What is UNIX? It has nothing to do with what kernel you use. Darwin (which runs under MacOS X) is certified as UNIX by the Open Group (which owns the UNIX trademark). Darwin is POSIX complient and you can run XWindows on it. From the prosepective of a program running in the userland, it is UNIX, and that is what matters. You could take the Linux kernel and substitute a different userland (i.e., not the GNU userland) and make an OS which would not be considered UNIX.
Heck, MacOS X is binary compatible with LinuxPPC. If you can run the same binary on Linux and MacOS X, how can you tell it is not UNIX.
The article implies that they are squeezing the downloads into "latent" portions of the DTV signal. I can only assume that this is equivelent to providing some signal in an analog TV channel by including information in the "empty space" between each frame of video. I think that is how SAP (second audio path IIRC) was added to the old analog signals.
I'm sure the DTV spec has some extra room padded into it for the sake of future growth. Some of it is probably unalocated for now and can be used if anyone cares to. If the DTV spec is ever updated to require that that "latent" region be used for something, the service will probably go away. It is really not likely to be a long term solution for anyone, but more of a stopgap measure for people who desparately need it.
Think about it:
This technology is only going to be available in urban areas
Bandwidth will drop off with distance
There is probably a limit to the amount of "latent" bandwith that can be piggybacked on anyway.
Any hey, maybe they are using Steganograpy to encode the data seamlessly into the video signal.:-)
LinuxPPC and X can live on the same disk, but not on the same partition. So you do have to partition your drive, but that is not the end of the world.
Anyway, he said UNIX, not Linux, and Darwin (the core OS under OSX, and accessible from terminal windows) is UNIX, plain and simple. It is essentially a new flavor of *BSD.
OK, but the finder will not allow the active system folder to be deleted. It is "in use", and will pop up a warning.
Also, if you haven't disabled the dialog box that asks you if you are sure you want to empty the trash, you get an extra chance to stop it. Applescript cannot override that.
Well, one of the downsides to writing a virus in AppleScript is that the language is designed to prevent you from doing anything harmful.
Example: AppleScript cannot delete or overwrite files. Any attempts to do so will only send the files to the trash. AppleScript cannot empty the trash. So the worst you could do would be send a bunch of email to people. As long as your email program requires you to confirm emails generated by scripts, that won't work either.
Besides which, under OS X, the file permissions are set so that users cannot delete anything that doesn't belong to them. Only the user folder can get hosed, which isn't good, but it's better than having to replace the whole system.
If it were possible to write a virus in AppleSript, I'd have expected to see one by now. Even with Apple's small share of the market, I would not expect one that would propegate by email, but I would have expected to see one that propegated somehow.
The fact is: Visual Basic Script was designed in such a way that it is possible to do real damage to your system. AppleScript is not.
When I read your post, I started to doubt myself. So I went and looked up the diffusivity of hydrogen in steel at room temperature. Using Fick's first law of diffusion, I was able to determine that a standard hydrogen cylinder made of steel 4mm thick at 1000PSI would leak about 1% of its hydrogen per day At that rate, it would lose nearly one third of its hydrogen in a month. That's just diffusion through the steel, not accounting for leakage out of the valve.
Of course, my estimate is probably only good to within an order of magnitude, but still. Containment of hydrogen is a concern.
it says that is not dangerous and nonflammable, etc. but hydrogen is one of the byproducts?? that sounds rather misleading.
One of the biggest problems for gaining acceptance of hydrogen as a fuel is containment of the hydrogen. Hydrogen gas will diffuse out of any container you put it in. So if you have a tank of hydrogen sitting around for a while (how long depends on the material), you will end up with an empty tank.
What makes this solution elegant is that they hydrogen is chemically locked up. As long as the NaBH4 is long lived, then you don't have to worry about it.
Also, the NaBH4 is only refined into hydrogen and borax when hydrogen is needed, so the amount of hydrogen around is relatively small at any given time.
Incidently, hydrogen is not that flamable. You need a proper combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and heat to set it burning and hydrogen dissipates very quickly. (And don't start talking about hydrogen bombs, you need a fission bomb just to ignite one of those and the hydrogen needs to be the heavier (and less common) isotopes anyway.
I'd just like to second this and add a few points. I'm writing this on a 500MHz DVD iBook right now.
The iBook is more durable than the TiBook. Remember which one is targeted at schools. The iBook has a magnesium sub-frame and a polycarbonate shell. Apple claims that this model is 3x as durable as the previous iBook (which was essentially rubber coated).
Downsides to the iBook:
No PC Card slot (not that there is much you would want to add to it now, but something might crop up down the road)
VGA out port does mirroring only.
You can't hot swap the battery. You have to shut the computer all the way down to change the battery (the battery lasts 4-5 hours, though).
A memory upgrade is a must for the iBook under OS X. I put an extra 256MB into mine as soon as possible and saw an immediate speedup under 10.0.4. 10.1 was an even bigger improvement. I also repartitioned my hard drive to create a swap partition of 500MB, which also seems to make things snappier (no fragmented swap files).
If you want a good deal, watch out for refurbs from Apple or Smalldog or a few other merchants. Most merchants these days are bundling 256MB with the iBook and they also throw in other stuff too. Apple doesn't let them lower the prices, so they bundle stuff instead. Check out dealmac.com for occational listings of good deals. Powerbook Central keeps an up to date list of bundles and availablilty from several merchants.
Apple's iPod product page says "ultra slim 5GB hard drive". I think that is perfectly clear.
As far as the copy protection goes, it is really not draconian. If you sync your iPod with iTunes, iTunes will overwrite all songs on the iPod that you don't have on your copy of iTunes. However, you can manually copy music files from the iPod to any Mac. The Register has more info. They actually got to play around with one.
It does come wrapped in plastic that says "don't steal music" in 4 languages.
PCs have access to FireWire, as does Linux. The direct connection to iTunes is the only Mac-only feature that I can see; I should hope Apple will be smart enough to enable compatability with PCs, or if not, develop a Windows version of iTunes to do the same job.
Given that this thing is essentially just a firewire hard disk with an integrated MP3 player, I think that it would be easy to use with any other platform.
My experience with iTunes tells me that iTunes stores music in nested folders of the form Artist:Album:Song.mp3. I supect that this thing just has a "Music" folder, with the MP3s stored this way. It probably has some new playlist format, but that can probably be reverse engineered (worst case scenario) if you want to be able to use that feature.
The only potential problem is that the HD is probably formatted in HFS+ format, so the system you are using would have to be able to read that.
The first time I ran into one of these sites was when I was trying to visit the web site for Nickelodeon (the kids TV network) and I misspelled it. I was using IE on a Win98 box and since every window is a separate process, you can't kill IE as a whole, so the only thing for it was to press the power button. Pretty disgusting when you think about it, because most of the people you are going to trap that way are going to be kids, and they definitely should not have been looking at the pictures that were displayed.
That does bring up the point that to some degree it is a problem with the software. At least I know on a Mac (OS9 or OSX), I could just kill the IE process and not have to forceably shut down the computer. Anybody out there know how to do this on Win98?
There are good ways to protect yourself on Paypal. One is to make sure that you only deal with people who have verified accounts. This means that they have linked a bank account to their Paypal account and (presumably) can be traced. In fact, if you pay someone for an eBay auction with Paypal AND they don't send the goods you can get up to $200 from eBay and $200 from Paypal.
Look here for up-to-date information on Paypal's fraud policy.
Osborne were the ones who announced that they would be coming out with a much better computer before they cleared their inventory of Osborne 1's. They went into Chapter 11 after that, but they did continue to make computers.
The first "PC" my family had was an Osborne Executive running CP/M with 2x5-1/4" floppy drives and 5" or so built in CRT!
Really the reason that you pay extra for sDSL over aDSL is because of the way the Telco figures that you'll use it.
The cheap rates they offer for aDSL assume you are a home user. They have a different pricing plan if you want to use that same connection to run a buisness. A typical home user is going to be downloading in short bursts from time to time. A typical web server is probably going to see near constant uploads.
The telcos probably have some sort of a stocastic model to tell them how much capacity they need at the central office so that most of their users can use most of their bandwith most of the time. That determines how big of a pipe they need from the CO to the rest of the internet.
So you could probably reverse that 768/128 connection, but the telco would just charge you the same as if you were using a 768/768 because of the type of bandwidth you'd be using. I don't believe for a second that equipment costs enter into it at all.
I'm going to step in as a materials engineer and contradict this. There is already an existing market for chips made from gallium arsenide. GaAs is used to make chips used in solid state lasers (in your CD player), LEDs, cell phones and certain high power applications. GaAs is used when silicon would simply fall apart. (Silicon does not emit light efficienly either)
These chips are made from GaAs wafers that are 3" in diameter. Current Silicon technology uses 12" wafers. Because of the difference in area, you have about 15x as much space on a state of the art silicon wafer. The reason that they don't work with bigger GaAS wafers is that
GaAs Single Crystals must be grown under extremely high pressure
It is damn near impossible to grow large GaAs single crystals without defects (specifically dislocations and twins)
So to be able to essentually turn a Si wafer into a GaAs wafer would be a godsend for GaAs processing technology.
In fact, if Motorola's claims are true, and it will cut the cost of GaAs circuitry by 90%, GaAs could start to become the material of choice for high end applications (after all, there was a brief time period when Cray was making their supercomputers with GaAs, but they just couldn't keep up with the advances in Silicon technology)
However, I will add one word of caution. There has long been a joke in Materials Science that GaAs is the material of the future, and always will be. YMMV.
There is no need to mark it as being a flame risk. The possiblity that it would catch on fire is nil. Bulk magnesium is very hard to burn because it is a very good heat conductor. If you have a lot of magnesium, it is very difficult to ignite, because it conducts heat away. and you can never get any part of it hot enough to ignite.
If you have a small piece (Like a strip that they use for chemistry demos), there is nowhere for the heat to go, so you can heat it up to the ignition point much easier.
Why do you think they had to go to Lawrence Livermore National Lab? It is not easy to generate that much heat safely.
I'll still say I find that hard to belive. That says that spinning the DVD is hardly drawing any power at all, when it is probably the biggest power hog in the system. I'll have to try it myself. I'm flying from Chicago to Boston Sunday, so I'll have a chance to give it a whack.
FWIW, every review of the iBook I've seen (and keep in mind, I love this thing) says that it gets about 2 hours playing a DVD.
I can watch two DVD movies on this, back to back, before the battery runs out.
Uh huh. I hate to say this, seeing as how I'm typing this on a brand new DVD iceBook, but that 5 hour battery life is only if you turn on all the powersave features and, unfortunatly, that does not work if you are watching a DVD. DVD viewing will give you about 2 hours of battery life before it dies. Enough for most movies, but not all, and certainly not two.
Nevertheless, most Wintel notebooks wouldn't get through one movie unless you have 2 batteries.
It is a great machine, though and I'm thrilled to death with it. OSX runs a little slow (I need to add some more RAM and get the OSX 10.1 update), but it has been rock solid.
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What is UNIX? It has nothing to do with what kernel you use. Darwin (which runs under MacOS X) is certified as UNIX by the Open Group (which owns the UNIX trademark). Darwin is POSIX complient and you can run XWindows on it. From the prosepective of a program running in the userland, it is UNIX, and that is what matters. You could take the Linux kernel and substitute a different userland (i.e., not the GNU userland) and make an OS which would not be considered UNIX.
Heck, MacOS X is binary compatible with LinuxPPC. If you can run the same binary on Linux and MacOS X, how can you tell it is not UNIX.
Go back under your bridge you troll.
I'm sure the DTV spec has some extra room padded into it for the sake of future growth. Some of it is probably unalocated for now and can be used if anyone cares to. If the DTV spec is ever updated to require that that "latent" region be used for something, the service will probably go away. It is really not likely to be a long term solution for anyone, but more of a stopgap measure for people who desparately need it.
Think about it:
Any hey, maybe they are using Steganograpy to encode the data seamlessly into the video signal. :-)
Anyway, he said UNIX, not Linux, and Darwin (the core OS under OSX, and accessible from terminal windows) is UNIX, plain and simple. It is essentially a new flavor of *BSD.
Also, if you haven't disabled the dialog box that asks you if you are sure you want to empty the trash, you get an extra chance to stop it. Applescript cannot override that.
Example: AppleScript cannot delete or overwrite files. Any attempts to do so will only send the files to the trash. AppleScript cannot empty the trash. So the worst you could do would be send a bunch of email to people. As long as your email program requires you to confirm emails generated by scripts, that won't work either.
Besides which, under OS X, the file permissions are set so that users cannot delete anything that doesn't belong to them. Only the user folder can get hosed, which isn't good, but it's better than having to replace the whole system.
If it were possible to write a virus in AppleSript, I'd have expected to see one by now. Even with Apple's small share of the market, I would not expect one that would propegate by email, but I would have expected to see one that propegated somehow.
The fact is: Visual Basic Script was designed in such a way that it is possible to do real damage to your system. AppleScript is not.
When I read your post, I started to doubt myself. So I went and looked up the diffusivity of hydrogen in steel at room temperature. Using Fick's first law of diffusion, I was able to determine that a standard hydrogen cylinder made of steel 4mm thick at 1000PSI would leak about 1% of its hydrogen per day At that rate, it would lose nearly one third of its hydrogen in a month. That's just diffusion through the steel, not accounting for leakage out of the valve.
Of course, my estimate is probably only good to within an order of magnitude, but still. Containment of hydrogen is a concern.
One of the biggest problems for gaining acceptance of hydrogen as a fuel is containment of the hydrogen. Hydrogen gas will diffuse out of any container you put it in. So if you have a tank of hydrogen sitting around for a while (how long depends on the material), you will end up with an empty tank.
What makes this solution elegant is that they hydrogen is chemically locked up. As long as the NaBH4 is long lived, then you don't have to worry about it.
Also, the NaBH4 is only refined into hydrogen and borax when hydrogen is needed, so the amount of hydrogen around is relatively small at any given time.
Incidently, hydrogen is not that flamable. You need a proper combination of hydrogen, oxygen, and heat to set it burning and hydrogen dissipates very quickly. (And don't start talking about hydrogen bombs, you need a fission bomb just to ignite one of those and the hydrogen needs to be the heavier (and less common) isotopes anyway.
The iBook is more durable than the TiBook. Remember which one is targeted at schools. The iBook has a magnesium sub-frame and a polycarbonate shell. Apple claims that this model is 3x as durable as the previous iBook (which was essentially rubber coated).
Downsides to the iBook:
A memory upgrade is a must for the iBook under OS X. I put an extra 256MB into mine as soon as possible and saw an immediate speedup under 10.0.4. 10.1 was an even bigger improvement. I also repartitioned my hard drive to create a swap partition of 500MB, which also seems to make things snappier (no fragmented swap files).
If you want a good deal, watch out for refurbs from Apple or Smalldog or a few other merchants. Most merchants these days are bundling 256MB with the iBook and they also throw in other stuff too. Apple doesn't let them lower the prices, so they bundle stuff instead. Check out dealmac.com for occational listings of good deals. Powerbook Central keeps an up to date list of bundles and availablilty from several merchants.
Sheesh. Why do you think they said it would only take one command?
As far as the copy protection goes, it is really not draconian. If you sync your iPod with iTunes, iTunes will overwrite all songs on the iPod that you don't have on your copy of iTunes. However, you can manually copy music files from the iPod to any Mac. The Register has more info. They actually got to play around with one.
It does come wrapped in plastic that says "don't steal music" in 4 languages.
Given that this thing is essentially just a firewire hard disk with an integrated MP3 player, I think that it would be easy to use with any other platform.
My experience with iTunes tells me that iTunes stores music in nested folders of the form Artist:Album:Song.mp3. I supect that this thing just has a "Music" folder, with the MP3s stored this way. It probably has some new playlist format, but that can probably be reverse engineered (worst case scenario) if you want to be able to use that feature.
The only potential problem is that the HD is probably formatted in HFS+ format, so the system you are using would have to be able to read that.
I'll have to try that, Thanks.
What is worse is that if you hit "end task", Windows trys closing the window normally first, which causes more windows to open.
The first time I ran into one of these sites was when I was trying to visit the web site for Nickelodeon (the kids TV network) and I misspelled it. I was using IE on a Win98 box and since every window is a separate process, you can't kill IE as a whole, so the only thing for it was to press the power button. Pretty disgusting when you think about it, because most of the people you are going to trap that way are going to be kids, and they definitely should not have been looking at the pictures that were displayed.
That does bring up the point that to some degree it is a problem with the software. At least I know on a Mac (OS9 or OSX), I could just kill the IE process and not have to forceably shut down the computer. Anybody out there know how to do this on Win98?
There are good ways to protect yourself on Paypal. One is to make sure that you only deal with people who have verified accounts. This means that they have linked a bank account to their Paypal account and (presumably) can be traced. In fact, if you pay someone for an eBay auction with Paypal AND they don't send the goods you can get up to $200 from eBay and $200 from Paypal.
Look here for up-to-date information on Paypal's fraud policy.
Except that the order of hostname.domainname.tld was set before the www. It was originally set that way for email.
Snail mail is addressed first to the recipent, then to the address, then to the city, state, and country.
Email addresses follow the same pattern, user@server.domain.tld, and they wouldn't make as much sense the other way around.
The Osborne Effect is a little more specific.
Osborne were the ones who announced that they would be coming out with a much better computer before they cleared their inventory of Osborne 1's. They went into Chapter 11 after that, but they did continue to make computers.
The first "PC" my family had was an Osborne Executive running CP/M with 2x5-1/4" floppy drives and 5" or so built in CRT!
Funny how much portable computers have changed.
Really the reason that you pay extra for sDSL over aDSL is because of the way the Telco figures that you'll use it.
The cheap rates they offer for aDSL assume you are a home user. They have a different pricing plan if you want to use that same connection to run a buisness. A typical home user is going to be downloading in short bursts from time to time. A typical web server is probably going to see near constant uploads.
The telcos probably have some sort of a stocastic model to tell them how much capacity they need at the central office so that most of their users can use most of their bandwith most of the time. That determines how big of a pipe they need from the CO to the rest of the internet.
So you could probably reverse that 768/128 connection, but the telco would just charge you the same as if you were using a 768/768 because of the type of bandwidth you'd be using. I don't believe for a second that equipment costs enter into it at all.
I'm going to step in as a materials engineer and contradict this. There is already an existing market for chips made from gallium arsenide. GaAs is used to make chips used in solid state lasers (in your CD player), LEDs, cell phones and certain high power applications. GaAs is used when silicon would simply fall apart. (Silicon does not emit light efficienly either)
These chips are made from GaAs wafers that are 3" in diameter. Current Silicon technology uses 12" wafers. Because of the difference in area, you have about 15x as much space on a state of the art silicon wafer. The reason that they don't work with bigger GaAS wafers is that
So to be able to essentually turn a Si wafer into a GaAs wafer would be a godsend for GaAs processing technology.
In fact, if Motorola's claims are true, and it will cut the cost of GaAs circuitry by 90%, GaAs could start to become the material of choice for high end applications (after all, there was a brief time period when Cray was making their supercomputers with GaAs, but they just couldn't keep up with the advances in Silicon technology)
However, I will add one word of caution. There has long been a joke in Materials Science that GaAs is the material of the future, and always will be. YMMV.
There is no need to mark it as being a flame risk. The possiblity that it would catch on fire is nil. Bulk magnesium is very hard to burn because it is a very good heat conductor. If you have a lot of magnesium, it is very difficult to ignite, because it conducts heat away. and you can never get any part of it hot enough to ignite.
If you have a small piece (Like a strip that they use for chemistry demos), there is nowhere for the heat to go, so you can heat it up to the ignition point much easier.
Why do you think they had to go to Lawrence Livermore National Lab? It is not easy to generate that much heat safely.
When the United States switched from two vaccines to one (I belive from MR & M 20 years ago), there was a rise in cases of Autism.
This could be deemed coincidence, but about a decade later, The UK made the same switch and also has seen a decade long rise in Autism cases.
The recomendation then would be to switch back to two vaccines, instead of one.
The iBook does have a fan. Steve Jobs mentioned this at the intro. It only turns on if it is hot out, however.
PS: I'm writing this on a brand new iceBook DVD that rocks.
OS X does not have DVD support yet either.
So no.
FWIW, every review of the iBook I've seen (and keep in mind, I love this thing) says that it gets about 2 hours playing a DVD.
Uh huh. I hate to say this, seeing as how I'm typing this on a brand new DVD iceBook, but that 5 hour battery life is only if you turn on all the powersave features and, unfortunatly, that does not work if you are watching a DVD. DVD viewing will give you about 2 hours of battery life before it dies. Enough for most movies, but not all, and certainly not two.
Nevertheless, most Wintel notebooks wouldn't get through one movie unless you have 2 batteries.
It is a great machine, though and I'm thrilled to death with it. OSX runs a little slow (I need to add some more RAM and get the OSX 10.1 update), but it has been rock solid.