All organisations, whether a large corporation or a federal office, eventually fall behind the times. This appears to have happened (although certainly not suddently) with the US Patent Office. A major re-structing and often a major re-thinking of the organisation's practices and direction is necessary.
The USPO needs to get with the times. They need to hire a panel of experts and outside consultants to act as the "devil's advocates" for all high-tech patent claims. This is necessary, because the USPO as it is today seems competely unable to find prior art, and this is resulting in a great number of ridiculous patent awards such as this one.
Perhaps the USPO would wake up if it washeld financially responsible? If a court throws out a new patent (based on obvious prior art) the first time that the owners of it try to use it to attack other companies (like is happening here), then that company and the USPO would share in the financial responisibity for the court costs of the defendants. That would make the USPO think twice about granting stupid patents.
Perhaps while they are at it, they should re-think the notion that patents encourage technological development. A good debate would make us feel better about whatever the outcome of it is.
A/UX or Apple UNIX was Apple computer's entry into the desktop UNIX world. It ran on their 68030 and '040 based systems, but was never ported to the PowerPC when they made the move to that CPU architechture in the early 90's.
A/UX had a nice GUI (it was from Apple after all!) which was very similar to the Macintosh GUI of the time (System 7). It had all the greatness of UNIX, including pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory, and it was even able to run most Macintosh applications without modification. Yes, you could bring up a terminal window and much around with a command line if you so pleased, but like today's Mac OS X, you never needed to. Sadly Apple only marketted it to corporate and higher-education users, so it never caught on and was forgotten.
This would be a great time for someone to sweep it up.;) *cough*OpenBeOS*cough*"
Um, yeah, except that Palm already owns "substantially all" of Be's former assets, including the BeOS. About the only thing that Be retained was the domain name and rights to file lawsuits, which they did, against MS for anti-competitive behaviour.
Lithium-Polymer technology exists and is widely used in devices like Sony's MiniDisc portables and (better) laptop computers, such as Apple's Titanium PowerBook G4 which gets a staggering 8-hour battery life. The economics of the commodity market of the Wintel universe do not allow for this level of engineering and premium battery technology, so people settle for higher power consumption and lesser batteries that run for about 3 hours.
I have heard QDesign's codecs. Quicktime uses them extensively, and they are very poor. Bad move on Apple's part.
Why has no one else mentioned Yamaha's amazing SoundVQ format (.vqf files)? It is amazing, giving better results than 128 kb/s MP3's at only 44 kb/s (1/3 the size of mp3). For links, google search for soundvq or vqf and/or yamaha.
Are you really so blind? PC's haven't been sexy for years. PC's are a commodity; there is no room left for 'sexy' in that economic equation. Only one PC product is sexy today...
Take two steps back, then walk over to the nearest Apple Store. Buy a Mac. You need to do this. You know you want to. Don't be afraid; you would be amazed at the level of support you will get from your friends after 'coming out'. Buy a Mac. Bask in its sexiness. Everything from the mouse to the case to the GUI is designed to appeal to the senses. The apps are functional without being bloated, and they are intuitively easy to use (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, etc.). When was the last time that you showed your system off to fellow computer geeks and had a 'wow' reaction? Your new G4 will get that.
Several of my long-time PC-using friends have recently joined me as new Mac users, and none have looked back.
For the record, it's silicon, not silicone. Silicon is a semiconductor; Silicone used to caulk window frames and for certain 'implants'.
The question is begged... how would a new lithography process which will enable silicon to continue to be used for another decade, make silicon obsolete? I really don't see how the original poster could have misunderstood this so grossly.
Highly doubtfull. What plattform? What version of the quicktime installer? Where are all the other reports of this problem? Why spread FUD?
In my experience, the Quicktime installer is and has been an efficient and effective download-on-demand installer, and it doesn't require users to reboot, like almost everything else in the windows world. There have never been reports of data loss resulting from it.
Sell all your Mac hardware and build yourself a (much faster) PC with commodity components
You are either misinformed or merely ignorant if you believe that any x86 based PC is faster than a G4 based Mac. Mhz means virtually nothing, but some people will never learn, I guess.
There is only one step necessary to avoid having been affected by this bug. RTFM. If users had done as instructed and removed previous versions of iTunes from their system before installation (a very good idea indeed, before installing any piece of software) then they would have been perfectly OK.
Re:GNU? "GNU" is "GNU is Not Unix" but Darwin IS
on
GNU-Darwin Goes Beta
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· Score: 1
is GNU/Darwin a paradox?
Darwin is Unix, as is its bigger brother, Mac OS X. Real Unix. BSD 4.4 (or whatever minor version is actually is). GNU means "GNU is Not Unix" (it's recursive, but that's the fun of it). So what does GNU/Darwin mean?
If you are going to post a correction, at least get the facts right!
The iPod has a 5 GB hard drive. Check out the Apple page. Also note that Fujitsu (the HD maker) only makes a 2 GB and a 5 GB version of the drive. It is also interesting that the 5 GB version has a street price of $400 - equal to that of the iPod in which it is encased!
The iPod can be used as a FireWire storage device, and songs loaded onto it (via iTunes or manually) can be copied off of it manually onto any computer. If connected to another Mac running iTunes, the songs will not be automatically sync'd as they would be on the "primary" computer. The rudimentary "copy protection" if it can even be called that, just prevents iTunes from automatically dumping the entire HD onto any Mac that it is plugged into. Also note that, although Apple doesn't tell you this, it can be used with a PC. Just plug it into your FireWire port (ok, IEEE1394 port), and dump songs onto it just like any hard drive. The files can then be manually imported as sound files through the iPod's GUI.
You can copy an entire CD worth of MP3 files (i.e. about 74 minutes worth of music) in 10 seconds, not 1 minute as stated in your "correction".
What's with all this Apple-bashing? Even this so-called correction grossly misrepresents the facts in a way that casts Apple and this amazing little (overpriced) product in a horrible light. (Copy protection my ass. Which computer maker brought DVD burning to the masses? Apple did. Long live Apple.
If you are amoung the UPN-challenged (and that includes directTV customers, dammit!), you may be able to pick up a Canadian station City TV on UHF, if you are close enough to the Canadian border.
Find the closest Canadian city using Mapquest, then use TVGrid or Canada.com to find the TV listings there, so that you know what channel number to look for.
Allow me to enter mine:
I have an SMC Barricade (8 port), and it works beautifully. In addition to all the cable/DSL firewall/Router features you could want, it also does print serving and even dial-up. It is nice to be able to fail-over to dialup when the good ol' reliable @home goes down, as it often does.
The SMC will allow port mapping to static IP's in addition to DHCP on the LAN (as the poster had wanted). In addition to that, it can be configured to block out certain IP's or networks; it can be configured to "open up" a range of incoming ports when a connection is started on a specific outgoing port from behind the firewall (good for kludging support for unsupported protocols); it can be configured to allow for ftp connections to work through the firewall on a non standard port (that kind of thing usually would break ie's ftp client, for example); it can do PPPoE out of the box (for certain DSL providers), supports hostname configuration and MAC address cloning (for certain Cable providers), supports dialup through an external modem, has a built-in print server, etc., etc... very full featured.
It works with my company's VPN (I don't know which protocol it uses, but did not work with WinRoute on a PC as a firewall). It also works with Quicktime streaming (the preffered RTTP over UDP method), which again broke with WinRoute on a PC.
In addition to all that, the unit is fairly small and unobtrusive and it does not use a power brick, instead it has a built-in power supply and takes a standard computer power cord! yeah! That's one fewer wall-wort to deal with on the power strip.
In almost any city in Canada, one can get either cable or ADSL for $40 CAN. That's about $26 USD. Actually, we have legislation in place that puts a cap on the price of high speed access at $50 ($33 USD). Cable, DSL, satellite, whatever. $50 max, and almost always $40 or less due to the competitive market. It's all good.
Acutally, power consumption is much lower with monochrome LCD displays. Note that I did not say that the LCD panel itself consumes more power, but the display as a whole does. The reason is simple: a color display has a color filter which lets through only the desired light color to each sub-pixel - Reg, Green, or Blue. Fully two thirds of the backlight's display is absorbed by this filer, necessitating a much brighter backlight just to get as bright of a display as a comparable mono display.
The affected webmasters should team up and file a class-action lawsuit against the bastards. It would save a bundle on legal fees and would probably net a positive result.
In theory, and in practice, the actual length of the "compressed" data files is equal to the length of the original files. Why? because all that happened is that a character ("5") was replaced by another character ("\D" or EOF). The tool wc obviously does not include EOF characters in its byte counts, so it does appear that the "compressed" files are smaller, in sum, than the original. In actuallity, the compressed files each have an extra byte tacked onto the end, where that "5" used to be -- an EOF character.
Does that matter? I think so.
Has Patrick, albiet perhaps unwittingly, used a "filesystem exploit" to (try to) win? Yes. The fact that the computer removes and ignores the EOF character when processing the file data is of no concern -- the EOF is there, stored in the file, regardless.
The P3 (all mobile, all FC-PGA versions, and most slot-1's) have only 256 kB of Level 2 cache, but it runs at the CPU speed (albiet with a relatively high latency). They also have only 16 kB each data and instruction for L1 cache.
The PowerPC G4 (as used in the PowerBook G4) has 1024 kB of L2 cache at 1/2 the CPU speed. They have 32 kB each data and instruction for L1 cache.
Besides the superiority in cache, the G4 has the advantage of Altivec, which, if taken advantage of, makes the chip a real screamer. Intel's SSE-2 doesn't come close. A Photoshop filter optimised for the G4 and Altivec often finishes twice as fast as the same filter optimised for the P3 and SSE-2. And that's on a G4 with half the clock speed of the P3. Obviously, clock speed means little these days.
Is it just me or does it really seem like the content providers (studios, networks, et all) are simply paranoid about piracy? It's not a non-existant issue, but compared to legit sales of product, piracy is an incredibly small issue.
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All organisations, whether a large corporation or a federal office, eventually fall behind the times. This appears to have happened (although certainly not suddently) with the US Patent Office. A major re-structing and often a major re-thinking of the organisation's practices and direction is necessary.
The USPO needs to get with the times. They need to hire a panel of experts and outside consultants to act as the "devil's advocates" for all high-tech patent claims. This is necessary, because the USPO as it is today seems competely unable to find prior art, and this is resulting in a great number of ridiculous patent awards such as this one.
Perhaps the USPO would wake up if it washeld financially responsible? If a court throws out a new patent (based on obvious prior art) the first time that the owners of it try to use it to attack other companies (like is happening here), then that company and the USPO would share in the financial responisibity for the court costs of the defendants. That would make the USPO think twice about granting stupid patents.
Perhaps while they are at it, they should re-think the notion that patents encourage technological development. A good debate would make us feel better about whatever the outcome of it is.
A/UX or Apple UNIX was Apple computer's entry into the desktop UNIX world. It ran on their 68030 and '040 based systems, but was never ported to the PowerPC when they made the move to that CPU architechture in the early 90's.
A/UX had a nice GUI (it was from Apple after all!) which was very similar to the Macintosh GUI of the time (System 7). It had all the greatness of UNIX, including pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory, and it was even able to run most Macintosh applications without modification. Yes, you could bring up a terminal window and much around with a command line if you so pleased, but like today's Mac OS X, you never needed to. Sadly Apple only marketted it to corporate and higher-education users, so it never caught on and was forgotten.
Um, yeah, except that Palm already owns "substantially all" of Be's former assets, including the BeOS. About the only thing that Be retained was the domain name and rights to file lawsuits, which they did, against MS for anti-competitive behaviour.
Lithium-Polymer technology exists and is widely used in devices like Sony's MiniDisc portables and (better) laptop computers, such as Apple's Titanium PowerBook G4 which gets a staggering 8-hour battery life. The economics of the commodity market of the Wintel universe do not allow for this level of engineering and premium battery technology, so people settle for higher power consumption and lesser batteries that run for about 3 hours.
Isn't satire protected against this type of legal action?
Reminds me of the Mastercard "Priceless" incident on the rec.humor.funny newsgroup
This codec was developed by a German student in his spare time. He was dissatisfied with the quality of MP3, so made his own better codec.
Look at the MPEGplus home page for more information.
It achieves better compression than MP3 with better sounding results.
Also check out these webpages where other people have gone through a lot of trouble to compare audio codecs: Eric Mrozek's Audio Compression Page
Radified Guide to non-MP3 Encoders for CD Audio
I have heard QDesign's codecs. Quicktime uses them extensively, and they are very poor. Bad move on Apple's part.
Why has no one else mentioned Yamaha's amazing SoundVQ format (.vqf files)? It is amazing, giving better results than 128 kb/s MP3's at only 44 kb/s (1/3 the size of mp3). For links, google search for soundvq or vqf and/or yamaha.
Are you really so blind? PC's haven't been sexy for years. PC's are a commodity; there is no room left for 'sexy' in that economic equation. Only one PC product is sexy today...
Take two steps back, then walk over to the nearest Apple Store. Buy a Mac. You need to do this. You know you want to. Don't be afraid; you would be amazed at the level of support you will get from your friends after 'coming out'. Buy a Mac. Bask in its sexiness. Everything from the mouse to the case to the GUI is designed to appeal to the senses. The apps are functional without being bloated, and they are intuitively easy to use (iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, etc.). When was the last time that you showed your system off to fellow computer geeks and had a 'wow' reaction? Your new G4 will get that.
Several of my long-time PC-using friends have recently joined me as new Mac users, and none have looked back.
For the record, it's silicon, not silicone. Silicon is a semiconductor; Silicone used to caulk window frames and for certain 'implants'.
The question is begged... how would a new lithography process which will enable silicon to continue to be used for another decade, make silicon obsolete? I really don't see how the original poster could have misunderstood this so grossly.
In my experience, the Quicktime installer is and has been an efficient and effective download-on-demand installer, and it doesn't require users to reboot, like almost everything else in the windows world. There have never been reports of data loss resulting from it.
You are either misinformed or merely ignorant if you believe that any x86 based PC is faster than a G4 based Mac. Mhz means virtually nothing, but some people will never learn, I guess.
There is only one step necessary to avoid having been affected by this bug. RTFM. If users had done as instructed and removed previous versions of iTunes from their system before installation (a very good idea indeed, before installing any piece of software) then they would have been perfectly OK.
Darwin is Unix, as is its bigger brother, Mac OS X. Real Unix. BSD 4.4 (or whatever minor version is actually is). GNU means "GNU is Not Unix" (it's recursive, but that's the fun of it). So what does GNU/Darwin mean?
The iPod has a 5 GB hard drive. Check out the Apple page. Also note that Fujitsu (the HD maker) only makes a 2 GB and a 5 GB version of the drive. It is also interesting that the 5 GB version has a street price of $400 - equal to that of the iPod in which it is encased!
The iPod can be used as a FireWire storage device, and songs loaded onto it (via iTunes or manually) can be copied off of it manually onto any computer. If connected to another Mac running iTunes, the songs will not be automatically sync'd as they would be on the "primary" computer. The rudimentary "copy protection" if it can even be called that, just prevents iTunes from automatically dumping the entire HD onto any Mac that it is plugged into. Also note that, although Apple doesn't tell you this, it can be used with a PC. Just plug it into your FireWire port (ok, IEEE1394 port), and dump songs onto it just like any hard drive. The files can then be manually imported as sound files through the iPod's GUI.
You can copy an entire CD worth of MP3 files (i.e. about 74 minutes worth of music) in 10 seconds, not 1 minute as stated in your "correction".
What's with all this Apple-bashing? Even this so-called correction grossly misrepresents the facts in a way that casts Apple and this amazing little (overpriced) product in a horrible light. (Copy protection my ass. Which computer maker brought DVD burning to the masses? Apple did. Long live Apple.
Notice the direction, softness, and darkness of the shadow cast by the "iWalk" compared to other items on the desk, such as the package of cigarettes.
It is not the same direction, not the same 'hardness' (soft edges) and not the same darkess as the other shadows.
Furthurmore, the camera flash creates a harsh bright spot on surfaces of the keyboard, but on the iWalk. Why? Because it's fake.
...just my 0.02
Find the closest Canadian city using Mapquest, then use TVGrid or Canada.com to find the TV listings there, so that you know what channel number to look for.
Allow me to enter mine:
I have an SMC Barricade (8 port), and it works beautifully. In addition to all the cable/DSL firewall/Router features you could want, it also does print serving and even dial-up. It is nice to be able to fail-over to dialup when the good ol' reliable @home goes down, as it often does.
The SMC will allow port mapping to static IP's in addition to DHCP on the LAN (as the poster had wanted). In addition to that, it can be configured to block out certain IP's or networks; it can be configured to "open up" a range of incoming ports when a connection is started on a specific outgoing port from behind the firewall (good for kludging support for unsupported protocols); it can be configured to allow for ftp connections to work through the firewall on a non standard port (that kind of thing usually would break ie's ftp client, for example); it can do PPPoE out of the box (for certain DSL providers), supports hostname configuration and MAC address cloning (for certain Cable providers), supports dialup through an external modem, has a built-in print server, etc., etc... very full featured.
It works with my company's VPN (I don't know which protocol it uses, but did not work with WinRoute on a PC as a firewall). It also works with Quicktime streaming (the preffered RTTP over UDP method), which again broke with WinRoute on a PC.
In addition to all that, the unit is fairly small and unobtrusive and it does not use a power brick, instead it has a built-in power supply and takes a standard computer power cord! yeah! That's one fewer wall-wort to deal with on the power strip.
It sure may be A great internet scam, but surely it is not the last great internet scam.
In almost any city in Canada, one can get either cable or ADSL for $40 CAN. That's about $26 USD. Actually, we have legislation in place that puts a cap on the price of high speed access at $50 ($33 USD). Cable, DSL, satellite, whatever. $50 max, and almost always $40 or less due to the competitive market. It's all good.
Acutally, power consumption is much lower with monochrome LCD displays. Note that I did not say that the LCD panel itself consumes more power, but the display as a whole does. The reason is simple: a color display has a color filter which lets through only the desired light color to each sub-pixel - Reg, Green, or Blue. Fully two thirds of the backlight's display is absorbed by this filer, necessitating a much brighter backlight just to get as bright of a display as a comparable mono display.
The affected webmasters should team up and file a class-action lawsuit against the bastards. It would save a bundle on legal fees and would probably net a positive result.
I don't know if it is required, but the telecom company that I work for pays by the day for being on call, plus wages for any call-ins that occur.
In theory, and in practice, the actual length of the "compressed" data files is equal to the length of the original files. Why? because all that happened is that a character ("5") was replaced by another character ("\D" or EOF). The tool wc obviously does not include EOF characters in its byte counts, so it does appear that the "compressed" files are smaller, in sum, than the original. In actuallity, the compressed files each have an extra byte tacked onto the end, where that "5" used to be -- an EOF character.
Does that matter? I think so.
Has Patrick, albiet perhaps unwittingly, used a "filesystem exploit" to (try to) win? Yes. The fact that the computer removes and ignores the EOF character when processing the file data is of no concern -- the EOF is there, stored in the file, regardless.
Correction on the cache sizes:
The P3 (all mobile, all FC-PGA versions, and most slot-1's) have only 256 kB of Level 2 cache, but it runs at the CPU speed (albiet with a relatively high latency). They also have only 16 kB each data and instruction for L1 cache.
The PowerPC G4 (as used in the PowerBook G4) has 1024 kB of L2 cache at 1/2 the CPU speed. They have 32 kB each data and instruction for L1 cache.
Besides the superiority in cache, the G4 has the advantage of Altivec, which, if taken advantage of, makes the chip a real screamer. Intel's SSE-2 doesn't come close. A Photoshop filter optimised for the G4 and Altivec often finishes twice as fast as the same filter optimised for the P3 and SSE-2. And that's on a G4 with half the clock speed of the P3. Obviously, clock speed means little these days.
Not true.
A person always implicitly holds a copyright to something that they create as soon as they create it.
Is it just me or does it really seem like the content providers (studios, networks, et all) are simply paranoid about piracy? It's not a non-existant issue, but compared to legit sales of product, piracy is an incredibly small issue.