the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud
Apple specifically engineered these systems to be quiet - the compartments are set up the way they are so they can get maximum airflow with minimal blowing. Just because you think "loud" when you hear nine fans doesn't mean they're actually any louder than anything else. You're spreading FUD.
it's built to cater to the end user, not to the embedded machine market.
Perhaps your definition of "embedded" is different from mine, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit this application. This is a supercomputer cluster. However you are correct that these machines were designed to be desktop computers. Apparently that's not all they're good for.
Many companies build physically smaller machines that still pack a lot of power,
Yeah, so does Apple, but these are faster.
or sell parts to allow someone to design their own layout in a chassis.
If Virginia Tech wants to order 1,100 of them, don't you think Apple would be flexible if this was a concern?
Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.
This is an interesting point I hadn't considered. Feeding 110v into each of 1,100 individual power supplies can't be as energy or heat efficient as what you describe. However, it's possible that they will actually be doing this - I don't think I've seen it mentioned anywhere.
Another consideration - apparently VT was pressed for time and they needed something that would be available quickly; Apple was able to deliver quickly. This may explain why they'd be more inclined to use stock off-the-shelf boxes instead of something more customized.
Once (and if) Apple gets their iTunes music store over to windows, and into international markets...
If? Has there actually been any doubt about the Windows port being available within the next 4 months as promised? As for international markets, I wouldn't be surprised if they're unable to enter some markets due to licensing issues, but I'm pretty sure they'll figure something out in most places. Has anyone heard suggestions to the contrary?
When I use XP I immediatly goto the "classic" theme and make it show the standard desktop icons just to be able to use the damn thing. I certainly am not alone in that regard.
I use OSX, and while the Aqua theme is vastly better than Luna, I use a piece of software called Duality to get (mostly) the Platinum theme from classic Mac OS (it's not exactly the same as Platinum, but it's reasonable).
I think you're right - they've reached the point where they now realize the importance of good security practices, but they've got so much insecure legacy code to deal with that they can't just fix it, they have to start over and rebuild it from scratch, while maintaining bug-for-bug compatibility (minus the security holes) with their legacy code so that everything still works.
I think if I were Microsoft I'd try really hard to just buy the entire WINE project, port it to NT, and start from there, using their expertise combined with Microsoft's access to the original code and staggering resources. Of course, if Microsoft did that, the entire open source community would probably feel about the same way some Mac users feel about VirtualPC....
Open Source certainly qualifies, but technically the department does not need to have the right to modify the software itself.
True, but they do need to be able to compile it themselves, and run their own compiled binaries. Having a closed-source vendor let them audit what is purportedly the source code, but then only being able to run the vendor-supplied binaries, pretty much defeats the purpose of the audit.
If people also distributed all proprietary software in source format (which could be modified for personal use if you had an ordinary license), I think that would be a Good Thing(tm).
Is there a possible way to advocate this change, or is the idea doomed to failure?
OK, the "programs are writing" makes complete sense, and I woud think that when distributing source only, the only worry would be infringing on copyrights, but if a program is compiled, it's no longer writing.
I can write a piece of music with a pencil, using standard musical notation. I can also punch holes on a roll of special paper in exact positions so that a player piano (a machine) can then reproduce the music as I intended. The process of doing this may be patented. The melody I write is copyrighted. Does my translation from human-readable to machine-readable media somehow change the nature of what the music is? Why should my song be patentable just because it's on a player piano roll?
If another person came up with the same tune that I did, but can demonstrate that they did so independently, they are not guilty of infringing my copyright, because they didn't copy from me. If each of us makes a piano roll of our respective songs, this is still true. Why should I be able to patent the piano roll of my song, but not what I wrote with a pencil?
Interestingly, the economist article says that Darl is a devour mormon. Don't they have a bible that some guy allegedly dictated from behind a wall? Doesn't it infringe the trade "secrets" of the normal bible in some ways?
I regret to inform you that all Slashdot comments are not posted by the same person. Not only are there different people on Slashdot, some of them have different opinions. It's a shocking revelation, I know.
That's not true! You're wrong. Each Slashdotter is part of the herd; we all think alike, and agree on everything. Why do you repeat such lies?
Okay, your complaint might be a valid one if Slashdot were one entity with one opinion but it's not - Slashdot is a wide variety of differing viewpoints from individuals so trying to make this argument is a fallacy.
How is this different from LiveJournal? Slashdot is one entity in the sense that it's owned by OSDN, and anybody can host a blog at LiveJournal.
I use SpamCop to filter anything on these and some other blacklists as well as anything with a high SpamAssassin score, then every day or two I go through everything that was blocked and look for false positives. Any false positives get whitelisted, and everything else gets reported to the appropriate abuse@ contacts. SpamCop is very good at figuring out where to send reports, and "spamvertised web sites" don't get reported unless I approve them first, which I usually don't take the time to do.
if it doesn't work on your favourite browser, I'd say it's time to send a bug report to it's engineers.
Meanwhile your site is broken, from the perspective of anyone who uses that browser. Every other site they've noticed recently works fine; why doesn't yours? You must suck.
(For those that design professionaly, customers usually understand the "standarts" point of view and actually like the idea after it's been carefully explained -- Every manager likes to proud himself of having the latest in technology;)
If by "customers" you mean the people who are paying you to design a site, as opposed to people who are visiting the site because they are or want to be customers of the owner of the site, then this may initially be true (non-technical managers can be persuaded when you make it sound like they have something to gain), but when the latter type of customers start commenting on it, that manager may change his mind.
However, Mozilla supports the standards well enough that coding for the standards and coding for Mozilla are practically the same thing. It's all those other browsers you've got to worry about.
One example: position: fixed; is perfectly valid standards-compliant CSS code, which doesn't work at all in Internet Explorer for Windows. Here is an interesting hack that works around it, making IE behave as though it was using position: fixed. To prevent the hack from breaking other browsers, it uses a proprietary Microsoft tag called a conditional comment, which looks like a standard HTML comment but will be parsed only by Internet Explorer. For IE 6, it also uses an extra comment at the beginning, which causes IE 6 to ignore the doctype declaration and fall back to quirks mode (otherwise the hack wouldn't work). Finally, it takes advantage of a feature that isn't supported in IE 5 for Mac, so that browser (which does support position: fixed) won't attempt to use it because of a major bug that causes mouseovers to completely break (no a:hover style, no hand cursor, no URL in the status bar).
Is this actually standards compliant? Well, technically, it should validate. Is it coding for the browser? Absolutely. Does it really work as well as it claims? I haven't really tested it yet; I was just directed to it this evening. If it does, and if your site design is good to begin with, will 92.8%* of your end users appreciate that you took the time? You bet.
* I'm aware that this statistic can't be accurate, due to user agent spoofing done at both the browser and proxy server level for a variety of reasons including the fact that some web sites still refuse to allow user agents that don't look like IE. Also, this press release was from 9 months ago. Still, it's a significant number of people.
I have never understood why, but in 1987, there were far, far fewer Mac users than today. But there were Mac books and magazines everywhere. Now, people are surprised when a Mac book is published. "The user base is too small." It was a helluva lot smaller 15 years ago.
This is an excellent point.
I think within the Mac community, it's never been surprising. However, the Mac community is expanding to include increasing numbers of Slashdotters, so this sort of thing is being posted to Slashdot now, whereas three years ago it was much less common. So, those Slashdotters who aren't (yet) a part of the growing Mac user base are all wondering what the hell is going on and why we all care. Back in 1987, they were probably completely oblivious.
I created Cannons and Castles in HyperCard, a sort-of port from an Apple II game. I attempted to make it as unHyperCardlike as possible, which I accomplished with lots of XCMDs and a hell of a lot of coding.
I must agree with the AC: HyperTalk was great. It had a gradual learning curve, it made basic things simple, and reasonably interesting things possible, if occasionally tedius. It prepared me for OOP - in HyperCard objects such as buttons are tangible rather than abstract (you can create them, move them around, set various properties, etc. with a normal GUI interface), and you can call handlers and functions in them from other scripts ("get foo("bar") from btn "Click Me" if I remember correctly). Even lexical scoping was new to me, coming from BASIC. Ah, those were the days.
I though it was common sense to stay away from all "Learn [Language] in 24 Hours" books.
A friend sent me a copy of Learn PHP4 in 24 Hours; I've found it to be quite good! I'm a Perl hacker, not a newbie, so most of the syntax is identical; I just have to learn about new things like... variables are scoped to the function, not to the block; arrays really work like hashes and don't always have consecutive numbered elements; elseif is spelled with an e in the middle.
However, I have noticed a surprising number of typos - whoever proofread this book was definitely asleep at the wheel, although a later edition may address this. It seemed a little strange to me that OOP, a fairly advanced topic, would be discussed as early as chapter 8, while strings, the basic building-block of dynamic web content, aren't discussed in detail until chapter 17. So it's far from perfect, and an O'Reilly book might be better, but this does suit my needs for the moment.
Obviously if I decide to do any serious programming in PHP (I know somebody who's writing an IRC bot in PHP, which I find disturbing), I'd need a bigger and better book, but I don't have time to learn everything there is to know about PHP at the moment.
Macs also used to suffer from worms though I don't know why things got better - sorry used to keep up with Macs but not anymore.
No they didn't. Whoever told you this was mistaken. I've been a Mac user for many years. Macs have never come with any network services turned on by default, and no Mac e-mail client automatically launches an executable attachment without the user's direct involvement.
Mac OS X 10.2 might come with a few ports open by default - things like sunrpc, which is used for NFS. I'm not sure about that. I know 10.1 does not. No previous version did.
There have been Mac viruses, but they were very rare and usually mostly harmless, and I don't know any Mac users who have even thought about Mac viruses within the past five years or so. I once downloaded a copy of Norton AntiVirus from Hotline, and the installer sat on my desktop for about two weeks before I deleted it - the annoyance that would have been caused by installing the software far outweighed the likelihood of ever needing it.
For its part, the RIAA said that Jane Doe's motion to intervene matters little, because a federal court has already upheld the validity of the subpoena process.
"The courts have already ruled that you're not anonymous when you're publicly distributing music online," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president at the RIAA. "Her lawyers are trying to obtain a free pass to download or upload music online illegally. Their arguments have already been addressed by federal court and been rejected."
The obvious problem with this is: who says she's "publicly distributing music online"? A court of law? A judge? No, just the RIAA. Sure, it may later be shown that she was, in fact, doing what they claim. They may have enough evidence against her to convince a judge to issue a warrant or a subpoena. Or, the RIAA may have made a mistake again. We have legal procedures in place to prevent abuse of the system, and these procedures are not being followed. In the past, the RIAA hasn't been exactly careful when determining who is or is not distributing copyrighted MP3s.
Even scarier:
"We informed the recording industry that one of our customers intended to challenge and asked the RIAA to deal with the lawyers directly.
Instead, according to Deutsch, the RIAA went to court recently and filed a motion to compel Verizon to provide the name.
Surprisingly (for those of us who have long considered them to be an evil company), Verizon is clearly doing all the right things here. They're only doing what they've already been forced by a court to do.
I wish Jane Doe the best of luck. She'll need it. Oh, and by the way, the first article mentions the EFF is working on fighting this too; they're always accepting donations.
Slashdot Mirror
the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud
Apple specifically engineered these systems to be quiet - the compartments are set up the way they are so they can get maximum airflow with minimal blowing. Just because you think "loud" when you hear nine fans doesn't mean they're actually any louder than anything else. You're spreading FUD.
it's built to cater to the end user, not to the embedded machine market.
Perhaps your definition of "embedded" is different from mine, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't fit this application. This is a supercomputer cluster. However you are correct that these machines were designed to be desktop computers. Apparently that's not all they're good for.
Many companies build physically smaller machines that still pack a lot of power,
Yeah, so does Apple, but these are faster.
or sell parts to allow someone to design their own layout in a chassis.
If Virginia Tech wants to order 1,100 of them, don't you think Apple would be flexible if this was a concern?
Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.
This is an interesting point I hadn't considered. Feeding 110v into each of 1,100 individual power supplies can't be as energy or heat efficient as what you describe. However, it's possible that they will actually be doing this - I don't think I've seen it mentioned anywhere.
Another consideration - apparently VT was pressed for time and they needed something that would be available quickly; Apple was able to deliver quickly. This may explain why they'd be more inclined to use stock off-the-shelf boxes instead of something more customized.
The only problem will be finding a desk big enough to fit the guys...
It'll also be one of the five largest desks in the world.
Once (and if) Apple gets their iTunes music store over to windows, and into international markets...
If? Has there actually been any doubt about the Windows port being available within the next 4 months as promised? As for international markets, I wouldn't be surprised if they're unable to enter some markets due to licensing issues, but I'm pretty sure they'll figure something out in most places. Has anyone heard suggestions to the contrary?
When I use XP I immediatly goto the "classic" theme and make it show the standard desktop icons just to be able to use the damn thing. I certainly am not alone in that regard.
I use OSX, and while the Aqua theme is vastly better than Luna, I use a piece of software called Duality to get (mostly) the Platinum theme from classic Mac OS (it's not exactly the same as Platinum, but it's reasonable).
I think you're right - they've reached the point where they now realize the importance of good security practices, but they've got so much insecure legacy code to deal with that they can't just fix it, they have to start over and rebuild it from scratch, while maintaining bug-for-bug compatibility (minus the security holes) with their legacy code so that everything still works.
I think if I were Microsoft I'd try really hard to just buy the entire WINE project, port it to NT, and start from there, using their expertise combined with Microsoft's access to the original code and staggering resources. Of course, if Microsoft did that, the entire open source community would probably feel about the same way some Mac users feel about VirtualPC....
Open Source certainly qualifies, but technically the department does not need to have the right to modify the software itself.
True, but they do need to be able to compile it themselves, and run their own compiled binaries. Having a closed-source vendor let them audit what is purportedly the source code, but then only being able to run the vendor-supplied binaries, pretty much defeats the purpose of the audit.
If Slamer has taught us anything,
Yes, but it hasn't.
Of course these tablets somehow "disappeared" before anyone but a few devotees actually had a chance to verify their existence.
I found this letter from Professor Charles Anthon of Columbia College (now Columbia University) to be quite interesting. More here.
If people also distributed all proprietary software in source format (which could be modified for personal use if you had an ordinary license), I think that would be a Good Thing(tm).
Is there a possible way to advocate this change, or is the idea doomed to failure?
The latter. Sorry.
OK, the "programs are writing" makes complete sense, and I woud think that when distributing source only, the only worry would be infringing on copyrights, but if a program is compiled, it's no longer writing.
I can write a piece of music with a pencil, using standard musical notation. I can also punch holes on a roll of special paper in exact positions so that a player piano (a machine) can then reproduce the music as I intended. The process of doing this may be patented. The melody I write is copyrighted. Does my translation from human-readable to machine-readable media somehow change the nature of what the music is? Why should my song be patentable just because it's on a player piano roll?
If another person came up with the same tune that I did, but can demonstrate that they did so independently, they are not guilty of infringing my copyright, because they didn't copy from me. If each of us makes a piano roll of our respective songs, this is still true. Why should I be able to patent the piano roll of my song, but not what I wrote with a pencil?
Interestingly, the economist article says that Darl is a devour mormon. Don't they have a bible that some guy allegedly dictated from behind a wall? Doesn't it infringe the trade "secrets" of the normal bible in some ways?
What "secrets" are you talking about?
Hmm, I guess I did misinterpret that the first time around. Never mind.
I regret to inform you that all Slashdot comments are not posted by the same person. Not only are there different people on Slashdot, some of them have different opinions. It's a shocking revelation, I know.
That's not true! You're wrong. Each Slashdotter is part of the herd; we all think alike, and agree on everything. Why do you repeat such lies?
Try this:
c om/';">Link</A>
<A HREF="javascript:window.location='http://phroggy.
Or:
<A HREF="http://phroggy.com/" onClick="window.location='http://phroggy.com/'; return false;">Link</A>
Somebody correct me if I've made an obvious error in my JavaScript. You get the idea, though.
Okay, your complaint might be a valid one if Slashdot were one entity with one opinion but it's not - Slashdot is a wide variety of differing viewpoints from individuals so trying to make this argument is a fallacy.
How is this different from LiveJournal? Slashdot is one entity in the sense that it's owned by OSDN, and anybody can host a blog at LiveJournal.
Some of the crazies who post on nana-e even have the whole country of Brazil banned on their private lists.
l es.us
If anyone's interested, the Brazil RBL is:
brazil.blackholes.us
Other countries I also have filtered:
korea.services.net
cn.rbl.cluecentral.net (China)
nigeria.blackholes.us
argentina.blackho
I use SpamCop to filter anything on these and some other blacklists as well as anything with a high SpamAssassin score, then every day or two I go through everything that was blocked and look for false positives. Any false positives get whitelisted, and everything else gets reported to the appropriate abuse@ contacts. SpamCop is very good at figuring out where to send reports, and "spamvertised web sites" don't get reported unless I approve them first, which I usually don't take the time to do.
Meanwhile your site is broken, from the perspective of anyone who uses that browser. Every other site they've noticed recently works fine; why doesn't yours? You must suck.
(For those that design professionaly, customers usually understand the "standarts" point of view and actually like the idea after it's been carefully explained -- Every manager likes to proud himself of having the latest in technology
If by "customers" you mean the people who are paying you to design a site, as opposed to people who are visiting the site because they are or want to be customers of the owner of the site, then this may initially be true (non-technical managers can be persuaded when you make it sound like they have something to gain), but when the latter type of customers start commenting on it, that manager may change his mind.
However, Mozilla supports the standards well enough that coding for the standards and coding for Mozilla are practically the same thing. It's all those other browsers you've got to worry about.
One example: position: fixed; is perfectly valid standards-compliant CSS code, which doesn't work at all in Internet Explorer for Windows. Here is an interesting hack that works around it, making IE behave as though it was using position: fixed. To prevent the hack from breaking other browsers, it uses a proprietary Microsoft tag called a conditional comment, which looks like a standard HTML comment but will be parsed only by Internet Explorer. For IE 6, it also uses an extra comment at the beginning, which causes IE 6 to ignore the doctype declaration and fall back to quirks mode (otherwise the hack wouldn't work). Finally, it takes advantage of a feature that isn't supported in IE 5 for Mac, so that browser (which does support position: fixed) won't attempt to use it because of a major bug that causes mouseovers to completely break (no a:hover style, no hand cursor, no URL in the status bar).
Is this actually standards compliant? Well, technically, it should validate. Is it coding for the browser? Absolutely. Does it really work as well as it claims? I haven't really tested it yet; I was just directed to it this evening. If it does, and if your site design is good to begin with, will 92.8%* of your end users appreciate that you took the time? You bet.
I really don't get why people hate this feature, it's literally the best thing added to Mozilla since the Firebird split.
Because IE 6 does it, and we all hate Microsoft.
I have never understood why, but in 1987, there were far, far fewer Mac users than today. But there were Mac books and magazines everywhere. Now, people are surprised when a Mac book is published. "The user base is too small." It was a helluva lot smaller 15 years ago.
This is an excellent point.
I think within the Mac community, it's never been surprising. However, the Mac community is expanding to include increasing numbers of Slashdotters, so this sort of thing is being posted to Slashdot now, whereas three years ago it was much less common. So, those Slashdotters who aren't (yet) a part of the growing Mac user base are all wondering what the hell is going on and why we all care. Back in 1987, they were probably completely oblivious.
I created Cannons and Castles in HyperCard, a sort-of port from an Apple II game. I attempted to make it as unHyperCardlike as possible, which I accomplished with lots of XCMDs and a hell of a lot of coding.
I must agree with the AC: HyperTalk was great. It had a gradual learning curve, it made basic things simple, and reasonably interesting things possible, if occasionally tedius. It prepared me for OOP - in HyperCard objects such as buttons are tangible rather than abstract (you can create them, move them around, set various properties, etc. with a normal GUI interface), and you can call handlers and functions in them from other scripts ("get foo("bar") from btn "Click Me" if I remember correctly). Even lexical scoping was new to me, coming from BASIC. Ah, those were the days.
I though it was common sense to stay away from all "Learn [Language] in 24 Hours" books.
A friend sent me a copy of Learn PHP4 in 24 Hours; I've found it to be quite good! I'm a Perl hacker, not a newbie, so most of the syntax is identical; I just have to learn about new things like... variables are scoped to the function, not to the block; arrays really work like hashes and don't always have consecutive numbered elements; elseif is spelled with an e in the middle.
However, I have noticed a surprising number of typos - whoever proofread this book was definitely asleep at the wheel, although a later edition may address this. It seemed a little strange to me that OOP, a fairly advanced topic, would be discussed as early as chapter 8, while strings, the basic building-block of dynamic web content, aren't discussed in detail until chapter 17. So it's far from perfect, and an O'Reilly book might be better, but this does suit my needs for the moment.
Obviously if I decide to do any serious programming in PHP (I know somebody who's writing an IRC bot in PHP, which I find disturbing), I'd need a bigger and better book, but I don't have time to learn everything there is to know about PHP at the moment.
Maybe people see the word "Christian" in the title and fly off the handle?
I'd bet some people see "Science" in the title and confuse it with the Church of Scientology.
That's the first thing I thought of too. :-)
Macs also used to suffer from worms though I don't know why things got better - sorry used to keep up with Macs but not anymore.
No they didn't. Whoever told you this was mistaken. I've been a Mac user for many years. Macs have never come with any network services turned on by default, and no Mac e-mail client automatically launches an executable attachment without the user's direct involvement.
Mac OS X 10.2 might come with a few ports open by default - things like sunrpc, which is used for NFS. I'm not sure about that. I know 10.1 does not. No previous version did.
There have been Mac viruses, but they were very rare and usually mostly harmless, and I don't know any Mac users who have even thought about Mac viruses within the past five years or so. I once downloaded a copy of Norton AntiVirus from Hotline, and the installer sat on my desktop for about two weeks before I deleted it - the annoyance that would have been caused by installing the software far outweighed the likelihood of ever needing it.
For its part, the RIAA said that Jane Doe's motion to intervene matters little, because a federal court has already upheld the validity of the subpoena process.
"The courts have already ruled that you're not anonymous when you're publicly distributing music online," said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president at the RIAA. "Her lawyers are trying to obtain a free pass to download or upload music online illegally. Their arguments have already been addressed by federal court and been rejected."
The obvious problem with this is: who says she's "publicly distributing music online"? A court of law? A judge? No, just the RIAA. Sure, it may later be shown that she was, in fact, doing what they claim. They may have enough evidence against her to convince a judge to issue a warrant or a subpoena. Or, the RIAA may have made a mistake again. We have legal procedures in place to prevent abuse of the system, and these procedures are not being followed. In the past, the RIAA hasn't been exactly careful when determining who is or is not distributing copyrighted MP3s.
Even scarier:
"We informed the recording industry that one of our customers intended to challenge and asked the RIAA to deal with the lawyers directly.
Instead, according to Deutsch, the RIAA went to court recently and filed a motion to compel Verizon to provide the name.
Surprisingly (for those of us who have long considered them to be an evil company), Verizon is clearly doing all the right things here. They're only doing what they've already been forced by a court to do.
I wish Jane Doe the best of luck. She'll need it. Oh, and by the way, the first article mentions the EFF is working on fighting this too; they're always accepting donations.