At first I wasn't sure if you meant the asteroid named Eros or just the similarity of the name Eros itself (also culled from Greco-Roman mythos). Then I realized it didn't matter because your statement applied regardless. You'd think someone would have thought about potential naming confusion for bodies in our own solar system. My Discordian friends are chortling with glee, though.
Um, no, you just read the story wrong. The story is saying that both "hot Earths" and habitable, Earth-like planets can form in systems that have so-called hot Jupiters.
It amazes me how some folks are so quick to judge something that they actually wind up demonstrating their own ignorance (or inability to comprehend a slightly confusing science article, take your pick).
At first it says that a Hot Jupiter would make a habitable planet, but then it says that the Hot Earths it makes will be uninhabitable.
If you read the article, it's a bit more clear than the summary apparently was for you.
The article is saying that as Hot Jupiters migrate inwards, they temporarily disrupt the belt of debris in the habitable zone of a forming solar system. Then, after the Hot Jupiter has passed through, that debris has a chance to coalesce into habitable, Earth-like planets. In addition to this (and this is where careful reading and good reading comprehension skills come in handy), Hot Earths can be formed when Hot Jupiters push some material forward with them during their inward migration. From the article:
"We now think there is a new class of ocean-covered--and possibly habitable--planets in solar systems unlike our own," Raymond said.
The simulations also showed that rocky planets known as hot Earths may often form when hot Jupiters push material forward during their inward treks.
Qwest has been doing something similar for its customers for some time now. I have Qwest Choice (TV and Internet access, all supplied via VDSL over the phone lines to my house), and my fiancee and I have found that e-mail to our qwest.net POP accounts is routinely filtered, and has been for almost 2 years now. We have no control over what gets blocked and what doesn't. We have found, through trial and error, that much of the blocking is being done on mail messages with multiple recipients -- but there's no hard and fast rule for this, so you can't say "messages with more than 2 recipients will get blocked." Various mailing lists don't get through anymore.
Qwest initially wouldn't admit they were doing any filtering or blocking of e-mail. This is SOP for them -- when I caught them blocking outbound NTP, the tier-1 tech support flatly denied they were doing any such thing, and I eventually had to escalate the matter to one of their network engineers, who finally admitted that someone went on a port-blocking binge to shut down customers who were reselling bandwidth (running porn sites from their houses, running their own ISPs, you name it). Apparently, the engineer who did this blocked NTP in both directions, so my Mac couldn't set its clock using Apple's NTP servers. (Their initial solution, after admitting to what they did, was to ask if I could use a non-default port for outbound NTP requests. I was using Mac OS 8 at the time, so no, I couldn't... but even if I could, most NTP servers in the Real World listen on the default port.)
When Qwest finally admitted that they were blocking/filtering e-mails, they would not commit to addressing any of my concerns. They have never implemented any kind of spam quarantine system, even though this blocking is supposed to help them fight spam. The messages often don't even get bounced; in these cases, they just get routed into a bit-bucket, so the sender has no idea that the recipient never got the message.
My fiancee and I now rely on other e-mail service providers to route around Qwest's brain-damage. We don't expect our qwest.net inboxes to be reliable.
What galls me, though, is the lack of transparency and accountability. These ISPs apparently feel no obligation to tell their customers that they have altered the terms of service in a potentially negative way, oftentimes because they have convinced themselves that they haven't actually changed anything -- and when called on it, they express neither shame nor guilt, but instead initially deny they did anything, and then when they realize that won't work, they offer mealy-mouthed excuses but continue to do nothing of substance.
Now, I'm sure that its a lower quality product, but we are talking digital right? Either it gets there or it doesn't, its not like the $7 cable sometimes sends 2s and 3s instead of 0s and 1s.
Sorry, that is not what "digital" means.
Just because you're sending bits over an electrical conductor doesn't mean those bits are immune to noise. Those bits can be altered by external noise and can be degraded by reflections in the cable. (More on that in a moment.)
While it's true that HDMI uses DVI signaling for video data, and the signaling is differential (which is intrinsically more immune to noise than other signaling techniques), that doesn't mean that the bits can't get scrambled from point A to point B. More importantly, there's no error correction. So the receiving end has no way to tell if the bits it's getting are the correct bits, and no way to fix them if they're wrong.
Noise can be induced from any cables that run parallel to your HDMI cable. Imagine two conductors, A and B, that are parallel to each other and spaced fairly close together. If a current is run through A, a magnetic field is created around A and induces a current in B. Now, induction is a great thing when it comes to power transformers, but it's a nuisance when you're trying to transmit data over an electrical conductor.
Signal degradation can be caused by a variety of things, but in the case of cheap cables, you can have improper termination at either or both ends of a cable. Improper termination can be caused by bad solder joints between the wires in the cable and the HDMI connectors at the cable ends, for example, or by using cheap hardware for the connectors themselves. The typical result of improper termination is an impedance mismatch. If you've ever studied impedance in a physics class or an EE class, you know that when a signal is transmitted from conductor A with one impedance to conductor B with a different impedance, the signal can be reflected at the point where the mismatch occurs. This reflected signal can then constructively or destructively interfere with the original signal.
Personally, I wouldn't trust a $7 HDMI cable for a cluttered AV rack like mine, but I agree with you that paying $80 and up for an HDMI cable is probably highway robbery. I think a good target price is around $25 or $35 for a 1 to 1.5 meter cable run.
This means that bit errors can creep in and degrade image quality when using low-quality cables, especially in an electrically noisy environment. I don't know about you, but I have a rat's nest of cables behind my AV rack; even with cable management, some cross-talk is unavoidable because of the sheer number of cables in close proximity.
Poor shielding is only one problem with cheap cables, though; you also have issues with improper termination (i.e., poor impedance matching) at the ends of the cable, something that makes a huge difference at the frequencies that DVI/HDMI operates at.
Thanks for the link! I thought I was losing my sanity, because I knew I had read a claim by Brian Krebs that he saw a version of the demo in person in which the exploit was demonstrated on Apple's shipping hardware -- without a third-party wireless card.
Here's the exact quote from the above-linked page where Krebs explicitly states this:
I've been asked this many times, so let me make this crystal clear: I had the opportunity to see a live version of the demo Maynor gave to a public audience the next day. In the video shown at Black Hat, he plugged a third-party USB wireless card into the Macbook -- but in the demo Maynor showed me personally, he exploited the Macbook without any third-party wireless card plugged in. As far as I'm aware, only one other person at the conference saw the demo the way I saw it (a Black Hat staff member whom I'm not at liberty to name); the discrepancy over the wireless card is probably the biggest reason why the Mac community was so confused and upset by my original post.
(Emphasis added.) So clearly, Mr. Krebs claims he saw this exploit working on Apple hardware using Apple-supplied WiFi drivers. Unfortunately, we can't corroborate this claim because we don't know the identity of the other person who supposedly saw this private demonstration.
Spotlight is not like Windows Search. Spotlight uses metadata much more extensively, and is actually more similar in concept to the database filesystem that BeOS had 10 years ago and that Microsoft has been trying (and failing) to implement since about the same time. So yes, Apple "copied" it -- but from BeOS, not Windows.
Actually, Apple did more than just copy BeFS and its "DB-like" filesystem metadata facility. They hired the former Be, Inc., engineer who designed BeFS and the cool system of "live queries" that would update in real time as the file system changed. The engineer's name is Dominic Giampolo. As I understand it, Dominic has contributed extensively to HFS+, including the journaling support. He's written a book on file system design too, so this guy can be fairly described as knowing the problem domain pretty well.
Since BeOS is now defunct, I'm glad that Apple absorbed one of the cooler technologies from that OS (which I was an early developer for -- my BeBox is now living in Tucson with a friend). I hate to see good ideas wither and die for lack of a platform. The implementation might not be identical to that in BeOS, but it certainly behaves in much the same way for the end user. I should also point out that both BeFS and HFS+ with Spotlight do pretty much what WinFS promised to do -- except that WinFS now is no longer slated to be included in Vista, and in fact may only ever live in future releases of MS SQL Server.
Even if Apple hadn't absorbed the engineering talent to make this feature possible, Paul Thurrott would still be off-base in claiming that Apple "stole" spotlight from Vista. After all, Vista is still unreleased software, and is still in a state of flux (e.g., features are still being adjusted and, just recently, some were dropped, such as WinFS). It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim that a shipping product "stole" features from a product that still isn't available for sale. (I guess there's room to argue here, but to me, it seems clear that Vista is still vapor for most rank-and-file users.)
I'm writing this as someone who briefly worked for Metrowerks on their BeOS suite of compiler tools, and I met Dominic twice -- once while working for Metrowerks, and once at Comdex at Be's booth. He's a great guy.
What really bakes my noodle is, current theory says that black holes can have spin and charge.
If you assume black holes have singularities, then how can an infinitely small point of infinite space-time curvature be said to rotate? (Yeah, I know, electrons are essentially point particles too, but electron "spin" is a quantum property and doesn't have to mesh with our intuitive understanding of what "spin" means in the macroscopic world. But black holes are described by relativistic mechanics, not by quantum theory, although Hawking has certainly brought quantum theory to bear on black holes -- hence the concept of Hawking Radiation.)
If photons mediate the electromagnetic force, and if a black hole can have an electrical charge, how does that work? The photons can never escape, just as you [njh] said. Moreover, why is it that (according to the article) a black hole can have charge but not a magnetic field? Seems to me that if a black hole has a charge and is "spinning," it could have a magnetic field the same way an electron does.
Obviously, I have more questions than answers. But to address your [njh's] point, if your logic is sound, then black holes could have neither charge nor magnetic field. Yet current theory says they can have charge but not a magnetic field. So this confuses me greatly.
Not currently. The MPAA specifically started doing its own moving ratings to stave off government regulation (and if the Wikipedia article is to be believed, the SCOTUS ruled in 1915 that movies were not protected by the First Amendment). In the early years of Hollywood, the U.S. government started doing to the film industry what the current Congress is doing to the videogame industry -- hearings, ill-conceived proposed legislation, you name it. (See this article for more on the history of the current U.S. rating system.)
This story has played out many times before -- another example from our history is the origin of the Comics Code Authority, which was created in direct response to Congressional efforts to regulate and censor comic books. The years of most stringent enforcement of the Code resulted in some of the worst quality comic writing and art. Technically, the code was voluntary, but most news stands wouldn't carry comic books that didn't carry the CCA seal of approval; this is not unlike the current situation with movie theaters and unrated films. Usually, an unrated film won't even get shown in a U.S. movie theater, except perhaps in a small art-house theater. Such films are treated similarly to films given an NC-17 rating (though, interestingly, many theater owners would be more inclined to show an unrated documentary or foreign film than they would to show a domestically produced NC-17 film because of the stigma of that rating, regardless of why the film got an NC-17 rating).
What I find interesting is that this new proposed legislation gives the U.S. Congress a back door to regulate the film industry. It's not just about video games! The U.S. government would very much like to have a single rating system for every kind of media that can be produced or consumed, and if they can get people to forget about First Amendment protections in at least one case, they can use that as a wedge to get other kinds of media (which are now recognized as having free speech protections) included under the same regulatory umbrella.
Final note: Although the SCOTUS ruled in 1915 that motion pictures didn't have First Amendment protections, a later 1952 decision reversed the earlier decision and established film as a protected form of speech.
Also DirectX/Direct3d is tied directly to the hardware. If your card doesn't support DirectX 9 your [sic] not going to be able to run DirectX 9 application.
Besides the spelling gaffe (your is the possessive of you, you're is a contraction of "you are"), this statement is not 100% correct. DirectX/Direct3D developers can mandate that certain API features are handled in hardware in order for the application to run, but they can just as easily allow DirectX to emulate in software what is not implemented in hardware. It's just that, for performance and usability reasons, most game developers don't want to allow DirectX to let the CPU handle certain things. So really, the practical difference between DirectX and OpenGL here is nil.
Since OpenGL is used for much more than just games, and since it's not as tightly tied to hardware specifications, it is more likely that OpenGL applications will tolerate missing hardware acceleration for some features. Having said that, I know there's a mechanism for programmatically determining which extensions an OpenGL implementation supports; what I don't know is whether you can easily detect if a particular feature is hardware accelerated or not. (I suspect the answer is yes, since there are still game developers out there who write to OpenGL.)
OpenGL ARB is 'Advanced Review Board'. They create a set of extensions to the current OpenGL standard to create proven/established OpenGL-related stuff that they can then wrap up together and place into the next generation OpenGL standard.
Actually, ARB stands for "Architecture Review Board." But the rest of what you said about the ARB is pretty accurate.
Nice try, but just because someone doesn't place monetary value on something doesn't automatically mean that they're obligated to provide it for you. You are, however, free to download a free font that's already available, or reverse-engineer a commercial font (which is perfectly legal in the U.S.), or create your own from scratch. If you value that work product, you're welcome to not share it with anyone. Just be aware that, once you've used that font in printed material which is published, it becomes fair game for someone else to reverse engineer.
I think there is a historical reason why the appearance of a font (the distinctive shapes of the letters) isn't copyrightable or trademarkable in many countries -- and it has a lot to do with the concern over squelching the free flow of ideas. After all, if you can control who uses what typeface, you can indirectly control the use of the printing press. There's probably a lesson here for the modern age.
I personally disagree with the classification of computer fonts as software (thus making them subject to copyright). However, I also recognize that rescinding this classification would be damned inconvenient to a number of companies, and even a few individuals who put hard work into creating good-looking computer fonts.
Whoops, forgot to say, you can trademark the name of a font... But most "clone" fonts have names that are just different enough to avoid trademark disputes. (Hence the proliferation of "Swiss" and "Helvetica" and "Sans Serif" variants, which are basically all the same or substantially similar on the printed page.)
You can't trademark, patent, or copyright a traditional typeface -- at least, not in the United States. For those who don't know, a typeface or font used to be a collection of metal blocks with raised edges which, when used in a printing press, would impress the images of the corresponding characters onto a page.
There is absolutely zero protection for the distinctive look of a typeface, which is why you can go out and buy "look-alike" fonts and why you can even download clone fonts.
The intellectual property protection for computer fonts comes from the idea that fonts are computer programs -- because a computer font is a file consisting of a set of instructions that tell the computer how to render the characters that make up the font. So copyright applies.
However, there's nothing stopping you from printing out each of the characters at some large point size (say, so there's one character filling each page), painstakingly tracing those characters with graph paper, and creating your own knock-off font. In fact, this technique is used a lot. What you won't be able to do, unless you're a master craftsman or engineer, is determine and duplicate the hints that make a font legible at small point sizes.
Now, I can't speak for the IP laws in the UK, but it is at least true that in the U.S., only computer fonts enjoy legal protection, and only because they are considered software.
Agreed, although there are astronomers and astrophysicists who also dabble in astrobiology, as I pointed out in a response to a sibling comment to yours. Just because someone specializes in one field doesn't mean they don't have a right to diversify and branch out into other fields. Furthermore, what input would a carbon-chauvanist biologist have about a life form that was not recognizable to biologists as "life as we know it?" A biologist can speak authoritatively about biological processes that are understood, but no biologist has any training in looking for genetic information carried by anything other than DNA.
(Yes, I know there's work being done with prions, but those are self-replicating protein structures which, to my knowledge, don't carry information we'd think of as "genetic" in nature. Prions don't form cells around themselves, to the best of my knowledge, nor do they seem to "code" for structures other than more of themselves.)
Astrobiology, being a speculative field of science, has people in it drawn from a much broader spectrum of scientific endeavor, and as such is a bit more immune to prejudice and narrow-minded thinking; astrobiologists routinely speculate about "exotic" biochemistries.
So... why not give samples to an astronomer? It's not as crazy an idea as you seem to suggest. The tendency in the modern world to overly-compartmentalize and over-specialize can retard the progress of science. Considering that the astronomer in question, Prof. Wickramasinghe, was one of the co-authors of the seminal paper on the theory of panspermia, why not let him participate in the research?
Many scientists have profitably crossed between disciplines in the past. I don't see why we should take a provincial view in this particular case.
I'm totally with you, although I should point out that there are many people who work across disciplines. Carl Sagan did some of the initial research on reproducing the earliest building-blocks of life in conditions that mimicked the conditions of the primordial Earth. Sagan is usually remembered as an astronomer, although he was trained as well in the biological sciences, and is one of the earliest exemplars of the field of astrobiology as a result.
That's assuming there's any DNA to find. There are many self-replicating molecules in the universe, of which DNA is one kind. If researchers don't find DNA, then the next logical step IMHO is to find evidence of any other self-replicating molecules present inside these "cells."
Preliminary tests don't seem to indicate the presence of DNA. This shouldn't be the end of the inquiry. Furthermore, repeated testing for the presence of DNA is only so useful; yes, it's good to independently verify results, but after you're satisfied that something isn't there, it's time to find out what is there.
Some believe that this non-incident represents Sun's exploratory steps towards eventually releasing its Java platform as free software. Let's hope Sun does that some day. We would welcome that, but we should save our appreciation for the day that actually occurs. In the mean time, the Java Trap still lies in wait for the work of programmers who don't take precautions to avoid it.
If RMS had bothered to listen to Jonathan Schwartz's keynote at JavaOne, he would know that Sun is interested in open-sourcing Java. Not just their implementation, but apparently the language itself and the platform that goes with it. I was there, and I clearly recall Mr. Schwartz saying, "It's not a question of whether, it's a question of how."
So yes, this "non-incident" is the first step. One thing RMS has never been good at is understanding political and corporate realities. You can't just snap your fingers and expect the world to instantly conform to your ideals; it takes time to overcome corporate inertia. In the meantime, I'm willing to show Sun that I appreciate the steps they've taken so far, and I will continue to prod them along toward the future I think we're all hoping for.
They only blocked access to the DVD file system. everything was intact down to the kernel source.
Do you think it's possible that somebody other than you might find this restriction to be too onerous for PS2 Linux to be worthwhile?
Personally, I would never want to write code for a system where one major piece (the optical drive, for crying out loud!) is inaccessible. I'm sure this was Sony's bright idea to prevent piracy -- and we see how well that's working. Game piracy seems to be happening regardless, so this policy really only hurts Linux enthusiasts who wanted to do development work on the PS2.
why is the base model not a decent blu ray player?
That's assuming the lack of HDMI is a big deal, which it might not be since many movie studios aren't including ICT on their discs. But regardless, this isn't the only reason to put a Blu-Ray drive in the PS3.
Sony fully intends to leverage the storage capacity of BD-ROM, the Blu-Ray disc storage format, for PS3 games. This means more in-game content and more high-res textures.
From everything we've been told, HDMI is required for the Blu-Ray DRM, which means if you buy a core PS3, you can't watch movies (or perhaps you can only watch them in stadard def, i'm not quite sure).
My understanding is that Blu-Ray (and for that matter, HD-DVD) will only downgrade analog outputs to standard def if the disc contains ICT, or Image Constraint Token. Because a lot of early adopters of HDTV don't even have HDMI inputs, only component video inputs, many early Blu-Ray movies will not have ICT; this is a concession the movie studios are making to early HD adopters. (HD-DVD movies in the first generation will also be missing ICT, for the same reason.) I believe Sony Pictures made an announcement along these lines for the Blu-Ray movies they'll be releasing in the first batch.
"Does anyone actually care that the barebones PS3 isn't going to have a card reader?" The people that want to use their old saved games from PS2 and PS1 games.
Actually, the "card reader" feature of the high-end PS3 is for memory sticks, SD cards, and the like... I haven't seen any mention of Sony omitting the slots for their own proprietary PlayStation memory cards. Indeed, the vaunted backwards-compatibility of the PS3 with PS1 and PS2 software wouldn't work very well without that support...
You pay the same amount of sales tax on a book as you would a bag of potato chips.
Granted.
You propose a "special" sales tax [...]
Just to be clear, I'm not the one proposing this tax.:-)
But seriously, the person to whom I was responding made a blanket statement as follows:
If you believe that TV, movies, music, video games, 'etc are free speech (and, outside of Jack Thompson, I'm pretty sure most people do), then taxing them is unconstitutional.
Raul654, the author of that statement, wasn't qualifying what type of "tax" he was talking about.
There are special classes of merchandise that are tax-exempt -- most states do not levy sales tax on grocery items (e.g., uncooked meats and vegetables), for example, but they allow sales taxes on prepared foods (e.g., a bag of potato chips). The state of Connecticut exempted things like U.S. flags and charcoal briquettes from sales tax (at least, when I lived there, pre-1994).
But printed/published materials that fall under First Amendment protection are generally not tax-exempt.
Now, if the Texas Senator is proposing an additional tax, like the VAT that many Europeans have to deal with, then yeah, I provisionally agree, that's possibly wrong... because it would effectively create a special class of "free speech" that can be regulated or squelched through taxation. On the other hand, many commodities that I'd argue are essential for living are taxed above and beyond the "standard" sales tax regimes for other items -- gasoline, for instance. Are those taxes unjust as well? Movie theaters in some jurisdictions are required to collect tax above and beyond (or in place of) standard sales tax on each ticket sold -- would you argue that movie patrons or studios are having their First Amendment rights breached?
I don't claim to have all the answers, but it seems to me that if elected officials wish to impose a different taxation regime for a certain class of product (which also happens to be a form of protected speech), there's enough gray area here to warrant more careful consideration.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, but it's more a case of "hope springs eternal" with me. As in, I hope people will act smarter than they often do.
Um, no, you just read the story wrong. The story is saying that both "hot Earths" and habitable, Earth-like planets can form in systems that have so-called hot Jupiters.
It amazes me how some folks are so quick to judge something that they actually wind up demonstrating their own ignorance (or inability to comprehend a slightly confusing science article, take your pick).
If you read the article, it's a bit more clear than the summary apparently was for you.
The article is saying that as Hot Jupiters migrate inwards, they temporarily disrupt the belt of debris in the habitable zone of a forming solar system. Then, after the Hot Jupiter has passed through, that debris has a chance to coalesce into habitable, Earth-like planets. In addition to this (and this is where careful reading and good reading comprehension skills come in handy), Hot Earths can be formed when Hot Jupiters push some material forward with them during their inward migration. From the article:(Emphasis added.)
Qwest has been doing something similar for its customers for some time now. I have Qwest Choice (TV and Internet access, all supplied via VDSL over the phone lines to my house), and my fiancee and I have found that e-mail to our qwest.net POP accounts is routinely filtered, and has been for almost 2 years now. We have no control over what gets blocked and what doesn't. We have found, through trial and error, that much of the blocking is being done on mail messages with multiple recipients -- but there's no hard and fast rule for this, so you can't say "messages with more than 2 recipients will get blocked." Various mailing lists don't get through anymore.
Qwest initially wouldn't admit they were doing any filtering or blocking of e-mail. This is SOP for them -- when I caught them blocking outbound NTP, the tier-1 tech support flatly denied they were doing any such thing, and I eventually had to escalate the matter to one of their network engineers, who finally admitted that someone went on a port-blocking binge to shut down customers who were reselling bandwidth (running porn sites from their houses, running their own ISPs, you name it). Apparently, the engineer who did this blocked NTP in both directions, so my Mac couldn't set its clock using Apple's NTP servers. (Their initial solution, after admitting to what they did, was to ask if I could use a non-default port for outbound NTP requests. I was using Mac OS 8 at the time, so no, I couldn't... but even if I could, most NTP servers in the Real World listen on the default port.)
When Qwest finally admitted that they were blocking/filtering e-mails, they would not commit to addressing any of my concerns. They have never implemented any kind of spam quarantine system, even though this blocking is supposed to help them fight spam. The messages often don't even get bounced; in these cases, they just get routed into a bit-bucket, so the sender has no idea that the recipient never got the message.
My fiancee and I now rely on other e-mail service providers to route around Qwest's brain-damage. We don't expect our qwest.net inboxes to be reliable.
What galls me, though, is the lack of transparency and accountability. These ISPs apparently feel no obligation to tell their customers that they have altered the terms of service in a potentially negative way, oftentimes because they have convinced themselves that they haven't actually changed anything -- and when called on it, they express neither shame nor guilt, but instead initially deny they did anything, and then when they realize that won't work, they offer mealy-mouthed excuses but continue to do nothing of substance.
Just because you're sending bits over an electrical conductor doesn't mean those bits are immune to noise. Those bits can be altered by external noise and can be degraded by reflections in the cable. (More on that in a moment.)
While it's true that HDMI uses DVI signaling for video data, and the signaling is differential (which is intrinsically more immune to noise than other signaling techniques), that doesn't mean that the bits can't get scrambled from point A to point B. More importantly, there's no error correction. So the receiving end has no way to tell if the bits it's getting are the correct bits, and no way to fix them if they're wrong.
Noise can be induced from any cables that run parallel to your HDMI cable. Imagine two conductors, A and B, that are parallel to each other and spaced fairly close together. If a current is run through A, a magnetic field is created around A and induces a current in B. Now, induction is a great thing when it comes to power transformers, but it's a nuisance when you're trying to transmit data over an electrical conductor.
Signal degradation can be caused by a variety of things, but in the case of cheap cables, you can have improper termination at either or both ends of a cable. Improper termination can be caused by bad solder joints between the wires in the cable and the HDMI connectors at the cable ends, for example, or by using cheap hardware for the connectors themselves. The typical result of improper termination is an impedance mismatch. If you've ever studied impedance in a physics class or an EE class, you know that when a signal is transmitted from conductor A with one impedance to conductor B with a different impedance, the signal can be reflected at the point where the mismatch occurs. This reflected signal can then constructively or destructively interfere with the original signal.
Personally, I wouldn't trust a $7 HDMI cable for a cluttered AV rack like mine, but I agree with you that paying $80 and up for an HDMI cable is probably highway robbery. I think a good target price is around $25 or $35 for a 1 to 1.5 meter cable run.
Not 100% accurate, as HDMI (which uses DVI signaling for the video portion) does not have any error correction built into the signaling. (See also the bottom of this page for similar info.)
This means that bit errors can creep in and degrade image quality when using low-quality cables, especially in an electrically noisy environment. I don't know about you, but I have a rat's nest of cables behind my AV rack; even with cable management, some cross-talk is unavoidable because of the sheer number of cables in close proximity.
Poor shielding is only one problem with cheap cables, though; you also have issues with improper termination (i.e., poor impedance matching) at the ends of the cable, something that makes a huge difference at the frequencies that DVI/HDMI operates at.
Here's the exact quote from the above-linked page where Krebs explicitly states this:(Emphasis added.)
So clearly, Mr. Krebs claims he saw this exploit working on Apple hardware using Apple-supplied WiFi drivers. Unfortunately, we can't corroborate this claim because we don't know the identity of the other person who supposedly saw this private demonstration.
Actually, Apple did more than just copy BeFS and its "DB-like" filesystem metadata facility. They hired the former Be, Inc., engineer who designed BeFS and the cool system of "live queries" that would update in real time as the file system changed. The engineer's name is Dominic Giampolo. As I understand it, Dominic has contributed extensively to HFS+, including the journaling support. He's written a book on file system design too, so this guy can be fairly described as knowing the problem domain pretty well.
Since BeOS is now defunct, I'm glad that Apple absorbed one of the cooler technologies from that OS (which I was an early developer for -- my BeBox is now living in Tucson with a friend). I hate to see good ideas wither and die for lack of a platform. The implementation might not be identical to that in BeOS, but it certainly behaves in much the same way for the end user. I should also point out that both BeFS and HFS+ with Spotlight do pretty much what WinFS promised to do -- except that WinFS now is no longer slated to be included in Vista, and in fact may only ever live in future releases of MS SQL Server.
Even if Apple hadn't absorbed the engineering talent to make this feature possible, Paul Thurrott would still be off-base in claiming that Apple "stole" spotlight from Vista. After all, Vista is still unreleased software, and is still in a state of flux (e.g., features are still being adjusted and, just recently, some were dropped, such as WinFS). It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim that a shipping product "stole" features from a product that still isn't available for sale. (I guess there's room to argue here, but to me, it seems clear that Vista is still vapor for most rank-and-file users.)
I'm writing this as someone who briefly worked for Metrowerks on their BeOS suite of compiler tools, and I met Dominic twice -- once while working for Metrowerks, and once at Comdex at Be's booth. He's a great guy.
Actually, it's Dominic Giampolo.
What really bakes my noodle is, current theory says that black holes can have spin and charge.
If you assume black holes have singularities, then how can an infinitely small point of infinite space-time curvature be said to rotate? (Yeah, I know, electrons are essentially point particles too, but electron "spin" is a quantum property and doesn't have to mesh with our intuitive understanding of what "spin" means in the macroscopic world. But black holes are described by relativistic mechanics, not by quantum theory, although Hawking has certainly brought quantum theory to bear on black holes -- hence the concept of Hawking Radiation.)
If photons mediate the electromagnetic force, and if a black hole can have an electrical charge, how does that work? The photons can never escape, just as you [njh] said. Moreover, why is it that (according to the article) a black hole can have charge but not a magnetic field? Seems to me that if a black hole has a charge and is "spinning," it could have a magnetic field the same way an electron does.
Obviously, I have more questions than answers. But to address your [njh's] point, if your logic is sound, then black holes could have neither charge nor magnetic field. Yet current theory says they can have charge but not a magnetic field. So this confuses me greatly.
Not currently. The MPAA specifically started doing its own moving ratings to stave off government regulation (and if the Wikipedia article is to be believed, the SCOTUS ruled in 1915 that movies were not protected by the First Amendment). In the early years of Hollywood, the U.S. government started doing to the film industry what the current Congress is doing to the videogame industry -- hearings, ill-conceived proposed legislation, you name it. (See this article for more on the history of the current U.S. rating system.)
This story has played out many times before -- another example from our history is the origin of the Comics Code Authority, which was created in direct response to Congressional efforts to regulate and censor comic books. The years of most stringent enforcement of the Code resulted in some of the worst quality comic writing and art. Technically, the code was voluntary, but most news stands wouldn't carry comic books that didn't carry the CCA seal of approval; this is not unlike the current situation with movie theaters and unrated films. Usually, an unrated film won't even get shown in a U.S. movie theater, except perhaps in a small art-house theater. Such films are treated similarly to films given an NC-17 rating (though, interestingly, many theater owners would be more inclined to show an unrated documentary or foreign film than they would to show a domestically produced NC-17 film because of the stigma of that rating, regardless of why the film got an NC-17 rating).
What I find interesting is that this new proposed legislation gives the U.S. Congress a back door to regulate the film industry. It's not just about video games! The U.S. government would very much like to have a single rating system for every kind of media that can be produced or consumed, and if they can get people to forget about First Amendment protections in at least one case, they can use that as a wedge to get other kinds of media (which are now recognized as having free speech protections) included under the same regulatory umbrella.
Final note: Although the SCOTUS ruled in 1915 that motion pictures didn't have First Amendment protections, a later 1952 decision reversed the earlier decision and established film as a protected form of speech.
Besides the spelling gaffe (your is the possessive of you, you're is a contraction of "you are"), this statement is not 100% correct. DirectX/Direct3D developers can mandate that certain API features are handled in hardware in order for the application to run, but they can just as easily allow DirectX to emulate in software what is not implemented in hardware. It's just that, for performance and usability reasons, most game developers don't want to allow DirectX to let the CPU handle certain things. So really, the practical difference between DirectX and OpenGL here is nil.
Since OpenGL is used for much more than just games, and since it's not as tightly tied to hardware specifications, it is more likely that OpenGL applications will tolerate missing hardware acceleration for some features. Having said that, I know there's a mechanism for programmatically determining which extensions an OpenGL implementation supports; what I don't know is whether you can easily detect if a particular feature is hardware accelerated or not. (I suspect the answer is yes, since there are still game developers out there who write to OpenGL.)
Actually, ARB stands for "Architecture Review Board." But the rest of what you said about the ARB is pretty accurate.
Nice try, but just because someone doesn't place monetary value on something doesn't automatically mean that they're obligated to provide it for you. You are, however, free to download a free font that's already available, or reverse-engineer a commercial font (which is perfectly legal in the U.S.), or create your own from scratch. If you value that work product, you're welcome to not share it with anyone. Just be aware that, once you've used that font in printed material which is published, it becomes fair game for someone else to reverse engineer.
I think there is a historical reason why the appearance of a font (the distinctive shapes of the letters) isn't copyrightable or trademarkable in many countries -- and it has a lot to do with the concern over squelching the free flow of ideas. After all, if you can control who uses what typeface, you can indirectly control the use of the printing press. There's probably a lesson here for the modern age.
I personally disagree with the classification of computer fonts as software (thus making them subject to copyright). However, I also recognize that rescinding this classification would be damned inconvenient to a number of companies, and even a few individuals who put hard work into creating good-looking computer fonts.
Whoops, forgot to say, you can trademark the name of a font... But most "clone" fonts have names that are just different enough to avoid trademark disputes. (Hence the proliferation of "Swiss" and "Helvetica" and "Sans Serif" variants, which are basically all the same or substantially similar on the printed page.)
You can't trademark, patent, or copyright a traditional typeface -- at least, not in the United States. For those who don't know, a typeface or font used to be a collection of metal blocks with raised edges which, when used in a printing press, would impress the images of the corresponding characters onto a page.
There is absolutely zero protection for the distinctive look of a typeface, which is why you can go out and buy "look-alike" fonts and why you can even download clone fonts.
The intellectual property protection for computer fonts comes from the idea that fonts are computer programs -- because a computer font is a file consisting of a set of instructions that tell the computer how to render the characters that make up the font. So copyright applies.
However, there's nothing stopping you from printing out each of the characters at some large point size (say, so there's one character filling each page), painstakingly tracing those characters with graph paper, and creating your own knock-off font. In fact, this technique is used a lot. What you won't be able to do, unless you're a master craftsman or engineer, is determine and duplicate the hints that make a font legible at small point sizes.
Now, I can't speak for the IP laws in the UK, but it is at least true that in the U.S., only computer fonts enjoy legal protection, and only because they are considered software.
Agreed, although there are astronomers and astrophysicists who also dabble in astrobiology, as I pointed out in a response to a sibling comment to yours. Just because someone specializes in one field doesn't mean they don't have a right to diversify and branch out into other fields. Furthermore, what input would a carbon-chauvanist biologist have about a life form that was not recognizable to biologists as "life as we know it?" A biologist can speak authoritatively about biological processes that are understood, but no biologist has any training in looking for genetic information carried by anything other than DNA.
(Yes, I know there's work being done with prions, but those are self-replicating protein structures which, to my knowledge, don't carry information we'd think of as "genetic" in nature. Prions don't form cells around themselves, to the best of my knowledge, nor do they seem to "code" for structures other than more of themselves.)
Astrobiology, being a speculative field of science, has people in it drawn from a much broader spectrum of scientific endeavor, and as such is a bit more immune to prejudice and narrow-minded thinking; astrobiologists routinely speculate about "exotic" biochemistries.
So... why not give samples to an astronomer? It's not as crazy an idea as you seem to suggest. The tendency in the modern world to overly-compartmentalize and over-specialize can retard the progress of science. Considering that the astronomer in question, Prof. Wickramasinghe, was one of the co-authors of the seminal paper on the theory of panspermia, why not let him participate in the research?
Many scientists have profitably crossed between disciplines in the past. I don't see why we should take a provincial view in this particular case.
I'm totally with you, although I should point out that there are many people who work across disciplines. Carl Sagan did some of the initial research on reproducing the earliest building-blocks of life in conditions that mimicked the conditions of the primordial Earth. Sagan is usually remembered as an astronomer, although he was trained as well in the biological sciences, and is one of the earliest exemplars of the field of astrobiology as a result.
That's assuming there's any DNA to find. There are many self-replicating molecules in the universe, of which DNA is one kind. If researchers don't find DNA, then the next logical step IMHO is to find evidence of any other self-replicating molecules present inside these "cells."
Preliminary tests don't seem to indicate the presence of DNA. This shouldn't be the end of the inquiry. Furthermore, repeated testing for the presence of DNA is only so useful; yes, it's good to independently verify results, but after you're satisfied that something isn't there, it's time to find out what is there.
If RMS had bothered to listen to Jonathan Schwartz's keynote at JavaOne, he would know that Sun is interested in open-sourcing Java. Not just their implementation, but apparently the language itself and the platform that goes with it. I was there, and I clearly recall Mr. Schwartz saying, "It's not a question of whether, it's a question of how."
So yes, this "non-incident" is the first step. One thing RMS has never been good at is understanding political and corporate realities. You can't just snap your fingers and expect the world to instantly conform to your ideals; it takes time to overcome corporate inertia. In the meantime, I'm willing to show Sun that I appreciate the steps they've taken so far, and I will continue to prod them along toward the future I think we're all hoping for.
Do you think it's possible that somebody other than you might find this restriction to be too onerous for PS2 Linux to be worthwhile?
Personally, I would never want to write code for a system where one major piece (the optical drive, for crying out loud!) is inaccessible. I'm sure this was Sony's bright idea to prevent piracy -- and we see how well that's working. Game piracy seems to be happening regardless, so this policy really only hurts Linux enthusiasts who wanted to do development work on the PS2.
That's assuming the lack of HDMI is a big deal, which it might not be since many movie studios aren't including ICT on their discs. But regardless, this isn't the only reason to put a Blu-Ray drive in the PS3.
Sony fully intends to leverage the storage capacity of BD-ROM, the Blu-Ray disc storage format, for PS3 games. This means more in-game content and more high-res textures.
My understanding is that Blu-Ray (and for that matter, HD-DVD) will only downgrade analog outputs to standard def if the disc contains ICT, or Image Constraint Token. Because a lot of early adopters of HDTV don't even have HDMI inputs, only component video inputs, many early Blu-Ray movies will not have ICT; this is a concession the movie studios are making to early HD adopters. (HD-DVD movies in the first generation will also be missing ICT, for the same reason.) I believe Sony Pictures made an announcement along these lines for the Blu-Ray movies they'll be releasing in the first batch.
Actually, the "card reader" feature of the high-end PS3 is for memory sticks, SD cards, and the like... I haven't seen any mention of Sony omitting the slots for their own proprietary PlayStation memory cards. Indeed, the vaunted backwards-compatibility of the PS3 with PS1 and PS2 software wouldn't work very well without that support...
Granted.
Just to be clear, I'm not the one proposing this tax.
But seriously, the person to whom I was responding made a blanket statement as follows:Raul654, the author of that statement, wasn't qualifying what type of "tax" he was talking about.
There are special classes of merchandise that are tax-exempt -- most states do not levy sales tax on grocery items (e.g., uncooked meats and vegetables), for example, but they allow sales taxes on prepared foods (e.g., a bag of potato chips). The state of Connecticut exempted things like U.S. flags and charcoal briquettes from sales tax (at least, when I lived there, pre-1994).
But printed/published materials that fall under First Amendment protection are generally not tax-exempt.
Now, if the Texas Senator is proposing an additional tax, like the VAT that many Europeans have to deal with, then yeah, I provisionally agree, that's possibly wrong... because it would effectively create a special class of "free speech" that can be regulated or squelched through taxation. On the other hand, many commodities that I'd argue are essential for living are taxed above and beyond the "standard" sales tax regimes for other items -- gasoline, for instance. Are those taxes unjust as well? Movie theaters in some jurisdictions are required to collect tax above and beyond (or in place of) standard sales tax on each ticket sold -- would you argue that movie patrons or studios are having their First Amendment rights breached?
I don't claim to have all the answers, but it seems to me that if elected officials wish to impose a different taxation regime for a certain class of product (which also happens to be a form of protected speech), there's enough gray area here to warrant more careful consideration.