If Sony/Blu-ray hadn't been throwing money at studios, Blu-ray wouldn't have had a chance.
And if Toshiba / HD DVD hadn't been throwing money at studios to back HD DVD exclusively (e.g., the Paramount / Dreamworks Animation deal), that format would have died already. So please stop pretending that this is a tactic only Sony and the Blu Ray camp have engaged in.
They introduced a player with no Internet connectivity and no good way to upgrade the firmware, and then they decide to change the "standard" after players were already out there.
Although it should be noted that the "they" you're referring to are Samsung, not Sony; your comment was kind of misleading that way, perhaps deliberately so.
Also, the "they" who changed the standard was the Blu Ray Association, and they had announced their intention to do so even when the 1.0 spec was published. So the "they" who built the player in question, and the "they" who changed the spec, are different entities, which you're conflating -- I simply can't tell if you're doing it deliberately or not. Neither of these "theys" was Sony.
Of course, this was mostly because Sony is literally orgasmic over DRM, and they had just forgotten that maybe Internet connectivity would be a good idea.
Except that, as pointed out, it was Samsung who "forgot" to include Internet connectivity on their product. The 1.0 spec made that optional, so Samsung didn't include the feature. What this may or may not have to do with DRM or Sony is pure speculation on your part, but it should be pointed out that BD+ was known to be scheduled for inclusion in the final spec from the get-go; if Samsung borked their product such that the firmware could never be updated to support BD+, then that's Samsung's fault, since BD+ is mandatory for full 1.0 compliance. But it's not as though Sony suddenly realized "hey, we want better DRM" and forced it into the spec at the last minute; the details were carefully negotiated with all the major movie studios.
More accurately, Samsung put a player out onto the market that met the demands of the (currently unfinished) Blu-ray disc standard.
Um, no, because the specification demands that all movies play on hardware that complies with version 1.0 of the spec, even if the advanced features of version 1.1 and 2.0 aren't supported by the hardware. Since the plaintiff in this case is complaining about movies that refuse to play at all, it seems clear (to me, anyway) that Samsung's player did not satisfy the demands of even version 1.0 of the Blu Ray spec.
Many of the ignorant thing that the menu system used by HD DVD is Microsoft's - which is completely false. HD DVD uses "Advanced Content" - an open standard defined by Disney & Warner Brothers. The most popular implementation is Microsoft's HDi. In other words, HDi is to Advanced Content as Internet Explorer is to HTML. HDi is one implementation, and is from Microsoft; Advanced Content is the standard, and is from Disney and Warner. HDi is the most popular, much like how IE is the dominant web browser for HTML.
And like IE did for the web, HDi is doing for HD DVD implementations -- that is to say, HDi has pretty much killed off competing implementations of Advanced Content. Case in point, both Toshiba's stand-alone HD DVD players as well as Microsoft's Xbox 360 add-on use HDi.
Personally, I think the development model required by Advanced Content is absurd -- it's basically the web development model (XML + ECMAscript, analogous to HTML + JavaScript), with lots of AJAX-y things to simulate a rich UI. That's one of the reasons I threw my support behind Blu Ray early on -- BD-J just seemed like a better idea in the long run. However, there are probably way more developers out there with a skill set adequate to do Advanced Content development vs. BD-J development, and they probably cost less to hire too.
Are you serious, or are you just trolling? Could you explain what you mean by Java not "working properly"? Java works fine for me. IntelliJ IDEA is snappy and responsive, and I can be productive under Leopard.
If you're complaining about the lack of Java 6 when Leopard first shipped, you should know that Apple has subsequently released an early access Java 6 for Leopard users -- it's a free download from ADC. (There was on older beta of Java 6 which predates Leopard, but that beta has been superseded by the newest one.) Eventually, Java 6 will be released generally for all Leopard users.
But the fact that Java had some serious problems and not even JOptionPane worked properly is why I did not pick a mac this time. JOptionPane is kind of important if you write Java based software.
Actually, Apple's Java engineers modified the behavior of JOptionPane so that it is consistent with native apps on the operating system. Apple has Human Interface guidelines which should be followed, and JOptionPane's previous behavior actually broke those. This is actually documented here (see Radar #4858198). There's more commentary here on the JOptionPane issue (which apparently all started because of an "ill informed rant" on javalobby.org which I remember reading), as well as general performance issues; the author of the Symphonious article even starts with this nugget of goodness:
The rumors of Java 5 being horribly broken beyond all usability on Leopard are, quite frankly, bullshit. It's faster, has better integration with the OS, the Aqua L&F is significantly improved, it has full support for 64 bit and a huge raft of bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements.
The goal of the Aqua L&F for Java on OS X is to insure that Java applications look as close to "native" applications as possible. If you don't like the Aqua L&F and don't care about your Swing apps looking like they belong on your Mac, you can change the L&F to something other than the default (which is Aqua on OS X). It's about one line of Swing code to set this.
As the Symphonious article points out, the rendering pipeline has changed, so if you rely on the Quartz renderer, you need to request it specifically or your GUI may suffer.
The defense attorney, William DuBois, had a weird exchange with one of the investigators which struck me as... well, very odd. Really made me wonder where he was going with this (as reported by Wired):
Defense attorney DuBois, while cross examining Brock, got into a discussion about the husband's 1988 Honda CRX, which is a hatchback. [...] Then the pair began haggling over the size of the hatchback.
"That's 23-cubic feet?"
"That's right."
"That seven feet by seven feet by seven feet?"
(No response from Brock.)
My only guess is that DuBois is trying to point out that Reiser couldn't have easily used his hatchback to transport a body, but I'm not really sure. All I know is, either DuBois is really bad with simple arithmetic, or he was making a point that sailed right over Brock's head. (Seven feet by seven feet by seven feet is 343 cubic feet. Twenty-three cubic feet, on the other hand, is a pretty tiny space. Yes, I'm sure you can cram a body into that, but it takes a bit of effort.)
The show (Journeyman) seemed to be getting around to revealing some big stuff. I assume there was a reason they kept showing us the physicist whom the protagonist has been trying to ask important questions about why this is happening, and the mechanics of it. (Still wondering about that mysterious cell phone call the protagonist got in the past from the physicist he met in the present.) I gave the show a shot because of its lead-in, and was pleasantly surprised how much I liked it.
OTOH, I am not sure what to think about Bionic Woman. I thought the new show was a clever update, but really, it seemed like a work program for Battlestar Galactica actors in some episodes. I mean, cripes, they even had snippets of BSG episodes playing on TV screens in the background in at least one episode that I can recall! Personally, I was a bit irked that they killed off one of the key characters introduced in the pilot, pretty much at the beginning of episode 2. I realize they left his fate up in the air at the end of the pilot, but the effect is very jarring for viewers of a new program. "Hey, don't get too invested in any of the characters if you watch this!" seems to be the message I'm getting.
Well, a quick glance at the OSXCrypt site reveals that these folks are aware of TrueCrypt 5.0, and they provide a brief comparison of the two:
Some little difference in TC and OSXCrypt must be taken in account:
OSXCrypt is a kernel module, and not based on MacFuse. That gives the project a really different approach.
The OSXCrypt Framework is based on the paradigm of implementing a modular kernel module that can be used with OTHER cyphers. Implementing dm-cryppt on mac, for example, is now trivially easy.
The GUI is coming even here, thanks to the efforts of a volunteer.
So the decision of which to use is probably a matter of which porting approach you find more palatable. Sounds as though they each have strengths and weaknesses, and the GUI currently only exists on TrueCrypt currently (based on my reading).
And it wasn't, until one of the programmers who made GNU/Linux viable in the first place by reverse engineering the SMB protocols, Tridge, tried to reverse engineer BitKeeper to try to create a free software version, something he had every right to do given he wasn't bound by the license.
Just one point of clarification: Tridge wasn't creating a free software version of BitKeeper, he was creating a tool to extract code out of the BitKeeper repository, thereby "freeing" the code. (In the sense that you needed to pay for a BitKeeper license to access the Linux kernel code at one point in time, which IMHO is a major problem for an OpenSource project.) It took a little bit of searching, but I found this article which confirms this version of events; more info at this blog post, and this one, plus old Slashdot coverage of Tridge's SourcePuller app.
As for Linus heaping scorn on Tridge... some of that was because Linus was good friends with Larry McVoy. Or at least, that's what got reported in the popular press.
Well, at least you got modded properly as Flamebait.
In actuality, "math" as an abbreviation of "mathematics" is older than "maths." Which would make the British version the neologism here. When you consider how Americans treat collective nouns compared to how the British treat collective nouns, this makes a lot of sense.
Math is the Amer.Eng. shortening, attested from 1890; the British preference, maths is attested from 1911.
It should also be noted that "mathematic" was the term used until the 17th century, according to this article; it was pluralized in the 17th century. It's not too tough to see that the linguistic conservatism of the North American colonists probably played a role in our use of the term "math."
I will never understand the ugly provincialism that gives some people the (mistaken) notion that their being British gives them the right to make value judgments on American English. American and British English are two different languages with a common ancestry. The etymology link I gave above was gleaned from this blog entry, in which one commenter noted:
To me, "maths vs math" isn't a big deal at all. I'm an American, and when I said "math" around my British friend the other day, he blew up, criticizing me for saying it incorrectly and being an idiot. Not cool. I'm surprised at how sensitive people are over the tiniest little things.
Not cool indeed. Talk about a sense of entitlement!
Actually, the Compact Disc was co-developed by Philips and Sony. Each of them gets the bragging rights to claim they "invented" the CD. The truth is each company had some key patents that were necessary to make the format fly, but neither did it solo.
Wish I had the mod points, but I don't... but you're dead right, it's not a pure assumption. There have been plenty of observations made to try and pin down the propagation speed of gravity. Shamelessly cribbed from an article I found on the topic:
While current observations do not yet provide a direct model-independent measurement of the speed of gravity, a test within the framework of general relativity can be made by observing the binary pulsar PSR 1913+16. The orbit of this binary system is gradually decaying, and this behavior is attributed to the loss of energy due to escaping gravitational radiation. But in any field theory, radiation is intimately related to the finite velocity of field propagation, and the orbital changes due to gravitational radiation can equivalently be viewed as damping caused by the finite propagation speed. (In the discussion above, this damping represents a failure of the "retardation" and "noncentral, velocity-dependent" effects to completely cancel.)
The rate of this damping can be computed, and one finds that it depends sensitively on the speed of gravity. The fact that gravitational damping is measured at all is a strong indication that the propagation speed of gravity is not infinite. If the calculational framework of general relativity is accepted, the damping can be used to calculate the speed, and the actual measurement confirms that the speed of gravity is equal to the speed of light to within 1%. (Measurements of at least one other binary pulsar system, PSR B1534+12, confirm this result, although so far with less precision.)
NewScientist also ran an article in 2003 about a then-new experiment to measure the speed of gravity. There's even a Wikipedia article on the topic.
If gravity WERE as slow as the speed of light, the sun would have long ago lost its planets and itself would have left the galaxy.
This is not a true statement; if it were, General Relativity would have been rejected as wrong a long time ago. That gravity waves propagate at the speed of light is fundamental to GR. There's a more technical discussion here which points out that, under most circumstances, the Newtonian and GR predictions of gravitational behavior are very close, and propagation delays are "almost" canceled out by other effects that have to be taken into account by GR. (The article also points out that, if you adjust Newton's equations to account for a propagation delay, the orbits of planets become unstable. Newton's equations just don't work that way, so you really have to change your thinking to conceptualize in GR terms.)
The equations for gravity don't have time values. That should tell us something.
Those are Newton's equations you're talking about, which describe the gravitational force. For those equations, there is no time dependency. However, Newton's equations also don't provide predictions for things like frame dragging and clocks running slower in higher gravitational fields; GR does provide predictions and explanations for these phenomena, all of which have been experimentally verified. Guess what? The relativistic equations for gravity do involve the time domain -- there's a reason why relativity introduced us to the concept of "space-time" as a single entity, after all.
There is no "separate partition or physical volume" option available to you on a Mac; Quicktime is either updated across the entire OS (and, by proxy, all installed video editing apps which use Quicktime) or it's not.
Yes, there is... it's called partitioning your hard drive, or installing a new (secondary, tertiary, etc.) hard drive, and then installing the OS on that drive. With separate partitions/volumes hosting different instances of the OS, updating QuickTime on one instance shouldn't update QuickTime on the others.
I know this might come as a shock to some users, but Macs have supported booting multiple OSes, and multiple installs of the same version (or different versions) of the same OS, for quite some time. It's even possible on a PowerPC Mac to have both the "Classic" Mac OS (Mac OS 9) and OS X on the same partition/volume, and switch booting between the two -- although that's not what's being discussed here.
Some folks might find this approach tedious, but considering how cheap hard drives are, and considering how many drive bays modern tower Macs have (at least 2 on the first gen G5s, 4 for all late-model G5s and current Mac Pros), there's no good reason not to slap an extra drive in and throw another OS install on it. If you're paranoid about the Quicktime update installer clobbering software across all OS installs, it's trivial to unmount the volume you're not currently booted from. The mounting/unmounting can be done with Disk Utility, and the startup volume is controlled through a preference pane in System Preferences. (You can also choose the startup volume at boot time by holding down Command-Option-Shift-Delete. More useful keyboard shortcuts during startup can be found here.)
Before lashing out and telling someone that they don't know what they're talking about, you might do well to first check and make sure you know what you're talking about.
Word. I was particularly interested in reading his comments about Galileo. Benedict actually tries to make the case, and props this up by quoting someone else (a scientist), that Relativity "proves" the heliocentric theory is "wrong" and merely a computational convenience, and that the geocentric theory must have been "right" all along. While it's true that Relativity forbids so-called privileged frames of reference, it does not automatically follow that the heliocentric theory of Galileo and Copernicus is somehow wrong or a mere computational convenience. It's pretty obvious to anyone with a basic grounding in physics that the sun has far greater mass than the earth, and that it therefore dominates when you're calculating orbits and gravitational coupling of bodies in the solar system.
And to think, I got pooh-poohed by teachers at a Catholic high school I attended because I made a "big deal" over the way the Church treated Galileo. Judging from Ratzinger's remarks, it's pretty clear that the forces of irrationalism are working behind the scenes to undo all the progress that has been made in the last century. (It wasn't that long ago, during the tenure of Pope John Paul II, that the Church officially apologized to Galileo.)
DMG files are disk images, so opening them only results them being mounted as a volume -- nothing inside them will be automatically executed.
Factually untrue. Many DMG images are set up to automatically mount, copy their contents to the current directory, then unmount the image and move it to the Trash. Other DMG images are set up to automatically run the OS X installer on an installer package embedded in the DMG after it auto-mounts. (For those who don't know, OS X has a standardized installer which reads a standardized package format. The packages typically have an icon that looks like a beige or orange-ish box that may be partially opened, or may be tied up with string.)
You can avoid the worst of this crap by turning off the preference in Safari which opens "safe" files after download. Of course, there's also usually a disclosure sheet attached to the Safari downloads window which asks if you really want to open this image/archive if it looks like it contains an executable.
Actually, the summary totally misquotes the article. Even the numbers are wrong. This is what the article actually said:
This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.
(Emphasis added.) This means that corn-based ethanol gives back 25% more energy than you put into it. So the summary omitted the "more" (changing the meaning of the sentence), and changed the 25 to a 24. The net result is, the summary makes the case for corn-based ethanol sound even worse than it really is.
Can you really even get SACD anymore? I would think that it would have died out and been replaced by DVD-Audio now.
Most of the audiophile labels (e.g., Chessky Records) put out SACD material now. DVD-Audio has been shown by some tests and models to be theoretically superior in sound quality (and this is still hotly contested), but in practice, many DVD-A discs contain watermarks that are actually audible -- the watermarks are intended to survive the transition into the analog domain, where they are most certainly audible to anyone with the kind of sound reproduction gear appropriate to SACD or DVD-A. Because of this, and several other issues, SACD sort of became a de facto standard in the audiophile community. (SACD has a watermark capability as well, but it's meant to prevent disc piracy -- the watermark exists purely in the digital domain.)
And unless you're an audiophile with very specific music tastes, I can't see how owning an SACD player would give you much.
That's perfectly fine, since the market for SACD material is now almost exclusively audiophiles who have very specific musical tastes. The latest pop album won't benefit from SACD in the least. Nobody buys SACD discs just because they're available in higher quality; as you yourself state, that's a stupid reason to do something. But if you really dig jazz, or orchestral, or you want to hear new life breathed into some classic studio recordings, SACD is great. I love listening to remasters of The Police in SACD.
Incidentally, most modern high-end players will handle SACD and DVD-Audio just fine. If you shop around, you can even find players that also play HDCD (which never really took off, but there are a number of albums out there in HDCD format, including Tool's Lateralus and Megadeth's Cryptic Writings which actually sound pretty darned good on the right equipment). My Denon DVD-2910 will happily play all three formats.
Considering how the DVD Forum (Consortium) has botched the promotion of every DVD-related follow-on technology after the original DVD video specification was hammered out, I don't necessarily think Sony introducing SACD was a bad thing. The industry group that brought us DVD-Audio also tried pushing HD-DVD, and here we are today with most movie studios backing Blu-Ray. People slam Blu-Ray as a Sony proprietary format, which it really isn't, but that's the meme that's stuck in everyone's head now.
So I don't necessarily think it's bad for Sony to "go its own way" and propose different standards. In the case of competing wireless USB standards, it seems obvious from the description that Sony's version is inferior in all the ways that count (maximum transmission distance, for example), and only marginally superior in one regard (bit rate). The market will very quickly converge on the technology that works best, so you'll probably only see Sony's version of "wireless USB" in Sony products. This is no different from Sony's dogged insistence on using Memory Stick instead of the industry standard SD card technology; even the Sony-Ericsson Walkman slider phone uses some micro variant of Memory Stick instead of micro-SD like every other cell phone in North America.
And without the peanut gallery comments about "what a waste of taxpayer money" (even though this particular work is IIRC privately funded), and "gee, why not give up doing astronomy and put those bright boys to work fixing the homeless problem in New Orleans?" (Paraphrasing, but seriously, that's what one comment said.)
TFA was cool, but those comments really depressed me. Sadly, most people still don't understand that their cell phone and their GPS receiver and a half million other things we take for granted are all the result of pure science research at some point. Personally, I'm in favor of understanding the structure of our universe as well as possible. Who knows what ways we might find to exploit what we learn?
Yeah, everyone knows 8*3 is 75% more than 4*1.5, just because the later one is 25% as much doesn't make the former one 75% more, and will never do...
Also why would this be that expensive considering the PS3 got 4 times as much SPE power[...]
You're assuming that number of processing cores and clock speed are the only factors involved in the performance difference, and that performance scales linearly as the product of the two numbers. Neither assumption is correct. A dual-core Intel processor is not automatically twice as fast as a single-core Intel processor of the same technology generation and clock speed. Similarly, doubling the clock speed of a CPU doesn't make it twice as fast at performing real-world operations; ultimately, you're constrained by RAM speeds and latencies, so unless your entire working set fits in the cache of your processor, you won't see that kind of scaling.
Also, the article got one factoid wrong -- the Cell processor in the PS3 might be manufactured with 8 SPEs on the die, but one of those is disabled; so there are really only 7 SPEs on the PS3 that are available to do work, of which one is (I believe) dedicated to the OS. Initially, Sony and Toshiba were worried about Cell processor yields, so they are using both fully functional chips with one SPE disabled, and marginally functional chips where one SPE didn't pass tests (and therefore was disabled).
It would be a pretty obvious application. I was working for IBM research as an intern, doing QA and beta testing on their Tangora engine for OS/2, called TangLite. The machines only had 486 processors, which weren't quite beefy enough to do the necessary calculations, so IBM fitted all the PS/2 machines with DSP microchannel cards to offload the computations. So IBM isn't averse to using this technique to boost performance, at least in-house.
Of course, when they released OS/2 with built-in speech recognition (code named Merlin, I believe), it was still essentially the TangLite engine, but running natively on the Pentium processor (which was beefy enough, barely).
Sorry, but the primary reason I destest Al Gore is his excessive resource use which he somehow thinks he absolves by buying trees. If he were truly serious about OUR environment he would cut back what he uses, not buy the right to abuse.
Funny enough, this charge was leveled at Gore during Congressional testimony. I believe it was Senator Inhofe who questioned the carbon offsets that Gore was using for his mansion.
At any rate, Al Gore was certainly sensitive to this criticism, and he actually did something about it. In about October of last year, Gore finished major renovations on the historical mansion that is his home; the story was picked up in most major news outlets, and I believe it was even mentioned here on Slashdot (sorry, don't have the link handy, but see the CNN article I just linked to). The list of improvements is staggering, and impressive when you consider the mansion is an 80-year-old structure that had to be entirely renovated to meet modern standards. So yes, Al Gore has indeed "cut back what he uses."
Buying carbon credits in the meantime was a smart strategy for him to employ; some of these improvements took years. (I can only imagine how long it took to put in the geothermal energy system, and it wasn't even fully integrated yet when the CNN article was written.)
with its "borrowed" GUI design courtesy of Xerox labs
You seem to be implying that Apple "stole" their UI from Xerox. In point of fact, they paid Xerox quite well for the license to use what they learned from PARC -- and that payment included shares of Apple stock.
Why this meme gets revived periodically is beyond me, but this assertion (that Apple stole from Xerox) is patently false. A simple Google search turns up plenty of information, including two Wikipedia articles: one on the history of the GUI, and the other about PARC itself. From the PARC article, we see:
Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because Xerox had waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired.
(Yeah, it wasn't an entirely friendly relationship between Apple and Xerox in the end, but Xerox was paid for their troubles well before any lawsuits happened.) From the GUI article, we see:
Note also that Apple was invited by PARC to view their research, and a number of PARC employees subsequently moved to Apple to work on the Lisa and Macintosh GUI. However, the Apple work extended PARC's considerably, adding manipulatable icons and a fixed menu bar and direct manipulation of objects in the file system (see Macintosh Finder) for example. A list of the improvements made by Apple to the PARC interface can be read here.
So we see that Apple's UI was, in fact, not entirely derivative of Xerox's work, but had unique elements. (Incidentally, that folklore.org link is worth checking out -- some really interesting perspective there.)
Oh my god, you idiot moderators! HOW THE [...] HELL IS THIS COMMENT TROLLING??
You're right -- it should have been modded Flamebait instead of Troll! Why? Because the comment in question ends with the following sentence:
Apple might be good for a grandma or for a graphic designer, but for a programmer it's an annoyance.
This is a direct slap in the face to all the programmers who specifically use Apple hardware and/or software (and yeah, that includes the OS) for their development work. Many could have tolerated such an expression of opinion back in the pre-OS X days, but it really doesn't track with reality today. Judging from the number of responses to the GP comment, I'd say a lot of people were dismayed by that one sentence. So yeah, it's Flamebait IMHO, and if I had the mod points, I'd moderate it as such.
Also, the moderation system doesn't work if you don't moderate. The system isn't perfect, but it does help filter out some of the noise. And sorry, but schoolyard insults and unqualified statements of opinion presented as fact aren't generally considered desirable. If you would like to share the reasons why you personally find OS X unusable as a development environment, please share them, but don't make blanket statements without justification and expect them to be modded "Insightful" or "Informative."
you can't use AAC format files on some other players, so you can't put music from iTunes on them
Minor clarification/correction: Apple's iTunes tracks are sold as AAC files, true, but the non-plus tracks (the ones that have DRM in them) are actually AAC files inside a DRM wrapper. Since it's technically illegal in the United States to circumvent the iTunes DRM (or at the very least illegal to possess or disseminate the "circumvention tools" necessary to liberate your iTunes tracks), these DRM-encrusted files won't play even on a 3rd-party player that supports AAC.
The iTunes-Plus tracks should be bog-standard AAC (though they still have personally-identifiable meta-data in them, so don't share them); such tracks should be playable on any AAC-capable player on the market. AAC is actually gaining some momentum outside Apple -- some DVD-Audio discs include AAC versions of the tracks in their data folders, and the PlayStation 3 rips CDs to its internal hard drive in AAC format by default. More portable players support AAC as an alternative to MP3 every day. This will accelerate once some of the key patents expire, but the licensing fees don't seem too bad right now.
There's nothing preventing you from changing iTunes' settings to rip your CDs into MP3 instead of AAC; those MP3 files can then be put on any portable player that supports MP3. I'm guessing, though, that when you wrote about "put[ting] music from iTunes on them," you meant tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
Nuclear power is not carbon neutral. Uranium is mined, and nobody is running mining equipment on biodiesel, nor are they transporting it to power plants using biodiesel, ethanol, or even renewable generated electricity on electric locomotives. To be sure, the amount of carbon is extremely low per kWh of electricity generated, but very small > 0, even for very small cases of very small.
Could you cite some sources for that? Because I'm pretty sure it's been shown that with reprocessing of fuel and/or breeder-type reactors, you can overcome the carbon-cost and be carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative. Seems to me the mining and refinement, while energy intensive, can be made to "pay for themselves" at least in theory. Whether that's currently true in practice is another matter entirely, but just because the United States has an aversion to reprocessing fuel doesn't mean it's not a good idea. France seems to do just fine.
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And if Toshiba / HD DVD hadn't been throwing money at studios to back HD DVD exclusively (e.g., the Paramount / Dreamworks Animation deal), that format would have died already. So please stop pretending that this is a tactic only Sony and the Blu Ray camp have engaged in.
Although it should be noted that the "they" you're referring to are Samsung, not Sony; your comment was kind of misleading that way, perhaps deliberately so.
Also, the "they" who changed the standard was the Blu Ray Association, and they had announced their intention to do so even when the 1.0 spec was published. So the "they" who built the player in question, and the "they" who changed the spec, are different entities, which you're conflating -- I simply can't tell if you're doing it deliberately or not. Neither of these "theys" was Sony.
Except that, as pointed out, it was Samsung who "forgot" to include Internet connectivity on their product. The 1.0 spec made that optional, so Samsung didn't include the feature. What this may or may not have to do with DRM or Sony is pure speculation on your part, but it should be pointed out that BD+ was known to be scheduled for inclusion in the final spec from the get-go; if Samsung borked their product such that the firmware could never be updated to support BD+, then that's Samsung's fault, since BD+ is mandatory for full 1.0 compliance. But it's not as though Sony suddenly realized "hey, we want better DRM" and forced it into the spec at the last minute; the details were carefully negotiated with all the major movie studios.
And like IE did for the web, HDi is doing for HD DVD implementations -- that is to say, HDi has pretty much killed off competing implementations of Advanced Content. Case in point, both Toshiba's stand-alone HD DVD players as well as Microsoft's Xbox 360 add-on use HDi.
Personally, I think the development model required by Advanced Content is absurd -- it's basically the web development model (XML + ECMAscript, analogous to HTML + JavaScript), with lots of AJAX-y things to simulate a rich UI. That's one of the reasons I threw my support behind Blu Ray early on -- BD-J just seemed like a better idea in the long run. However, there are probably way more developers out there with a skill set adequate to do Advanced Content development vs. BD-J development, and they probably cost less to hire too.
Are you serious, or are you just trolling? Could you explain what you mean by Java not "working properly"? Java works fine for me. IntelliJ IDEA is snappy and responsive, and I can be productive under Leopard.
If you're complaining about the lack of Java 6 when Leopard first shipped, you should know that Apple has subsequently released an early access Java 6 for Leopard users -- it's a free download from ADC. (There was on older beta of Java 6 which predates Leopard, but that beta has been superseded by the newest one.) Eventually, Java 6 will be released generally for all Leopard users.
Actually, Apple's Java engineers modified the behavior of JOptionPane so that it is consistent with native apps on the operating system. Apple has Human Interface guidelines which should be followed, and JOptionPane's previous behavior actually broke those. This is actually documented here (see Radar #4858198). There's more commentary here on the JOptionPane issue (which apparently all started because of an "ill informed rant" on javalobby.org which I remember reading), as well as general performance issues; the author of the Symphonious article even starts with this nugget of goodness: The goal of the Aqua L&F for Java on OS X is to insure that Java applications look as close to "native" applications as possible. If you don't like the Aqua L&F and don't care about your Swing apps looking like they belong on your Mac, you can change the L&F to something other than the default (which is Aqua on OS X). It's about one line of Swing code to set this.
As the Symphonious article points out, the rendering pipeline has changed, so if you rely on the Quartz renderer, you need to request it specifically or your GUI may suffer.
My only guess is that DuBois is trying to point out that Reiser couldn't have easily used his hatchback to transport a body, but I'm not really sure. All I know is, either DuBois is really bad with simple arithmetic, or he was making a point that sailed right over Brock's head. (Seven feet by seven feet by seven feet is 343 cubic feet. Twenty-three cubic feet, on the other hand, is a pretty tiny space. Yes, I'm sure you can cram a body into that, but it takes a bit of effort.)
The show (Journeyman) seemed to be getting around to revealing some big stuff. I assume there was a reason they kept showing us the physicist whom the protagonist has been trying to ask important questions about why this is happening, and the mechanics of it. (Still wondering about that mysterious cell phone call the protagonist got in the past from the physicist he met in the present.) I gave the show a shot because of its lead-in, and was pleasantly surprised how much I liked it.
OTOH, I am not sure what to think about Bionic Woman. I thought the new show was a clever update, but really, it seemed like a work program for Battlestar Galactica actors in some episodes. I mean, cripes, they even had snippets of BSG episodes playing on TV screens in the background in at least one episode that I can recall! Personally, I was a bit irked that they killed off one of the key characters introduced in the pilot, pretty much at the beginning of episode 2. I realize they left his fate up in the air at the end of the pilot, but the effect is very jarring for viewers of a new program. "Hey, don't get too invested in any of the characters if you watch this!" seems to be the message I'm getting.
So the decision of which to use is probably a matter of which porting approach you find more palatable. Sounds as though they each have strengths and weaknesses, and the GUI currently only exists on TrueCrypt currently (based on my reading).
Just one point of clarification: Tridge wasn't creating a free software version of BitKeeper, he was creating a tool to extract code out of the BitKeeper repository, thereby "freeing" the code. (In the sense that you needed to pay for a BitKeeper license to access the Linux kernel code at one point in time, which IMHO is a major problem for an OpenSource project.) It took a little bit of searching, but I found this article which confirms this version of events; more info at this blog post, and this one, plus old Slashdot coverage of Tridge's SourcePuller app.
As for Linus heaping scorn on Tridge... some of that was because Linus was good friends with Larry McVoy. Or at least, that's what got reported in the popular press.
In actuality, "math" as an abbreviation of "mathematics" is older than "maths." Which would make the British version the neologism here. When you consider how Americans treat collective nouns compared to how the British treat collective nouns, this makes a lot of sense.
See this article from the online etymology dictionary, which states:It should also be noted that "mathematic" was the term used until the 17th century, according to this article; it was pluralized in the 17th century. It's not too tough to see that the linguistic conservatism of the North American colonists probably played a role in our use of the term "math."
I will never understand the ugly provincialism that gives some people the (mistaken) notion that their being British gives them the right to make value judgments on American English. American and British English are two different languages with a common ancestry. The etymology link I gave above was gleaned from this blog entry, in which one commenter noted:Not cool indeed. Talk about a sense of entitlement!
Actually, the Compact Disc was co-developed by Philips and Sony. Each of them gets the bragging rights to claim they "invented" the CD. The truth is each company had some key patents that were necessary to make the format fly, but neither did it solo.
NewScientist also ran an article in 2003 about a then-new experiment to measure the speed of gravity. There's even a Wikipedia article on the topic.
I know this might come as a shock to some users, but Macs have supported booting multiple OSes, and multiple installs of the same version (or different versions) of the same OS, for quite some time. It's even possible on a PowerPC Mac to have both the "Classic" Mac OS (Mac OS 9) and OS X on the same partition/volume, and switch booting between the two -- although that's not what's being discussed here.
Some folks might find this approach tedious, but considering how cheap hard drives are, and considering how many drive bays modern tower Macs have (at least 2 on the first gen G5s, 4 for all late-model G5s and current Mac Pros), there's no good reason not to slap an extra drive in and throw another OS install on it. If you're paranoid about the Quicktime update installer clobbering software across all OS installs, it's trivial to unmount the volume you're not currently booted from. The mounting/unmounting can be done with Disk Utility, and the startup volume is controlled through a preference pane in System Preferences. (You can also choose the startup volume at boot time by holding down Command-Option-Shift-Delete. More useful keyboard shortcuts during startup can be found here.)
Before lashing out and telling someone that they don't know what they're talking about, you might do well to first check and make sure you know what you're talking about.
And to think, I got pooh-poohed by teachers at a Catholic high school I attended because I made a "big deal" over the way the Church treated Galileo. Judging from Ratzinger's remarks, it's pretty clear that the forces of irrationalism are working behind the scenes to undo all the progress that has been made in the last century. (It wasn't that long ago, during the tenure of Pope John Paul II, that the Church officially apologized to Galileo.)
You can avoid the worst of this crap by turning off the preference in Safari which opens "safe" files after download. Of course, there's also usually a disclosure sheet attached to the Safari downloads window which asks if you really want to open this image/archive if it looks like it contains an executable.
Incidentally, most modern high-end players will handle SACD and DVD-Audio just fine. If you shop around, you can even find players that also play HDCD (which never really took off, but there are a number of albums out there in HDCD format, including Tool's Lateralus and Megadeth's Cryptic Writings which actually sound pretty darned good on the right equipment). My Denon DVD-2910 will happily play all three formats.
Considering how the DVD Forum (Consortium) has botched the promotion of every DVD-related follow-on technology after the original DVD video specification was hammered out, I don't necessarily think Sony introducing SACD was a bad thing. The industry group that brought us DVD-Audio also tried pushing HD-DVD, and here we are today with most movie studios backing Blu-Ray. People slam Blu-Ray as a Sony proprietary format, which it really isn't, but that's the meme that's stuck in everyone's head now.
So I don't necessarily think it's bad for Sony to "go its own way" and propose different standards. In the case of competing wireless USB standards, it seems obvious from the description that Sony's version is inferior in all the ways that count (maximum transmission distance, for example), and only marginally superior in one regard (bit rate). The market will very quickly converge on the technology that works best, so you'll probably only see Sony's version of "wireless USB" in Sony products. This is no different from Sony's dogged insistence on using Memory Stick instead of the industry standard SD card technology; even the Sony-Ericsson Walkman slider phone uses some micro variant of Memory Stick instead of micro-SD like every other cell phone in North America.
And without the peanut gallery comments about "what a waste of taxpayer money" (even though this particular work is IIRC privately funded), and "gee, why not give up doing astronomy and put those bright boys to work fixing the homeless problem in New Orleans?" (Paraphrasing, but seriously, that's what one comment said.)
TFA was cool, but those comments really depressed me. Sadly, most people still don't understand that their cell phone and their GPS receiver and a half million other things we take for granted are all the result of pure science research at some point. Personally, I'm in favor of understanding the structure of our universe as well as possible. Who knows what ways we might find to exploit what we learn?
You're assuming that number of processing cores and clock speed are the only factors involved in the performance difference, and that performance scales linearly as the product of the two numbers. Neither assumption is correct. A dual-core Intel processor is not automatically twice as fast as a single-core Intel processor of the same technology generation and clock speed. Similarly, doubling the clock speed of a CPU doesn't make it twice as fast at performing real-world operations; ultimately, you're constrained by RAM speeds and latencies, so unless your entire working set fits in the cache of your processor, you won't see that kind of scaling.
Also, the article got one factoid wrong -- the Cell processor in the PS3 might be manufactured with 8 SPEs on the die, but one of those is disabled; so there are really only 7 SPEs on the PS3 that are available to do work, of which one is (I believe) dedicated to the OS. Initially, Sony and Toshiba were worried about Cell processor yields, so they are using both fully functional chips with one SPE disabled, and marginally functional chips where one SPE didn't pass tests (and therefore was disabled).
It would be a pretty obvious application. I was working for IBM research as an intern, doing QA and beta testing on their Tangora engine for OS/2, called TangLite. The machines only had 486 processors, which weren't quite beefy enough to do the necessary calculations, so IBM fitted all the PS/2 machines with DSP microchannel cards to offload the computations. So IBM isn't averse to using this technique to boost performance, at least in-house.
Of course, when they released OS/2 with built-in speech recognition (code named Merlin, I believe), it was still essentially the TangLite engine, but running natively on the Pentium processor (which was beefy enough, barely).
At any rate, Al Gore was certainly sensitive to this criticism, and he actually did something about it. In about October of last year, Gore finished major renovations on the historical mansion that is his home; the story was picked up in most major news outlets, and I believe it was even mentioned here on Slashdot (sorry, don't have the link handy, but see the CNN article I just linked to). The list of improvements is staggering, and impressive when you consider the mansion is an 80-year-old structure that had to be entirely renovated to meet modern standards. So yes, Al Gore has indeed "cut back what he uses."
Buying carbon credits in the meantime was a smart strategy for him to employ; some of these improvements took years. (I can only imagine how long it took to put in the geothermal energy system, and it wasn't even fully integrated yet when the CNN article was written.)
Why this meme gets revived periodically is beyond me, but this assertion (that Apple stole from Xerox) is patently false. A simple Google search turns up plenty of information, including two Wikipedia articles: one on the history of the GUI, and the other about PARC itself. From the PARC article, we see:(Yeah, it wasn't an entirely friendly relationship between Apple and Xerox in the end, but Xerox was paid for their troubles well before any lawsuits happened.) From the GUI article, we see:So we see that Apple's UI was, in fact, not entirely derivative of Xerox's work, but had unique elements. (Incidentally, that folklore.org link is worth checking out -- some really interesting perspective there.)
Also, the moderation system doesn't work if you don't moderate. The system isn't perfect, but it does help filter out some of the noise. And sorry, but schoolyard insults and unqualified statements of opinion presented as fact aren't generally considered desirable. If you would like to share the reasons why you personally find OS X unusable as a development environment, please share them, but don't make blanket statements without justification and expect them to be modded "Insightful" or "Informative."
Minor clarification/correction: Apple's iTunes tracks are sold as AAC files, true, but the non-plus tracks (the ones that have DRM in them) are actually AAC files inside a DRM wrapper. Since it's technically illegal in the United States to circumvent the iTunes DRM (or at the very least illegal to possess or disseminate the "circumvention tools" necessary to liberate your iTunes tracks), these DRM-encrusted files won't play even on a 3rd-party player that supports AAC.
The iTunes-Plus tracks should be bog-standard AAC (though they still have personally-identifiable meta-data in them, so don't share them); such tracks should be playable on any AAC-capable player on the market. AAC is actually gaining some momentum outside Apple -- some DVD-Audio discs include AAC versions of the tracks in their data folders, and the PlayStation 3 rips CDs to its internal hard drive in AAC format by default. More portable players support AAC as an alternative to MP3 every day. This will accelerate once some of the key patents expire, but the licensing fees don't seem too bad right now.
There's nothing preventing you from changing iTunes' settings to rip your CDs into MP3 instead of AAC; those MP3 files can then be put on any portable player that supports MP3. I'm guessing, though, that when you wrote about "put[ting] music from iTunes on them," you meant tracks purchased from the iTunes Music Store.