The Medal of Freedom is generally considered the Kiss of Death to any career. But consider that Cerf was already awarded the National Medal of Technology by Bill Clinton in 1997. At least Cerf and Kahn got the Turing Award, which came with a $100k cash prize.
I think by "wrong criteria" you really meant "wrong criteria according to ME." Your rash statements don't explain why power users and Unix geeks like OS X. You think its beauty is only skin deep.
I recently went to an art museum where there was a little piece of electronic equipment attached to a huge subwoofer that was moving at 1hz, slowing down to about.5hz, and back to 1hz again. If you put your hand up close to it, you could feel a slight breeze, but you couldn't hear a damn thing. It was created more for the visual effect of seeing the huge speaker cone moving in and out at a slow speed.
So a subwoofer with a 1hz capability is nothing to get excited about, you could do that with a wide variety of subwoofers. And achieving such a low, inaudible frequency sure as hell doesn't make it the world's most powerful subwoofer.
Macs are nice. Macs are pretty. Macs are intuitive, easy to learn, and allow you to configure things without learning much about them. All good for some people. The question is, which people?
The answer is, the people who aren't using linux.
It appears the general consensus is that linux needs to be more like MacOS X. But everyone's been trying to make Linux more like Windows. No wonder linux is a flop as a desktop OS.
I recommend this graphics system, it is much less expensive than the VTech and Leapfrog systems, has an infinite variety of software available, has a low learning curve, and kids enjoy it tremendously.
You're not following the scam. It's not the Foundation pharma stock holdings that are making BIllG the profits, it's his PERSONAL holdings in big pharma. BillG already got a huge tax writeoff when he endowed the Foundation with a few billion bucks worth of MSFT stock (note: he hasn't sunk another dime into its endowment since). Any increase in the Foundation's portfolio goes back into the Foundation's endowment, not BillG's pocket. BillG can't touch the Foundation's money, but he can use their money to seed projects that he will profit from with HIS personal portfolio.
OK, I'll cop to it, I missed the "in thousands." But there is still no evidence in that annual report that actual cash money was given away to anyone. They don't list grants other than to describe them as "approved grant committments." The whole Gates Foundation deal is a complex system of arbitrage and investments, they don't give cash grants, they loan stock options or bond futures and then the recipient borrows against them.
Read that last link closely. It alleges that the primary goal of the Foundation is to insure that third world companies stay as good customers to Gates' pharma companies so they don't break the world intellectual property treaties which would render BillG's pharmaceutical assets worthless (and maybe Microsoft too, if say Africa decided to legalize piracy of Windows).
The details of the Foundation's financial "grant" transactions are not available in their annual report, just the summaries. I will have to do a little more research, I've seen the whole scam laid out but I haven't been able to relocate the link.
Jesus fucking christ, are you a sucker. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a fraud, and you fell for it, they absolutely do NOT give away a billion every year. They give away incredible amounts of money, incredibly SMALL amounts of money. Yes, it is a pittance, an even smaller pittance than you realize.
Go read the B&MGF annual reports, you will be astonished. Here's an example:
In 2004, the total assets of the foundation were about $29 million. That is million with an M. In 2004, the total grants expenditures were $1.88 million. That is million with an M. More than half the grant money was used to educate people about the activities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the wonderful philantropic genius of Mr. Bill Gates.
Go check charity tracker websites like guidestar.org or charitynavigator.org, and you will see that even most phony scam charities manage to give away more than $2m per year, just to keep it looking like they aren't phony.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did NOT donate one red cent to any charity. They NEVER do. They only give "grants" which are always complicated deals involving stock options that can be borrowed against but never sold, and do not actually transfer cash to charities. The deals always involve Bill or Melinda getting a seat on the board of the charity, and the ability to direct how his "donation" is used. And the "donation" is always used for purchasing expensive pharmaceuticals from companies like Merck, Schering-Plough, etc. which coincidentally happen to have Bill Gates as a major stockholder.
Bill Gates does not give money to charities, he assimilates them. He uses the charities to get third world countries hooked on Big Pharma products that he profits from. Bill Gates is a druglord.
Yes, I've read the DMCA. The specific clause about security testing is rather vague. It allows security testing, but only up to a point of "infringement" (whatever that means). This hasn't been tested in court AFAIK but even prominent security researchers are afraid of it. The way I read it (IANAL) is that you can security test it up to the point where you disassemble it enough to discover how to break the DRM, and ANY code audit that could find security holes would cross that line.
You obviously didn't read the article very closely. Sony patched the CD/DVD drivers, Sony's code runs every time you access the drive. He didn't disassemble the entire driver so there is no clear indication that it doesn't contain security problems (whether by incompetence like a buffer overflow, or a deliberate backdoor) that would allow arbitrary code to run. There is no way to audit the code for security, it is probably illegal under the DMCA to disassemble and fully analyze DRM code in sufficient detail for a full code audit THAT is the biggest problem with these windoze DRM hacks. You can secure your system with all the technology at your disposal, but it means nothing when you are tricked into running a rootkit disguised as DRM. Then you have to trust the DRM vendor did not make any mistakes that expose you to further security risks.
People like to gripe about Apple's DRM, but at least they know better than to pull crap like this.
Odd that the Mountbatten Building was destroyed by an explosion and fire, it is a sadly ironic reminder of how Louis Mountbatten was killed by an IRA bomb.
The nVidia 7800 is definitely not a mistake, as Apple is prominently featuring it in all their benchmarks and online literature. I talked to the Apple Store today, the rep said he suspects the 7800 will be available about the same time the quad G5s ship. But the rep admitted he was only guessing. The big problem is, if I wait to place an order for a quad G5 until the 7800 becomes available, how far down the queue will I be? The rep suggested I order the quad now with the basic card and then try to change the order in a few weeks before it ships. That sounded rather risky, Apple could always ship early and then I'd be stuck with the low-end video card, since Apple traditionally has refused to sell these video cards separately from CPUs.
BTW, I read about CHUD and nap mode on xlr8yourmac a long time ago, but the user reports always raised issues of stability, and I really like stability. But I'll test it and see what happens.
Alias updated their qualified hardware list, the document is dated Oct 4 but only appeared online today (Oct 20) so they've obviously been testing these machines internally for a while now.
Maya 7 now officially supports all the new Macs, and the nVidia 6600 and FX 4500. BUT there is no word on the 7800 yet. I called Alias tech support and they said that the quad processors are "supported but not optimized" whatever that means. I pressed them on the issue, they said they'd research it and get back to me. I suspect that this means that they still only support 2 processors and that Maya will run on a quad-G5 but with no speed advantage for the extra processors. But I can only guess at this, until I get better info.
I think we're going to get a lot of this sort of waffling until the quad G5s get into developer hands, although it is not a good sign when a developer obviously HAS the machines and has tested them but hasn't publicly committed to 4 processor support. And this is the crux of the issue, are developers going to support these last-generation quad-G5s or are they going to skip over them and put their resources into preparing for the Intel macs? It would be a shame if they didn't support the quads, as the performance looks like it will beat anything on the market. I guess time will tell. And there's not much time left on the G5s, so this could be a problem.
The spec sheets list the 7800 cards as available, but it's not currently available as a Build To Order option on the Apple Store. And you pretty much have to get an official Apple OEM video card if you want to insure long-term support and firmware updates. I was coming to the conclusion that the 7800 was more bang for the buck and much cheaper than the Quadro, so I am glad to hear some specifics about what the Quadro was intended to do. It might be useful for wireframe mode in Maya, but I don't know if that's worth $2k. Apple claims the card has double the speed of the baseline video card (6600?) which would be great for hardware rendering, but still, you could buy a second G5 CPU for about $2k and double your rendering speed with a second render queue. All in all, I'm still uncertain about the video cards, I guess the question will remain open until someone gets their hands on a quad G5 with the different video cards to do benchmarking.
I've been saving up for one final PowerMac generation, I figured that no 1st gen MacIntel will come close to a Quad G5, and besides, I'd probably want to have a good top-end PPC machine around even after the transition starts since it will be a while before native Intel apps get released.
BUT.. this top end Quad G5 configuration has me astonished, especially the +$1650 nVidia Quadro FX 4500. I was thinking of investing in a nice 30in Cinema Display and a QuadG5, for applications like FCP, Maya, Shake, and Motion. But I wonder if it's really worth spending that kind of money on a video card, I mean jeez, that card alone is almost as much as a basic dualcore-2Ghz G5 CPU! Is this card going to really give a performance boost to make it worth that kind of money? It's not like I'm going to do the fancy tricks this card is capable of, like stereographic LCD glasses, dual 30in screens, etc. The other big question is quad processor support. I recall seeing the "Use X processors" option in the Maya prefs, but it wouldn't accept any number higher than 2 (of course, since there were only 2 processors). I guess I'll have to call Alias (or is it now Autodesk?) to ask them if Maya will support 4 processors in the G5, and if it's worth it to get the FX 4500 video card. I know that Apple will support quad processors in their own apps like FCP, but I wonder if third party apps will be updated to quad when they're already forced to deal with the MacIntel transition. Another issue is the amount of space for expansion in the new CPUs. There are a few aftermarket kits to toss in up to 4 additional hard drives, in the space up front between the grille and the CPU area. But now it looks like there is much less space available, no room to squeeze in a nice 4 drive RAID. Damn. I was going to stick in 4 300Gb drives and a SATA RAID card, but now it looks like this will be impossible. I guess we will have to wait and see what some clever engineer can figure out how to squeeze into that space. Darn it, I want that option NOW, not later when they figure out how to do it. Oh well, you can't have it all. Then there's the final issue: heat dissipation. I wonder how much heat these suckers kick out, especially with extra hard drives. My office is already baking from the hot exhaust of my dual-1Ghz MDD with 4 drives, I bet a similar quadG5 config really will kick out the heat and suck up the power. It's 60 degrees outside but I'm still running the air conditioning because without it, my CPU heats my tiny office up to about 90 degrees even under moderately light CPU use.
Perhaps you mean Adobe Bridge is dead. That's more like it. Aperture is for importing and sorting files, and doing basic adjustments to RAW files. There are already pro products doing well in that niche, like Capture One Pro. But these are just front-ends to Photoshop, which will always be the tool of choice for serious photo editing.
I can't wait for this Aperture, as the Canon File Viewer software is a real piece of crap, and so is their "Pro" version Canon Photo Pro. They are clumsy Windows ports that perform incredibly poorly and have the worst GUI I've ever seen. Most astonishingly, Canon Photo Pro doesn't support my Canon S50 camera! Aperture does.
Oh bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about. The FBI can't seize someone's property without a warrant, and they can't do a raid without a warrant either. Ralsky had due process, and he has more due process coming up, he'll either be charged and the seized property will become trial evidence, or he'll get his property back after the investigation.
This system is already implemented widely in Japan. There have been several panics about food poisoning in various types of fresh vegetables, which is usually associated with specific batches from specific farms, but the panic causes drops in sales of all vegetables of that type. To confine the panic and the sales losses somewhat, there is a new system to track food products to the source. In some stores, you can go up to a barcode reader and get the details of the packaged product's origin. Seems like a good idea to me, especially after some of the recent tainted food scandals in Japan (you don't want to know).
Slashdot Mirror
The Medal of Freedom is generally considered the Kiss of Death to any career. But consider that Cerf was already awarded the National Medal of Technology by Bill Clinton in 1997. At least Cerf and Kahn got the Turing Award, which came with a $100k cash prize.
I think by "wrong criteria" you really meant "wrong criteria according to ME." Your rash statements don't explain why power users and Unix geeks like OS X. You think its beauty is only skin deep.
I recently went to an art museum where there was a little piece of electronic equipment attached to a huge subwoofer that was moving at 1hz, slowing down to about .5hz, and back to 1hz again. If you put your hand up close to it, you could feel a slight breeze, but you couldn't hear a damn thing. It was created more for the visual effect of seeing the huge speaker cone moving in and out at a slow speed.
So a subwoofer with a 1hz capability is nothing to get excited about, you could do that with a wide variety of subwoofers. And achieving such a low, inaudible frequency sure as hell doesn't make it the world's most powerful subwoofer.
The answer is, the people who aren't using linux.
It appears the general consensus is that linux needs to be more like MacOS X. But everyone's been trying to make Linux more like Windows. No wonder linux is a flop as a desktop OS.
I recommend this graphics system, it is much less expensive than the VTech and Leapfrog systems, has an infinite variety of software available, has a low learning curve, and kids enjoy it tremendously.
You're not following the scam. It's not the Foundation pharma stock holdings that are making BIllG the profits, it's his PERSONAL holdings in big pharma. BillG already got a huge tax writeoff when he endowed the Foundation with a few billion bucks worth of MSFT stock (note: he hasn't sunk another dime into its endowment since). Any increase in the Foundation's portfolio goes back into the Foundation's endowment, not BillG's pocket. BillG can't touch the Foundation's money, but he can use their money to seed projects that he will profit from with HIS personal portfolio.
OK, I'll cop to it, I missed the "in thousands." But there is still no evidence in that annual report that actual cash money was given away to anyone. They don't list grants other than to describe them as "approved grant committments." The whole Gates Foundation deal is a complex system of arbitrage and investments, they don't give cash grants, they loan stock options or bond futures and then the recipient borrows against them.
Here's a start:
Bill Gates has sold almost half a billion dollar's worth of Microsoft stock this year [2002], and begun to invest heavily in big pharma. In the second half of this year he bought 2.5 million shares in Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, and also made major investments in Merck and Pfizer, notes Information Week.
The Gates Foundation's top five stock investments in pharmaceutical firms, in millions:
Merck $76.9
Pfizer $37.3
J & J $29.7
Wyeth $12.7
Abbott Labs $11.9
Read that last link closely. It alleges that the primary goal of the Foundation is to insure that third world companies stay as good customers to Gates' pharma companies so they don't break the world intellectual property treaties which would render BillG's pharmaceutical assets worthless (and maybe Microsoft too, if say Africa decided to legalize piracy of Windows).
The details of the Foundation's financial "grant" transactions are not available in their annual report, just the summaries. I will have to do a little more research, I've seen the whole scam laid out but I haven't been able to relocate the link.
Jesus fucking christ, are you a sucker. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a fraud, and you fell for it, they absolutely do NOT give away a billion every year. They give away incredible amounts of money, incredibly SMALL amounts of money. Yes, it is a pittance, an even smaller pittance than you realize.
c ialreports/2004FinancialStmts.pdf
Go read the B&MGF annual reports, you will be astonished. Here's an example:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/NR/Downloads/finan
In 2004, the total assets of the foundation were about $29 million. That is million with an M.
In 2004, the total grants expenditures were $1.88 million. That is million with an M.
More than half the grant money was used to educate people about the activities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the wonderful philantropic genius of Mr. Bill Gates.
Go check charity tracker websites like guidestar.org or charitynavigator.org, and you will see that even most phony scam charities manage to give away more than $2m per year, just to keep it looking like they aren't phony.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did NOT donate one red cent to any charity. They NEVER do. They only give "grants" which are always complicated deals involving stock options that can be borrowed against but never sold, and do not actually transfer cash to charities. The deals always involve Bill or Melinda getting a seat on the board of the charity, and the ability to direct how his "donation" is used. And the "donation" is always used for purchasing expensive pharmaceuticals from companies like Merck, Schering-Plough, etc. which coincidentally happen to have Bill Gates as a major stockholder.
Bill Gates does not give money to charities, he assimilates them. He uses the charities to get third world countries hooked on Big Pharma products that he profits from. Bill Gates is a druglord.
Yes, I've read the DMCA. The specific clause about security testing is rather vague. It allows security testing, but only up to a point of "infringement" (whatever that means). This hasn't been tested in court AFAIK but even prominent security researchers are afraid of it. The way I read it (IANAL) is that you can security test it up to the point where you disassemble it enough to discover how to break the DRM, and ANY code audit that could find security holes would cross that line.
You obviously didn't read the article very closely. Sony patched the CD/DVD drivers, Sony's code runs every time you access the drive. He didn't disassemble the entire driver so there is no clear indication that it doesn't contain security problems (whether by incompetence like a buffer overflow, or a deliberate backdoor) that would allow arbitrary code to run. There is no way to audit the code for security, it is probably illegal under the DMCA to disassemble and fully analyze DRM code in sufficient detail for a full code audit
THAT is the biggest problem with these windoze DRM hacks. You can secure your system with all the technology at your disposal, but it means nothing when you are tricked into running a rootkit disguised as DRM. Then you have to trust the DRM vendor did not make any mistakes that expose you to further security risks.
People like to gripe about Apple's DRM, but at least they know better than to pull crap like this.
Odd that the Mountbatten Building was destroyed by an explosion and fire, it is a sadly ironic reminder of how Louis Mountbatten was killed by an IRA bomb.
ha HA HA HA HA HA! Hee hee. Ha! ROTFLMAO!
You guys are killing me.
The nVidia 7800 is definitely not a mistake, as Apple is prominently featuring it in all their benchmarks and online literature. I talked to the Apple Store today, the rep said he suspects the 7800 will be available about the same time the quad G5s ship. But the rep admitted he was only guessing. The big problem is, if I wait to place an order for a quad G5 until the 7800 becomes available, how far down the queue will I be? The rep suggested I order the quad now with the basic card and then try to change the order in a few weeks before it ships. That sounded rather risky, Apple could always ship early and then I'd be stuck with the low-end video card, since Apple traditionally has refused to sell these video cards separately from CPUs.
BTW, I read about CHUD and nap mode on xlr8yourmac a long time ago, but the user reports always raised issues of stability, and I really like stability. But I'll test it and see what happens.
Just to follow up my own question...
Alias updated their qualified hardware list, the document is dated Oct 4 but only appeared online today (Oct 20) so they've obviously been testing these machines internally for a while now.
Maya 7 now officially supports all the new Macs, and the nVidia 6600 and FX 4500. BUT there is no word on the 7800 yet. I called Alias tech support and they said that the quad processors are "supported but not optimized" whatever that means. I pressed them on the issue, they said they'd research it and get back to me. I suspect that this means that they still only support 2 processors and that Maya will run on a quad-G5 but with no speed advantage for the extra processors. But I can only guess at this, until I get better info.
I think we're going to get a lot of this sort of waffling until the quad G5s get into developer hands, although it is not a good sign when a developer obviously HAS the machines and has tested them but hasn't publicly committed to 4 processor support. And this is the crux of the issue, are developers going to support these last-generation quad-G5s or are they going to skip over them and put their resources into preparing for the Intel macs? It would be a shame if they didn't support the quads, as the performance looks like it will beat anything on the market. I guess time will tell. And there's not much time left on the G5s, so this could be a problem.
The spec sheets list the 7800 cards as available, but it's not currently available as a Build To Order option on the Apple Store. And you pretty much have to get an official Apple OEM video card if you want to insure long-term support and firmware updates.
I was coming to the conclusion that the 7800 was more bang for the buck and much cheaper than the Quadro, so I am glad to hear some specifics about what the Quadro was intended to do. It might be useful for wireframe mode in Maya, but I don't know if that's worth $2k. Apple claims the card has double the speed of the baseline video card (6600?) which would be great for hardware rendering, but still, you could buy a second G5 CPU for about $2k and double your rendering speed with a second render queue.
All in all, I'm still uncertain about the video cards, I guess the question will remain open until someone gets their hands on a quad G5 with the different video cards to do benchmarking.
I've been saving up for one final PowerMac generation, I figured that no 1st gen MacIntel will come close to a Quad G5, and besides, I'd probably want to have a good top-end PPC machine around even after the transition starts since it will be a while before native Intel apps get released.
BUT.. this top end Quad G5 configuration has me astonished, especially the +$1650 nVidia Quadro FX 4500. I was thinking of investing in a nice 30in Cinema Display and a QuadG5, for applications like FCP, Maya, Shake, and Motion. But I wonder if it's really worth spending that kind of money on a video card, I mean jeez, that card alone is almost as much as a basic dualcore-2Ghz G5 CPU! Is this card going to really give a performance boost to make it worth that kind of money? It's not like I'm going to do the fancy tricks this card is capable of, like stereographic LCD glasses, dual 30in screens, etc.
The other big question is quad processor support. I recall seeing the "Use X processors" option in the Maya prefs, but it wouldn't accept any number higher than 2 (of course, since there were only 2 processors). I guess I'll have to call Alias (or is it now Autodesk?) to ask them if Maya will support 4 processors in the G5, and if it's worth it to get the FX 4500 video card. I know that Apple will support quad processors in their own apps like FCP, but I wonder if third party apps will be updated to quad when they're already forced to deal with the MacIntel transition.
Another issue is the amount of space for expansion in the new CPUs. There are a few aftermarket kits to toss in up to 4 additional hard drives, in the space up front between the grille and the CPU area. But now it looks like there is much less space available, no room to squeeze in a nice 4 drive RAID. Damn. I was going to stick in 4 300Gb drives and a SATA RAID card, but now it looks like this will be impossible. I guess we will have to wait and see what some clever engineer can figure out how to squeeze into that space. Darn it, I want that option NOW, not later when they figure out how to do it. Oh well, you can't have it all.
Then there's the final issue: heat dissipation. I wonder how much heat these suckers kick out, especially with extra hard drives. My office is already baking from the hot exhaust of my dual-1Ghz MDD with 4 drives, I bet a similar quadG5 config really will kick out the heat and suck up the power. It's 60 degrees outside but I'm still running the air conditioning because without it, my CPU heats my tiny office up to about 90 degrees even under moderately light CPU use.
Uh.. no.
Perhaps you mean Adobe Bridge is dead. That's more like it. Aperture is for importing and sorting files, and doing basic adjustments to RAW files. There are already pro products doing well in that niche, like Capture One Pro. But these are just front-ends to Photoshop, which will always be the tool of choice for serious photo editing.
I can't wait for this Aperture, as the Canon File Viewer software is a real piece of crap, and so is their "Pro" version Canon Photo Pro. They are clumsy Windows ports that perform incredibly poorly and have the worst GUI I've ever seen. Most astonishingly, Canon Photo Pro doesn't support my Canon S50 camera! Aperture does.
Oh bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about. The FBI can't seize someone's property without a warrant, and they can't do a raid without a warrant either. Ralsky had due process, and he has more due process coming up, he'll either be charged and the seized property will become trial evidence, or he'll get his property back after the investigation.
Well, think of it another way, it allows the stores to pull tainted products before they are sold.
This system is already implemented widely in Japan. There have been several panics about food poisoning in various types of fresh vegetables, which is usually associated with specific batches from specific farms, but the panic causes drops in sales of all vegetables of that type. To confine the panic and the sales losses somewhat, there is a new system to track food products to the source. In some stores, you can go up to a barcode reader and get the details of the packaged product's origin. Seems like a good idea to me, especially after some of the recent tainted food scandals in Japan (you don't want to know).
The headline is just plain wrong.
EBay is buying one DIVISION of Verisign, not the whole company.
Oh really? Macs had a 64 bit OS before Windows, and we'll be running on Intel long before this game ever ships (if it ever ships).
OK smart-ass, how do I play it on my MacOS X platform?