I'm not sure whether it is suitable, but It does give access to the full API via "declare" statements.
Don't reject it out of hand just because it isn't a "macho" language.
I don't say it's the right environment for you. I do say you're being foolish if you don't at least take a look at it.
You can make a very good evaluation because REALsoftwarelets you download a version that is complete, and comes with full documentation (it produces time-crippled applications that only work for thirty days).
Any time someone mentions a "success rate" without also mentioning the false positive rate, they're feeding you garbage
I'd be much more impressed by a claim of an 0.001% false alarm rate than I am by a 94% success rate.
Yet, on a per-line basis, if you assume that a user averages, say, three typed lines per minute, that's 180 lines per hour = 360000 lines per working year.
A.001% false alarm rate means that an innocent worker is going to be interrupted THREE TIMES A YEAR by burly security people at the cube doorway shouting "Hands off that keyboard RIGHT NOW!"
Well, I've read a number of reports from very critical people that inhabit rec.arts.movies.tech , and that group tends on the whole to be anti-digital, pro-film. And some consumer-type columnists (including Roger Ebert). All of these reports were on theatres showing the same film at more or less the same time in film and DLP, and the viewer walked back and forth between houses to compare.
What's remarkable, to my way of thinking, is that without exception ALL observers who have actually seen DLP and compared it to film under real-life conditions have come up with the same judgement: Not much difference. Of course they all go on to slice 'n' dice the differences that exist (on the one hand DLP is steadier, on the other hand DLP has visible pixelation and softness at viewing distances that some like for film, etc. etc.)
But the bottom line: there's not much difference. I have yet to see any eyewitness account in which the reporter said that there was a big difference. No great raves about DLP, no great pans.
I've personally seen DLP only once, and didn't compare it against film. All I can say is, it was a bit steadier and less flickery. But if I hadn't known it was DLP I never would have noticed.
70mm versus 35mm is a "Wow! what a difference" experience. DLP versus 35mm? "What's the difference?"
Now, as for dirty prints: it's all a matter of degree, and I have to say that the local multiplexes in the Boston area AIN'T that bad. I saw "Lord of the Rings" at the Randolph showcase when it had been showing for three or four weeks, and the print looked absolutely perfect to me. Plenty of dirt and scratches on the previews and "no smoking" stuff, but the feature itself was fine.
I don't think DLP has won by any means. It's perceived that the main cost is to the theatre owners and the main benefit is to the distributors.
Another unknown is the durability and reliability of the DLP gear. I WANTED to see DLP TWICE. I schlepped out to Framingham specifically to see "Fantasia 2000" in DLP, and the projector was down the day I went. How much of that is there? Can the DLP gear be run by people with the same amount of training and professionalism as the people they hire to run the film projectors?
And film projectors last and make money for theatre operators for decades and decades. The spiffy new DLP setup will probably still FUNCTION in five years, but what are the chances that the format of the distribution media won't change and that there won't be a constant "upgrade treadmill" cost?
My consumer camcorder has a variety of settings that affect the way it "sees" rapid motion. When transferring 8 mm films through one of those cheap reflector boxes, for example, the normal settings give a pulsating and unevenly bright image because of strobing. But if I use one of the "simulate slow shutter" settings, I can get very good results. The LONGEST of these settings does smear and blur motion, but one of the intermediate settings removes the flicker while adding very little motion blur.
And this is just a cheap consumer camcorder--and it's a feature that it has ALREADY.
I can easily believe that Cinea might be able to introduce short "tachistoscopic" artifacts that might screw up a camcorder on its normal settings, but if the camcorder's effective "simulated slow shutter speed" is 1/20 of a second or so, the artifacts will have to last 1/20th of a second or so to be visible to the camera--and at that speed, they'd be pretty visible to the naked eye.
I find it very hard to believe that the people who take videos off a movie screen don't know how to adjust their camcorders. Or that, if the Cinea scheme becomes popular, camcorder vendors will not respond with settings that are called by some other name but nudge, nudge, wink, wink designed to overcome the problem. Or that it can't be taken care of by some kind of digital processing afterward (analogous to using timebase correctors on analog VCR copy-protection schemes.)
In other words, it's a scam perpetrated on theatre owners.
Also, undoubtedly the "camcorder-jamming" artifacts are actually just as visible as, say, dirt specks flashing quickly by on individual frames of a dirty print. It may not make a lay audience walk out and demand their money back--they don't do that for dirty prints now. But people will be aware that the image quality isn't what it should be.
To a critical eye, DLP is currently SLIGHTLY inferior to traditional film projection in some regards (superior in others). Anything that tips that balance is going to be a problem. If the ordinary UNCRITICAL lay audience judges that "perfect" digital DLP actually isn't quite as good as 35mm and starts thinking of it as a cheap-and-cheesy alternative. I would think a cinema manager would be nuts to shell out a couple of hundred thousand for a DLP setup then add anything that would make the image quality worse.
Uh-oh... what's scary is that his scenario might prove very attractive to the computer industry.
The computer industry is currently reeling from the high degree of competition that has been brought about the commoditization and universality of the PC architecture.
In the bad old days, IBM deliberately kept product lines separate and incompatible so that they could segment individually manipulate different groups of customers. Certain product lines were arbitrarily designated for certain classes of customers (small business, large business, scientific, etc.) If competition developed in one area, they could cross-subsidize and lower prices for that group while raising them for another. The victimized group couldn't do much, because migration to the more cost-effective hardware was too difficult. High margins were maintained.
With DRM, we can foresee a return to the golden days of yore. If DRM makes computers useless for applications where security and high reliability are required, voila! we have market segmentation.
We could have cheap consumer PC's with DRM in them, basically unusable for many applications for the reasons so clearly articulated by Yodaiken.
This would, of course, create a market for exactly the "very expensive nonstandard hardware" he talks about.
Vendors could make high margins on products like "medical computers," knowing that hospitals did not have the option of migrating to commodity consumer PC's.
"Don't confuse me with facts..."
on
Open Source Studies
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· Score: 5, Informative
I'm sure the study will have very little effect on software development practices.
It reminds me of the study cited in DeMarco and Lister's "Peopleware" on the relation between schedule setting and productivity. They compared programmer productivity under four regimes: schedule set by the manager; schedule set by the programmer; schedule set by a neutral third party; and no schedule. The first three alternatives were tightly bunched, with "schedule set by the manager" producing the worst results (but only by a small amount). The fourth, no schedule, result in more than double the productivity of any of the others.
This book has been out for at least a decade, but as far as I know it has not led to the adoption of schedule-free development anywhere...
Like others, I'm scratching my head at this if the price is really $99.
The Palm m105 really does cost $99. (A quick check at Yahoo stores shows: Palm Online Store $99.00; Circuit City $99.95; Datavision $99.94; BuyDig.com $90.00).
Maybe the Zire costs Palm much less and is sold to retailers for much less; and, as with some other products, maybe the price at Palm's store will continue to be $99, but street prices at the Best Buys, Staples, and Wal*Marts of the world will be much lower.
If the price were really $58.88 or $49.95 or "39.95 after $30 mail-in rebate" I'd buy one for my wife in an instant.
I'd really LIKE to believe that Apple is taking a conscious and principled stand against digital restrictions management, as suggested in your article here.
Your article is, however, basically speculative.
Do you have any evidence that Apple really has an anti-DRM corporate strategy? Gateway has issued a limited but significant public statement of support for fair-use rights. Do you have any ideas why Apple has not done anything like this?
The web site have a wealth of information and links to resources; documents with guidelines for "best practices" and the like.
A few months ago I had a question on open-reel magnetic tape preservation and I contacted some of the people involved, and, like most library folk, they answer their phones and emails, they know a lot, and are very helpful.
For a long time, a search on "Samuel Johnson" returned Frank Lynch's "Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page" as the first hit. And, flatteringly, but mysteriously, a search on "Eyeglass Prescription" returned a web page of mine as the first hit. (I say "mysteriously" because the only page that Google reports as linking to my page is... my own home page! So it is not PageRank that accounted for its ranking).
About a month ago, Frank's page dropped to #3 and mine dropped to about #20. In Frank's case, the #1 spot went to a fine Samuel Johnson web site at Rutgers; in mine, I was edged out by a bunch of commercial sites selling eyeglasses.
The interesting thing is that two or weeks ago both sites popped back to number 1.
And then a few weeks later, Frank's is again at #3 and mine is down around #10 or so.
I don't think there's any reason why eyeglass prescriptions and Samuel Johnson would be connected. (And, no, Frank's page and mine do NOT link to each other!) So the changes must reflect tinkering by Google.
Neither Frank nor I use any kind of "cheating" to boost our ratings. And I don't think the sites that climbed above our did, either. Nor do I think many of the sites involved changed ANYTHING significant that would have altered their rankings.
(BTW I'm NOT giving URL's because the contents of these pages are irrelevant to my observations, I don't want them slashdotted, and this is NOT an attempt to boost the rankings of either page).
The name of the OS is Lindows. It's aimed at the general consumer. The whole point is that it's supposed to be a viable alternative to a Windows machine.
The reviewer mentions that not even Office 2000--surely the one application you'd expect to have been tested--will install. "We stuck the Office 2000 CD in our Lindows box. No luck."
And the reviewer dismisses it lightly: "Windows apps - Who gives a crap?... "
Well, the average home user might want to run the Windows software that came bundled with his new digital camera--without which there's no obvious way to print the pictures he took.
Or the conference proceedings on CD-ROM from that last meeting he attended, that autoboot into navigation/presentation software.
Or the games and edutainment titles in the electronics section of Wal*Mart.
The reviewer brushes this aside blandly, "If you want to run Windows apps then just run Windows."
Right. And if you DON'T want to run Windows applications--then just run Mac OS X.
The whole Lindows premise seems to be bait and switch: sell the machine by saying it will run Windows programs and hope that the customer can be switched to Linux substitutes before they notice that the pea has been moved to a different shell.
When and why did the name change from "FORTRAN" (all uppercase, preferably with a slash across the letter O) to "Fortran" (mixed-case)?
Indeed, since the name means Formula Translation, if the name was to be changed at all, why was it not changed to ForTran (with an internal upper-case T?)
Those familiar with the world of M, I mean MUMPS, I mean M[UMPS], where the name of the language either was or was not officially changed, and the language is or is not properly referred to by both names or by one or by the other, and where M is either an officially sanctioned abbreviation, an officially sanctioned alternate name, or the One True name, or was changed in the ANSI spec but not the ISO spec... or not... will appreciate the importance of such issues.
Particularly since in these modern days it's pretty safe to assume that your PC's printer is equipped with a full 192-character chain.
Stories about weird stuff falling from the sky have been with us for millennia. Charles Fort (1874-1932) devoted his life to collecting newspaper clippings of rains of fungi, formless masses of protoplasm, hatchets, masks, the ceremonial regalia of savages, and stones--with and without inscriptions. One of his accounts, The Book of the Damned is online here. (By "the damned," he means data that science refuses to accept).Written in an almost poetic, tart, prose style, it is very readable. He talks of rains of "Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it." Most of his information was obtained from newspaper accounts.
I'm inclined to take a very skeptical view of any stories about weird stuff falling from the sky. Maybe it's true about the blocks of ice, and maybe Fort's falls of frogs and fishes were true, and maybe other accounts of worms, snails mussels, snakes, turtles, and even a whole calf are true.
But I'd want to see heavier evidence than an MSNBC story.
That MSNBC article reminds me very much of the early days of micros... when nothing worked but nobody would admit it. An attitude that has, alas, to some extent been internalized into the whole PC industry.
In the late seventies, an acquaintance of mine used to rave about his Northstar system. I asked about reliability and he said it had been perfect, never any problems. I asked for a demo. He said he'd love to give me one but he couldn't right then, as the power supply had burned out. I said "I thought you said you hadn't had any problems." He said, "Oh, the problem is just in the power supply. The computer itself is fine."
The MSNBC article has that flavor to me. "As for the Microtel hardware, everything works as advertised except for the CD-ROM drive, which I haven't been able to get sound from yet." Right. It's not as if sound were an important function.
He says "I mentioned that Lindows was originally touted as being able to run Microsoft Windows programs. Guess what? IT CAN." (Capitals his). That's what he says first. It's only a little later that he mentions "[in Office the] Open New Document icon;... doesn't work. Outlook almost works (it can't find my e-mail server at work) and Internet Explorer works sometimes. I haven't tried other Windows software titles, but I'm told some do work."
Yeah, right. It's not as if you'd ever want to create a NEW document, editing existing ones should be good enough for anyone. It's not as if it matters that the email program can't talk to your email server. And, yes, I'm so picky that I expect IE to work more often than "sometimes." I demand nothing less than "mostly," and you should, too.
Lindows... "IT CAN" run Windows software. And my friend's Northstar computer wasn't broken.
And exactly how would all this have prevented the sideways swinging patent #6368227? How much expertise and certification to you need to spot the prior art in THAT one?
"Benefits" of killing the Alpha and PA-RISC...
on
Itanium Problems
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Saddest sentence in the whole article:
"There are other benefits for Hewlett-Packard. The Itanium allows the company to eliminate both of its current 64-bit chips -- the H.P. PA-RISC and Compaq Alpha. That alone should save the company $200 million to $400 million annually in development and manufacturing costs, according to Steven M. Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch."
Yeah, HP and Compaq have been fine stewards of their engineering legacy...
Remember that hoax a couple of years ago about a company that was going to implant ID chips in the palm of everyone's right hand, readable by the mouse to authenticate online purchases......intentionally recalling the passage in the Book of Revelations, "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name?"
I realize that neither side of the controversy is interested in a moderate or centrist view... but it does seem to me that IF you had digital restrictions management that allowed bit-for-bit digital copies and imposed no restrictions at all on what you could copy... but restricted copying SPEED to about 2X realtime... you'd have something very reasonable.
(The point is to duplicate the sort of porous protection copyrights have always had, in which fair-use and casual personal copying is easy, but large-scale commercial piracy is difficult--and is based, not on technical mechanisms, but on the relationship between the value of the unauthorized copies and the cost and practicality of enforcement).
Yes, yes, yes, I know, the DRM opponents (the side I'm on, mostly. I'm an EFF member, BTW. Are you?) would never trust that a DRM scheme, once in place, would ever be limited to ANYTHING reasonable. And I can think of various ways of evading the intent of the speed restriction.
Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but I don't see how it can achieve "airborne and ground kills at a distance of more than six miles" unless the air is clear. Heck, they say they need to do special tricks just to get the beam through the aircraft's own turbulence.
If the laser is powerful enough I suppose it can evaporate the fog, but... let's see, World War II "FIDO" (Fog, Intense, Dispersal Of) installtions used 75,000 gallons of gasoline. I'm not sure just how long those 75,000 gallons lasted, but I don't think it was very long. Let's say an hour. One gallon of gasoline/hr = 100,000 BTU/hr = 30 kilowatts. So a FIDO installation while in operation might have been putting out about 2000 megawatts.
On a clear day, you can kill forever?
Neck cramps, eye problems... it won't work.
on
3D LCD Display
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· Score: 2
"The screens can only be seen in 3-D from certain angles and distances, however, and a "sweet spot indicator" -- a small bar at the lower end of the screen -- appears solid black when the viewer is at an optimum position for 3-D."
Right... this is basically the same idea as many kind of "3D without glasses" dating back to the turn of the century. Including the well-known lenticular displays.
In effect it creates a pair of invisible "virtual glasses" in the air and you have to line up your head with them to see the effect. The problem is that your eyes are only 3 inches apart, so even ideally, at the VERY BEST you only have 3 inches of freedom to move your head before the left eye moves into the right-eye "virtual lens" or vice versa. In real life, the image is likely to blur or darken or otherwise turn funny if you move your head less than that.
This is going to create neck cramps like you won't believe, and all sorts of other irritations.
It's one thing to have a gimmick on a cereal package, or a poster, that grabs your attention for a few seconds. It's quite another to look at it for as long as you'd look at a computer screen.
Consumer cameras that produce lenticular "view-without-glasses" prints have been available on and off for decades. They have NEVER been popular.
I was intrigued by the casual statement, "Even launch has a 5 times out of 100 chance of blowing up."
What category of "launches" does this apply to? Is the Delta II rocket that was used to launch the Pathfinder much less reliable than the Space Shuttle? Or should we assume that the chances of a Space Shuttle or Proton blowing up on launch are roughly in the same ballpark?
(At the time of the Challenger disaster, Feynman said something to the effect working engineers estimated the Space Shuttle odds at 1/100, while NASA management estimated them at 1/100,000...)
...Well, you gotta to admit that if you're GOING to steal, that's the way to do it. Don't you have to admire the brazen, arrogant presumption of it? No question about it, this IS theft.
The only things I can think of to compare with it are
a) the apocryphal? urban legend? tales of programs that round all financial transactions to the lower penny instead of the nearest penny and divert all the fractional cents to the thief's account;
b) The $95 fee which some Massachusetts banks introduced about five years ago. The bank charges the fee for the "service" of terminating an inactive account and turning the money in it over to the Commonwealth. The person most concerned is whoever abandoned the account, who is probably either dead with no relatives or has Alzheimer's, and either way isn't going to complain.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure whether it is suitable, but It does give access to the full API via "declare" statements.
Don't reject it out of hand just because it isn't a "macho" language.
I don't say it's the right environment for you. I do say you're being foolish if you don't at least take a look at it.
You can make a very good evaluation because REALsoftwarelets you download a version that is complete, and comes with full documentation (it produces time-crippled applications that only work for thirty days).
I'm obviously missing something here (or missing something obvious here). What's the point? Why not just buy a laptop?
Any time someone mentions a "success rate" without also mentioning the false positive rate, they're feeding you garbage
.001% false alarm rate means that an innocent worker is going to be interrupted THREE TIMES A YEAR by burly security people at the cube doorway shouting "Hands off that keyboard RIGHT NOW!"
I'd be much more impressed by a claim of an 0.001% false alarm rate than I am by a 94% success rate.
Yet, on a per-line basis, if you assume that a user averages, say, three typed lines per minute, that's 180 lines per hour = 360000 lines per working year.
A
Well, I've read a number of reports from very critical people that inhabit rec.arts.movies.tech , and that group tends on the whole to be anti-digital, pro-film. And some consumer-type columnists (including Roger Ebert). All of these reports were on theatres showing the same film at more or less the same time in film and DLP, and the viewer walked back and forth between houses to compare.
What's remarkable, to my way of thinking, is that without exception ALL observers who have actually seen DLP and compared it to film under real-life conditions have come up with the same judgement: Not much difference. Of course they all go on to slice 'n' dice the differences that exist (on the one hand DLP is steadier, on the other hand DLP has visible pixelation and softness at viewing distances that some like for film, etc. etc.)
But the bottom line: there's not much difference. I have yet to see any eyewitness account in which the reporter said that there was a big difference. No great raves about DLP, no great pans.
I've personally seen DLP only once, and didn't compare it against film. All I can say is, it was a bit steadier and less flickery. But if I hadn't known it was DLP I never would have noticed.
70mm versus 35mm is a "Wow! what a difference" experience. DLP versus 35mm? "What's the difference?"
Now, as for dirty prints: it's all a matter of degree, and I have to say that the local multiplexes in the Boston area AIN'T that bad. I saw "Lord of the Rings" at the Randolph showcase when it had been showing for three or four weeks, and the print looked absolutely perfect to me. Plenty of dirt and scratches on the previews and "no smoking" stuff, but the feature itself was fine.
I don't think DLP has won by any means. It's perceived that the main cost is to the theatre owners and the main benefit is to the distributors.
Another unknown is the durability and reliability of the DLP gear. I WANTED to see DLP TWICE. I schlepped out to Framingham specifically to see "Fantasia 2000" in DLP, and the projector was down the day I went. How much of that is there? Can the DLP gear be run by people with the same amount of training and professionalism as the people they hire to run the film projectors?
And film projectors last and make money for theatre operators for decades and decades. The spiffy new DLP setup will probably still FUNCTION in five years, but what are the chances that the format of the distribution media won't change and that there won't be a constant "upgrade treadmill" cost?
My consumer camcorder has a variety of settings that affect the way it "sees" rapid motion. When transferring 8 mm films through one of those cheap reflector boxes, for example, the normal settings give a pulsating and unevenly bright image because of strobing. But if I use one of the "simulate slow shutter" settings, I can get very good results. The LONGEST of these settings does smear and blur motion, but one of the intermediate settings removes the flicker while adding very little motion blur.
And this is just a cheap consumer camcorder--and it's a feature that it has ALREADY.
I can easily believe that Cinea might be able to introduce short "tachistoscopic" artifacts that might screw up a camcorder on its normal settings, but if the camcorder's effective "simulated slow shutter speed" is 1/20 of a second or so, the artifacts will have to last 1/20th of a second or so to be visible to the camera--and at that speed, they'd be pretty visible to the naked eye.
I find it very hard to believe that the people who take videos off a movie screen don't know how to adjust their camcorders. Or that, if the Cinea scheme becomes popular, camcorder vendors will not respond with settings that are called by some other name but nudge, nudge, wink, wink designed to overcome the problem. Or that it can't be taken care of by some kind of digital processing afterward (analogous to using timebase correctors on analog VCR copy-protection schemes.)
In other words, it's a scam perpetrated on theatre owners.
Also, undoubtedly the "camcorder-jamming" artifacts are actually just as visible as, say, dirt specks flashing quickly by on individual frames of a dirty print. It may not make a lay audience walk out and demand their money back--they don't do that for dirty prints now. But people will be aware that the image quality isn't what it should be.
To a critical eye, DLP is currently SLIGHTLY inferior to traditional film projection in some regards (superior in others). Anything that tips that balance is going to be a problem. If the ordinary UNCRITICAL lay audience judges that "perfect" digital DLP actually isn't quite as good as 35mm and starts thinking of it as a cheap-and-cheesy alternative. I would think a cinema manager would be nuts to shell out a couple of hundred thousand for a DLP setup then add anything that would make the image quality worse.
Uh-oh... what's scary is that his scenario might prove very attractive to the computer industry.
The computer industry is currently reeling from the high degree of competition that has been brought about the commoditization and universality of the PC architecture.
In the bad old days, IBM deliberately kept product lines separate and incompatible so that they could segment individually manipulate different groups of customers. Certain product lines were arbitrarily designated for certain classes of customers (small business, large business, scientific, etc.) If competition developed in one area, they could cross-subsidize and lower prices for that group while raising them for another. The victimized group couldn't do much, because migration to the more cost-effective hardware was too difficult. High margins were maintained.
With DRM, we can foresee a return to the golden days of yore. If DRM makes computers useless for applications where security and high reliability are required, voila! we have market segmentation.
We could have cheap consumer PC's with DRM in them, basically unusable for many applications for the reasons so clearly articulated by Yodaiken.
This would, of course, create a market for exactly the "very expensive nonstandard hardware" he talks about.
Vendors could make high margins on products like "medical computers," knowing that hospitals did not have the option of migrating to commodity consumer PC's.
I think it's more interesting to hear Ballmer acknowledging this too.
I'm sure the study will have very little effect on software development practices.
It reminds me of the study cited in DeMarco and Lister's "Peopleware" on the relation between schedule setting and productivity. They compared programmer productivity under four regimes: schedule set by the manager; schedule set by the programmer; schedule set by a neutral third party; and no schedule. The first three alternatives were tightly bunched, with "schedule set by the manager" producing the worst results (but only by a small amount). The fourth, no schedule, result in more than double the productivity of any of the others.
This book has been out for at least a decade, but as far as I know it has not led to the adoption of schedule-free development anywhere...
Like others, I'm scratching my head at this if the price is really $99.
The Palm m105 really does cost $99. (A quick check at Yahoo stores shows: Palm Online Store $99.00; Circuit City $99.95; Datavision $99.94; BuyDig.com $90.00).
Maybe the Zire costs Palm much less and is sold to retailers for much less; and, as with some other products, maybe the price at Palm's store will continue to be $99, but street prices at the Best Buys, Staples, and Wal*Marts of the world will be much lower.
If the price were really $58.88 or $49.95 or "39.95 after $30 mail-in rebate" I'd buy one for my wife in an instant.
I'd really LIKE to believe that Apple is taking a conscious and principled stand against digital restrictions management, as suggested in your article here.
Your article is, however, basically speculative.
Do you have any evidence that Apple really has an anti-DRM corporate strategy? Gateway has issued a limited but significant public statement of support for fair-use rights. Do you have any ideas why Apple has not done anything like this?
Was it this one?
You may wish to visit the
Colorado Digitization Project's web site, and contact the people involved.
The web site have a wealth of information and links to resources; documents with guidelines for "best practices" and the like.
A few months ago I had a question on open-reel magnetic tape preservation and I contacted some of the people involved, and, like most library folk, they answer their phones and emails, they know a lot, and are very helpful.
...because I've noticed some odd correlations.
For a long time, a search on "Samuel Johnson" returned Frank Lynch's "Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page" as the first hit. And, flatteringly, but mysteriously, a search on "Eyeglass Prescription" returned a web page of mine as the first hit. (I say "mysteriously" because the only page that Google reports as linking to my page is... my own home page! So it is not PageRank that accounted for its ranking).
About a month ago, Frank's page dropped to #3 and mine dropped to about #20. In Frank's case, the #1 spot went to a fine Samuel Johnson web site at Rutgers; in mine, I was edged out by a bunch of commercial sites selling eyeglasses.
The interesting thing is that two or weeks ago both sites popped back to number 1.
And then a few weeks later, Frank's is again at #3 and mine is down around #10 or so.
I don't think there's any reason why eyeglass prescriptions and Samuel Johnson would be connected. (And, no, Frank's page and mine do NOT link to each other!) So the changes must reflect tinkering by Google.
Neither Frank nor I use any kind of "cheating" to boost our ratings. And I don't think the sites that climbed above our did, either. Nor do I think many of the sites involved changed ANYTHING significant that would have altered their rankings.
(BTW I'm NOT giving URL's because the contents of these pages are irrelevant to my observations, I don't want them slashdotted, and this is NOT an attempt to boost the rankings of either page).
The name of the OS is Lindows. It's aimed at the general consumer. The whole point is that it's supposed to be a viable alternative to a Windows machine.
... "
The reviewer mentions that not even Office 2000--surely the one application you'd expect to have been tested--will install. "We stuck the Office 2000 CD in our Lindows box. No luck."
And the reviewer dismisses it lightly: "Windows apps - Who gives a crap?
Well, the average home user might want to run the Windows software that came bundled with his new digital camera--without which there's no obvious way to print the pictures he took.
Or the conference proceedings on CD-ROM from that last meeting he attended, that autoboot into navigation/presentation software.
Or the games and edutainment titles in the electronics section of Wal*Mart.
The reviewer brushes this aside blandly, "If you want to run Windows apps then just run Windows."
Right. And if you DON'T want to run Windows applications--then just run Mac OS X.
The whole Lindows premise seems to be bait and switch: sell the machine by saying it will run Windows programs and hope that the customer can be switched to Linux substitutes before they notice that the pea has been moved to a different shell.
But what about the BIG question?
When and why did the name change from "FORTRAN" (all uppercase, preferably with a slash across the letter O) to "Fortran" (mixed-case)?
Indeed, since the name means Formula Translation, if the name was to be changed at all, why was it not changed to ForTran (with an internal upper-case T?)
Those familiar with the world of M, I mean MUMPS, I mean M[UMPS], where the name of the language either was or was not officially changed, and the language is or is not properly referred to by both names or by one or by the other, and where M is either an officially sanctioned abbreviation, an officially sanctioned alternate name, or the One True name, or was changed in the ANSI spec but not the ISO spec... or not... will appreciate the importance of such issues.
Particularly since in these modern days it's pretty safe to assume that your PC's printer is equipped with a full 192-character chain.
Stories about weird stuff falling from the sky have been with us for millennia. Charles Fort (1874-1932) devoted his life to collecting newspaper clippings of rains of fungi, formless masses of protoplasm, hatchets, masks, the ceremonial regalia of savages, and stones--with and without inscriptions. One of his accounts, The Book of the Damned is online here. (By "the damned," he means data that science refuses to accept).Written in an almost poetic, tart, prose style, it is very readable. He talks of rains of "Butter and beef and blood and a stone with strange inscriptions upon it." Most of his information was obtained from newspaper accounts.
I'm inclined to take a very skeptical view of any stories about weird stuff falling from the sky. Maybe it's true about the blocks of ice, and maybe Fort's falls of frogs and fishes were true, and maybe other accounts of worms, snails mussels, snakes, turtles, and even a whole calf are true.
But I'd want to see heavier evidence than an MSNBC story.
Anyway, Fort would have loved this one.
That MSNBC article reminds me very much of the early days of micros... when nothing worked but nobody would admit it. An attitude that has, alas, to some extent been internalized into the whole PC industry.
... doesn't work. Outlook almost works (it can't find my e-mail server at work) and Internet Explorer works sometimes. I haven't tried other Windows software titles, but I'm told some do work."
In the late seventies, an acquaintance of mine used to rave about his Northstar system. I asked about reliability and he said it had been perfect, never any problems. I asked for a demo. He said he'd love to give me one but he couldn't right then, as the power supply had burned out. I said "I thought you said you hadn't had any problems." He said, "Oh, the problem is just in the power supply. The computer itself is fine."
The MSNBC article has that flavor to me. "As for the Microtel hardware, everything works as advertised except for the CD-ROM drive, which I haven't been able to get sound from yet." Right. It's not as if sound were an important function.
He says "I mentioned that Lindows was originally touted as being able to run Microsoft Windows programs. Guess what? IT CAN." (Capitals his). That's what he says first. It's only a little later that he mentions "[in Office the] Open New Document icon;
Yeah, right. It's not as if you'd ever want to create a NEW document, editing existing ones should be good enough for anyone. It's not as if it matters that the email program can't talk to your email server. And, yes, I'm so picky that I expect IE to work more often than "sometimes." I demand nothing less than "mostly," and you should, too.
Lindows... "IT CAN" run Windows software. And my friend's Northstar computer wasn't broken.
And exactly how would all this have prevented the sideways swinging patent #6368227? How much expertise and certification to you need to spot the prior art in THAT one?
Saddest sentence in the whole article:
"There are other benefits for Hewlett-Packard. The Itanium allows the company to eliminate both of its current 64-bit chips -- the H.P. PA-RISC and Compaq Alpha. That alone should save the company $200 million to $400 million annually in development and manufacturing costs, according to Steven M. Milunovich, an analyst at Merrill Lynch."
Yeah, HP and Compaq have been fine stewards of their engineering legacy...
Remember that hoax a couple of years ago about a company that was going to implant ID chips in the palm of everyone's right hand, readable by the mouse to authenticate online purchases... ...intentionally recalling the passage in the Book of Revelations, "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name?"
I realize that neither side of the controversy is interested in a moderate or centrist view... but it does seem to me that IF you had digital restrictions management that allowed bit-for-bit digital copies and imposed no restrictions at all on what you could copy... but restricted copying SPEED to about 2X realtime... you'd have something very reasonable.
(The point is to duplicate the sort of porous protection copyrights have always had, in which fair-use and casual personal copying is easy, but large-scale commercial piracy is difficult--and is based, not on technical mechanisms, but on the relationship between the value of the unauthorized copies and the cost and practicality of enforcement).
Yes, yes, yes, I know, the DRM opponents (the side I'm on, mostly. I'm an EFF member, BTW. Are you?) would never trust that a DRM scheme, once in place, would ever be limited to ANYTHING reasonable. And I can think of various ways of evading the intent of the speed restriction.
Just a thought.
Maybe I'm missing something really obvious, but I don't see how it can achieve "airborne and ground kills at a distance of more than six miles" unless the air is clear. Heck, they say they need to do special tricks just to get the beam through the aircraft's own turbulence.
If the laser is powerful enough I suppose it can evaporate the fog, but... let's see, World War II "FIDO" (Fog, Intense, Dispersal Of) installtions used 75,000 gallons of gasoline. I'm not sure just how long those 75,000 gallons lasted, but I don't think it was very long. Let's say an hour. One gallon of gasoline/hr = 100,000 BTU/hr = 30 kilowatts. So a FIDO installation while in operation might have been putting out about 2000 megawatts.
On a clear day, you can kill forever?
"The screens can only be seen in 3-D from certain angles and distances, however, and a "sweet spot indicator" -- a small bar at the lower end of the screen -- appears solid black when the viewer is at an optimum position for 3-D."
Right... this is basically the same idea as many kind of "3D without glasses" dating back to the turn of the century. Including the well-known lenticular displays.
In effect it creates a pair of invisible "virtual glasses" in the air and you have to line up your head with them to see the effect. The problem is that your eyes are only 3 inches apart, so even ideally, at the VERY BEST you only have 3 inches of freedom to move your head before the left eye moves into the right-eye "virtual lens" or vice versa. In real life, the image is likely to blur or darken or otherwise turn funny if you move your head less than that.
This is going to create neck cramps like you won't believe, and all sorts of other irritations.
It's one thing to have a gimmick on a cereal package, or a poster, that grabs your attention for a few seconds. It's quite another to look at it for as long as you'd look at a computer screen.
Consumer cameras that produce lenticular "view-without-glasses" prints have been available on and off for decades. They have NEVER been popular.
I was intrigued by the casual statement, "Even launch has a 5 times out of 100 chance of blowing up."
What category of "launches" does this apply to? Is the Delta II rocket that was used to launch the Pathfinder much less reliable than the Space Shuttle? Or should we assume that the chances of a Space Shuttle or Proton blowing up on launch are roughly in the same ballpark?
(At the time of the Challenger disaster, Feynman said something to the effect working engineers estimated the Space Shuttle odds at 1/100, while NASA management estimated them at 1/100,000...)
...Well, you gotta to admit that if you're GOING to steal, that's the way to do it. Don't you have to admire the brazen, arrogant presumption of it? No question about it, this IS theft.
The only things I can think of to compare with it are
a) the apocryphal? urban legend? tales of programs that round all financial transactions to the lower penny instead of the nearest penny and divert all the fractional cents to the thief's account;
b) The $95 fee which some Massachusetts banks introduced about five years ago. The bank charges the fee for the "service" of terminating an inactive account and turning the money in it over to the Commonwealth. The person most concerned is whoever abandoned the account, who is probably either dead with no relatives or has Alzheimer's, and either way isn't going to complain.
Can anyone else think of anything comparable?