watching them all, out of appreciation for what was and hoping against hope for what might be but almost never is.
Three cheers for the entertainers who remember the old show business maxim, "Always leave 'em wanting more."
Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare
on
Pure Math, Pure Joy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air. O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized! Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
There's no real similarity in theme--but "Google is God" did induce a random synaptic firing and brought up the title of an H. G. Wells story entitled "Jimmy Goggles the God." Yes, Goggles as in eyewear, not Google as in Barney Google.
I said in another post that Google reminded me of Isaac Asimov's Multivac... but Google together with the Internet also reminds me of H. G. Well's _World Brain_. Except of course that Wells foresaw it as a dignified, high-minded intellectual enterprise, a modernized kind of French Revolution Encyclopedia.
No, but Google IS Multivac...
on
Does Google = God?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
...It's always interesting to see which of the science-fiction concepts of my youth have actually come to pass. Moon travel came to pass, but certainly not the way Heinlein or H. G. Wells or Jules Verne imagined it.
In the sixties and early seventies, people were awed but poorly informed about computers. The commonest question that "lay" friends and relatives would ask me is "But what do you DO with a computer? Do you ask it questions?" That seemed bizarrely naive to me, and I would try to explain that it was more like playing with an electric train set, and that, outside of jokes, or Asimov's "Multivac" stories, you didn't "ask questions" of a computer.
Well, Google may not be Multivac, but it sure is a lot more like Multivac than H. G. Well's space gun or Cavorite sphere is like Project Apollo. You don't normally phrase the questions as questions, and it doesn't provide interpretative, English-language "answers," but it certainly is an awesome and it may not be omniscient but it's an order of magnitude more "scient" than anything else I've seen.
And, yes, it FINALLY looks as if "flat TV you can hang on a wall" is not only here, but I expect I'll be buying one within the next five years or so.
No helicars or voice typewriters yet, though.
(No, ViaVoice is NOT a good realization of the "voicewriter" fantasy. Oh, and for the record, to me, "Ask Jeeves" does NOT feel like Multivac at all, but Google does. I can't say why, that's just the way it strikes me.)
As the hand scans the second and third paragraphs--beginning "small size" and "totally silent," it certainly appears to me that printed words are appearing AHEAD of the printer.
What's going on? Either the video is a fake, or the printer is held several inches above the surface and sprays ink very accurately over a wide "cone of printing..." or... well... I think it's a fake.
Steve Jobs' assistants roll out the two carts... they open Photoshop... they click on the "Gnorglize foodlefacets" effect... the progress bars start moving... the Pentium's pulls ahead... the Pentium completes... the Mac is still grinding away......and Steve Jobs says, "Well, as you can see, the Pentium really IS a little faster at this particular task. But, hey, the Mac has a prettier case and it's easier to use?"
I'd really like to see this someday, but somehow I don't expect to.
Or, at least, a distant relative of the Waller Gunnery Trainer, which used five movie projectors. (Waller, who invented this system, went on to create Cinerama. Cinerama used three synchronized projectors to produce a wraparound widescreen experience).
What matters is not image quality in a test laboratory, but image quality in the local gigaplex. I believe biggest factor determining image quality in current theatres using traditional film is not the technology, but whether or not management gives a damn about picture quality.
For example, take dirty film. There is no reason why film should get scratched or dirty if it is being handled competently. In at least perfectly ordinary local theatre (Showcase Cinemas in Randolph--no, I have NO connection with them except as a satisfied customer) prints run for weeks and weeks and still look absolutely pristine. In other venues, I've literally never seen a showing where the film was clean and unscratched.
So far, I have managed to go to two DLP screenings in the Boston area. In one case ("Ocean's Eleven" at the Randolph Showcase) it looked pretty much the same as 35 mm. Some ways better, some ways worse. Beautifully steady and flicker-free (better) but I had to sit a little further back to avoid seeing visible pixel structure (worse), and it seemed to me the blacks were greyish. Really, about a wash.
The other time... ("Fantasia 2000" at the General Cinema in Burlington)... well, what can I say? The gear was out of commission and they were showing 35mm film in the house that had been designated as showing digital.
Given that the equipment in both venues was probably almost brand-new and hardly used, 50% success in just having the equipment function is not a very good track record.
When operated IN REAL LIFE under the same management as current theatres, using projectionists trained the same amount... how is digital cinema going to hold up? No, the picture will never look scratched, bits being bits, but the media can still get scratched... will there be dropouts? skips? Poorly maintained analog produces a poor picture, but poorly maintained digital can't give you a show at all.
Currently, digital films are loaded off of multiple DVD's onto big, fast disk arrays. How will those fare? Are the disks hot-swappable and will all the theatres have a good supply of spares to swap in if they fail?
Not only does digital projection equipment cost five or ten times what conventional projectors cost, but conventional projectors have service lives that are extremely long--many, many decades. Somehow I doubt this will be true of digital projectors.
Do you really think theatres are going to be anxious to put in projection equipment that is an order of magnitude more expensive, just in order to get a picture that is ROUGHLY the same quality as they get from 35mm? And far, far lower than the quality available from 70mm, common just a few years ago but almost extinct now (the current generation may never have a chance to really _see_ "Lawrence of Arabia" or "2001, A Space Odyssey").
The move to digital cinema is obviously beneficial to studios and distributors, but I'm darned if I see what it does for theatres or theatregoers.
...and deliberately put up fantasy specifications that Apple won't be able to meet?
No, I don't really believe this... but I sure hope the leak was correct, and that the posted material represents what engineering/manufacturing/IBM actually came up with, and not what Steve Jobs wanted (and had website material prepared for) but couldn't quite get.
One thing is for sure: if you CAN'T buy a dual 2 GHz 970 by, say, Fall, an awful lot of people are now going to be awfully disappointed.
...eBooks want to be locked up. Apparently. At any rate, with regard to fonts, Cynthia Hollandsworth, a VP at Simon and Schuster, in this article, is quoted as saying
âoeWhat is absolutely clear to me (working for the largest e-book publisher in the industry) is that there is not any business left for font makers who want to play in this e-world. We use fonts in our e-books, of course, but the font companies have a very skewed view about what these products are worth in this environment. It is likely that a market will come up for renamed and redigitized fonts tuned for e-books and other screen technologies that are sold with unlimited rights to reproduce. In a paperless world, itâ(TM)s impossible to manage the rights of these products with royalties and permissions.â
In other words, Simon and Schuster doesn't want to PAY bloated prices for locked-up intellectual property. I wonder whether they will ever realize that book readers feel just the same way about eBooks as they do about fonts?
...As an angry, disillusioned Rocket eBook owner, I'm very disappointed that they could have gotten so many of the basic technical aspects of the device RIGHT, yet screwed up the marketing so badly as to discredit the entire eBook concept. The Rocket eBook is pleasant to use and I can and do read long novels on it. Alas, Gemstar's business model was irretrievably customer-hostile, and both price and availability of content were poor.
I want to acknowledge that Gemstar is treating their customer base reasonably well under the circumstances and far better than might have been expected.
What they're NOT doing, of course, is to provide a Gemstar-format-to-something-else conversion tool. Or replacements for the Gemstar-format eBook titles we "own" with some other format.
There won't be any new content available after July 16th, but they say they will keep the servers up for at least three years--so the people whose eBooks can ONLY download directly from the server will be able to use their purchased content for that long. They also have a sort of warranty policy under which, for as long as supplies last, they say that if your eBook fails, even if you didn't buy it from them, they will replace it with another Gemstar eBook device (but possibly not the same model) for $30.
And, having designed OUT personal content (the ability to download arbitrary.txt and.html files--like Project Gutenberg texts) from the later devices themselves, they have now put it back IN as a Web-based service. Not a problem for owners of the original Rocket eBook, which can convert and download from a PC or Mac, but later buyers can ONLY download over a phoneline from Gemstar's servers. But now they can UPLOAD personal content to those servers and have it converted.
I'm not happy, but at least the Gemstar eBook is being gently euthanized, not shot at dawn.
True... and what a pity that Apple threw away so many babies with the bathwater in OS X.
Not that OS X is terrible, but the UI is NOT as good as OS 7 through 9... for no obvious reason. (I suspect internal rivalry between traditional Apple factions and NeXT factions).
The OS X finder feels clunky, and very much as if was designed by someone working from a marketing features list, someone who didn't really grok the traditional Mac user experience.
Candy-colored buttons on the window that give you clue, other than their color, as to what they do until you mouse over them... finder windows that no longer automatically update to reflect real-time changes in directory contents... don't get me started.
It's water over the dam now, but it is still painful to those of us have known the Mac since 1984.
Oh well, it's still good for UNIX-based OS. And, yes, I do prefer working in OS X because the "real OS" virtues do, overall, outweigh the "not-quite-a-Mac" UI.
...by Hans Christian Andersen, and all the ingenious "automata" of the nineteenth century, show, at least, that there is nothing new about the love of gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry.
It's probably a form of idolatry... that's a sin we're not very conscious of these days...
I'm suddenly starting to wonder just how much modern digital techniques bring to the party. For example, remember the technique of bounding signals off of meteor trails? I believe they recorded audio at normal speed, then waited for a meteor trail and squirted it out at many times normal speed... that sort of thing would be trivial and cheap to do with digital technology.
Maybe a LOT of old, low-fi, unreliable radio broadcast technologies can have useful new digital life. It could be very handy as a backup for satellite-based communications.
It's very sad. The Rocket eBook device itself got a lot of things right. I can't enjoy reading from a PDA screen, but I can and do enjoy reading all sort of things, including very long 19th-century novels from Project Gutenberg, on my Rocket.
The original Rocket had two ways of working. You downloaded purchased material to your PC or Mac, then downloaded from the PC or Mac into the Rocket. Or, using the included "RocketWriter" software, which was a little buggy but functional, you could convert straight ASCII text or HTML, either residing on your PC/Mac hard drive OR _directly from a Web URL,_ into RB format. This latter way of operating was referred to as "personal content."
Unfortunately, Nuvomedia was acquired by Gemstar which then went through a series of nutty changes in policy. The brilliant businessman, Henry Yuen, who brought Gemstar to the great success it enjoys today (insert ironic smiley here) was totally opposed to supporting "personal content" at all. Gemstar stopped including RocketWriter with the software bundle (although you could and still can download it from the Web). At one point, they encouraged people to download a sort of Trojan Horse firmware upgrade that stopped the device from accepting "personal content" altogether. They reversed that in a later firmware upgrade.
They then produced revised models, the RCA and Gemstar-branded ones, which were intended for purchased content only. They connect only a phone line, and only for the purpose of downloading purchased content.
Recently, they restored a "personal content" capability in which you take.HTML files on your PC, UPLOAD them to their Website, and IT converts it on the server to.RB format which you can download over a phone line with your REB1100. Or something like that. I haven't tried it.
By the way, the number of bookselling websites from which you can download "mainstream" material has shrunk from over a dozen down to exactly one--Powell's. A lot of small indie publishers, mostly of "genre" titles, have purchasable material--at very fair prices--but I'm sorry to say I personally haven't liked much of what I've found there.
It's been reported in the trade press that Gemstar is thinking about discontinuing their eBook division, which should make things even worse. I wonder what will happen to the server on which your "personal bookshelf" of purchased material resides?
Did I mention that the RocketWriter software is buggy? It doesn't work on full.HTML, only on a specific Rocket-defined "subset" of HTML 3.2. And it has various problems there. Which I've figured out ways of working around (I have a collection of.mpw scripts to convert Project Gutenberg text into.html that's acceptable to the Mac version of RocketWriter, which is even buggier than the PC version). This supporting software isn't being maintained very well. Indeed, the Mac version hasn't been maintained at all since the last version was released in the year 2000.
In short: great devices, what a pity that the marketers couldn't figure out what to do with them.
By all means, if you can get a used Rocket eBook (NOT a REB1100) at a good price and just want to try playing around with what is a decent, well-designed, dedicated eBook reader, go for it.
People tell me that the REB1200, which is actually a completely different design, is much better than the 1100, and I _think_ that _perhaps_ it allows personal content.
Just in case this wasn't an implied rhetorical question... the term, as far as I know, was invented by Robert Heinlein in his novel _Stranger in a Strange Land,_ where it is an expression used by Martians. It literally means "to drink," but the Martians use it to mean an understanding that is both very deep and very complete.
Yes, but would you want to ride a space elevator with a safety factor of only 1.00000? So there's probably a factor of ten left to go. I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime.
In my lifetime, I'd settle for seeing humans get back to the moon. I'd like Mars, but I'll settle for the moon. Of all the things science-fiction writers predicted, reaching the moon and then abandoning lunar flights and letting grass grow on the launching pads was not one of them.
The purpose of patents is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. .."
The practice of pre-emptive patenting does not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
Therefore, if current law permits this practice, then Congress has a clear responsibility to change the laws.
Taking the article at face value, which I do, cellphone use really is a hazard. But simply asking people to turn of their cell phones probably isn't good enough.
I'm perfectly cooperative, but on my last plane flight I had put my cell phone in my backpack, put the backpack in the overhead luggage, honestly thought it was turned off, and after landing discovered I had left it turned on.
What does a cell phone do when it's powered on but not being used to make or receive calls? Does it transmit occasionally and spontaneously?
So the next question is: without suggesting any draconian measures, is there any good way that flight staff can _detect_ that there's a powered-up cell phone on board--so that they can politely tell the flyer to turn it off?
... then to find a wheel, see whether the documentation states how many spokes it has, give up and count the spokes, determine what the rights status of the wheel is and, if it's not open source, what the royalty agreement is, convince your boss to license the wheel, compile the wheel, fix the compile errors due to your compiler vendor not implementing the language standard properly, build an adapter to allow the metric wheel to fix on your U. S. Customary hub, test the wheel, discover that it vibrates dangerously at 16.5 mph, try to balance the wheel, and finally give up and build a wheel.
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For years now a certain company has been delivering data to the company I work for on CD-R's. And every time, it's a crapshoot finding a drive that can read the thing. Sometimes I can, but my colleague in the next cube can't. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes I can read it in my Mac but not in my PC. Sometimes in my PC but not in my Mac.
This seems to be par for the course. And it's even worse with CD-RW's. And worse yet with DVD media.
Yes, I've heard all the usual folklore. "If you have a reasonably MODERN drive, it SHOULD read MOST CD media--if it's of high quality."
And how can you tell if the blanks are good enough? With gasoline, I glance at the octane number printed on the pump; with motor oil, the API rating.
With CD-R media? Well, some folks say "just use Verbatim," some say "use anything BUT Verbatim," some say "the green dye is best," some say "I just buy the cheapest I can find and never have any problems..." Some say "Just keep testing different brands and stick with the one you find that works best." Right. I have better things to do with my time than QA media.
And if you have problems and complain, the media companies say "sounds like your drive is the problem" and the drive companies say "sounds like you have bad media."
Meanwhile, this company keeps sending us CD's and when one comes in, it's time to spend an hour finding who has a PC that will read THIS one.
We've asked the company to please use high quality media and they assure us that they do.
The LAST, absolutely the LAST thing we need is some harebrained nonstandard compression scheme, and idiots sending us compressed CD's and telling us, "Well, they work fine in MY drive."
Anyone remember "K.I.S.S." (Keep It Simple Spreadsheet?) A failure, to be sure, but a noble one. Spreadsheets got completely ossified around, oh, 1992 or so. Various innovative ideas were tried (MUSE, Javelin, oh heck what was the NeXTstep-based one? Improv. Even Wingz had some interesting ideas in it).
K.I.S.S. had a really bad name. I bought it at MacWorld. I'm just geeky enough to be intimidated by attractive women ten years younger than me, so I couldn't bring myself to say something like "I want a KISS" or anything like that. It took about twenty seconds of stammering and pointing to convey my meaning. "Uh, the um spreadsheet with the, acronym, kay, eye, ess, ess, back there..."
And the product was interesting--but it WASN'T a spreadsheet. And it wasn't easy to use.
But, darn it all, it was so nice to see people trying to apply some fresh thinking.
Around the days when Context MBA and Lotus 1-2-3 were slugging it out, the trade press was filled with dozens of stories about a hot new software product named "Ovation." It was one of the first big products to be managed and launched by MBA's, and it almost literally fits the above description. The MBA's were simply brilliant at lining up venture capital, getting press attention, making sure the product had the right features, doing absolutely everything right. The press raved about the screen shots. Everyone was sure it was going to be the biggest success in PC history up to that time. Because, for the first time, you had real business people on board and in charge from day one.
Except they omitted one small detail.
Developing the product.
..."Harriman was shown into te office of the president of the Moka-Coka Company.... Harriman took out a large sheet of paper and spread it on Grigg's desk. 'You see, the equipment is set up anywhere ner the center of the Moon, as we see it. Eighteen pyrotechnics rockets shoot out in eighteen directions, like the spokes of a wheel, but to carefully calculated distances. They hit and the bombs the carry go off, spreading finely divided carbon black for calculated sitances. There's no air on the Mooh, you know, Pat--a fine powder will throw out just like a javelin. Here's your result.' He turned over the paper and an the back there was a picture of the Moon, printed lightly. Overlaying it, in black, heavy print was: 6+.
'People will never stand for it. It's sacrilege.' Harriman looked sad. 'I wish you were right. But they stand for skywriting--and video commercials.' 'Griggs chewed his lip. "You know the damn well the name of my product won't go on the face of the Moon. The letters would be too small to be read.'"
--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Man who Sold the Moon" (1950)
OK, maybe the second one shouldn't count. Like Dvorak's symphonies, maybe we can renumber them.
The first three Star Wars movies were good, the first three James Bond movies were good, even the first three Rocky pictures were good...
To a true fan, nothing is sadder than the beloved series that goes on and on, becoming less good, then mediocre, then embarrasingly bad self-parody.
Because the true fan just has to keep watching them all, out of appreciation for what was and hoping against hope for what might be but almost never is.
Three cheers for the entertainers who remember the old show business maxim, "Always leave 'em wanting more."
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
There's no real similarity in theme--but "Google is God" did induce a random synaptic firing and brought up the title of an H. G. Wells story entitled "Jimmy Goggles the God." Yes, Goggles as in eyewear, not Google as in Barney Google.
I said in another post that Google reminded me of Isaac Asimov's Multivac... but Google together with the Internet also reminds me of H. G. Well's _World Brain_. Except of course that Wells foresaw it as a dignified, high-minded intellectual enterprise, a modernized kind of French Revolution Encyclopedia.
...It's always interesting to see which of the science-fiction concepts of my youth have actually come to pass. Moon travel came to pass, but certainly not the way Heinlein or H. G. Wells or Jules Verne imagined it.
In the sixties and early seventies, people were awed but poorly informed about computers. The commonest question that "lay" friends and relatives would ask me is "But what do you DO with a computer? Do you ask it questions?" That seemed bizarrely naive to me, and I would try to explain that it was more like playing with an electric train set, and that, outside of jokes, or Asimov's "Multivac" stories, you didn't "ask questions" of a computer.
Well, Google may not be Multivac, but it sure is a lot more like Multivac than H. G. Well's space gun or Cavorite sphere is like Project Apollo. You don't normally phrase the questions as questions, and it doesn't provide interpretative, English-language "answers," but it certainly is an awesome and it may not be omniscient but it's an order of magnitude more "scient" than anything else I've seen.
And, yes, it FINALLY looks as if "flat TV you can hang on a wall" is not only here, but I expect I'll be buying one within the next five years or so.
No helicars or voice typewriters yet, though.
(No, ViaVoice is NOT a good realization of the "voicewriter" fantasy. Oh, and for the record, to me, "Ask Jeeves" does NOT feel like Multivac at all, but Google does. I can't say why, that's just the way it strikes me.)
Their see how it works link looks very odd to me.
As the hand scans the second and third paragraphs--beginning "small size" and "totally silent," it certainly appears to me that printed words are appearing AHEAD of the printer.
What's going on? Either the video is a fake, or the printer is held several inches above the surface and sprays ink very accurately over a wide "cone of printing..." or... well... I think it's a fake.
Steve Jobs' assistants roll out the two carts... they open Photoshop... they click on the "Gnorglize foodlefacets" effect... the progress bars start moving... the Pentium's pulls ahead... the Pentium completes... the Mac is still grinding away... ...and Steve Jobs says, "Well, as you can see, the Pentium really IS a little faster at this particular task. But, hey, the Mac has a prettier case and it's easier to use?"
I'd really like to see this someday, but somehow I don't expect to.
Or, at least, a distant relative of the Waller Gunnery Trainer, which used five movie projectors. (Waller, who invented this system, went on to create Cinerama. Cinerama used three synchronized projectors to produce a wraparound widescreen experience).
What matters is not image quality in a test laboratory, but image quality in the local gigaplex. I believe biggest factor determining image quality in current theatres using traditional film is not the technology, but whether or not management gives a damn about picture quality.
For example, take dirty film. There is no reason why film should get scratched or dirty if it is being handled competently. In at least perfectly ordinary local theatre (Showcase Cinemas in Randolph--no, I have NO connection with them except as a satisfied customer) prints run for weeks and weeks and still look absolutely pristine. In other venues, I've literally never seen a showing where the film was clean and unscratched.
So far, I have managed to go to two DLP screenings in the Boston area. In one case ("Ocean's Eleven" at the Randolph Showcase) it looked pretty much the same as 35 mm. Some ways better, some ways worse. Beautifully steady and flicker-free (better) but I had to sit a little further back to avoid seeing visible pixel structure (worse), and it seemed to me the blacks were greyish. Really, about a wash.
The other time... ("Fantasia 2000" at the General Cinema in Burlington)... well, what can I say? The gear was out of commission and they were showing 35mm film in the house that had been designated as showing digital.
Given that the equipment in both venues was probably almost brand-new and hardly used, 50% success in just having the equipment function is not a very good track record.
When operated IN REAL LIFE under the same management as current theatres, using projectionists trained the same amount... how is digital cinema going to hold up? No, the picture will never look scratched, bits being bits, but the media can still get scratched... will there be dropouts? skips? Poorly maintained analog produces a poor picture, but poorly maintained digital can't give you a show at all.
Currently, digital films are loaded off of multiple DVD's onto big, fast disk arrays. How will those fare? Are the disks hot-swappable and will all the theatres have a good supply of spares to swap in if they fail?
Not only does digital projection equipment cost five or ten times what conventional projectors cost, but conventional projectors have service lives that are extremely long--many, many decades. Somehow I doubt this will be true of digital projectors.
Do you really think theatres are going to be anxious to put in projection equipment that is an order of magnitude more expensive, just in order to get a picture that is ROUGHLY the same quality as they get from 35mm? And far, far lower than the quality available from 70mm, common just a few years ago but almost extinct now (the current generation may never have a chance to really _see_ "Lawrence of Arabia" or "2001, A Space Odyssey").
The move to digital cinema is obviously beneficial to studios and distributors, but I'm darned if I see what it does for theatres or theatregoers.
...and deliberately put up fantasy specifications that Apple won't be able to meet?
No, I don't really believe this... but I sure hope the leak was correct, and that the posted material represents what engineering/manufacturing/IBM actually came up with, and not what Steve Jobs wanted (and had website material prepared for) but couldn't quite get.
One thing is for sure: if you CAN'T buy a dual 2 GHz 970 by, say, Fall, an awful lot of people are now going to be awfully disappointed.
...eBooks want to be locked up. Apparently. At any rate, with regard to fonts, Cynthia Hollandsworth, a VP at Simon and Schuster, in this article, is quoted as saying
âoeWhat is absolutely clear to me (working for the largest e-book publisher in the industry) is that there is not any business left for font makers who want to play in this e-world. We use fonts in our e-books, of course, but the font companies have a very skewed view about what these products are worth in this environment. It is likely that a market will come up for renamed and redigitized fonts tuned for e-books and other screen technologies that are sold with unlimited rights to reproduce. In a paperless world, itâ(TM)s impossible to manage the rights of these products with royalties and permissions.â
In other words, Simon and Schuster doesn't want to PAY bloated prices for locked-up intellectual property. I wonder whether they will ever realize that book readers feel just the same way about eBooks as they do about fonts?
...As an angry, disillusioned Rocket eBook owner, I'm very disappointed that they could have gotten so many of the basic technical aspects of the device RIGHT, yet screwed up the marketing so badly as to discredit the entire eBook concept. The Rocket eBook is pleasant to use and I can and do read long novels on it. Alas, Gemstar's business model was irretrievably customer-hostile, and both price and availability of content were poor.
.txt and .html files--like Project Gutenberg texts) from the later devices themselves, they have now put it back IN as a Web-based service. Not a problem for owners of the original Rocket eBook, which can convert and download from a PC or Mac, but later buyers can ONLY download over a phoneline from Gemstar's servers. But now they can UPLOAD personal content to those servers and have it converted.
I want to acknowledge that Gemstar is treating their customer base reasonably well under the circumstances and far better than might have been expected.
What they're NOT doing, of course, is to provide a Gemstar-format-to-something-else conversion tool. Or replacements for the Gemstar-format eBook titles we "own" with some other format.
There won't be any new content available after July 16th, but they say they will keep the servers up for at least three years--so the people whose eBooks can ONLY download directly from the server will be able to use their purchased content for that long. They also have a sort of warranty policy under which, for as long as supplies last, they say that if your eBook fails, even if you didn't buy it from them, they will replace it with another Gemstar eBook device (but possibly not the same model) for $30.
And, having designed OUT personal content (the ability to download arbitrary
I'm not happy, but at least the Gemstar eBook is being gently euthanized, not shot at dawn.
True... and what a pity that Apple threw away so many babies with the bathwater in OS X.
Not that OS X is terrible, but the UI is NOT as good as OS 7 through 9... for no obvious reason. (I suspect internal rivalry between traditional Apple factions and NeXT factions).
The OS X finder feels clunky, and very much as if was designed by someone working from a marketing features list, someone who didn't really grok the traditional Mac user experience.
Candy-colored buttons on the window that give you clue, other than their color, as to what they do until you mouse over them... finder windows that no longer automatically update to reflect real-time changes in directory contents... don't get me started.
It's water over the dam now, but it is still painful to those of us have known the Mac since 1984.
Oh well, it's still good for UNIX-based OS. And, yes, I do prefer working in OS X because the "real OS" virtues do, overall, outweigh the "not-quite-a-Mac" UI.
...by Hans Christian Andersen, and all the ingenious "automata" of the nineteenth century, show, at least, that there is nothing new about the love of gadgetry for the sake of gadgetry.
It's probably a form of idolatry... that's a sin we're not very conscious of these days...
I'm suddenly starting to wonder just how much modern digital techniques bring to the party. For example, remember the technique of bounding signals off of meteor trails? I believe they recorded audio at normal speed, then waited for a meteor trail and squirted it out at many times normal speed... that sort of thing would be trivial and cheap to do with digital technology.
Maybe a LOT of old, low-fi, unreliable radio broadcast technologies can have useful new digital life. It could be very handy as a backup for satellite-based communications.
It's very sad. The Rocket eBook device itself got a lot of things right. I can't enjoy reading from a PDA screen, but I can and do enjoy reading all sort of things, including very long 19th-century novels from Project Gutenberg, on my Rocket.
.HTML files on your PC, UPLOAD them to their Website, and IT converts it on the server to .RB format which you can download over a phone line with your REB1100. Or something like that. I haven't tried it.
.HTML, only on a specific Rocket-defined "subset" of HTML 3.2. And it has various problems there. Which I've figured out ways of working around (I have a collection of .mpw scripts to convert Project Gutenberg text into .html that's acceptable to the Mac version of RocketWriter, which is even buggier than the PC version). This supporting software isn't being maintained very well. Indeed, the Mac version hasn't been maintained at all since the last version was released in the year 2000.
The original Rocket had two ways of working. You downloaded purchased material to your PC or Mac, then downloaded from the PC or Mac into the Rocket. Or, using the included "RocketWriter" software, which was a little buggy but functional, you could convert straight ASCII text or HTML, either residing on your PC/Mac hard drive OR _directly from a Web URL,_ into RB format. This latter way of operating was referred to as "personal content."
Unfortunately, Nuvomedia was acquired by Gemstar which then went through a series of nutty changes in policy. The brilliant businessman, Henry Yuen, who brought Gemstar to the great success it enjoys today (insert ironic smiley here) was totally opposed to supporting "personal content" at all. Gemstar stopped including RocketWriter with the software bundle (although you could and still can download it from the Web). At one point, they encouraged people to download a sort of Trojan Horse firmware upgrade that stopped the device from accepting "personal content" altogether. They reversed that in a later firmware upgrade.
They then produced revised models, the RCA and Gemstar-branded ones, which were intended for purchased content only. They connect only a phone line, and only for the purpose of downloading purchased content.
Recently, they restored a "personal content" capability in which you take
By the way, the number of bookselling websites from which you can download "mainstream" material has shrunk from over a dozen down to exactly one--Powell's. A lot of small indie publishers, mostly of "genre" titles, have purchasable material--at very fair prices--but I'm sorry to say I personally haven't liked much of what I've found there.
It's been reported in the trade press that Gemstar is thinking about discontinuing their eBook division, which should make things even worse. I wonder what will happen to the server on which your "personal bookshelf" of purchased material resides?
Did I mention that the RocketWriter software is buggy? It doesn't work on full
In short: great devices, what a pity that the marketers couldn't figure out what to do with them.
By all means, if you can get a used Rocket eBook (NOT a REB1100) at a good price and just want to try playing around with what is a decent, well-designed, dedicated eBook reader, go for it.
People tell me that the REB1200, which is actually a completely different design, is much better than the 1100, and I _think_ that _perhaps_ it allows personal content.
Just in case this wasn't an implied rhetorical question... the term, as far as I know, was invented by Robert Heinlein in his novel _Stranger in a Strange Land,_ where it is an expression used by Martians. It literally means "to drink," but the Martians use it to mean an understanding that is both very deep and very complete.
Yes, but would you want to ride a space elevator with a safety factor of only 1.00000? So there's probably a factor of ten left to go. I don't think I'll see it in my lifetime.
In my lifetime, I'd settle for seeing humans get back to the moon. I'd like Mars, but I'll settle for the moon. Of all the things science-fiction writers predicted, reaching the moon and then abandoning lunar flights and letting grass grow on the launching pads was not one of them.
The purpose of patents is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. . ."
The practice of pre-emptive patenting does not "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
Therefore, if current law permits this practice, then Congress has a clear responsibility to change the laws.
Taking the article at face value, which I do, cellphone use really is a hazard. But simply asking people to turn of their cell phones probably isn't good enough.
I'm perfectly cooperative, but on my last plane flight I had put my cell phone in my backpack, put the backpack in the overhead luggage, honestly thought it was turned off, and after landing discovered I had left it turned on.
What does a cell phone do when it's powered on but not being used to make or receive calls? Does it transmit occasionally and spontaneously?
So the next question is: without suggesting any draconian measures, is there any good way that flight staff can _detect_ that there's a powered-up cell phone on board--so that they can politely tell the flyer to turn it off?
... then to find a wheel, see whether the documentation states how many spokes it has, give up and count the spokes, determine what the rights status of the wheel is and, if it's not open source, what the royalty agreement is, convince your boss to license the wheel, compile the wheel, fix the compile errors due to your compiler vendor not implementing the language standard properly, build an adapter to allow the metric wheel to fix on your U. S. Customary hub, test the wheel, discover that it vibrates dangerously at 16.5 mph, try to balance the wheel, and finally give up and build a wheel.