I must really be missing something here, because I don't see how the polarization plays any important role in securing the transmission.
It seems to me that you could do the same thing with ANY modulation mode: just mix two copies of the signal, one delayed by 239-nanoseconds apart, with a noise background, and extract the signal by correlating it against a 239-nanosecond-delayed version of itself.
Seems like a fairly weak kind of encipherment, since all you need to know is what kind of modulation has been used and what the delay is.
Seems to me that even the kinds of ciphers I used to read about in junior high school (Vigenere, etc.) would be just as secure if not more.
I don't see much security just from a novel means of modulation. I mean, sure, if all anyone has are FM receivers you can send secret messages by using AM modulation. And an ordinary 2400 bps modem is pretty secure if all you can do is listen to it with the naked ear...
Would Declan McCullagh care to underwrite DMCA insurance for universities? Insurance that would pay all legal costs if the university is sued under the DMCA?
If he's right, such insurance could be profitably provided at an affordable price. Sounds like a great opportunity.
If he DOESN'T want to take that risk, then I don't see why universities, who are less well informed about the situation than he is, would ever want to assume it themselves.
"The site doesn't mention whether there will be any onerous playback-restriction technology included as a free bonus."
Well, as a matter of fact, some of the key ADVERTISED capabilities will be "available via a free, automatic upgrade available in the near future.
So, whether or not playback-restrictions are currently in force, they could easily be added as a "free, automatic upgrade" in the near future.
There is precedent for this. For example, owners of the REB1100 eBook device at one point discovered that they could no longer download any commercial eBooks without an easy, automatic firmware upgrade--and the firmware upgrade just happened to disable the REB1100's previous capability of downloading personal content (e.g free Project Gutenberg eTexts, HTML content captured from the Web, etc).
Yes, I know that even under pre-DMCA law this wasn't true. I read all the fine print. But I think this is the rallying cry under which the public can be engaged. Most people BELIEVE that it is true in some very fundamental sense--and that if the laws say it's not true, the laws are wrong.
Most people think that it IS "theft" if you fiddle with the wires and cable box and watch programs that you've haven't paid for.
But most people think that once you PAY for that television signal, you have a perfect right to invite friends to watch it with you, or watch it on two TV's at the same time, or record it on your VCR.
Property rights go deep into human history, society, and psyche. Congress can pass all the laws they like, and the RIAA can hire all the lawyers they like, and they can get people put in jail and so forth. And they can conduct all the "educational" campaigns they like. People are STILL going to believe:
"I bought it. I own it. It's MINE, and I'll use it as I darn well please."
Riiiiggghhht... Well, the ENIAC could complete a calculation in less time than it takes a bolus of digested material to fall from an anus to the surface of the water in a water closet, so I guess by that reasoning the ENIAC was faster than s---.
This page says "The faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated [blah blah blah...]"
Not that I expect much truth-in-advertising from computer vendors, but isn't that a bit much?
Oh, well...
I wonder if they count spring-loaded folders as one of Jaguar's 150 "amazing" new features... not that I didn't think it WAS pretty amazing in OS 8, but...
This is one of these "memory hole" things. I seem to be the only person on the planet that remembers that in the waning days of Windows NT 3.51, one of the promises Microsoft made for Windows NT 4 was that it would almost never be necessary to reboot in order to install new software. I believe they said this was one of their major goals.
I've tried to find documentary evidence of this claim, but haven't succeeded so far (so who knows, maybe I'm just wrong?)
What I'd really like to see is a shootout between the UNINSTALL procedures on these two platforms. Windows Uninstalls are a joke. I would say the percentage of times an Uninstall simply a) run to completion without b) saying "Some components could not be uninstalled, you must delete the manually" or c) asking ME to tell WINDOWS whether some QQXXZZ314.DLL is needed by any program anywhere is about, and d) leaves the machine in a state where there are NOT obvious chunks of the software still embedded in the system, is about 5%.
Yep. Like that. Good work! Makes me proud of my alma mater...
Arise, ye sons of MIT* In loyal brotherhood The future beckons unto thee And life is full and good; Arise and raise your steins on high Tonight shall ever be A mem'ry that shall never die Ye sons* of MIT!
It didn't kill off live-actor movies, did it? Indeed, it seems to me that the Disney organization made a few live-actor movies itself...
Besides, the animators couldn't do it all by themselves. All of the figures in the Disney cartoons that had to look human--such as Snow White--were "rotoscoped," a process that basically allowed animators to trace over film of human actors.
I don't know if you remember the Disney publicity material that implied that actors were hired to spend lots of time "modelling" so that the animators could see and draw how the folds of the clothing moved, etc? That was disinformation--they didn't make drawings of the "models," they rotoscoped the actors who did the actual performances you saw in the film. I mean cartoon.
The modern analog to this is, of course, motion capture.
All the "doing away with live actors" is just another version of the managerial "robots-don't-call-in-sick-or-have-strikes" fantasy. If you're a manager, it seems as if it would be nice to have total control and not have to deal with those difficult human beings all the time... but those pesky machines have problems of their own--to say nothing of the human technicians that operate them, the human field service engineers that repair them, and the human vendors that sell them to you in the first place and want to make money out of them...
In the seventies, they did refer to disk drives as using "voice coil" technology. And loudspeakers did, and probably still do, use a strong magnet containing a deep, cylindrical groove in them into which the "voice coil" nests. In a speaker, the magnet weighs a few ounces, the coil is perhaps 3/4" in diameter, and it and the speaker cone weigh a fraction of an ounce.
In a Digital RK05 disk drive, the magnet weighed pounds, the "voice coil" was about the size of a tin can, and generated enough thrust to move a drive assembly weighing a fraction of a pound. The recoil was enough to make the cabinets shake visibly. Under the right circumstances, disk drives of the sixties and seventies could and did walk across the floor like an unbalanced washing machine. I'm not sure I believe the stories about computer operators having "disk drive races," though.
Anyway, I'll bet that if you rigged one of THOSE babies up as a loudspeaker, you could probably get frequencies up at least to thirty or forty Hz. You could probably get some nice Sensurround effects. Play a seismograph recording back through them and actually generate the feeling of a small earthquake, maybe?
Consumers want more choice! Come on, give it to us!
We want DVD=RAM, DVD~RW, DVD±R, and DVD_ROM!
Don't hold back! We want one, two, and three-layer formats! One, two, and three-sided disks!
We want the kind that come in a cartridge but you can remove them, and the kind that come in a cartridge but you can't remove them, and the kind that don't come in a cartridge but you need a caddy!
We crave the thrill, the excitement, and the suspense of putting a DVD in a player and wondering what, if anything will happen!
Oh, and, please, we'd hate to break the law by recording anything you don't think we should record, so put in something to stop us from doing that.
And we'd really like to get valuable discount coupons in the mail, but only on the stuff we like to watch, so it would be helpful if the player sent a list of everything we watch to get sent to the MPAA, the RIAA, and the Department of Homeland Security so that they could form a dossier, I mean profile of our interests.
A Google search shows this quotation as being attributed to various unnamed IBM executives, but I am almost sure it really did appear in some IBM ad copy in the early nineties. I recall it as long, white paper-ish discussion; the point was that UNIX systems didn't interoperate with IBM gear, so once you started using UNIX systems you'd never be able to use anything but UNIX systems. Wish I had kept a copy...
The college provides the trails, but which trails you take are up to you.
There is supposed to be plenty of snow, but there will be some bare spots, and they won't always be marked. Some trails that are supposed to be open may be closed.
Signs may point out the most popular trails, but you don't have to take them.
You can have a bad day at a good ski area, and a good day at a bad ski area.
If you don't know how to ski, it's a good idea to take lessons; but just going to the lessons won't automatically make you a good skier. You have to spend time by yourself working on what you've learned.
Breaking with the ski analogy:
Calculate how much each class you attend will cost you. If you're attending 15 classes a week, attending two 20-week semesters, that's 600 classes; if tuition is $18,000, that's $30 per class. This is simply a number you should KNOW. It can put things in perspective. I don't say you should get $30 value out of every class; many will be valueless, a few will be priceless. I don't say you should never cut a class, but keep in mind that you're wasting $30 tuition whenever you do.
USE your college. This is not like high school, where someone else will make all the decisions for you. Take a few chances. If you have electives, elect something interesting.
Your college has facilities besides classes. Wander around. Find out what libraries it has. Make it a goal to enter every building on campus at least once.
Oh, and one bit of strictly practical advice. Find out what the rules are about dropping courses. It's important to know whether and when you can drop a course and not have it show on your record. I've never heard of anyone dropping a course and seriously regretting it, and I know several people who really were hurt by mistakenly staying in courses they should have dropped, either out of reluctance to quit or accidentally missing the deadline for dropping.
When you go to the movie theatre you vaguely assume that you are seeing "the same" movie as everyone else. But as cineastes know, there are often minor variations in content even during the first run, and major ones on second runs, re-releases, etc. Oklahoma! was filmed concurrently in 35mm and Todd-AO so the two versions actually represent similar but different performances, etc. etc.
Recently this has all become more _visible_ (in the form of deliberately labeled "special editions," "director's cuts," etc.) There's now so much of this going on I have to wonder whether the whole idea of "a" movie is gradually becoming obsolete.
Multiple versions of movies are now available to fans within a year of the release. Of course, the variations in the versions are trivial (unless you're a dedicated aficionado...)
There was a World's Fair where some director, Czech I think, showed a movie in which at ten or eleven decision points, the audience got to vote on what the actors should do. Of course, the plot was engineered to reconverge on the next decision point (so the amount of film that needed to be shot was only 2X, not 1024X or 2048X the running length of the movie).
I wonder just where these DVD's are going? DVD's supposely offer the ability to choose different camera angles, but I've yet to rent one in which this ability was actually enabled... Are "movies" going to gradually become a participatory experience? Where you have at least the illusion of a trivial degree of participation?
In the fifties, food companies (supposedly) discovered that housewives did not like complete cake mixes, because it made them feel as if they were being lazy. So they gradually moved to mixes that required adding some ingredients (milk, eggs, etc.), supposedly not because fresh ingredients actually improved the flavor, but because housewives felt they were doing a better job if they had contributed SOMETHING to the process.
I dunno, though...
On the whole, I think I would just prefer to "watch a movie" and assume that for better or for worse the producers have made all the decisions for me, and all that's left for me is to like it or not.
Go ahead, argue all you like. White is still white, black is still black, two and two still make four.
"We argue that the lack of content protection is currently hindering the introduction of richer content systems." Yeah, right... and here I thought the INTRODUCTION of Napster and AudioGalaxy had been VERY successful.
"Content owners will not make content available in the variety, quantity, and format that users want until adequate protection measures are in place." Bullpuckey. I own a Rocket eBook (= REB1100) which has hardware-based DRM locked to a serial number in the device. When I go on a trip I like to load it up with nice easy-reading current mainstream books. And, you know what? They're mostly not available. Never have been, even before the whole eBook scene died. I recently did a check--of about 44 titles on Oprah's book club, which I think is a good test since they're good books, widely distributed, have been out long enough to give plenty of time for conversion, etc.
In eBook format, with good DRM, about 6 titles are available.
In audiobook (cassette tape) format--with no DRM, and a much more expensive production process, about 35 titles are available.
So don't tell me that DRM will increase the choices available to me. It exists, and it doesn't.
Indeed, one of the whole premises behind the Rocket eBook/REB1100 was good hardware-based DRM. Why did it fail? It was (and is) a pretty good device from a techical, UI, and product point of view. The screen is a lot more pleasant to read than a Palm; it's a lot more portable than a laptop; I can settle in and have a fine "immersive" reading experience with it.
It failed BECAUSE of a) lack of content--I have more choice in the average airport bookstore than I do in the online "bookstore" for my device; b) overpriced content; and, c) BECAUSE of DRM.
In the early nineties, one of the knocks on Windows, versus UNIX, was that Windows locked you in to a specific processor architecture.
When Nt was announced, Microsoft was at great pains to blunt the appeal of UNIX by asserting that NT was highly portable and promising that it would be available on lots and lots of processor architectures.
I'm not sure I remember all of them, but certainly MIPS, Alpha, and PPC were among them. (Remember the ACE initiative, anyone?)
All of the versions for non-Intel hardware were late, or had problems, or weren't supported, or never materialized at all. I believe PPC never materialized at all. Alpha never made it past NT 3.5. The promise that NT would be available for multiple processors was pretty much broken in a surprisingly short period of time.
I keep wondering why this didn't hurt MS in the marketplace. Windows locks you in twice--to Microsoft and to Intel architecture. Admittedly there are viable non-Intel sources for Intel architecture, but still...
The transition from 68K to PowerPC went better than anyone might have expected, but it was still a headache. As it happened, I was using two Macs at the same time. One was the latest of the 68K generation, the other being the first of the PowerPC generation, and--although it did great on pure-processor benchmarks--the PowerPC was distinctly more sluggish. And crashed more. It really took about two or three years before PowerPC's FELT fast again, and before everyone had native PPC versions of their software.
I use Virtual PC on my Mac. It works, sort of. For $200-odd it's a great product. It works better than anyone might have imagined, in fact. But it's no substitute for a real PC.
So what will happen if Apple goes Intel? I assume they'll do their best to provide some kind of PowerPC emulation so that old software will RUN, but I'm sure it will be slow. And buggy.
And, darn it, old software is IMPORTANT. It's not just a question of the cost of upgrading; I have significant amounts of software that I still use whose companies are either out of business or not upgrading their products.
And it's always the beloved GAMES that don't run in emulation...
Just want to chime in with a "me, too." Like all of John McPhee's books,"The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" is a great read. I think he may be the greatest nonfiction writer of our time.
When I saw this article, "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" popped into my head immediately.
(After you read "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed," you may want to check out "The Curve of Binding Energy." But don't read it anytime around the anniversary of 9/11...)
The infamous U. S. patent 6,368,227 granted a patent to the method of swinging sideways on a playground swing, in the manner practiced by children for decades.
Could this patent have been granted in Europe, and, if not, what would have prevented it?
OK, I never owned one... but at every trade show where Apple was exhibiting them I bellied up to the booth and made a very serious effort to see whether the Newton would work for me.
It didn't come close.
It wasn't an issue of missing a word here or there, it basically missed more of them than it got. I decided it was going to be useless to me and never got one.
Your mileage may, of course vary.
At WWDC 1996, I noticed that lots of attendees had Newtons--and that almost without exception they were using them with add-on keyboards.
In contrast, I have very little trouble with the Graffiti system on the Palm. Slow, but perfectly usable.
Right... I certainly remember the Accutron, and lusted after it. IIRC the original price was something like $300, which would be the equivalent of $3000 or so today, way way beyond my means (or even my parents' graduation-present means).
Before the Accutron, watches, even quite expensive ones, could gain or lose a minute A DAY.
After the Accutron, there was the Pulsar, the first quartz watch, which I also lusted after and also couldn't afford. I believe this was the first quartz watch, certainly the first well-known one. It had a red LED display, and the drain on the batteries was so high that it just displayed a black face until you pushed a button on the side, then the LED's lit up. John D. MacDonald wrote about one in one of the Travis McGee novels, favorably; he said that he liked the idea of a watch that only showed you the time when you WANTED it to, like the old pocket watches with flip-open cases.
Sometimes technological dreams to come true. In the case of wristwatches, TWO of mine have. In the fifties, quartz-crystal timepieces were huge things--I imagine they were rackmounted but I don't know whether I've ever seen one--that were kept only in places like the Naval Observatory and the Bureau of Standards. Being able to pick up a CHEAP quartz WRISTWATCH at the drugstore is a dream come true.
The second... well, I don't know if anyone remembers a movie from the sixties, "David and Lisa," starring Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin. Keir Dullea is better known for playing the role of astronaut David Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a heart-touching romance (really!) between a neurotic young man and a psychotic young woman. The young man is obsessed with time and has dreams of being trapped with his head in a huge clock whose rotating hands will eventually decapitate him slowly.
He tells the psychiatrist that he has a dream of inventing a watch that would synchronize via radio waves from a central location so that everybody could always know the exact time.
I thought this was a pretty neat idea, so I was a little alarmed when the psychiatrist identified it as a neurotic symptom.
Anyway, neurotic or not, I have a quartz-crystal wristwatch on my left hand, and upstairs I have a $25 Oregon Scientific clock that synchronizes via radio (WWVB, I think) to an atomic clock in... well, in Colorado anyway. (It's very puzzling... some of the atomic clock companies say the atomic clock is in Fort Collins, some say Boulder. I suspect the truth is that they synchronize to WWVB in Fort Collins which, in turn, is controlled by an atomic clock in Boulder.)
I've had the radio-controlled clock a year. The only time I actually need to set my watch is when the time changes. I just checked, and my watch and my "atomic" clock are reading within two seconds after each other.
This link DOES show a rebate coupon, the coupon DOES list "Mac OS X 10.2: Jaguar," and the coupon DOES say it is good for purchases made between 7/29/02 and 09/03/02.
Slashdot Mirror
I must really be missing something here, because I don't see how the polarization plays any important role in securing the transmission.
It seems to me that you could do the same thing with ANY modulation mode: just mix two copies of the signal, one delayed by 239-nanoseconds apart, with a noise background, and extract the signal by correlating it against a 239-nanosecond-delayed version of itself.
Seems like a fairly weak kind of encipherment, since all you need to know is what kind of modulation has been used and what the delay is.
Seems to me that even the kinds of ciphers I used to read about in junior high school (Vigenere, etc.) would be just as secure if not more.
I don't see much security just from a novel means of modulation. I mean, sure, if all anyone has are FM receivers you can send secret messages by using AM modulation. And an ordinary 2400 bps modem is pretty secure if all you can do is listen to it with the naked ear...
Would Declan McCullagh care to underwrite DMCA insurance for universities? Insurance that would pay all legal costs if the university is sued under the DMCA?
If he's right, such insurance could be profitably provided at an affordable price. Sounds like a great opportunity.
If he DOESN'T want to take that risk, then I don't see why universities, who are less well informed about the situation than he is, would ever want to assume it themselves.
...are actually just OS 9's old features?
"The site doesn't mention whether there will be any onerous playback-restriction technology included as a free bonus."
Well, as a matter of fact, some of the key ADVERTISED capabilities will be "available via a free, automatic upgrade available in the near future.
So, whether or not playback-restrictions are currently in force, they could easily be added as a "free, automatic upgrade" in the near future.
There is precedent for this. For example, owners of the REB1100 eBook device at one point discovered that they could no longer download any commercial eBooks without an easy, automatic firmware upgrade--and the firmware upgrade just happened to disable the REB1100's previous capability of downloading personal content (e.g free Project Gutenberg eTexts, HTML content captured from the Web, etc).
Yes, I know that even under pre-DMCA law this wasn't true. I read all the fine print. But I think this is the rallying cry under which the public can be engaged. Most people BELIEVE that it is true in some very fundamental sense--and that if the laws say it's not true, the laws are wrong.
Most people think that it IS "theft" if you fiddle with the wires and cable box and watch programs that you've haven't paid for.
But most people think that once you PAY for that television signal, you have a perfect right to invite friends to watch it with you, or watch it on two TV's at the same time, or record it on your VCR.
Property rights go deep into human history, society, and psyche. Congress can pass all the laws they like, and the RIAA can hire all the lawyers they like, and they can get people put in jail and so forth. And they can conduct all the "educational" campaigns they like. People are STILL going to believe:
"I bought it. I own it. It's MINE, and I'll use it as I darn well please."
Riiiiggghhht... Well, the ENIAC could complete a calculation in less time than it takes a bolus of digested material to fall from an anus to the surface of the water in a water closet, so I guess by that reasoning the ENIAC was faster than s---.
This page says "The faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated [blah blah blah...]"
Not that I expect much truth-in-advertising from computer vendors, but isn't that a bit much?
Oh, well...
I wonder if they count spring-loaded folders as one of Jaguar's 150 "amazing" new features... not that I didn't think it WAS pretty amazing in OS 8, but...
This is one of these "memory hole" things. I seem to be the only person on the planet that remembers that in the waning days of Windows NT 3.51, one of the promises Microsoft made for Windows NT 4 was that it would almost never be necessary to reboot in order to install new software. I believe they said this was one of their major goals.
I've tried to find documentary evidence of this claim, but haven't succeeded so far (so who knows, maybe I'm just wrong?)
What I'd really like to see is a shootout between the UNINSTALL procedures on these two platforms. Windows Uninstalls are a joke. I would say the percentage of times an Uninstall simply a) run to completion without b) saying "Some components could not be uninstalled, you must delete the manually" or c) asking ME to tell WINDOWS whether some QQXXZZ314.DLL is needed by any program anywhere is about, and d) leaves the machine in a state where there are NOT obvious chunks of the software still embedded in the system, is about 5%.
Yep. Like that. Good work! Makes me proud of my alma mater...
Arise, ye sons of MIT*
In loyal brotherhood
The future beckons unto thee
And life is full and good;
Arise and raise your steins on high
Tonight shall ever be
A mem'ry that shall never die
Ye sons* of MIT!
*Yes, I know that it is now "all ye of MIT..."
It didn't kill off live-actor movies, did it? Indeed, it seems to me that the Disney organization made a few live-actor movies itself...
Besides, the animators couldn't do it all by themselves. All of the figures in the Disney cartoons that had to look human--such as Snow White--were "rotoscoped," a process that basically allowed animators to trace over film of human actors.
I don't know if you remember the Disney publicity material that implied that actors were hired to spend lots of time "modelling" so that the animators could see and draw how the folds of the clothing moved, etc? That was disinformation--they didn't make drawings of the "models," they rotoscoped the actors who did the actual performances you saw in the film. I mean cartoon.
The modern analog to this is, of course, motion capture.
All the "doing away with live actors" is just another version of the managerial "robots-don't-call-in-sick-or-have-strikes" fantasy. If you're a manager, it seems as if it would be nice to have total control and not have to deal with those difficult human beings all the time... but those pesky machines have problems of their own--to say nothing of the human technicians that operate them, the human field service engineers that repair them, and the human vendors that sell them to you in the first place and want to make money out of them...
In the seventies, they did refer to disk drives as using "voice coil" technology. And loudspeakers did, and probably still do, use a strong magnet containing a deep, cylindrical groove in them into which the "voice coil" nests. In a speaker, the magnet weighs a few ounces, the coil is perhaps 3/4" in diameter, and it and the speaker cone weigh a fraction of an ounce.
In a Digital RK05 disk drive, the magnet weighed pounds, the "voice coil" was about the size of a tin can, and generated enough thrust to move a drive assembly weighing a fraction of a pound. The recoil was enough to make the cabinets shake visibly. Under the right circumstances, disk drives of the sixties and seventies could and did walk across the floor like an unbalanced washing machine. I'm not sure I believe the stories about computer operators having "disk drive races," though.
Anyway, I'll bet that if you rigged one of THOSE babies up as a loudspeaker, you could probably get frequencies up at least to thirty or forty Hz. You could probably get some nice Sensurround effects. Play a seismograph recording back through them and actually generate the feeling of a small earthquake, maybe?
Consumers want more choice! Come on, give it to us!
We want DVD=RAM, DVD~RW, DVD±R, and DVD_ROM!
Don't hold back! We want one, two, and three-layer formats! One, two, and three-sided disks!
We want the kind that come in a cartridge but you can remove them, and the kind that come in a cartridge but you can't remove them, and the kind that don't come in a cartridge but you need a caddy!
We crave the thrill, the excitement, and the suspense of putting a DVD in a player and wondering what, if anything will happen!
Oh, and, please, we'd hate to break the law by recording anything you don't think we should record, so put in something to stop us from doing that.
And we'd really like to get valuable discount coupons in the mail, but only on the stuff we like to watch, so it would be helpful if the player sent a list of everything we watch to get sent to the MPAA, the RIAA, and the Department of Homeland Security so that they could form a dossier, I mean profile of our interests.
A Google search shows this quotation as being attributed to various unnamed IBM executives, but I am almost sure it really did appear in some IBM ad copy in the early nineties. I recall it as long, white paper-ish discussion; the point was that UNIX systems didn't interoperate with IBM gear, so once you started using UNIX systems you'd never be able to use anything but UNIX systems. Wish I had kept a copy...
Think of college as a ski area.
You've obtained a four-year season pass.
The college provides the trails, but which trails you take are up to you.
There is supposed to be plenty of snow, but there will be some bare spots, and they won't always be marked. Some trails that are supposed to be open may be closed.
Signs may point out the most popular trails, but you don't have to take them.
You can have a bad day at a good ski area, and a good day at a bad ski area.
If you don't know how to ski, it's a good idea to take lessons; but just going to the lessons won't automatically make you a good skier. You have to spend time by yourself working on what you've learned.
Breaking with the ski analogy:
Calculate how much each class you attend will cost you. If you're attending 15 classes a week, attending two 20-week semesters, that's 600 classes; if tuition is $18,000, that's $30 per class. This is simply a number you should KNOW. It can put things in perspective. I don't say you should get $30 value out of every class; many will be valueless, a few will be priceless. I don't say you should never cut a class, but keep in mind that you're wasting $30 tuition whenever you do.
USE your college. This is not like high school, where someone else will make all the decisions for you. Take a few chances. If you have electives, elect something interesting.
Your college has facilities besides classes. Wander around. Find out what libraries it has. Make it a goal to enter every building on campus at least once.
Oh, and one bit of strictly practical advice. Find out what the rules are about dropping courses. It's important to know whether and when you can drop a course and not have it show on your record. I've never heard of anyone dropping a course and seriously regretting it, and I know several people who really were hurt by mistakenly staying in courses they should have dropped, either out of reluctance to quit or accidentally missing the deadline for dropping.
When you go to the movie theatre you vaguely assume that you are seeing "the same" movie as everyone else. But as cineastes know, there are often minor variations in content even during the first run, and major ones on second runs, re-releases, etc. Oklahoma! was filmed concurrently in 35mm and Todd-AO so the two versions actually represent similar but different performances, etc. etc.
Recently this has all become more _visible_ (in the form of deliberately labeled "special editions," "director's cuts," etc.) There's now so much of this going on I have to wonder whether the whole idea of "a" movie is gradually becoming obsolete.
Multiple versions of movies are now available to fans within a year of the release. Of course, the variations in the versions are trivial (unless you're a dedicated aficionado...)
There was a World's Fair where some director, Czech I think, showed a movie in which at ten or eleven decision points, the audience got to vote on what the actors should do. Of course, the plot was engineered to reconverge on the next decision point (so the amount of film that needed to be shot was only 2X, not 1024X or 2048X the running length of the movie).
I wonder just where these DVD's are going? DVD's supposely offer the ability to choose different camera angles, but I've yet to rent one in which this ability was actually enabled... Are "movies" going to gradually become a participatory experience? Where you have at least the illusion of a trivial degree of participation?
In the fifties, food companies (supposedly) discovered that housewives did not like complete cake mixes, because it made them feel as if they were being lazy. So they gradually moved to mixes that required adding some ingredients (milk, eggs, etc.), supposedly not because fresh ingredients actually improved the flavor, but because housewives felt they were doing a better job if they had contributed SOMETHING to the process.
I dunno, though...
On the whole, I think I would just prefer to "watch a movie" and assume that for better or for worse the producers have made all the decisions for me, and all that's left for me is to like it or not.
...that testified under oath that the VCR was to Hollywood what the Boston
strangler was to women home alone?
Go ahead, argue all you like. White is still white, black is still black, two and two still make four.
"We argue that the lack of content protection is currently hindering the introduction of richer content systems." Yeah, right... and here I thought the INTRODUCTION of Napster and AudioGalaxy had been VERY successful.
"Content owners will not make content available in the variety, quantity, and format that users want until adequate protection measures are in place." Bullpuckey. I own a Rocket eBook (= REB1100) which has hardware-based DRM locked to a serial number in the device. When I go on a trip I like to load it up with nice easy-reading current mainstream books. And, you know what? They're mostly not available. Never have been, even before the whole eBook scene died. I recently did a check--of about 44 titles on Oprah's book club, which I think is a good test since they're good books, widely distributed, have been out long enough to give plenty of time for conversion, etc.
In eBook format, with good DRM, about 6 titles are available.
In audiobook (cassette tape) format--with no DRM, and a much more expensive production process, about 35 titles are available.
So don't tell me that DRM will increase the choices available to me. It exists, and it doesn't.
Indeed, one of the whole premises behind the Rocket eBook/REB1100 was good hardware-based DRM. Why did it fail? It was (and is) a pretty good device from a techical, UI, and product point of view. The screen is a lot more pleasant to read than a Palm; it's a lot more portable than a laptop; I can settle in and have a fine "immersive" reading experience with it.
It failed BECAUSE of a) lack of content--I have more choice in the average airport bookstore than I do in the online "bookstore" for my device; b) overpriced content; and, c) BECAUSE of DRM.
Speaking of OS ports...
In the early nineties, one of the knocks on Windows, versus UNIX, was that Windows locked you in to a specific processor architecture.
When Nt was announced, Microsoft was at great pains to blunt the appeal of UNIX by asserting that NT was highly portable and promising that it would be available on lots and lots of processor architectures.
I'm not sure I remember all of them, but certainly MIPS, Alpha, and PPC were among them. (Remember the ACE initiative, anyone?)
All of the versions for non-Intel hardware were late, or had problems, or weren't supported, or never materialized at all. I believe PPC never materialized at all. Alpha never made it past NT 3.5. The promise that NT would be available for multiple processors was pretty much broken in a surprisingly short period of time.
I keep wondering why this didn't hurt MS in the marketplace. Windows locks you in twice--to Microsoft and to Intel architecture. Admittedly there are viable non-Intel sources for Intel architecture, but still...
Oh, jeez, what a headache if they change.
Emulation sucks.
The transition from 68K to PowerPC went better than anyone might have expected, but it was still a headache. As it happened, I was using two Macs at the same time. One was the latest of the 68K generation, the other being the first of the PowerPC generation, and--although it did great on pure-processor benchmarks--the PowerPC was distinctly more sluggish. And crashed more. It really took about two or three years before PowerPC's FELT fast again, and before everyone had native PPC versions of their software.
I use Virtual PC on my Mac. It works, sort of. For $200-odd it's a great product. It works better than anyone might have imagined, in fact. But it's no substitute for a real PC.
So what will happen if Apple goes Intel? I assume they'll do their best to provide some kind of PowerPC emulation so that old software will RUN, but I'm sure it will be slow. And buggy.
And, darn it, old software is IMPORTANT. It's not just a question of the cost of upgrading; I have significant amounts of software that I still use whose companies are either out of business or not upgrading their products.
And it's always the beloved GAMES that don't run in emulation...
Just want to chime in with a "me, too." Like all of John McPhee's books,"The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" is a great read. I think he may be the greatest nonfiction writer of our time.
When I saw this article, "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" popped into my head immediately.
(After you read "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed," you may want to check out "The Curve of Binding Energy." But don't read it anytime around the anniversary of 9/11...)
The infamous U. S. patent 6,368,227 granted a patent to the method of swinging sideways on a playground swing, in the manner practiced by children for decades.
Could this patent have been granted in Europe, and, if not, what would have prevented it?
OK, I never owned one... but at every trade show where Apple was exhibiting them I bellied up to the booth and made a very serious effort to see whether the Newton would work for me.
It didn't come close.
It wasn't an issue of missing a word here or there, it basically missed more of them than it got. I decided it was going to be useless to me and never got one.
Your mileage may, of course vary.
At WWDC 1996, I noticed that lots of attendees had Newtons--and that almost without exception they were using them with add-on keyboards.
In contrast, I have very little trouble with the Graffiti system on the Palm. Slow, but perfectly usable.
Right... I certainly remember the Accutron, and lusted after it. IIRC the original price was something like $300, which would be the equivalent of $3000 or so today, way way beyond my means (or even my parents' graduation-present means).
Before the Accutron, watches, even quite expensive ones, could gain or lose a minute A DAY.
After the Accutron, there was the Pulsar, the first quartz watch, which I also lusted after and also couldn't afford. I believe this was the first quartz watch, certainly the first well-known one. It had a red LED display, and the drain on the batteries was so high that it just displayed a black face until you pushed a button on the side, then the LED's lit up. John D. MacDonald wrote about one in one of the Travis McGee novels, favorably; he said that he liked the idea of a watch that only showed you the time when you WANTED it to, like the old pocket watches with flip-open cases.
Sometimes technological dreams to come true. In the case of wristwatches, TWO of mine have. In the fifties, quartz-crystal timepieces were huge things--I imagine they were rackmounted but I don't know whether I've ever seen one--that were kept only in places like the Naval Observatory and the Bureau of Standards. Being able to pick up a CHEAP quartz WRISTWATCH at the drugstore is a dream come true.
The second... well, I don't know if anyone remembers a movie from the sixties, "David and Lisa," starring Keir Dullea and Janet Margolin. Keir Dullea is better known for playing the role of astronaut David Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a heart-touching romance (really!) between a neurotic young man and a psychotic young woman. The young man is obsessed with time and has dreams of being trapped with his head in a huge clock whose rotating hands will eventually decapitate him slowly.
He tells the psychiatrist that he has a dream of inventing a watch that would synchronize via radio waves from a central location so that everybody could always know the exact time.
I thought this was a pretty neat idea, so I was a little alarmed when the psychiatrist identified it as a neurotic symptom.
Anyway, neurotic or not, I have a quartz-crystal wristwatch on my left hand, and upstairs I have a $25 Oregon Scientific clock that synchronizes via radio (WWVB, I think) to an atomic clock in... well, in Colorado anyway. (It's very puzzling... some of the atomic clock companies say the atomic clock is in Fort Collins, some say Boulder. I suspect the truth is that they synchronize to WWVB in Fort Collins which, in turn, is controlled by an atomic clock in Boulder.)
I've had the radio-controlled clock a year. The only time I actually need to set my watch is when the time changes. I just checked, and my watch and my "atomic" clock are reading within two seconds after each other.
Dan is happy.
Sorry, that URL got mangled... either remove two internal spaces from it, or try this
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail /-/software/B00006F7S2/rebates/02/002-1732681-4549 637
As of five minutes ago...
This link DOES show a rebate coupon, the coupon DOES list "Mac OS X 10.2: Jaguar," and the coupon DOES say it is good for purchases made between 7/29/02 and 09/03/02.