We make assumption that Bitcoin can be considered a currency by design. Since it is not back by any national bank or precious metal by design (Yes, you trade BTC to other currencies or gold, but it has highly variable exchange rate.). So, how does the IRS treat transactions involving BTC? They treat like a capital gain, either short term or long term, depending on how long you have possessed the BTC. That makes for intricate accounting, and it means the taxes involved for each transaction depending on the change of value while held. US dollars may rise or fall in value with respect to Euros or U.K. Pounds, but you are not taxes for any gain value. You are taxed for Bitcoins, which make them similar to other commodities. Until some country undertakes making BTC their currency, it remains a commodity. If it becomes a foreign currency, then other parts of the Tax code come into play. Go talk to a good CPA or financial lawyer, and you will find that BTC offers some novel financial possibilities, but there are limitations in taxes and transaction costs.
The quote from Terry Gou about the possible number of jobs is misleading. There will not be 30,000 - 50,000 jobs involved for the plant in SE Wisconsin, more like 3000, if that many. Let's not conflate the possible economic benefits. I cite the report on PBS Newshour tonight to back my claims.
If the most popular web browsers all suffer from the same problems, could you build a new browser that avoids some of the problems with significantly better performance and remains compliant with web standards? Surely some group could fork Firefox and offer at least a Linux variant!?
The Edge Conference, which one can attend by invitation only, includes "delegates" from Google, Mozilla, Facebook, but not from Apple. Many of the web API's unsupported on Safari include functions provided by API's in iOS, or even Android. Some people want to create Web Apps, that create experiences very similar to iOS, but run on a mobile or desktop web browser. Apple would prefer you develop such Apps using iOS using Swift or Objective-C API's, which run natively with better performance in security. Why should Apple support API's on Safari, that allow Web apps to recreate the iOS experience on non-Apple devices? Why do you think Steve Jobs banned JAVA and Adobe Flash from iPhones?
BTW, you can see which web API's are supported on a given web browser by going to http://caniuse.com/
Leonard Nimoy was famous for his character Spock, and his relationship with Captain Kirk. However, Nimoy and Shatner acted together two years earlier in an early episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. - The Project Strigas Affair in 1964, along with William Klemperer and the usual cast of the TMFU. Check out the episode if can, it is worth it.
I think that the current US magnetic strip EMV credit card days are numbered.
Some form of two factor authentication should follow, which limits the vulnerability of the card information. Most european EMV credit cards use a Chip and PIN method of authentication, but the expense of these cards have been a deal breaker so far.
The heist is so big, I sometimes wonder, if it was done to destabilize the current US credit card system.
As a college student, I did my "year" of organic chemistry during summer term in between freshman and sophomore years. That was a smart move for me, because it let me concentrate entirely on "Orgo" and nothing else. I made a notebook of different reactions concepts during the course, which helped me grasp the concepts, and I found that being a chess player was helpful figuring out to synthesize a target molecule during tests. My mother was a chemistry major, and she taught chemistry in high school; so, doing well in any chemistry class was a priority for me. I went on to complete a combined B.S.-M.S. in Biochemistry in 4 years, and later went to medical school.
The new MCAT requirements, which add Biochemistry, Psychology, Sociology, along with general statistics to other scientific prerequisites have shifted some of the first year courses to the undergraduate course load. If you are going to do clinical medicine, I can understand some physicians frustration with doing organic chemistry, but knowing organic chemistry is also learning experience in understanding a scientific vocabulary of different pharmaceutical compounds. I think most physicians should learn generic drug names rather than trade names, but most physicians never take the time to understand a drug's chemical structure. If you are a research physician in academia, one can use basic science knowledge regularly, since you are in uncharted territory. Most new pharmaceutical compounds are going to be biomolecules rather than organic chemicals synthesized in the lab.
I have taken some of the online courses available through edX and Coursera, which was revealing to me in what has changed in General Chemistry and Physical Chemistry, but Organic Chemistry has plateaued somewhat in new knowledge. Organic Chemistry lab has changed with the use of NMR and other spectroscopy methods for identifying unknowns rather the qualitative tests you would find in Shriner-Fuson.
Although it may seem strange, I think that some form of computer/IT literacy is going to become a survival skill in medicine, if only for documentation. I think taking typing in high school has helped me as much as any other course in college during my clinical career. Should a physician has some form of web programming literacy for the future as part of his communication skills. That may be as valuable as a fluency in organic chemistry or even biochemistry.
I must sincerely disagree with Larry Page on the subject of privacy of medical records. There are many medical conditions, that can be compromising or embarrassing for a patient. If someone has a congenital condition that affect their behavioral or physical condition, that is something they might want to manage privately for their own protection. Reproductive issues are very private issues, for obvious reasons. If someone has a undiagnosed condition that affects their ability to work or to engage in a social life, they deserve privacy while they work with a health provider to figure things out. I find Mr. Page's feelings very inconsiderate to other people. I respect Mr. Page's courage in dealing with his current vocal cord paralysis, which has been ongoing for sometime, and he has taken a very blunt way of dealing with it. Not everyone's condition affords them such candor.
If you check SEC company executive stock records, one can find that Scott Forstall has sold off his Apple Stock options earlier this year, in preparation for a possible departure. His departure has actually been planned for several weeks, but was not announced until today along with the departure of John Browett, who was Sr. VP for Retails operations for Apple.
The current executive reorganization of Mr. Forstall's duties have been spread over several senior Apple executives, distributing responsibilities according to their current function. Read the press release to see the respective changes.
Some people have speculated that Scott Forstall might be the ultimate successor to Steve Jobs, since he came with Steve from NeXT computer back to Apple in 1997. He has been involved in the development of Mac OS X, including heading the Leopard OS development and development of the Aqua user interface in OS X, along with leading the development of iPhone and later iOS system software since 2004.
I don't know what Scott Forstall plans to do, but there is some speculation that he might be involved a project with a former Apple engineer. Needless to say, he probably has a non-compete clause with Apple, he will have respect for a while given his critical involvement with key Apple products like the iPhone, iPad and iOS system software.
I would not be surprised to see Scott come back to Apple sometime in the future, but he has earned a well-earned sabbatical given his recent efforts.
Regarding 3rd party In-App purchases for apple iOS apps, I would consider whether the patent covers Apple's iOS framework for In-App purchases through the App Store. It would behoove Apple to apply for a patent this software process, in order to prevent a third party from patenting the process / technology and leeching money from Apple's App store commerce, whether LodeSys's patent applies here is controversial. There are rumors that the Justice department is investigating LodeSys's actions on the basis of whether they violate RICO laws, and we will have wait and see, whether Justice takes any action in the future.
I would remind people that the Patent office issuing a patent for some collection of claims, does not mean that patent can't be overturned in court.
Also, I would remind Open Source Software programmers, that IP law with software patents and trademarks will always pose barriers and hurdles to take in mind. As the software market matures, the software industry is beginning to resemble the pharmaceutical industry, where brand-name drugs have a legal monopoly for the that country for the remaining life of the patent, after which generic drugs can be introduced in a regulated fashion. Until the Intellectual property law principles of software patents are restricted or clarified, the company with the biggest legal staff has the bigger stick.
One would support furthers efforts by the EFF, ACM and other independent groups to support efforts like the ACLU to help the little guy / company toe the IP law line, and survive.
It is regrettable that Steve Jobs has died. He was remarkable person to meet in person as well as experience through the media. I expect that much will be written about him the days ahead. However, there is no doubt he changed the world as we know it. Like him or not, he could not be ignored or underestimated. Take Care and be well!
The problem with the patent law in the Federal Court of Eastern Texas cannot just solved with a democratic vote, because the law is not entirely democratic, but depends previous legal precedents in that jurisdiction. Even if there is legal reform, the reform does not overturn previous legal precedents retroactively. One must understand that federal civil litigation is quite different from criminal procedure. Intellectual property law depends as much on property law and common law for the judges interpretation. It does not really matter what judges say in NYC, San Francisco or Chicago, since they are in different federal jurisdictions. Only the Supreme Court of The USA can overturn such cases on valid appeals. Even if congress passes a new patent law, it only solves things going forward in time, not necessarily retroactively. Lodsys though seems very well funded financially, and I would not be surprised if there was some indirect connection to Microsoft. It seems too common for coincidence that Microsoft's competitors fall prey to messy lawsuits, whether it be Apple, Linux distribution companies or IT companies. Not that I have hard evidence, but that has been MS's MO back in the 90's when Apple was staggering around without Steve Job's leadership.
Nonetheless, Apple does not want to stand by and watch their iOS market's being damaged, and Google and other mobile systems might be subject to litigation. However, I have not heard of any suits against Microsoft and their allied developers. Only time will tell.
Preliminary reports from m.i.c. gadget (an off-shore China news site, which is not subject to China goverment. censorship) say that the explosion occurred in a part of the assembly line, where the workers use a flammable dust to polish iPad screens. It is believed that a worker, who was smoking a cigarette in a prohibited area, caused the explosion. Access to the building is limited right now until the risk of secondary explosions can be minimized. See this local article at fortune.com http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/21/inside-the-apple-ipad-factory/
Pretty obvious what happaned. Safety standards for the operating assembly line will need to be reviewed and enforced. As for the impact on iPad2 output remains to be seen, but preliminary reports at the Apple store speculate that wait times for iPad2 may go up 1-2 weeks. Since most of the iPad2 manufacturing was based in Chengdu, one will have to see what subsequent effect this explosion will have on manufacturing capacity.
Although I don't expect Apple to release an Apple Server edition with a Tilera multicore processor, I would be interested to see a version of FreeBSD running with Grand Central Dispatch on a Tilera multicore chip. It would give a good idea of how effective GCD would be in allocating cores for execution. Any machine with 100 cores must have a considerable amount of RAM, perhap 8GB+, even with large caches.
Apple has been very active in developing LLVM compilers, and has recently added CLANG front end, instead of GCC. I don't think apple has open sourced all their work yet, but check llvm.org for the current details. The real trick is breaking any algorithm into blocks. Using OpenCL to organize your code for execution. I mean how different is a 100 core multi-CPU chip from a multicore GPU accellerator!
I visited the site http://beginningruby.org/ as well and was redirected to http://www.cancer.org/docroot/don/don_0.asp. I suspected someone has hacked the domain name or web site and redirecting to the cancer.org. You can view the original content by googling the site and checking the cached content.
There is no confirmed use of ZFS file system on Mac OS X client but the same may not be true in the future for Server, but as of now there is no full implementation of ZFS on Mac OS X Server, but one cannot say the same for the future. Suffice it to say that ZFS is a resource hungry file system with many features that are very helpful on Servers, but would be inefficient on Client systems. Those who say there is no ZFS announced for Mac OS X would be correct, but it would break several NDA for someone to discuss all the possibilities for the future. I am sure Apple will clarify these issues in the future, perhaps with the release to Leopard. Time will tell
It is a little ironic to look at how Microsoft initially started the litigation spree for Burst by settling for $60M which makes a litigation warchest for Burst to pursue Microsoft's major competitors in multimedia distribution, i.e. Apple Computer & Akamai.
It's kinda like how Microsoft initially bought a license from SCO several years ago, and then watched as SCO attempted to IP-attack the Linux community, again a upstart competetitor for Microsoft for Server Operating systems.
Is there a pattern emerging here, where Microsoft throws in the towel against a lowly firm IP software patents, which indirectly supports Microsoft's ultimate goals. The old adage: The enemy of my enemy is my friend!
Hypercard was the wonderful creation of Bill Atkinson, along with MacPaint and Quickdraw. Although Bill spends most of his time now as professional photographer, and not actively programming for Apple, he still uses Hypercard every day. Rumor has it that Bill has the certain retained rights to at least a good sized portion of the source code of Hypercard, which become active if Apple does not actively sell Hypercard. While more recent features of Hypercard such as Quicktime 3.0 might remain Apple's property intellectually, I would be interested to see if Bill Atkinson would be interested in putting Hypercard core code out in the Open Source area for development. It would require at least some grudging cooperation by Apple. So, the fact Apple has dropped it from its active inventory may actually set part of Hypercard free sometime in the future.
MacHack has traditionally been held around the 3rd week of June, if only because it gave people to recover from the end of college classes and get started with summer work, and to assimilate the new information released at WWDC that year. This year, WWDC follows MacHack and so any Panther Hacks will difficult to demonstrate without breaking your Privacy agreements with Apple.
It also signals a possible change in support from Apple executive management regarding MacHack. The O'Reilly Macintosh Conference held last year in October may gaining favor, or this may just represent a rescheduling of WWDC to represent the major Apple Summer Conference as Apple and MacWorld management work out their differences. However, many Apple programmers like going to MacHack, which has a more laid-back atmosphere, which encourages people to interact, create and program original new things, which get shown off at the Hack Contest. WWDC is a much more passive event, where people only have a chance to sit and listen and occasionally ask a question or make a comment.
I am glad to see MacHack staying the course, and making accommodations for people, but there is weekend during which people can fly from Detroit to California.
If people do have to make choice between MacHack and WWDC, I would prefer that Apple send me a refund and allow me to go to MacHack, and perhaps send me the DVD of the WWDC sessions.
Perhaps for the WWDC diehards, Apple could send Steve Jobs jet to bring us back to California for WWDC. I am sure more developers are upset with Apple for changing WWDC with only 2 months notice. There will be alot of unhappy hotel managers in San Jose, and a lot of busy hotel staff in San Francisco as they prepare for over 20,000 developers to descend on SF for WWDC.
Well now that Bertelsman and EMI have made their intentions known about copy protection for Audio CDs. The used CD market will become much more popular. New CD's will take a noticable decline for at least 6 months. Note that the article at New Scientist, notes that copy protection will apply to PC CD drives, not to most personal audio CD drives. I don't think there would be anything wrong with hooking the line out from a regular audio CD drive into your computer audio in and RIPing the audio to MP3 or your format of choice. And there goes the fruitless attempts of copy protection. The computer game companies figured out a long time ago that copy protection is a hopeless cause. I wonder what will be next, mandatory registration of all audio CD with biometric restricted access!?
It does not surprise me that some Mullahs, or holy clerics, rebounded from being leaned on by the BSA with outrageous doctrines about IP theft. But what is in store for the poor, unfortunate users, when it comes time for their punishment? Remember, Sunni Islam still believes in an eye for eye, or in this case, they chop off your hand for being a thief. That would make touchtyping much slower, and second offenses are likely to leave you up the creek without anyway to paddle or type on your keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
We make assumption that Bitcoin can be considered a currency by design. Since it is not back by any national bank or precious metal by design (Yes, you trade BTC to other currencies or gold, but it has highly variable exchange rate.). So, how does the IRS treat transactions involving BTC? They treat like a capital gain, either short term or long term, depending on how long you have possessed the BTC. That makes for intricate accounting, and it means the taxes involved for each transaction depending on the change of value while held. US dollars may rise or fall in value with respect to Euros or U.K. Pounds, but you are not taxes for any gain value. You are taxed for Bitcoins, which make them similar to other commodities.
Until some country undertakes making BTC their currency, it remains a commodity. If it becomes a foreign currency, then other parts of the Tax code come into play. Go talk to a good CPA or financial lawyer, and you will find that BTC offers some novel financial possibilities, but there are limitations in taxes and transaction costs.
The quote from Terry Gou about the possible number of jobs is misleading. There will not be 30,000 - 50,000 jobs involved for the plant in SE Wisconsin, more like 3000, if that many. Let's not conflate the possible economic benefits. I cite the report on PBS Newshour tonight to back my claims.
If the most popular web browsers all suffer from the same problems, could you build a new browser that avoids some of the problems with significantly better performance and remains compliant with web standards? Surely some group could fork Firefox and offer at least a Linux variant!?
The Edge Conference, which one can attend by invitation only, includes "delegates" from Google, Mozilla, Facebook, but not from Apple. Many of the web API's unsupported on Safari include functions provided by API's in iOS, or even Android. Some people want to create Web Apps, that create experiences very similar to iOS, but run on a mobile or desktop web browser. Apple would prefer you develop such Apps using iOS using Swift or Objective-C API's, which run natively with better performance in security. Why should Apple support API's on Safari, that allow Web apps to recreate the iOS experience on non-Apple devices? Why do you think Steve Jobs banned JAVA and Adobe Flash from iPhones?
BTW, you can see which web API's are supported on a given web browser by going to http://caniuse.com/
Oops!, Thanks!
Leonard Nimoy was famous for his character Spock, and his relationship with Captain Kirk. However, Nimoy and Shatner acted together two years earlier in an early episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. - The Project Strigas Affair in 1964, along with William Klemperer and the usual cast of the TMFU. Check out the episode if can, it is worth it.
I think that the current US magnetic strip EMV credit card days are numbered.
Some form of two factor authentication should follow, which limits the vulnerability of the card information. Most european EMV credit cards use a Chip and PIN method of authentication, but the expense of these cards have been a deal breaker so far.
The heist is so big, I sometimes wonder, if it was done to destabilize the current US credit card system.
As a college student, I did my "year" of organic chemistry during summer term in between freshman and sophomore years. That was a smart move for me, because it let me concentrate entirely on "Orgo" and nothing else. I made a notebook of different reactions concepts during the course, which helped me grasp the concepts, and I found that being a chess player was helpful figuring out to synthesize a target molecule during tests. My mother was a chemistry major, and she taught chemistry in high school; so, doing well in any chemistry class was a priority for me. I went on to complete a combined B.S.-M.S. in Biochemistry in 4 years, and later went to medical school.
The new MCAT requirements, which add Biochemistry, Psychology, Sociology, along with general statistics to other scientific prerequisites have shifted some of the first year courses to the undergraduate course load. If you are going to do clinical medicine, I can understand some physicians frustration with doing organic chemistry, but knowing organic chemistry is also learning experience in understanding a scientific vocabulary of different pharmaceutical compounds. I think most physicians should learn generic drug names rather than trade names, but most physicians never take the time to understand a drug's chemical structure. If you are a research physician in academia, one can use basic science knowledge regularly, since you are in uncharted territory. Most new pharmaceutical compounds are going to be biomolecules rather than organic chemicals synthesized in the lab.
I have taken some of the online courses available through edX and Coursera, which was revealing to me in what has changed in General Chemistry and Physical Chemistry, but Organic Chemistry has plateaued somewhat in new knowledge. Organic Chemistry lab has changed with the use of NMR and other spectroscopy methods for identifying unknowns rather the qualitative tests you would find in Shriner-Fuson.
Although it may seem strange, I think that some form of computer/IT literacy is going to become a survival skill in medicine, if only for documentation. I think taking typing in high school has helped me as much as any other course in college during my clinical career. Should a physician has some form of web programming literacy for the future as part of his communication skills. That may be as valuable as a fluency in organic chemistry or even biochemistry.
Now we have a Doctor Who, who has been a real Doctor Fan for a long time! Best Wishes to all Whovians!
I must sincerely disagree with Larry Page on the subject of privacy of medical records. There are many medical conditions, that can be compromising or embarrassing for a patient. If someone has a congenital condition that affect their behavioral or physical condition, that is something they might want to manage privately for their own protection. Reproductive issues are very private issues, for obvious reasons. If someone has a undiagnosed condition that affects their ability to work or to engage in a social life, they deserve privacy while they work with a health provider to figure things out. I find Mr. Page's feelings very inconsiderate to other people. I respect Mr. Page's courage in dealing with his current vocal cord paralysis, which has been ongoing for sometime, and he has taken a very blunt way of dealing with it. Not everyone's condition affords them such candor.
If you check SEC company executive stock records, one can find that Scott Forstall has sold off his Apple Stock options earlier this year, in preparation for a possible departure. His departure has actually been planned for several weeks, but was not announced until today along with the departure of John Browett, who was Sr. VP for Retails operations for Apple.
The current executive reorganization of Mr. Forstall's duties have been spread over several senior Apple executives, distributing responsibilities according to their current function. Read the press release to see the respective changes.
Some people have speculated that Scott Forstall might be the ultimate successor to Steve Jobs, since he came with Steve from NeXT computer back to Apple in 1997. He has been involved in the development of Mac OS X, including heading the Leopard OS development and development of the Aqua user interface in OS X, along with leading the development of iPhone and later iOS system software since 2004.
I don't know what Scott Forstall plans to do, but there is some speculation that he might be involved a project with a former Apple engineer. Needless to say, he probably has a non-compete clause with Apple, he will have respect for a while given his critical involvement with key Apple products like the iPhone, iPad and iOS system software.
I would not be surprised to see Scott come back to Apple sometime in the future, but he has earned a well-earned sabbatical given his recent efforts.
Regarding 3rd party In-App purchases for apple iOS apps, I would consider whether the patent covers Apple's iOS framework for In-App purchases through the App Store. It would behoove Apple to apply for a patent this software process, in order to prevent a third party from patenting the process / technology and leeching money from Apple's App store commerce, whether LodeSys's patent applies here is controversial. There are rumors that the Justice department is investigating LodeSys's actions on the basis of whether they violate RICO laws, and we will have wait and see, whether Justice takes any action in the future.
I would remind people that the Patent office issuing a patent for some collection of claims, does not mean that patent can't be overturned in court.
Also, I would remind Open Source Software programmers, that IP law with software patents and trademarks will always pose barriers and hurdles to take in mind. As the software market matures, the software industry is beginning to resemble the pharmaceutical industry, where brand-name drugs have a legal monopoly for the that country for the remaining life of the patent, after which generic drugs can be introduced in a regulated fashion. Until the Intellectual property law principles of software patents are restricted or clarified, the company with the biggest legal staff has the bigger stick.
One would support furthers efforts by the EFF, ACM and other independent groups to support efforts like the ACLU to help the little guy / company toe the IP law line, and survive.
It is regrettable that Steve Jobs has died. He was remarkable person to meet in person as well as experience through the media. I expect that much will be written about him the days ahead. However, there is no doubt he changed the world as we know it. Like him or not, he could not be ignored or underestimated. Take Care and be well!
The problem with the patent law in the Federal Court of Eastern Texas cannot just solved with a democratic vote, because the law is not entirely democratic, but depends previous legal precedents in that jurisdiction. Even if there is legal reform, the reform does not overturn previous legal precedents retroactively. One must understand that federal civil litigation is quite different from criminal procedure. Intellectual property law depends as much on property law and common law for the judges interpretation. It does not really matter what judges say in NYC, San Francisco or Chicago, since they are in different federal jurisdictions. Only the Supreme Court of The USA can overturn such cases on valid appeals. Even if congress passes a new patent law, it only solves things going forward in time, not necessarily retroactively.
Lodsys though seems very well funded financially, and I would not be surprised if there was some indirect connection to Microsoft. It seems too common for coincidence that Microsoft's competitors fall prey to messy lawsuits, whether it be Apple, Linux distribution companies or IT companies. Not that I have hard evidence, but that has been MS's MO back in the 90's when Apple was staggering around without Steve Job's leadership.
Nonetheless, Apple does not want to stand by and watch their iOS market's being damaged, and Google and other mobile systems might be subject to litigation. However, I have not heard of any suits against Microsoft and their allied developers. Only time will tell.
Preliminary reports from m.i.c. gadget (an off-shore China news site, which is not subject to China goverment. censorship) say that the explosion occurred in a part of the assembly line, where the workers use a flammable dust to polish iPad screens. It is believed that a worker, who was smoking a cigarette in a prohibited area, caused the explosion. Access to the building is limited right now until the risk of secondary explosions can be minimized.
See this local article at fortune.com
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/21/inside-the-apple-ipad-factory/
Pretty obvious what happaned. Safety standards for the operating assembly line will need to be reviewed and enforced. As for the impact on iPad2 output remains to be seen, but preliminary reports at the Apple store speculate that wait times for iPad2 may go up 1-2 weeks. Since most of the iPad2 manufacturing was based in Chengdu, one will have to see what subsequent effect this explosion will have on manufacturing capacity.
Yes, You can download the Lion Developer Preview, but it requires the App Store App, and the process has been a little quirky. Good Luck!
Although I don't expect Apple to release an Apple Server edition with a Tilera multicore processor, I would be interested to see a version of FreeBSD running with Grand Central Dispatch on a Tilera multicore chip. It would give a good idea of how effective GCD would be in allocating cores for execution. Any machine with 100 cores must have a considerable amount of RAM, perhap 8GB+, even with large caches.
Apple has been very active in developing LLVM compilers, and has recently added CLANG front end, instead of GCC. I don't think apple has open sourced all their work yet, but check llvm.org for the current details. The real trick is breaking any algorithm into blocks. Using OpenCL to organize your code for execution. I mean how different is a 100 core multi-CPU chip from a multicore GPU accellerator!
You can read the original content here - http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:y8CuWLUgkMkJ:beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/+beginning+ruby.org&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
I visited the site http://beginningruby.org/ as well and was redirected to http://www.cancer.org/docroot/don/don_0.asp. I suspected someone has hacked the domain name or web site and redirecting to the cancer.org. You can view the original content by googling the site and checking the cached content.
There is no confirmed use of ZFS file system on Mac OS X client but the same may not be true in the future for Server, but as of now there is no full implementation of ZFS on Mac OS X Server, but one cannot say the same for the future. Suffice it to say that ZFS is a resource hungry file system with many features that are very helpful on Servers, but would be inefficient on Client systems. Those who say there is no ZFS announced for Mac OS X would be correct, but it would break several NDA for someone to discuss all the possibilities for the future. I am sure Apple will clarify these issues in the future, perhaps with the release to Leopard. Time will tell
It is a little ironic to look at how Microsoft initially started the litigation spree for Burst by settling for $60M which makes a litigation warchest for Burst to pursue Microsoft's major competitors in multimedia distribution, i.e. Apple Computer & Akamai.
It's kinda like how Microsoft initially bought a license from SCO several years ago, and then watched as SCO attempted to IP-attack the Linux community, again a upstart competetitor for Microsoft for Server Operating systems.
Is there a pattern emerging here, where Microsoft throws in the towel against a lowly firm IP software patents, which indirectly supports Microsoft's ultimate goals. The old adage: The enemy of my enemy is my friend!
Hypercard was the wonderful creation of Bill Atkinson, along with MacPaint and Quickdraw. Although Bill spends most of his time now as professional photographer, and not actively programming for Apple, he still uses Hypercard every day. Rumor has it that Bill has the certain retained rights to at least a good sized portion of the source code of Hypercard, which become active if Apple does not actively sell Hypercard. While more recent features of Hypercard such as Quicktime 3.0 might remain Apple's property intellectually, I would be interested to see if Bill Atkinson would be interested in putting Hypercard core code out in the Open Source area for development. It would require at least some grudging cooperation by Apple. So, the fact Apple has dropped it from its active inventory may actually set part of Hypercard free sometime in the future.
MacHack has traditionally been held around the 3rd week of June, if only because it gave people to recover from the end of college classes and get started with summer work, and to assimilate the new information released at WWDC that year. This year, WWDC follows MacHack and so any Panther Hacks will difficult to demonstrate without breaking your Privacy agreements with Apple.
It also signals a possible change in support from Apple executive management regarding MacHack. The O'Reilly Macintosh Conference held last year in October may gaining favor, or this may just represent a rescheduling of WWDC to represent the major Apple Summer Conference as Apple and MacWorld management work out their differences. However, many Apple programmers like going to MacHack, which has a more laid-back atmosphere, which encourages people to interact, create and program original new things, which get shown off at the Hack Contest. WWDC is a much more passive event, where people only have a chance to sit and listen and occasionally ask a question or make a comment.
I am glad to see MacHack staying the course, and making accommodations for people, but there is weekend during which people can fly from Detroit to California.
If people do have to make choice between MacHack and WWDC, I would prefer that Apple send me a refund and allow me to go to MacHack, and perhaps send me the DVD of the WWDC sessions.
Perhaps for the WWDC diehards, Apple could send Steve Jobs jet to bring us back to California for WWDC. I am sure more developers are upset with Apple for changing WWDC with only 2 months notice. There will be alot of unhappy hotel managers in San Jose, and a lot of busy hotel staff in San Francisco as they prepare for over 20,000 developers to descend on SF for WWDC.
Well now that Bertelsman and EMI have made their intentions known about copy protection for Audio CDs. The used CD market will become much more popular. New CD's will take a noticable decline for at least 6 months. Note that the article at New Scientist, notes that copy protection will apply to PC CD drives, not to most personal audio CD drives. I don't think there would be anything wrong with hooking the line out from a regular audio CD drive into your computer audio in and RIPing the audio to MP3 or your format of choice. And there goes the fruitless attempts of copy protection. The computer game companies figured out a long time ago that copy protection is a hopeless cause. I wonder what will be next, mandatory registration of all audio CD with biometric restricted access!?
It does not surprise me that some Mullahs, or holy clerics, rebounded from being leaned on by the BSA with outrageous doctrines about IP theft. But what is in store for the poor, unfortunate users, when it comes time for their punishment? Remember, Sunni Islam still believes in an eye for eye, or in this case, they chop off your hand for being a thief. That would make touchtyping much slower, and second offenses are likely to leave you up the creek without anyway to paddle or type on your keyboard.