I think the success of the iTunes Music Store has shown that people don't care too much about DRM as long as it is transparent enough. Look at what URGE will offer. 9.95 for unlimited music. Anything you want. For those not willing to break the law to pirate music, or too lazy to do so, or both (this third category includes me) this is an awesome deal. For just 10 bucks a month, it's as if my music collection was essentially infinite. I don't care if I don't "own" the music. Why should I? For movies, it makes even more sense (because the replay value is much lower than for music) to have some sort of subscription-type system so that you just pay a flat fee per month and have unlimited access to unlimited movies. But to have such systems (either music or movies) be viable, it has to be protected so that you can't just have one person be a subscriber and then that person can copy the stuff to the whole world. That's just a fact of life. Because people can't be trusted NOT to copy, there has to be some system to prevent it. Or at least prevent it for the "casual user" that won't go jump hoops to crack it. I think it was Steve Jobs who said "to keep the honest people honest".
The future will have DRM in the main-stream whether you like it or not. Of course you can always choose to get your media through some other channels, but if you think that "5 people" (obviously you didn't mean it literally) will be using DRM at the end of 2006, then you are seriously mistaken.
I'm by no means saying that that's the level browsers in mobile devices are today. That's obviously the absolute latest and greatest. But it shows where things are headed. It's Safari based, supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, with full support for JavaScript (including AJAX-stuff), frames, forms, etc. etc.. Hell, it even supports SVG and Flash, as well as the Netscape plugin API. Most devices that will feature that browser (or feature it already) have screen resolutions of QVGA or higher and many of them have WiFi.
The mobile world is catching up quite fast! The low-end is roughly at the level Netscape 2 was on back in 1996 / 1997 or so. The high-end is more or less caught up to the state of the art of PC browsers.
The new HiRISE camera has a maximum resolution of 30 cm - not 1 m. MGS on the other hand, has a resolution of 1 m. Howerver there's a trick you can do. The MGS camera, like many other spacecraft cameras, consists of a single sensor line. When you fly in orbit on mars, that field of view of that single sensor line sweeps over the terrain like a broom being pushed. This push-brooming technique with a single sensor line means you can get an image that is as wide as the sensor line, but as long as you want. You just keep recording data and the result is an image that has arbitrary height. Now here's the trick: if you roll against the forward motion the "broom" will not move forward in the terrain with the same velocity as the spacecraft. This is similar in idea to sitting in a moving car and turning your head to view something on the side of the road rather than just looking straight out and let the object on the side of the road go by your field of view quickly. As a result, they can roll the spacecraft so that any given spot in the terrain basically gets imaged twice (because each recorded "scanline" will overlap). This gives higher resolution in one dimension (in the direction of spacecraft travel). That's why MGS has produced certain images with 50 cm resolution in one dimension and 1 m resolution in the other dimension.
I honestly don't think Apple cares about if single users here and their hack OS X and put it on their generic PC hardware. Big deal. I'm sure they don't care too much about if those people use a pirated or purchased copy of OS X. Seriously, they don't care too much. That's a handful of people. The losses are in thousands of dollars at worst.
What they do care about though, is if people take that hacked OS X that runs on generic PC hardware and give it to the masses. Why? Why is this the crucial point that makes the big difference? Because once that happens, people are able to run OS X and get the most important part of the Apple experience without paying anything to Apple. ANYTHING. At least if people pirate the genuine OS X version, they will run it in Apple hardware and Apple doesn't suffer too bad from the losses of the lost OS X sale. But if the hacked-to-run-on-generic-PC-hardware OS X gets out, Apple loses significant income.
Even if only 1% of Mac users would decide to run the hacked OS X version on generic PC's, that's still hundreds of thousands of people! That's millions lost in hardware sales! And there's no reason to think that only 1% would do it. More likely, it would be tens of percent and the impact could be very serious on Apple's bottom line. That's why they care.
Now as far as all the bullshit goes about how this is just like if a baker said you can't feed bread to the birds; only eat it yourself. Come on. That's nothing at all like this is. The baker will not lose any money or have any risk with you feeding birds. And if you honestly think that people will go out and buy a copy of OS X and then use some downloaded kit to modify the OS X installation to run on generic PC, then you're insane. Maybe one person in a thousand will do that. Everyone else will just get it pirated.
It's illegal in many countries, but worse, it's immoral in every country.
We'll see what happens, but I for one will have a hard time stopping myself from slapping people I see running OS X on generic PC hardware. I seriously might smack people that do that!
Perhaps not in the USA. But the USA isn't the only country in the world, and in particular when it comes to mobile services, it's definitely not representable of the rest of the world. In Asia and in Europe (I live in Finland) people use the Internet a lot - directly and indirectly. Directly in the obvious ways; web, email, download of games, etc. And indirectly by using various applications that access the Internet - for example online multiplayer games, news readers (like the Finnish "Kanavat" application that downloads compact web-like content from various media sources and allows these to be read offline and/or with zero-wait between page switches).
The prices are obviously not as cheap as they could and should be, and crazy expensive relative to home broadband Internet. But in absolute terms, it's not that bad. I pay 18 euros a month for 100 MB of data traffic. 100 MB is a huge amount to download over a cellphone link (with EDGE or 3G UMTS, the real-world speed is at best somewhere above 200Kbps). I typically read the news from a couple of websites each morning on the subway, and that results in total data downloads of maybe 50 megs per month. 18 euros for that is around 50 cents per day for this pleasure. Like I said, in absolute amounts, that's really not so bad!
Rumor has it that flat-rate fees for unlimited traffic are coming (to FInland) in 2006 and the prices will be around 20 euros a month.
I've been programming since I was 7. I've done Basic, Pascal, C, x86 assembly, Modula 2, SML, C++, Java, plus a large bunch of scripting languages. I've programmed for the Java VM (ME, SE and EE), Amiga, DOS, 16 and 32 bit Windows, most UNIX variants and a large number of mobile OS's including Symbian, PalmOS and Windows Mobile.
When I got a Apple PowerBook, my intention was not to use it for programming. ObjectiveC and Cocoa was totally irrelevant for me and I didn't bother to learn it. That is, until one evening when I decided to just take a look at some of the ADC docs included with XCode. After reading for about an hour, I was very surprised. It couldn't possibly be this easy and straightforward. It felt like it Cocoa must be seriously limited in functionality. The API was so easy and so compact, and ObjectiveC was like a halfway mix of Java and C++. I bought a book on Cocoa and read through it in about a week. It covered everything from basic GUI programming to drag and drop, printing with pagination, OpenGL, making custom widgets, data binding and persistence, preferences, making and using frameworks (think DLL's), and so much much more. And all of this was amazingly simple compared to any other OS and language combo I had ever used. And not just easier, but dramatically easier.
As an example, the chapter on drag and drop was something like 5 pages and covered making drag sources, drag targets, controlling the icon you see while you drag, data flavors, and so on. The classes involved were all extremely simple, easy and intuitive. Printing is even easier!
I haven't really had any need to do any apps of my own lately, so admittedly I haven't used Cocoa for anything in particular other than simple test applications, but I'm thoroughly impressed!! I would give about 80% of the credit to Cocoa, and 20% to ObjectiveC. You can use Cocoa with Java too, but it seems a tad bit more compatible and elegant with Cocoa. Also, looking at the more recent API's like CoreImage, it seems there's more and more functionality in the Cocoa family of API's but the simplicity remains. I strongly recommend picking up ObjectiveC if you know C++ or Java!
As far as I know, the Powershot Pro 1 has a Sony ICX456 CCD in it. And by the way, the Sony R1 has Carl Zeiss optics. So half of your argument melts away there.
Having said that, there are obvious benefits of an SLR and while I wouldn't buy the R1 myself, I think you should read DP Review's review of it. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydscr1/
Judging from the review, the CCD is top notch. The main lacking part in my opinion is the slow tele-end of the lens (F4.8). If it was F2.8 all the way from 24 to 120mm, I don't see much reason for most people to need any interchangeable lenses - unless you're shooting birds or something. And quite frankly, most owners of say, Canon 350D's will only have one slow and crappy zoom like a 28-105 with F3.5 at the wide-end or something. So this camera will be a much better choice for a lot of the current DSLR buyers.
You might wonder that, but you'd be wrong. Mobile gaming is HUGELY popular and as the devices get more and more capable, 3D graphics is becoming main stream and viable, revenues are sky-rocketing, the future is looking brighter than ever for mobile gaming!
You can find tons of stuff about it with a bit of Googling, but here's some reading to get you started:
The situations is exactly identical on Mac and on Windows. On Mac OS X, the web browser (HTML redering) functionality is WebKit and Safari is just a thin GUI shell around it. In the same way, IE is just a thin GUI shell around the web browser (HTML rendering) functionality embedded into the OS.
If you remove the IE shell, nothing will break in Windows. However, if you remove the HTML rendering capability lots of things will break. In the same way, if you remove Safari nothing will break in OS X but if you remove WebKit, tons of things will break. There's a HUGE amount of applications that rely on WebKit!!
Of course Slashdot readers often overlook this fact because they think it's cool to bitch about Microsoft.
I agree that this launch isn't a big deal, but for other reasons than you suggest.
First of all, the shuttle doesn't launch things to GTO because it itself cannot go to GTO. It launches things to LEO and then the satellites themselves will boost their orbit to GTO, and finally to geosynchronous orbit.
Second, three satellites is no big deal either. For on flight V165, an Ariane 5 launched not one, not two, not three but 7 satellites. Granted one of them was a nano-satellite that weighted only 20kg. Likewise, on flight V162, two satellites were launched to GTO and one to the moon (Smart-1, which was released into GTO but propelled its own way to the moon with ion propulsion). Hell, even the Ukranian Kosmos rocket (that most people haven't even heard about) is capable of similar satellite launching as the shuttle is. Just the other week, it launched TopSat, Rubin 5, Beijing 1, SSETI (which included 3 nano cubesats XI-V, UWE-1 and NCUBE-2), Mozhayets 5 and Sinah 1. When did the shuttle ever launch 9 satellites in one flight? Much less to an orbit that is 686km high. When did the shuttle ever even reach an orbit of 686km?
Third, if you want to compare, compare the Titan 4, Delta 4 or Atlas 5 to the Ariane 5. They are much more comparable. The shuttle is an embarrasing failure.
There's a reason the shuttle hasn't launched any satellites in years. It's too dangerous and too costly! It's totally not worth bringing 3 satellites in the cargo hold and launch them to GTO using their own boosters when you could just pack them into one or two single-use launchers and have it done with much less fuss, cheaper, and without risking the lives of 7 astronauts for no good reason.
The shuttles abililty to "rescue satellites" is the biggest joke ever. Rescue what satellites? The vast majority of satellites are in orbits the shuttle can't even reach. And from the orbits the shuttle CAN reach, satellites decay and fall down to earth in a few years. The one notable exception to this is the Hubble, which is at the edge of where the shuttle can go (around 600km) and has actually been saved by the shuttle.
Granted the Ariane 5 has had its own share of failures but at least the nature of those has been implementation fuckups that can be ironed out rather than design flaws like with the shuttle. And I'm not talking about the O-rings - I'm talking about the way the shuttle is stacked, the "need" for fragile wings, etc.
I couldn't quite make out if your post was sarcastic and suggesting that the European space technology is in fact Russian? Or perhaps you were actually saying it like it is. That is, Europe has a strategy of having a heavy lift launcher, a medium lift launcher, and a lightweight lift launcher.
The heavy lift is the Ariane 5 in its various versions, and is capable of lifting not just one but several huge payloads either to low earth orbit or to geosynchronous (transfer) orbit. Ariane will launch the Galileo satellites, which are the European GPS satellites that will give Europe (and the rest of the world) global positioning that is NOT military based and NOT owned and controlled by the increasingly unpredictable USA. The Ariane 5 is also responsible of launching the ATV, which is like an oversized (3x more cargo capacity) Progress cargo ship. The ATV will be able to ferry large loads of cargo to the ISS. The Ariane, Galileo and the ATV are all European technology.
The medium lift technology has been missing. It's more suitable for launching lighter missions for very specific targets that are not shared by other probes. For example if you want to go to Mars or Venus, it's not really practical to bring along another probe that's heading for GTO. Or perhaps you want to launch something relatively small into a polar orbit, and so on. For that, Europe is using the Russian made Soyuz. The Soyuz is extremely reliable and the Russians are more than willing to cooperate, so this is great for Europe.
Finally, there's the Vega launcher (which hasn't flown yet). Vega is similar to Orbital Science's Taurus in size and style and is capable of launching small loads (up to 2000kg or so, depending on the altitude and inclination) to low earth orbit. Vega will be good for stuff like scientific missions to monitor polar ice caps, clouds, the seas, and so on. You want to be fairly low down for those kinds of missions (500 to 1000km) and your satellite won't be the size of a bus, like some of the communication satellites that Ariance 5 launches. Vega will be fully European technology, just like Ariane.
Exactly. And even more importantly for Mars missions and such is that the energy / velocity required to get to Mars varies hardly at all between the every couple of year distance of 49 million miles vs. this year's 43.1 million miles. It's easier to visualize if one understands that one doesn't fly in a straight line to Mars from Earth. That is, to fly from Earth to Mars today, you wouldn't travel 43.1 million miles just because that's the distance today. Rather, you'd travel something like 500 million miles cause you'd fly in a so called Hohman transfer orbit that essentially traces an elliptical orbit that has a periapsis (closest to sun) point that touches Earth's orbit and apoapsis (furthest from the sun point that touches Mars' orbit. The distance of the arc of that orbit between the periapsis and apoapsis is very roughly 500 million miles and varies VERY little depending on how close Mars was to Earth at launch time. And equally small is the variation in flight time and required fuel, thrust and delta velocity.
When I say that the difference in distance is mostly irrelevant, I meant the difference in distance of the closest approach - which happens roughly every two years. It doesn't matter much in terms of delta velocity if the distance from Earth to Mars is 0.38 or 0.42 astronomical units. It would matter much if the distance is 0.4 or 2.5 AU though, but that's irrelevant since missions to Mars are only started when the two planets are close to the closest approach. And that's no rare event at all - it happens once per two years or so.
We all went to school and we all know how this works. Let's just calm down and consider how rare or not rare this event is.
Earth orbits the sun in a nearly circular orbit at a mean distance of 1 astronomical unit (by definition of AU). Mars on the other hand orbits the sun in a less circular orbit that takes it as far as 1.67 and as close as 1.38 astronomical units from the sun. As we all know, it takes earth 1 year to orbit the sun (again, by definition of a year). It takes Mars 687 days (1.88 earth years).
Let's put this into more "human" terms using an analogy. Let's imagine a rock in the middle of a field. And let's put two people walking in circles around the rock. One person at a distance of 10 meters and the other at a distance that varies between 14 and 17 meters from the rock. Very quickly we'll notice that the closest the people can ever come from eachother is 4 meters and the furthest they can come is 27 meters. But we also notice that as they walk around, the person closer to the rock will take 1 minute to walk around the rock and the person on the outside will take 1.88 mintues so the one on the inside will be overtaking the one on the outside roughly every other minute (once per two years in Mars-Earth terms). And whenever they overtake, the distance will be anything from 4 to 7 meters. And quite often, it will be a distance of 4 to 5 meters or so. It's not rare at all. What's rare is that it would be VERY close to the minimum 4 meters.
So.. when we say it's "amazingly close" and "closer than in 60000 years", it's more like getting within 4.1 meters instead of 4.25 in the analogy above. We're not talking about 4 meters vs. 27 meters or anything like that.
Conclusion: this isn't THAT special at all. Mars isn't THAT much closer at all. For example for Mars missions and such, the difference in distance is mostly irrelevant.
I live in Finland - the country that Nokia is based in and a country that has been at the forefront of mobile phone development for at least the past 10 years. I have to say I don't understand at all the "I want a phone that is just a phone" or "I want a phone that works" type of comments.
I can't even remember when I've had a phone that didn't work. In the past 10+ years, the battery life on every phone I've had has been good enough that I have charged them about twice a week; that's 3+ days of real-life battery life that includes plenty of calls, text messages, etc. Reception has always been good and the only time I remember having dropped calls is when I've been in an elevator going down to an underground parking hall or something as extreme. Hell, even on my recent hiking trip in the mountains in Norway, there was reception half of the time. And that was far from any civilization! On the roads on the way to the mountains, there was good reception 100% of the time. Either way, reception is more about the deployment of base stations than about the phone. The last phone I had with an external antenna was 5 years ago anyway.
As far as functionality is concerned, I also don't get the complaint at all. There are plenty of models for all tastes. Let's look at Nokia, which this article is about:
Nokia 1100, 1110, 2650, 2600, 3100, 3120, 3220. None of them have a camera. You are free to pick one. Or if your carrier doesn't offer one, it's probably because nobody wants them!
Having said that, I wish people would get over the "phone" label. It's a device. Who gives a damn about what the name of it is? Not wanting a "phone" to have a camera or mp3 player is similar to saying that your don't want your computer to have the ability to play mp3's or view photos from your digital camera. It's a COMPUTER. It should only COMPUTE.
Seriously, it's a device and it has a bunch of features that makes sense to people in their daily lives. And you get whichever device (or none) that makes sense to you.
I have a Nokia 6630 right now and it's perfect for my use. It has 3G, EDGE and GPRS. It has tri-band GSM and it has Bluetooth. That means I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world! And with 3G/EDGE and Bluetooth, I can get Internet access to my laptop anywhere in the world too. I can sit in Starbucks in Shanghai and surf the net and read emails on the laptop while the phone is in my backpack, without ever touching a button on it. That's important to me, because I travel a lot and because I like to work in cafes, restaurants etc.
The phone has a 1.3 megapixel camera and a lens with less crappy quality than on most other mobile phone cameras. That allows me to snap pics of booths on tradeshows and MMS or email them to colleagues back in Finland. "Check out what company X is showing!". Or I can send my wife pictures of the beautiful lake by the sauna at the company off-site. "Wish you were here!". Obviously, it's not a replacement for my actual camera, which takes 100x better quality pictures. But the useage is different and I don't want to carry around my camera everywhere!
The phone has an email app. It lets me check my email when I'm somewhere where I don't want to take the laptop along. For example, I could be hiking in Lapland but I still want to check if we got that major deal that I was hoping would have been done before my vacation began. I don't use it much, but there are times when it's been a real life saver.
The phone has an XHTML web/wap browser. I use it to check the news, weather, TV-program listings, view webcams from Finland when I'm traveling, check what movies are in what theater and at what time, and even to order movie tickets once in a while. It's also good to do the occasional Wikipedia or Google lookup.
It has Symbian OS and Java, so I can play some fun games on it to pass the time on the subway or while waiting for a connecting flight. Or I can run some other useful apps, like IRC, AOL IM, MSN IM, SSH, BusWatch, WorldMate, Opera, etc. There's tons,
Did anyone else notice that a large piece of.. something.. fell off just after the SRB's separated? It looked black in the tank camera view, and flashed very clearly in the view for short time on the left side (seen from the camera) of the shuttle. I doubt it was an SRB because they had already fallen further away a few seconds earlier.
I bet we will be hearing a lot about that in the next few days as people start looking more closely at the camera recordings!
People commonly under-estimate the size of Finland. It's actually larger than most people think: about 1200 km from north to south (750 miles), which is roughly equal to the distance from San Francisco to Seattle. The area is 338000 sq km (130000 sq miles), which is larger than all other US states but Alaska, Texas, California and Montana. Put another way, Finland is twice the size of Florida.
Many people seem to think that a country that is twice the size as another would naturally take twice as long to deploy a new technology. In reality, however, a country twice as big would also have twice as many people to do the job. After all, it's not like the guy in New York has to fly to Los Angeles to deploy broadband Internet once he is finished in New York. The problem is solved in parallel - not serially.
You might think that population density changs this. But that too would seem to be wrong at closer inspection. With only half the population density, you would also have only half as many homes to deploy broadband to. The amount of homes per installation guy is what really matters.
Of course in reality, the people who live in the middle of nowhere will be at a disadvantage since it is less likely that a company puts in a lot of time, effort and money to deploy cables in the middle of US Alaska or Finnish Lapland.
So finally, let's examine the population densities:
Finland's population density is 13 people per square km. The USA's is 27 (and for comparison, France has 106 and the UK has 383).
EU has 460 million people. USA has 300 million people.
Assuming the same level of spread of Internet access, the EU should have 1.5 times more zombies than the USA.
The site mentioned in the article shows that in May, EU had 1320985 zombies and the USA had 964020. That means the EU has 1.37 times the zombies of the USA, despite having 1.5 times more people.
In 2004, Internet usage rates were at 47% in EU and 52% in the USA.
Conclusion: the zombie rates don't vary between USA and Europe. Population, on the other hand, does vary. Therefore, you can expect the EU to continue to have more zombies than the USA. Also, as China's and India's internet usage grows, they will probably pull ahead in the stats.
Disclaimer: The numbers were pulled from various sites online using Google for searching. If someone has conflicting figures one way or the other, I wouldn't be surprised.
I work from cafés (yes, I actually buy stuff there too) quite a lot and I connect my laptop online using Bluetooth to my Nokia 6630, which in turn is connected to the Internet over 3G (UMTS). It works extremely well, the latency is about 500ms and the bandwith tends to be around 250 kbps or so, which is fine for that sort of usage.
I can talk on the phone at the same time if needed, send and receive text or MMS messages, and the net connection will keep on ticking.
This is in Finland though, so I don't know how well it would work in the USA.
The parent post to which I replied seemed to suggest that 10.4 owes just about everything to OSS. That's why I replied to it. Here's the original text from the root post in this thread - note how it specifically says "between.3 and.4":
"Considering how much FOSS there is in OS X, surely more has been spent on advertising OS X than has been directly spent on developing OS X between.3 and.4."
What I'm saying is very simple: No, between.3 and.4, OSS had very little to do with the development, contrary to what is being claimed here by the original poster.
I was not saying anything about the role of OSS in OS X as a whole. And that's the only thing you're talking about. So you're not countering my claims. You're countering some claims that you believe I made, but in fact didn't.
Now, later in the thread, I said that OS X would have been possible without FOSS. You counter that by saying that it would be radically different or that "possibly it would not even exist". Well, yes, of course, that might be the case. But it's also possible that they would have made good friends with Sun, licensed Solaris for X86, used closed compilers for it, developed OS X in exactly the way it's today, but using Java instead of Objective-C with Cocoa, done a Cocoa port for SPARC Solaris, complete with the Aqua GUI. It's possible that it would have resulted in Sun and Apple having 25% market share in desktop computers today.
That's perhaps not the most likely scenario. I'm simply using it as an example of how you can't predict what might have happened if they had not used OSS. There are lots of other possible outcomes than Apple being dead today.
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I think the success of the iTunes Music Store has shown that people don't care too much about DRM as long as it is transparent enough. Look at what URGE will offer. 9.95 for unlimited music. Anything you want. For those not willing to break the law to pirate music, or too lazy to do so, or both (this third category includes me) this is an awesome deal. For just 10 bucks a month, it's as if my music collection was essentially infinite. I don't care if I don't "own" the music. Why should I? For movies, it makes even more sense (because the replay value is much lower than for music) to have some sort of subscription-type system so that you just pay a flat fee per month and have unlimited access to unlimited movies. But to have such systems (either music or movies) be viable, it has to be protected so that you can't just have one person be a subscriber and then that person can copy the stuff to the whole world. That's just a fact of life. Because people can't be trusted NOT to copy, there has to be some system to prevent it. Or at least prevent it for the "casual user" that won't go jump hoops to crack it. I think it was Steve Jobs who said "to keep the honest people honest".
The future will have DRM in the main-stream whether you like it or not. Of course you can always choose to get your media through some other channels, but if you think that "5 people" (obviously you didn't mean it literally) will be using DRM at the end of 2006, then you are seriously mistaken.
Peppe
http://www.s60.com/browser
I'm by no means saying that that's the level browsers in mobile devices are today. That's obviously the absolute latest and greatest. But it shows where things are headed. It's Safari based, supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, with full support for JavaScript (including AJAX-stuff), frames, forms, etc. etc.. Hell, it even supports SVG and Flash, as well as the Netscape plugin API. Most devices that will feature that browser (or feature it already) have screen resolutions of QVGA or higher and many of them have WiFi.
The mobile world is catching up quite fast! The low-end is roughly at the level Netscape 2 was on back in 1996 / 1997 or so. The high-end is more or less caught up to the state of the art of PC browsers.
Peppe
Just because they aren't computer gurus doesn't mean they are stupid. It's exactly that sort of attitude the article talks about.
The new HiRISE camera has a maximum resolution of 30 cm - not 1 m. MGS on the other hand, has a resolution of 1 m. Howerver there's a trick you can do. The MGS camera, like many other spacecraft cameras, consists of a single sensor line. When you fly in orbit on mars, that field of view of that single sensor line sweeps over the terrain like a broom being pushed. This push-brooming technique with a single sensor line means you can get an image that is as wide as the sensor line, but as long as you want. You just keep recording data and the result is an image that has arbitrary height. Now here's the trick: if you roll against the forward motion the "broom" will not move forward in the terrain with the same velocity as the spacecraft. This is similar in idea to sitting in a moving car and turning your head to view something on the side of the road rather than just looking straight out and let the object on the side of the road go by your field of view quickly. As a result, they can roll the spacecraft so that any given spot in the terrain basically gets imaged twice (because each recorded "scanline" will overlap). This gives higher resolution in one dimension (in the direction of spacecraft travel). That's why MGS has produced certain images with 50 cm resolution in one dimension and 1 m resolution in the other dimension.
Peppe
I honestly don't think Apple cares about if single users here and their hack OS X and put it on their generic PC hardware. Big deal. I'm sure they don't care too much about if those people use a pirated or purchased copy of OS X. Seriously, they don't care too much. That's a handful of people. The losses are in thousands of dollars at worst.
What they do care about though, is if people take that hacked OS X that runs on generic PC hardware and give it to the masses. Why? Why is this the crucial point that makes the big difference? Because once that happens, people are able to run OS X and get the most important part of the Apple experience without paying anything to Apple. ANYTHING. At least if people pirate the genuine OS X version, they will run it in Apple hardware and Apple doesn't suffer too bad from the losses of the lost OS X sale. But if the hacked-to-run-on-generic-PC-hardware OS X gets out, Apple loses significant income.
Even if only 1% of Mac users would decide to run the hacked OS X version on generic PC's, that's still hundreds of thousands of people! That's millions lost in hardware sales! And there's no reason to think that only 1% would do it. More likely, it would be tens of percent and the impact could be very serious on Apple's bottom line. That's why they care.
Now as far as all the bullshit goes about how this is just like if a baker said you can't feed bread to the birds; only eat it yourself. Come on. That's nothing at all like this is. The baker will not lose any money or have any risk with you feeding birds. And if you honestly think that people will go out and buy a copy of OS X and then use some downloaded kit to modify the OS X installation to run on generic PC, then you're insane. Maybe one person in a thousand will do that. Everyone else will just get it pirated.
It's illegal in many countries, but worse, it's immoral in every country.
We'll see what happens, but I for one will have a hard time stopping myself from slapping people I see running OS X on generic PC hardware. I seriously might smack people that do that!
Peppe
A Scotsman who spells
Whisky with a n 'e',
should be hand cuffed
and thrown head first in the Dee.
In the USA and Ireland,
it's spelt with an 'e'
but in Scotland
it's real 'Whisky'.
So if you see Whisky
and it has an 'e',
only take it,
if you get it for free!
For the name is not the same
and it never will be,
a dram is only a real dram,
from a bottle of 'Scotch Whisky'.
Stanley Bruce.
20th April 2004
Perhaps not in the USA. But the USA isn't the only country in the world, and in particular when it comes to mobile services, it's definitely not representable of the rest of the world. In Asia and in Europe (I live in Finland) people use the Internet a lot - directly and indirectly. Directly in the obvious ways; web, email, download of games, etc. And indirectly by using various applications that access the Internet - for example online multiplayer games, news readers (like the Finnish "Kanavat" application that downloads compact web-like content from various media sources and allows these to be read offline and/or with zero-wait between page switches).
The prices are obviously not as cheap as they could and should be, and crazy expensive relative to home broadband Internet. But in absolute terms, it's not that bad. I pay 18 euros a month for 100 MB of data traffic. 100 MB is a huge amount to download over a cellphone link (with EDGE or 3G UMTS, the real-world speed is at best somewhere above 200Kbps). I typically read the news from a couple of websites each morning on the subway, and that results in total data downloads of maybe 50 megs per month. 18 euros for that is around 50 cents per day for this pleasure. Like I said, in absolute amounts, that's really not so bad!
Rumor has it that flat-rate fees for unlimited traffic are coming (to FInland) in 2006 and the prices will be around 20 euros a month.
Peppe
I've been programming since I was 7. I've done Basic, Pascal, C, x86 assembly, Modula 2, SML, C++, Java, plus a large bunch of scripting languages. I've programmed for the Java VM (ME, SE and EE), Amiga, DOS, 16 and 32 bit Windows, most UNIX variants and a large number of mobile OS's including Symbian, PalmOS and Windows Mobile.
When I got a Apple PowerBook, my intention was not to use it for programming. ObjectiveC and Cocoa was totally irrelevant for me and I didn't bother to learn it. That is, until one evening when I decided to just take a look at some of the ADC docs included with XCode. After reading for about an hour, I was very surprised. It couldn't possibly be this easy and straightforward. It felt like it Cocoa must be seriously limited in functionality. The API was so easy and so compact, and ObjectiveC was like a halfway mix of Java and C++. I bought a book on Cocoa and read through it in about a week. It covered everything from basic GUI programming to drag and drop, printing with pagination, OpenGL, making custom widgets, data binding and persistence, preferences, making and using frameworks (think DLL's), and so much much more. And all of this was amazingly simple compared to any other OS and language combo I had ever used. And not just easier, but dramatically easier.
As an example, the chapter on drag and drop was something like 5 pages and covered making drag sources, drag targets, controlling the icon you see while you drag, data flavors, and so on. The classes involved were all extremely simple, easy and intuitive. Printing is even easier!
I haven't really had any need to do any apps of my own lately, so admittedly I haven't used Cocoa for anything in particular other than simple test applications, but I'm thoroughly impressed!! I would give about 80% of the credit to Cocoa, and 20% to ObjectiveC. You can use Cocoa with Java too, but it seems a tad bit more compatible and elegant with Cocoa. Also, looking at the more recent API's like CoreImage, it seems there's more and more functionality in the Cocoa family of API's but the simplicity remains. I strongly recommend picking up ObjectiveC if you know C++ or Java!
Peppe
As far as I know, the Powershot Pro 1 has a Sony ICX456 CCD in it. And by the way, the Sony R1 has Carl Zeiss optics. So half of your argument melts away there.
Having said that, there are obvious benefits of an SLR and while I wouldn't buy the R1 myself, I think you should read DP Review's review of it. http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydscr1/
Judging from the review, the CCD is top notch. The main lacking part in my opinion is the slow tele-end of the lens (F4.8). If it was F2.8 all the way from 24 to 120mm, I don't see much reason for most people to need any interchangeable lenses - unless you're shooting birds or something. And quite frankly, most owners of say, Canon 350D's will only have one slow and crappy zoom like a 28-105 with F3.5 at the wide-end or something. So this camera will be a much better choice for a lot of the current DSLR buyers.
Peppe
You might wonder that, but you'd be wrong. Mobile gaming is HUGELY popular and as the devices get more and more capable, 3D graphics is becoming main stream and viable, revenues are sky-rocketing, the future is looking brighter than ever for mobile gaming!
m ing_analysis/
You can find tons of stuff about it with a bit of Googling, but here's some reading to get you started:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/09/mobile_ga
Peppe
Incorrect.
The situations is exactly identical on Mac and on Windows. On Mac OS X, the web browser (HTML redering) functionality is WebKit and Safari is just a thin GUI shell around it. In the same way, IE is just a thin GUI shell around the web browser (HTML rendering) functionality embedded into the OS.
If you remove the IE shell, nothing will break in Windows. However, if you remove the HTML rendering capability lots of things will break. In the same way, if you remove Safari nothing will break in OS X but if you remove WebKit, tons of things will break. There's a HUGE amount of applications that rely on WebKit!!
Of course Slashdot readers often overlook this fact because they think it's cool to bitch about Microsoft.
Like one that takes pictures like this?
A 4ok1.jpg
http://sci.esa.int/science-e-media/img/68/DSC7348
Peppe
I agree that this launch isn't a big deal, but for other reasons than you suggest.
First of all, the shuttle doesn't launch things to GTO because it itself cannot go to GTO. It launches things to LEO and then the satellites themselves will boost their orbit to GTO, and finally to geosynchronous orbit.
Second, three satellites is no big deal either. For on flight V165, an Ariane 5 launched not one, not two, not three but 7 satellites. Granted one of them was a nano-satellite that weighted only 20kg. Likewise, on flight V162, two satellites were launched to GTO and one to the moon (Smart-1, which was released into GTO but propelled its own way to the moon with ion propulsion). Hell, even the Ukranian Kosmos rocket (that most people haven't even heard about) is capable of similar satellite launching as the shuttle is. Just the other week, it launched TopSat, Rubin 5, Beijing 1, SSETI (which included 3 nano cubesats XI-V, UWE-1 and NCUBE-2), Mozhayets 5 and Sinah 1. When did the shuttle ever launch 9 satellites in one flight? Much less to an orbit that is 686km high. When did the shuttle ever even reach an orbit of 686km?
Third, if you want to compare, compare the Titan 4, Delta 4 or Atlas 5 to the Ariane 5. They are much more comparable. The shuttle is an embarrasing failure.
There's a reason the shuttle hasn't launched any satellites in years. It's too dangerous and too costly! It's totally not worth bringing 3 satellites in the cargo hold and launch them to GTO using their own boosters when you could just pack them into one or two single-use launchers and have it done with much less fuss, cheaper, and without risking the lives of 7 astronauts for no good reason.
The shuttles abililty to "rescue satellites" is the biggest joke ever. Rescue what satellites? The vast majority of satellites are in orbits the shuttle can't even reach. And from the orbits the shuttle CAN reach, satellites decay and fall down to earth in a few years. The one notable exception to this is the Hubble, which is at the edge of where the shuttle can go (around 600km) and has actually been saved by the shuttle.
Granted the Ariane 5 has had its own share of failures but at least the nature of those has been implementation fuckups that can be ironed out rather than design flaws like with the shuttle. And I'm not talking about the O-rings - I'm talking about the way the shuttle is stacked, the "need" for fragile wings, etc.
Peppe
I couldn't quite make out if your post was sarcastic and suggesting that the European space technology is in fact Russian? Or perhaps you were actually saying it like it is. That is, Europe has a strategy of having a heavy lift launcher, a medium lift launcher, and a lightweight lift launcher.
The heavy lift is the Ariane 5 in its various versions, and is capable of lifting not just one but several huge payloads either to low earth orbit or to geosynchronous (transfer) orbit. Ariane will launch the Galileo satellites, which are the European GPS satellites that will give Europe (and the rest of the world) global positioning that is NOT military based and NOT owned and controlled by the increasingly unpredictable USA. The Ariane 5 is also responsible of launching the ATV, which is like an oversized (3x more cargo capacity) Progress cargo ship. The ATV will be able to ferry large loads of cargo to the ISS. The Ariane, Galileo and the ATV are all European technology.
The medium lift technology has been missing. It's more suitable for launching lighter missions for very specific targets that are not shared by other probes. For example if you want to go to Mars or Venus, it's not really practical to bring along another probe that's heading for GTO. Or perhaps you want to launch something relatively small into a polar orbit, and so on. For that, Europe is using the Russian made Soyuz. The Soyuz is extremely reliable and the Russians are more than willing to cooperate, so this is great for Europe.
Finally, there's the Vega launcher (which hasn't flown yet). Vega is similar to Orbital Science's Taurus in size and style and is capable of launching small loads (up to 2000kg or so, depending on the altitude and inclination) to low earth orbit. Vega will be good for stuff like scientific missions to monitor polar ice caps, clouds, the seas, and so on. You want to be fairly low down for those kinds of missions (500 to 1000km) and your satellite won't be the size of a bus, like some of the communication satellites that Ariance 5 launches. Vega will be fully European technology, just like Ariane.
Peppe
Exactly. And even more importantly for Mars missions and such is that the energy / velocity required to get to Mars varies hardly at all between the every couple of year distance of 49 million miles vs. this year's 43.1 million miles. It's easier to visualize if one understands that one doesn't fly in a straight line to Mars from Earth. That is, to fly from Earth to Mars today, you wouldn't travel 43.1 million miles just because that's the distance today. Rather, you'd travel something like 500 million miles cause you'd fly in a so called Hohman transfer orbit that essentially traces an elliptical orbit that has a periapsis (closest to sun) point that touches Earth's orbit and apoapsis (furthest from the sun point that touches Mars' orbit. The distance of the arc of that orbit between the periapsis and apoapsis is very roughly 500 million miles and varies VERY little depending on how close Mars was to Earth at launch time. And equally small is the variation in flight time and required fuel, thrust and delta velocity.
Peppe
When I say that the difference in distance is mostly irrelevant, I meant the difference in distance of the closest approach - which happens roughly every two years. It doesn't matter much in terms of delta velocity if the distance from Earth to Mars is 0.38 or 0.42 astronomical units. It would matter much if the distance is 0.4 or 2.5 AU though, but that's irrelevant since missions to Mars are only started when the two planets are close to the closest approach. And that's no rare event at all - it happens once per two years or so.
Peppe
We all went to school and we all know how this works. Let's just calm down and consider how rare or not rare this event is.
Earth orbits the sun in a nearly circular orbit at a mean distance of 1 astronomical unit (by definition of AU). Mars on the other hand orbits the sun in a less circular orbit that takes it as far as 1.67 and as close as 1.38 astronomical units from the sun. As we all know, it takes earth 1 year to orbit the sun (again, by definition of a year). It takes Mars 687 days (1.88 earth years).
Let's put this into more "human" terms using an analogy. Let's imagine a rock in the middle of a field. And let's put two people walking in circles around the rock. One person at a distance of 10 meters and the other at a distance that varies between 14 and 17 meters from the rock. Very quickly we'll notice that the closest the people can ever come from eachother is 4 meters and the furthest they can come is 27 meters. But we also notice that as they walk around, the person closer to the rock will take 1 minute to walk around the rock and the person on the outside will take 1.88 mintues so the one on the inside will be overtaking the one on the outside roughly every other minute (once per two years in Mars-Earth terms). And whenever they overtake, the distance will be anything from 4 to 7 meters. And quite often, it will be a distance of 4 to 5 meters or so. It's not rare at all. What's rare is that it would be VERY close to the minimum 4 meters.
So.. when we say it's "amazingly close" and "closer than in 60000 years", it's more like getting within 4.1 meters instead of 4.25 in the analogy above. We're not talking about 4 meters vs. 27 meters or anything like that.
Conclusion: this isn't THAT special at all. Mars isn't THAT much closer at all. For example for Mars missions and such, the difference in distance is mostly irrelevant.
Peppe
No, but I have a camera that doesn't have a lens that's made from the bottom of a plastic Coke bottle.
I live in Finland - the country that Nokia is based in and a country that has been at the forefront of mobile phone development for at least the past 10 years. I have to say I don't understand at all the "I want a phone that is just a phone" or "I want a phone that works" type of comments.
I can't even remember when I've had a phone that didn't work. In the past 10+ years, the battery life on every phone I've had has been good enough that I have charged them about twice a week; that's 3+ days of real-life battery life that includes plenty of calls, text messages, etc. Reception has always been good and the only time I remember having dropped calls is when I've been in an elevator going down to an underground parking hall or something as extreme. Hell, even on my recent hiking trip in the mountains in Norway, there was reception half of the time. And that was far from any civilization! On the roads on the way to the mountains, there was good reception 100% of the time. Either way, reception is more about the deployment of base stations than about the phone. The last phone I had with an external antenna was 5 years ago anyway.
As far as functionality is concerned, I also don't get the complaint at all. There are plenty of models for all tastes. Let's look at Nokia, which this article is about:
Nokia 1100, 1110, 2650, 2600, 3100, 3120, 3220. None of them have a camera. You are free to pick one. Or if your carrier doesn't offer one, it's probably because nobody wants them!
Having said that, I wish people would get over the "phone" label. It's a device. Who gives a damn about what the name of it is? Not wanting a "phone" to have a camera or mp3 player is similar to saying that your don't want your computer to have the ability to play mp3's or view photos from your digital camera. It's a COMPUTER. It should only COMPUTE.
Seriously, it's a device and it has a bunch of features that makes sense to people in their daily lives. And you get whichever device (or none) that makes sense to you.
I have a Nokia 6630 right now and it's perfect for my use. It has 3G, EDGE and GPRS. It has tri-band GSM and it has Bluetooth. That means I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world! And with 3G/EDGE and Bluetooth, I can get Internet access to my laptop anywhere in the world too. I can sit in Starbucks in Shanghai and surf the net and read emails on the laptop while the phone is in my backpack, without ever touching a button on it. That's important to me, because I travel a lot and because I like to work in cafes, restaurants etc.
The phone has a 1.3 megapixel camera and a lens with less crappy quality than on most other mobile phone cameras. That allows me to snap pics of booths on tradeshows and MMS or email them to colleagues back in Finland. "Check out what company X is showing!". Or I can send my wife pictures of the beautiful lake by the sauna at the company off-site. "Wish you were here!". Obviously, it's not a replacement for my actual camera, which takes 100x better quality pictures. But the useage is different and I don't want to carry around my camera everywhere!
The phone has an email app. It lets me check my email when I'm somewhere where I don't want to take the laptop along. For example, I could be hiking in Lapland but I still want to check if we got that major deal that I was hoping would have been done before my vacation began. I don't use it much, but there are times when it's been a real life saver.
The phone has an XHTML web/wap browser. I use it to check the news, weather, TV-program listings, view webcams from Finland when I'm traveling, check what movies are in what theater and at what time, and even to order movie tickets once in a while. It's also good to do the occasional Wikipedia or Google lookup.
It has Symbian OS and Java, so I can play some fun games on it to pass the time on the subway or while waiting for a connecting flight. Or I can run some other useful apps, like IRC, AOL IM, MSN IM, SSH, BusWatch, WorldMate, Opera, etc. There's tons,
Did anyone else notice that a large piece of .. something.. fell off just after the SRB's separated? It looked black in the tank camera view, and flashed very clearly in the view for short time on the left side (seen from the camera) of the shuttle. I doubt it was an SRB because they had already fallen further away a few seconds earlier.
I bet we will be hearing a lot about that in the next few days as people start looking more closely at the camera recordings!
People commonly under-estimate the size of Finland. It's actually larger than most people think: about 1200 km from north to south (750 miles), which is roughly equal to the distance from San Francisco to Seattle. The area is 338000 sq km (130000 sq miles), which is larger than all other US states but Alaska, Texas, California and Montana. Put another way, Finland is twice the size of Florida.
Many people seem to think that a country that is twice the size as another would naturally take twice as long to deploy a new technology. In reality, however, a country twice as big would also have twice as many people to do the job. After all, it's not like the guy in New York has to fly to Los Angeles to deploy broadband Internet once he is finished in New York. The problem is solved in parallel - not serially.
You might think that population density changs this. But that too would seem to be wrong at closer inspection. With only half the population density, you would also have only half as many homes to deploy broadband to. The amount of homes per installation guy is what really matters.
Of course in reality, the people who live in the middle of nowhere will be at a disadvantage since it is less likely that a company puts in a lot of time, effort and money to deploy cables in the middle of US Alaska or Finnish Lapland.
So finally, let's examine the population densities:
Finland's population density is 13 people per square km. The USA's is 27 (and for comparison, France has 106 and the UK has 383).
EU has 460 million people. USA has 300 million people.
Assuming the same level of spread of Internet access, the EU should have 1.5 times more zombies than the USA.
The site mentioned in the article shows that in May, EU had 1320985 zombies and the USA had 964020. That means the EU has 1.37 times the zombies of the USA, despite having 1.5 times more people.
In 2004, Internet usage rates were at 47% in EU and 52% in the USA.
Conclusion: the zombie rates don't vary between USA and Europe. Population, on the other hand, does vary. Therefore, you can expect the EU to continue to have more zombies than the USA. Also, as China's and India's internet usage grows, they will probably pull ahead in the stats.
Disclaimer: The numbers were pulled from various sites online using Google for searching. If someone has conflicting figures one way or the other, I wouldn't be surprised.
I work from cafés (yes, I actually buy stuff there too) quite a lot and I connect my laptop online using Bluetooth to my Nokia 6630, which in turn is connected to the Internet over 3G (UMTS). It works extremely well, the latency is about 500ms and the bandwith tends to be around 250 kbps or so, which is fine for that sort of usage.
I can talk on the phone at the same time if needed, send and receive text or MMS messages, and the net connection will keep on ticking.
This is in Finland though, so I don't know how well it would work in the USA.
Do you understand the concept of an "example"?
The parent post to which I replied seemed to suggest that 10.4 owes just about everything to OSS. That's why I replied to it. Here's the original text from the root post in this thread - note how it specifically says "between .3 and .4":
.3 and .4."
.3 and .4, OSS had very little to do with the development, contrary to what is being claimed here by the original poster.
"Considering how much FOSS there is in OS X, surely more has been spent on advertising OS X than has been directly spent on developing OS X between
What I'm saying is very simple: No, between
I was not saying anything about the role of OSS in OS X as a whole. And that's the only thing you're talking about. So you're not countering my claims. You're countering some claims that you believe I made, but in fact didn't.
Now, later in the thread, I said that OS X would have been possible without FOSS. You counter that by saying that it would be radically different or that "possibly it would not even exist". Well, yes, of course, that might be the case. But it's also possible that they would have made good friends with Sun, licensed Solaris for X86, used closed compilers for it, developed OS X in exactly the way it's today, but using Java instead of Objective-C with Cocoa, done a Cocoa port for SPARC Solaris, complete with the Aqua GUI. It's possible that it would have resulted in Sun and Apple having 25% market share in desktop computers today.
That's perhaps not the most likely scenario. I'm simply using it as an example of how you can't predict what might have happened if they had not used OSS. There are lots of other possible outcomes than Apple being dead today.