Intrestingly enough, it looks like this update blocks ALL versions of files saved by Word for the Mac. It even blocks the most current version of Word for the Mac, Word 2004 for Mac.
I'm shocked that nobody else checked TFA to verify your claims; even more shocked that you got modded +5 Informative when your comments are actually factually false.
Double-click the FilesBeforeVersion registry entry, and then type the value in the Value data box that corresponds to one of the values in the following table.
For example, the default value of this entry is set to "Word 6.0 for Windows" or "101." This setting means that all Word documents that were created in Word 1.x for Windows through Word 2.x for Windows Taiwan are blocked from opening. You can increase or decrease the default version. The versions that are specified in the list are in ascending order.
(Emphasis added by me.) Now, if you look at the provided handy table of values, you see that the two versions of MS Word for Mac that are directly compatible with OS X, registry values 195 and 268 (for Word X for Mac, and Word 2004 for Mac, respectively) are below the default cut-off on the table. In fact, even Word 98 for the Mac (which can only run on OS X in Classic) falls below the cut-off on the table. Only products with corresponding values from the table numerically below 101 (those appearing above the cut-off line in the table) will be blocked.
Since Office 2004 for Mac is still a supported product, it would be insane for Microsoft to block its files from being loaded in the Windows version of Office. I admit these instructions are confusing, but the KBase article clearly does not say what you claim it is saying.
Incidentally, according to the table and the above quoted text, the only Mac Word document formats that are blocked by default in this service pack are the following:
Word 4.x for Macintosh
Word 5.x for Macintosh
And that's it. Even Word 6 for Mac isn't blocked, because it falls after the magic cut-off.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, reverse engineering for compatibility purposes is legal.
Totally legal in the United States. In other jurisdictions, the law is not so clear-cut. In Europe, the right to reverse engineer is not sacrosanct. Then again, Europe doesn't (yet) have software patents.
Standard IANAL disclaimers apply, of course, but I've worked for several companies that relied on reverse engineering precisely for the purpose of compatibility with undocumented file formats. In one such company, I was informed by management (after advice from legal counsel) that it was actually legal not only to reverse engineer the file format, but it was even legal to reverse engineer / decompile the code for the application that generated the files in order to see how they were written -- the caveat being, you could only reverse engineer the code to insure compatibility, not to plagiarize it. (Usually you do a clean room reverse engineering process to insure that the people who reverse engineer the code write a clean spec that the people who write your code then use. The people doing the reverse engineering shouldn't be writing code based on that process, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.) Of course, that particular employer's policy was to not reverse engineer the code of the applications themselves, only the files they wrote, but if we had the resources and we needed to, we could reverse engineer just about anything we wanted.
The legal climate in the U.S. was shaped in part by the outcome of a case where IBM sued Compaq for reverse engineering the BIOS of the IBM PC. Clearly, Compaq prevailed, and the clone PC market was born.
Microsoft have many political reasons to dislike Java, but BD-J being a messy, ill-specced pile of slowness in comparison to iHD is a valid technical one.
This is actually the first time I've seen anyone claim that BD-J is poorly specified or slow. Could you provide some references to support that contention?
I can't speak to the speed of BD-J, though clearly this smacks of the "Java is slow" FUD that Java proponents have been dealing with for years now. Java VMs aren't really "slow" anymore, unless you're dealing with memory-constrained devices. Most Blu-Ray players are going to have plenty enough RAM, so I don't think constrained memory footprint is going to be an issue.
As for the "ill-specced" claim, I'm puzzled. I know that BD-J is based on an already existing standard for embedding interactive Java content in terrestrial television broadcasts and European cable transmissions; this technology is used, for example, in the German version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" (or maybe it was "Deal or No Deal") -- it allows viewers to play along at home using their remote control. BD-J is just an extension of this already existing and deployed standard, so how is it poorly specified?
I attended JavaOne in 2006, and attended a couple sessions on BD-J and related technologies, so that's where I got my information from.
This has already been addressed elsewhere multiple times, but...
First, there is a "Java release 6" available for OS X which is not Java 6, it's a sixth release of Java 5 for Tiger. If you carefully read the blurb on Apple's developer site, it does say that it is in fact a newer release of JDK 1.5, not JDK 1.6 (aka Java 6).
Second, Apple made a beta of Java 6 available long before Leopard came out. The early access release of Java 6 coincided roughly with JavaOne 2006; I actually attended the BOF session with Apple's Java engineers, where they demoed it. This beta was yanked from Apple's developer site over a month before Leopard was released. (Sorry, I don't know how long exactly before Leopard's release the download was pulled -- I just know that, when I went to look for it around the same time that I was looking to purchase an Intel Mac, the download was missing.)
First off, I wanted to point out that the Anonymous Coward you're responding to is not me. I never would have used the word "idiot." Also, for the record, I was not responding to formatting of any kind. I was responding to your choice of words and to your mangled metaphor.
That said... it is unwarranted to blindly assume someone has autism, Asperger's, or any other sort of disorder. It's even worse that you tar all such people with the brush of mediocrity and small-mindedness.
You proceed from the false assumption that someone is trying to impress you. This may come across as harsh, but... you're not someone worthy of impressing. I was merely trying to help you out, since you seem to have trouble communicating effectively. That, and I happen to love my language, and my cultural heritage, though you seem to have respect for neither. So, what we have here is an impasse -- you refuse to change your ways, and people like me are not going to stop critiquing you. Either you learn to develop thicker skin, or learn better communication skills. Complaining, however, is highly unlikely to stop all of us. In fact, it might even make you a bigger target. I certainly have no intention of "changing my ways" because, well, I happen to have a fetish for saying what I mean and respecting my ancestors. (Yeah, I have Greek ancestry.)
I can forgive lack of capitalization and poor punctuation. I can forgive a lot of things. But using the wrong word crosses a threshold for me, and mangled metaphors just put your post over the top. So, that's why I responded. It's not a personal attack on you.
He didn't port basic. He wrote a Basic interpreter for the 8080!
With liberal help from looking at source code dumps from a BASIC interpreter for a TOPS-20 system, according to some insider sources I have spoken to... one of whom actually has a printout of Microsoft's source code for their BASIC interpreter, their claim to fame.
The source with the printout claims that some non-Microsoft copyrights are still visible in source comments, although I personally find this surprising. Nobody doubts that there were some clever hacks employed to squeeze everything into 4K of RAM, hacks that wouldn't be necessary on a TOPS-20 system. But Gates et. al. didn't start from scratch, that much is certain. So I'm not sure it's incorrect to talk about "porting" BASIC to the 8080. It's a kinder word to use than "plagiarized."
By that definition, my operating system is in violation of the law whenever it scans for an available network and presents it to me for connection.
The key word here is "knowingly." That's the weasel word that lets computer-illiterate users off the hook.
I've written about it previously on Slashdot, but I ran into a similar problem when I was doing some consulting work at a corporate office complex in Scottsdale, AZ. One of the other renters in the complex was Honeywell, and one of their employees connected a wireless access point without permission to the corporate network. Since the access point was unsecured, anyone could connect to it -- and I unwittingly did so when I woke my iBook from sleep. Of course, after that point, I then (wrongly) assumed that the access point was set up by Honeywell as a convenience for visitors, something set up in a network DMZ. In fact, I could have accessed anything on their private network.
Honeywell only discovered my "intrusion" because I blogged about my surprise at the free network access. Months after the fact, they tried to pressure my consulting company into firing me (since Honeywell was one of the consulting company's biggest clients, even though I wasn't doing any consulting for Honeywell at the time; the client I was working for just happened to be located in the same building as a Honeywell satellite office). Luckily, the client I was working for said that if my consulting firm fired me, they'd just hire me direct. That, plus assurances from me that I had no intention of hacking into Honeywell's network (and allowing Honeywell's technicians to image my iBook's hard drive), saved me a lot of grief.
It should be noted, however, that nowhere did anyone mention prosecuting me for network trespass. I'm sure this is partly because Honeywell would then have to divulge the circumstances of their network security hole, which might cost them some federal dollars (since they do a lot of work for the U.S. Government); having that kind of embarrassing information made public in a court case would have been bad for them in any event. But moreso, I consulted with my lawyer and found that it's not clear either Honeywell or the state of Arizona could have gone after me, and if they did, they might not have won. This is especially true since the default behavior of the Airport wireless stack is to try to connect to unsecured access points if available. The same is true of the wireless software that ships on many notebooks -- I had a recent experience with an Acer notebook that was set up by the manufacturer to automatically connect to unsecured networks unless a secured network was configured and made a higher priority. The damn thing actually connected to my neighbor's access point instead of mine, since I run mine with WEP and require a password to connect. (This appeared to be behavior specific to some of the third-party software Acer preloaded on the laptop; I don't think this was purely Vista's fault.)
The California statute as cited might be difficult to enforce in the case of unsecured wireless access points, especially with a proliferation of free access points provided by various businesses. And it seems that someone could defend himself easily enough by pointing out that the software that shipped on his computer did the dirty deed without any user interaction. At that point, a prosecutor could either press the issue and get villified in the press, go after the computer manufacturer or the software vendor that provided the wireless stack, or (most likely) they could drop the matter.
Emphasis added. The word you want to use here is "illicit," as in illegal. "Elicit" is a homophone, but means something entirely different.
[...] and there is no putting pandora back in the box [...]
OK, Pandora was never in the box, you dig? The box (actually a jar in better translations) contained a whole host of blessings (at least in some versions), but also many curses besides (from the versions of the myth that have persisted in popular culture), and it was the opening of the box that released these ills into the world. Most of the versions I've read say that hope was the only thing left in the box after it was carelessly opened, something humanity was allowed to hang onto in order to make up for all the evilness that was let loose, and to compensate us for the good things that were lost. There's a pretty good retelling of the story here.
Only real differences are diet and lifestyle related
You forgot a big difference -- immune system. Humans of 5000 years ago would probably not be as adept at coping with modern diseases. This is one area where humans are in a veritable arms race with microbes and viruses.
Blu-ray is saddled with one DRM scheme identical to HD-DVD's, and a couple of others that have turned out to be disasters in practice that are highly unlikely to ever work properly. Aside from that, it has nothing HD-DVD doesn't have, and lacks the features above - as of current working, purchasable, systems. That, and slightly more capacity.
ROM Mark was never intended to thwart casual piracy. It was intended to track down and/or prevent bootleg discs manufactured by large-scale piracy rings. This seems to be fairly effective when it's employed correctly.
As for BD+, yeah, that's so far been underwhelming. But just because the first discs featuring BD+ have already been cracked doesn't mean that future discs using BD+ won't have more sophisticated programs to detect so-called abuse. (Not saying I think DRM is a good thing, but look at it from the studios' perspective.) The BD+ standard specifies a full virtual machine, so in theory, you can put some really sophisticated software on a disc that can determine all kinds of things about the host environment. This could make hacking more difficult moving forward.
Finally, it's disingenuous to characterize a 20 GB capacity difference as "slightly more." Blu-Ray discs offer 66% greater capacity than HD-DVD discs, comparing dual-layer to dual-layer discs. (For single layer discs, HD-DVD only offers 15 GB, while Blu-Ray offers 25 GB, which is still 66% greater capacity on the BD side.) Unless, of course, you're trying to make the claim that there are no dual-layer Blu-Ray discs on the market, which is a claim I debunked in a sibling thread. Dual layer Blu-Ray movies have been out since October of last year, over a year on the market.
As for your list of features that HD-DVD has which Blu-Ray supposedly lacks:
You mention "Hard disk juke box support," but Managed Copy is part of the Blu-Ray specification, so I'm not really sure what your point there is. I haven't seen any software or consumer devices designed to let people do that with HD-DVD discs, so right now, the point is sort of moot.
You mention "DVD media support." Not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean that you can author HD-DVD content using regular DVD media, then I suppose this is a win for those who would like to save costs and not use the higher capacity disc. On the other hand, then you're restricted as to how much content you can cram on the disc. This doesn't seem like much of a win overall to me.
First off, dual-layer, 50 GB Blu-Ray discs are already on the market, contrary to your claim that Blu-Ray is "stuck at 25 GB." The first movie to be released in this format was Click, and it was released on October 10, 2006. Your information is over a year out of date.
Blu-Ray's DRM is much, much, MUCH more complicated than HD-DVDs. Not to mention Blu-Ray's Java runtime requirement. This also translates to Blu-Ray players costing much more than HD-DVD players, and Blu-Ray discs costing much more to master.
Your reasoning is specious. Blu-Ray's fundamental DRM scheme is identical to the one used by HD-DVD. It's called AACS. Blu-Ray includes an additional layer of DRM protection, BD+, as well as BD-ROM Mark, described as "a small amount of cryptographical data that is stored physically differently from normal Blu-ray Disc data." So the ROM-Mark is a small amount of data, and is designed to thwart mass-scale disc duplication by professional pirates (as opposed to end users who just want to rip the contents of the disc for filesharing or watching on unauthorized players). It also doesn't live where the regular data on a BD lives. The BD+ stuff can be as big or as small as the studio wishes to make it; it's basically a spec for a virtual machine, which allows embedding small programs to check the host environment and thus thwart pirates.
As for BD-J, the Java-on-Blu-Ray spec, it might be somewhat costlier to license, but I haven't seen any numbers broken out for what Sun gets in terms of licensing fees. However, BD-J is far more flexible and powerful than iHD / HDi; furthermore, HDi is Microsoft-owned and controlled, so there's nothing preventing Microsoft from jacking up the licensing fees after they kill off the rival format. Furthermore, the Java runtime (the biggest thing about Java) is embedded in the player's firmware, not on the discs themselves. Only the classes/JARs for BD-J content will live on the discs. The sizes are comparable to HDi content, though development for BD-J is admittedly more complicated. That's what you get when you go with a real programming language instead of a simplified markup language (which is what HDi really is).
None of these extra BD technologies will "clog" the discs the way you suggest.
Please try to get your facts straight before making unfounded claims that HD-DVD is the "technically superior format in practice." And definitely don't play the "you are uninformed" card when you, yourself, are the one who is uninformed.
(And yeah, supposedly other parties can develop their own Advanced Content implementation to rival HDi, but consider that Microsoft originally cooked up the spec when it was originally called iHD, and that their implementation is in the most popular HD-DVD players. Studios are going to code to the Microsoft version, which leaves Microsoft in de facto control.)
Most of the Blu-Ray discs that have non-interrupting menus on them usually mention this as a feature on the back of the package. Sometimes, it's just a pleasant surprise. I doubt it's a player-specific feature, though I'll freely admit I'm watching Blu-Ray movies on the PS3. My understanding, though, is that the software on the disc has to support this feature; whether the player does may be another factor.
I can say for sure that the menus on 300 and A Scanner Darkly do not interrupt the film (unless you select a special feature such as a "making of" featurette -- even then, the menu itself does not interrupt the film, it's only the selection of some alternate content that you want to play back).
Count me in. Building 20 was the beloved eyesore that was a part of the Institute's lore. Everybody would always be sure to tell the incoming freshmen that the buildings were saved from being razed because they were deemed historical landmarks (because that's where RADAR was invented).
Along comes Bill Gates (who never made a single academic contribution to computer science) waving around some money, and now it's suddenly OK to raze these buildings. And he gets a building named after him, not to mention all the Microsoft software that gets crammed down students' throats now. Brilliant.
I do wonder where the ROTC students are "doing their thing" now. When I was an undergrad at MIT, there was a movement to kick ROTC off campus because of their discriminatory policies toward gay students (which contravened MIT's anti-discrimination policies). But I never personally had it in for ROTC, and other nearby colleges (e.g., Harvard) had to send their ROTC students to MIT because they were unable or unwilling to accommodate ROTC themselves.
I do think it's cool that LCS and the AI Lab got consolidated into CSAIL, but these buildings are eyesores. Even the "Pei toilet" looks better. (For those who don't know, one of the buildings on campus was designed by I.M. Pei, and is covered by what appear to be bathroom tiles on the outside. IIRC, that's the building where the Media Lab is housed.)
The features you tout as being advantages of HD-DVD (non-interrupting menus, bookmarking, etc.) are in fact not unique to HD-DVD. Just about every Blu-Ray disc I've seen thus far has non-interrupting menus -- the movie starts up immediately upon load, and bringing up the menu does not interrupt the film.
Once the 1.1 Blu-Ray spec is finalized and the new players shipped (and Sony delivers a firmware update to the PS3 to enable that), Blu-Ray will close the gap on some of the interactive features that HD-DVD has, and surpass HD-DVD on other features. Yeah, BD-J is a bit of a pain compared to HDi / iHD for authoring, but ultimately, BD-J provides more power and flexibility. So, it's not just the higher capacity of Blu-Ray and the space age materials and coatings that make it spiffy.
Finally, I've noticed that the sound engineering going into recent Blu-Ray releases is stellar. Dolby True-HD sounds exceptional, even on stereo speakers (downmixes better than Dolby Digital 5.1). I know HD-DVD supports most of the same audio formats as Blu-Ray, but with the extra disc capacity on BDs, the studios are less stingy about providing high resolution audio content to go with that stunning picture.
Wish I had the mod points to raise your visibility.
As for your question: So why then do we have 1080i as a HD option?
Probably because, when HD was first being promoted, CRTs were quite viable. (You can still buy CRT-based HD televisions, and they're fairly inexpensive compared to LCD and plasma sets -- but they're also damned heavy and bulky.) All CRT-based HDTVs sold in the U.S. are 1080i native, which means if they get a 720p signal, they convert it internally to 1080i. LCD televisions that have 1080 scanlines and can do 1080p natively are a relatively new phenomenon. My understanding is that these newer LCD sets are deinterlacing 1080i prior to display.
From what I recall, 1080p is still not an ATSC terrestrial broadcast standard in North America (would require twice the bandwidth of 1080i for the same framerate, and Microsoft was late to the party suggesting that 1080p be added as a format), so 1080p will probably only be relevant for prerecorded media and digital downloads here in the States.
It's funny that the GP poster (comment you were responding to) got modded +5 Informative, since if you read the comments section in TFA, they discuss how many modern TV sets still can't do 3:2 pulldown correctly, which is why 1080p actually looks better than 1080i on a lot of equipment. That, and a lot of people can in fact see the difference, especially younger viewers (presumably with better eyesight).
It's a British vs. American thing. Please see this etymology article for more info. (Although, curiously, the American "math" is older than the British "maths." That doesn't mean one is necessarily more correct than the other; they may have been arrived at independently.)
Math is the Amer.Eng. shortening, attested from 1890; the British preference, maths is attested from 1911.
So, the British version is in fact the neologism here. American English is typically more conservative in grammatical constructions and preservation of archaic forms, so it's no surprise that we've stubbornly stuck to "our version" all this time. (I won't go into variant spellings, since some of our spellings are the result of a simplified spelling movement, and that definitely is not "conservative" in the least -- but then again, even when Webster and his cohorts were deciding what American spellings should be like, many spellings were not fully standardized.)
But thank you for that ugly display of provincialism.
Worth noting, though, is that while Apple is busy supporting Ruby and Python Cocoa bindings, they officially deprecated the Java Cocoa bindings... and word is that Java 6 is MIA in OS X 10.5, leaving a lot of Java developers further out in the cold.
Jobs dissed on Java back in February (in the context of iPhone development, but careful reading between the lines tells us that for whatever reason, the honeymoon is over). Looks like we're seeing the fruits of that now. The Java 6 early beta has quietly been removed from developer.apple.com/java, and the silence lately has been deafening.
Fortunately, there is the option of dual-booting an Intel Mac into Linux, which does have Java 6 support -- from Sun.
New Laptop, replaced Vista with Ubuntu 7.10
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Vista Vs. Gutsy Gibbon
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I picked up an HP laptop recently (one of the "Verve special edition" laptops), and it came preinstalled with Vista. Unlike some other craptastic laptops I've tried out (and in particular, one Acer laptop I tried out and returned after a week due to unsupported wireless in Linux and bad keyboard), this thing actually ran Vista almost decently. Still too long of a wait to boot -- XP boot times seem far faster to me -- but it was usable.
Problem is, the laptop didn't come with any sort of optical media for Vista. HP puts a partition on the hard drive that is there to allow the user to recover and restore, and they provide software in Vista to burn 2 restore DVDs "just in case." I burned the restore discs and hoped for the best... But as it turns out, Vista's flavor of NTFS doesn't resize properly in GParted (either refuses to resize, or resizes and then becomes unbootable without volume repair). Without genuine Vista discs, I was unable to do any repairs after an abortive attempt to resize the Vista partition, soooo...
I turned the laptop over to the tender mercies of the Ubuntu 7.10 installer off of the Gutsy DVD. Amazingly, sound and networking worked with nary a hiccup, suspend and resume work the way they should, and even the media keys across the top of the keyboard do what you'd expect them to. About the only thing I'm missing support for right now is the SD card reader. (Chipset seems to be unsupported, will have to research.) There's a built-in webcam and stereo microphones in the lid, and I'm going to experiment with them to see if I can get them to work, but it's not a major priority for me.
I would have preferred to keep Vista around -- not because I really like Vista (as I work with XP daily at the office, and Vista really doesn't work the way I think Windows "ought" to), but because theoretically there might be some games or the random app that might not work right / be available under Linux. But this morning, as I started throwing more and more packages on the laptop, I started to realize that maybe this is a blessing in disguise. By Vista not wanting to share and play nicely, I've been forced to decide between Vista and Ubuntu. It wasn't even much of a choice.
Still, it would've been nice to keep Vista around in a small partition, just as a security blanket. But if I can get WoW working under Wine (and reports say that it should actually run pretty well, providing my graphics adapter can keep up), it'd be tough to say just what I'd really need Vista for.
So the same feature that first appeared on Windows Server in 2003 and then on Vista is considered a security risk, especially because it is too 'easy' to use. [...] And now the same freaking feature in OS X is considered a 'security feature', and they claim it is even 'easier' to use than Vista's version?
One of the big problems I have with System Restore is that only certain key files are "backed up," and they're backed up as versioned, hidden files on the same volume. Although VSC attempts to be more comprehensive, it has the similar flaw of storing everything on the same volume. (The VSC solution also has the ability to store deltas, as block level changes, to a normally hidden part of the file system -- the shadow copy storage area.) My understanding is that the Microsoft-branded technologies rely on snapshots taken at periodic intervals (roughly once a day), and if you need a particular version of a particular file that falls in between a couple different snapshot intervals, you could be screwed. Time Machine is way more granular, providing comprehensive versioning (i.e., every revision that gets written to the file system is tracked) for each file, and on another volume, typically another drive. While there's been much talk about using external hard drives for Time Machine, Mac Pro users will no doubt use one of their many extra drive bays internal to their machines -- perfect since installation and removal is a snap.
Tracking every single revision makes it easier to track down where in time a particular file may have gotten corrupted or maliciously modified. It also becomes easier to then find a "last known good" version of a specific file, without having to pore over sets of snapshots.
Note that I'm only touching on a few small details here. But a Google search would easily enlighten you... or you could start with the links I've provided above.
It isn't just VOIP. There's been a recent thread on Macintouch regarding Comcast not playing nice with iChat's audio and video.
Some background: I regularly have video chats with my father, normally once a week on Sunday morning. Over the last few months, I've noticed that my dad's video will start macroblocking and/or stuttering after the first 2-5 minutes of the conversation; audio will be similarly affected. We finally figured out that Comcast was packet shaping; they notice that X amount of bandwidth is being used, and they allow it for a few minutes before throttling you back.
The work-around is to have my dad set his video bandwidth cap at 200 kbps. This seems to be adequate for our needs, though it really is noticeable whenever there's a lot of motion on his end.
Some of the fault lies with iChat, which determines connection speed during initial handshake but doesn't periodically re-check the speed.
Its not the rarest meme in sci fi but YGBM (you gotta believe me) technology is well explored in a book I picked up called Rainbow's End, Vernor Vinge was the author I think.
The title is Rainbows End (there is no apostrophe), and the author is indeed Vernor Vinge. The missing apostrophe was important enough for the author to mention it several times in the book; in fact, the last chapter's title is "The missing apostrophe." Astute readers might pick up that there is some significance to this detail.
Having said all that, I'm not sure that YGBM technology (aka mind control via technological persuasion) fits exactly with the notion of inducing a religious experience or an emotional state. One can argue that the concepts are related, but I don't think there's a 1:1 mapping here, especially if the religious experience one is inducing isn't externally controlled. (The shared religious experience of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? seemed to be fairly uniform among all partakers, if I remember correctly, but the device described in TFA seems to operate differently -- participants in the experiments tend to describe the experience using their own religious framework as a reference point.)
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According to the Knowledgebase article:(Emphasis added by me.) Now, if you look at the provided handy table of values, you see that the two versions of MS Word for Mac that are directly compatible with OS X, registry values 195 and 268 (for Word X for Mac, and Word 2004 for Mac, respectively) are below the default cut-off on the table. In fact, even Word 98 for the Mac (which can only run on OS X in Classic) falls below the cut-off on the table. Only products with corresponding values from the table numerically below 101 (those appearing above the cut-off line in the table) will be blocked.
Since Office 2004 for Mac is still a supported product, it would be insane for Microsoft to block its files from being loaded in the Windows version of Office. I admit these instructions are confusing, but the KBase article clearly does not say what you claim it is saying.
Incidentally, according to the table and the above quoted text, the only Mac Word document formats that are blocked by default in this service pack are the following:
- Word 4.x for Macintosh
- Word 5.x for Macintosh
And that's it. Even Word 6 for Mac isn't blocked, because it falls after the magic cut-off.Totally legal in the United States. In other jurisdictions, the law is not so clear-cut. In Europe, the right to reverse engineer is not sacrosanct. Then again, Europe doesn't (yet) have software patents.
Standard IANAL disclaimers apply, of course, but I've worked for several companies that relied on reverse engineering precisely for the purpose of compatibility with undocumented file formats. In one such company, I was informed by management (after advice from legal counsel) that it was actually legal not only to reverse engineer the file format, but it was even legal to reverse engineer / decompile the code for the application that generated the files in order to see how they were written -- the caveat being, you could only reverse engineer the code to insure compatibility, not to plagiarize it. (Usually you do a clean room reverse engineering process to insure that the people who reverse engineer the code write a clean spec that the people who write your code then use. The people doing the reverse engineering shouldn't be writing code based on that process, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.) Of course, that particular employer's policy was to not reverse engineer the code of the applications themselves, only the files they wrote, but if we had the resources and we needed to, we could reverse engineer just about anything we wanted.
The legal climate in the U.S. was shaped in part by the outcome of a case where IBM sued Compaq for reverse engineering the BIOS of the IBM PC. Clearly, Compaq prevailed, and the clone PC market was born.
I can't speak to the speed of BD-J, though clearly this smacks of the "Java is slow" FUD that Java proponents have been dealing with for years now. Java VMs aren't really "slow" anymore, unless you're dealing with memory-constrained devices. Most Blu-Ray players are going to have plenty enough RAM, so I don't think constrained memory footprint is going to be an issue.
As for the "ill-specced" claim, I'm puzzled. I know that BD-J is based on an already existing standard for embedding interactive Java content in terrestrial television broadcasts and European cable transmissions; this technology is used, for example, in the German version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" (or maybe it was "Deal or No Deal") -- it allows viewers to play along at home using their remote control. BD-J is just an extension of this already existing and deployed standard, so how is it poorly specified?
I attended JavaOne in 2006, and attended a couple sessions on BD-J and related technologies, so that's where I got my information from.
This has already been addressed elsewhere multiple times, but...
First, there is a "Java release 6" available for OS X which is not Java 6, it's a sixth release of Java 5 for Tiger. If you carefully read the blurb on Apple's developer site, it does say that it is in fact a newer release of JDK 1.5, not JDK 1.6 (aka Java 6).
Second, Apple made a beta of Java 6 available long before Leopard came out. The early access release of Java 6 coincided roughly with JavaOne 2006; I actually attended the BOF session with Apple's Java engineers, where they demoed it. This beta was yanked from Apple's developer site over a month before Leopard was released. (Sorry, I don't know how long exactly before Leopard's release the download was pulled -- I just know that, when I went to look for it around the same time that I was looking to purchase an Intel Mac, the download was missing.)
Somehow, this doesn't surprise anyone that you would say such a thing.
First off, I wanted to point out that the Anonymous Coward you're responding to is not me. I never would have used the word "idiot." Also, for the record, I was not responding to formatting of any kind. I was responding to your choice of words and to your mangled metaphor.
That said... it is unwarranted to blindly assume someone has autism, Asperger's, or any other sort of disorder. It's even worse that you tar all such people with the brush of mediocrity and small-mindedness.
You proceed from the false assumption that someone is trying to impress you. This may come across as harsh, but... you're not someone worthy of impressing. I was merely trying to help you out, since you seem to have trouble communicating effectively. That, and I happen to love my language, and my cultural heritage, though you seem to have respect for neither. So, what we have here is an impasse -- you refuse to change your ways, and people like me are not going to stop critiquing you. Either you learn to develop thicker skin, or learn better communication skills. Complaining, however, is highly unlikely to stop all of us. In fact, it might even make you a bigger target. I certainly have no intention of "changing my ways" because, well, I happen to have a fetish for saying what I mean and respecting my ancestors. (Yeah, I have Greek ancestry.)
I can forgive lack of capitalization and poor punctuation. I can forgive a lot of things. But using the wrong word crosses a threshold for me, and mangled metaphors just put your post over the top. So, that's why I responded. It's not a personal attack on you.
With liberal help from looking at source code dumps from a BASIC interpreter for a TOPS-20 system, according to some insider sources I have spoken to... one of whom actually has a printout of Microsoft's source code for their BASIC interpreter, their claim to fame.
The source with the printout claims that some non-Microsoft copyrights are still visible in source comments, although I personally find this surprising. Nobody doubts that there were some clever hacks employed to squeeze everything into 4K of RAM, hacks that wouldn't be necessary on a TOPS-20 system. But Gates et. al. didn't start from scratch, that much is certain. So I'm not sure it's incorrect to talk about "porting" BASIC to the 8080. It's a kinder word to use than "plagiarized."
The key word here is "knowingly." That's the weasel word that lets computer-illiterate users off the hook.
I've written about it previously on Slashdot, but I ran into a similar problem when I was doing some consulting work at a corporate office complex in Scottsdale, AZ. One of the other renters in the complex was Honeywell, and one of their employees connected a wireless access point without permission to the corporate network. Since the access point was unsecured, anyone could connect to it -- and I unwittingly did so when I woke my iBook from sleep. Of course, after that point, I then (wrongly) assumed that the access point was set up by Honeywell as a convenience for visitors, something set up in a network DMZ. In fact, I could have accessed anything on their private network.
Honeywell only discovered my "intrusion" because I blogged about my surprise at the free network access. Months after the fact, they tried to pressure my consulting company into firing me (since Honeywell was one of the consulting company's biggest clients, even though I wasn't doing any consulting for Honeywell at the time; the client I was working for just happened to be located in the same building as a Honeywell satellite office). Luckily, the client I was working for said that if my consulting firm fired me, they'd just hire me direct. That, plus assurances from me that I had no intention of hacking into Honeywell's network (and allowing Honeywell's technicians to image my iBook's hard drive), saved me a lot of grief.
It should be noted, however, that nowhere did anyone mention prosecuting me for network trespass. I'm sure this is partly because Honeywell would then have to divulge the circumstances of their network security hole, which might cost them some federal dollars (since they do a lot of work for the U.S. Government); having that kind of embarrassing information made public in a court case would have been bad for them in any event. But moreso, I consulted with my lawyer and found that it's not clear either Honeywell or the state of Arizona could have gone after me, and if they did, they might not have won. This is especially true since the default behavior of the Airport wireless stack is to try to connect to unsecured access points if available. The same is true of the wireless software that ships on many notebooks -- I had a recent experience with an Acer notebook that was set up by the manufacturer to automatically connect to unsecured networks unless a secured network was configured and made a higher priority. The damn thing actually connected to my neighbor's access point instead of mine, since I run mine with WEP and require a password to connect. (This appeared to be behavior specific to some of the third-party software Acer preloaded on the laptop; I don't think this was purely Vista's fault.)
The California statute as cited might be difficult to enforce in the case of unsecured wireless access points, especially with a proliferation of free access points provided by various businesses. And it seems that someone could defend himself easily enough by pointing out that the software that shipped on his computer did the dirty deed without any user interaction. At that point, a prosecutor could either press the issue and get villified in the press, go after the computer manufacturer or the software vendor that provided the wireless stack, or (most likely) they could drop the matter.
You forgot a big difference -- immune system. Humans of 5000 years ago would probably not be as adept at coping with modern diseases. This is one area where humans are in a veritable arms race with microbes and viruses.
ROM Mark was never intended to thwart casual piracy. It was intended to track down and/or prevent bootleg discs manufactured by large-scale piracy rings. This seems to be fairly effective when it's employed correctly.
As for BD+, yeah, that's so far been underwhelming. But just because the first discs featuring BD+ have already been cracked doesn't mean that future discs using BD+ won't have more sophisticated programs to detect so-called abuse. (Not saying I think DRM is a good thing, but look at it from the studios' perspective.) The BD+ standard specifies a full virtual machine, so in theory, you can put some really sophisticated software on a disc that can determine all kinds of things about the host environment. This could make hacking more difficult moving forward.
Finally, it's disingenuous to characterize a 20 GB capacity difference as "slightly more." Blu-Ray discs offer 66% greater capacity than HD-DVD discs, comparing dual-layer to dual-layer discs. (For single layer discs, HD-DVD only offers 15 GB, while Blu-Ray offers 25 GB, which is still 66% greater capacity on the BD side.) Unless, of course, you're trying to make the claim that there are no dual-layer Blu-Ray discs on the market, which is a claim I debunked in a sibling thread. Dual layer Blu-Ray movies have been out since October of last year, over a year on the market.
As for your list of features that HD-DVD has which Blu-Ray supposedly lacks:
First off, dual-layer, 50 GB Blu-Ray discs are already on the market, contrary to your claim that Blu-Ray is "stuck at 25 GB." The first movie to be released in this format was Click, and it was released on October 10, 2006. Your information is over a year out of date.
Your reasoning is specious. Blu-Ray's fundamental DRM scheme is identical to the one used by HD-DVD. It's called AACS. Blu-Ray includes an additional layer of DRM protection, BD+, as well as BD-ROM Mark, described as "a small amount of cryptographical data that is stored physically differently from normal Blu-ray Disc data." So the ROM-Mark is a small amount of data, and is designed to thwart mass-scale disc duplication by professional pirates (as opposed to end users who just want to rip the contents of the disc for filesharing or watching on unauthorized players). It also doesn't live where the regular data on a BD lives. The BD+ stuff can be as big or as small as the studio wishes to make it; it's basically a spec for a virtual machine, which allows embedding small programs to check the host environment and thus thwart pirates.
As for BD-J, the Java-on-Blu-Ray spec, it might be somewhat costlier to license, but I haven't seen any numbers broken out for what Sun gets in terms of licensing fees. However, BD-J is far more flexible and powerful than iHD / HDi; furthermore, HDi is Microsoft-owned and controlled, so there's nothing preventing Microsoft from jacking up the licensing fees after they kill off the rival format. Furthermore, the Java runtime (the biggest thing about Java) is embedded in the player's firmware, not on the discs themselves. Only the classes/JARs for BD-J content will live on the discs. The sizes are comparable to HDi content, though development for BD-J is admittedly more complicated. That's what you get when you go with a real programming language instead of a simplified markup language (which is what HDi really is).
None of these extra BD technologies will "clog" the discs the way you suggest.
Please try to get your facts straight before making unfounded claims that HD-DVD is the "technically superior format in practice." And definitely don't play the "you are uninformed" card when you, yourself, are the one who is uninformed.
(And yeah, supposedly other parties can develop their own Advanced Content implementation to rival HDi, but consider that Microsoft originally cooked up the spec when it was originally called iHD, and that their implementation is in the most popular HD-DVD players. Studios are going to code to the Microsoft version, which leaves Microsoft in de facto control.)
What movies have you watched?
Most of the Blu-Ray discs that have non-interrupting menus on them usually mention this as a feature on the back of the package. Sometimes, it's just a pleasant surprise. I doubt it's a player-specific feature, though I'll freely admit I'm watching Blu-Ray movies on the PS3. My understanding, though, is that the software on the disc has to support this feature; whether the player does may be another factor.
I can say for sure that the menus on 300 and A Scanner Darkly do not interrupt the film (unless you select a special feature such as a "making of" featurette -- even then, the menu itself does not interrupt the film, it's only the selection of some alternate content that you want to play back).
I can't believe you're the only person who noticed this gaffe. You'd think there would at least be some basic editorial clean-up on article summaries.
Count me in. Building 20 was the beloved eyesore that was a part of the Institute's lore. Everybody would always be sure to tell the incoming freshmen that the buildings were saved from being razed because they were deemed historical landmarks (because that's where RADAR was invented).
Along comes Bill Gates (who never made a single academic contribution to computer science) waving around some money, and now it's suddenly OK to raze these buildings. And he gets a building named after him, not to mention all the Microsoft software that gets crammed down students' throats now. Brilliant.
I do wonder where the ROTC students are "doing their thing" now. When I was an undergrad at MIT, there was a movement to kick ROTC off campus because of their discriminatory policies toward gay students (which contravened MIT's anti-discrimination policies). But I never personally had it in for ROTC, and other nearby colleges (e.g., Harvard) had to send their ROTC students to MIT because they were unable or unwilling to accommodate ROTC themselves.
I do think it's cool that LCS and the AI Lab got consolidated into CSAIL, but these buildings are eyesores. Even the "Pei toilet" looks better. (For those who don't know, one of the buildings on campus was designed by I.M. Pei, and is covered by what appear to be bathroom tiles on the outside. IIRC, that's the building where the Media Lab is housed.)
The features you tout as being advantages of HD-DVD (non-interrupting menus, bookmarking, etc.) are in fact not unique to HD-DVD. Just about every Blu-Ray disc I've seen thus far has non-interrupting menus -- the movie starts up immediately upon load, and bringing up the menu does not interrupt the film.
Once the 1.1 Blu-Ray spec is finalized and the new players shipped (and Sony delivers a firmware update to the PS3 to enable that), Blu-Ray will close the gap on some of the interactive features that HD-DVD has, and surpass HD-DVD on other features. Yeah, BD-J is a bit of a pain compared to HDi / iHD for authoring, but ultimately, BD-J provides more power and flexibility. So, it's not just the higher capacity of Blu-Ray and the space age materials and coatings that make it spiffy.
Finally, I've noticed that the sound engineering going into recent Blu-Ray releases is stellar. Dolby True-HD sounds exceptional, even on stereo speakers (downmixes better than Dolby Digital 5.1). I know HD-DVD supports most of the same audio formats as Blu-Ray, but with the extra disc capacity on BDs, the studios are less stingy about providing high resolution audio content to go with that stunning picture.
Wish I had the mod points to raise your visibility.
As for your question: So why then do we have 1080i as a HD option?
Probably because, when HD was first being promoted, CRTs were quite viable. (You can still buy CRT-based HD televisions, and they're fairly inexpensive compared to LCD and plasma sets -- but they're also damned heavy and bulky.) All CRT-based HDTVs sold in the U.S. are 1080i native, which means if they get a 720p signal, they convert it internally to 1080i. LCD televisions that have 1080 scanlines and can do 1080p natively are a relatively new phenomenon. My understanding is that these newer LCD sets are deinterlacing 1080i prior to display.
From what I recall, 1080p is still not an ATSC terrestrial broadcast standard in North America (would require twice the bandwidth of 1080i for the same framerate, and Microsoft was late to the party suggesting that 1080p be added as a format), so 1080p will probably only be relevant for prerecorded media and digital downloads here in the States.
It's funny that the GP poster (comment you were responding to) got modded +5 Informative, since if you read the comments section in TFA, they discuss how many modern TV sets still can't do 3:2 pulldown correctly, which is why 1080p actually looks better than 1080i on a lot of equipment. That, and a lot of people can in fact see the difference, especially younger viewers (presumably with better eyesight).
It's a British vs. American thing. Please see this etymology article for more info. (Although, curiously, the American "math" is older than the British "maths." That doesn't mean one is necessarily more correct than the other; they may have been arrived at independently.)
Oh, and incidentally, "math" as a shortening of "mathematics" is older than "maths," according to this entry from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which states:
So, the British version is in fact the neologism here. American English is typically more conservative in grammatical constructions and preservation of archaic forms, so it's no surprise that we've stubbornly stuck to "our version" all this time. (I won't go into variant spellings, since some of our spellings are the result of a simplified spelling movement, and that definitely is not "conservative" in the least -- but then again, even when Webster and his cohorts were deciding what American spellings should be like, many spellings were not fully standardized.)
But thank you for that ugly display of provincialism.
Worth noting, though, is that while Apple is busy supporting Ruby and Python Cocoa bindings, they officially deprecated the Java Cocoa bindings... and word is that Java 6 is MIA in OS X 10.5, leaving a lot of Java developers further out in the cold.
Jobs dissed on Java back in February (in the context of iPhone development, but careful reading between the lines tells us that for whatever reason, the honeymoon is over). Looks like we're seeing the fruits of that now. The Java 6 early beta has quietly been removed from developer.apple.com/java, and the silence lately has been deafening.
Fortunately, there is the option of dual-booting an Intel Mac into Linux, which does have Java 6 support -- from Sun.
I picked up an HP laptop recently (one of the "Verve special edition" laptops), and it came preinstalled with Vista. Unlike some other craptastic laptops I've tried out (and in particular, one Acer laptop I tried out and returned after a week due to unsupported wireless in Linux and bad keyboard), this thing actually ran Vista almost decently. Still too long of a wait to boot -- XP boot times seem far faster to me -- but it was usable.
Problem is, the laptop didn't come with any sort of optical media for Vista. HP puts a partition on the hard drive that is there to allow the user to recover and restore, and they provide software in Vista to burn 2 restore DVDs "just in case." I burned the restore discs and hoped for the best... But as it turns out, Vista's flavor of NTFS doesn't resize properly in GParted (either refuses to resize, or resizes and then becomes unbootable without volume repair). Without genuine Vista discs, I was unable to do any repairs after an abortive attempt to resize the Vista partition, soooo...
I turned the laptop over to the tender mercies of the Ubuntu 7.10 installer off of the Gutsy DVD. Amazingly, sound and networking worked with nary a hiccup, suspend and resume work the way they should, and even the media keys across the top of the keyboard do what you'd expect them to. About the only thing I'm missing support for right now is the SD card reader. (Chipset seems to be unsupported, will have to research.) There's a built-in webcam and stereo microphones in the lid, and I'm going to experiment with them to see if I can get them to work, but it's not a major priority for me.
I would have preferred to keep Vista around -- not because I really like Vista (as I work with XP daily at the office, and Vista really doesn't work the way I think Windows "ought" to), but because theoretically there might be some games or the random app that might not work right / be available under Linux. But this morning, as I started throwing more and more packages on the laptop, I started to realize that maybe this is a blessing in disguise. By Vista not wanting to share and play nicely, I've been forced to decide between Vista and Ubuntu. It wasn't even much of a choice.
Still, it would've been nice to keep Vista around in a small partition, just as a security blanket. But if I can get WoW working under Wine (and reports say that it should actually run pretty well, providing my graphics adapter can keep up), it'd be tough to say just what I'd really need Vista for.
Sure, I'll bite.
This has been rehashed over and over again, but... Time Machine is not Volume Shadow Copy. See also here and here. See also this comment in this article.
One of the big problems I have with System Restore is that only certain key files are "backed up," and they're backed up as versioned, hidden files on the same volume. Although VSC attempts to be more comprehensive, it has the similar flaw of storing everything on the same volume. (The VSC solution also has the ability to store deltas, as block level changes, to a normally hidden part of the file system -- the shadow copy storage area.) My understanding is that the Microsoft-branded technologies rely on snapshots taken at periodic intervals (roughly once a day), and if you need a particular version of a particular file that falls in between a couple different snapshot intervals, you could be screwed. Time Machine is way more granular, providing comprehensive versioning (i.e., every revision that gets written to the file system is tracked) for each file, and on another volume, typically another drive. While there's been much talk about using external hard drives for Time Machine, Mac Pro users will no doubt use one of their many extra drive bays internal to their machines -- perfect since installation and removal is a snap.
Tracking every single revision makes it easier to track down where in time a particular file may have gotten corrupted or maliciously modified. It also becomes easier to then find a "last known good" version of a specific file, without having to pore over sets of snapshots.
Note that I'm only touching on a few small details here. But a Google search would easily enlighten you... or you could start with the links I've provided above.
Incidentally, Microsoft has a good resource explaining How Volume Shadow Copy Service Works.
It isn't just VOIP. There's been a recent thread on Macintouch regarding Comcast not playing nice with iChat's audio and video.
Some background: I regularly have video chats with my father, normally once a week on Sunday morning. Over the last few months, I've noticed that my dad's video will start macroblocking and/or stuttering after the first 2-5 minutes of the conversation; audio will be similarly affected. We finally figured out that Comcast was packet shaping; they notice that X amount of bandwidth is being used, and they allow it for a few minutes before throttling you back.
The work-around is to have my dad set his video bandwidth cap at 200 kbps. This seems to be adequate for our needs, though it really is noticeable whenever there's a lot of motion on his end.
Some of the fault lies with iChat, which determines connection speed during initial handshake but doesn't periodically re-check the speed.
The title is Rainbows End (there is no apostrophe), and the author is indeed Vernor Vinge. The missing apostrophe was important enough for the author to mention it several times in the book; in fact, the last chapter's title is "The missing apostrophe." Astute readers might pick up that there is some significance to this detail.
Having said all that, I'm not sure that YGBM technology (aka mind control via technological persuasion) fits exactly with the notion of inducing a religious experience or an emotional state. One can argue that the concepts are related, but I don't think there's a 1:1 mapping here, especially if the religious experience one is inducing isn't externally controlled. (The shared religious experience of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? seemed to be fairly uniform among all partakers, if I remember correctly, but the device described in TFA seems to operate differently -- participants in the experiments tend to describe the experience using their own religious framework as a reference point.)