Conspicuously missing from the article, where the hydrogen comes from.
I fail to understand how the post to which I'm responding got modded so high. Especially considering that the article did, in fact, address the issue of hydrogen production, and the current techniques that can be used to produce it.
My own favorite is the use of nuclear plants to provide the energy necessary to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Since Bush is pushing for more new nuclear plants, this might work. The article mentions newer nuclear plant designs (such as one plant in South Africa) that are significantly safer than older designs currently in use.
Costner turned the lead role from hero to antihero. In the book, the Postman was looking for and actually trying to reestablish civilization. In the movie, he's just trying to scam food, supplies and sex (while also getting a lot of people killed in the process).
It's been years since I've read The Postman, but I have to disagree with your reading of the book. If you read the book carefully, you'll find that the "hero" was much like Costner's version of the same character -- a flawed man who started out trying to scam some free food and shelter, moving from town to town. He finds a Post Office jeep stranded out in the middle of nowhere with the decayed remains of its driver, and the protagonist steals the uniform (or what was left of it) and a few other odds and ends (such as a scintillator, since there were nuclear weapons used in the war that occurred before the book's events, and some areas were still "hot zones"). He takes a bag of mail with him, and uses the letters as a desperate ploy to gain entry into towns that have built city walls to keep marauders out. Only later does the protagonist take on a more noble role, when he realizes the power in the dream that he's been selling people.
The problem is, Kevin Costner can't play at being smart, because he's clearly lacking the intellect to pull it off, and he's also seriously un-hip. So Costner rewrote the protagonist as a bumbling fool, when the protagonist in the book was smart (and survived on his wits alone at many points in the story). It's no wonder that Costner removed all mention of the group that was trying to re-establish technology, and their fake AI -- the real AI was destroyed shortly after the war, in the book. The protagonist in the book saw right through the fake AI, realizing that it was a scam, and there was a man behind the curtain. (The real AI was destroyed by rioting mobs, who sabotaged the power plant and facilities used to support the AI, which tragically shut down the AI's plans to help rebuild the country and the economy -- no doubt Brin's scathing commentary on the Luddite streak that permeates American culture.) Costner's version of that character lacked the smarts to see through such a deception. And on it goes.
I'm not sure which plot line you're referring to as "the most important." If I'm remembering correctly from your "night of the long knives" comment, this has to do with the plot line featuring the biologically enhanced super-soldiers who essentially became the feudal warlords of a broken America. If that's what you're referring to, then yeah, that's a key plot element Costner scoured out of the story.
I remember this one part of the film where they talked about the "Bad Mumps," when they were called "war mumps" in the book, and I cringed. Costner made some comment in the press before the movie came out that he'd "tweaked" the dialog, to make it sound just right, and after seeing this film, I have become convinced that Kevin Costner should never be allowed to edit a script ever again.
Yep... you're the second person to point this out to me. Although the legal protections conferred on parodies in the U.S. seem to dilute the original author's rights with respect to "derivative works." I'd really like to hear a lawyer's take on this.
I do agree, however, that bad fiction based in someone else's universe can turn people off of the original works, and therefore hurt an author's revenue stream. Not that Larry Niven should be worrying about money, considering he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I find it odd that, although many Sci Fi authors don't seem to have a problem with fan fiction written in their fictional universe, Larry Niven has almost always said "no" to fan fic, and stamped it out wherever possible.
Whatever your views on playing in someone else's sandbox, it's something to give you pause for reflection. (I've been in writing workshops taught/moderated by Joe Haldeman, for instance, who didn't like writing fiction set in someone else's universe, although he did write a Star Trek novel once. Go figure. I think he was moderately flattered by the fan fic set in his own worlds, but my memory may be failing me.)
Ah, that's a point I hadn't considered. Of course, if an author exaggerates or otherwise distorts one or more traits of a race described in one of Niven's original books, as Elf did with the Kzin, then that becomes a matter of parody. I don't remember the exact text of the Supreme Court ruling that Elf cites, but it was pretty interesting, outlining what does and does not constitute parody.
Since special protection has been conferred on works of parody, this does seem to weaken copyright law with regard to derivative works. I wonder if there's a lawyer out there who'd care to comment?
so apperently it takes 30 minutes to drain ones will power and common sense...;)
Since you used a smiley, I am pretty sure that wasn't intended as an actual slam. The truth is, I would have walked out of the film if I hadn't been there with my wife. The sad thing is, she loved it.
She and I are divorced now. Read into that what you will.:-)
Considering that Lucas did a lot of pioneering work in this area when he shot Phantom Menace... In scenes featuring both Liam Neeson as QuiGon and Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan, he would digitally stitch together different takes of the same scene, using part of a take where he liked one actor's delivery of a given line, and part of another take where he liked the other actor's delivery. Nobody can deny that these two men are fine actors, but with the amount of green-screen work in the latest Star Wars movies, there's no doubt that the actors are seriously handicapped. Like other human beings, they rely on visual and auditory cues so they can react intelligently to their surroundings...
And if the surroundings are being "edited in" after filming, that makes their task a lot more difficult.
I don't view these techniques as a replacement for real acting skills. Rather, I think they're an important tool to help augment an actor's innate skill on a highly technical production. But no technological crutch will save you when there's bad script-writing and bad acting afoot. (In my opinion, Hayden Christensen stank on ice in Attack of the Clones -- it's hard to say how much of that was lack of acting skill and how much was having to deal with a crappy script.)
Once upon a time there was a gaming article that blew away the punch lines of several Man-Kzin War stories. I asked that it not be published. In that case too, I acted to protect my copyrights and my authors.
This doesn't sound right to me. How can he stop someone from giving away the ending. Sure, he can ask nice and hope they are nice, but talks acts like he had some kind of legal right. WTF?
You know, that struck me as a bit odd, too. I don't see how copyright can cover a plot summary of a book or story. Not only that, but the Fair Use clause of copyright law expressly allows for quotations and summaries used in book reviews and scholarly writings... Properly attributed, of course. I haven't seen the gaming magazine in question, but I don't see how Niven could have had a case unless there was a really egregious case of plagiarism.
This smacks of the same heavy-handed tactics others (especially authors) have used to suppress material they don't like. His high-priced attorneys are banking that nobody will be able to afford to mount a legal defense, and will cave in to any request that Niven makes. That's why, as much as I hate Elf Sternberg, I'm glad to see that he found a viable way to defend himself against this aggressive litigation: Elf claims that he's writing parody, as defined in the body of U.S. law and legal opinion, and at least in this country, that's an absolute defense against any infringement claims. (I get a kick reading some U.K. sites that talk about unauthorised parody, in regard to the flap over Mike Meyers using the title Goldmember for one of his Austin Powers movies. I guess the U.K. doesn't believe in protecting parody.)
Well, I knew someone would bring up Elf Sternberg's stories, and how Mr. Sternberg ran afoul of Larry Niven. Naturally, Niven claims that Sternberg violated his copyrights. Pardon me, but I was under the impression that copyright only applied to complete works; you can only trademark a name, such as "Kzin." (Paramount goes nuts with claiming trademarks and registered trademarks on everything under the sun, so I know this is pretty standard practice.) Similarly, although IANAL, I understand that you technically can't claim copyright on a character or a concept, only on a work of fiction involving that character or concept.
Not that I think Elf's stories are worth the electrons wasted in transmitting them. Those of us old enough to remember Elf's massive cross-posts of his fiction to a number of Usenet newsgroups (many of which were, in fact, inappropriate venues for this sort of work) will remember the complaints about wasted bandwidth and so forth. At least now that this junk is all archived on the web, only people who want to see it can go seek it out, and the rest of us are spared.
What's interesting, though, is that Elf claims "The Only Fair Game" is the original story where he ran afoul of Niven. I seem to recall an earlier work of Elf's that mentioned Kzinti, which was later edited so that the one Kzin character was changed to some sort of anthropomorphic tiger. (There have to be some early archives of the Usenet posts that contain the original version of the story.) I remember Niven's editorial in one of the Man Kzin Wars books, where he blasts Elf (though not by name) for writing a rather bad story involving a "sadomasochistic homosexual gang-bang." I'll never forget that line. Anyway, I assumed that Niven was speaking about this other, earlier story, and had no idea "The Only Fair Game" even existed until today.
The thing is, though, Sternberg doesn't just steal from Niven's work -- he steals freely from a variety of writers. (I've found elements of C. J. Cherryh's books in some of the stories.) Which leads to the natural question, what can an author do legally to prevent someone from stealing things outright? Short of the Paramount solution (i.e., claim trademark on everything), I don't see that there's much you can do except threatening someone with legal action and hoping they can't afford to fight back in court.
My only other comment is regarding the question of film adaptation, and why so many bad SciFi stories get made into films whereas the "good stuff" never makes it to film. Ignoring for the moment the definition of what constitutes good Sci Fi, I wanted to comment that I was aghast at Niven's seemingly congratulatory tone speaking of how The Postman got turned into a film. I enjoyed David Brin's The Postman, but the film was nothing short of horrible. Costner methodically removed any trace of the Sci Fi elements present in the original book, and dumbed down the dialogue so much that I almost walked out in the first 30 minutes.
Bottom line, I think a bad film adaptation of a Sci Fi book is worse than no adaptation being made at all. I mean, how would Niven feel if some Hollywood mogul made a version of Ringworld, but removed all of what made it good Sci Fi?
Maybe Niven should be grateful nobody's raped his intellectual property yet, rather than being jealous.
"But the punchline is strengthened; the byte is defined in multiple sources as the size of a character variable. One use of this form of the word byte has been shown to predate the incorrect definition of a byte as strictly equal to an octet. Case rests." This logical fallacy is commonly referred to as argument by appeal to false authority. Your argument doesn't change the fact that most common people, as well as computer science text books, refer to a byte as an octet of data, regardless of whatever historical definitions may or may not have been applied. This is the evolution of language, much as you might not like it.
Neither the Jargon File nor the C specification is a sufficient source of authority to redefine the byte as you see fit.
Furthermore, if a byte's definition is so fluid, what does this say about other units of data width, such as the nybble? (Granted, the nybble is archaic, but those of us who used it remember.)
Referring to a language specification (such as the ISO C99 spec) or the Jargon File doesn't really work when you're defining words in common use. Although historically the byte has varied in size (as many other posters have pointed out), the commonly accepted definition among laymen and most computer scientists alike is that a byte consists of eight bits of data, and a nybble consists of four bits.
If you open any dictionary such as the OED or Webster's, you'll find such a definition.
To disprove the validity of using a language specification as a proof of how big a data type is defined to be, one only needs to pick up another language specification. I do much of my programming in Java, and in Java, the byte data type is defined to always be a signed, eight-bit number. (In many C implementations, byte is equivalent to an unsigned char; in other C implementations, byte is equivalent to char, and can be signed or unsigned.) In Java, a char is a unicode character, sixteen bits in size, and not at all equivalent to a byte.
In general computer science classes, a byte is treated as an eight-bit entity. It was taught this way at MIT. A nybble was similarly taught to always be a four-bit entity. Then again, at MIT, the CS professors emphasized the distinction between computer science concepts in general and implementation details of languages in specific. Since I have built discrete component computers for the infamous MIT 6.003 course, which rely on ALU chips that process data in discrete nybble (four-bit) sized chunks, I have a pretty solid grasp of what the common parlance is.
The fact that C tries to redefine a byte to be some data size that's processor dependent is interesting, but does not agree with common use among most computer professionals or laymen. Therefore, the more common use should be considered the correct one, regardless of whether you personally agree with this position. That's how dictionaries get written -- consensus and common use.
Back when I was learning C, there was no "byte" data type, only char.
"But now consider a computer that can address eight-bit-wide areas of store, but my OS uses 16-bit Unicode. The byte is now 16 bits, as that's the smallest chunk of memory that can hold a single char." This quote makes no sense. A char does not define a byte, nor does the operating system's choice of how to represent characters internally.
Clearly, in the world of Platonic ideals, there's an entity called a byte that is invariant and unchanging. And then there are crappy implementations of languages and operating systems in the real world, as well as some really questionable fluff in language specifications. Sorry, but I don't buy argument by redefinition. And the later posts that follow up, appealing to the Jargon File and other storehouses of historical trivia, do not in any way reflect common usage, which again should be the arbiter of how language is defined and used. It's nice to know that old IBM machines represented a byte as anywhere from one to six bits, but today, a byte is an octet of data, and that's that.
Get over it and move on. Find a more fruitful battle to fight.
I'm sorry, but the word byte is a contraction of
by eight. A byte is 8 bits by definition. You're just wrong, period.
Although I agree that the commonly accepted definition of byte is 8-bits (and a nybble is 4-bits), your derivation of byte as a contraction of by eight is apocryphal. The words byte and nybble were adopted from the Old English forms of the words bite and nibble, and refer to chunks of data in 8 and 4 bit sizes, respectively.
OK, I personally think the parent post should be modded as flame-bait, or a troll. But that's my opinion.
IBM has contributed a lot of resources (people and money) to the Linux cause. They've done research into putting Linux on small devices (such as those nifty watches), and on large mainframe-type systems. They've contributed code to many Linux-related Open Source projects, as well as to the Linux kernel itself.
Oh, and they even sell ThinkPad laptops pre-configured to run RedHat. Who else does that? Precious few hardware vendors, that's who.
After all, evolution contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics, so it is more absurd than creationism.
Wait a minute! The preceding post (to which this is a response) was moderated down as Flamebait, but this isn't considered flame bait? Please, people. I thought by now that nobody fell for the fallacious argument that evolution contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.
OK, once again, kids: The second law applies to a closed system. The earth isn't a closed system -- it's a system into which energy is currently being dumped, constantly. We get energy from sunlight, and that energy drives photosynthesis and weather, among other things. There's also plenty of spare energy and raw material being churned up from the core of the planet, which is still cooling off from when the planet was formed. That energy and raw material goes into things like geothermal vents and volcanoes. (The thermal energy and chemical compounds are used by some deep sea creatures that use chemosynthesis, for instance.)
So, yeah, the core of the planet is gradually getting colder, and the sun is gradually spending its hydrogen fuel. The biosphere of the planet Earth benefits, and so do we. If you try to argue that the second law of thermodynamics disallows evolution, then by the same logic you should also argue that life itself should be impossible, or that the world's organisms should be devolving into simpler forms, or that the human population should be shrinking instead of expanding.
Re:It all went downhill when Gene died
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 2, Informative
There's a rather clear and definable moment where Star Trek's quality suffered a containment breach. The moment Gene Roddenberry died.
OK, look. I know that it's generally considered in poor taste to speak ill of the dead. However, can we please stop lionizing Gene Roddenberry? He may have been the guy who got the ball rolling, and he may have pioneered making science fiction more acceptable and mainstream for the mass media, but he made a lot of negative contributions to the series as well. Allow me to elaborate...
Gene castrated many of the original stories. He rewrote City on the Edge of Forever because Harlan Ellison's version was too grim and dark and harsh for his overly-romanticized B'hai vision of the future. Granted, some of the castration was the fault of NBC, but not all of it. Years later, when Harlan Ellison critiqued Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he commented that Gene only ever had one or two story ideas which he recycled in every script he wrote. The most often used was: The Enterprise crew encounter God, and he/she/it turns out to be a child/simpleton/whatever.
Have you ever read the writer's guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation? I have. I nearly puked when I read the character description for Beverly Crusher. It described her as having, and I quote, The walk of a strip-tease queen. Hopefully that got expunged in a later version of the document. It's this kind of inherent sexism in Gene's vision of the Star Trek universe that really makes me wonder about things, like Denise Crosby's exodus from TNG, or Gates McFadden's season-long departure. (Unkind people have suggested that McFadden left the show for a season so she could take acting lessons, and although I think this isn't entirely off-base, that's a pretty nasty character attack.)
I'm pretty sure that Gene's antics on and off the set colored both the original series and TNG. He was carrying on affairs with two of the actresses on TOS, and rumor has it that wasn't the full extent of his indiscretion. He also tacitly gave his approval (through inaction, if nothing else) of William Shatner's sexual predation on guest actresses on the show. Those who don't know what I'm talking about, check into some of the filmed commentary that the SciFi Channel aired pertaining to guest stars and fans and their experiences on TOS. (They were aired as segments inserted with commercial breaks when SciFi aired the entire original Trek series a couple years back.) Some pretty pointed comments in there from at least one actress who didn't pull any punches.
The utopian vision of the future of humanity would have been a lot better if it didn't get mired in Roddenberry's obsession with the carnal. Yeah, I ate that stuff up when I was younger, but now that I can look at Trek more objectively as an adult, I can see that Gene's influence was severely being moderated by the time TNG rolled around.
Incidentally, for those who have stated that the first couple seasons of TNG sucked, I would note that in at least the first season, many of the scripts were recycled from the pile of scripts written for the never-produced Star Trek: Phase II series. This may have been a contributing factor, especially since some of the dialogue didn't neatly map from the original characters to TNG characters.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 1
Not that this is at all on-topic anymore, but I read Greg Bear's Eon (and the sequel, Eternity, though I never got to read the prequel which came out some time later). My question is, what book did you read? I ask this because I have no idea how you could say that the ending of Eon has anything to do with witchcraft -- unless, of course, you're indulging in hyperbole, in which case I'd still say you're way off the mark.
Re:I wonder how much of this is quality . . .
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Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 1
Heming Way [sic] is a hack. While some of Shakespeare is brilliant, some is just twaddle. And recommending Chaucer? What next? Say go read Beowulf in the original prose? Read Voltaire in the original French?
This got a score of 2? Please. Ernest Hemingway was anything but a hack writer. His only sin was publishing his best novel (The Sun Also Rises) first. The rest of his novels aren't that great. However, Hemingway's short stories are excellent, if hard to follow at times. (Editorial errors make some even harder to follow; check into the story entitled A Clean, Well Lighted Place and you'll see what I mean. Most published versions of the story run two lines of dialogue from two different characters together into one line, which ruins the flow.) I'm not saying Hemingway is the zenith of American literature, but he's worth reading and knowing about.
Shakespeare was, it's true, writing for the masses. That's why he put a little of everything into his plays to appeal to both the common man and the educated nobility. It's wise to understand the historical context in which literature is written. Doing so gives you a better appreciation for fiction written then, and now.
And just what the hell is wrong with Chaucer? His works are historically very important. Literature is an entity which evolves. I'm not saying everything that was written in the past is better or worse than what we have now, but if you don't know where we've come from, you have no idea where we are now, or where we're going.
Edgar Allen Poe wrote some of the first detective fiction ever, and much of what he wrote would better be classified as horror; therefore, I am loath to classify much of his writing as science fiction. (This is also what irks me about the SciFi Channel -- they include a lot of genres under the umbrella of SciFi that I would never include.) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, however, is a perfect example of science fiction -- it wouldn't work without the science or speculative element. (Even though the science is wrong, that's not the point -- she certainly had no way of knowing back when she wrote the book. The story takes a hard look at the use and abuse of science, and the moral dilemmas it presents.) That's Shelley with two E's, by the way. She was married to one of the better poets of the era. If you want to talk about good literature, check his stuff out.
This sort of brings me to my next point... Too much that masquerades as science fiction these days, isn't. Star Wars is arguably great space opera, but lousy science fiction. It could be easily placed in a Western milieu, for instance, and work just as well. Star Trek, especially the original series, has been used as an excellent vehicle for science fiction storytelling, but the show itself isn't really science fiction -- many episodes completely lack a dependency on core science themes. Other episodes beat the same tired concept to death -- 'Oh great, yet another transporter accident episode.'
Bringing this back to the topic at hand: I plan on going to see Nemesis tonight, and I'm trying to keep an open mind. I'm a little saddened that they're doing the whole Data duplicate thing again -- didn't they go through this with Lore earlier? I also wonder about the apparent plot hole that I can already see: Why didn't the ruthless Romulans simply kill the Picard clone instead of throwing him in a mine? Oh, wait, then there wouldn't be a story...
I'm not sure whether this movie will qualify as science fiction in the purest sense, although there's some potential for it. I do expect to be entertained, however.
I did my Bachelor's Thesis on cellular automata and how they can be used to model physical systems. While it's true that any cell's neighbors can provide inputs to a cell's finite state machine, the "output states" can be anything. You aren't limited to a cell being "alive" or "dead." In many CA programs, a given cell's state is often represented by color.
I've seen many 3- and 4-state CA systems that have been simulated. I've also seen many CA systems with widely divergent definitions of what a "neighbor" is. (The most common cases are where the neighbor is a cell adjacent on one of the four cardinal directions, or where the neighbor is a cell on one of the eight adjacent squares. This assumes a rectilinear or chessboard space.)
Another error in your description is the statement that cellular automata are a bunch of specialized finite state machines. This implies that each cell could be running a different "program." The truth is, most if not all CA systems run the same "program" on every cell, in lockstep. In other words, cellular automata are a special case of SIMD processing. (I suppose it's possible to construct a MIMD example of CA, but then you run into the problem of how you assign your initial conditions -- i.e., not only do you need to assign an initial state to each cell, but you also need to assign a "program" to each cell.)
Actually, Serial ATA debuted at 150 MB/s, not 133. It's therefore theoretically a bit faster than ATA/133. However, since most motherboard manufacturers are hanging Serial ATA controllers off of the PCI bus (and since all add-on Serial ATA cards are, naturally, PCI), there's a performance cap associated with the top bandwidth afforded by PCI.
What this means is that, in order to realize the current max bandwidth of Serial ATA (and to provide a growth path for the future), future motherboard chipsets will need to integrate Serial ATA in a manner which bypasses PCI altogether.
Of course, these architectural issues are minor compared to the benefits of thinner, more easily routed cabling (and consequently better case cooling). I'm not sure I like how Serial ATA is strictly point-to-point rather than multi-drop -- this means each drive needs a separate cable. No more daisy chaining drives off a single bus with Serial ATA. But considering how small the Serial ATA connector is, you can put a lot more of them on a motherboard, so I guess it all balances out.
(And yeah, I know you can buy round cables for standard ATA/100 and ATA/133 drives, but there are signal integrity issues with round IDE cables.)
Uh, I have two words for you
Region Coding. thank you.
I fail to see how regional coding of games has any bearing on dumping laws. While it's certainly true that an Xbox sold in the U.S. can't play Japanese Xbox games, and vice versa, the fact remains that the products are identical except for the region encoded in their BIOS/firmware. There's no substantial difference between the systems otherwise.
By way of analogy, consider automobiles (which are an item often dumped in the U.S.). Automobiles sold in the U.S. have the steering wheel on the left side of the dashboard, because roads in North America require you to drive on the right hand side of the road. The same cars have the steering wheel on the right hand side of the dashboard in the Japanese models. Clearly, a Mitsubishi Eclipse is a Mitsubishi Eclipse, regardless of where the steering wheel is located. The dumping laws only care whether the product is sold at a drastically lower price in one country versus another.
Of course, region coding can be used to sell the same piece of software for drastically different prices in different countries -- this phenomenon is already well documented with DVD sales. But in the case of software, the cost of producing the software (development, replication) is so much lower than the actual selling price of the media, the dumping laws would probably never come into play, since the publisher is making a huge profit regardless of whether they charge $10 or $50 for the disc.
And if your cable company's set-top box isn't supported by the PVR, because the IR codes for your set-top box either aren't known or published, then you're screwed. This is why I'm stuck programming both my ReplayTV and my cable box whenever I want to tune a show for recording.
I complained to ReplayTV that my IR blaster didn't work with my cable box, and they tried to implement the IR command set for my cable box, but the implementation never worked right. So I eventually chucked the IR blaster cable.
Guess what? It's no longer the case that ReplayTV requires no monthly fee. SonicBlue dropped the prices on the ReplayTV units, and made up for this by switching to a monthly service fee, just like TiVo. You're still allowed to pay one lump sum up front for your service, however -- but you'd have to keep your ReplayTV service for over 2 years to break even compared to the monthly payment plan.
I think SonicBlue made this change to stimulate purchasing of the newer ReplayTV units, which were otherwise too expensive for most consumers to bother with. Most average consumers are more willing to pay less up front and pay for a monthly service charge of approximately $10.
I first found out about this change one day when I paused my ReplayTV unit, and after returning from my break saw that an ad was displayed on-screen -- an ad for the newest ReplayTV units, now at a "new, lower price." Obviously, for those of us who already own ReplayTV units, we'll continue to enjoy service without paying a monthly fee. Newcomers will have to choose which plan they want.
"Not Invented Here" syndrome is only a small part of it. One big motivation for picking a standard that originates here in America is that it means the licensing fees will be flowing into the United States intead of out of it. This is economic protectionism, in a sense. Why is it wrong for the United States to bias technical decisions in favor of home-brewed standards? Other countries (especially Japan) do this all the time.
If the United States mandated a digital television standard that required the use of an audio (or video) standard based on foreign IP, it would not play well politically, and would have the effect of leeching more money out of this country. It's bad enough that there are no domestic producers of television sets left in the U.S. Since this country seems best at generating IP rather than manufacturing, licensing fees are a good way to funnel some of the wealth back to U.S. institutions.
In response to someone in another branch of this thread who chalked this up to nationalism, I would counter that this move is no more nationalistic than similar technology decisions made in countries like Japan or France.
My own experiences, for what they're worth
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Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Let me lead off by stating that I'm running OS X 10.2.2 (Jaguar) on my iBook, and 10.1.5 on my G4 Cube. The reason I haven't yet upgraded the Cube has to do with making sure all the core apps on the Cube are up-to-date so they'll work with Jaguar, and making sure there are no other "gotchas" in Jaguar. (Also, I need to free up more hard disk space on the Cube, since Jaguar eats more disk space.)
OS X has gotten steadily better, to the point where I never boot my iBook back into OS 9 anymore. I've noticed a few annoyances when upgrading from 10.1.5 to 10.2.X on my iBook -- having to fix my PATH to once again include/usr/local/bin and having to recompile tinyfugue were both minorly annoying. But the speed improvement, and the ability to browse SMB shares easily, were worth it. My iBook is now a very usable OS X machine, and it's only a 500 MHz G3 machine.
My G4 Cube is a workhorse. It sometimes is a little slow to load applications, but once running, they don't seem to drag much at all. (Those who remember NeXTStep may recall that application load times sucked there too.)
One of the few application performance complaints that I have is with (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer. Even after installing the latest 5.2.2 update, I've noticed painfully slow page render times on some sites. I've also noticed bad/wrong rendering (stuff that Netscape gets right, and that IE on Windows usually gets right). But then, IE on OS X has had numerous bugs from day one, including lack of support for long filenames (a problem shared with Microsoft Office v.X), occasional corruption of JPEG and other image files when saved to the local hard disk from the browser, and font rendering glitches (especially in Jaguar).
Where OS X shines is in applications that are written for the Cocoa framework, and in running Java applications. (Java applications run pretty quick under OS X, and look great to boot. Especially well written Swing apps.)
My one source of befuddlement: Load times and execution times for some "Classic" applications are even faster than the native versions of the same applications. (Well, assuming the Classic environment is already running.)
Well, Firewire could be made to carry control signal information in addition to multimedia content. But it's really meant for applications where high bandwidth is a requirement. It's kind of a waste to use Firewire for sending a signal from your PVR (Replay TV, TiVO, etc.) to your cable box saying "change to channel 11."
You could make Firewire carry everything multiplexed over one cable -- it supports enough bandwidth to make this practical, at least for standard resolution video streams (but probably not for high definition video). But you'd run into a hell of a lot of opposition in the consumer electronics industry.
The DVD Forum (aka DVD Consortium) has a standing policy banning the use of Firewire ports on DVD players. Their fear was that Firewire used as a carrier for digital video would facilitate piracy of DVD movies. Hollywood would never have jumped on the DVD bandwagon without this concession. (Interestingly, now that movie directors have gotten into DVD for their home theaters, many are doing after-market modifications of DVD players and big-screen plasma TVs to use a much higher bandwidth interconnect than Firewire for transmitting video. This takes advantage of the obvious loophole in the ban on Firewire ports for DVD players -- other digital interconnects aren't disallowed.)
The original ReplayTV units had Firewire ports on them, with the intent that they would eventually be activated by a software revision allowing consumers to dump recorded video to an external hard drive or other storage device. Later models removed this port (and the Panasonic Replay TV unit that I own also lacks the port); the software was never updated to use the Firewire port. Again, this was a concession to big media companies concerned about piracy. Similarly, Castlewood bet the farm on the notion that PVR devices on the market would eventually incorporate Orb drives for removable storage. None of these devices ever made it to market, at least not in North America.
Bottom line: Don't count on Firewire being a universal standard for two-way communication between home theater components any time soon. The few devices that have come out lately which burn DVDs and have Firewire capability are set up to use that port strictly to take video from a digital camcorder and transfer it to the unit's hard disk or straight to DVD.
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I fail to understand how the post to which I'm responding got modded so high. Especially considering that the article did, in fact, address the issue of hydrogen production, and the current techniques that can be used to produce it.
My own favorite is the use of nuclear plants to provide the energy necessary to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen. Since Bush is pushing for more new nuclear plants, this might work. The article mentions newer nuclear plant designs (such as one plant in South Africa) that are significantly safer than older designs currently in use.
It's been years since I've read The Postman, but I have to disagree with your reading of the book. If you read the book carefully, you'll find that the "hero" was much like Costner's version of the same character -- a flawed man who started out trying to scam some free food and shelter, moving from town to town. He finds a Post Office jeep stranded out in the middle of nowhere with the decayed remains of its driver, and the protagonist steals the uniform (or what was left of it) and a few other odds and ends (such as a scintillator, since there were nuclear weapons used in the war that occurred before the book's events, and some areas were still "hot zones"). He takes a bag of mail with him, and uses the letters as a desperate ploy to gain entry into towns that have built city walls to keep marauders out. Only later does the protagonist take on a more noble role, when he realizes the power in the dream that he's been selling people.
The problem is, Kevin Costner can't play at being smart, because he's clearly lacking the intellect to pull it off, and he's also seriously un-hip. So Costner rewrote the protagonist as a bumbling fool, when the protagonist in the book was smart (and survived on his wits alone at many points in the story). It's no wonder that Costner removed all mention of the group that was trying to re-establish technology, and their fake AI -- the real AI was destroyed shortly after the war, in the book. The protagonist in the book saw right through the fake AI, realizing that it was a scam, and there was a man behind the curtain. (The real AI was destroyed by rioting mobs, who sabotaged the power plant and facilities used to support the AI, which tragically shut down the AI's plans to help rebuild the country and the economy -- no doubt Brin's scathing commentary on the Luddite streak that permeates American culture.) Costner's version of that character lacked the smarts to see through such a deception. And on it goes.
I'm not sure which plot line you're referring to as "the most important." If I'm remembering correctly from your "night of the long knives" comment, this has to do with the plot line featuring the biologically enhanced super-soldiers who essentially became the feudal warlords of a broken America. If that's what you're referring to, then yeah, that's a key plot element Costner scoured out of the story.
I remember this one part of the film where they talked about the "Bad Mumps," when they were called "war mumps" in the book, and I cringed. Costner made some comment in the press before the movie came out that he'd "tweaked" the dialog, to make it sound just right, and after seeing this film, I have become convinced that Kevin Costner should never be allowed to edit a script ever again.
Yep... you're the second person to point this out to me. Although the legal protections conferred on parodies in the U.S. seem to dilute the original author's rights with respect to "derivative works." I'd really like to hear a lawyer's take on this.
I do agree, however, that bad fiction based in someone else's universe can turn people off of the original works, and therefore hurt an author's revenue stream. Not that Larry Niven should be worrying about money, considering he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I find it odd that, although many Sci Fi authors don't seem to have a problem with fan fiction written in their fictional universe, Larry Niven has almost always said "no" to fan fic, and stamped it out wherever possible.
Whatever your views on playing in someone else's sandbox, it's something to give you pause for reflection. (I've been in writing workshops taught/moderated by Joe Haldeman, for instance, who didn't like writing fiction set in someone else's universe, although he did write a Star Trek novel once. Go figure. I think he was moderately flattered by the fan fic set in his own worlds, but my memory may be failing me.)
Ah, that's a point I hadn't considered. Of course, if an author exaggerates or otherwise distorts one or more traits of a race described in one of Niven's original books, as Elf did with the Kzin, then that becomes a matter of parody. I don't remember the exact text of the Supreme Court ruling that Elf cites, but it was pretty interesting, outlining what does and does not constitute parody.
Since special protection has been conferred on works of parody, this does seem to weaken copyright law with regard to derivative works. I wonder if there's a lawyer out there who'd care to comment?
Since you used a smiley, I am pretty sure that wasn't intended as an actual slam. The truth is, I would have walked out of the film if I hadn't been there with my wife. The sad thing is, she loved it.
She and I are divorced now. Read into that what you will.
Considering that Lucas did a lot of pioneering work in this area when he shot Phantom Menace... In scenes featuring both Liam Neeson as QuiGon and Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan, he would digitally stitch together different takes of the same scene, using part of a take where he liked one actor's delivery of a given line, and part of another take where he liked the other actor's delivery. Nobody can deny that these two men are fine actors, but with the amount of green-screen work in the latest Star Wars movies, there's no doubt that the actors are seriously handicapped. Like other human beings, they rely on visual and auditory cues so they can react intelligently to their surroundings...
And if the surroundings are being "edited in" after filming, that makes their task a lot more difficult.
I don't view these techniques as a replacement for real acting skills. Rather, I think they're an important tool to help augment an actor's innate skill on a highly technical production. But no technological crutch will save you when there's bad script-writing and bad acting afoot. (In my opinion, Hayden Christensen stank on ice in Attack of the Clones -- it's hard to say how much of that was lack of acting skill and how much was having to deal with a crappy script.)
You know, that struck me as a bit odd, too. I don't see how copyright can cover a plot summary of a book or story. Not only that, but the Fair Use clause of copyright law expressly allows for quotations and summaries used in book reviews and scholarly writings... Properly attributed, of course. I haven't seen the gaming magazine in question, but I don't see how Niven could have had a case unless there was a really egregious case of plagiarism.
This smacks of the same heavy-handed tactics others (especially authors) have used to suppress material they don't like. His high-priced attorneys are banking that nobody will be able to afford to mount a legal defense, and will cave in to any request that Niven makes. That's why, as much as I hate Elf Sternberg, I'm glad to see that he found a viable way to defend himself against this aggressive litigation: Elf claims that he's writing parody, as defined in the body of U.S. law and legal opinion, and at least in this country, that's an absolute defense against any infringement claims. (I get a kick reading some U.K. sites that talk about unauthorised parody, in regard to the flap over Mike Meyers using the title Goldmember for one of his Austin Powers movies. I guess the U.K. doesn't believe in protecting parody.)
Well, I knew someone would bring up Elf Sternberg's stories, and how Mr. Sternberg ran afoul of Larry Niven. Naturally, Niven claims that Sternberg violated his copyrights. Pardon me, but I was under the impression that copyright only applied to complete works; you can only trademark a name, such as "Kzin." (Paramount goes nuts with claiming trademarks and registered trademarks on everything under the sun, so I know this is pretty standard practice.) Similarly, although IANAL, I understand that you technically can't claim copyright on a character or a concept, only on a work of fiction involving that character or concept.
Not that I think Elf's stories are worth the electrons wasted in transmitting them. Those of us old enough to remember Elf's massive cross-posts of his fiction to a number of Usenet newsgroups (many of which were, in fact, inappropriate venues for this sort of work) will remember the complaints about wasted bandwidth and so forth. At least now that this junk is all archived on the web, only people who want to see it can go seek it out, and the rest of us are spared.
What's interesting, though, is that Elf claims "The Only Fair Game" is the original story where he ran afoul of Niven. I seem to recall an earlier work of Elf's that mentioned Kzinti, which was later edited so that the one Kzin character was changed to some sort of anthropomorphic tiger. (There have to be some early archives of the Usenet posts that contain the original version of the story.) I remember Niven's editorial in one of the Man Kzin Wars books, where he blasts Elf (though not by name) for writing a rather bad story involving a "sadomasochistic homosexual gang-bang." I'll never forget that line. Anyway, I assumed that Niven was speaking about this other, earlier story, and had no idea "The Only Fair Game" even existed until today.
The thing is, though, Sternberg doesn't just steal from Niven's work -- he steals freely from a variety of writers. (I've found elements of C. J. Cherryh's books in some of the stories.) Which leads to the natural question, what can an author do legally to prevent someone from stealing things outright? Short of the Paramount solution (i.e., claim trademark on everything), I don't see that there's much you can do except threatening someone with legal action and hoping they can't afford to fight back in court.
My only other comment is regarding the question of film adaptation, and why so many bad SciFi stories get made into films whereas the "good stuff" never makes it to film. Ignoring for the moment the definition of what constitutes good Sci Fi, I wanted to comment that I was aghast at Niven's seemingly congratulatory tone speaking of how The Postman got turned into a film. I enjoyed David Brin's The Postman, but the film was nothing short of horrible. Costner methodically removed any trace of the Sci Fi elements present in the original book, and dumbed down the dialogue so much that I almost walked out in the first 30 minutes.
Bottom line, I think a bad film adaptation of a Sci Fi book is worse than no adaptation being made at all. I mean, how would Niven feel if some Hollywood mogul made a version of Ringworld, but removed all of what made it good Sci Fi?
Maybe Niven should be grateful nobody's raped his intellectual property yet, rather than being jealous.
"But the punchline is strengthened; the byte is defined in multiple sources as the size of a character variable. One use of this form of the word byte has been shown to predate the incorrect definition of a byte as strictly equal to an octet. Case rests."
This logical fallacy is commonly referred to as argument by appeal to false authority. Your argument doesn't change the fact that most common people, as well as computer science text books, refer to a byte as an octet of data, regardless of whatever historical definitions may or may not have been applied. This is the evolution of language, much as you might not like it.
Neither the Jargon File nor the C specification is a sufficient source of authority to redefine the byte as you see fit.
Furthermore, if a byte's definition is so fluid, what does this say about other units of data width, such as the nybble? (Granted, the nybble is archaic, but those of us who used it remember.)
The C standard in no way, shape, or form defines reality outside itself.
The C specification does not force general computer science concepts to conform to itself. Indeed, the reverse SHOULD be true.
Referring to a language specification (such as the ISO C99 spec) or the Jargon File doesn't really work when you're defining words in common use. Although historically the byte has varied in size (as many other posters have pointed out), the commonly accepted definition among laymen and most computer scientists alike is that a byte consists of eight bits of data, and a nybble consists of four bits.
If you open any dictionary such as the OED or Webster's, you'll find such a definition.
To disprove the validity of using a language specification as a proof of how big a data type is defined to be, one only needs to pick up another language specification. I do much of my programming in Java, and in Java, the byte data type is defined to always be a signed, eight-bit number. (In many C implementations, byte is equivalent to an unsigned char; in other C implementations, byte is equivalent to char, and can be signed or unsigned.) In Java, a char is a unicode character, sixteen bits in size, and not at all equivalent to a byte.
In general computer science classes, a byte is treated as an eight-bit entity. It was taught this way at MIT. A nybble was similarly taught to always be a four-bit entity. Then again, at MIT, the CS professors emphasized the distinction between computer science concepts in general and implementation details of languages in specific. Since I have built discrete component computers for the infamous MIT 6.003 course, which rely on ALU chips that process data in discrete nybble (four-bit) sized chunks, I have a pretty solid grasp of what the common parlance is.
The fact that C tries to redefine a byte to be some data size that's processor dependent is interesting, but does not agree with common use among most computer professionals or laymen. Therefore, the more common use should be considered the correct one, regardless of whether you personally agree with this position. That's how dictionaries get written -- consensus and common use.
Back when I was learning C, there was no "byte" data type, only char.
"But now consider a computer that can address eight-bit-wide areas of store, but my OS uses 16-bit Unicode. The byte is now 16 bits, as that's the smallest chunk of memory that can hold a single char." This quote makes no sense. A char does not define a byte, nor does the operating system's choice of how to represent characters internally.
Clearly, in the world of Platonic ideals, there's an entity called a byte that is invariant and unchanging. And then there are crappy implementations of languages and operating systems in the real world, as well as some really questionable fluff in language specifications. Sorry, but I don't buy argument by redefinition. And the later posts that follow up, appealing to the Jargon File and other storehouses of historical trivia, do not in any way reflect common usage, which again should be the arbiter of how language is defined and used. It's nice to know that old IBM machines represented a byte as anywhere from one to six bits, but today, a byte is an octet of data, and that's that.
Get over it and move on. Find a more fruitful battle to fight.
Although I agree that the commonly accepted definition of byte is 8-bits (and a nybble is 4-bits), your derivation of byte as a contraction of by eight is apocryphal. The words byte and nybble were adopted from the Old English forms of the words bite and nibble, and refer to chunks of data in 8 and 4 bit sizes, respectively.
OK, I personally think the parent post should be modded as flame-bait, or a troll. But that's my opinion.
IBM has contributed a lot of resources (people and money) to the Linux cause. They've done research into putting Linux on small devices (such as those nifty watches), and on large mainframe-type systems. They've contributed code to many Linux-related Open Source projects, as well as to the Linux kernel itself.
Oh, and they even sell ThinkPad laptops pre-configured to run RedHat. Who else does that? Precious few hardware vendors, that's who.
Yep, smells like flame-bait to me.
OK, once again, kids: The second law applies to a closed system. The earth isn't a closed system -- it's a system into which energy is currently being dumped, constantly. We get energy from sunlight, and that energy drives photosynthesis and weather, among other things. There's also plenty of spare energy and raw material being churned up from the core of the planet, which is still cooling off from when the planet was formed. That energy and raw material goes into things like geothermal vents and volcanoes. (The thermal energy and chemical compounds are used by some deep sea creatures that use chemosynthesis, for instance.)
So, yeah, the core of the planet is gradually getting colder, and the sun is gradually spending its hydrogen fuel. The biosphere of the planet Earth benefits, and so do we. If you try to argue that the second law of thermodynamics disallows evolution, then by the same logic you should also argue that life itself should be impossible, or that the world's organisms should be devolving into simpler forms, or that the human population should be shrinking instead of expanding.
OK, look. I know that it's generally considered in poor taste to speak ill of the dead. However, can we please stop lionizing Gene Roddenberry? He may have been the guy who got the ball rolling, and he may have pioneered making science fiction more acceptable and mainstream for the mass media, but he made a lot of negative contributions to the series as well. Allow me to elaborate...
Gene castrated many of the original stories. He rewrote City on the Edge of Forever because Harlan Ellison's version was too grim and dark and harsh for his overly-romanticized B'hai vision of the future. Granted, some of the castration was the fault of NBC, but not all of it. Years later, when Harlan Ellison critiqued Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he commented that Gene only ever had one or two story ideas which he recycled in every script he wrote. The most often used was: The Enterprise crew encounter God, and he/she/it turns out to be a child/simpleton/whatever.
Have you ever read the writer's guide for Star Trek: The Next Generation? I have. I nearly puked when I read the character description for Beverly Crusher. It described her as having, and I quote, The walk of a strip-tease queen. Hopefully that got expunged in a later version of the document. It's this kind of inherent sexism in Gene's vision of the Star Trek universe that really makes me wonder about things, like Denise Crosby's exodus from TNG, or Gates McFadden's season-long departure. (Unkind people have suggested that McFadden left the show for a season so she could take acting lessons, and although I think this isn't entirely off-base, that's a pretty nasty character attack.)
I'm pretty sure that Gene's antics on and off the set colored both the original series and TNG. He was carrying on affairs with two of the actresses on TOS, and rumor has it that wasn't the full extent of his indiscretion. He also tacitly gave his approval (through inaction, if nothing else) of William Shatner's sexual predation on guest actresses on the show. Those who don't know what I'm talking about, check into some of the filmed commentary that the SciFi Channel aired pertaining to guest stars and fans and their experiences on TOS. (They were aired as segments inserted with commercial breaks when SciFi aired the entire original Trek series a couple years back.) Some pretty pointed comments in there from at least one actress who didn't pull any punches.
The utopian vision of the future of humanity would have been a lot better if it didn't get mired in Roddenberry's obsession with the carnal. Yeah, I ate that stuff up when I was younger, but now that I can look at Trek more objectively as an adult, I can see that Gene's influence was severely being moderated by the time TNG rolled around.
Incidentally, for those who have stated that the first couple seasons of TNG sucked, I would note that in at least the first season, many of the scripts were recycled from the pile of scripts written for the never-produced Star Trek: Phase II series. This may have been a contributing factor, especially since some of the dialogue didn't neatly map from the original characters to TNG characters.
Not that this is at all on-topic anymore, but I read Greg Bear's Eon (and the sequel, Eternity, though I never got to read the prequel which came out some time later). My question is, what book did you read? I ask this because I have no idea how you could say that the ending of Eon has anything to do with witchcraft -- unless, of course, you're indulging in hyperbole, in which case I'd still say you're way off the mark.
This got a score of 2? Please. Ernest Hemingway was anything but a hack writer. His only sin was publishing his best novel (The Sun Also Rises) first. The rest of his novels aren't that great. However, Hemingway's short stories are excellent, if hard to follow at times. (Editorial errors make some even harder to follow; check into the story entitled A Clean, Well Lighted Place and you'll see what I mean. Most published versions of the story run two lines of dialogue from two different characters together into one line, which ruins the flow.) I'm not saying Hemingway is the zenith of American literature, but he's worth reading and knowing about.
Shakespeare was, it's true, writing for the masses. That's why he put a little of everything into his plays to appeal to both the common man and the educated nobility. It's wise to understand the historical context in which literature is written. Doing so gives you a better appreciation for fiction written then, and now.
And just what the hell is wrong with Chaucer? His works are historically very important. Literature is an entity which evolves. I'm not saying everything that was written in the past is better or worse than what we have now, but if you don't know where we've come from, you have no idea where we are now, or where we're going.
Edgar Allen Poe wrote some of the first detective fiction ever, and much of what he wrote would better be classified as horror; therefore, I am loath to classify much of his writing as science fiction. (This is also what irks me about the SciFi Channel -- they include a lot of genres under the umbrella of SciFi that I would never include.) Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, however, is a perfect example of science fiction -- it wouldn't work without the science or speculative element. (Even though the science is wrong, that's not the point -- she certainly had no way of knowing back when she wrote the book. The story takes a hard look at the use and abuse of science, and the moral dilemmas it presents.) That's Shelley with two E's, by the way. She was married to one of the better poets of the era. If you want to talk about good literature, check his stuff out.
This sort of brings me to my next point... Too much that masquerades as science fiction these days, isn't. Star Wars is arguably great space opera, but lousy science fiction. It could be easily placed in a Western milieu, for instance, and work just as well. Star Trek, especially the original series, has been used as an excellent vehicle for science fiction storytelling, but the show itself isn't really science fiction -- many episodes completely lack a dependency on core science themes. Other episodes beat the same tired concept to death -- 'Oh great, yet another transporter accident episode.'
Bringing this back to the topic at hand: I plan on going to see Nemesis tonight, and I'm trying to keep an open mind. I'm a little saddened that they're doing the whole Data duplicate thing again -- didn't they go through this with Lore earlier? I also wonder about the apparent plot hole that I can already see: Why didn't the ruthless Romulans simply kill the Picard clone instead of throwing him in a mine? Oh, wait, then there wouldn't be a story...
I'm not sure whether this movie will qualify as science fiction in the purest sense, although there's some potential for it. I do expect to be entertained, however.
I did my Bachelor's Thesis on cellular automata and how they can be used to model physical systems. While it's true that any cell's neighbors can provide inputs to a cell's finite state machine, the "output states" can be anything. You aren't limited to a cell being "alive" or "dead." In many CA programs, a given cell's state is often represented by color.
I've seen many 3- and 4-state CA systems that have been simulated. I've also seen many CA systems with widely divergent definitions of what a "neighbor" is. (The most common cases are where the neighbor is a cell adjacent on one of the four cardinal directions, or where the neighbor is a cell on one of the eight adjacent squares. This assumes a rectilinear or chessboard space.)
Another error in your description is the statement that cellular automata are a bunch of specialized finite state machines. This implies that each cell could be running a different "program." The truth is, most if not all CA systems run the same "program" on every cell, in lockstep. In other words, cellular automata are a special case of SIMD processing. (I suppose it's possible to construct a MIMD example of CA, but then you run into the problem of how you assign your initial conditions -- i.e., not only do you need to assign an initial state to each cell, but you also need to assign a "program" to each cell.)
Actually, Serial ATA debuted at 150 MB/s, not 133. It's therefore theoretically a bit faster than ATA/133. However, since most motherboard manufacturers are hanging Serial ATA controllers off of the PCI bus (and since all add-on Serial ATA cards are, naturally, PCI), there's a performance cap associated with the top bandwidth afforded by PCI.
What this means is that, in order to realize the current max bandwidth of Serial ATA (and to provide a growth path for the future), future motherboard chipsets will need to integrate Serial ATA in a manner which bypasses PCI altogether.
Of course, these architectural issues are minor compared to the benefits of thinner, more easily routed cabling (and consequently better case cooling). I'm not sure I like how Serial ATA is strictly point-to-point rather than multi-drop -- this means each drive needs a separate cable. No more daisy chaining drives off a single bus with Serial ATA. But considering how small the Serial ATA connector is, you can put a lot more of them on a motherboard, so I guess it all balances out.
(And yeah, I know you can buy round cables for standard ATA/100 and ATA/133 drives, but there are signal integrity issues with round IDE cables.)
I fail to see how regional coding of games has any bearing on dumping laws. While it's certainly true that an Xbox sold in the U.S. can't play Japanese Xbox games, and vice versa, the fact remains that the products are identical except for the region encoded in their BIOS/firmware. There's no substantial difference between the systems otherwise.
By way of analogy, consider automobiles (which are an item often dumped in the U.S.). Automobiles sold in the U.S. have the steering wheel on the left side of the dashboard, because roads in North America require you to drive on the right hand side of the road. The same cars have the steering wheel on the right hand side of the dashboard in the Japanese models. Clearly, a Mitsubishi Eclipse is a Mitsubishi Eclipse, regardless of where the steering wheel is located. The dumping laws only care whether the product is sold at a drastically lower price in one country versus another.
Of course, region coding can be used to sell the same piece of software for drastically different prices in different countries -- this phenomenon is already well documented with DVD sales. But in the case of software, the cost of producing the software (development, replication) is so much lower than the actual selling price of the media, the dumping laws would probably never come into play, since the publisher is making a huge profit regardless of whether they charge $10 or $50 for the disc.
And if your cable company's set-top box isn't supported by the PVR, because the IR codes for your set-top box either aren't known or published, then you're screwed. This is why I'm stuck programming both my ReplayTV and my cable box whenever I want to tune a show for recording.
I complained to ReplayTV that my IR blaster didn't work with my cable box, and they tried to implement the IR command set for my cable box, but the implementation never worked right. So I eventually chucked the IR blaster cable.
Guess what? It's no longer the case that ReplayTV requires no monthly fee. SonicBlue dropped the prices on the ReplayTV units, and made up for this by switching to a monthly service fee, just like TiVo. You're still allowed to pay one lump sum up front for your service, however -- but you'd have to keep your ReplayTV service for over 2 years to break even compared to the monthly payment plan.
I think SonicBlue made this change to stimulate purchasing of the newer ReplayTV units, which were otherwise too expensive for most consumers to bother with. Most average consumers are more willing to pay less up front and pay for a monthly service charge of approximately $10.
I first found out about this change one day when I paused my ReplayTV unit, and after returning from my break saw that an ad was displayed on-screen -- an ad for the newest ReplayTV units, now at a "new, lower price." Obviously, for those of us who already own ReplayTV units, we'll continue to enjoy service without paying a monthly fee. Newcomers will have to choose which plan they want.
"Not Invented Here" syndrome is only a small part of it. One big motivation for picking a standard that originates here in America is that it means the licensing fees will be flowing into the United States intead of out of it. This is economic protectionism, in a sense. Why is it wrong for the United States to bias technical decisions in favor of home-brewed standards? Other countries (especially Japan) do this all the time.
If the United States mandated a digital television standard that required the use of an audio (or video) standard based on foreign IP, it would not play well politically, and would have the effect of leeching more money out of this country. It's bad enough that there are no domestic producers of television sets left in the U.S. Since this country seems best at generating IP rather than manufacturing, licensing fees are a good way to funnel some of the wealth back to U.S. institutions.
In response to someone in another branch of this thread who chalked this up to nationalism, I would counter that this move is no more nationalistic than similar technology decisions made in countries like Japan or France.
Let me lead off by stating that I'm running OS X 10.2.2 (Jaguar) on my iBook, and 10.1.5 on my G4 Cube. The reason I haven't yet upgraded the Cube has to do with making sure all the core apps on the Cube are up-to-date so they'll work with Jaguar, and making sure there are no other "gotchas" in Jaguar. (Also, I need to free up more hard disk space on the Cube, since Jaguar eats more disk space.)
/usr/local/bin and having to recompile tinyfugue were both minorly annoying. But the speed improvement, and the ability to browse SMB shares easily, were worth it. My iBook is now a very usable OS X machine, and it's only a 500 MHz G3 machine.
OS X has gotten steadily better, to the point where I never boot my iBook back into OS 9 anymore. I've noticed a few annoyances when upgrading from 10.1.5 to 10.2.X on my iBook -- having to fix my PATH to once again include
My G4 Cube is a workhorse. It sometimes is a little slow to load applications, but once running, they don't seem to drag much at all. (Those who remember NeXTStep may recall that application load times sucked there too.)
One of the few application performance complaints that I have is with (surprise, surprise) Internet Explorer. Even after installing the latest 5.2.2 update, I've noticed painfully slow page render times on some sites. I've also noticed bad/wrong rendering (stuff that Netscape gets right, and that IE on Windows usually gets right). But then, IE on OS X has had numerous bugs from day one, including lack of support for long filenames (a problem shared with Microsoft Office v.X), occasional corruption of JPEG and other image files when saved to the local hard disk from the browser, and font rendering glitches (especially in Jaguar).
Where OS X shines is in applications that are written for the Cocoa framework, and in running Java applications. (Java applications run pretty quick under OS X, and look great to boot. Especially well written Swing apps.)
My one source of befuddlement: Load times and execution times for some "Classic" applications are even faster than the native versions of the same applications. (Well, assuming the Classic environment is already running.)
Well, Firewire could be made to carry control signal information in addition to multimedia content. But it's really meant for applications where high bandwidth is a requirement. It's kind of a waste to use Firewire for sending a signal from your PVR (Replay TV, TiVO, etc.) to your cable box saying "change to channel 11."
You could make Firewire carry everything multiplexed over one cable -- it supports enough bandwidth to make this practical, at least for standard resolution video streams (but probably not for high definition video). But you'd run into a hell of a lot of opposition in the consumer electronics industry.
The DVD Forum (aka DVD Consortium) has a standing policy banning the use of Firewire ports on DVD players. Their fear was that Firewire used as a carrier for digital video would facilitate piracy of DVD movies. Hollywood would never have jumped on the DVD bandwagon without this concession. (Interestingly, now that movie directors have gotten into DVD for their home theaters, many are doing after-market modifications of DVD players and big-screen plasma TVs to use a much higher bandwidth interconnect than Firewire for transmitting video. This takes advantage of the obvious loophole in the ban on Firewire ports for DVD players -- other digital interconnects aren't disallowed.)
The original ReplayTV units had Firewire ports on them, with the intent that they would eventually be activated by a software revision allowing consumers to dump recorded video to an external hard drive or other storage device. Later models removed this port (and the Panasonic Replay TV unit that I own also lacks the port); the software was never updated to use the Firewire port. Again, this was a concession to big media companies concerned about piracy. Similarly, Castlewood bet the farm on the notion that PVR devices on the market would eventually incorporate Orb drives for removable storage. None of these devices ever made it to market, at least not in North America.
Bottom line: Don't count on Firewire being a universal standard for two-way communication between home theater components any time soon. The few devices that have come out lately which burn DVDs and have Firewire capability are set up to use that port strictly to take video from a digital camcorder and transfer it to the unit's hard disk or straight to DVD.