Micropayments is one of those technologies, like rocket backpacks, that techno-nerds keep promoting but which never show up, and for the same reason. They're not practical.
The Teledon project back in the 1970s used micro-payments, and failed. Project Xanadu was going to be financed by micropayments and failed. Nicholas Negroponte predicted that micropayments would finance the WWW. First Virtual founded an internet bank based on micropayments and went bankrupt.
The problem is that the cost of administering any micro-payment scheme overwhelms the value of the service provided; all the money goes to the payment administrator and comparatively little goes to the content provider. Content providers hate them.
Users hate them too. They add another layer of cost and complexity to internet transactions. Users prefer to pay one bill each month, or whatever, and download whatever they want without having to keep track of every individual piece. Micropayments break that.
They don't even work for the service providers. Now they have to account for every individual service they provide. How much do they charge for this message? For a page? For an image? What if the user browses without loading images? What if they only read half the page and demand a refund for the half they didn't read?
Ignoring all the problems with micropayments, it doesn't even provide any solutions. Will it stop piracy? No. Will it bring back the glory days of the Internet bubble? No. Will it provide services that users want they didn't have before? No.
Micropayments have all kinds of problems and offer no benefits, except to techo-cheerleaders who imagine themselves getting paid for content no one is willing to spend money on.
The biggest thing that I've noticed is that it's UNIQUE (at least to modern popular TV-centric culture)...
Not by a long shot. The notion that "reality is an illusion" has been central to many myths, stories, religions, and even popular movements for thousands of years.
It's not unique in "modern popular TV-centric culture" either. The extremely popular science fiction writer Philp K. Dick wrote a novel with this theme, Ubik, in 1969. Star Trek: The Next Generation had several episodes all take place in the artificial reality of the holodeck, and you can't get any more "popular TV-centric" than that.
It's hardly an original idea even for a major motion picture. "Open Your Eyes", "Dark City", and "The Thirteenth Floor", all used this idea earlier and better.
In fact, the sets of Dark City were so atmospheric that the Wachowskis used them unchanged in "The Matrix". How "unique" is that?
In "Dark City", when John realized that guns and bullets were only illusions, he threw them away and had to outsmart the Strangers. In "The Matrix", Neo and the agents keep blasting away at each other over and over (and over) even though they both know they can't actually kill each other.
Nothing in "The Matrix" is original. Putting the main characters in leather fetish wear was done before in "Rocky Horror Picture Show" (another geek favorite), the ki-fu and wirework comes directly from dozens of Hong Kong action pictures from the 1970s 'till now, and the synthetic camerawork came from TV commercials.
You may be mistaken because the article title clearly refers to "G5's" and not "G5s".
The possessive apostrophe indicates the poster is talking about an entity named "G5" which owns or produces the new Power5 chip. Perhaps "G5" is a previously unknown department of IBM responsible for desktop CPUs.
Many posters mention this page. In fact, I have spoken with other Java advocates who mention this page as proof the JVM is language-neutral. However, they do not mention that most of the "languages" on this page are Java interpreters or code generators, and nearly all the remainder are vapourware or proposals, not actual shipping products.
Rogers Sessions took the time to investigate every single one of the projects on the JVM languages page. He posted his results to the ObjectWatch site. After long research, he found only 8 that were actual implementations of a non-Java programming language for the JVM. Of those 8, in his opinion not one was available or suitable for professional development.
In his conclusion he states "I believe that Simon Phipps and other Sun luminaries have greatly exaggerated the degree of language neutrality supported by the Java platform".
Peter J. Leonard has written extensively about the origins of gamma ray bursts. I think he had an article in Sky & Telescope a few years back, and is in last month's Scientific American.
The best evidence indicates that short-period GRBs are created by collisons between ultra-massive objects like neutron stars or black holes.
There is less evidence for the origin of long-period GRBs, but the current theory is that they are created by the collapse of massive stars into black holes.
While there is no absolute proof of these theories, I think we have gone past the "what the hell are they?" stage in explaining GRBs.
Yes you do need to say more. You need to say why you think Chimera "wins" when the article left it unrated because it was a beta release. It was also the only browser rated "prone to crashes" and having "minimal preferences; limited support for Flash".
What the summary said is Chimera is the "browser to watch". As in, if it ever becomes reliable and supports plug-ins it will become a contender, but not until then. The summary also said Internet Explorer is "the browser to beat". IMHO this comes a lot closer to "winning" than the "browser to watch".
Think Sci-Fi TV; being able to just speak and have the computer respond to your requests.
I think Sci-Fi TV is a very poor model for UIs. Fictional computer UIs are designed to show the viewer what is going on, not to actually control any real device.
Consider the typical computer UI on television or movies; a single huge window with no widgets or chrome, where the user types extremely ambiguous commands like "Download Virus" in inch-high text.
This is what Sci-Fi TV voice UI is like. "Computer, open airlock". Which computer? I have 4 around me right now, and our sci-fi hero probably has dozens. Which airlock? Which door? What if someone's already inside it? The UIs in Sci-Fi are oversimplified to the point of absurdity.
Yes, I realize that these Sci-Fi computers have continuous, untrained, natural speech recognition with mega-AI to recognize ambiguous commands. But they will still need some kind of display to let users know the machine state. Either that, or you'll need to have a conversation just to walk through a door (shades of Hitchhiker's Guide!).
Unicode is neither. Unicode is a pure number, like 10 or 36000. Now, there are multiple encoding formats available in unicode and one of them, UTF-16, is a 16-bit encoding without endianness specified.
If you want to store unicode values in UTF-16 you're supposed to start with a Byte Order Mark (U+FEFF). This will tell you what order the encoding is in. Note that the byte-swapped BOM is U+FFFE, an illegal value, so you can tell if a UTF-16 string is in the wrong order.
In general, though, I would use a different format that does not have a byte order and not UTF-16.
Re: Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Large passenger planes are able to glide quite well. Less than a month ago a large Airbus 330 lost power over the atlantic and was able to glide for an hour, all the way to the Azores.
A CNN report of the event. I have heard of others.
Allowing multiple different "script systems" in file names is just incredibly poor design.
I don't think you understood the article. Script systems are UI-only abstractions. They allow people with different languages to type file names in their own language and have them appear correctly on each others' computers. They are not stored in file names and all file names are stored as UTF-8.
What we are talking about here is the property that, given a directory entry, there is exactly one way of referring to it.
No we are not. The original question and this discussion was specifically about file names. You know, those things users see in the GUI when they open a folder? File names.
How you interpreted "typing the name "Random" in the U.S. English script system... will match the file named "Random" typed in Romanji." as meaning they are actually stored differently baffles me, but whatever.
Whether the fact that different unicode strings can appear identical to the user is because Apple or the Unicode Consortium is "stupid" is irrelevant. They can and do appear identical. What you are suggesting is that file names which are absolutely identical to the user be stored differently in the file system, even if the user has a script system that doesn't allow them to type one of the file names. Interesting...
The decomposing should be done by the *comparing* function, not by the filename storage.
No. The reason the case insensitivity check is done by the "comparing function" and not stored in the filesystem is to preserve case but not rely on it. If your file name is "Random" it stores and displays it that way, but if you search for "RANDOM" it will still match. I know this is not the way computer geeks do it, but this is the way English-speaking people have done it for centuries.
Decomposing... depends on Unicode assignments that have not all been finalized yet.... some programs are going to rely on algorithims that do not match other programs.
Wrong. The filename decomposing is done by the filesystem; not user programs. Your program does not get to decide on the file name algorithm, and if the algorithm changes it changes for the file system and all user programs.
Again, it is irrelevant if you think I am "stupid" and a "fool" since I am not the one who decided this. If you have a better idea, let apple know. You will have to do a better job convincing them than what you have posted here.
You're right; typing a lot does not mean I know anything. Actually using the HFS+ APIs in Mac OS software does mean I know things, however. And I have used them.
Your assertions about file names and user interface are complete straw men; you are the one claiming that file names and file identifiers are identical. They are not.
If you think "Random" and " rand0m" are the same, you are wrong, they have different characters in every encoding. File names are composed of characters, not encodings, because people can type and read characters, not encodings.
And I am absolutely shocked that somebody would be so stupid as to think that matching unicode mappings is a good idea. HFS does not do this...
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but that is exactly what HFS+ does. Don't believe me? Read the docs.
I don't know what to make of your "HFS" remarks; HFS is not in OS X, has not been used for many years, and was never even mentioned before by anyone in the thread. OS X, OS 9, and 8 use HFS+ and I only ever referred to it. Do you think they are the same thing? They are not. Do you think HFS+ does not use unicode? You are wrong. Read the docs.
Perhaps you should write Apple about how "stupid" they are. I warn you, they'll require more proof than the typical/. reader.
What do you need a case sensitive FS for?... Because it means that file name equality translates into file identity.
This has not been true since the 1970s. Hard links and internal shares can make multiple file names for the exact same file. External shares can use the same filename for different files. If you think file name equality translates into file identity please post a warning label on all software you have ever written.
Even if file names were unique identifiers, this would do no good because they are not persistent; you can change a file name without changing its data, and vice-versa. File names have absolutely nothing to do with file identity.
HFS+ includes an internal File ID with does uniquely identify a file; the same file referred to by file name, symlink, or alias will have the same ID. Mounting two different files with the same name will give them two different IDs.
File names identify files to users, not computers. Users think "Random", "random", and "RANDOM" are the same name, and HFS+ thinks they are too. Users think "Random" on one CD is different from "Random" on another CD, and HFS+ thinks so too.
Are file names written in katakana and hiragana identical?
Good question! UFS thinks they are not; even if the names are character-for character identical. This means you can never, ever match a file name unless you know the script system used for every character in every file. Too bad the shell doesn't show the script system used by characters in file names.
HFS+, on the other hand, allows you to specify the script system used for filenames, and uses it when if matches files. That means typing the name "Random" in the U.S. English script system will display as "Random" when localized to Japanese, and will match the file named "Random" typed in Romanji. With your method, they are three different files, two of which can't even by typed in the other script system.
Furthermore, yes, software does rely on it.
Sadly, you are right. There is software that assumes a filename is a unique identifier. Such software cannot be localized, breaks with external filesystems, and goes into infinite loops when it encounters symbolic links.
Programmers need to let go of the assumption that file name equality translates into file identity.
Won't touch OS X until window focus can follow the mouse.
There is no way window focus will ever follow the mouse in OS X because all windows share the same menu bar.
If window focus followed the mouse it would be impossible to use menu commands on window selections; the commands would disappear as soon as you moved the mouse out of the window.
There is a Mac OS X SQL front end called Mac SQL available from RunTime Labs that includes ODBC drivers for mSQL, mySQL, and Sybase. I believe Metro Technologies has Mac OS X ODBC drivers for Oracle.
The person to ask about this is Marc Lilback; he wrote the ODBC stuff for OS X; his web site at www.lilback.com has drivers, sample code, and ports, but I believe he charges for this. Mac SQL databases are his livelihood.
I see several posters suggesting books by Feynman and Hawking. While these are no doubt excellent writers for university undergrads, the article writer specifically asked for "online articles or PDFs" giving "a good, solid foundation".
If you are looking for an on-line physics course covering the basics, with a free on-line PDF textbook, check out Light and Matter. This course starts out at square 1, describing what science and physics are, moving on to what a "measurement" is, why mathematics are useful for physics, then starts with Newtonian physics, continues through optics and electromagnetism, and to quantum mechanics.
The site also contains some astronomy texts, physics Java applets. This is an excellent site for anyone teaching physics.
Re:What does charge have to do with it?
on
The Casimir Effect
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· Score: 1
I have no idea what "how 'opaque' the plates are to the light at those frequencies" is supposed to mean; but whether the light is able to penetrate the plates or not, what most people mean by "opaque", has nothing to do with it. Charge, however, does have something to do with it.
I hope you're sitting down for this, but photons are affected by charge. Quantum mechanics says photons constantly form electron-positron pairs, which then mutually annihilate to reform the original photon. These particles are charged and are affected by surrounding charges. This is not some kind of mathematical theory; it has been verified experimentally, and is the underlying reason for the refractive index of materials.
Yes, it is a duplicate. Next time try looking at the links in the post; they are character-for-character identical. In fact, I think the earlier poster's write-up was better.
My university roommate's Betamax player had one great advantage I've never seen in another player; Beta, VHS, or DVD, It could play tapes at double speed.
No, I don't mean fast forward, nor the existing 2X speed thing with no sound. It could play regular tapes at double speed, with sound. The sound was at normal volume and pitch. People and music didn't sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, they sounded like people speaking very quickly or music played at a faster tempo. You could watch a complete 1-hour drama in 25 minutes without missing anything.
I would love to hear of a DVD player that could do that.
IE for Mac OS has only marginal Java support. Essentially, all it does is reserve a rectangle in the browser window then call Apple's MRJ Java interpreter to fill it.
In particular, what it does not support is LiveConnect; a way to exchange data between the Java interpreter, the browser, and the web site. There is no way for the browser to tell what is going on inside the Java rectangle, and no way for the Java applet inside to know anything about the browser. This is why, for example, web pages with Java applets must have a link or something saying "Don't see anything in this page? Click here!"; the applet can't tell if the browser loaded it, and the browser can't tell if the applet is working.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually not "swords", but "S words"; words that begin with the letter "S".
The answer is "Popeye is this sort of man". Remember, your question must begin with the letter "S".
Micropayments is one of those technologies, like rocket backpacks, that techno-nerds keep promoting but which never show up, and for the same reason. They're not practical.
The Teledon project back in the 1970s used micro-payments, and failed. Project Xanadu was going to be financed by micropayments and failed. Nicholas Negroponte predicted that micropayments would finance the WWW. First Virtual founded an internet bank based on micropayments and went bankrupt.
The problem is that the cost of administering any micro-payment scheme overwhelms the value of the service provided; all the money goes to the payment administrator and comparatively little goes to the content provider. Content providers hate them.
Users hate them too. They add another layer of cost and complexity to internet transactions. Users prefer to pay one bill each month, or whatever, and download whatever they want without having to keep track of every individual piece. Micropayments break that.
They don't even work for the service providers. Now they have to account for every individual service they provide. How much do they charge for this message? For a page? For an image? What if the user browses without loading images? What if they only read half the page and demand a refund for the half they didn't read?
Ignoring all the problems with micropayments, it doesn't even provide any solutions. Will it stop piracy? No. Will it bring back the glory days of the Internet bubble? No. Will it provide services that users want they didn't have before? No.
Micropayments have all kinds of problems and offer no benefits, except to techo-cheerleaders who imagine themselves getting paid for content no one is willing to spend money on.
It's not unique in "modern popular TV-centric culture" either. The extremely popular science fiction writer Philp K. Dick wrote a novel with this theme, Ubik, in 1969. Star Trek: The Next Generation had several episodes all take place in the artificial reality of the holodeck, and you can't get any more "popular TV-centric" than that.
It's hardly an original idea even for a major motion picture. "Open Your Eyes", "Dark City", and "The Thirteenth Floor", all used this idea earlier and better.
In fact, the sets of Dark City were so atmospheric that the Wachowskis used them unchanged in "The Matrix". How "unique" is that?
In "Dark City", when John realized that guns and bullets were only illusions, he threw them away and had to outsmart the Strangers. In "The Matrix", Neo and the agents keep blasting away at each other over and over (and over) even though they both know they can't actually kill each other.
Nothing in "The Matrix" is original. Putting the main characters in leather fetish wear was done before in "Rocky Horror Picture Show" (another geek favorite), the ki-fu and wirework comes directly from dozens of Hong Kong action pictures from the 1970s 'till now, and the synthetic camerawork came from TV commercials.
Oh, and the acting stank, too.
The possessive apostrophe indicates the poster is talking about an entity named "G5" which owns or produces the new Power5 chip. Perhaps "G5" is a previously unknown department of IBM responsible for desktop CPUs.
"The 3DEL pages were last modified on 23.6.2000"
While this page is interesting, it is very out of date.
Rogers Sessions took the time to investigate every single one of the projects on the JVM languages page. He posted his results to the ObjectWatch site. After long research, he found only 8 that were actual implementations of a non-Java programming language for the JVM. Of those 8, in his opinion not one was available or suitable for professional development.
In his conclusion he states "I believe that Simon Phipps and other Sun luminaries have greatly exaggerated the degree of language neutrality supported by the Java platform".
The best evidence indicates that short-period GRBs are created by collisons between ultra-massive objects like neutron stars or black holes.
There is less evidence for the origin of long-period GRBs, but the current theory is that they are created by the collapse of massive stars into black holes.
While there is no absolute proof of these theories, I think we have gone past the "what the hell are they?" stage in explaining GRBs.
What the summary said is Chimera is the "browser to watch". As in, if it ever becomes reliable and supports plug-ins it will become a contender, but not until then. The summary also said Internet Explorer is "the browser to beat". IMHO this comes a lot closer to "winning" than the "browser to watch".
Consider the typical computer UI on television or movies; a single huge window with no widgets or chrome, where the user types extremely ambiguous commands like "Download Virus" in inch-high text.
This is what Sci-Fi TV voice UI is like. "Computer, open airlock". Which computer? I have 4 around me right now, and our sci-fi hero probably has dozens. Which airlock? Which door? What if someone's already inside it? The UIs in Sci-Fi are oversimplified to the point of absurdity.
Yes, I realize that these Sci-Fi computers have continuous, untrained, natural speech recognition with mega-AI to recognize ambiguous commands. But they will still need some kind of display to let users know the machine state. Either that, or you'll need to have a conversation just to walk through a door (shades of Hitchhiker's Guide!).
If you want to store unicode values in UTF-16 you're supposed to start with a Byte Order Mark (U+FEFF). This will tell you what order the encoding is in. Note that the byte-swapped BOM is U+FFFE, an illegal value, so you can tell if a UTF-16 string is in the wrong order.
In general, though, I would use a different format that does not have a byte order and not UTF-16.
A CNN report of the event. I have heard of others.
No we are not. The original question and this discussion was specifically about file names. You know, those things users see in the GUI when they open a folder? File names.
Whether the fact that different unicode strings can appear identical to the user is because Apple or the Unicode Consortium is "stupid" is irrelevant. They can and do appear identical. What you are suggesting is that file names which are absolutely identical to the user be stored differently in the file system, even if the user has a script system that doesn't allow them to type one of the file names. Interesting...
No. The reason the case insensitivity check is done by the "comparing function" and not stored in the filesystem is to preserve case but not rely on it. If your file name is "Random" it stores and displays it that way, but if you search for "RANDOM" it will still match. I know this is not the way computer geeks do it, but this is the way English-speaking people have done it for centuries. Wrong. The filename decomposing is done by the filesystem; not user programs. Your program does not get to decide on the file name algorithm, and if the algorithm changes it changes for the file system and all user programs.Again, it is irrelevant if you think I am "stupid" and a "fool" since I am not the one who decided this. If you have a better idea, let apple know. You will have to do a better job convincing them than what you have posted here.
Your assertions about file names and user interface are complete straw men; you are the one claiming that file names and file identifiers are identical. They are not.
If you think "Random" and " rand0m" are the same, you are wrong, they have different characters in every encoding. File names are composed of characters, not encodings, because people can type and read characters, not encodings.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but that is exactly what HFS+ does. Don't believe me? Read the docs.I don't know what to make of your "HFS" remarks; HFS is not in OS X, has not been used for many years, and was never even mentioned before by anyone in the thread. OS X, OS 9, and 8 use HFS+ and I only ever referred to it. Do you think they are the same thing? They are not. Do you think HFS+ does not use unicode? You are wrong. Read the docs.
Perhaps you should write Apple about how "stupid" they are. I warn you, they'll require more proof than the typical /. reader.
Even if file names were unique identifiers, this would do no good because they are not persistent; you can change a file name without changing its data, and vice-versa. File names have absolutely nothing to do with file identity.
HFS+ includes an internal File ID with does uniquely identify a file; the same file referred to by file name, symlink, or alias will have the same ID. Mounting two different files with the same name will give them two different IDs.
File names identify files to users, not computers. Users think "Random", "random", and "RANDOM" are the same name, and HFS+ thinks they are too. Users think "Random" on one CD is different from "Random" on another CD, and HFS+ thinks so too.
Good question! UFS thinks they are not; even if the names are character-for character identical. This means you can never, ever match a file name unless you know the script system used for every character in every file. Too bad the shell doesn't show the script system used by characters in file names.HFS+, on the other hand, allows you to specify the script system used for filenames, and uses it when if matches files. That means typing the name "Random" in the U.S. English script system will display as "Random" when localized to Japanese, and will match the file named "Random" typed in Romanji. With your method, they are three different files, two of which can't even by typed in the other script system.
Sadly, you are right. There is software that assumes a filename is a unique identifier. Such software cannot be localized, breaks with external filesystems, and goes into infinite loops when it encounters symbolic links.Programmers need to let go of the assumption that file name equality translates into file identity.
There is no way window focus will ever follow the mouse in OS X because all windows share the same menu bar.
If window focus followed the mouse it would be impossible to use menu commands on window selections; the commands would disappear as soon as you moved the mouse out of the window.
Oops, they have!
Well, we all know Apple's just "embracing and extending", they don't ever submit any of their extensions to the IETF and release that code, right?
wrong, and wrong again!
The person to ask about this is Marc Lilback; he wrote the ODBC stuff for OS X; his web site at www.lilback.com has drivers, sample code, and ports, but I believe he charges for this. Mac SQL databases are his livelihood.
If you are looking for an on-line physics course covering the basics, with a free on-line PDF textbook, check out Light and Matter. This course starts out at square 1, describing what science and physics are, moving on to what a "measurement" is, why mathematics are useful for physics, then starts with Newtonian physics, continues through optics and electromagnetism, and to quantum mechanics.
The site also contains some astronomy texts, physics Java applets. This is an excellent site for anyone teaching physics.
I hope you're sitting down for this, but photons are affected by charge. Quantum mechanics says photons constantly form electron-positron pairs, which then mutually annihilate to reform the original photon. These particles are charged and are affected by surrounding charges. This is not some kind of mathematical theory; it has been verified experimentally, and is the underlying reason for the refractive index of materials.
Yes, it is a duplicate. Next time try looking at the links in the post; they are character-for-character identical. In fact, I think the earlier poster's write-up was better.
/. editors screw up.
I'm quick to blame when
I'll refrain from the obvious comment about /. editors.
My university roommate's Betamax player had one great advantage I've never seen in another player; Beta, VHS, or DVD, It could play tapes at double speed.
No, I don't mean fast forward, nor the existing 2X speed thing with no sound. It could play regular tapes at double speed, with sound. The sound was at normal volume and pitch. People and music didn't sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, they sounded like people speaking very quickly or music played at a faster tempo. You could watch a complete 1-hour drama in 25 minutes without missing anything.
I would love to hear of a DVD player that could do that.
IE for Mac OS has only marginal Java support. Essentially, all it does is reserve a rectangle in the browser window then call Apple's MRJ Java interpreter to fill it.
In particular, what it does not support is LiveConnect; a way to exchange data between the Java interpreter, the browser, and the web site. There is no way for the browser to tell what is going on inside the Java rectangle, and no way for the Java applet inside to know anything about the browser. This is why, for example, web pages with Java applets must have a link or something saying "Don't see anything in this page? Click here!"; the applet can't tell if the browser loaded it, and the browser can't tell if the applet is working.