Spain doesn't exactly have a stellar record for respecting freedom of speech. After all, Spain was complicit with Nazi Germany (Franco used German-designed weaponry in his little revolution, and the Germans used Spain as a test-bed). Franco was a fascist, and didn't tolerate dissent very well. Yes, yes, things are different now, but c'mon, they had a democracy and it was subverted; they're only now starting to recover, despite Franco's attempt to re-establish a monarchy.
Also, there are many within the EU who would privately question whether Spain and Portugal can truly be considered first-world countries, considering how far they lag behind the rest of Europe economically and socially. Many basic services don't reach everyone on the Iberian Peninsula, even now. Of course, I'm sure an apologist will shout me down, but it's hard to argue with the latest poverty statistics for Spain. (Google for them yourself, don't take my word for it.)
This is certainly humorous, but not at all analogous to the situation.
IMHO, any so-called "university" that silences a professor because he gave a lecture that made some corporate interests uncomfortable needs to have its academic credentials revoked. Doing so would cause such situations to correct themselves very quickly.
To amplify what another poster has said, in academia, a professor (especially a tenured professor) is "fired" by being pressured into resigning. This sort of thing also happens in the higher echelons of government, e.g., "I expect to see your resignation on my desk in the morning."
Well, there is one obvious benefit of Blu-Ray over HD DVD: storage capacity. While HD DVD makes up for the lack of storage capacity with a more efficient encoding scheme for video, that only makes the two formats more-or-less equivalent for consumer video applications.
For pure data applications, Blu-Ray is the superior choice. This may be why many computer manufacturers (including Apple, which has traditionally been conservative about backing media formats) are backing Blu-Ray. You can never have too much storage.
Blu-Ray supports 25 GB per layer; HD DVD supports only 15. Blu-Ray can also theoretically support more than 2 layers per side, according to some articles I've read. Now, Toshiba just announced a higher-capacity version of HD DVD, which will provide 45 GB of storage (versus 50 GB of storage for a dual-layer BD-ROM). Toshiba accomplished this by adding another layer to the disc, making it a 3-layer disc. Personally, I wonder if this is going to fly due to issues with optics and manufacturing. After all, one of the supposed benefits of HD DVD is that it can be manufactured more easily by leveraging existing facilities which manufacture conventional DVD discs.
I totally agree that including a Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 is as much about politics as it is about technical merit. We already know the PS3 supports HD video output (it includes two HDMI connectors for output). The Blu-Ray drive will make the PS3 capable of playing movies in that format, and there's every reason to think the PS3 will do this out of the box. The PS3 will promote the format nicely, since the PS3 will be purchased by consumers who otherwise wouldn't care about HD video on a disc.
It's also interesting to note that the PS3 will support SACD. But not DVD-Audio! SACD is probably not a hot selling feature either, but people will buy a PS3 and say, "Hey, I can now play those Super Audio discs!" The PS3 is a hedge against format obsolescence, definitely.
Ah, just re-read that. I stand corrected. Of course, it was hard to tell because all the OP mentioned was bare midriffs on the female crew members.
(I probably would have been slightly less confused if you'd phrased your comment differently, e.g., "It seems as though you're describing the Mirror Universe episodes and not...")
Amazon is not "my local market." I was specifically writing about my local retail market (i.e., Phoenix, Arizona). There are many different pricing structures, and they all depend on which retailer you happen to patronize; I personally avoid buying music and video at Wal-Mart because I don't support censorship and I don't support what Wal-Mart does to smaller locally owned and operated businesses.
So, for the stores that I frequent, $20 is the average magic price point for a DVD. You might get a discount if the movie is released brand new (Best Buy, for instance, discounts new releases). And the UMD video prices have been calibrated to almost always be less than that.
IIRC, this has been disabled in the newer 64-bit PowerPC chips. There was a mode switch that was utilized in older versions of Virtual PC; I've seen it referred to online as "virtual little endian mode." (Microsoft talks about it on this page and refers to it as "pseudo little-endian mode.") The G5 lacks this mode, so Virtual PC was not compatible with the G5 PowerMac initially.
Support for operation as in both Big-Endian and Little-Endian modes; the PowerPC can switch from one mode to the other at run-time. This feature is not supported in the PowerPC G5. (This is the reason why Virtual PC won't run on the G5 yet.)
Virtual PC has since been updated for G5 compatibility.
I think 3 dual-core 3.2GHz processors are going to be pretty expensive.
I don't think these are dual-core processors. More likely is that they are similar to Intel's HyperThreaded P4 designs. The IGN specs published today seem to back this up; they talk about three CPU cores with two hardware threads per core. "Two hardware threads" is not the same as dual cores.
three 3.2GHz PPC chips aren't that much more than a 800MHz PIII??
The problem is that emulation is not something that can easily exploit parallelism. So while we have three 3.2 GHz PowerPC chips in Xbox 360, each of which supports some form of hardware multithreading (each chip supposedly capable of supporting two simultaneous threads in hardware, according to what I've read elsewhere -- I'm guessing it's probably some sort of HyperThreading implementation, and not true dual-core capability), emulating the 800 MHz P3 of the original Xbox might only be able to leverage a single CPU in the Xbox 360.
To boil this down to a snappy quote: You can't take nine women and make them have a single baby in one month.
The problem is worse than this, though. The original Xbox used an nVidia video solution; the Xbox 360 uses an ATI solution. While it's true that game developers wrote to Microsoft's API when developing games for the Xbox, it's also true that many of these developers tweaked the shader programs in their 3D games to specifically optimize them for the nVidia hardware. Translating shader programs from one rendering architecture to another is non-trivial, and to do so on-the-fly is a daunting task. I suppose one of the PowerPC chips in the Xbox 360 could be tasked with translating shader programs, leaving another PowerPC to emulate the x86 instruction set and intelligently code-translate the original games. API calls should map directly, more or less, with some data massaging (e.g., big vs. little endian issues).
Maybe the ATI chip was designed with a compatibility mode to run original Xbox shader programs? Doubtful, as nVidia owns a lot of the intellectual property embedded in their chips and drivers.
Even if you ignore the fact that emulation usually can't exploit parallelism, you do have one final fact to deal with: Emulation works best when the chip doing the emulation is at least an order of magnitude faster than the chip that is being emulated. A single 3.2 GHz PowerPC processor is maybe a factor of 3 or 4 faster than an 800 MHz Pentium 3, not a factor of 10 or more. And multiprocessing doesn't give you an automatic multiplier -- two CPUs in parallel are not twice as fast as a single CPU, because of memory bandwidth limits and synchronization overhead.
It looks as though in the Phoenix Metro market, they're airing "These are the Voyages..." tonight, and "Terra Prime" on Sunday (May 15th). Kind of lame, if you ask me.
Then again, we have the Phoenix Suns to thank. Anyone else in other television markets having this problem?
No, he's referring to the episodes of Enterprise guest-starring Peter Weller. Weller plays a xenophobic isolationist who wants to remove non-humans from Earth.
I've seen several folks making note of the fact that just because the widget gets automatically copied into the "right" folder, it doesn't get launched/activated until the user explicitly does so in Dashboard. While this does provide an extra layer of protection, it's not enough for most users. (I'm not meaning to imply that the commenter I linked to specifically was underestimating the seriousness of this issue, but his comment was the clearest explanation of the widget behavior that wasn't written by AC.)
I learned a painful lesson in user naivity when I visited my father for the holidays. I meant to do a little cleanup on his system, but what I discovered was a complete mess that I could barely scratch the surface of. It looked like he had installed every single demo, crapware, shareware app, and plugin imaginable; he probably got these from Apple's.Mac service, since Apple likes to put a variety of software in the user's iDisk under the Software folder IIRC. The Applications folder on his G5 was littered with broken apps, disk image files, you name it. The scary thing is, he had no recollection of installing most of these things, nor could he recall giving anyone else control of his machine to install these items. There were things he installed that he didn't even have use for, such as the TiVo Desktop. (That was a bit harder to get rid of than most stuff, because TiVo's software installs a preference pane.)
My father is not an idiot, but he is elderly, and he's not as computer savvy as he sometimes thinks he is. If a naive user can install a bunch of application binaries without really remembering doing so, what's to say that some naive user won't notice a new widget sitting in Dashboard, and activate it out of curiosity to see what it does? After all, Apple's philosophy has always been to encourage users to explore and play around with their computing environment to learn how things work.
Bottom line: The end user can't be trusted. Users can't be trusted not to do perverse things with their systems. Users can't even be trusted not to click on something that's been downloaded, nor can they be trusted not to click on something that's been "helpfully" installed for them.
Superbit is just a standard DVD with a higher bitrate for the encoded video, sometimes at the expense of bonus material (since higher bitrate video means less space for bonus material). My copy of the movie Adaptation is in Superbit format; I don't even know if a non-Superbit version was released.
Of all the things you've mentioned, Superbit is the least proprietary, since it works with all existing DVD players.
Oddly enough, here in Phoenix, Arizona, I am seeing most UMD video releases at about the $14 price point, with maybe one or two falling below that, and only one video selling above that (that I've seen). I've been looking at Fry's Electronics and Target mainly.
For those who care, the one UMD video selling for $20 here in Phoenix is House of Flying Daggers, and that was at Target. I haven't seen anything higher than that.
Funny, but here in Phoenix, Arizona, the UMD movies are typically retailing for $14 (though at least one store was selling House of Flying Daggers on UMD for $20). I even think I've seen one or two places carry UMD video for under $14.
Most DVDs here retail for about $20 or slightly more. It would be foolhardy to market the UMD versions of these movies for more than the DVD version, considering that DVD gives you extra bonus features as well as higher resolution. (This, despite Sony's claim on the UMD movie packaging that these movies are DVD quality.)
I think it's safe to say I don't agree with most of the fundamental premises that underlie Orson Scott Card's arguments. His line of reasoning might be valid (though I would say, having read the LA Times article he wrote, that he engages in hand waving a bit much, and his logic has holes). But an argument built upon false premises does not yield valid conclusions. I find it particularly interesting that in one paragraph, Mr. Card speaks of bad writing in Star Trek, then goes on to list a bunch of authors of that era he considers to be good -- a list that includes several authors who wrote scripts for Star Trek.
I find the "insight" he provides to be shallow. I don't see a lot of evidence of deep thought behind his argument. So my value judgment stands.
Maybe he got the form, but I don't believe he got the substance. Lots of people make careers in writing (and other areas) by following a formula.
He also has written one of the best learn-to-write books: "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy". 'Nuff said.
Hardly. Writing a "How To" book doesn't make you an expert or a master of something. It doesn't hurt if you already know how to do something, and want to write a book about it, but personal expertise is actually not a requirement. I've read several technical books on a variety of topics (computer-related and otherwise), and many were written by those who knew enough to teach the topic but not enough to actually make a career doing it.
There's another related argument, about the difference between craftsmanship (e.g., Stephen King) and artistry (e.g., Ernest Hemingway). But the SciFi field is populated by a lot of craftsmen (less kind people would say hacks) and precious few artists.
And yes, he is a conservative Mormon apologist, which is kind of scary. But it doesn't negate his abilities and knowledge as a writer.
That's about the only thing you wrote that I agree with. I just have a problem when the line between the two roles (that of Mormon apologist vs. that of SF writer) starts to blur.
Oh, and here is a link to a brief article about the so-called canals on Mars. It mentions Lowell, the U.S. astronomer who spent much of his life looking for these canals, but it also credits Schiaparelli with starting the furor over canals on Mars in the first place. (My first exposure to this issue was Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos -- I think it's discussed in the episode entitled "Blues for a Red Planet." There's a companion book also called Cosmos which gives even more detail about the history of astronomical observation of Mars.)
Now that I've been corrected (At the size being 38% less than Earth's, which I will admit, unashamedly) I can understand how gravity would be affected.
Not to pick nits, but you still got it wrong. It's not that Mars' gravity is 38% less than Earth's. It's that Mars' gravity is 38% of Earth's gravity. In other words, Mars' surface gravity is 62% lower than that of Earth.
Just to be clear: if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you'd weigh 37.7 pounds on Mars. (There's a spiffy calculator on a JPL/NASA web site.)
Furthermore, it's not the size of a planet that accounts for its gravity; it's the mass. Mars is less dense than Earth and it is physically smaller; the combination explains the significantly lower mass. (OK, gravitational force does diminish as the inverse of the square of the distance between your center of mass and the planet's, so the diameter of the planet does factor into the gravitational equation. Still, the dominant term here is mass when you're talking about a person or other object sitting on the planet's surface.)
And no, after ten minutes of looking thru the entire astronomy section of the book, Canals are not mentioned. Maybe this is why the US population (Republicans, Democrats, and morons alike) are getting dumber and dumber each year? Education thru misinformation?
Um, he was being facetious. There are no canals on Mars. The idea that Mars had canals originated with an Italian astronomer who used an optical telescope to view Mars, and spoke of "canali" (channels) which he sketched in his notebooks. This word was mistranslated as "canals," which implies an artificial origin.
So basically, the person to whom you are responding was making a jest about the quality of your textbook. Presumably, a textbook mentioning canals on Mars is either antiquated or badly written, since the existence of canals on Mars has been disproven.
Are they REALLY good points? Are they valid?
on
No Need For Trek Anymore
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The Slashdot article suggests Card makes some good points about the development of SciFi over the last 30+ years. I'm not entirely sure, because based on what Card holds up as paragons of good SciFi, it's pretty clear to me that his definition of SciFi doesn't match mine. (Another poster echoed this sentiment, stating that many "examples" were more Fantasy than SciFi.)
To be clear: Science Fiction is fiction in which, when you remove the science element, it no longer makes sense. Science is integral somehow. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is SciFi; without the premise of reanimation with electricity, it just wouldn't be the same story. (I can just hear the Fantasy apologists chiming in with the "Fantasy is indistinguishable from SciFi" argument, by claiming that magic is indistinguishable from technology. I don't want to get mired in this debate, however. Good fantasy requires some kind of self-consistency on some level, just like good SciFi, but fantasy doesn't have to square with conventional reality in any way. Even "far out" SciFi concepts are usually extrapolations of current ideas or trends or technologies.)
By this definition, most space opera is not SciFi. Star Wars, minus the SciFi trappings of spaceships and futuristic weaponry and droids, would be a Western with some metaphysical overtones. Now, it's true that Star Trek was sold to NBC as a "wagon train to the stars." This was because Westerns were the popular milieu of the day; most of the successful TV shows at the time were Westerns. But there were still stories being told against that backdrop that had real science fiction in them.
Orson Scott Card's LA Times article does a lot of name dropping. He mentions Larry Niven and Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison. And yet, many of these writers wrote episodes for Star Trek. (Ellison's script won an award, even though Roddenberry rewrote it for the screen. The episode was "City on the Edge of Forever," and won a Hugo. Ellison's original script won a Writers Guild of America award. Niven wrote for the animated series.) Some young SciFi authors got their start because of Star Trek -- remember David Gerrold? He wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles," and is now a respected SF author in his own right.
What is Card's problem with 1930's SciFi? Not all of it was episodic pulp crap or low-budget moviehouse serials. Some of the best SciFi I've read has come from the 1930's and 1940's.
He's right that later incarnations of Star Trek were better acted, and wrong that the content stagnated. At least with ST:TNG, many thought provoking stories were told, and would actually qualify as "real" SciFi by my test above, providing you're willing to forgive Star Trek physics and some of its consistent inconsistencies with real physics. Even the mundane backdrop trappings of the Star Trek universe were the subject of fascinating books.
I will grant that Card's right about one thing: Star Trek popularized Science Fiction. Some would say Trek diluted the pool of good stuff by filling the airwaves with mediocre material. This is an opinion I do not share.
I would also argue that Card's wrong about the quality of modern SciFi on television and film; I disagree that it's every bit as good as what's in print, if only because there are many things that can only be approximated with special effects, things that the human imagination is much more adept at rendering. (But then, I have long believed that Card simply doesn't "get it," and wouldn't recognize truly good SciFi if it bit him on the ass.)
While the recent incarnations of Trek have been painful to watch (with season 4 of Enterprise being what the show should have been all along, but too little, too late), I don't think the "need" for Trek has diminished. Trek was more than just a vehicle for telling stories in a SciFi milieu. Trek was more
[...]but just to be able to put the book down and go wash the veneer of his homophobic Christianity from my hands.
Some of us would contend that it's not even really Christianity. Card is, after all, a conservative Mormon apologist. This is the guy who wrote a now infamous article when I was an undergrad, in which he opined that it was a good thing for government to retain laws which proscribe homosexuality. Even though I wasn't as cravenly PC as my classmates, I found Card's thesis objectionable.
The man does not believe in the separation of Church and State. (My ex-Mormon friends assure me this is endemic to Mormonism, though that is entirely another topic.) He mixes religious themes freely into his Science Fiction, which in my humble opinion brings it closer to the realm of Fantasy than SciFi.
Mr. Card has a very specific view of what constitutes Science Fiction, and it doesn't mesh with mine. His opinions of SciFi are therefore suspect. It's not just that he chose to slay a sacred cow (Star Trek); his arguments are specious and slanted. Maybe he's suffering from Hemingway syndrome (i.e., wrote all his best material first). Part of me thinks his Ender series is just a cynical exploitation of empowerment fantasies shared by most geeks. But I never felt that Card was legit; I always felt that he was a poseur, that he never really "got" the genre he was writing in. I'd say this LA Times article is proof.
Then again, the Left have all but beaten the Right into submission, but still play the role of martyrs.
If that's true, why is it that the Right is firmly in control of the United States, the only remaining Western superpower? I call Troll. (Or Flamebait, take your pick.)
Yeah, we can see how badly beaten the political Right is. Please, spare me.
That's why I said I was disappointed. I didn't expect Apple to behave better, but I hoped for it. KHTML is under the LGPL; thus, so is WebCore. It would have been nice if Apple contributed changes back to KHTML in a manner more conducive to the improvement of KHTML; that would have made Apple a better "citizen" in Open Source land. However, Apple is at least complying with the letter of the LGPL if not the spirit. So they're making WebCore source available, as they should.
At this point, WebCore is more of a fork of KHTML, so the KHTML authors may need to re-engineer a few things that Apple did to the source to improve standards compliance or speed rendering. Apple could have cooperated more closely with the KHTML team, but they chose not to. They could have made their changes to KHTML in a more platform-independent manner, but they chose not to. (And they still could have done it in a way that would leverage OS X's advantages.)
Apple derived benefit from KHTML, but the KHTML team hasn't gotten a reciprocal amount of benefit from Apple. The code came into their hands in a form that was reasonably platform-neutral, which was useful to Apple. Apple polluted the code with platform-specific stuff in a few spots, so it didn't leave their hands in the same state. So much for the promise of Open Source. Apple's actions hurt them in the long run, because more and more people are starting to believe that Apple's commitment to Open Source is more PR than anything.
On the other hand, it's a good sign that at least Apple's engineers are willing to discuss the changes they made to the source, which mitigates the problem of how Apple sends the patches/code back to the KHTML team. So Apple's not being quite so uncooperative as they're being made out to be. But they could have done a far sight better. This kind of cynical profiteering from Open Source serves to discourage others from contributing to Open Source projects, for fear that corporate interests will benefit from free code and give nothing substantial back.
Lost the first attempt at writing a comment, so here's the (abbreviated) second draft:
The article contains factual errors, logical errors, and even spelling mistakes. I think Paul Murphy really needs to get a good editor. (Yeah, nit picking spelling is usually frowned on here, but come on, the guy can't even spell Phoenix right! Speaking as someone who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, I can't believe a professional news publication would let this kind of crap slip through.)
Aside from nit-picky details like the fact that it was Lenin, not Stalin, who coined the term "useful idiots," Paul Murphy quotes Eric Raymond out of context to bolster a fallacious argument, cites one of his own prior articles as evidence to bolster the main argument of his current article, and in fact parrots arguments made by the Alexis de Toqueville Institute in the book Samizdat. The arguments gleaned from Samizdat and AdTI have been widely discredited, and in fact most of the sources cited in Samizdat have repudiated the book and the manner in which they were represented in the book.
For example, Mr. Murphy claims that the Linux kernel was begun as a hack to the Minix kernel, then grew into its own kernel (which he at some points seems to confuse with a full-blown operating system). This is patently absurd for several reasons. For starters, the two kernels have completely different architectures: Minix is a microkernel written for wide portability, and Linux is a monolithic kernel originally written to take specific advantage of features in the 386 instruction set. Tannenbaum and Torvalds both agree that Linux never contained a shred of Minix code, although Linus clearly learned a great deal from examining the Minix source.
(It's also of note that Torvalds was never Tannenbaum's student, so the whole bit about Tannenbaum giving Torvalds a "C" is a distortion of actual events. Tannenbaum's comments were made in the hypothetical, and were tongue-in-cheek.)
Others have already pointed out that clean room techniques are not a prerequisite for legal reverse engineering. Furthermore, it should be obvious that reverse engineering was entirely unnecessary: Linus had the POSIX specification to refer to, a published and public specification. And the source code for UNIX could hardly be considered a secret, since the Lions book has been passed around as a samizdat manuscript for a number of years before it became fully legal for everyone to own and reference. In short, the entire "Myth of Immaculate Conception" section is bogus.
The entire "Meeting the Requirements Easily" section has been refuted multiple times, and is based upon an already discredited legal theory.
When Mr. Murphy sums up his argument, he is only half right in much of what he says. Consider:
The claim that a failure to find copied code today proves that previous processes were uncontaminated is fallacious. And the presumptive consequence about due diligence having been widely rendered is unsupported wishful thinking.
While it's strictly true that a lack of misappropriated code in the Linux kernel today doesn't mean that it wasn't there in the past, we know from past experience that due dilligence has been exercised, and is continuing to be exercised to this day. It's not just that the current kernel source code is widely available for public scrutiny; we also have the entire history of the kernel source tree to examine. Milestone snapshots have been archived practically since day one. And in fact, I can recall at least one incident where inappropriately contributed code in the Linux kernel was in fact removed, and this happened well before the SCO lawsuit. So the process works.
Ah, yes, so if you experience this behavior, it must be a problem with the browser, not with your machine, right...?
Yeah, that was sarcasm. If you're experiencing Safari crashes with any kind of frequency, you should check your system, and if it's an extreme enough case of being biffed, I would recommend an archive-and-install of Mac OS X 10.3. Then reapply the version updates and the security updates, in order.
The only time I've seen Safari crash is on some very badly authored web sites, most of which also generate dozens of pop-up ads. In many cases, the site in question relied on at least one 3rd party plugin for rich media content, so that's suspect right there.
So, either you've got a system problem, or you're surfing some very questionable sites. I maintain several OS X systems, and I have a couple friends who also run OS X; nobody I know personally has experienced the kind of crashing behavior in Safari you're describing.
Those who have described such behavior either have file corruption, permissions problems, or in rare cases, bad RAM. Other hardware issues (e.g., thermal problems) can theoretically cause similar symptoms. So can some badly behaved third-party software, such as old versions of Pith Helmet (a Safari enhancer).
Yeah, I went through the comments on Dave Hyatt's blog and found this link in the comments section (the same link you give above), and I was pretty shocked. Like most folks, I thought that KHTML was benefiting from Apple's contributions. However, after reading the critique by Zack Rusin (one of the KHTML developers), I took a closer look at some of the patches that Dave Hyatt posted links to on his blog.
While many of the patches were simple logic changes, a few of them had OS X specific code in them which makes them non portable. Hyatt's follow-up comments indicate that he tried to hide many of the Mac-isms behind an abstraction layer so that they could port cleanly to other platforms, but a cursory glance at the patches shows that he didn't hide everything.
So while this is a great win for Apple and for Mac OS X, it's not the boon to KHTML that many thought it would be.
Personally, I'm disappointed that the Safari team would put Mac-specific code into the KHTML engine, making some of their patches impossible to incorporate back into the KHTML baseline. This is the kind of thing I would expect from a novice programmer who's only ever coded for, say, Windows.
(Just a side note to the poster I'm responding to: Most folks who read your comment probably didn't realize the significance of it because they didn't follow the link. A brief summary of what the link is pointing to would have been really useful.)
Slashdot Mirror
Spain doesn't exactly have a stellar record for respecting freedom of speech. After all, Spain was complicit with Nazi Germany (Franco used German-designed weaponry in his little revolution, and the Germans used Spain as a test-bed). Franco was a fascist, and didn't tolerate dissent very well. Yes, yes, things are different now, but c'mon, they had a democracy and it was subverted; they're only now starting to recover, despite Franco's attempt to re-establish a monarchy.
Also, there are many within the EU who would privately question whether Spain and Portugal can truly be considered first-world countries, considering how far they lag behind the rest of Europe economically and socially. Many basic services don't reach everyone on the Iberian Peninsula, even now. Of course, I'm sure an apologist will shout me down, but it's hard to argue with the latest poverty statistics for Spain. (Google for them yourself, don't take my word for it.)
This is certainly humorous, but not at all analogous to the situation.
IMHO, any so-called "university" that silences a professor because he gave a lecture that made some corporate interests uncomfortable needs to have its academic credentials revoked. Doing so would cause such situations to correct themselves very quickly.
To amplify what another poster has said, in academia, a professor (especially a tenured professor) is "fired" by being pressured into resigning. This sort of thing also happens in the higher echelons of government, e.g., "I expect to see your resignation on my desk in the morning."
Well, there is one obvious benefit of Blu-Ray over HD DVD: storage capacity. While HD DVD makes up for the lack of storage capacity with a more efficient encoding scheme for video, that only makes the two formats more-or-less equivalent for consumer video applications.
For pure data applications, Blu-Ray is the superior choice. This may be why many computer manufacturers (including Apple, which has traditionally been conservative about backing media formats) are backing Blu-Ray. You can never have too much storage.
Blu-Ray supports 25 GB per layer; HD DVD supports only 15. Blu-Ray can also theoretically support more than 2 layers per side, according to some articles I've read. Now, Toshiba just announced a higher-capacity version of HD DVD, which will provide 45 GB of storage (versus 50 GB of storage for a dual-layer BD-ROM). Toshiba accomplished this by adding another layer to the disc, making it a 3-layer disc. Personally, I wonder if this is going to fly due to issues with optics and manufacturing. After all, one of the supposed benefits of HD DVD is that it can be manufactured more easily by leveraging existing facilities which manufacture conventional DVD discs.
I totally agree that including a Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 is as much about politics as it is about technical merit. We already know the PS3 supports HD video output (it includes two HDMI connectors for output). The Blu-Ray drive will make the PS3 capable of playing movies in that format, and there's every reason to think the PS3 will do this out of the box. The PS3 will promote the format nicely, since the PS3 will be purchased by consumers who otherwise wouldn't care about HD video on a disc.
It's also interesting to note that the PS3 will support SACD. But not DVD-Audio! SACD is probably not a hot selling feature either, but people will buy a PS3 and say, "Hey, I can now play those Super Audio discs!" The PS3 is a hedge against format obsolescence, definitely.
Ah, just re-read that. I stand corrected. Of course, it was hard to tell because all the OP mentioned was bare midriffs on the female crew members.
(I probably would have been slightly less confused if you'd phrased your comment differently, e.g., "It seems as though you're describing the Mirror Universe episodes and not...")
Amazon is not "my local market." I was specifically writing about my local retail market (i.e., Phoenix, Arizona). There are many different pricing structures, and they all depend on which retailer you happen to patronize; I personally avoid buying music and video at Wal-Mart because I don't support censorship and I don't support what Wal-Mart does to smaller locally owned and operated businesses.
So, for the stores that I frequent, $20 is the average magic price point for a DVD. You might get a discount if the movie is released brand new (Best Buy, for instance, discounts new releases). And the UMD video prices have been calibrated to almost always be less than that.
IIRC, this has been disabled in the newer 64-bit PowerPC chips. There was a mode switch that was utilized in older versions of Virtual PC; I've seen it referred to online as "virtual little endian mode." (Microsoft talks about it on this page and refers to it as "pseudo little-endian mode.") The G5 lacks this mode, so Virtual PC was not compatible with the G5 PowerMac initially.
Another article seems to agree with me:Virtual PC has since been updated for G5 compatibility.
I don't think these are dual-core processors. More likely is that they are similar to Intel's HyperThreaded P4 designs. The IGN specs published today seem to back this up; they talk about three CPU cores with two hardware threads per core. "Two hardware threads" is not the same as dual cores.
The problem is that emulation is not something that can easily exploit parallelism. So while we have three 3.2 GHz PowerPC chips in Xbox 360, each of which supports some form of hardware multithreading (each chip supposedly capable of supporting two simultaneous threads in hardware, according to what I've read elsewhere -- I'm guessing it's probably some sort of HyperThreading implementation, and not true dual-core capability), emulating the 800 MHz P3 of the original Xbox might only be able to leverage a single CPU in the Xbox 360.
To boil this down to a snappy quote: You can't take nine women and make them have a single baby in one month.
The problem is worse than this, though. The original Xbox used an nVidia video solution; the Xbox 360 uses an ATI solution. While it's true that game developers wrote to Microsoft's API when developing games for the Xbox, it's also true that many of these developers tweaked the shader programs in their 3D games to specifically optimize them for the nVidia hardware. Translating shader programs from one rendering architecture to another is non-trivial, and to do so on-the-fly is a daunting task. I suppose one of the PowerPC chips in the Xbox 360 could be tasked with translating shader programs, leaving another PowerPC to emulate the x86 instruction set and intelligently code-translate the original games. API calls should map directly, more or less, with some data massaging (e.g., big vs. little endian issues).
Maybe the ATI chip was designed with a compatibility mode to run original Xbox shader programs? Doubtful, as nVidia owns a lot of the intellectual property embedded in their chips and drivers.
Even if you ignore the fact that emulation usually can't exploit parallelism, you do have one final fact to deal with: Emulation works best when the chip doing the emulation is at least an order of magnitude faster than the chip that is being emulated. A single 3.2 GHz PowerPC processor is maybe a factor of 3 or 4 faster than an 800 MHz Pentium 3, not a factor of 10 or more. And multiprocessing doesn't give you an automatic multiplier -- two CPUs in parallel are not twice as fast as a single CPU, because of memory bandwidth limits and synchronization overhead.
It looks as though in the Phoenix Metro market, they're airing "These are the Voyages..." tonight, and "Terra Prime" on Sunday (May 15th). Kind of lame, if you ask me.
Then again, we have the Phoenix Suns to thank. Anyone else in other television markets having this problem?
No, he's referring to the episodes of Enterprise guest-starring Peter Weller. Weller plays a xenophobic isolationist who wants to remove non-humans from Earth.
I've seen several folks making note of the fact that just because the widget gets automatically copied into the "right" folder, it doesn't get launched/activated until the user explicitly does so in Dashboard. While this does provide an extra layer of protection, it's not enough for most users. (I'm not meaning to imply that the commenter I linked to specifically was underestimating the seriousness of this issue, but his comment was the clearest explanation of the widget behavior that wasn't written by AC.)
.Mac service, since Apple likes to put a variety of software in the user's iDisk under the Software folder IIRC. The Applications folder on his G5 was littered with broken apps, disk image files, you name it. The scary thing is, he had no recollection of installing most of these things, nor could he recall giving anyone else control of his machine to install these items. There were things he installed that he didn't even have use for, such as the TiVo Desktop. (That was a bit harder to get rid of than most stuff, because TiVo's software installs a preference pane.)
I learned a painful lesson in user naivity when I visited my father for the holidays. I meant to do a little cleanup on his system, but what I discovered was a complete mess that I could barely scratch the surface of. It looked like he had installed every single demo, crapware, shareware app, and plugin imaginable; he probably got these from Apple's
My father is not an idiot, but he is elderly, and he's not as computer savvy as he sometimes thinks he is. If a naive user can install a bunch of application binaries without really remembering doing so, what's to say that some naive user won't notice a new widget sitting in Dashboard, and activate it out of curiosity to see what it does? After all, Apple's philosophy has always been to encourage users to explore and play around with their computing environment to learn how things work.
Bottom line: The end user can't be trusted. Users can't be trusted not to do perverse things with their systems. Users can't even be trusted not to click on something that's been downloaded, nor can they be trusted not to click on something that's been "helpfully" installed for them.
Superbit is just a standard DVD with a higher bitrate for the encoded video, sometimes at the expense of bonus material (since higher bitrate video means less space for bonus material). My copy of the movie Adaptation is in Superbit format; I don't even know if a non-Superbit version was released.
Of all the things you've mentioned, Superbit is the least proprietary, since it works with all existing DVD players.
Oddly enough, here in Phoenix, Arizona, I am seeing most UMD video releases at about the $14 price point, with maybe one or two falling below that, and only one video selling above that (that I've seen). I've been looking at Fry's Electronics and Target mainly.
For those who care, the one UMD video selling for $20 here in Phoenix is House of Flying Daggers, and that was at Target. I haven't seen anything higher than that.
Funny, but here in Phoenix, Arizona, the UMD movies are typically retailing for $14 (though at least one store was selling House of Flying Daggers on UMD for $20). I even think I've seen one or two places carry UMD video for under $14.
Most DVDs here retail for about $20 or slightly more. It would be foolhardy to market the UMD versions of these movies for more than the DVD version, considering that DVD gives you extra bonus features as well as higher resolution. (This, despite Sony's claim on the UMD movie packaging that these movies are DVD quality.)
I think it's safe to say I don't agree with most of the fundamental premises that underlie Orson Scott Card's arguments. His line of reasoning might be valid (though I would say, having read the LA Times article he wrote, that he engages in hand waving a bit much, and his logic has holes). But an argument built upon false premises does not yield valid conclusions. I find it particularly interesting that in one paragraph, Mr. Card speaks of bad writing in Star Trek, then goes on to list a bunch of authors of that era he considers to be good -- a list that includes several authors who wrote scripts for Star Trek.
I find the "insight" he provides to be shallow. I don't see a lot of evidence of deep thought behind his argument. So my value judgment stands.
Hardly. Writing a "How To" book doesn't make you an expert or a master of something. It doesn't hurt if you already know how to do something, and want to write a book about it, but personal expertise is actually not a requirement. I've read several technical books on a variety of topics (computer-related and otherwise), and many were written by those who knew enough to teach the topic but not enough to actually make a career doing it.
There's another related argument, about the difference between craftsmanship (e.g., Stephen King) and artistry (e.g., Ernest Hemingway). But the SciFi field is populated by a lot of craftsmen (less kind people would say hacks) and precious few artists.
That's about the only thing you wrote that I agree with. I just have a problem when the line between the two roles (that of Mormon apologist vs. that of SF writer) starts to blur.
Oh, and here is a link to a brief article about the so-called canals on Mars. It mentions Lowell, the U.S. astronomer who spent much of his life looking for these canals, but it also credits Schiaparelli with starting the furor over canals on Mars in the first place. (My first exposure to this issue was Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos -- I think it's discussed in the episode entitled "Blues for a Red Planet." There's a companion book also called Cosmos which gives even more detail about the history of astronomical observation of Mars.)
Not to pick nits, but you still got it wrong. It's not that Mars' gravity is 38% less than Earth's. It's that Mars' gravity is 38% of Earth's gravity. In other words, Mars' surface gravity is 62% lower than that of Earth.
Just to be clear: if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you'd weigh 37.7 pounds on Mars. (There's a spiffy calculator on a JPL/NASA web site.)
Furthermore, it's not the size of a planet that accounts for its gravity; it's the mass. Mars is less dense than Earth and it is physically smaller; the combination explains the significantly lower mass. (OK, gravitational force does diminish as the inverse of the square of the distance between your center of mass and the planet's, so the diameter of the planet does factor into the gravitational equation. Still, the dominant term here is mass when you're talking about a person or other object sitting on the planet's surface.)
Um, he was being facetious. There are no canals on Mars. The idea that Mars had canals originated with an Italian astronomer who used an optical telescope to view Mars, and spoke of "canali" (channels) which he sketched in his notebooks. This word was mistranslated as "canals," which implies an artificial origin.
So basically, the person to whom you are responding was making a jest about the quality of your textbook. Presumably, a textbook mentioning canals on Mars is either antiquated or badly written, since the existence of canals on Mars has been disproven.
The Slashdot article suggests Card makes some good points about the development of SciFi over the last 30+ years. I'm not entirely sure, because based on what Card holds up as paragons of good SciFi, it's pretty clear to me that his definition of SciFi doesn't match mine. (Another poster echoed this sentiment, stating that many "examples" were more Fantasy than SciFi.)
To be clear: Science Fiction is fiction in which, when you remove the science element, it no longer makes sense. Science is integral somehow. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein is SciFi; without the premise of reanimation with electricity, it just wouldn't be the same story. (I can just hear the Fantasy apologists chiming in with the "Fantasy is indistinguishable from SciFi" argument, by claiming that magic is indistinguishable from technology. I don't want to get mired in this debate, however. Good fantasy requires some kind of self-consistency on some level, just like good SciFi, but fantasy doesn't have to square with conventional reality in any way. Even "far out" SciFi concepts are usually extrapolations of current ideas or trends or technologies.)
By this definition, most space opera is not SciFi. Star Wars, minus the SciFi trappings of spaceships and futuristic weaponry and droids, would be a Western with some metaphysical overtones. Now, it's true that Star Trek was sold to NBC as a "wagon train to the stars." This was because Westerns were the popular milieu of the day; most of the successful TV shows at the time were Westerns. But there were still stories being told against that backdrop that had real science fiction in them.
Orson Scott Card's LA Times article does a lot of name dropping. He mentions Larry Niven and Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison. And yet, many of these writers wrote episodes for Star Trek. (Ellison's script won an award, even though Roddenberry rewrote it for the screen. The episode was "City on the Edge of Forever," and won a Hugo. Ellison's original script won a Writers Guild of America award. Niven wrote for the animated series.) Some young SciFi authors got their start because of Star Trek -- remember David Gerrold? He wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles," and is now a respected SF author in his own right.
What is Card's problem with 1930's SciFi? Not all of it was episodic pulp crap or low-budget moviehouse serials. Some of the best SciFi I've read has come from the 1930's and 1940's.
He's right that later incarnations of Star Trek were better acted, and wrong that the content stagnated. At least with ST:TNG, many thought provoking stories were told, and would actually qualify as "real" SciFi by my test above, providing you're willing to forgive Star Trek physics and some of its consistent inconsistencies with real physics. Even the mundane backdrop trappings of the Star Trek universe were the subject of fascinating books.
I will grant that Card's right about one thing: Star Trek popularized Science Fiction. Some would say Trek diluted the pool of good stuff by filling the airwaves with mediocre material. This is an opinion I do not share.
I would also argue that Card's wrong about the quality of modern SciFi on television and film; I disagree that it's every bit as good as what's in print, if only because there are many things that can only be approximated with special effects, things that the human imagination is much more adept at rendering. (But then, I have long believed that Card simply doesn't "get it," and wouldn't recognize truly good SciFi if it bit him on the ass.)
While the recent incarnations of Trek have been painful to watch (with season 4 of Enterprise being what the show should have been all along, but too little, too late), I don't think the "need" for Trek has diminished. Trek was more than just a vehicle for telling stories in a SciFi milieu. Trek was more
Some of us would contend that it's not even really Christianity. Card is, after all, a conservative Mormon apologist. This is the guy who wrote a now infamous article when I was an undergrad, in which he opined that it was a good thing for government to retain laws which proscribe homosexuality. Even though I wasn't as cravenly PC as my classmates, I found Card's thesis objectionable.
The man does not believe in the separation of Church and State. (My ex-Mormon friends assure me this is endemic to Mormonism, though that is entirely another topic.) He mixes religious themes freely into his Science Fiction, which in my humble opinion brings it closer to the realm of Fantasy than SciFi.
Mr. Card has a very specific view of what constitutes Science Fiction, and it doesn't mesh with mine. His opinions of SciFi are therefore suspect. It's not just that he chose to slay a sacred cow (Star Trek); his arguments are specious and slanted. Maybe he's suffering from Hemingway syndrome (i.e., wrote all his best material first). Part of me thinks his Ender series is just a cynical exploitation of empowerment fantasies shared by most geeks. But I never felt that Card was legit; I always felt that he was a poseur, that he never really "got" the genre he was writing in. I'd say this LA Times article is proof.
If that's true, why is it that the Right is firmly in control of the United States, the only remaining Western superpower? I call Troll. (Or Flamebait, take your pick.)
Yeah, we can see how badly beaten the political Right is. Please, spare me.
That's why I said I was disappointed. I didn't expect Apple to behave better, but I hoped for it. KHTML is under the LGPL; thus, so is WebCore. It would have been nice if Apple contributed changes back to KHTML in a manner more conducive to the improvement of KHTML; that would have made Apple a better "citizen" in Open Source land. However, Apple is at least complying with the letter of the LGPL if not the spirit. So they're making WebCore source available, as they should.
At this point, WebCore is more of a fork of KHTML, so the KHTML authors may need to re-engineer a few things that Apple did to the source to improve standards compliance or speed rendering. Apple could have cooperated more closely with the KHTML team, but they chose not to. They could have made their changes to KHTML in a more platform-independent manner, but they chose not to. (And they still could have done it in a way that would leverage OS X's advantages.)
Apple derived benefit from KHTML, but the KHTML team hasn't gotten a reciprocal amount of benefit from Apple. The code came into their hands in a form that was reasonably platform-neutral, which was useful to Apple. Apple polluted the code with platform-specific stuff in a few spots, so it didn't leave their hands in the same state. So much for the promise of Open Source. Apple's actions hurt them in the long run, because more and more people are starting to believe that Apple's commitment to Open Source is more PR than anything.
On the other hand, it's a good sign that at least Apple's engineers are willing to discuss the changes they made to the source, which mitigates the problem of how Apple sends the patches/code back to the KHTML team. So Apple's not being quite so uncooperative as they're being made out to be. But they could have done a far sight better. This kind of cynical profiteering from Open Source serves to discourage others from contributing to Open Source projects, for fear that corporate interests will benefit from free code and give nothing substantial back.
The article contains factual errors, logical errors, and even spelling mistakes. I think Paul Murphy really needs to get a good editor. (Yeah, nit picking spelling is usually frowned on here, but come on, the guy can't even spell Phoenix right! Speaking as someone who lives in Phoenix, Arizona, I can't believe a professional news publication would let this kind of crap slip through.)
Aside from nit-picky details like the fact that it was Lenin, not Stalin, who coined the term "useful idiots," Paul Murphy quotes Eric Raymond out of context to bolster a fallacious argument, cites one of his own prior articles as evidence to bolster the main argument of his current article, and in fact parrots arguments made by the Alexis de Toqueville Institute in the book Samizdat. The arguments gleaned from Samizdat and AdTI have been widely discredited, and in fact most of the sources cited in Samizdat have repudiated the book and the manner in which they were represented in the book.
For example, Mr. Murphy claims that the Linux kernel was begun as a hack to the Minix kernel, then grew into its own kernel (which he at some points seems to confuse with a full-blown operating system). This is patently absurd for several reasons. For starters, the two kernels have completely different architectures: Minix is a microkernel written for wide portability, and Linux is a monolithic kernel originally written to take specific advantage of features in the 386 instruction set. Tannenbaum and Torvalds both agree that Linux never contained a shred of Minix code, although Linus clearly learned a great deal from examining the Minix source.
(It's also of note that Torvalds was never Tannenbaum's student, so the whole bit about Tannenbaum giving Torvalds a "C" is a distortion of actual events. Tannenbaum's comments were made in the hypothetical, and were tongue-in-cheek.)
Others have already pointed out that clean room techniques are not a prerequisite for legal reverse engineering. Furthermore, it should be obvious that reverse engineering was entirely unnecessary: Linus had the POSIX specification to refer to, a published and public specification. And the source code for UNIX could hardly be considered a secret, since the Lions book has been passed around as a samizdat manuscript for a number of years before it became fully legal for everyone to own and reference. In short, the entire "Myth of Immaculate Conception" section is bogus.
The entire "Meeting the Requirements Easily" section has been refuted multiple times, and is based upon an already discredited legal theory.
When Mr. Murphy sums up his argument, he is only half right in much of what he says. Consider:While it's strictly true that a lack of misappropriated code in the Linux kernel today doesn't mean that it wasn't there in the past, we know from past experience that due dilligence has been exercised, and is continuing to be exercised to this day. It's not just that the current kernel source code is widely available for public scrutiny; we also have the entire history of the kernel source tree to examine. Milestone snapshots have been archived practically since day one. And in fact, I can recall at least one incident where inappropriately contributed code in the Linux kernel was in fact removed, and this happened well before the SCO lawsuit. So the process works.
Ah, yes, so if you experience this behavior, it must be a problem with the browser, not with your machine, right...?
Yeah, that was sarcasm. If you're experiencing Safari crashes with any kind of frequency, you should check your system, and if it's an extreme enough case of being biffed, I would recommend an archive-and-install of Mac OS X 10.3. Then reapply the version updates and the security updates, in order.
The only time I've seen Safari crash is on some very badly authored web sites, most of which also generate dozens of pop-up ads. In many cases, the site in question relied on at least one 3rd party plugin for rich media content, so that's suspect right there.
So, either you've got a system problem, or you're surfing some very questionable sites. I maintain several OS X systems, and I have a couple friends who also run OS X; nobody I know personally has experienced the kind of crashing behavior in Safari you're describing.
Those who have described such behavior either have file corruption, permissions problems, or in rare cases, bad RAM. Other hardware issues (e.g., thermal problems) can theoretically cause similar symptoms. So can some badly behaved third-party software, such as old versions of Pith Helmet (a Safari enhancer).
Yeah, I went through the comments on Dave Hyatt's blog and found this link in the comments section (the same link you give above), and I was pretty shocked. Like most folks, I thought that KHTML was benefiting from Apple's contributions. However, after reading the critique by Zack Rusin (one of the KHTML developers), I took a closer look at some of the patches that Dave Hyatt posted links to on his blog.
While many of the patches were simple logic changes, a few of them had OS X specific code in them which makes them non portable. Hyatt's follow-up comments indicate that he tried to hide many of the Mac-isms behind an abstraction layer so that they could port cleanly to other platforms, but a cursory glance at the patches shows that he didn't hide everything.
So while this is a great win for Apple and for Mac OS X, it's not the boon to KHTML that many thought it would be.
Personally, I'm disappointed that the Safari team would put Mac-specific code into the KHTML engine, making some of their patches impossible to incorporate back into the KHTML baseline. This is the kind of thing I would expect from a novice programmer who's only ever coded for, say, Windows.
(Just a side note to the poster I'm responding to: Most folks who read your comment probably didn't realize the significance of it because they didn't follow the link. A brief summary of what the link is pointing to would have been really useful.)