Ironic, isn't it, that this flamebait ZDNet editorial was written just 2 weeks after Apple's latest release of Darwin 1.31, including source code? He also conveniently forgets about major open-source projects like Darwin Streaming Server, which Apple didn't need to release as a free product, but did anyway.
ZDNet is notorious for being whores for hits, they always post flamebait editorials hoping it will infuriate people and drive viewers to the site, causing more hits and more advertising revenue. I wonder if other advertisers are using the slashdot effect to their financial advantage like this.
Negative on the BSD x86 SMP only. MacOS X supports SMP on PowerPC G3 and G4 dual CPU systems, and it's BSD all the way.
Message found in a copy of Flatland
on
The New Flatland
·
· Score: 2
Actually, that book by Rudy Rucker isn't much of a sequel to Flatland. Like almost all geometry books, it discusses the issue, but isn't framed in the Flatland world.
However, Rucker DID write a direct sequel. It is a short story called "Message found in a copy of Flatland" and you can find it in "Transreal!" which is an anthology of his writings (and one of the best damn SF books I know). Check it out, ISBN 1-878914-00-6
This is no technological breakthrough. I worked with a stereo manufacturer in the mid-1970s that manufactured thin film speakers. The speakers were a thin film of mylar with a metal surface that was applied by vapor deposition. They got the technology from NASA, as part of the FedGov's technology transfer program. The speakers had good bass response too. The manufacturer went out of business, but I know a couple of public places that still have the speakers installed and working, 20+ years later. The best thing about these speakers was that you could make a speaker 6 feet long and 0.5 inches wide, instead of a point source like a speaker cone that radiates in a spherical pattern, the sound radiated in a cylindrical pattern. Channel separation was excellent, as was spatial accuracy.
The koreans are making one huge misrepresentation, though. These speakers will never roll up, then unfold and just tack to the wall. You MUST keep the film taut in order to produce optimal sound. If you bend the films, the surface coatings break. And read the article closely. They haven't "invented" any new speaker technology, they've invented a new way to bond the electrodes to the surface. Whoop de doo.
Thanks for pointing out the truth behind Apple's actions. Let me add one more:
Apple has several patents on themes and theme implementation. This was even covered by a story on Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/25/169230.shtml
Apple has a long history of agressively pursuing theme designers whenever they encroach on Apple's intellectual property, particularly themes that they do not want appearing on Wintel. You'd have to be an idiot to start developing a software that you KNOW is going to draw Apple's wrath.
I am personally more inclined to believe the deaths took place during ground accidents. I recently saw some documentary (history channel, I think) that says the Russians now admit to one fatal training accident. Some guy was in a pressure chamber breathing pure oxygen when he dropped an alcohol-saturated swab onto the hotplate he used for heating food. It burst into flame, and if you remember Apollo 1, you know what happens in a pressurized pure oxygen atmosphere when a flame is applied. Anyway, if the russkies had admitted to this incident, the US probably never would have used pure oxygen in Apollo 1 and the astronauts' lives would have been saved. As it was, the russians had to spend extra time developing mixed-air breathing systems at a time when we were moving full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes.
Note that O'Meara says his deal with Apple convinced him he could make a living as a programmer, but now he talks more like he's forced to cease all development of GForce now that he's on active duty, and he's "profoundly depressed."
Take a step back and take a look at this circuit. Now take a step forward. Now take a step back again... nevermind.
Take a look at what this circuit really DOES. I examined the schematic, and having designed computer-driven power relays before, I think I have a good idea of what this circuit actually does. Think about this: it introduces a single-point failure node into the power supply of up to 16 computers. So now if this circuit fails, it can potentially take down a whole room full of systems. Or even worse, if a cracker gets into it, he can blow your systems away at will. I recently had the displeasure of having an old linux test box get cracked through the old FTP exploit, boy that skript kiddee enjoyed himself rebooting my system over and over, as I later determined from reading the logs.
Anyway, I used to build similar power relays, I just did the computer front end, and some expert electrics guys assembled the solenoid driven switching system. I worked at a stereo shop back in the mid-70s, they wanted to put all their demonstration stereos on relays, then have a computer turn them on and off, in preset configurations. So I got an Apple II with a Corvus 5Mb hard disk, I set up a UCSD Pascal system, and wrote a nice little program to browse through presets and create your own.
Now came the hard part. I set up 4 PSIO boards, which were these cool boards with 4 parallel ports each. So I had 64 bits of parallel I/O, so I could control 32 L/R stereo powered audio channels.
On the audio side, the electrics guy wired up a series of 64 switchable solenoids capable of carrying about 500watts of power each, but were capable of being triggered by the low voltage of a parallel port signal. One bit per relay. I just wrote 1s or 0s to the port, and the relays all triggered to their new state, on or off. Hit the whole array with 0s to turn everything off, 1s to turn them on. The electrics guy wired the whole thing up with thick copper Monster Cable, and there were plenty of worries over grounding, which was way beyond my abilities, but solved by the application of thick braided cables. I didn't want to go anywhere near that assembly, since it was hooked up to high-powered stereo equipment, like Phase Linear 400s, a few assorted tube amps, etc. These guys were demonstrating high-end audiofile stuff, and the speakers were the real key. They wanted to be able to switch different amplifiers to different arrays of stereo speakers. You could turn the relays on or off in pairs, or leave 2, 4, or more pairs of speakers on to listen to them in parallel. And there's where the problem started.
I discovered that my conceptually clean idea of the relays going on and off in a crisp square wave transition was not reality. The relays took longer to close than to open. The switch bounced closed and took a moment to stabilize. We didn't realize this when we first started playing with it, and every time they tried to switch settings, it blew up the audio amps (and they were mighty peeved at blowing expensive PA400 amps!). We had to pull everything out, run a test signal through the relays and look at the output on an oscilloscope, where we discovered that if we switched amp relays, there was a brief period where both settings were open, causing the amps and speakers to run parallel, short circuiting everything and melting it all down in one huge imploding glumph. Ooops!
So I had to rewrite all the Pascal switching routines in 6502 assembly language. I could keep the user interface, and just pass the switching preset strings to the ASM routine. The program turned off all the relays at once, then ran a short ASM delay loop, then wrote the new switch presets. Whew, that was a bitch, I had to time both the relays's switch performance as well as the ASM delay loops on the oscilloscope, and got everything timed out perfectly. But it was pretty dicey there for a while.
So you see why I'm skeptical about power management through computer controlled relay systems. IMHO, it's like setting up a rack of servers connected to a light switch on the wall, and there's a security guard standing by it who is only supposed to allow authorized users to flip the switch. Except he's probably just as likely to bump the damn switch and blow out the whole server farm.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic, isn't it, that this flamebait ZDNet editorial was written just 2 weeks after Apple's latest release of Darwin 1.31, including source code? He also conveniently forgets about major open-source projects like Darwin Streaming Server, which Apple didn't need to release as a free product, but did anyway.
ZDNet is notorious for being whores for hits, they always post flamebait editorials hoping it will infuriate people and drive viewers to the site, causing more hits and more advertising revenue. I wonder if other advertisers are using the slashdot effect to their financial advantage like this.
Negative on the BSD x86 SMP only. MacOS X supports SMP on PowerPC G3 and G4 dual CPU systems, and it's BSD all the way.
Actually, that book by Rudy Rucker isn't much of a sequel to Flatland. Like almost all geometry books, it discusses the issue, but isn't framed in the Flatland world.
However, Rucker DID write a direct sequel. It is a short story called "Message found in a copy of Flatland" and you can find it in "Transreal!" which is an anthology of his writings (and one of the best damn SF books I know). Check it out, ISBN 1-878914-00-6
This is no technological breakthrough. I worked with a stereo manufacturer in the mid-1970s that manufactured thin film speakers. The speakers were a thin film of mylar with a metal surface that was applied by vapor deposition. They got the technology from NASA, as part of the FedGov's technology transfer program. The speakers had good bass response too. The manufacturer went out of business, but I know a couple of public places that still have the speakers installed and working, 20+ years later. The best thing about these speakers was that you could make a speaker 6 feet long and 0.5 inches wide, instead of a point source like a speaker cone that radiates in a spherical pattern, the sound radiated in a cylindrical pattern. Channel separation was excellent, as was spatial accuracy.
The koreans are making one huge misrepresentation, though. These speakers will never roll up, then unfold and just tack to the wall. You MUST keep the film taut in order to produce optimal sound. If you bend the films, the surface coatings break. And read the article closely. They haven't "invented" any new speaker technology, they've invented a new way to bond the electrodes to the surface. Whoop de doo.
Thanks for pointing out the truth behind Apple's actions. Let me add one more:l
Apple has several patents on themes and theme implementation. This was even covered by a story on Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/25/169230.shtm
Apple has a long history of agressively pursuing theme designers whenever they encroach on Apple's intellectual property, particularly themes that they do not want appearing on Wintel. You'd have to be an idiot to start developing a software that you KNOW is going to draw Apple's wrath.
I am personally more inclined to believe the deaths took place during ground accidents. I recently saw some documentary (history channel, I think) that says the Russians now admit to one fatal training accident. Some guy was in a pressure chamber breathing pure oxygen when he dropped an alcohol-saturated swab onto the hotplate he used for heating food. It burst into flame, and if you remember Apollo 1, you know what happens in a pressurized pure oxygen atmosphere when a flame is applied. Anyway, if the russkies had admitted to this incident, the US probably never would have used pure oxygen in Apollo 1 and the astronauts' lives would have been saved. As it was, the russians had to spend extra time developing mixed-air breathing systems at a time when we were moving full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes.
Yeah, he talked about the deal with Apple in a separate article at WIRED, which has an entirely different take on O'Meara's situation.
0 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,42870,0
Note that O'Meara says his deal with Apple convinced him he could make a living as a programmer, but now he talks more like he's forced to cease all development of GForce now that he's on active duty, and he's "profoundly depressed."
Take a step back and take a look at this circuit. Now take a step forward. Now take a step back again... nevermind.
Take a look at what this circuit really DOES. I examined the schematic, and having designed computer-driven power relays before, I think I have a good idea of what this circuit actually does. Think about this: it introduces a single-point failure node into the power supply of up to 16 computers. So now if this circuit fails, it can potentially take down a whole room full of systems. Or even worse, if a cracker gets into it, he can blow your systems away at will. I recently had the displeasure of having an old linux test box get cracked through the old FTP exploit, boy that skript kiddee enjoyed himself rebooting my system over and over, as I later determined from reading the logs.
Anyway, I used to build similar power relays, I just did the computer front end, and some expert electrics guys assembled the solenoid driven switching system. I worked at a stereo shop back in the mid-70s, they wanted to put all their demonstration stereos on relays, then have a computer turn them on and off, in preset configurations. So I got an Apple II with a Corvus 5Mb hard disk, I set up a UCSD Pascal system, and wrote a nice little program to browse through presets and create your own.
Now came the hard part. I set up 4 PSIO boards, which were these cool boards with 4 parallel ports each. So I had 64 bits of parallel I/O, so I could control 32 L/R stereo powered audio channels.
On the audio side, the electrics guy wired up a series of 64 switchable solenoids capable of carrying about 500watts of power each, but were capable of being triggered by the low voltage of a parallel port signal. One bit per relay. I just wrote 1s or 0s to the port, and the relays all triggered to their new state, on or off. Hit the whole array with 0s to turn everything off, 1s to turn them on. The electrics guy wired the whole thing up with thick copper Monster Cable, and there were plenty of worries over grounding, which was way beyond my abilities, but solved by the application of thick braided cables. I didn't want to go anywhere near that assembly, since it was hooked up to high-powered stereo equipment, like Phase Linear 400s, a few assorted tube amps, etc. These guys were demonstrating high-end audiofile stuff, and the speakers were the real key. They wanted to be able to switch different amplifiers to different arrays of stereo speakers. You could turn the relays on or off in pairs, or leave 2, 4, or more pairs of speakers on to listen to them in parallel. And there's where the problem started.
I discovered that my conceptually clean idea of the relays going on and off in a crisp square wave transition was not reality. The relays took longer to close than to open. The switch bounced closed and took a moment to stabilize. We didn't realize this when we first started playing with it, and every time they tried to switch settings, it blew up the audio amps (and they were mighty peeved at blowing expensive PA400 amps!). We had to pull everything out, run a test signal through the relays and look at the output on an oscilloscope, where we discovered that if we switched amp relays, there was a brief period where both settings were open, causing the amps and speakers to run parallel, short circuiting everything and melting it all down in one huge imploding glumph. Ooops!
So I had to rewrite all the Pascal switching routines in 6502 assembly language. I could keep the user interface, and just pass the switching preset strings to the ASM routine. The program turned off all the relays at once, then ran a short ASM delay loop, then wrote the new switch presets. Whew, that was a bitch, I had to time both the relays's switch performance as well as the ASM delay loops on the oscilloscope, and got everything timed out perfectly. But it was pretty dicey there for a while.
So you see why I'm skeptical about power management through computer controlled relay systems. IMHO, it's like setting up a rack of servers connected to a light switch on the wall, and there's a security guard standing by it who is only supposed to allow authorized users to flip the switch. Except he's probably just as likely to bump the damn switch and blow out the whole server farm.