I played with an OQO at Foo camp. It is the real deal.
The display is impressively clear in both low light and direct sunlight. As a whole, the produce is very well engineered and the UI felt relatively snappy.
It does run Linux and uses the same hard drive internally as an iPod. Battery life is fairly decent, given computing power, and the battery is designed such that you can upgrade to a higher capacity battery that is simply thicker than the original (making the entire unit thicker).
The screen is also touch sensitive and there is a stylus slot in the top of the unit. As such, one could definitely read email, browse the web, navigate meetings/schedules/calendars, and read documents without having to pop it open to use the keyboard.
The keyboard certainly does not have the feel of a full sized board, but is surprisingly usable for the size.
One of the neatest features is the "docking cable". Basically, OQO will provide a cable that has all of the various different ports -- usb, firewire, video, etc... -- hanging off of it.
The unit has a cradle that you can leave on your desk. It has VGA out. So, in combination with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and an external monitor, you can drop the OQO into the cradle and it "just works".
Certainly not a primary machine for gamers or developers, but a damned nice little device for folks that want a portable computing device that offers a more real computing experience than a palm device, blackberry, or the like.
From Symantec's analysis: If the current month is after August, or if the current date is after the 15th, the worm will perform a DoS on "windowsupdate.com."
With the current logic, the worm will activate the DoS attack on the 16th of this month, and continue until the end of the year.
Maybe this will motivate Microsoft to actually deal with the gaping festering security holes in their OS? How many systems do you think will still be infected after the 15th?
You are looking at the wrong stock. SCO is not SCO/Caldera. SCO -- SCOR group, traded on NYSE (first clue that it wasn't the right symbol) -- isn't doing well, either, but that is coincidental (unless there are a bunch of stupid day traders that can't tell their symbols apart).
Caldera is SCOX (traded on NASDAQ) -- yahoo summary.
While they are down a boatload in the last couple of days, they are still not below the levels they were trading at the beginning of May (or earlier).
As it stands, it looks like this little publicity stunt has driven the stock up more than down. Given current trends, it looks like it may normalize such that the whole thing is a short term wash in terms of stock value-- whether it proves profitable over the long term remains to be seen.
It says Remote access of copyrighted music is only provided for personal use or as otherwise legally permitted use only or when otherwise permitted by the law.
However, it appears that the library sharing feature is legal. And there is precedent -- Microsoft's ThreeDegrees has a similar feature.
iTunes streaming does not appear to fall under the "webcasting" laws/tariffs as the potential audience is limited, it is not live, and the client has the full ability to browse the contents of the server.
Re:A (hopefully) unbiased opinion on Perl v. Pytho
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Python in a Nutshell
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· Score: 5, Insightful
But the problem is that Python suffers from a lot of Perl's problems and adds a few of its own: you can't implement it in itself, it has no strong typing (even Perl's use strict is ridiculously better), an OO system with no support for data hiding, etc. etc. And that brings me to the biggest problem: Python doesn't really have a niche to fill. The CGI space has been seemingly co-opted completely by Perl (at least until people start using PHP), and it's too dog-slow to be used for real CS applications. As a beginner's language it's ideal, but that's not going to help it be taken seriously when it comes to real
Uhh.... you are seriously misinformed.
data hiding: trivial to implement by overriding the standard accessors and limiting the set of things that can be accessed externally. Since you have full access to the scope and stack, you can even limit things in a fashion similar to java's private/public/protected. I have used this many times to force attributes to be set only through a particular path that involves certain chunks of business logic.
implement it in itself: Not sure what your point is, but you can certainly implement the Python VM in itself. The Python VM is actually quite portable as is demonstrated by the excellent Java based implementation found in Jython.
strong typing: yes -- python has no strong typing, but it is trivial to check types and constrain APIs to particular types. At times, it would be nice to have strong types, but weak typing also has some extremely powerful uses and patterns.
Too dog slow? Uh, no. See the Twisted project for an example of an "internet event server" whose web server implementation is faster-- and more flexible-- than apache. Not that apache is fast, mind you, but something that is faster than apache while maintaining flexibility can certainly claim to have better performance than the server used by, what, 50+% of the world's web servers?
Python scales well, it is extremely reliable, and has excellent performance for an interpreted language. Python is used in many mission critical situations in both commercially saleable products as well as in embedded markets.
Personally, I have built trading systems in Python. If you have ever been around a Trader when their technology doesn't work, you know that using technology that is fundamentally broken is exceedingly unpleasant (unless you enjoy being yelled at and having heavy things thrown at you). Python proved to be extremely reliable and allowed us to roll out new versions of the software very rapidly.
Note that I am not a Python Zealot -- I program in some random combination of Python, C, Objective-C, Java and Lisp on a daily basis. Of all the languages, I prefer to use Python because I can get things done more quickly and with lower maintenance costs than any of the other languages. However, I'm not going to berate a client simply because they insist on using Java-- and certainly not if they have a good reason for doing so....
Perl blows. What a shit language. Perfect for what it was made for-- simple text filters-- and absolute crap for "heavy lifting" or any other general purpose programming solution.
Shit. Use a freakin' language that you can actually *read* like, say, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Obj-C, SmallTalk, or basically anything but some line-noise-derived-pile-of-crap.
(venting -- had to maintain some perl recently. Barforama.)
Actually, that was one way that clustering could happen on the NeXT. However, there were others-- a number of others. PDO doesn't really scale well; tends to lead to packet storms. Other architectures are preferable.
There have been a handful of stories that talk about the [very competitive, btw] clustering capabilities of the XServe.
Feet are counted base 10, inches base 12. So, you take your 10' length of rope cut it into three pieces of 3 and 1/3rd feet each. Since each foot is 12 inches, the 1/3rd of a foot is expressed in inches as 1/3rd of 12 inches -- or 4 inches.
In some respects, 12 is actually a much more convenient base to work with when doing things like carpentry and other work that often involves taking 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/12 1/6 of the something. In all cases, 1/x where x is 2,3,4, or 6 ends up as a whole number.
With base 10, you basically have 1/2, 1/5, and 1/10th of something.
---
As far as the 10' rope turning into a 10' circle and the math not agreeing w/a radius measurement that makes sense, I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.
The math makes perfect sense in that (a) you can physically see every step in the process of going from a 10' straight line to a 10' in circumference circle to a radius whose decimal representation is slightly odd. Furthermore, it makes perfect sense in that there is a very simple formula that absolutely tells you the radius given the circumference and vice-versa.
Simply because you end up with an irrational [transcendtal?] number does not mean the math doesn't make sense, it just means that our representation of numbers cannot directly represent the math that is at work.
Base 10 numbers are simply one of many possible representations for numbers. That we chose base-10 is not surprising given the number of fingers at the end of most people's arms.
I believe there were cultures-- mayan??-- that chose base-12 or base-60 numeric systems.
In some respects, we might have been better off with a base 12, base 16, base 2, or base 60 numeric systems -- while 10 seems natural to us due to the tremendous cultural history, 10 is not the most natural of bases to work with in mathematics or computing.
While walking down 14th Street [Manhattan] the other day, I ran across one of those 'happy cry lucky' style imported crap tourist trap shops that had, among all the garbage, several different kinds of 'N in 1' games-in-the-game-controller products.
One stood out because it had 180 different games in a SNES style controller. For $40.
I'm sure Canal street has a similar assortment of gaming trivia, as well.
So, if you happen to be in NYC... take a stroll down either and have a close look. You'll want the western part of Canal street (where most of the electronic vendors are) or 14th between 5th ave and about 7th ave.
It could be a multi-platform solution if a similar bridge worked with GNUStep.
The bridge was originally written to support the GNUStep runtime. However, support for GNUStep fell out of the current version because none of the active developers are using GNUStep regularly.
The bridge is modular in nature -- there are Foundation and AppKit modules that sit on top of the objc chunk.
It would be a matter of making the objc module portable, then converting AppKit and Foundation to do a similar kind of cross platform support as, say, the os.path module in Python.
See, I thought you could even add Objective-C classes while the program was running, as it's totally dynamic.
Oh -- certainly -- you can always load a bundle. However, redefining existing classes has always been somewhat limited because of the way ObjC is implemented. Not a criticism of the language-- just the nature of its implementation.
With the Python stuff, it is much easier to effectively redefine everything about a class. This isn't 100% considered within the current implementation, but the potential is there.
Well, sure, you have always been able to subclass ObjC classes from ObjC...:-)
The key difference is that doing so in Python doesn't require recompilation and relinking the app (it currently requires relaunching the app, but that is an artificial barrier).
The key advantage is that one can often implement functionality in Python much more rapidly than pure ObjC simply because of the reduction in number of lines of code and the greater degree of abstraction offered by Python.
Even with a pure ObjC Cocoa app, PyObjC can be mixed in to provide a level of scriptability that isn't available in other solutions. Specifically, because Python provides a completely transparent interface between ObjC and Python, an entire application becomes scriptable simply by including PyObjC.
From reading the threads, let me respond with a bit of clarification.
This is really only of interest to Python programmers that want to leverage Cocoa or ObjC [including Cocoa] programmers that want to leverage the power of Python.
It is not intended to be used as a cross platform solution.
In context, it happens to be extremely powerful. The ability to subclass and extend ObjC classes with Python means that one can build Cocoa applications that can have their classes reloaded and redefined on the fly. I.e. it can greatly reduce the "run-compile" part of the "run-compile-edit" loop that developers tend to be stuck in.
Furthermore, having access to the power of Python from Cocoa greatly reduces the # of lines of code necessary to perform certain tasks. The Python libraries provide great, easy to use, HTTP client/server solutions, excellent XML-RPC support and a slew of other features that are damned handy to have around.
The real value of the PyObjC module-- and credit largely goes to Ronald for this-- is the transparency with which one can interact between languages. This isn't just a messaging solution (like CamelBones). PyObjC provides the developer with the ability to subclass ObjC classes from Python and-- if one really wanted to go there-- subclass Python subclasses of ObjC classes in ObjC.
As well, PyObjC tends to be a bit more straightforward in terms of integration than AppleScript Studio.
Think of it this way: PyObjC allows the developer to quickly and easily prototype applications in a scripting language [Python] while not sacrificing any of the awesome power of Cocoa [and awesome it is!].
- If you want a pure Unix experience at the command line, install OS X on UFS. Trivial. Works. Breaks some third party apps that are Carbon based, but you'll likely not care (I don't).
- porting: Most packages compile out of the bag or with very little in the way of patching (a lot only require a couple of command line arguments. Fink.sourceforge.net currently has 1100 packages 'ported' to OS X, all fully managed by the debian package manager.
Fink has certainly grown in size since your purchase, but not much else has changed.
As James Gosling recently said: "OS X is like Linux, only with Q/A [Quality Assurance] and taste!".
Discs of Tron
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Tron 2.0 Game
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Tron was a cool arcade game, but Discs of Tron was, perhaps, one of the coolest games ever made.
Discs of Tron was basically taken from the movie scene with Tron fighting Sark in the arena with balls of energy. They each stood on discs of energy and the goal was to knock your opponent off.
Some called it 'the frisbee game'.
The arcade game was amazing. First, the controls. On the right (or was it left?) you had a joystick with a trigger button and a thumb button. Trigger throws an energy ball, button goes into blocking mode.
On the left, you had a twisty knob that spun freely and used an optical sensor to detect motion. It could also be pulled up and pushed down. It was used to aim your energy ball throw.
Aiming was incredibly precise. Combining the two, you could do strafing shots unlike anything possible in a FPS -- by spinning the knob in time with moving the joystick, you could set up a set of three energy balls in the air that crossed sark's disc in a gridded fashion.
You could also set up amazing rebound shots off the wall and, in later levels, the ceiling. As well, in later levels the discs would move and, if hit by a blob, disappear.
The whole implementation of the game was freakin' perfect. It was so well done.
There were 1,000 of what was called the 'environmental unit' configuration of the cabinets made.
You literally stood inside the environmental unit. It had six channel surround sound-- stereo front, stereo rear, a center channel near the control deck and a bass channel in the rear of the cabinet that you were leaning against.
Totally immersive, especially for 1985 or so.
The implementation was interesting; two Z80s + a totally custom TTL based video computer to handle the 3D vector style (it wasn't truly vector and not everything was vectorized--- there were filled areas) graphics.
The Linux kit is documented by Sony as including a set of proprietary libraries [binary only] that give access to the emotion engine and the rest of the PS2 hardware.
In other words, it does have full access but it is proprietary.
Re:entry of new vendors
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PVR For Linux
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· Score: 2
But hardware vendors could make pre-installed low-cost, no-subscription-required boxes. Of, they could in fact offer a subscription to their own service. This lowers the cost of entry and time-to-market for competing with TiVo and ReplayTV. I suspect, however, that a number of bogus patents stand in the way.
For a PVR to be attractive to most of the market-- the folks that couldn't care less what Linux is or what the GPL means-- the solution needs to have all that wonderful point and click scheduling features that can only be had by feeding it with complete, localized, schedules!
As far as lowering the cost-- think again! The TiVo and ReplayTV are basically embedded PCs with a few specalized chips and a big hard drive. They are cheap to make, cheap to test, cheap to maintain... not something that an off the shelf PC can achieve.
Someone *could* go the right of building a custom, embedded type solution that could approach the low cost of a TiVo/Replay, but that would require a significant up front investment.
Re:Not competition for TiVo/Replay
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PVR For Linux
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· Score: 2
Absolutely and for Europeans this stuff kicks butt. But there is a big chunk of potential PVR market that'll never touch it (or even be aware that it exists). Not a criticism, just market realities.
Not competition for TiVo/Replay
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PVR For Linux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
To put things in a bit of perspective: This is an awesome achievement and these guys should be congratulated many times over for the achievement. It is *way* cool!!
However, it is *not* competition to TiVo outside of the handful of geeks that may choose to do it themselves over buying the off the shelf solution provided by TiVo and ReplayTV.
First, the Linux VDR based solution is not a no-brainer installation. Not by any stretch of the imagination. You have to deal with obtaining the correct hardware configuration, install all the software correctly, etc,etc,etc. Even if someone were to pick it up and sell it as an off the shelf, preconfigured unit it will still have significant maintenance issues above and beyond, say, a TiVo.
This is not a criticism-- just a recognition that the market for a TiVo and the primary market for this software is very different.
Most of the folks I know with a TiVo do not have the knowledge or the time to deal with such a solution.
Frankly, even with the knowledge an awful lot of folks aren't going to have the time or aren't going to see blowing the time on building out such a thing as being a useful investment.
Personally, I would rather pay $500 to TiVo and be done with it than have to screw around with getting all of the different random bits inline to make the Linux VDR solution work!
Finally, the TiVo provides a level of seamless integration that will not be achieved in the GPL VDR solution for a long time. A lot of the channel and scheduling information isn't available via public channels without doing a boatload of parsing and screen scraping. Even then, it'll change over time and break often. TiVo and Replay have the distinct advantage of having paid the big $$$ for data feeds that provide this data in a machine readable format.
Paying the $$$ to TiVo/Replay buys a lot more than just some software and hardware. It buys a service, a data feed, and a company to back the whole package. For a lot of the market, all of that must be included before something can be considered competition!
(Found this in the press this morning. Wonder if it was HETE and the coordinates given by NASA where the first point of 'no longer in space'. If that is the case, I could imagine that the visible bits would occur hundreds of miles away. May be completely unrelated-- I'm fully willing to admit I did zero research beyond seeing the article and the/. article in a short enough period of time that both were still in short term memory.)
Strange lights in the sky baffle Bavarians
MUNICH, Germany, April 7 (Reuters) - Strange lights in the sky baffled Bavarians late on Saturday as hundreds of panicked callers jammed police telephone lines seeking an explanation for the phenomenon.
Reports of an unsettling late-night natural light show came from all over the southern German state as well as the neighbouring region of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
"It had nothing to do with the weather. But I don't think little green men from Mars have landed in Bavaria. It was something burning out in the atmosphere," a meteorologist said.
"It was like a huge firework," a Reuters TV correspondent in Munich said, describing the display. "You could even see it through half-closed blinds. It lasted around three seconds," she said.
Pilots flying into Munich airport radioed the control tower with reports of unusual lights in the sky.
The German police said NASA scientists initially thought the light was caused by space junk -- floating debris in the Earth's atmosphere -- but later said they were still unsure.
The German army reported no unusual movements on its radar.
Scientists said the lights may have the result of a meteor breaking through the Earth's atmosphere.
"There are no signs of impact or damage. We can't say what it was," a police spokesman said.
(I wrote this at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100490/)
Finlay Dobbie published an article about how Apple effectively does not allow minors-- folks under 18-- to participate in the Apple Developer Program or contribute changes to the Darwin project.
Unfortunately, Apple's policy is a reflection of the legal status of minors within the US. The policy is largely out of Apple's control!
The problem stems from the whole COPA/COPPA [Children's Online Protection Act which morphed into Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or something like that] related set of laws.
I actually have a bunch of pertinent technical experience related to COPA/COPPA in that CodeFab built much of the back end engine used by the www.noggin.com site including the editorial tools used to manage content produced by minors.
Basically, if you are under 18, you are deemed a minor and you do not have the legal authority to sign contracts, cannot publish or contribute content that falls under another party's copyright/ownership, and are otherwise severely restricted in a legal fashion.
In other words, Apple cannot directly allow you to participate either as a Darwin contributor or as an ADC member because there is no legal way for you to effectively 'sign' the contracts required to be a member.
While Apple could extend the program such that your parents or legal guardians could give permission for your participation-- effectively signing for you-- that would not actually be enough for you to participate in the programs. In particular, for content produced by a minor to be published in a forum visible to others, several criteria must be met:
Parental consent must be obtained at least once.
Every piece of content must be reviewed prior to being made available within a forum outside of the company that effectively 'owns' the content (in this case, Apple).
If the parent's ever rescind the permission to use content, it must be possible to effectively "unpublish" the content. Imagine the implications within a CVS repository of, say, having to remove the changes in version 1.5 of a file that is now at revision 1.24...?
When a piece of content produced by a minor is actually published, it must be published in a fashion that effectively hides the identity of the source. This part is fairly fuzzy in that it is hard to hide identity when a username is the user's actual name... but the law was not exactly created by folks totally familiar with technology.
The bottom line is that Apple's -- and other companies -- hands are tied in this. They would have to put forth a tremendous amount of effort to make it possible for minors to participate. Even then, a minor could not participate in the full fashion and there is still implied liability.
If you are in this position, your best bet is to have a parent/guardian sign up for the ADC account. As far as Darwin contributions are concerned, it will likely have to be done through some other resource who is of majority age.
Not only does this not surprise me, it will be no surprise that crap like this is only going to get worse.
I have noticed a *very* disturbing trend in the reams of spam I receive. More and more of it is coming from seemingly legitimate BigCos.
In the last week I have received spam for several different forms of service from AT cellular and long distance. I have also received three different spams for the Columbia House CD/DVD club.
I'm fairly certain that a number of these spam have been merely a test; just a dip of the toe in the pool, so to speak.
Can you imagine what would happen if an AT&T or a Columbia House (Sony, isn't it?) were to decide the spam was a 'legitimate market channel'?
Slashdot Mirror
I played with an OQO at Foo camp. It is the real deal.
The display is impressively clear in both low light and direct sunlight. As a whole, the produce is very well engineered and the UI felt relatively snappy.
It does run Linux and uses the same hard drive internally as an iPod. Battery life is fairly decent, given computing power, and the battery is designed such that you can upgrade to a higher capacity battery that is simply thicker than the original (making the entire unit thicker).
The screen is also touch sensitive and there is a stylus slot in the top of the unit. As such, one could definitely read email, browse the web, navigate meetings/schedules/calendars, and read documents without having to pop it open to use the keyboard.
The keyboard certainly does not have the feel of a full sized board, but is surprisingly usable for the size.
One of the neatest features is the "docking cable". Basically, OQO will provide a cable that has all of the various different ports -- usb, firewire, video, etc... -- hanging off of it.
The unit has a cradle that you can leave on your desk. It has VGA out. So, in combination with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and an external monitor, you can drop the OQO into the cradle and it "just works".
Certainly not a primary machine for gamers or developers, but a damned nice little device for folks that want a portable computing device that offers a more real computing experience than a palm device, blackberry, or the like.
That title was intended to be sarcasm, by the way.
From Symantec's analysis:
If the current month is after August, or if the current date is after the 15th, the worm will perform a DoS on "windowsupdate.com."
With the current logic, the worm will activate the DoS attack on the 16th of this month, and continue until the end of the year.
Maybe this will motivate Microsoft to actually deal with the gaping festering security holes in their OS? How many systems do you think will still be infected after the 15th?
Nahh....
You are looking at the wrong stock. SCO is not SCO/Caldera. SCO -- SCOR group, traded on NYSE (first clue that it wasn't the right symbol) -- isn't doing well, either, but that is coincidental (unless there are a bunch of stupid day traders that can't tell their symbols apart).
Caldera is SCOX (traded on NASDAQ) -- yahoo summary.
While they are down a boatload in the last couple of days, they are still not below the levels they were trading at the beginning of May (or earlier).
As it stands, it looks like this little publicity stunt has driven the stock up more than down. Given current trends, it looks like it may normalize such that the whole thing is a short term wash in terms of stock value-- whether it proves profitable over the long term remains to be seen.
Read the license. That is not what it says.
It says Remote access of copyrighted music is only provided for personal use or as otherwise legally permitted use only or when otherwise permitted by the law.
I read the license and did some research. I am not a lawyer.
However, it appears that the library sharing feature is legal. And there is precedent -- Microsoft's ThreeDegrees has a similar feature.
iTunes streaming does not appear to fall under the "webcasting" laws/tariffs as the potential audience is limited, it is not live, and the client has the full ability to browse the contents of the server.
But the problem is that Python suffers from a lot of Perl's problems and adds a few of its own: you can't implement it in itself, it has no strong typing (even Perl's use strict is ridiculously better), an OO system with no support for data hiding, etc. etc. And that brings me to the biggest problem: Python doesn't really have a niche to fill. The CGI space has been seemingly co-opted completely by Perl (at least until people start using PHP), and it's too dog-slow to be used for real CS applications. As a beginner's language it's ideal, but that's not going to help it be taken seriously when it comes to real
Uhh.... you are seriously misinformed.
data hiding: trivial to implement by overriding the standard accessors and limiting the set of things that can be accessed externally. Since you have full access to the scope and stack, you can even limit things in a fashion similar to java's private/public/protected. I have used this many times to force attributes to be set only through a particular path that involves certain chunks of business logic.
implement it in itself: Not sure what your point is, but you can certainly implement the Python VM in itself. The Python VM is actually quite portable as is demonstrated by the excellent Java based implementation found in Jython.
strong typing: yes -- python has no strong typing, but it is trivial to check types and constrain APIs to particular types. At times, it would be nice to have strong types, but weak typing also has some extremely powerful uses and patterns.
Too dog slow? Uh, no. See the Twisted project for an example of an "internet event server" whose web server implementation is faster-- and more flexible-- than apache. Not that apache is fast, mind you, but something that is faster than apache while maintaining flexibility can certainly claim to have better performance than the server used by, what, 50+% of the world's web servers?
Python scales well, it is extremely reliable, and has excellent performance for an interpreted language. Python is used in many mission critical situations in both commercially saleable products as well as in embedded markets.
Personally, I have built trading systems in Python. If you have ever been around a Trader when their technology doesn't work, you know that using technology that is fundamentally broken is exceedingly unpleasant (unless you enjoy being yelled at and having heavy things thrown at you). Python proved to be extremely reliable and allowed us to roll out new versions of the software very rapidly.
Note that I am not a Python Zealot -- I program in some random combination of Python, C, Objective-C, Java and Lisp on a daily basis. Of all the languages, I prefer to use Python because I can get things done more quickly and with lower maintenance costs than any of the other languages. However, I'm not going to berate a client simply because they insist on using Java-- and certainly not if they have a good reason for doing so....
asscii.com
It cheats because it uses color. But makes up for it by providing an ASCII chart.
Perl blows. What a shit language. Perfect for what it was made for-- simple text filters-- and absolute crap for "heavy lifting" or any other general purpose programming solution.
Shit. Use a freakin' language that you can actually *read* like, say, Python, Ruby, Lisp, Obj-C, SmallTalk, or basically anything but some line-noise-derived-pile-of-crap.
(venting -- had to maintain some perl recently. Barforama.)
Actually, that was one way that clustering could happen on the NeXT. However, there were others-- a number of others. PDO doesn't really scale well; tends to lead to packet storms. Other architectures are preferable.
There have been a handful of stories that talk about the [very competitive, btw] clustering capabilities of the XServe.
Feet are counted base 10, inches base 12. So, you take your 10' length of rope cut it into three pieces of 3 and 1/3rd feet each. Since each foot is 12 inches, the 1/3rd of a foot is expressed in inches as 1/3rd of 12 inches -- or 4 inches.
In some respects, 12 is actually a much more convenient base to work with when doing things like carpentry and other work that often involves taking 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/12 1/6 of the something. In all cases, 1/x where x is 2,3,4, or 6 ends up as a whole number.
With base 10, you basically have 1/2, 1/5, and 1/10th of something.
---
As far as the 10' rope turning into a 10' circle and the math not agreeing w/a radius measurement that makes sense, I honestly have no idea what you are talking about.
The math makes perfect sense in that (a) you can physically see every step in the process of going from a 10' straight line to a 10' in circumference circle to a radius whose decimal representation is slightly odd. Furthermore, it makes perfect sense in that there is a very simple formula that absolutely tells you the radius given the circumference and vice-versa.
Simply because you end up with an irrational [transcendtal?] number does not mean the math doesn't make sense, it just means that our representation of numbers cannot directly represent the math that is at work.
Base 10 numbers are simply one of many possible representations for numbers. That we chose base-10 is not surprising given the number of fingers at the end of most people's arms.
I believe there were cultures-- mayan??-- that chose base-12 or base-60 numeric systems.
In some respects, we might have been better off with a base 12, base 16, base 2, or base 60 numeric systems -- while 10 seems natural to us due to the tremendous cultural history, 10 is not the most natural of bases to work with in mathematics or computing.
While walking down 14th Street [Manhattan] the other day, I ran across one of those 'happy cry lucky' style imported crap tourist trap shops that had, among all the garbage, several different kinds of 'N in 1' games-in-the-game-controller products.
One stood out because it had 180 different games in a SNES style controller. For $40.
I'm sure Canal street has a similar assortment of gaming trivia, as well.
So, if you happen to be in NYC... take a stroll down either and have a close look. You'll want the western part of Canal street (where most of the electronic vendors are) or 14th between 5th ave and about 7th ave.
It could be a multi-platform solution if a similar bridge worked with GNUStep.
The bridge was originally written to support the GNUStep runtime. However, support for GNUStep fell out of the current version because none of the active developers are using GNUStep regularly.
The bridge is modular in nature -- there are Foundation and AppKit modules that sit on top of the objc chunk.
It would be a matter of making the objc module portable, then converting AppKit and Foundation to do a similar kind of cross platform support as, say, the os.path module in Python.
See, I thought you could even add Objective-C classes while the program was running, as it's totally dynamic.
Oh -- certainly -- you can always load a bundle. However, redefining existing classes has always been somewhat limited because of the way ObjC is implemented. Not a criticism of the language-- just the nature of its implementation.
With the Python stuff, it is much easier to effectively redefine everything about a class. This isn't 100% considered within the current implementation, but the potential is there.
Well, sure, you have always been able to subclass ObjC classes from ObjC... :-)
The key difference is that doing so in Python doesn't require recompilation and relinking the app (it currently requires relaunching the app, but that is an artificial barrier).
The key advantage is that one can often implement functionality in Python much more rapidly than pure ObjC simply because of the reduction in number of lines of code and the greater degree of abstraction offered by Python.
Even with a pure ObjC Cocoa app, PyObjC can be mixed in to provide a level of scriptability that isn't available in other solutions. Specifically, because Python provides a completely transparent interface between ObjC and Python, an entire application becomes scriptable simply by including PyObjC.
From reading the threads, let me respond with a bit of clarification.
This is really only of interest to Python programmers that want to leverage Cocoa or ObjC [including Cocoa] programmers that want to leverage the power of Python.
It is not intended to be used as a cross platform solution.
In context, it happens to be extremely powerful. The ability to subclass and extend ObjC classes with Python means that one can build Cocoa applications that can have their classes reloaded and redefined on the fly. I.e. it can greatly reduce the "run-compile" part of the "run-compile-edit" loop that developers tend to be stuck in.
Furthermore, having access to the power of Python from Cocoa greatly reduces the # of lines of code necessary to perform certain tasks. The Python libraries provide great, easy to use, HTTP client/server solutions, excellent XML-RPC support and a slew of other features that are damned handy to have around.
The real value of the PyObjC module-- and credit largely goes to Ronald for this-- is the transparency with which one can interact between languages. This isn't just a messaging solution (like CamelBones). PyObjC provides the developer with the ability to subclass ObjC classes from Python and-- if one really wanted to go there-- subclass Python subclasses of ObjC classes in ObjC.
As well, PyObjC tends to be a bit more straightforward in terms of integration than AppleScript Studio.
Think of it this way: PyObjC allows the developer to quickly and easily prototype applications in a scripting language [Python] while not sacrificing any of the awesome power of Cocoa [and awesome it is!].
- If you want a pure Unix experience at the command line, install OS X on UFS. Trivial. Works. Breaks some third party apps that are Carbon based, but you'll likely not care (I don't).
- porting: Most packages compile out of the bag or with very little in the way of patching (a lot only require a couple of command line arguments. Fink.sourceforge.net currently has 1100 packages 'ported' to OS X, all fully managed by the debian package manager.
Fink has certainly grown in size since your purchase, but not much else has changed.
As James Gosling recently said: "OS X is like Linux, only with Q/A [Quality Assurance] and taste!".
Tron was a cool arcade game, but Discs of Tron was, perhaps, one of the coolest games ever made.
Discs of Tron was basically taken from the movie scene with Tron fighting Sark in the arena with balls of energy. They each stood on discs of energy and the goal was to knock your opponent off.
Some called it 'the frisbee game'.
The arcade game was amazing. First, the controls. On the right (or was it left?) you had a joystick with a trigger button and a thumb button. Trigger throws an energy ball, button goes into blocking mode.
On the left, you had a twisty knob that spun freely and used an optical sensor to detect motion. It could also be pulled up and pushed down. It was used to aim your energy ball throw.
Aiming was incredibly precise. Combining the two, you could do strafing shots unlike anything possible in a FPS -- by spinning the knob in time with moving the joystick, you could set up a set of three energy balls in the air that crossed sark's disc in a gridded fashion.
You could also set up amazing rebound shots off the wall and, in later levels, the ceiling. As well, in later levels the discs would move and, if hit by a blob, disappear.
The whole implementation of the game was freakin' perfect. It was so well done.
There were 1,000 of what was called the 'environmental unit' configuration of the cabinets made.
You literally stood inside the environmental unit. It had six channel surround sound-- stereo front, stereo rear, a center channel near the control deck and a bass channel in the rear of the cabinet that you were leaning against.
Totally immersive, especially for 1985 or so.
The implementation was interesting; two Z80s + a totally custom TTL based video computer to handle the 3D vector style (it wasn't truly vector and not everything was vectorized--- there were filled areas) graphics.
Totally kicked ass.
You're wrong. :-)
The Linux kit is documented by Sony as including a set of proprietary libraries [binary only] that give access to the emotion engine and the rest of the PS2 hardware.
In other words, it does have full access but it is proprietary.
But hardware vendors could make pre-installed low-cost, no-subscription-required boxes. Of, they could in fact offer a subscription to their own service. This lowers the cost of entry and time-to-market for competing with TiVo and ReplayTV. I suspect, however, that a number of bogus patents stand in the way.
For a PVR to be attractive to most of the market-- the folks that couldn't care less what Linux is or what the GPL means-- the solution needs to have all that wonderful point and click scheduling features that can only be had by feeding it with complete, localized, schedules!
As far as lowering the cost-- think again! The TiVo and ReplayTV are basically embedded PCs with a few specalized chips and a big hard drive. They are cheap to make, cheap to test, cheap to maintain... not something that an off the shelf PC can achieve.
Someone *could* go the right of building a custom, embedded type solution that could approach the low cost of a TiVo/Replay, but that would require a significant up front investment.
Absolutely and for Europeans this stuff kicks butt. But there is a big chunk of potential PVR market that'll never touch it (or even be aware that it exists). Not a criticism, just market realities.
To put things in a bit of perspective: This is an awesome achievement and these guys should be congratulated many times over for the achievement. It is *way* cool!!
However, it is *not* competition to TiVo outside of the handful of geeks that may choose to do it themselves over buying the off the shelf solution provided by TiVo and ReplayTV.
First, the Linux VDR based solution is not a no-brainer installation. Not by any stretch of the imagination. You have to deal with obtaining the correct hardware configuration, install all the software correctly, etc,etc,etc. Even if someone were to pick it up and sell it as an off the shelf, preconfigured unit it will still have significant maintenance issues above and beyond, say, a TiVo.
This is not a criticism-- just a recognition that the market for a TiVo and the primary market for this software is very different.
Most of the folks I know with a TiVo do not have the knowledge or the time to deal with such a solution.
Frankly, even with the knowledge an awful lot of folks aren't going to have the time or aren't going to see blowing the time on building out such a thing as being a useful investment.
Personally, I would rather pay $500 to TiVo and be done with it than have to screw around with getting all of the different random bits inline to make the Linux VDR solution work!
Finally, the TiVo provides a level of seamless integration that will not be achieved in the GPL VDR solution for a long time. A lot of the channel and scheduling information isn't available via public channels without doing a boatload of parsing and screen scraping. Even then, it'll change over time and break often. TiVo and Replay have the distinct advantage of having paid the big $$$ for data feeds that provide this data in a machine readable format.
Paying the $$$ to TiVo/Replay buys a lot more than just some software and hardware. It buys a service, a data feed, and a company to back the whole package. For a lot of the market, all of that must be included before something can be considered competition!
(Found this in the press this morning. Wonder if it was HETE and the coordinates given by NASA where the first point of 'no longer in space'. If that is the case, I could imagine that the visible bits would occur hundreds of miles away. May be completely unrelated-- I'm fully willing to admit I did zero research beyond seeing the article and the /. article in a short enough period of time that both were still in short term memory.)
Strange lights in the sky baffle Bavarians
MUNICH, Germany, April 7 (Reuters) - Strange lights in the sky baffled Bavarians late on Saturday as hundreds of panicked callers jammed police telephone lines seeking an explanation for the phenomenon.
Reports of an unsettling late-night natural light show came from all over the southern German state as well as the neighbouring region of Baden-Wuerttemberg.
"It had nothing to do with the weather. But I don't think little green men from Mars have landed in Bavaria. It was something burning out in the atmosphere," a meteorologist said.
"It was like a huge firework," a Reuters TV correspondent in Munich said, describing the display. "You could even see it through half-closed blinds. It lasted around three seconds," she said.
Pilots flying into Munich airport radioed the control tower with reports of unusual lights in the sky.
The German police said NASA scientists initially thought the light was caused by space junk -- floating debris in the Earth's atmosphere -- but later said they were still unsure.
The German army reported no unusual movements on its radar.
Scientists said the lights may have the result of a meteor breaking through the Earth's atmosphere.
"There are no signs of impact or damage. We can't say what it was," a police spokesman said.
(I wrote this at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100490/)
Finlay Dobbie published an article about how Apple effectively does not allow minors-- folks under 18-- to participate in the Apple Developer Program or contribute changes to the Darwin project.
Unfortunately, Apple's policy is a reflection of the legal status of minors within the US. The policy is largely out of Apple's control!
The problem stems from the whole COPA/COPPA [Children's Online Protection Act which morphed into Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or something like that] related set of laws.
I actually have a bunch of pertinent technical experience related to COPA/COPPA in that CodeFab built much of the back end engine used by the www.noggin.com site including the editorial tools used to manage content produced by minors.
Basically, if you are under 18, you are deemed a minor and you do not have the legal authority to sign contracts, cannot publish or contribute content that falls under another party's copyright/ownership, and are otherwise severely restricted in a legal fashion.
In other words, Apple cannot directly allow you to participate either as a Darwin contributor or as an ADC member because there is no legal way for you to effectively 'sign' the contracts required to be a member.
While Apple could extend the program such that your parents or legal guardians could give permission for your participation-- effectively signing for you-- that would not actually be enough for you to participate in the programs. In particular, for content produced by a minor to be published in a forum visible to others, several criteria must be met:
Parental consent must be obtained at least once.
Every piece of content must be reviewed prior to being made available within a forum outside of the company that effectively 'owns' the content (in this case, Apple).
If the parent's ever rescind the permission to use content, it must be possible to effectively "unpublish" the content. Imagine the implications within a CVS repository of, say, having to remove the changes in version 1.5 of a file that is now at revision 1.24...?
When a piece of content produced by a minor is actually published, it must be published in a fashion that effectively hides the identity of the source. This part is fairly fuzzy in that it is hard to hide identity when a username is the user's actual name... but the law was not exactly created by folks totally familiar with technology.
The bottom line is that Apple's -- and other companies -- hands are tied in this. They would have to put forth a tremendous amount of effort to make it possible for minors to participate. Even then, a minor could not participate in the full fashion and there is still implied liability.
If you are in this position, your best bet is to have a parent/guardian sign up for the ADC account. As far as Darwin contributions are concerned, it will likely have to be done through some other resource who is of majority age.
Not only does this not surprise me, it will be no surprise that crap like this is only going to get worse.
I have noticed a *very* disturbing trend in the reams of spam I receive. More and more of it is coming from seemingly legitimate BigCos.
In the last week I have received spam for several different forms of service from AT cellular and long distance. I have also received three different spams for the Columbia House CD/DVD club.
I'm fairly certain that a number of these spam have been merely a test; just a dip of the toe in the pool, so to speak.
Can you imagine what would happen if an AT&T or a Columbia House (Sony, isn't it?) were to decide the spam was a 'legitimate market channel'?