According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, the launch is scheduled for 9 AM, Oct. 15, which is 2 PM EDT, Oct. 14th here in the US. That means that it's slated to go off in just under 2 hours from now.
Allegedly, there will be live television coverage of the launch. Anyone know how to get a peek?
A "real" troll realizes that the term derives from the verb "to troll" and not the noun for a hairy creature that lives under a bridge and eats farm animals. The operative definition of "to troll" as it applies to Internet messages is #3.
Main Entry: troll
Pronunciation: 'trOl
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English
Date: 15th century
transitive senses
1 : to cause to move round and round : ROLL
2 a : to sing the parts of (as a round or catch) in succession
b : to sing loudly c : to celebrate in song
3 a : to fish for by trolling b : to fish by trolling in (troll lakes) c : to pull through the water in trolling (troll a lure)
intransitive senses
If you want to use the term to refer to a message that invites one to respond or otherwise lures you into a discussion, you want this definition of the noun, from Webster's:
Main Entry: troll
Function: noun
Date: 1869
: a lure or a line with its lure and hook used in trolling
For those of you who were in diapers when the Internet was created, a "troll" is a message designed to lure you into responding, to rise to the bait, so to speak. Please learn this bit of Internet lore before we have to start the canings again.
I do too, but for a different reason. Your wife's lack of diligence with personal financial data and other private information has only caused some minor inconveniences. That might not be a severe enough "penalty" for her to learn her lesson and next time it might result in actual identity theft and serious financial loss on your part.
Sun will be fine. After the exit of the two companies mentioned in the story, they are the 64 bit and high end market provider now.
For now. At "for now" is a very, very short time. Sun simply doesn't have the technology resources and financial wherewithal to make SPARC a mainstream, widely supported processor that is able to stay ahead of a rapidly accelerating market. IBM, AMD, and Intel are all shipping 64 bit chip sets and most of the hardware configurations being built around them will far outpace a comparably priced Sun box without busting a sweat.
Sun continues to rest on its laurels as the "premiere" platform for academic and scientific applications. Unfortunately, the market has long since overcome that fallacy and Sun will never recapture the high end workstation market for the simple reason that it no longer exists. Even moderately priced desktop boxes outperform Sun's best engineering workstations from just a year or two ago. So other than the ego boost ascribed to an academician with a Sun box on his desk, it's hard to argue there is any value in selecting that workstation option at this point. Sure, there are legacy software issues with stuff written to proprietary Sun graphics or clustering APIs, but that stuff all has non-proprietary solutions now that make porting quite easy.
Sun's only other market, high performance Internet servers, evaporated with the DotCom bubble. They're stuck holding a fist full of defaulted loans, cancelled leases, and warehouses of repossessed server boxes in the wake of that carnage. Nobody's interested in going that route again.
Seriously. If you want to spend $5000, $8000, or even $75,000 on a computer, you can go to Dell. But, if you're looking to drop $1.3 million on a computer, you go to Sun.
Now there's a brilliant reason to purchase a computer -- that it costs $1.3 million. Odds are likely 100% that you can purchase a superior system from a non-Sun manufacturer for an order of magnitude less now. You basically make Merrill's case for why Sun will be dead in 2 years. The pool of idiots willing to plunk down $1M for a box to serve web pages dried up 2 years ago. Look at how people do it now (i.e., Google, Yahoo, etc.) -- racks and racks of cheap, redundant commodity servers. Where's Sun's answer to that?
No, actually, they are not for certain albums. A subsequent conversation with one of the sales guys there confirmed their process issue with PayPal. You will receive the URL from them via e-mail, along with a username and password, to complete the download. Next week, PayPal is supposed to be integrated into the purchase/download process the same way Visa/Mastercard purchases work now.
A word to the wise. Do NOT use PayPal to purchase music from this site. I just purchased (or so I thought) an album, paid with PayPal, and promptly found myself dumped on a Thank You screen without any download links. Nice. Not evil, just stupid.
You'll probably make more money in the long run if you take the tuition money and invest it in the stock market or some real estate.
From a hiring perspective, it seems like most people feel Ph.Ds in IT fields are lacking in real world, business-savvy experience because they've spent too long in academia relative to peers in the job market. And nobody wants to hire a seemingly-expensive PhD to do mid-level (or even senior level) engineering.
Park your tuition money in a reasonably good performing mutual fund and get back to work. PhDs in computer science are overrated unless you want to teach.
Casady and Greene was simply a publisher. The rights to all the software they sold was (obviously) retained by the authors of their respective apps. C&G didn't develop the software they sold.
But what really need to happen is interconnect-ability between all apps though:(
This has been my biggest beef with iChat since its first release. For all of Apple's proselytizing of the technology, iChat is essentially devoid of any support for AppleScript and AppleEvents.
It would be awesome to be able to tie iChat to other scriptable Mac apps via AppleScript. The possibilities are endless. Unfortunately Apple thinks the potential for hackers to abuse the IM system via AppleScript outweigh the benefits to users who have applications that are desperate for a chat interface. Oh well, there's always the UI scripting extensions...
Is there any (technical) reason someone could not hack together a smooth Mac OS X work-a-like on top of Linux? (emphasis mine)
Your choice of words is excellent. Linux desktops tend to feel "hacked together", whereas OSX has a consistent feel. My opinion as to why that is is that the developers on Linux tend to get close enough and then get tired or bored and move on.
I think the real reason goes back further than that. Linux apps are developed to a wide range of GUI and other API standards. Each project is free to come at the Linux O/S from whatever angle seems best because there is a huge variety of ways to tackle any given GUI or OS issue.
On the other hand, most Mac developers that have been around for a while started with volumes 1-3 of "Inside Macintosh". That was it. All you got. You either conformed to those APIs, those GUI standards, and made you app work like everyone elses', or your app didn't work (or got soundly thrashed in the market as some un-Mac-like monstrosity.)
I think that discipline has simply carried forward into OS X. The value of a consistent look and feel, coupled with standard rules of behavior for apps, all implemented to a consistent set of APIs is something Linux will never achieve until there is some significant consolidation of all the competing GUI standards, APIs, etc.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but until Linux replicates the Apple developer experience, it's likely to always feel "hacked together." Because in reality, it is.
There is a price of entry for geocaching that weeds out most of the casual types that would abuse the sport. Specifically, you have to shell out several hundred bucks for a good GPS receiver. Rowdy high school punks aren't likely to go trash caches on a whim just because they read about it on-line if the price to play is $200.
I think black hole lists are a great thing, but I will admit, they are certainly censorship, and the customers of an ISP using such a list may disagree with some or all of it.
You may admit that they are censorship, but that doesn't make it so. Censorship, by its very nature, makes a conscious decision about the content of a communication and selectively blocks some or all of that communication based on semantic content.
Black hole lists are not nearly as discriminating, simply blocking all traffic from a site, regardless of content. That is not censorship. It is a selective outage. If a server chooses to abrogate its end of the Internet bargain by refusing to properly maintain control over its resources to prevent damage to peers on the network (i.e., open SMTP relays), then other conforming servers have the right to cancel their portion of the bargain and refuse to transit traffic from the offendor. That, too, is in the spirit of the Internet.
I think all the Chicken Littles that are crying 'censorship' are complaining about a problem that doesn't really exist. Nobody is censoring messages. They are blindly blocking all traffic from an offending server. Black hole lists are simply an example of a more automated form of regulating inappropriate behavior taking place on a shared resource that Internet administrators have been doing for the past 25 years.
This site is just a public registry for people who are using the STREAMING capability of iTunes to play music for others. This is nothing more than a "guestbook" app that lets you publish a URL for your Mac running iTunes 4.
This is not P2P file sharing, it's not piracy, and it has already been discussed to death in the media over the past 2 weeks.
I've met Ray on several social occasions and discussed his vision for the future. There is a huge flaw (or blind spot) in his vision. All of his massive advances in AI and general computing functionality are based on extrapolating trends like Moore's Law, Metcalf's Law, etc. into the near future. He infers that because they predict that massive CPU power and network bandwidth will be available, that the software to match it will naturally come along, too. Ray's a hardware guy, for sure. Unfortunately, we've already seen a plateau in the demand for CPU cycles and network bandwidth. Without market forces to drive these trends, why assume they'll be sustained?
The problem with depending on hardware and network advances to drive his vision is that software engineering simply cannot keep up with the pace of advances on the hardware front. Anyone who has ever read the "Mythical Man Month" understands this at a basic level. Humans simply cannot organize themselves well enough to tackle software projects of the magnitude that Ray envisions, at least not by 2029.
Ray dismisses this argument by saying we'll have software that writes the software. Well, there's a tautology for you. If you can't write the software you need because it's too complicated, how can you possibly be expected to write the software to write that software? Genetic algorithms are useful for some very specific trial and error sorts of problems. But using them to random walk our way to a billion lines of debugged, functional AI code seems a bit of a stretch.
Judging by the tenor of comments here, it doesn't seem like many people took the time to actually read the relevant patents before providing opinions.
eBay's lawyers may be quite right in saying they have a reason to be hopeful. The patent numbered 5,845,265 has a relatively vague abstract that makes it sound like eBay's business model. But if you read further in the claims, you'll see that what this guy is claiming is something entirely different.
Claim #1 describes a basic system for an on-line auction house where the actual, physical good is escrowed by the auction house, bar-coded, photographed, and placed on a Web site to be bid on. This process is elaborated on in claim #3 with sufficient detail as to make clear that the intent of the patent is to mediate a traditional auction of physical goods by replacing bidders' paddles with on-line terminals.
The mechanisms described for inventorying auctioned goods comprise a major portion of the claims, in particular #15. Subsequent claims from 18-22 do sound more like what eBay does at the conclusion of an auction, but even so, it's up to the buyer and seller on eBay to consumate the transaction. This patent assumes the auction house is clearing the transaction before releasing the physical goods. Seems like another difference with eBay's model.
In my own, particular opinion, I think that it will be settled out of court because eBay will likely be able to demonstrate it can potentially prevail if it goes to trial. Prediction: $10M in one time, go-away money. No royalties, no court case.
Netscape (spyware) busted under OS X / Jaguar
on
Netscape 7.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure how Netscape is supposed to win market share when they release versions that don't even run. Specifically, Netscape 7.0 starts up, sends its spyware query to the "Registration Server", waits for a bit, closes that window, and then never does anything else. Nada. No home page, no registration dialog, nothing.
OS X 10.2 users can expect to see a blank menu bar and no windows opening up, no controls to click, and no menus to select. What a QA travesty! This problem has happened on 3 different machines running Jaguar, so it's clearly a Netscape hairball.
Even MSIE runs when you click on it. Maybe that's how they gained all that market share!
If you read the reviews, you'll notice that the new OS10 borrows heavily from Windows design.
If you actually used OS X, you'd notice that your dogma borrows heavily from Microsoft and couldn't be further from the truth.
It would be enlightening to others following this thread if you could cite some specific examples of where OS X borrows heavily from Windows. Given that it's essentially BSD on a Mach kernel, it certainly doesn't borrow from the OS level. And since Quartz was based on the NeXT Display Postscript engine and the Finder inherited most of its functionality from previous MacOS UIs, I don't suppose you're referring to elements borrowed from Microsoft's GUI. So what is left? What have they borrowed from Microsoft for OS X?
While that may sound like a lot, it's really not, considering an F-16 can carry up to 14,000 lbs. of ordinance, an F-18 can carry almost 18,000, and an F-15 can carry up to 23,000 lbs.
Actually, it is a lot. The UCAV is being designed to carry a new generation of miniature cruise missle designed by Boeing, which has a 100 pound warhead that is the equivalent of a 500 pound conventional explosive bomb. The small cruise missle has about a 40 mile range, so even the UCAV can stay out of harm's way.
No one has made this particularly clear, but semi-automomous for this vehicle is an huge understatement. The aircraft have the ability to self-deploy from bases far from the conflict site and will include a computer generated voice radio to communicate with traditional air traffic controllers as it proceeds through controlled air space to its mission area.
Multiple UCAVs will have the ability to share target info amongst themselves and can strike each others' targets if one becomes disabled.
Most importantly, unlike other unmanned vehicles to date, nobody flys the UCAV with a joystick. Its flight control system accepts inputs in the form of waypoints and actions to perform. All of the necessary control inputs required to reach the desired target are generated and executed by the UCAVs own computers. This is also true for threat avoidance and evasive manuevers.
I've actually had the opportunity to operate the UCAV flight console in a simulator environment and it's actually quite boring from the operator's perspective. There's a moving map display with friend/foe data on it, several windows containing vehicle stats, and a mouse and keyboard for command input. I was able to target downtown Las Vegas with one mouse click (and contextual menu choice) and fire a stand-off missle without any additional input. The UCAV took off, flew the mission, struck the target, and returned to the base with only that info as input. It also sent back multiple side-scan radar images of the target area prior to launching its attack so it could receive confirmation from a human before completing the attack.
Given that 5 or 6 of these things can be loaded on a C-17 and deployed to any commercial or military airport within 700-800 miles of a hot spot, the bad guys should be very afraid of these aircraft. They're stealthy, small, cheap, and can outmanuever any manned aircraft. They also don't require expensively trained pilots to operate. Just hope we don't sell them to our "friends"...
But one thing is for sure- with the DMCA, and these new video formats, PVRs could become a thing of the past.
It doesn't even have to be viewable to be recordable. Anyone with a DirecTV Tivo is doing everything necessary today to work with an encrypted or compressed video stream. The DirecTivo boxes take the unadulterated downlink signal right off the receiver and spew it onto the hard drive. It's only decoded during playback.
It's a no-brainer to record the HDTV signal, regardless of its format, and save all the bits, and then stream them out later in time shifted form to the HDTV receiver.
Of course, all the encryption scheme would have to have is some sort of time based encoding synced with the TV's clock to render time shifted playback impossible, but how smart have the industry protocol designers been so far?
Oops! They're reading this post! We're doomed now.
(And of course, it presupposes that people can set the clocks on their TVs. Given the number of flashing "12:00" displays on the world's VCRs, this doesn't seem likely...)
This is the original message as posted to the MacHTTP discussion list for those interested in the Lisa's details:
Hello All,
Due to the many requests, I just put on-line my Apple Lisa2 web
server.
Since I am not finished with my site content I am only going leave her
up till about 8:00am on 1/2/2002 US Central Time. Check it out at:
http://www.lisa2.com
Let me know what you think. As far as I know, She is the only Apple
Lisa2
based web server in the world, and she may be one of the oldest PC's
on the net!
My current config is:
Apple Lisa2
Lisa Screen Mod.
800K disk Mod.
1 Meg slot RAM
MacWorks+II Ver 2.5.5
XLerator 18 with 8 meg Fast RAM
Sun SCSI with QuickBoot ROM
500 Meg SCSI Drive with Apple ROM
Mac System 7.01?
MacTCP 2.06
MacHTTP 2.2.2
TCP/IP via MacIP to my RevB iMac running IPnetrouter.
iMac Modem @ 50K to net.
This has to be a joke! CPL? NiP? Even the articles linked to by this story give absolutely no clue what this is about. Clearly it must be some secret code used by pale, pasty little nerd boys who bask in the blue glow of a CRT, thumbs and eyes twitching in some strange little simulated universe where their pathetic lives simulate real worth.
Unfortunately, I was pathetic enough to click on this thread to see what the heck it was about and I still don't know...
It probably predates even this. Apple had patents issued around the concepts of irregular regions, masks, and blitting algorithms as part of the original Lisa O/S. These were originally developed on the 6502 series of Apple machines in a package called AppleGraphics, which shipped in about 1980, I think.
There's no sense in bitching them out about this. Their work very likely predates every other computer manufacturer except for work done at Xerox/PARC. And we all know that story...
Apple has had a greatly diminished QA organization over the years. I think this is due in large part to the serious turnover the company experienced in late '97 - early '98. Nearly every engineer that worked on the original Mac OS left during this time. The Developer Technical Support organization was gutted, and quality assurance became an exercise in million monkey button pounding.
Having been the author of a 3rd party product bundled and shipped on Apple hardware, I can tell you that the extent of their QA process doesn't go much beyond making sure the software installs and runs on an out of the box system, followed by some mediocre mashing of buttons and menus. They really don't understand or implement the concept of actually testing on live, deployed, end user (like) systems. They have racks of off the shelf machines with standard software loads. If they install and run and stay up over the weekend, it's shippable.
We would get reams and reams of complaints about how dialog boxes weren't formatted just so, etc., but their QA department never caught a single defect that most would consider a bug in the code. And there were certainly bugs to catch.
This is a chronic problem that most commercial software houses have. They tend to put junior people with little product experience in the QA organizations and assume that by acting like reasonably competent users, they will somehow uncover logic flaws, data errors, and other engineering foibles. The only time I ever saw QA done right was on a NASA project with life critical software systems. The project was staffed with the very most senior engineers running the QA department and all of the junior engineers were slinging code.
It was up to the gray beards to make sure the junior guys wrote code that was to spec, integrated properly, handled all of the possible input scenarios, and actually performed in a live environment. These senior guys were also the architects of the system, so they knew what the software was supposed to do, how it was supposed to be constructed, and what it should take to break it. I doubt that 1 in 100 commercial shops today have an engineer working in the QA department that actually understands the code they are testing down to the module level. When was the las time you saw a QA guy in a design session, learning about how the system he's going to test is going to be architected?
This is so far from the current practice in commercial industry today as to almost have the flavor of a fairy tale. Apple's no different than any number of other companies who are rushing to ship software on a too short schedule. They pay lip service to QA and rely on their early adopter users to find any lingering problems. In this case, they totally dicked over their customers by not doing their job. However, they're only partially to blame since I think the development of iTunes is still done by Casady and Greene under contract to Apple. I'd be surprised if they weren't ultimately responsible for creating everything, including the installer. Regardless, Apple should have tested this before sticking it on-line on a Saturday night.
Slashdot Mirror
Allegedly, there will be live television coverage of the launch. Anyone know how to get a peek?
Main Entry: troll
Pronunciation: 'trOl
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English
Date: 15th century
transitive senses
1 : to cause to move round and round : ROLL
2 a : to sing the parts of (as a round or catch) in succession
b : to sing loudly c : to celebrate in song
3 a : to fish for by trolling b : to fish by trolling in (troll lakes) c : to pull through the water in trolling (troll a lure)
intransitive senses
If you want to use the term to refer to a message that invites one to respond or otherwise lures you into a discussion, you want this definition of the noun, from Webster's:
Main Entry: troll
Function: noun
Date: 1869
: a lure or a line with its lure and hook used in trolling
For those of you who were in diapers when the Internet was created, a "troll" is a message designed to lure you into responding, to rise to the bait, so to speak. Please learn this bit of Internet lore before we have to start the canings again.
I do too, but for a different reason. Your wife's lack of diligence with personal financial data and other private information has only caused some minor inconveniences. That might not be a severe enough "penalty" for her to learn her lesson and next time it might result in actual identity theft and serious financial loss on your part.
For now. At "for now" is a very, very short time. Sun simply doesn't have the technology resources and financial wherewithal to make SPARC a mainstream, widely supported processor that is able to stay ahead of a rapidly accelerating market. IBM, AMD, and Intel are all shipping 64 bit chip sets and most of the hardware configurations being built around them will far outpace a comparably priced Sun box without busting a sweat.
Sun continues to rest on its laurels as the "premiere" platform for academic and scientific applications. Unfortunately, the market has long since overcome that fallacy and Sun will never recapture the high end workstation market for the simple reason that it no longer exists. Even moderately priced desktop boxes outperform Sun's best engineering workstations from just a year or two ago. So other than the ego boost ascribed to an academician with a Sun box on his desk, it's hard to argue there is any value in selecting that workstation option at this point. Sure, there are legacy software issues with stuff written to proprietary Sun graphics or clustering APIs, but that stuff all has non-proprietary solutions now that make porting quite easy.
Sun's only other market, high performance Internet servers, evaporated with the DotCom bubble. They're stuck holding a fist full of defaulted loans, cancelled leases, and warehouses of repossessed server boxes in the wake of that carnage. Nobody's interested in going that route again.
Seriously. If you want to spend $5000, $8000, or even $75,000 on a computer, you can go to Dell. But, if you're looking to drop $1.3 million on a computer, you go to Sun.
Now there's a brilliant reason to purchase a computer -- that it costs $1.3 million. Odds are likely 100% that you can purchase a superior system from a non-Sun manufacturer for an order of magnitude less now. You basically make Merrill's case for why Sun will be dead in 2 years. The pool of idiots willing to plunk down $1M for a box to serve web pages dried up 2 years ago. Look at how people do it now (i.e., Google, Yahoo, etc.) -- racks and racks of cheap, redundant commodity servers. Where's Sun's answer to that?
Bye, Sun!
No, actually, they are not for certain albums. A subsequent conversation with one of the sales guys there confirmed their process issue with PayPal. You will receive the URL from them via e-mail, along with a username and password, to complete the download. Next week, PayPal is supposed to be integrated into the purchase/download process the same way Visa/Mastercard purchases work now.
A word to the wise. Do NOT use PayPal to purchase music from this site. I just purchased (or so I thought) an album, paid with PayPal, and promptly found myself dumped on a Thank You screen without any download links. Nice. Not evil, just stupid.
You'll probably make more money in the long run if you take the tuition money and invest it in the stock market or some real estate.
From a hiring perspective, it seems like most people feel Ph.Ds in IT fields are lacking in real world, business-savvy experience because they've spent too long in academia relative to peers in the job market. And nobody wants to hire a seemingly-expensive PhD to do mid-level (or even senior level) engineering.
Park your tuition money in a reasonably good performing mutual fund and get back to work. PhDs in computer science are overrated unless you want to teach.
Casady and Greene was simply a publisher. The rights to all the software they sold was (obviously) retained by the authors of their respective apps. C&G didn't develop the software they sold.
This has been my biggest beef with iChat since its first release. For all of Apple's proselytizing of the technology, iChat is essentially devoid of any support for AppleScript and AppleEvents.
It would be awesome to be able to tie iChat to other scriptable Mac apps via AppleScript. The possibilities are endless. Unfortunately Apple thinks the potential for hackers to abuse the IM system via AppleScript outweigh the benefits to users who have applications that are desperate for a chat interface. Oh well, there's always the UI scripting extensions...
Your choice of words is excellent. Linux desktops tend to feel "hacked together", whereas OSX has a consistent feel. My opinion as to why that is is that the developers on Linux tend to get close enough and then get tired or bored and move on.
I think the real reason goes back further than that. Linux apps are developed to a wide range of GUI and other API standards. Each project is free to come at the Linux O/S from whatever angle seems best because there is a huge variety of ways to tackle any given GUI or OS issue.
On the other hand, most Mac developers that have been around for a while started with volumes 1-3 of "Inside Macintosh". That was it. All you got. You either conformed to those APIs, those GUI standards, and made you app work like everyone elses', or your app didn't work (or got soundly thrashed in the market as some un-Mac-like monstrosity.)
I think that discipline has simply carried forward into OS X. The value of a consistent look and feel, coupled with standard rules of behavior for apps, all implemented to a consistent set of APIs is something Linux will never achieve until there is some significant consolidation of all the competing GUI standards, APIs, etc.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but until Linux replicates the Apple developer experience, it's likely to always feel "hacked together." Because in reality, it is.
Most laurels (rhododendrons) are poisonous. We don't eat them at our house.
There is a price of entry for geocaching that weeds out most of the casual types that would abuse the sport. Specifically, you have to shell out several hundred bucks for a good GPS receiver. Rowdy high school punks aren't likely to go trash caches on a whim just because they read about it on-line if the price to play is $200.
You may admit that they are censorship, but that doesn't make it so. Censorship, by its very nature, makes a conscious decision about the content of a communication and selectively blocks some or all of that communication based on semantic content.
Black hole lists are not nearly as discriminating, simply blocking all traffic from a site, regardless of content. That is not censorship. It is a selective outage. If a server chooses to abrogate its end of the Internet bargain by refusing to properly maintain control over its resources to prevent damage to peers on the network (i.e., open SMTP relays), then other conforming servers have the right to cancel their portion of the bargain and refuse to transit traffic from the offendor. That, too, is in the spirit of the Internet.
I think all the Chicken Littles that are crying 'censorship' are complaining about a problem that doesn't really exist. Nobody is censoring messages. They are blindly blocking all traffic from an offending server. Black hole lists are simply an example of a more automated form of regulating inappropriate behavior taking place on a shared resource that Internet administrators have been doing for the past 25 years.
This is not P2P file sharing, it's not piracy, and it has already been discussed to death in the media over the past 2 weeks.
The problem with depending on hardware and network advances to drive his vision is that software engineering simply cannot keep up with the pace of advances on the hardware front. Anyone who has ever read the "Mythical Man Month" understands this at a basic level. Humans simply cannot organize themselves well enough to tackle software projects of the magnitude that Ray envisions, at least not by 2029.
Ray dismisses this argument by saying we'll have software that writes the software. Well, there's a tautology for you. If you can't write the software you need because it's too complicated, how can you possibly be expected to write the software to write that software? Genetic algorithms are useful for some very specific trial and error sorts of problems. But using them to random walk our way to a billion lines of debugged, functional AI code seems a bit of a stretch.
My money sure isn't on Ray's pony...
eBay's lawyers may be quite right in saying they have a reason to be hopeful. The patent numbered 5,845,265 has a relatively vague abstract that makes it sound like eBay's business model. But if you read further in the claims, you'll see that what this guy is claiming is something entirely different.
Claim #1 describes a basic system for an on-line auction house where the actual, physical good is escrowed by the auction house, bar-coded, photographed, and placed on a Web site to be bid on. This process is elaborated on in claim #3 with sufficient detail as to make clear that the intent of the patent is to mediate a traditional auction of physical goods by replacing bidders' paddles with on-line terminals.
The mechanisms described for inventorying auctioned goods comprise a major portion of the claims, in particular #15. Subsequent claims from 18-22 do sound more like what eBay does at the conclusion of an auction, but even so, it's up to the buyer and seller on eBay to consumate the transaction. This patent assumes the auction house is clearing the transaction before releasing the physical goods. Seems like another difference with eBay's model.
In my own, particular opinion, I think that it will be settled out of court because eBay will likely be able to demonstrate it can potentially prevail if it goes to trial. Prediction: $10M in one time, go-away money. No royalties, no court case.
OS X 10.2 users can expect to see a blank menu bar and no windows opening up, no controls to click, and no menus to select. What a QA travesty! This problem has happened on 3 different machines running Jaguar, so it's clearly a Netscape hairball.
Even MSIE runs when you click on it. Maybe that's how they gained all that market share!
If you actually used OS X, you'd notice that your dogma borrows heavily from Microsoft and couldn't be further from the truth.
It would be enlightening to others following this thread if you could cite some specific examples of where OS X borrows heavily from Windows. Given that it's essentially BSD on a Mach kernel, it certainly doesn't borrow from the OS level. And since Quartz was based on the NeXT Display Postscript engine and the Finder inherited most of its functionality from previous MacOS UIs, I don't suppose you're referring to elements borrowed from Microsoft's GUI. So what is left? What have they borrowed from Microsoft for OS X?
Actually, it is a lot. The UCAV is being designed to carry a new generation of miniature cruise missle designed by Boeing, which has a 100 pound warhead that is the equivalent of a 500 pound conventional explosive bomb. The small cruise missle has about a 40 mile range, so even the UCAV can stay out of harm's way.
No one has made this particularly clear, but semi-automomous for this vehicle is an huge understatement. The aircraft have the ability to self-deploy from bases far from the conflict site and will include a computer generated voice radio to communicate with traditional air traffic controllers as it proceeds through controlled air space to its mission area.
Multiple UCAVs will have the ability to share target info amongst themselves and can strike each others' targets if one becomes disabled.
Most importantly, unlike other unmanned vehicles to date, nobody flys the UCAV with a joystick. Its flight control system accepts inputs in the form of waypoints and actions to perform. All of the necessary control inputs required to reach the desired target are generated and executed by the UCAVs own computers. This is also true for threat avoidance and evasive manuevers.
I've actually had the opportunity to operate the UCAV flight console in a simulator environment and it's actually quite boring from the operator's perspective. There's a moving map display with friend/foe data on it, several windows containing vehicle stats, and a mouse and keyboard for command input. I was able to target downtown Las Vegas with one mouse click (and contextual menu choice) and fire a stand-off missle without any additional input. The UCAV took off, flew the mission, struck the target, and returned to the base with only that info as input. It also sent back multiple side-scan radar images of the target area prior to launching its attack so it could receive confirmation from a human before completing the attack.
Given that 5 or 6 of these things can be loaded on a C-17 and deployed to any commercial or military airport within 700-800 miles of a hot spot, the bad guys should be very afraid of these aircraft. They're stealthy, small, cheap, and can outmanuever any manned aircraft. They also don't require expensively trained pilots to operate. Just hope we don't sell them to our "friends"...
Oh, I'm sure. Especially when the OS they're waiting for dates back to the early 1970's in its antecedents.
It doesn't even have to be viewable to be recordable. Anyone with a DirecTV Tivo is doing everything necessary today to work with an encrypted or compressed video stream. The DirecTivo boxes take the unadulterated downlink signal right off the receiver and spew it onto the hard drive. It's only decoded during playback.
It's a no-brainer to record the HDTV signal, regardless of its format, and save all the bits, and then stream them out later in time shifted form to the HDTV receiver.
Of course, all the encryption scheme would have to have is some sort of time based encoding synced with the TV's clock to render time shifted playback impossible, but how smart have the industry protocol designers been so far?
Oops! They're reading this post! We're doomed now.
(And of course, it presupposes that people can set the clocks on their TVs. Given the number of flashing "12:00" displays on the world's VCRs, this doesn't seem likely...)
This is the original message as posted to the MacHTTP discussion list for those interested in the Lisa's details:
Hello All,
Due to the many requests, I just put on-line my Apple Lisa2 web
server.
Since I am not finished with my site content I am only going leave her
up till about 8:00am on 1/2/2002 US Central Time. Check it out at:
http://www.lisa2.com
Let me know what you think. As far as I know, She is the only Apple
Lisa2
based web server in the world, and she may be one of the oldest PC's
on the net!
My current config is:
Apple Lisa2
Lisa Screen Mod.
800K disk Mod.
1 Meg slot RAM
MacWorks+II Ver 2.5.5
XLerator 18 with 8 meg Fast RAM
Sun SCSI with QuickBoot ROM
500 Meg SCSI Drive with Apple ROM
Mac System 7.01?
MacTCP 2.06
MacHTTP 2.2.2
TCP/IP via MacIP to my RevB iMac running IPnetrouter.
iMac Modem @ 50K to net.
Thanks,
R
Unfortunately, I was pathetic enough to click on this thread to see what the heck it was about and I still don't know...
There's no sense in bitching them out about this. Their work very likely predates every other computer manufacturer except for work done at Xerox/PARC. And we all know that story...
Having been the author of a 3rd party product bundled and shipped on Apple hardware, I can tell you that the extent of their QA process doesn't go much beyond making sure the software installs and runs on an out of the box system, followed by some mediocre mashing of buttons and menus. They really don't understand or implement the concept of actually testing on live, deployed, end user (like) systems. They have racks of off the shelf machines with standard software loads. If they install and run and stay up over the weekend, it's shippable.
We would get reams and reams of complaints about how dialog boxes weren't formatted just so, etc., but their QA department never caught a single defect that most would consider a bug in the code. And there were certainly bugs to catch.
This is a chronic problem that most commercial software houses have. They tend to put junior people with little product experience in the QA organizations and assume that by acting like reasonably competent users, they will somehow uncover logic flaws, data errors, and other engineering foibles. The only time I ever saw QA done right was on a NASA project with life critical software systems. The project was staffed with the very most senior engineers running the QA department and all of the junior engineers were slinging code.
It was up to the gray beards to make sure the junior guys wrote code that was to spec, integrated properly, handled all of the possible input scenarios, and actually performed in a live environment. These senior guys were also the architects of the system, so they knew what the software was supposed to do, how it was supposed to be constructed, and what it should take to break it. I doubt that 1 in 100 commercial shops today have an engineer working in the QA department that actually understands the code they are testing down to the module level. When was the las time you saw a QA guy in a design session, learning about how the system he's going to test is going to be architected?
This is so far from the current practice in commercial industry today as to almost have the flavor of a fairy tale. Apple's no different than any number of other companies who are rushing to ship software on a too short schedule. They pay lip service to QA and rely on their early adopter users to find any lingering problems. In this case, they totally dicked over their customers by not doing their job. However, they're only partially to blame since I think the development of iTunes is still done by Casady and Greene under contract to Apple. I'd be surprised if they weren't ultimately responsible for creating everything, including the installer. Regardless, Apple should have tested this before sticking it on-line on a Saturday night.