It seems to me that if you're selling more of something that you can make, at your current prices, you'd be stupid to cut them in order to make them more competitive.
You only need all the extra stuff if you're doing live broadcasting. You don't need a $2000 video digitizing card; if you have a Firewire camcorder, you just need a $15 Firewire card (assuming you don't already have Firewire; a lot of hardware does these days, including everything from Apple). As for the rest, Apple has its own broadcasting program ready to ship as soon as the MPEG-4 licensing people come to their senses, so soon you won't need Sorenson Broadcaster or the Sorenson 3 Pro encoder. Apple's program will be free, but probably Mac-only. Still, it's going to be cheaper to buy a G4 to do your live digitizing than to pay the Real server tax.
Darwin Streaming Server can stream standard MPEG-4. Not much can actually be used to view such a stream, of course. Not even QuickTime; as has been mentioned on Slashdot, Apple is refusing to ship QuickTime 6 (which has full MPEG-4 support) until the MPEG-4 licensing people come to their senses.
Re:Why the hell would you run it under Classic?
on
MacPerl 5.6.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Are you familiar with AppleScript Studio? The basic idea is that you can use InterfaceBuilder and ProjectBuilder (Apple's free developer tools) to create fully-fledged applications using just AppleScript, and you can easily combine AppleScript and Objective-C in Cocoa applications. It's rumored that Apple also has a "Perl Studio", but it's unclear if it'll ever get publicly released or if it's just something that some folks at Apple thought might be fun to play around with.
Personally, I'd love to see it released. I quite like Objective-C, but for small apps were performance isn't critical, it's often just too much trouble. AppleScript is nice, but it isn't nearly as powerful as Perl, and it has much lower performance. Perl would fill the gap between Objective-C and AppleScript perfectly, allowing people to develop fairly serious apps quickly and easily.
So use general purpose devices. Another 10 years of PDA evolution and you'll be able to do this all in software, on top of standard PDA hardware. They can declare the software illegal, but how effective has that sort of thing ever been and stopping distribution?
The effects this sort of thing will have on the media industry really do worry me. Sure, it would be nice to cut the big media companies out of the loop. But will people really pay the artists? And what about movies, where it's not hard to spend $100 filming? Who will pay for that?
Evolution doesn't really take place in individuals. It takes place in populations. In small, isolated populations, beneficial mutations can spread quickly through the gene pool. In large populations, they tend to get lost in the noise.
A beanstalk needs to be anchored in geostationary orbit. There's no such thing as a geostationary orbit around a body that doesn't rotate on its own axis. So no, you can't build a space elevator on a tidally locked world. And it would be really impractical on worlds that rotate very slowly, like Mercury; you'd need an absurdly long cable.
10 milliseconds? I see more like 0.6 milliseconds pinging across a 100 Mb switch here. And G4s have gigabit ethernet, which gives you a hell of a lot more bandwidth than a parallel port.
Centris machines aren't going to be too useful, but there's no reason to just use old hardware. A lab full of G4s by day can turn into a pretty serious cluster by night.
I expect by the time we have useful interstellar travel, we will have reached the point that raw materials and construction are essentially free. Building space habitats is cheap with the right tech. All you do is set a few self-replicating robots loose in an asteroid belt. Of course, teraforming planets is cheap too, with that kind of tech (plus the sort of biotech we'd probably have by then), but it still takes a really long time.
Maybe if the planet is earth-like enough that you can just land, go outside in your T-shirt, pitch a tent and stay the night, it'll get colonized. But there isn't much point if you have to do any serious work, like, say, replacing a reducing atmosphere or getting more water from somewhere.
Titanium is under $3.50/pound (about 5 times the price of aluminum, for comparison). You'd have to get hit with a hell of a lot of it to pay any decent medical bill.
.NET isn't just a new development platform. It's a delivery vehicle (to use the cigarette industry's term) for subscription-based web services. What is open source's answer to this? All Mono does is provide a way for Microsoft to sell its services to non-Windows users. While the open source community worries about building a free telephone, Microsoft is setting itself up to own the phone network.
Amen to that! The success of the BSDs, XFree86, and especially Apache (which, with 60% of the web server market, is open source's biggest success to date) demonstrates that it simply isn't necessary to enforce software freedom at the expense of developer freedom.
I don't like it
on
Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The thing I've always really liked about the BSDs is that they're complete and separate systems that include everything from the kernel to the userland tools, all integrated by one team. Compare with the Linux world, where you have a bunch of different distros that many people pretend are all the same OS (in spite of the fact that file systems are arranged differently, boot sequences are different, configuration is different, package management is different, userland tools are often different, etc.) because they happen to use the same kernel. The BSD way has always seemed a lot cleaner to me. The idea of seeing a myriad of distros based on the BSD kernels really isn't one that I like. I believe it's a step in exactly the wrong direction. Open source Unix needs more standardization, not more fragmentation.
There are also.htmld bundles in OS X. An OS X bundle is really a directory (that shows up as a single file in the file manager), so.htmld bundles are fully backwards compatible, since browsers just see a directory with HTML files and images in it.
You don't need to license PDF from Adobe. It's an open standard. This is one of the reasons why OS X has a shiny new PDF-based graphics engine, instead of continuing to use the Display PostScript engine from NeXTStep.
All that RAM in the iPod isn't really for skip protection. It's so that the hard drive can be spun down most of the time. That saves a ton of battery power, and vastly reduces the chances of the device getting damaged in a shock. If Apple has done things cleverly, I'd be surprised if the drive had to be spun up for more than a minute every hour (assuming you're just playing through a playlist, so the device knows what songs are coming up and can read ahead to load as many songs as will fit in RAM).
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that if you're selling more of something that you can make, at your current prices, you'd be stupid to cut them in order to make them more competitive.
You only need all the extra stuff if you're doing live broadcasting. You don't need a $2000 video digitizing card; if you have a Firewire camcorder, you just need a $15 Firewire card (assuming you don't already have Firewire; a lot of hardware does these days, including everything from Apple). As for the rest, Apple has its own broadcasting program ready to ship as soon as the MPEG-4 licensing people come to their senses, so soon you won't need Sorenson Broadcaster or the Sorenson 3 Pro encoder. Apple's program will be free, but probably Mac-only. Still, it's going to be cheaper to buy a G4 to do your live digitizing than to pay the Real server tax.
Darwin Streaming Server can stream standard MPEG-4. Not much can actually be used to view such a stream, of course. Not even QuickTime; as has been mentioned on Slashdot, Apple is refusing to ship QuickTime 6 (which has full MPEG-4 support) until the MPEG-4 licensing people come to their senses.
Are you familiar with AppleScript Studio? The basic idea is that you can use InterfaceBuilder and ProjectBuilder (Apple's free developer tools) to create fully-fledged applications using just AppleScript, and you can easily combine AppleScript and Objective-C in Cocoa applications. It's rumored that Apple also has a "Perl Studio", but it's unclear if it'll ever get publicly released or if it's just something that some folks at Apple thought might be fun to play around with.
Personally, I'd love to see it released. I quite like Objective-C, but for small apps were performance isn't critical, it's often just too much trouble. AppleScript is nice, but it isn't nearly as powerful as Perl, and it has much lower performance. Perl would fill the gap between Objective-C and AppleScript perfectly, allowing people to develop fairly serious apps quickly and easily.
So use general purpose devices. Another 10 years of PDA evolution and you'll be able to do this all in software, on top of standard PDA hardware. They can declare the software illegal, but how effective has that sort of thing ever been and stopping distribution?
The effects this sort of thing will have on the media industry really do worry me. Sure, it would be nice to cut the big media companies out of the loop. But will people really pay the artists? And what about movies, where it's not hard to spend $100 filming? Who will pay for that?
Evolution doesn't really take place in individuals. It takes place in populations. In small, isolated populations, beneficial mutations can spread quickly through the gene pool. In large populations, they tend to get lost in the noise.
That doesn't help; it means that a geostationary lunar orbit would intersect with the Earth. Minor problem, that.
A beanstalk needs to be anchored in geostationary orbit. There's no such thing as a geostationary orbit around a body that doesn't rotate on its own axis. So no, you can't build a space elevator on a tidally locked world. And it would be really impractical on worlds that rotate very slowly, like Mercury; you'd need an absurdly long cable.
10 milliseconds? I see more like 0.6 milliseconds pinging across a 100 Mb switch here. And G4s have gigabit ethernet, which gives you a hell of a lot more bandwidth than a parallel port.
Here is an open source (LGPL) XML-RPC framework that advertises itself as a drop-in replacement for Cocoa's NSConnection object.
Zilla isn't back, but Pooch isn't the only OS X clustering product.
And here's the documentation for using distributed objects in Cocoa.
Centris machines aren't going to be too useful, but there's no reason to just use old hardware. A lab full of G4s by day can turn into a pretty serious cluster by night.
I expect by the time we have useful interstellar travel, we will have reached the point that raw materials and construction are essentially free. Building space habitats is cheap with the right tech. All you do is set a few self-replicating robots loose in an asteroid belt. Of course, teraforming planets is cheap too, with that kind of tech (plus the sort of biotech we'd probably have by then), but it still takes a really long time.
Maybe if the planet is earth-like enough that you can just land, go outside in your T-shirt, pitch a tent and stay the night, it'll get colonized. But there isn't much point if you have to do any serious work, like, say, replacing a reducing atmosphere or getting more water from somewhere.
Titanium is under $3.50/pound (about 5 times the price of aluminum, for comparison). You'd have to get hit with a hell of a lot of it to pay any decent medical bill.
.NET isn't just a new development platform. It's a delivery vehicle (to use the cigarette industry's term) for subscription-based web services. What is open source's answer to this? All Mono does is provide a way for Microsoft to sell its services to non-Windows users. While the open source community worries about building a free telephone, Microsoft is setting itself up to own the phone network.
Amen to that! The success of the BSDs, XFree86, and especially Apache (which, with 60% of the web server market, is open source's biggest success to date) demonstrates that it simply isn't necessary to enforce software freedom at the expense of developer freedom.
The thing I've always really liked about the BSDs is that they're complete and separate systems that include everything from the kernel to the userland tools, all integrated by one team. Compare with the Linux world, where you have a bunch of different distros that many people pretend are all the same OS (in spite of the fact that file systems are arranged differently, boot sequences are different, configuration is different, package management is different, userland tools are often different, etc.) because they happen to use the same kernel. The BSD way has always seemed a lot cleaner to me. The idea of seeing a myriad of distros based on the BSD kernels really isn't one that I like. I believe it's a step in exactly the wrong direction. Open source Unix needs more standardization, not more fragmentation.
There are also .htmld bundles in OS X. An OS X bundle is really a directory (that shows up as a single file in the file manager), so .htmld bundles are fully backwards compatible, since browsers just see a directory with HTML files and images in it.
You don't need to license PDF from Adobe. It's an open standard. This is one of the reasons why OS X has a shiny new PDF-based graphics engine, instead of continuing to use the Display PostScript engine from NeXTStep.
"Finally?" NeXTStep's Display PostScript closed this gap 13 years ago.
Steve Jobs is going to be really pissed! Especially with MacWorld Expo coming up next week.
And what if you go to a Ford dealership and picket just outside of their property with a "Ford Sucks!" sign? Should they be able to sue you?
Or get an iPod. I think it has the same mechanism as that drive, and the extra $100 for the built-in MP3 player seems like a good deal to me.
All that RAM in the iPod isn't really for skip protection. It's so that the hard drive can be spun down most of the time. That saves a ton of battery power, and vastly reduces the chances of the device getting damaged in a shock. If Apple has done things cleverly, I'd be surprised if the drive had to be spun up for more than a minute every hour (assuming you're just playing through a playlist, so the device knows what songs are coming up and can read ahead to load as many songs as will fit in RAM).
I'm betting that whatever method it uses to transfer files from the computer isn't nearly as slick as the iPod's iTunes syncing.