I think the wording of the original agreement, even as changed by amendment 2, makes a strong case that SCO did not acquire the SysV copyright, but there's some wiggle room. In the "excluded assets" (i.e., what SCO didn't get), they list:
"A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the [...] copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies. However, in no event shall Novell be liable to SCO for any claim brought by any third party pertaining to said copyrights and trademarks."
Two things stand out here. First, the fact that Novell retains "All copyrights and trademarks, except..." stronly implies that they retained most of the copyrights involved (otherwise why would this section be in "excluded assets", rather than putting "All copyrights and trademarks, except..." in the "included assets" section?).
Second, what does the word "acquisition" mean in this context? I would interpret it as saying that SCO required certain copyrights and trademarks in order to be able to legally sell SysV UNIX (since the amendment was a generalization of the phrase "except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare"). According to this reading, source code would definitely not be included, and transfer of copyright would take place only as part of the acquisition (i.e., SCO can't come back and claim copyright over other things now). This seems to be Novell's interpretation as well as mine. However, it could be argued that "required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition" is an ongoing thing, and that SCO is now claiming that they need the copyrights in order to continue exercising their rights.
Looking at the section as a whole, and at the history of the document, I'm inclined to lean toward Novell's interpretation, but I have to admit that there's enough ambiguity that SCO might have a case, albeit a weak one.
BTW, FWIW, IANAL. IJLTRLD (I just like to read legal documents).
That's only because the sky doesn't let other wavelengths of light through. If you adjust the colors of the image so that the sky is a neutral grey, you'll see that Mars isn't red at all, but is a sort of greenish-blue. And that crater they plan to investigate, in the upper left there? Yep, you guessed it, it's really a swimming pool.
Nah, it's easy to drink 6 cups a day and still be overweight. It goes like this:
8:45 AM: First two cups, just to wake up. 10:30 AM: writing a report, need two more cups. 12 PM: Client lunch, 2 martinis. 1:30 PM; Gotta sober upp a bit, two more cups. 5:30 PM: Time to wind down with a beer or two. 8 PM: Wow, good game! Let's stay and have a few more beers. 10:30 PM: Gotta schtopp n'pikkup shum beersh on the way home. 1:45 AM: Why'd I stay up this late? Never mind, I'll have some coffee in the morning.
Okay, I can't resist (my apologies in advance for slant rhymes):
It was twenty years ago today Richard Stallman quit M-I-Tay He's been working on the code for Hurd And growing one hellacious beard So let me introduce to you The father of all things GNU Richard Stallman's libre-software band!
The beauty of the Google Zeitgeist is that you can see weekends! All of their plots show five days of high activity followed by two days of low activity. Look at the congestion plot, for example. I guess people still access the internet from work at lot more than from home.
Sorry, not directed to you at all. It was directed to the people who would rather read my spoiler than go see the movie, or (heaven forbid) read the original story.:-)
You're right, the grandmother-cell idea has been discredited (and fwiw, I don't believe it either). But so has the complete-distributed-processing idea (i.e., the holographic memory concept you mentioned). It's absolutely untrue that your entire brain is involved in each thing you brain does, just as it's absolutely untrue each brain function can be mapped to a single neuron - and that was exactly the point I was trying to make when I said:
There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The "holographic brain" idea you mentioned is clearly untrue, because if you break the brain in two (e.g., cut the corpus callosum), you don't end up with two identical brains, each less detailed. You end up with two different brains, each containing some of the information stored in the other (for example, you pointed out indirectly that Broca's and Wernicke's areas are associated with different inputs and outputs). So the information in the brain isn't totally distributed. OTOH, cases such as your grandmother's, in which she was able to regain an ability she had lost, argue that brain abilities aren't totally localized.
I'm going to ignore your suggestion that advertising and religion are more powerful than science and medicine, because it ignores my other point - that you can manipulate something without really understanding it. But I think my two conclusions still stand:
(1) The brain uses both local and distributed processing, and we don't understand the nature and extent of either; and (2) Even without understanding something, we can manipulate it in such a way as to achieve the desired affect.
FWIW, Phillip K Dick has been the inspiration of many movies over the past 20 years or so. According to IMDB (since I don't trust my own memory), he's credited with the inspiration (since he died in '82) of (in chronological order):
"Out of This World" (1962), a TV series based on Impostor (a short story in which aliens who take the place of humans are convinced that they are in fact the humans whose places they took - the concept of identity, what it is, and how it can be determined is a common theme throughout his work).
"Blade Runner" (1982), a movie *very* loosely based on his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". The common theme here is what makes one human - memories, a fragile body, the desire to live, or some other intangible thing (a soul)?
"Total Recall" (1990). Miserable adaptation of a clever idea by PKD. I won't describe the movie, which you've probably already seen, but I'll describe the original story which you probably haven't read (warning:spoilers - skip to the end of the paragraph). A young man pays for a "vacation" in which false memories of a trip as a secret agent to Mars are implanted. Except the company (Rekal, Inc) can't implant the memories, because the man really was a secret agent who went to Mars, but had his memories erased - trying to implant the new ones released the old ones. But he doesn't fully realize what happened, and the old memories haven't fully resurfaced, so he goes back to complain about their bad service. Well, the secret service discovers that he's starting to remember the memories they hid, so they capture him. They'd like to kill him, but as a last attempt to save this potentially-useful agent, they have a shrink examine his psyche for some fantasy that sits even deeper in his psyche than wanting to be a secret agent. They find this deep-seated wish-fulfillment fantasy where, as a child, he encounters an invading alien species of mice. Because of his kindness to them, the aliens agree not to invade Earth as long as he's alive. So they decide to implant this memory in place of the Mars-secret-agent one. Only they discover that it isn't a fantasy after all....
"Confessions of a Crap Artist" (1992). Haven't seen the movie, but according to the IMDB reviews it's a faithful adaptation of the novel of the same name. Not Sci-fi, but great novel nonetheless.
"Screamers" (1995). Again, haven't seen the movie. The story is about a war between robots and humans (Matrix, anyone?), in which the robots create human-like machines to prey on the sympathies of the humans. Once again, the question arises - who's really human, and who's a ticking time bomb?
"Impostor" (2002). See "Out of This World", above.
"Minority Report" (2002). Decent adaptation, except for the fact that they CHANGED THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STORY! (More spoilers) The story at it's heart was fatalistic- it introduced the "pre-crime" idea, in which people are arrested for crimes they are about to commit, regardless of whether they know they will commit them or not. Pre-crime is based on the thoughts of three 'precogs', who can predict the future- if two agree about a future activity, then the person responsible is investigated. The head of pre-crime, John Anderton in the movie (don't remember the name in the story), finds out that he's about to kill someone. He consults the "precogs" (people with pre-cognitive abilities to predict the future) and finds that two of the three think that he's going to kill someone who he doesn't know and has never met, a military leader. The military is upset because pre-crime is making them irrelevant, so they want to destroy its credibility. This leader has Anderton captured, and explains to him their plans for destroying pre-crime. Anderton wants to kill him, but doesn't, because he knows it will play into their hands (by discrediting the head of precrime, they can destroy it). So the military plans a press conference showing Anderton next to this military leader as a way of discrediting pre-crime,
You've hit upon the fundamental difference between scientists and doctors here - which, incidentally, is why most people of either profession refuse to take the other seriously. Scientists think the way you do: if something's going wrong and you don't understand what's happening, then figure it out before you do anything that could screw things up even worse. Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible; it doesn't matter if you understand how the treatment works or not (for example, we have no idea how most drugs have their effect, which is a large part of the reason why drug development is so expensive and time-consuming and requires clinical trials). The difference stems from the fact that scientists want to understand (or at least predict) the behavior of the universe, whereas doctors want to keep people alive.
To bring this back to the discussion at hand, there are two competing theories of how our minds work. In the first, we have specific cells devoted to specific memories - e.g., you have a "grandmother cell" that remembers your grandmother, and if that cell were to die, you'd lose the memory. In the second, our brain is a state machine, so the memory of you grandmother is spread throughout the activity of the entire brain. There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle. From the standpoint of believable movie science, do we understand enough about the brain to be able to erase someone's memory precisely, accurately, and repeatably, knowing exactly what we're doing? No. That's the scientist's point of view. Do we have enough tools at our command to be able to erase part of someone's memory if it were really, really important and we had plenty of time and money to spend on the problem? Maybe. That's the doctor's point of view (not that a doctor would do this necessarily, but it illustrates the solve-a-practical-problem vs. understand-the-fundamental-principles mentality that separates the two cultures).
Try turning off ACPI support in the kernel. With it on, my system would lock up every ten minutes, or whenever I generated a lot of IDE traffic (whichever came first). With it off, my system's rock-solid again.
Actually, the post about Linux is more subtle, referring to both hard drive mounting and the "Execution Protection" feature (which may or may not be implemented in hardware in linux). What it says in plain English is:
If you say "no files on this hard drive should be treated as executable code" (the "noexec" mount option), and you then read one of those files into memory (the mmap() function), you should not then be allowed to treat that chunk of memory as executable code (the PROT_EXEC flag).
In other words, "Execution Protection" is already in the 2.6 kernel. The fix described (and presumably written) by drepper@redhat takes advantage of execution protection to close up a loophole that existed in the noexec mount option (i.e., that you could mmap() a file on a noexec'd partition and then execute the chunk of code from memory).
Weiner was walking across the MIT campus and stopped to talk to a student. When the conversation was over, he asked the student in which direction he had been heading. The student pointed, and Weiner said, "Oh, then I must've had lunch already."
Y'know, the slowness of these things always bugged me too, but I just figured it was a security "feature". If it only spits out one thing at a time, and waits a while before spitting out the next one, you have enough time to grab each thing and stuff it somewhere safe before the next one comes out. If it spits out your money, your card, and your receipt all at once, then you get two and the money/identity thief behind you gets one.
Your ears use several techniques to try and locate the position of a sound. The first is the interaural time difference (ITD), which is a measure of the difference in arrival time at the two ears (e.g., if a sound is to your right, it will reach your right ear first). This method works best for impulsive sounds and mid-to-high frequency continuous sounds, where the short travel time across your head (about 1 msec) can result in a large phase delay. The sound is perceived as coming from the ear with the phase lead. You can test this out yourself - use your favorite sound-generating program to play a 4000 Hz tone in one channel and a 4001 Hz tone in the other, and listen to it over headphones. You'll hear a single tone that bounces from left to right inside your head at 1 Hz, as the 4001 Hz tone alternately leads and lags the other.
The second technique is called the interaural level difference (ILD). For a point source of sound, sound intensity falls off as the cube of the distance from the source, so the sound will be louder in the closer ear (generally; the HRTF described below can actually make it louder, too). You can actually play the ITD and ILD off of each other; if a sound hits the left ear first, but is louder in the right ear, it might sound centered.
However, as ajs318 surmised in an earlier post, a given ITD and ILD define a "cone of confusion"; the same ITD and ILD could result from a sound source at any location on a paraboloid. We resolve the confusion in two ways. First, we use a head-related transfer function (HRTF), which describes how our ears shape the frequency spectrum of sound as a function of direction. It turns out that our pinnas (the outer, fleshy part of the ear) filter the sound so that there are sharp notches, or dropouts, in the frequency spectrum. The exact frequency of these dropouts varies with the incoming sound direction, so by detecting where these dropouts occur we can figure out where on the cone of confusion the sound is coming from. You can try this for yourself; close your eyes and have someone jingle their keys while you point to them. Then pinch the tops and bottoms of your pinnas together and repeat the test - you'll find that you point to the correct horizontal angle, but you often get up/down and front/back confused.
Of course, this system depends on your brainstem knowing the map between the sound location and the frequency of the notch. Since this relation varies somewhat from person to person, it's nigh-impossible to make a device (like these speakers) that tries to simulate it accurately for everyone.
The second way we resolve the cone-of-confusion problem is through head motion. As a student I did some research on front-back confusion when listening through acoustic mannikins (which are often used to simulate virtual listening environments), and found that most naive listeners have trouble telling front from back. Putting the mannikin head on a motor and letting it turn with the listener's head movements resolved the confusion. The reason for this is that turning your head moves the sound location from one cone of confusion to another, and the cone it moves to depends on where the sound is. Head motion can also tell you something about the distance to the source of nearby sounds, for the same reason (for sounds very far away, you can judge distance from the spectral content, since high frequencies are attenuated more by travelling through air). Of course, head-motion effects only work for sounds of long duration.
These speakers work by simulating the HRTF to fool you into thinking that the sounds are coming from behind you, when they're really coming from in front. This will work well if two conditions are met: (1) your HRTF is reasonably close to the one they use in their simulations, and (2) you keep your head still. If you move your head, the sound will move onto the wrong cone, and the illusion will be lost.
On the bright side, this technique shouldn't depend too much on being in the "sweet spot", b
Maybe that's why Microsoft has switched to sending out vulnerability announcements only once a month - they're hoping to get a negative "time-to-fix" score!
Some of the things I've read by RMS lead me to believe that there is at least a part of him that hopes that his software will help contribute to the downfall of proprietary software.
I think you're right. Here's a bit of code I found in the latest version of emacs:
Hrm, it seems I spoke too soon. It gets about halfway through the install (regardless of whether you use winxp or win2k) and then hangs on "iTunes Setup is performing the requested operations." And just copying the files from a vmware install didn't work either (although it runs just fine from within vmware, natch).
When I try to start it up with Crossover Office after just copying (using --verbose), it complains about needing iphlpapi.dll. Copying that dll from an XP install to the iTunes directory gets past that error, but generates a bunch of warnings about other dlls (maybe I need to update all of crossover office's dlls?), and then pops up a fatal error about not being able to start quicktime. Looks like it's not going to be trivial to get it working.
iTunes fails install on Crossover because Crossover emulates Windows 98 and not 2000
Just edit ~/.cxoffice/dotwine/config and change the "Windows" = "win98" line to read "Windows" = "winxp". That got the install to run for me. Still have to see if it runs, though.
Anyone signing up for a "muslim meal" should also be flagged as high-risk.
I'd be more worried about the people who sign up for NO meal. If they're concerned about what they eat, they're probably expecting to live through the flight....
Slashdot Mirror
I think the wording of the original agreement, even as changed by amendment 2, makes a strong case that SCO did not acquire the SysV copyright, but there's some wiggle room. In the "excluded assets" (i.e., what SCO didn't get), they list:
"A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the [...] copyrights and trademarks owned by Novell as of the date of the Agreement required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies. However, in no event shall Novell be liable to SCO for any claim brought by any third party pertaining to said copyrights and trademarks."
Two things stand out here. First, the fact that Novell retains "All copyrights and trademarks, except..." stronly implies that they retained most of the copyrights involved (otherwise why would this section be in "excluded assets", rather than putting "All copyrights and trademarks, except..." in the "included assets" section?).
Second, what does the word "acquisition" mean in this context? I would interpret it as saying that SCO required certain copyrights and trademarks in order to be able to legally sell SysV UNIX (since the amendment was a generalization of the phrase "except for the trademarks UNIX and UnixWare"). According to this reading, source code would definitely not be included, and transfer of copyright would take place only as part of the acquisition (i.e., SCO can't come back and claim copyright over other things now). This seems to be Novell's interpretation as well as mine. However, it could be argued that "required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition" is an ongoing thing, and that SCO is now claiming that they need the copyrights in order to continue exercising their rights.
Looking at the section as a whole, and at the history of the document, I'm inclined to lean toward Novell's interpretation, but I have to admit that there's enough ambiguity that SCO might have a case, albeit a weak one.
BTW, FWIW, IANAL. IJLTRLD (I just like to read legal documents).
That's only because the sky doesn't let other wavelengths of light through. If you adjust the colors of the image so that the sky is a neutral grey, you'll see that Mars isn't red at all, but is a sort of greenish-blue. And that crater they plan to investigate, in the upper left there? Yep, you guessed it, it's really a swimming pool.
Nah, it's easy to drink 6 cups a day and still be overweight. It goes like this:
8:45 AM: First two cups, just to wake up.
10:30 AM: writing a report, need two more cups.
12 PM: Client lunch, 2 martinis.
1:30 PM; Gotta sober upp a bit, two more cups.
5:30 PM: Time to wind down with a beer or two.
8 PM: Wow, good game! Let's stay and have a few more beers.
10:30 PM: Gotta schtopp n'pikkup shum beersh on the way home.
1:45 AM: Why'd I stay up this late? Never mind, I'll have some coffee in the morning.
You're taking the "blame the patient" position. It's been debunked.
;-)
One notable characteristic of type II diabetes is the loss of the post meal insulin pulse.
And whose fault is that?
Okay, I can't resist (my apologies in advance for slant rhymes):
It was twenty years ago today
Richard Stallman quit M-I-Tay
He's been working on the code for Hurd
And growing one hellacious beard
So let me introduce to you
The father of all things GNU
Richard Stallman's libre-software band!
The beauty of the Google Zeitgeist is that you can see weekends! All of their plots show five days of high activity followed by two days of low activity. Look at the congestion plot, for example. I guess people still access the internet from work at lot more than from home.
Sorry, not directed to you at all. It was directed to the people who would rather read my spoiler than go see the movie, or (heaven forbid) read the original story. :-)
You're right, the grandmother-cell idea has been discredited (and fwiw, I don't believe it either). But so has the complete-distributed-processing idea (i.e., the holographic memory concept you mentioned). It's absolutely untrue that your entire brain is involved in each thing you brain does, just as it's absolutely untrue each brain function can be mapped to a single neuron - and that was exactly the point I was trying to make when I said:
There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The "holographic brain" idea you mentioned is clearly untrue, because if you break the brain in two (e.g., cut the corpus callosum), you don't end up with two identical brains, each less detailed. You end up with two different brains, each containing some of the information stored in the other (for example, you pointed out indirectly that Broca's and Wernicke's areas are associated with different inputs and outputs). So the information in the brain isn't totally distributed. OTOH, cases such as your grandmother's, in which she was able to regain an ability she had lost, argue that brain abilities aren't totally localized.
I'm going to ignore your suggestion that advertising and religion are more powerful than science and medicine, because it ignores my other point - that you can manipulate something without really understanding it. But I think my two conclusions still stand:
(1) The brain uses both local and distributed processing, and we don't understand the nature and extent of either; and
(2) Even without understanding something, we can manipulate it in such a way as to achieve the desired affect.
FWIW, Phillip K Dick has been the inspiration of many movies over the past 20 years or so. According to IMDB (since I don't trust my own memory), he's credited with the inspiration (since he died in '82) of (in chronological order):
"Out of This World" (1962), a TV series based on Impostor (a short story in which aliens who take the place of humans are convinced that they are in fact the humans whose places they took - the concept of identity, what it is, and how it can be determined is a common theme throughout his work).
"Blade Runner" (1982), a movie *very* loosely based on his novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". The common theme here is what makes one human - memories, a fragile body, the desire to live, or some other intangible thing (a soul)?
"Total Recall" (1990). Miserable adaptation of a clever idea by PKD. I won't describe the movie, which you've probably already seen, but I'll describe the original story which you probably haven't read (warning:spoilers - skip to the end of the paragraph). A young man pays for a "vacation" in which false memories of a trip as a secret agent to Mars are implanted. Except the company (Rekal, Inc) can't implant the memories, because the man really was a secret agent who went to Mars, but had his memories erased - trying to implant the new ones released the old ones. But he doesn't fully realize what happened, and the old memories haven't fully resurfaced, so he goes back to complain about their bad service. Well, the secret service discovers that he's starting to remember the memories they hid, so they capture him. They'd like to kill him, but as a last attempt to save this potentially-useful agent, they have a shrink examine his psyche for some fantasy that sits even deeper in his psyche than wanting to be a secret agent. They find this deep-seated wish-fulfillment fantasy where, as a child, he encounters an invading alien species of mice. Because of his kindness to them, the aliens agree not to invade Earth as long as he's alive. So they decide to implant this memory in place of the Mars-secret-agent one. Only they discover that it isn't a fantasy after all....
"Confessions of a Crap Artist" (1992). Haven't seen the movie, but according to the IMDB reviews it's a faithful adaptation of the novel of the same name. Not Sci-fi, but great novel nonetheless.
"Screamers" (1995). Again, haven't seen the movie. The story is about a war between robots and humans (Matrix, anyone?), in which the robots create human-like machines to prey on the sympathies of the humans. Once again, the question arises - who's really human, and who's a ticking time bomb?
"Impostor" (2002). See "Out of This World", above.
"Minority Report" (2002). Decent adaptation, except for the fact that they CHANGED THE WHOLE POINT OF THE STORY! (More spoilers) The story at it's heart was fatalistic- it introduced the "pre-crime" idea, in which people are arrested for crimes they are about to commit, regardless of whether they know they will commit them or not. Pre-crime is based on the thoughts of three 'precogs', who can predict the future- if two agree about a future activity, then the person responsible is investigated. The head of pre-crime, John Anderton in the movie (don't remember the name in the story), finds out that he's about to kill someone. He consults the "precogs" (people with pre-cognitive abilities to predict the future) and finds that two of the three think that he's going to kill someone who he doesn't know and has never met, a military leader. The military is upset because pre-crime is making them irrelevant, so they want to destroy its credibility. This leader has Anderton captured, and explains to him their plans for destroying pre-crime. Anderton wants to kill him, but doesn't, because he knows it will play into their hands (by discrediting the head of precrime, they can destroy it). So the military plans a press conference showing Anderton next to this military leader as a way of discrediting pre-crime,
You've hit upon the fundamental difference between scientists and doctors here - which, incidentally, is why most people of either profession refuse to take the other seriously. Scientists think the way you do: if something's going wrong and you don't understand what's happening, then figure it out before you do anything that could screw things up even worse. Doctors think in a different way: do whatever is necessary, and whatever you can, to keep the patient alive and as healthy as possible; it doesn't matter if you understand how the treatment works or not (for example, we have no idea how most drugs have their effect, which is a large part of the reason why drug development is so expensive and time-consuming and requires clinical trials). The difference stems from the fact that scientists want to understand (or at least predict) the behavior of the universe, whereas doctors want to keep people alive.
To bring this back to the discussion at hand, there are two competing theories of how our minds work. In the first, we have specific cells devoted to specific memories - e.g., you have a "grandmother cell" that remembers your grandmother, and if that cell were to die, you'd lose the memory. In the second, our brain is a state machine, so the memory of you grandmother is spread throughout the activity of the entire brain. There's evidence to support both ideas, which suggests that the truth is somewhere in the middle. From the standpoint of believable movie science, do we understand enough about the brain to be able to erase someone's memory precisely, accurately, and repeatably, knowing exactly what we're doing? No. That's the scientist's point of view. Do we have enough tools at our command to be able to erase part of someone's memory if it were really, really important and we had plenty of time and money to spend on the problem? Maybe. That's the doctor's point of view (not that a doctor would do this necessarily, but it illustrates the solve-a-practical-problem vs. understand-the-fundamental-principles mentality that separates the two cultures).
(and, once again, five mod points go unused.)
Try turning off ACPI support in the kernel. With it on, my system would lock up every ten minutes, or whenever I generated a lot of IDE traffic (whichever came first). With it off, my system's rock-solid again.
Actually, the post about Linux is more subtle, referring to both hard drive mounting and the "Execution Protection" feature (which may or may not be implemented in hardware in linux). What it says in plain English is:
If you say "no files on this hard drive should be treated as executable code" (the "noexec" mount option), and you then read one of those files into memory (the mmap() function), you should not then be allowed to treat that chunk of memory as executable code (the PROT_EXEC flag).
In other words, "Execution Protection" is already in the 2.6 kernel. The fix described (and presumably written) by drepper@redhat takes advantage of execution protection to close up a loophole that existed in the noexec mount option (i.e., that you could mmap() a file on a noexec'd partition and then execute the chunk of code from memory).
I heard another Norbert Weiner story:
Weiner was walking across the MIT campus and stopped to talk to a student. When the conversation was over, he asked the student in which direction he had been heading. The student pointed, and Weiner said, "Oh, then I must've had lunch already."
You're absolutely right, but that doesn't mean it's not the reason they did it....
Y'know, the slowness of these things always bugged me too, but I just figured it was a security "feature". If it only spits out one thing at a time, and waits a while before spitting out the next one, you have enough time to grab each thing and stuff it somewhere safe before the next one comes out. If it spits out your money, your card, and your receipt all at once, then you get two and the money/identity thief behind you gets one.
Your ears use several techniques to try and locate the position of a sound. The first is the interaural time difference (ITD), which is a measure of the difference in arrival time at the two ears (e.g., if a sound is to your right, it will reach your right ear first). This method works best for impulsive sounds and mid-to-high frequency continuous sounds, where the short travel time across your head (about 1 msec) can result in a large phase delay. The sound is perceived as coming from the ear with the phase lead. You can test this out yourself - use your favorite sound-generating program to play a 4000 Hz tone in one channel and a 4001 Hz tone in the other, and listen to it over headphones. You'll hear a single tone that bounces from left to right inside your head at 1 Hz, as the 4001 Hz tone alternately leads and lags the other.
The second technique is called the interaural level difference (ILD). For a point source of sound, sound intensity falls off as the cube of the distance from the source, so the sound will be louder in the closer ear (generally; the HRTF described below can actually make it louder, too). You can actually play the ITD and ILD off of each other; if a sound hits the left ear first, but is louder in the right ear, it might sound centered.
However, as ajs318 surmised in an earlier post, a given ITD and ILD define a "cone of confusion"; the same ITD and ILD could result from a sound source at any location on a paraboloid. We resolve the confusion in two ways. First, we use a head-related transfer function (HRTF), which describes how our ears shape the frequency spectrum of sound as a function of direction. It turns out that our pinnas (the outer, fleshy part of the ear) filter the sound so that there are sharp notches, or dropouts, in the frequency spectrum. The exact frequency of these dropouts varies with the incoming sound direction, so by detecting where these dropouts occur we can figure out where on the cone of confusion the sound is coming from. You can try this for yourself; close your eyes and have someone jingle their keys while you point to them. Then pinch the tops and bottoms of your pinnas together and repeat the test - you'll find that you point to the correct horizontal angle, but you often get up/down and front/back confused.
Of course, this system depends on your brainstem knowing the map between the sound location and the frequency of the notch. Since this relation varies somewhat from person to person, it's nigh-impossible to make a device (like these speakers) that tries to simulate it accurately for everyone.
The second way we resolve the cone-of-confusion problem is through head motion. As a student I did some research on front-back confusion when listening through acoustic mannikins (which are often used to simulate virtual listening environments), and found that most naive listeners have trouble telling front from back. Putting the mannikin head on a motor and letting it turn with the listener's head movements resolved the confusion. The reason for this is that turning your head moves the sound location from one cone of confusion to another, and the cone it moves to depends on where the sound is. Head motion can also tell you something about the distance to the source of nearby sounds, for the same reason (for sounds very far away, you can judge distance from the spectral content, since high frequencies are attenuated more by travelling through air). Of course, head-motion effects only work for sounds of long duration.
These speakers work by simulating the HRTF to fool you into thinking that the sounds are coming from behind you, when they're really coming from in front. This will work well if two conditions are met: (1) your HRTF is reasonably close to the one they use in their simulations, and (2) you keep your head still. If you move your head, the sound will move onto the wrong cone, and the illusion will be lost.
On the bright side, this technique shouldn't depend too much on being in the "sweet spot", b
Maybe that's why Microsoft has switched to sending out vulnerability announcements only once a month - they're hoping to get a negative "time-to-fix" score!
I think you're right. Here's a bit of code I found in the latest version of emacs:
Hrm, it seems I spoke too soon. It gets about halfway through the install (regardless of whether you use winxp or win2k) and then hangs on "iTunes Setup is performing the requested operations." And just copying the files from a vmware install didn't work either (although it runs just fine from within vmware, natch).
When I try to start it up with Crossover Office after just copying (using --verbose), it complains about needing iphlpapi.dll. Copying that dll from an XP install to the iTunes directory gets past that error, but generates a bunch of warnings about other dlls (maybe I need to update all of crossover office's dlls?), and then pops up a fatal error about not being able to start quicktime. Looks like it's not going to be trivial to get it working.
iTunes fails install on Crossover because Crossover emulates Windows 98 and not 2000
Just edit ~/.cxoffice/dotwine/config and change the "Windows" = "win98" line to read "Windows" = "winxp". That got the install to run for me. Still have to see if it runs, though.
Can somebody tell me why SVG would be implemented using XML?
Well, obviously it needs to be backwards-compatible with 7-bit teletype terminals!
Oh, that's easy:
:-)
cat > important_graphic.eps
%!
0.5 0.2 0.7 0 setcmykcolor
100 100 moveto
200 100 lineto 200 200 lineto 100 200 lineto closepath fill
showpage
^D
What could be easier than that?
we need to find a way to make a ton of ethanol with out impacting on the land a whole lot
Get frat boys to donate blood?
Anyone signing up for a "muslim meal" should also be flagged as high-risk.
I'd be more worried about the people who sign up for NO meal. If they're concerned about what they eat, they're probably expecting to live through the flight....
Not to mention a school of pufferfish.