I actually maintain a pinball machine at a local bar to ensure that our company has decent pinball at local bar-- a rarity. The machine is Creature from the Black Lagoon @ The Village Idiot, 9th Ave and 14th Street in Manhattan.
Our company-- CodeFab-- has 7 pinball machines in house. Four currently working, three in restoration mode.
Among the employees we have a bunch more. Personally, I own Dr. Who, Addams Family Gold, Gilligan's Island, Pinbot, and Game Show. A sys admin has a Twighlight Zone and Dracula [awesome game, that].
Just got done rebuilding all four flippers on the Addams Family at the office. Including replacing all bridge rectifiers on the power driver board.
Pinball is an excellent way to take a break from work. It is a digital system-- all machines after 1990 are computer controlled (including the flippers)-- but behaves in a very analog / real world fashion.
BTW: The new Stern machine-- Monopoly-- was *designed* by the same guy who built Addams Family, Monster Bash, and numerous other Williams/Bally classics. Go play it. It is a worthy machine.
Again, anyone in NYC-- check out www.nycpinball.org, sign up on the very low volume mailing list, and join us for the next PinBall BarCrawl!!
Re: the guy that had the sketches of a similar iMac last summer.
If he even remotely claims Apple 'stole' his ideas, he should be laughed off the face of the planet.
Consider the incredible number of conceptual drawings and sketches about possible new iMac designs that have made the rounds in the last two years. Combine that with the fact that every computer needs a spot for ports, a display, and something to contain the cpu/drives/ram/etc. Now, combine that with the industrial design directions Apple set by announcing the death of the CRT [last may @ WWDC, I believe] and the icebook/tibook look and feel.
All told, it is no surprise that *one* of the myriad concept sketches that appeared on the net look similar! As innovative as Apple is, they have yet to be able to entirely break the bonds of reality (i.e. say, a completely detached floating display).
As well, the guy *sent* his concept sketches to Apple-- including to Steve Jobs. Apple's policy on such matters is quite clear; anything submitted becomes the property of Apple and they can do whatever they bloody well please with it-- including giving it to a competitor, if they saw fit to do so.
Yeah-- my math was off... but not by a huge amount. Neither USB or FireWire ever runs at the maximum transfer rate. Transfer rates to USB drives are fairly slow and I have heard [and occasionally experienced] numerous reports of extra hugely long transfer times.
So it is a day -- at best -- it is still a pain in the ass long amount of time.
I haven't been taking drags off the Jobs crack pipe. I recognize good design when I see it, touch it, use it and the iPod is that. The Riot is the fairly typical curvy-for-the-sake-of-curvy bloated hunk o' yucky plastic that'll be a pain in the ass to carry around. Yippee.
>>There will be those that will reply with 'but do >>you *really* swap your entire playlists on a
>>regular basis? I don't and I don't miss it...'
Yes-- but do you NOT do it because you wouldn't or because you can't conveniently? In my experience, the use of a device is often defined by the limitations of the device. That you can't conviently swap out all the content doesn't mean you wouldn't do it if you could!
I swap the entire contents 2 to 3 times a week, on average. I have 100+ GB of high bitrate mp3s encoded from my CD collection and typically grab some random 4.5GB cross section of that ever few days based on mood, desire, or context.
That it uses a 20GB hard drive means that it is at least twice the size. The 5gb hard drive used in the iPod is significantly smaller than the 2.5inch form factor required by the 20gb drive.
The Riot has a USB interface... the iPod uses FireWire (1394b). End result? You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes. Even loading 5gb onto the Rio is going to take something like 10 hours -- 20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
It is unbelievably handy/convenient/cool to be able to reload your entire portable music collection in a matter of minutes. I can get up in the morning and select 500+ tracks -- 50 albums or several playlists (depending on how I have things organized) -- based on my mood, desires, whatever... and the iPod is completely reloaded and ready to go by the time I'm out of the shower and ready to catch the train!
All in a device that slips conveniently into a pocket, is light weight, and incredibly tough. Did you know an iPod bounces when you drop it? Mine does-- and it still works fine.
Not too mention that having a 5gb FireWire hard drive in my pocket has proven to be damned convenient on numerous occasions. My iPod was used as a temporary holding spot for data or for sneaker net transfers no less than 4 times last week simply because it was the fastest and most convenient way to move the data around! USB wouldn't have cut it-- try moving 1gb of data across a USB bus in under a minute. (Sure, USB 2.0 can do it-- but who has USB 2.0 support on their MP3 player?)
Don't get me wrong-- the Riot is *very cool*. But it isn't an iPod killer. They are completely different products.
Personally, I don't need an FM tuner and really don't want a device that doesn't fit in a pocket.
There will be those that will reply with 'but do you *really* swap your entire playlists on a regular basis? I don't and I don't miss it...'
You may not wipe your Archos clean on a regular basis because it is a *pain in the ass* to reload.
I replace *all* songs on my iPod on a regular basis because it takes such a short amount of time to refresh. And it charges while it is doing so.
I can get up in the morning, select a playlist that fits my mood, connect the iPod to the mac and it will be fully sync'd AND have enough of a charge to get me from home to work in the time it takes me to shower and eat breakfast.
It is easy to confuse limitations with usage patterns...
OS X: Or go and download Podestal from VersionTracker.com.
Podestal detects the presence of an iPod and displays the music on the device organized by Artist and Album. One can easily select tracks and drag-n-drop 'em to wherever to copy. It parses the ID3 tags, so the presentation is quite a bit cleaner than just displaying everything by filename. It also includes a file browser.
I would post the URL, but versiontracker's search facility is broken right now.
(I wrote the silly thing so I won't comment on quality.:-)
My house is in the norwalk/westport area of Connecticut near the coast.
In other words, we have light pollution out the wazoo.
I had initially set my alarm to go off at 4:45AM but decided to shut it off-- if I really wanted to see meteors, I would wake up.
Woke up around 4:50AM and lay in bed looking out the window deciding whether or not I wanted to freeze my ass off. Within a minute, I had spotted two meteors out the window, with no glasses, in the direction of some bad light pollution.
I headed outside. Within 5 minutes, I spotted 10 or so faint meteors with trails, 3 or 4 that were fairly bright that left a trail that was viisble for a couple of seconds (and not retina burn), and 1 that was bright enough to light the clouds to the south.
Unbelievable.
So, head in, wake the wife, and we watched for another fifteen minutes with similar results including a couple of more truly spectacular trails.
After going back to bed at 5:45am, I lay away awake for a while looking out the window. At this point, the Sun was starting to come up.
I caught another six meteors out the window-- two of which were *bright* and one of which actually created a *flash* at the end of the trail.
HP product blows iPod [Apple product] out of the water?
That'd be a troll if I ever read one... they aren't even in the same *markets*. The iPod is intended to be a portable, secondary music playing device whereas the HP box is intended to be stuck on your stereo, left there, and used as the center for all of your music needs.
They are *completely* different markets. Get a clue!
That's a pretty crappy test criteria-- limiting the input to 128kbit/sec-- for those of us itnerested in achieving as-close-to-CD-as-possible performance from our compressed music.
I don't claim to have golden ears, but I can distinctly hear the difference between different playback engines (example; on a Mac, the Audion playback engine is considerable better sounding than iTunes) and different encoding engines with nearly the same settings (LAME is, by far and away, the best I have heard yet).
In any case, it would be useful to have an expanded test that includes higher bitrates for those that listen to tunes on something other than crappy computer speakers.
One of the best sites around, r3mix offers a wealth of technical information, some very well executed scientific and listening tests, and a section that destroys a lot of the myths surrounding mp3s.
If you have the pleasure of using an OS X box and want to install any of a number of open source packages, I highly recommend that you check out fink.sourceforge.net.
Fink includes a set of package descriptions that patch a downloaded sourceball, configure and compile, install it into a custom directory, then debianize the binary...
Reading through the posts, there have been numerous pissing contest style "my linux system is more hardened then yours".
Unfortunately, you missed the point entirely. Linux simply does not matter in the context of the RIAAs efforts to "protect" their "assets".
Apple is barely a blip on their radar.
In their eyes, the only systems that matter are the Windows boxen of the world. Makes sense, really, given that Windows desktop boxes comprise something like 90%-95% of the desktops around.
For the/. community to be an effective part of the effort to reveal how ludicrous the RIAA's legal actions have been, we need to collectively pull our heads out of the sands and focus on the real issues.
Hardened systems, firewalls, mounting partitions as read only are not solutions. 90% of the people that would be affected by the RIAAs efforts don't even know what those things are!
Equally as unfortunate, taking an attitude of "screw the ignorant masses, we know how to do things right" is going to be terribly constructive either. A key reason why some of the multimedia "standards" that we non-Windows users leverage on a daily basis are "standard" is because of the massive "potential market" that Windows represents.
Finally, an attitude of "Linux will rule the world" isn't going to help, either. Linux simply isn't ready to compete in the ignorant dumbass marketplace that Windows dominates.
Everyone and everything should start using weak encryption to transfer data of any kind.
The computational power required to break weak encryption would render it basically impossible to monitor data transfer in real time. It also obscures the conversation such that it makes it extremely difficult for the monitoring agent to be able to tell what part of the sampled conversation should be analyzed offline to determine if the data is copyrighted.
/. could lead the way be providing an https://slashdot.org/ URL that uses a low bit rate certificate to obscure all data to/from slashdot. The more people that do this and the more P2P (likely a significant target) that integrate weak encryptioni, the more difficult of a job Big Brother has.
I was going to say much the same thing. To add to it:
Amelio: Not only was he a failure of a CEO, but he went on to write one of the whiniest books around on his "tenure" at Apple and how Steve "stole" his impending success, blahblahblah...
Gassee: The Be machine was pretty sexy, but the OS was doomed from the start! All C++ and you basically had to multithread from the get go. The development docs basically said "Everything is threaded. Threading is hard. Be careful. Have a nice day!". Worse, Be made every mistake that NeXT and others made-- but 10 years after the market no longer tolerated that kind of BS. Proprietary this, closed that, etc... *yawn* Don't get me wrong-- it was really cool to look at and play with, just utterly doomed to simply not matter when the history books are written.
Raskin obviously has a serious bone to pick over the whole 10.x/NeXT thing. He consistently slams 10.x on things that are simply different than the MacOS he helped build. Quite a number of his points are valid, but saying that 10.1 is just a "face lift" with a lot of "minuses" clearly indicates that he is bitter about something. 10.1 cleans up a boatload of little details and is loads and loads faster. Clearly not just a face lift and without any minuses. Besides, Mac OS 9 is an utter joke-- for all intents and purposes, the memory and multitasking model is about as modern as DOS, but with a really pretty face.
Fortt's love affair with XP's built in instant message is a good sign his is smoking whatever Ballmer was smoking before the recent Monkey Boy episode.
As for Bajarin, he is likely the only one that can stand up straight for lack of a mondo Apple related chip on his shoulder. Of course, the fact that he would agree to be on this "panel" in the first place raises a few questions...
Hell, I'm surprised they didn't pull in Spindler, Hancock, and Sculley.
What a total joke... the sad thing is that it will be completely unsurprising when CNET picks up whatever the result is as a sure sign of Apple's impending doom.
One of the engineers at CodeFab picked up 130 NeXT systems in a bid to get our attention and have us hire him. It worked (CodeFab was founded by and has hired a number of old hand NeXT community folk).
We gave most of the machines to the free hardware foundation (it was a long time ago and I can't even remember who or give a link. Doh! If you are really interested in tracking this down ping me and I'll figure it out.).
In any case, out of the 130, I kept one configuration for myself... a dream machine. It is a Turbo Cube with 3 NeXTdimension boards connected to 3 21" NeXT monitors. It is frighteningly large but very cool. Works seamlessly.
My next experiment is to try hooking up the various bits of NTSC video in/outs together and see if I can't cause some nice feedback loops or something.
Third point is wrong; the reality is that IP law is a very strange beast indeed.
There are definitely situations within which if you do not take action to defend your intellectual property, you lose the RIGHT to defend it at all!
(had this explained to me by a lawyer quite some time ago... details are shaky)
Likewise, cue:cat! (wHaTe^er) can claim IP-- have you looked at their bar codes? They are all slanty with funky stuff around 'em.:-)
On a more serious note, they could claim real IP in terms of the contents of the bar code-- if there is some alternative bit of info or some alternative encoding in use, that is IP.
Has anyone actually looked at the numbers? Microsoft makes a boatload of money on the MSOffice product-- and a significant portion of that money comes from sales *on the macintosh platform*.
If Linux really does represent a significant desktop market-- and it is clear that if that hasn't already happened, it will inevitably happen-- then Microsoft is going to port office to the platform *because it is going to generate a boatload of revenue*.
Sure a lot of folks are going to make all kinds of noise about it not being OpenSource. So what? Is that really going to matter to people who are actually going to PAY for the software?
If Microsoft does go this route, I [and likely CodeFab] will quite likely BUY copies of Office for Linux? Why? Because we use it.
Why do we use these packages from the *evil empire*? Because--very much unlike their operating systems-- *they work*.
Deal. Linux is going Big Business. Success will do that to any grassroots product.
Sphinx was originally built on a combination of NeXT systems [for the DSP] with large scale analysis performed on a vast array of random Unix/Andrew workstations.
I was the NeXT Campus Consultant at the time and, as such, had Sphinx [and numerous other cool projects] on my computer. Very cool stuff!
When NeXT "officially" opened their Pittsburgh office [the office had been unoficially for quite some time], I demoed Sphinx to a bunch of Pittsburgh area business leaders and all the top management at NeXT-- including Steve Jobs [Amusing anecdote in that; but not one I'd feel comfortable sharing in this public of a forum].
It was cool stuff-- worked great.
It was also amusing being at CMU when they were building the original recognition libraries. Every week the school newspaper had an add for "seeking speakers for training of the Sphinx project"-- but every week they would put the call out for english speakers AND english-as-second-language-speakers with very specific first languages.
Jwz: A public thank you for that extremely illuminating response! Seriously.
So: if the TiVo is restoring the Macrovision copy protection... then, likely, they have a simple circuit or bit o' software that is randomly flipping the blanking region... Interesting.
(1) The software is relatively complex and offers a bunch of features-- including databases full of schedules and all sorts of cool fuzzy searching features.
(2) Hardware to do MPEG II encoding at the rates and quality that either TiVo or ReplayTV do is neither cheap nor readily available in a form that could be easily integrated with the random bits of custom software you would need to write.
(3) Putting together a bunch of off the shelf components that achieve the same level of quality (the LOWEST quality record/playback is about the same as normal video tape) would cost WAY more. Factoring in software engineering time adds a very large amount of cost on top of that (though it would be fun).
Not to say it won't happen, it will.... but it will take a while before anyone comes up with a homebrew system that can compare in features and price.
Slashdot Mirror
www.nycpinball.org
Or simply email me.
I actually maintain a pinball machine at a local bar to ensure that our company has decent pinball at local bar-- a rarity. The machine is Creature from the Black Lagoon @ The Village Idiot, 9th Ave and 14th Street in Manhattan.
Our company-- CodeFab-- has 7 pinball machines in house. Four currently working, three in restoration mode.
Among the employees we have a bunch more. Personally, I own Dr. Who, Addams Family Gold, Gilligan's Island, Pinbot, and Game Show. A sys admin has a Twighlight Zone and Dracula [awesome game, that].
Just got done rebuilding all four flippers on the Addams Family at the office. Including replacing all bridge rectifiers on the power driver board.
Pinball is an excellent way to take a break from work. It is a digital system-- all machines after 1990 are computer controlled (including the flippers)-- but behaves in a very analog / real world fashion.
BTW: The new Stern machine-- Monopoly-- was *designed* by the same guy who built Addams Family, Monster Bash, and numerous other Williams/Bally classics. Go play it. It is a worthy machine.
Again, anyone in NYC-- check out www.nycpinball.org, sign up on the very low volume mailing list, and join us for the next PinBall BarCrawl!!
b.bum
Damn! It was even worse than I suspected...
Gandhi beat Blade Runner for best "Art Direction / Set Direction".
Pathetic.
Was anyone else incredibly pissed that Tron lost an Oscar to Gandhi for *BEST COSTUME*???!?!!
I was. That was the turning point. From then on, I knew the oscars were a complete sham.
Come on; a bunch of freakin' sheets beat out the most yummy high tech other worldly costume design to have ever graced the big screen?
Re: the guy that had the sketches of a similar iMac last summer.
If he even remotely claims Apple 'stole' his ideas, he should be laughed off the face of the planet.
Consider the incredible number of conceptual drawings and sketches about possible new iMac designs that have made the rounds in the last two years. Combine that with the fact that every computer needs a spot for ports, a display, and something to contain the cpu/drives/ram/etc. Now, combine that with the industrial design directions Apple set by announcing the death of the CRT [last may @ WWDC, I believe] and the icebook/tibook look and feel.
All told, it is no surprise that *one* of the myriad concept sketches that appeared on the net look similar! As innovative as Apple is, they have yet to be able to entirely break the bonds of reality (i.e. say, a completely detached floating display).
As well, the guy *sent* his concept sketches to Apple-- including to Steve Jobs. Apple's policy on such matters is quite clear; anything submitted becomes the property of Apple and they can do whatever they bloody well please with it-- including giving it to a competitor, if they saw fit to do so.
It can't; it 'feels' like about half that... about 200 mbit/sec or so.
Still a buttload faster than USB and fast enough to make it convenient to swap all content.
Yeah-- my math was off... but not by a huge amount. Neither USB or FireWire ever runs at the maximum transfer rate. Transfer rates to USB drives are fairly slow and I have heard [and occasionally experienced] numerous reports of extra hugely long transfer times.
So it is a day -- at best -- it is still a pain in the ass long amount of time.
I haven't been taking drags off the Jobs crack pipe. I recognize good design when I see it, touch it, use it and the iPod is that. The Riot is the fairly typical curvy-for-the-sake-of-curvy bloated hunk o' yucky plastic that'll be a pain in the ass to carry around. Yippee.
[damnit, got cut off]
>>There will be those that will reply with 'but do >>you *really* swap your entire playlists on a
>>regular basis? I don't and I don't miss it...'
Yes-- but do you NOT do it because you wouldn't or because you can't conveniently? In my experience, the use of a device is often defined by the limitations of the device. That you can't conviently swap out all the content doesn't mean you wouldn't do it if you could!
I swap the entire contents 2 to 3 times a week, on average. I have 100+ GB of high bitrate mp3s encoded from my CD collection and typically grab some random 4.5GB cross section of that ever few days based on mood, desire, or context.
That it uses a 20GB hard drive means that it is at least twice the size. The 5gb hard drive used in the iPod is significantly smaller than the 2.5inch form factor required by the 20gb drive.
The Riot has a USB interface... the iPod uses FireWire (1394b). End result? You can completely replace the contents on your iPod in less than 15 minutes. Even loading 5gb onto the Rio is going to take something like 10 hours -- 20gb would likely take something like *two days*.
It is unbelievably handy/convenient/cool to be able to reload your entire portable music collection in a matter of minutes. I can get up in the morning and select 500+ tracks -- 50 albums or several playlists (depending on how I have things organized) -- based on my mood, desires, whatever... and the iPod is completely reloaded and ready to go by the time I'm out of the shower and ready to catch the train!
All in a device that slips conveniently into a pocket, is light weight, and incredibly tough. Did you know an iPod bounces when you drop it? Mine does-- and it still works fine.
Not too mention that having a 5gb FireWire hard drive in my pocket has proven to be damned convenient on numerous occasions. My iPod was used as a temporary holding spot for data or for sneaker net transfers no less than 4 times last week simply because it was the fastest and most convenient way to move the data around! USB wouldn't have cut it-- try moving 1gb of data across a USB bus in under a minute. (Sure, USB 2.0 can do it-- but who has USB 2.0 support on their MP3 player?)
Don't get me wrong-- the Riot is *very cool*. But it isn't an iPod killer. They are completely different products.
Personally, I don't need an FM tuner and really don't want a device that doesn't fit in a pocket.
There will be those that will reply with 'but do you *really* swap your entire playlists on a regular basis? I don't and I don't miss it...'
Bullshit.
You may not wipe your Archos clean on a regular basis because it is a *pain in the ass* to reload.
I replace *all* songs on my iPod on a regular basis because it takes such a short amount of time to refresh. And it charges while it is doing so.
I can get up in the morning, select a playlist that fits my mood, connect the iPod to the mac and it will be fully sync'd AND have enough of a charge to get me from home to work in the time it takes me to shower and eat breakfast.
It is easy to confuse limitations with usage patterns...
OS X: Or go and download Podestal from VersionTracker.com.
:-)
Podestal detects the presence of an iPod and displays the music on the device organized by Artist and Album. One can easily select tracks and drag-n-drop 'em to wherever to copy. It parses the ID3 tags, so the presentation is quite a bit cleaner than just displaying everything by filename. It also includes a file browser.
I would post the URL, but versiontracker's search facility is broken right now.
(I wrote the silly thing so I won't comment on quality.
My house is in the norwalk/westport area of Connecticut near the coast.
In other words, we have light pollution out the wazoo.
I had initially set my alarm to go off at 4:45AM but decided to shut it off-- if I really wanted to see meteors, I would wake up.
Woke up around 4:50AM and lay in bed looking out the window deciding whether or not I wanted to freeze my ass off. Within a minute, I had spotted two meteors out the window, with no glasses, in the direction of some bad light pollution.
I headed outside. Within 5 minutes, I spotted 10 or so faint meteors with trails, 3 or 4 that were fairly bright that left a trail that was viisble for a couple of seconds (and not retina burn), and 1 that was bright enough to light the clouds to the south.
Unbelievable.
So, head in, wake the wife, and we watched for another fifteen minutes with similar results including a couple of more truly spectacular trails.
After going back to bed at 5:45am, I lay away awake for a while looking out the window. At this point, the Sun was starting to come up.
I caught another six meteors out the window-- two of which were *bright* and one of which actually created a *flash* at the end of the trail.
An amazing show.
It was an excellent night for wishes....
HP product blows iPod [Apple product] out of the water?
That'd be a troll if I ever read one... they aren't even in the same *markets*. The iPod is intended to be a portable, secondary music playing device whereas the HP box is intended to be stuck on your stereo, left there, and used as the center for all of your music needs.
They are *completely* different markets. Get a clue!
That's a pretty crappy test criteria-- limiting the input to 128kbit/sec-- for those of us itnerested in achieving as-close-to-CD-as-possible performance from our compressed music.
I don't claim to have golden ears, but I can distinctly hear the difference between different playback engines (example; on a Mac, the Audion playback engine is considerable better sounding than iTunes) and different encoding engines with nearly the same settings (LAME is, by far and away, the best I have heard yet).
In any case, it would be useful to have an expanded test that includes higher bitrates for those that listen to tunes on something other than crappy computer speakers.
Ogg vs. LAME article
An excellent Ars article that only covers differences between mp3 encoders.
MP3 tech has a bunch of useful resources.
One of the best sites around, r3mix offers a wealth of technical information, some very well executed scientific and listening tests, and a section that destroys a lot of the myths surrounding mp3s.
If you have the pleasure of using an OS X box and want to install any of a number of open source packages, I highly recommend that you check out fink.sourceforge.net.
Fink includes a set of package descriptions that patch a downloaded sourceball, configure and compile, install it into a custom directory, then debianize the binary...
...and, finally, installs the debian package.
There is also a binary version available.
i.e. you can:
'fink install gimp'
... and it installs gimp and all depdencies.
Reading through the posts, there have been numerous pissing contest style "my linux system is more hardened then yours".
/. community to be an effective part of the effort to reveal how ludicrous the RIAA's legal actions have been, we need to collectively pull our heads out of the sands and focus on the real issues.
Unfortunately, you missed the point entirely. Linux simply does not matter in the context of the RIAAs efforts to "protect" their "assets".
Apple is barely a blip on their radar.
In their eyes, the only systems that matter are the Windows boxen of the world. Makes sense, really, given that Windows desktop boxes comprise something like 90%-95% of the desktops around.
For the
Hardened systems, firewalls, mounting partitions as read only are not solutions. 90% of the people that would be affected by the RIAAs efforts don't even know what those things are!
Equally as unfortunate, taking an attitude of "screw the ignorant masses, we know how to do things right" is going to be terribly constructive either. A key reason why some of the multimedia "standards" that we non-Windows users leverage on a daily basis are "standard" is because of the massive "potential market" that Windows represents.
Finally, an attitude of "Linux will rule the world" isn't going to help, either. Linux simply isn't ready to compete in the ignorant dumbass marketplace that Windows dominates.
Nope-- he isn't lying. 10.1 breaks XFree86-- but not in a fatal fashion.
If you go into the XDarwin application's preferences and force it to load a keymap from a file, it'll work again.
The problem is that XDarwin defaults to loading the keymap from the kernel, but the underlying API went away in 10.1 (as it really should have).
Everyone and everything should start using weak encryption to transfer data of any kind.
The computational power required to break weak encryption would render it basically impossible to monitor data transfer in real time. It also obscures the conversation such that it makes it extremely difficult for the monitoring agent to be able to tell what part of the sampled conversation should be analyzed offline to determine if the data is copyrighted.
/. could lead the way be providing an https://slashdot.org/ URL that uses a low bit rate certificate to obscure all data to/from slashdot. The more people that do this and the more P2P (likely a significant target) that integrate weak encryptioni, the more difficult of a job Big Brother has.
I was going to say much the same thing. To add to it:
Amelio: Not only was he a failure of a CEO, but he went on to write one of the whiniest books around on his "tenure" at Apple and how Steve "stole" his impending success, blahblahblah...
Gassee: The Be machine was pretty sexy, but the OS was doomed from the start! All C++ and you basically had to multithread from the get go. The development docs basically said "Everything is threaded. Threading is hard. Be careful. Have a nice day!". Worse, Be made every mistake that NeXT and others made-- but 10 years after the market no longer tolerated that kind of BS. Proprietary this, closed that, etc... *yawn* Don't get me wrong-- it was really cool to look at and play with, just utterly doomed to simply not matter when the history books are written.
Raskin obviously has a serious bone to pick over the whole 10.x/NeXT thing. He consistently slams 10.x on things that are simply different than the MacOS he helped build. Quite a number of his points are valid, but saying that 10.1 is just a "face lift" with a lot of "minuses" clearly indicates that he is bitter about something. 10.1 cleans up a boatload of little details and is loads and loads faster. Clearly not just a face lift and without any minuses. Besides, Mac OS 9 is an utter joke-- for all intents and purposes, the memory and multitasking model is about as modern as DOS, but with a really pretty face.
Fortt's love affair with XP's built in instant message is a good sign his is smoking whatever Ballmer was smoking before the recent Monkey Boy episode.
As for Bajarin, he is likely the only one that can stand up straight for lack of a mondo Apple related chip on his shoulder. Of course, the fact that he would agree to be on this "panel" in the first place raises a few questions...
Hell, I'm surprised they didn't pull in Spindler, Hancock, and Sculley.
What a total joke... the sad thing is that it will be completely unsurprising when CNET picks up whatever the result is as a sure sign of Apple's impending doom.
One of the engineers at CodeFab picked up 130 NeXT systems in a bid to get our attention and have us hire him. It worked (CodeFab was founded by and has hired a number of old hand NeXT community folk).
We gave most of the machines to the free hardware foundation (it was a long time ago and I can't even remember who or give a link. Doh! If you are really interested in tracking this down ping me and I'll figure it out.).
In any case, out of the 130, I kept one configuration for myself... a dream machine. It is a Turbo Cube with 3 NeXTdimension boards connected to 3 21" NeXT monitors. It is frighteningly large but very cool. Works seamlessly.
My next experiment is to try hooking up the various bits of NTSC video in/outs together and see if I can't cause some nice feedback loops or something.
Third point is wrong; the reality is that IP law is a very strange beast indeed.
:-)
There are definitely situations within which if you do not take action to defend your intellectual property, you lose the RIGHT to defend it at all!
(had this explained to me by a lawyer quite some time ago... details are shaky)
Likewise, cue:cat! (wHaTe^er) can claim IP-- have you looked at their bar codes? They are all slanty with funky stuff around 'em.
On a more serious note, they could claim real IP in terms of the contents of the bar code-- if there is some alternative bit of info or some alternative encoding in use, that is IP.
Has anyone actually looked at the numbers? Microsoft makes a boatload of money on the MSOffice product-- and a significant portion of that money comes from sales *on the macintosh platform*.
If Linux really does represent a significant desktop market-- and it is clear that if that hasn't already happened, it will inevitably happen-- then Microsoft is going to port office to the platform *because it is going to generate a boatload of revenue*.
Sure a lot of folks are going to make all kinds of noise about it not being OpenSource. So what? Is that really going to matter to people who are actually going to PAY for the software?
If Microsoft does go this route, I [and likely CodeFab] will quite likely BUY copies of Office for Linux? Why? Because we use it.
Why do we use these packages from the *evil empire*? Because--very much unlike their operating systems-- *they work*.
Deal. Linux is going Big Business. Success will do that to any grassroots product.
Well... considering the history of the project....
I'd hate to see what happened if someone yells "YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!!!".
Sphinx was originally built on a combination of NeXT systems [for the DSP] with large scale analysis performed on a vast array of random Unix/Andrew workstations.
I was the NeXT Campus Consultant at the time and, as such, had Sphinx [and numerous other cool projects] on my computer. Very cool stuff!
When NeXT "officially" opened their Pittsburgh office [the office had been unoficially for quite some time], I demoed Sphinx to a bunch of Pittsburgh area business leaders and all the top management at NeXT-- including Steve Jobs [Amusing anecdote in that; but not one I'd feel comfortable sharing in this public of a forum].
It was cool stuff-- worked great.
It was also amusing being at CMU when they were building the original recognition libraries. Every week the school newspaper had an add for "seeking speakers for training of the Sphinx project"-- but every week they would put the call out for english speakers AND english-as-second-language-speakers with very specific first languages.
Cool stuff! Good to see that it has survived.
Jwz: A public thank you for that extremely illuminating response! Seriously.
So: if the TiVo is restoring the Macrovision copy protection... then, likely, they have a simple circuit or bit o' software that is randomly flipping the blanking region... Interesting.
It isn't that simple.
(1) The software is relatively complex and offers a bunch of features-- including databases full of schedules and all sorts of cool fuzzy searching features.
(2) Hardware to do MPEG II encoding at the rates and quality that either TiVo or ReplayTV do is neither cheap nor readily available in a form that could be easily integrated with the random bits of custom software you would need to write.
(3) Putting together a bunch of off the shelf components that achieve the same level of quality (the LOWEST quality record/playback is about the same as normal video tape) would cost WAY more. Factoring in software engineering time adds a very large amount of cost on top of that (though it would be fun).
Not to say it won't happen, it will.... but it will take a while before anyone comes up with a homebrew system that can compare in features and price.