You know, I intended this to be read in the context of what Bill was saying about Microsoft rather than what he was saying about Apple. 'stole the TV' is a pretty strong metaphor for thought theft.
Bill Gates is pretty much admitting to 'Thought Theft' there: Microsoft wouldn't even have their flagship product line if they hadn't taken the idea of the GUI from Xerox and Apple.
I guess these days, Microsoft is Xerox, and some darn kids are nicking their TV now.
No, Steve, I think its more like we both have a rich neighbor named Xerox, and you broke in to steal the TV set, and you found out I'd been there first, and you said. "Hey that's no fair! I wanted to steal the TV set!"
-- Bill Gates talking about Steve Jobs and the GUI
... because no, Red Hat (for example) cannot take responsibility for 'the Linux kernel', because that is indeed separate from their distribution.
However, Red Hat is in no way dependant on 'the Linux kernel', because they have the source, and they have permission to modify it. They CAN and in fact DO take responsibility for the kernel as supplied with their distributions. RedHat issue their own kernel, and have been known to fix security issues (and even add features) before they make it into the main kernel tree on occasion.
The Microsoft veep is basically saying this:
1. RedHat is not responsible for the core Linux kernel distribution 2. RedHat make a Linux distribution
and trying to claim that these are related. They would be if the kernel was closed source, but it's not. RedHat could fork the kernel tomorrow if the core distribution didn't match up to their customers expectations. They probably would, too.
(Oh yeah, 'solution stack'. Bwhahahaa. Marketspeak gets worse every day... oh, and 'no single development environment'. Choice, apparently, is a bad thing. Just imagine all that taxing thinking you might have to do. No, far better not to think and choose Microsoft)
Er, the parent post is so ignorant I don't even know where to begin.
Let's see...
1. Relevance to 'modern' global warming: none. This is a hypothesis to explain one of the biggest extinctions in the history of the planet. Whatever caused it, afterwards the planet was almost a complete desert.
2. The siberian volcano wasn't merely 'big'. It was the size of Europe! One of the biggest volcanoes to happen since life evolved on Earth. And it lasted a very long time: erupting pretty much constantly for a million years. Krakatoa wasn't even a damp fart in comparison, and it changed the climate for years. It's called a flood basalt eruption, and they are really rare.
3. We know something happened to the oxygen levels at that time. They've never recovered: before the extinction, oxygen levels were nearly double what we have now. Afterwards, oxygen levels were as low as they are now at the top of high mountains. Modern animals, including us, would have serious problems in that environment. Imagine what problems animals used to even more oxygen would have. Yep, they'd die.
4. The dinosaurs. Yes. Well. Guess which event preceded the dinosaurs? You don't suppose, perchance, that the reason the world was warmer when the dinosaurs were about was because of this? I mean, saying the dinosaurs were happy in a hotter climate, so it doesn't matter if it's hot is just dumb. The hot climate that the dinos lived in was what killed the creatures that came before. That made space for dinosaurs to appear.
Or to put it another way. Polar bears are perfectly happy when the temperature is -20 or lower. So naturally, everything else would be happy if the entire world was at this temperature. Yeah, right. (And of course, polar bears would be just fine living at the equator. The dinosaurs had it hotter! SHEEEESH)
5. The main cause of the fall in oxygen levels was supposedly a massive drop in sea levels. The most likely cause of this is supposedly global cooling caused by the volcanoes ash (there are very large carbon deposits under the sea, which would have become liberated when the sea levels dropped enough). This is what caused the global warming.
Finally, this is not sensationalistic. This huge extinction HAPPENED. The siberian volcano also happened, at the same time. The reduction in oxygen levels happened, too. A lot of other stuff happened at this time. There's very good evidence for all of this. The question the paper is trying to answer is what caused the extinction. This has bugger-all to do with global warming in a modern context, cows or even vogons.
This link describes the vulcanism in Siberia a bit better than the rather lame Yahoo article linked by the blurb.
Uh, 'Viewtiful Joe' is a modern sidescroller. It topped the charts here in the UK for a while, so they're still popular. 'Paper Mario' sounds like it might be basically a side scroller, too.
Hmm, the lighting is very inconsistent in that screenshot. The shadows appear to be offset as for a lightsource at the top of the screen and in the middle. Some, but not all, of the icons in the panel are designed that way too. However, the shading on the windows, the buttons in the calculator, etc, are all for a light source in the top left. Oh dear: if you were to copy Apple's style and apply it to GNOME without really thinking about why the icons are designed that way (in either GNOME or OS X), this is probably what you'd get.
These shadows, and Apple's, are gaussian shadows: to make them, you take the silouette of your window, apply a gaussian blur kernel and then offset the shadow. This gives the shadows a 'soft', natural appearance, but makes them slightly larger than the window giving that 'all-around shadow' effect. It's fairly computationally expensive to do for arbitrarily shaped windows, but you can 'fake' the effect easily for windows with similar shapes (and straight edges). This is also the shadow effect you'll see in applications like the Gimp or photoshop.
Sigh, you seem to think I didn't try this. I did this from the terminal - rm asks for no password. Neither do pieces of software like TextEdit, which delete the file before replacing it.
It's a security hole because it allows you to do something that you normally would require a password without using one.
As to why: the admin group has write access to the/Library/Preferences directory. That means you can modify the directory: ie move, create or delete files, regardless of the permissions on this file, with no further authentication. Setting the '+t' permission restricts this priviledge to files that you also have write access to.
Proof: go to a terminal, type 'cd/Library/Preferences' then 'rm com.apple.sharing.firewall.plist'. *Poof* your firewall settings are gone, and you didn't enter a password. (You did remember to back them up before trying this, didn't you?)
Alternatively, open/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sharing.firewall.pl ist in TextEdit, alter it and hit 'Save'. TextEdit will ask if you want to try to force an overwrite, choose 'Overwrite', *poof* firewall settings overwritten, no password.
Of course, someone who wants to mess with your system while your back is turned would probably be more interested in some of the other files in there. Altering loginwindow.plist would provide them with an easy way to get root access, for example.
It's a privilege escalation vulnerability. If you can get a session as an admin account (because the real admin has his back turned, for example), you can use this misfeature to gain full root access without ever knowing a single password on the system.
Think outside the box. You can't write to the file, but you *can* write to the directory: it has write permissions for members of the admin group. So you can rename or delete the file without the need to authenticate, provided you're a member of the admin group. Then you create a new one in its place.
chmod +t/Library/Preferences closes this hole, though that might affect other things: I haven't tried this yet.
NeXT since 1989. NeXTStep's dock was almost certainly the original inspiration for the taskbar in Windows '95 (as well as many of the X11 task switchers).
The main difference was that in NeXT, windows were always grouped by application, but with Windows, windows are only grouped by application sometimes.
JET reached (or came very close to) the break-even point (produced as much power as it consumed). ITER will surpass it and actually generate power. (5-10x as much out as is put in, so that would mean that the heating required during fusion would be around 50-100MW). See here, for example.
It's also designed to be repairable in the event of a failure (in the way a commercial reactor would need to be), and its designers have benefitted considerably from the experience of JET. The BBC has covered this reactor for some time: I'm surprised slashdot has only picked up on it now.
Possibly because the 10.2 help application used its own (crappy) HTML renderer rather than WebKit, so the help: protocol doesn't exist.
It's a bit of a design flaw, really. Why is the help: protocol registered globally at all? There really isn't a good reason for doing that, I don't think (unless [NSURLProtocol registerClass:] registers globally. In which case, that's a HUGE design flaw). The help: protocol exists to allow the help application to run local scripts: this flaw is there by design!
I think the poor quality of Apple's package manager is deliberate. Apple don't/like/ install software: they think that you should be able to run new software straight from the CD, and installation should be a matter of dragging the application from it's CD or disk image straight to wherever you want it to be installed. Installation programs break the spatial paradigm that is the heart of Mac OS, and Apple's documentation says this.
Now, this is useless for command line tools, but Mac OS X is emphatically not a command line OS at heart. The.pkg format is intended for those (RARE!) times when there's no other choice than to install files in multiple places. The reason you rarely need to do this is because of Apple's use of NeXT-style bundles. Sheesh, even M$ gets this right. You can run Word v.X straight off the Office X CD if you want.
This also has the *HUGE* advantage that there's no such thing as 'uninstalling'. Because everything associated with an application goes in the bundle, deleting the app is all you need: no auxiliary files are left lying around to mystify you later on.
Then again, what do I know? RPM and apt messed up their package databases so often for me on Linux that these days I always install from source there: it often only takes one broken package, and it's always a complete ARSE to repair. Hah, I've just finished reinstalling fink after it decided to make approximately half of its X11 applications depend on its own X11 port and the other half depend on the system installed X11. According to the fink mailing list this was obviously my own fault. Though they wouldn't tell me any specifics on how this could possibly happen, just that it was nothing to do with them. Wonderful. Having both system-x11 and xfree86 installed simultaneously makes for an amazingly non-broken system. And no, you can't uninstall either. Give me application bundles any day.
(Not that fink is designed for being uninstalled at all. Not that it could resist the sheer unadulterated power of rm -rf. Man, that was satisfying.)
Back in 1996, there was a computer with a working pizza oven. And a sink, of course. (I was at the show where that was being demoed: no, not on April 1, and it really did cook pizza). I can't remember what the other slices did, though.
It's 1995 predecessor was smaller, and lacked the kitchen sink.
Not 75Mhz, but 30Mhz would have been easily possible: 10 years ago, the 30Mhz version of the ARM6/7 was available (and shipping in production hardware). Designed for low power consumption and low cost, not much different from the ARM processors we see in portable devices today, really. The Apple Newton was shipping too, and it had an operating system that would not have looked out of place in modern hardware. Plus the original Palm Pilot was shipping, and the OS there hasn't changed much in that time.
As the ARM was shipping in hardware in those days, a full set of support hardware and software was available, Digital was licensing the technology in order to develop the StrongARM (1995/6 for the 200Mhz version IIRC - got a Palm on my desk that's powered by one of those). ARM didn't have quite the same profile in embedded systems markets in those days, but they were well aware of the potential of their CPU: the ARM6 was the first CPU they specifically designed for embedded applications.
So no, the hardware was *NOT* the limiting factor. The main limiting factor was the will to make the devices, especially as the (ARM6 powered) Newton was not exactly setting the world on fire.
See Here for example, discussing the ARM6 core - in 1991!
I bet that calculator is powered by an ARM7/8. A direct descendant of a processor available in quantity 10 years ago, not that much faster, and it wasn't the only one around.
Someone did a survey of how modern games responded to XYZZY and PLUGH. There's a wide range of responses, ranging from hollow voices to easter eggs. Let's see... here it is.
I implemented speech synthesis in the Mac OS X version of Zoom, although more as a gimmick than anything else. When I get around to it, the new Cocoa version should improve on this considerably (as it will be able to take advantage of Mac OS X's existing accessibility features as well as providing its own synthesis).
Speech recognition is more difficult under OS X, as you have to provide specific phrases to recognise. I thought about hacking the game and reading the grammar tables (both the Inform and Infocom formats are documented somewhere) in order to generate these, but it did seem like rather too much effort and would probably be a bit hit and miss in any case.
Iain M. Banks seems to think like you do; quite a lot of his books seem to take a poke at the 'sex is all that's left' style of SF. He's got a good sense of humour and a keen sense of human nature - it probably helps that most of what he writes is 'serious' literature, published under a slightly different name so he doesn't get lumped as a 'Sci-Fi' author. (Against a Dark Background being my personal favourite of his)
There are quite a few 'near future' type books; Stephen Baxter's Voyage is a superb book about a manned mission to Mars, replete with technical detail. Titan suffers from a poor ending (Baxter seems to have trouble with them), but the start is worryingly prophetic (hmm, it may feature NERVA later on, too. Been a while since I read it). Footfall (can't remember the author) is noted for featuring Orion. Ken McLeod has written several near future books about space travel, and Peter F. Hamilton portrays a future where money is based on fusion fuel rather than gold. Neal Asher's polity series has brilliant portrayals of really alien ecosystems. If you look for it, you'll probably find someone who's written about it.
Of course, books are more about entertainment than predicting the future. I know I wouldn't buy a book that turned out to be 100% right while being 100% boring.
It's got less publicity than the iBook problems, but Apple has also been having some serious problems with a failing power inverter in the 17" studio displays. However, some people reporting this problem have actually been suffering from a similar Open Firmware problem. Your problem might be well be that. The solution is easy, apparently (I haven't tried it): on boot, hold down Apple/Option A+V to reset the video system. I haven't been able to find any apple docs on this beyond a few things mentioned in the support forums, so many disclaimers apply:-)
Look for the 'Half dimmed flat panel display' in the apple support forums to see the thread about 17" studio displays - this, and the 1 year warranty is the main reason my LCD display did not come from Apple.
If someone can install DHCP servers on your network, then it's *ALREADY* *COMPROMISED*. In short, your security is already crap, so a couple of extra compromised macs is not going to make a huge amount of difference.
Plus, if you're willing to spend an extra minute setting up security, you could always use it to turn the damn option off. It's not exactly hard. You get a whole 55 seconds left over to do other things. Like maybe securing that damn XP box that people keep installing rogue DHCP servers on. Yeesh, treat the cause, not the symptoms.
Yep, but these problems have *ALWAYS* been there. The usual cause is an annoying interaction between the automounter and the Finder. (The finder creates a.DS_Store file that prevents the automounter from mounting the remote machines, usually if the Windows machine is shut down while mounted).
The solution I've found: go to/private/var/automount/WORKGROUP/SOMEXPMACHINE - if the directory exists but is empty, you should be able to ls -a and see the %!^@.DS_Store file. Delete the file and the directory (don't rm -rf unless you like living dangerously: rm.DS_Store and then rmdir SOMEXPMACHINE). killall -HUP automount, and relaunch the finder. Everything starts to work again, right up until the next time you shut down your XP machine.
My experience with HFS+ is that it suffers very badly from directory fragmentation. DiskWarrior should be supplied as standard with all macs; on 10.2, directory fragmentation can become a problem in months on a well-used system, and it reduces the reliability of HFS+ to the point that it can cause kernel panics. (Which are random, and make you think you have a RAM or a processor problem). Plus it makes filesystem performance really, really suck - you start to find that some operations can be hundreds of times slower than they should be.
Apple's fsck is useless: it can detect these sort of problems, but can't fix them. Norton Utilities can't either, sometimes (orphan files seem to fox it, in particular). Can't remember the specific message that fsck gives, but you'll know it if you see it (it implies a problem was fixed that wasn't. I suspect there's a/* IMPLEMENT ME */ comment in the source somewhere near there).
DiskWarrior reported that the disk was about 30% out of order; running it found about 20 files that nothing else could, solved the kernel panic problem, and made a huge difference to speed (things that would take minutes suddenly were instantaneous). It shouldn't have been necessary, though.
Currently there are all these increadably Orwellian things going on in the UK. It's amazing to drive anywhere in the UK now, there are cameras everywhere. And I don't mean the ones that photograph you when you speed (although there are lots of those), I mean video cameras. When I ask people what they are for, people don't seem to have thought about it very much.
The ones on main roads are mostly for congestion control. They probably also provide occasional early warning for the emergency services when an accident occurs. The quality usually isn't good enough to read number plates. (If you're really curious, you can get filmed by a camera, then pay 10 quid and see the pictures. Data protection act, y'see)
The other cameras, I'm not so sure about. There's been a fair few CCTV cameras around most of my life. Crime prevention mainly - usually when there's a big news story (an abduction, a murder, whatever), they show CCTV footage (crap quality). I've never heard of a case where they were abused, though - and such a case would be big news, I think.
When you go to open a bank account in the UK, they will ask you for a gas bill with your name on it in order to indentify who you are. Really. Seriously. A gas bill. And how can you get such a gas bill? Find someone who already has one, phone up with Gas Board, and ask them to add your name to the bill. (Or any name for that matter). And that's it.
That's just one form of ID. They'll accept a bill, a passport, a drivers license or a bunch of other things. Basically something that's an official document, and has your address on it. Photo ID of any sort was uncommon in the UK until very recently (my 5 year old driving license has no photo on it), so a bill really is as good as these forms of ID. (A bank statement will do as well, apparently).
Similarly with hospitals, it is apparently very easy to get treatment in the uk even if you are not a UK taxpayer, because the hospitals have no reliable way to tell who you are.
I do a lot of work for the NHS, and their main interest is actually patient history rather than ID for tax purposes. Neither will happen, as there is a lot of paranoia about leaking patient info, and a lot of political infighting. The tabloid press have a very bad reputation - if a hospital leaked something important about a celebrity, the news stories would never end. Plus there's the politics, and don't forget the politics.
1) There are increadibly draconian/orwellian things happening in the UK, and yet there is very little public debate about it and nobody seems that bothered.
1984 was a news buzzword throughout the 90's, but most of the ground was covered with the DPA, which applies to both companies and the government. If you hold information about people, you have to register under the DPA, so it's pretty hard to do any legal cloak-and-dagger stuff. You're also very restricted in what you can do with that info - it's hard to legally build up a database to sell (usual technique is those scratchcard things you get free with newspapers. Quite a lot of fine print on those, you'll see).
2) The Brits are dead against something that would actually be of great benefit in reducing all types of fraud - i.e. actually having a secure way to identify themselves.
But fraud is a national pastime! If we didn't have our fraud, we'd have to go outside or watch TV or something to pass the time, and where's the fun in that?
We have several secure ways of identifying ourselves already. Passports being the most obvious example (it's a bugger to get one), but also driving licenses, tax numbers, etc. The real problem with the ID card is that it's a form of ID we'd be expected to carry all the time (which is a pain. And we're lazy). It wouldn't change the forms of ID various services require anyway. It's all about tracking: at the moment, your fingerprints aren't on file until you actually
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I intended this to be read in the context of what Bill was saying about Microsoft rather than what he was saying about Apple. 'stole the TV' is a pretty strong metaphor for thought theft.
Bill Gates is pretty much admitting to 'Thought Theft' there: Microsoft wouldn't even have their flagship product line if they hadn't taken the idea of the GUI from Xerox and Apple.
I guess these days, Microsoft is Xerox, and some darn kids are nicking their TV now.
If you don't like acrobat, there are some alternatives for Windows that might be worth a try, not to mention stuff like GhostScript, xpdf, etc.
Part-true, part-untrue. If you're not connected to the internet, Steam will start in offline mode. You can still create LAN servers.
However, if you've previously failed to log in due to a fault like the one described in the article, Steam will disable offline mode, which is dumb.
Valve could have saved themselves a lot of problems if they'd just made steam fall back to offline mode when it couldn't contact the content servers.
... because no, Red Hat (for example) cannot take responsibility for 'the Linux kernel', because that is indeed separate from their distribution.
However, Red Hat is in no way dependant on 'the Linux kernel', because they have the source, and they have permission to modify it. They CAN and in fact DO take responsibility for the kernel as supplied with their distributions. RedHat issue their own kernel, and have been known to fix security issues (and even add features) before they make it into the main kernel tree on occasion.
The Microsoft veep is basically saying this:
1. RedHat is not responsible for the core Linux kernel distribution
2. RedHat make a Linux distribution
and trying to claim that these are related. They would be if the kernel was closed source, but it's not. RedHat could fork the kernel tomorrow if the core distribution didn't match up to their customers expectations. They probably would, too.
(Oh yeah, 'solution stack'. Bwhahahaa. Marketspeak gets worse every day... oh, and 'no single development environment'. Choice, apparently, is a bad thing. Just imagine all that taxing thinking you might have to do. No, far better not to think and choose Microsoft)
Er, the parent post is so ignorant I don't even know where to begin.
Let's see...
1. Relevance to 'modern' global warming: none. This is a hypothesis to explain one of the biggest extinctions in the history of the planet. Whatever caused it, afterwards the planet was almost a complete desert.
2. The siberian volcano wasn't merely 'big'. It was the size of Europe! One of the biggest volcanoes to happen since life evolved on Earth. And it lasted a very long time: erupting pretty much constantly for a million years. Krakatoa wasn't even a damp fart in comparison, and it changed the climate for years. It's called a flood basalt eruption, and they are really rare.
3. We know something happened to the oxygen levels at that time. They've never recovered: before the extinction, oxygen levels were nearly double what we have now. Afterwards, oxygen levels were as low as they are now at the top of high mountains. Modern animals, including us, would have serious problems in that environment. Imagine what problems animals used to even more oxygen would have. Yep, they'd die.
4. The dinosaurs. Yes. Well. Guess which event preceded the dinosaurs? You don't suppose, perchance, that the reason the world was warmer when the dinosaurs were about was because of this? I mean, saying the dinosaurs were happy in a hotter climate, so it doesn't matter if it's hot is just dumb. The hot climate that the dinos lived in was what killed the creatures that came before. That made space for dinosaurs to appear.
Or to put it another way. Polar bears are perfectly happy when the temperature is -20 or lower. So naturally, everything else would be happy if the entire world was at this temperature. Yeah, right. (And of course, polar bears would be just fine living at the equator. The dinosaurs had it hotter! SHEEEESH)
5. The main cause of the fall in oxygen levels was supposedly a massive drop in sea levels. The most likely cause of this is supposedly global cooling caused by the volcanoes ash (there are very large carbon deposits under the sea, which would have become liberated when the sea levels dropped enough). This is what caused the global warming.
Finally, this is not sensationalistic. This huge extinction HAPPENED. The siberian volcano also happened, at the same time. The reduction in oxygen levels happened, too. A lot of other stuff happened at this time. There's very good evidence for all of this. The question the paper is trying to answer is what caused the extinction. This has bugger-all to do with global warming in a modern context, cows or even vogons.
This link describes the vulcanism in Siberia a bit better than the rather lame Yahoo article linked by the blurb.
Uh, 'Viewtiful Joe' is a modern sidescroller. It topped the charts here in the UK for a while, so they're still popular. 'Paper Mario' sounds like it might be basically a side scroller, too.
Hmm, the lighting is very inconsistent in that screenshot. The shadows appear to be offset as for a lightsource at the top of the screen and in the middle. Some, but not all, of the icons in the panel are designed that way too. However, the shading on the windows, the buttons in the calculator, etc, are all for a light source in the top left. Oh dear: if you were to copy Apple's style and apply it to GNOME without really thinking about why the icons are designed that way (in either GNOME or OS X), this is probably what you'd get.
These shadows, and Apple's, are gaussian shadows: to make them, you take the silouette of your window, apply a gaussian blur kernel and then offset the shadow. This gives the shadows a 'soft', natural appearance, but makes them slightly larger than the window giving that 'all-around shadow' effect. It's fairly computationally expensive to do for arbitrarily shaped windows, but you can 'fake' the effect easily for windows with similar shapes (and straight edges). This is also the shadow effect you'll see in applications like the Gimp or photoshop.
Sigh, you seem to think I didn't try this. I did this from the terminal - rm asks for no password. Neither do pieces of software like TextEdit, which delete the file before replacing it.
/Library/Preferences directory. That means you can modify the directory: ie move, create or delete files, regardless of the permissions on this file, with no further authentication. Setting the '+t' permission restricts this priviledge to files that you also have write access to.
/Library/Preferences' then 'rm com.apple.sharing.firewall.plist'. *Poof* your firewall settings are gone, and you didn't enter a password. (You did remember to back them up before trying this, didn't you?)
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sharing.firewall.pl ist in TextEdit, alter it and hit 'Save'. TextEdit will ask if you want to try to force an overwrite, choose 'Overwrite', *poof* firewall settings overwritten, no password.
It's a security hole because it allows you to do something that you normally would require a password without using one.
As to why: the admin group has write access to the
Proof: go to a terminal, type 'cd
Alternatively, open
Of course, someone who wants to mess with your system while your back is turned would probably be more interested in some of the other files in there. Altering loginwindow.plist would provide them with an easy way to get root access, for example.
It's a privilege escalation vulnerability. If you can get a session as an admin account (because the real admin has his back turned, for example), you can use this misfeature to gain full root access without ever knowing a single password on the system.
Think outside the box. You can't write to the file, but you *can* write to the directory: it has write permissions for members of the admin group. So you can rename or delete the file without the need to authenticate, provided you're a member of the admin group. Then you create a new one in its place.
/Library/Preferences closes this hole, though that might affect other things: I haven't tried this yet.
chmod +t
Andrew.
NeXT since 1989. NeXTStep's dock was almost certainly the original inspiration for the taskbar in Windows '95 (as well as many of the X11 task switchers).
The main difference was that in NeXT, windows were always grouped by application, but with Windows, windows are only grouped by application sometimes.
JET reached (or came very close to) the break-even point (produced as much power as it consumed). ITER will surpass it and actually generate power. (5-10x as much out as is put in, so that would mean that the heating required during fusion would be around 50-100MW). See here, for example.
It's also designed to be repairable in the event of a failure (in the way a commercial reactor would need to be), and its designers have benefitted considerably from the experience of JET. The BBC has covered this reactor for some time: I'm surprised slashdot has only picked up on it now.
Possibly because the 10.2 help application used its own (crappy) HTML renderer rather than WebKit, so the help: protocol doesn't exist.
It's a bit of a design flaw, really. Why is the help: protocol registered globally at all? There really isn't a good reason for doing that, I don't think (unless [NSURLProtocol registerClass:] registers globally. In which case, that's a HUGE design flaw). The help: protocol exists to allow the help application to run local scripts: this flaw is there by design!
I think the poor quality of Apple's package manager is deliberate. Apple don't /like/ install software: they think that you should be able to run new software straight from the CD, and installation should be a matter of dragging the application from it's CD or disk image straight to wherever you want it to be installed. Installation programs break the spatial paradigm that is the heart of Mac OS, and Apple's documentation says this.
.pkg format is intended for those (RARE!) times when there's no other choice than to install files in multiple places. The reason you rarely need to do this is because of Apple's use of NeXT-style bundles. Sheesh, even M$ gets this right. You can run Word v.X straight off the Office X CD if you want.
Now, this is useless for command line tools, but Mac OS X is emphatically not a command line OS at heart. The
This also has the *HUGE* advantage that there's no such thing as 'uninstalling'. Because everything associated with an application goes in the bundle, deleting the app is all you need: no auxiliary files are left lying around to mystify you later on.
Then again, what do I know? RPM and apt messed up their package databases so often for me on Linux that these days I always install from source there: it often only takes one broken package, and it's always a complete ARSE to repair. Hah, I've just finished reinstalling fink after it decided to make approximately half of its X11 applications depend on its own X11 port and the other half depend on the system installed X11. According to the fink mailing list this was obviously my own fault. Though they wouldn't tell me any specifics on how this could possibly happen, just that it was nothing to do with them. Wonderful. Having both system-x11 and xfree86 installed simultaneously makes for an amazingly non-broken system. And no, you can't uninstall either. Give me application bundles any day.
(Not that fink is designed for being uninstalled at all. Not that it could resist the sheer unadulterated power of rm -rf. Man, that was satisfying.)
It's 1995 predecessor was smaller, and lacked the kitchen sink.
Not 75Mhz, but 30Mhz would have been easily possible: 10 years ago, the 30Mhz version of the ARM6/7 was available (and shipping in production hardware). Designed for low power consumption and low cost, not much different from the ARM processors we see in portable devices today, really. The Apple Newton was shipping too, and it had an operating system that would not have looked out of place in modern hardware. Plus the original Palm Pilot was shipping, and the OS there hasn't changed much in that time.
As the ARM was shipping in hardware in those days, a full set of support hardware and software was available, Digital was licensing the technology in order to develop the StrongARM (1995/6 for the 200Mhz version IIRC - got a Palm on my desk that's powered by one of those). ARM didn't have quite the same profile in embedded systems markets in those days, but they were well aware of the potential of their CPU: the ARM6 was the first CPU they specifically designed for embedded applications.
So no, the hardware was *NOT* the limiting factor. The main limiting factor was the will to make the devices, especially as the (ARM6 powered) Newton was not exactly setting the world on fire.
See Here for example, discussing the ARM6 core - in 1991!
I bet that calculator is powered by an ARM7/8. A direct descendant of a processor available in quantity 10 years ago, not that much faster, and it wasn't the only one around.
Someone did a survey of how modern games responded to XYZZY and PLUGH. There's a wide range of responses, ranging from hollow voices to easter eggs. Let's see... here it is.
I implemented speech synthesis in the Mac OS X version of Zoom, although more as a gimmick than anything else. When I get around to it, the new Cocoa version should improve on this considerably (as it will be able to take advantage of Mac OS X's existing accessibility features as well as providing its own synthesis). Speech recognition is more difficult under OS X, as you have to provide specific phrases to recognise. I thought about hacking the game and reading the grammar tables (both the Inform and Infocom formats are documented somewhere) in order to generate these, but it did seem like rather too much effort and would probably be a bit hit and miss in any case.
Iain M. Banks seems to think like you do; quite a lot of his books seem to take a poke at the 'sex is all that's left' style of SF. He's got a good sense of humour and a keen sense of human nature - it probably helps that most of what he writes is 'serious' literature, published under a slightly different name so he doesn't get lumped as a 'Sci-Fi' author. (Against a Dark Background being my personal favourite of his)
There are quite a few 'near future' type books; Stephen Baxter's Voyage is a superb book about a manned mission to Mars, replete with technical detail. Titan suffers from a poor ending (Baxter seems to have trouble with them), but the start is worryingly prophetic (hmm, it may feature NERVA later on, too. Been a while since I read it). Footfall (can't remember the author) is noted for featuring Orion. Ken McLeod has written several near future books about space travel, and Peter F. Hamilton portrays a future where money is based on fusion fuel rather than gold. Neal Asher's polity series has brilliant portrayals of really alien ecosystems. If you look for it, you'll probably find someone who's written about it.
Of course, books are more about entertainment than predicting the future. I know I wouldn't buy a book that turned out to be 100% right while being 100% boring.
Look for the 'Half dimmed flat panel display' in the apple support forums to see the thread about 17" studio displays - this, and the 1 year warranty is the main reason my LCD display did not come from Apple.
Not Microsoft, but Babbage steam engines, obviously. And they smelled of rotten eggs.
If someone can install DHCP servers on your network, then it's *ALREADY* *COMPROMISED*. In short, your security is already crap, so a couple of extra compromised macs is not going to make a huge amount of difference.
Plus, if you're willing to spend an extra minute setting up security, you could always use it to turn the damn option off. It's not exactly hard. You get a whole 55 seconds left over to do other things. Like maybe securing that damn XP box that people keep installing rogue DHCP servers on. Yeesh, treat the cause, not the symptoms.
Yep, but these problems have *ALWAYS* been there. The usual cause is an annoying interaction between the automounter and the Finder. (The finder creates a .DS_Store file that prevents the automounter from mounting the remote machines, usually if the Windows machine is shut down while mounted).
/private/var/automount/WORKGROUP/SOMEXPMACHINE - if the directory exists but is empty, you should be able to ls -a and see the %!^@ .DS_Store file. Delete the file and the directory (don't rm -rf unless you like living dangerously: rm .DS_Store and then rmdir SOMEXPMACHINE). killall -HUP automount, and relaunch the finder. Everything starts to work again, right up until the next time you shut down your XP machine.
The solution I've found: go to
Andrew.
My experience with HFS+ is that it suffers very badly from directory fragmentation. DiskWarrior should be supplied as standard with all macs; on 10.2, directory fragmentation can become a problem in months on a well-used system, and it reduces the reliability of HFS+ to the point that it can cause kernel panics. (Which are random, and make you think you have a RAM or a processor problem). Plus it makes filesystem performance really, really suck - you start to find that some operations can be hundreds of times slower than they should be.
/* IMPLEMENT ME */ comment in the source somewhere near there).
Apple's fsck is useless: it can detect these sort of problems, but can't fix them. Norton Utilities can't either, sometimes (orphan files seem to fox it, in particular). Can't remember the specific message that fsck gives, but you'll know it if you see it (it implies a problem was fixed that wasn't. I suspect there's a
DiskWarrior reported that the disk was about 30% out of order; running it found about 20 files that nothing else could, solved the kernel panic problem, and made a huge difference to speed (things that would take minutes suddenly were instantaneous). It shouldn't have been necessary, though.
The ones on main roads are mostly for congestion control. They probably also provide occasional early warning for the emergency services when an accident occurs. The quality usually isn't good enough to read number plates. (If you're really curious, you can get filmed by a camera, then pay 10 quid and see the pictures. Data protection act, y'see)
The other cameras, I'm not so sure about. There's been a fair few CCTV cameras around most of my life. Crime prevention mainly - usually when there's a big news story (an abduction, a murder, whatever), they show CCTV footage (crap quality). I've never heard of a case where they were abused, though - and such a case would be big news, I think.
That's just one form of ID. They'll accept a bill, a passport, a drivers license or a bunch of other things. Basically something that's an official document, and has your address on it. Photo ID of any sort was uncommon in the UK until very recently (my 5 year old driving license has no photo on it), so a bill really is as good as these forms of ID. (A bank statement will do as well, apparently).
I do a lot of work for the NHS, and their main interest is actually patient history rather than ID for tax purposes. Neither will happen, as there is a lot of paranoia about leaking patient info, and a lot of political infighting. The tabloid press have a very bad reputation - if a hospital leaked something important about a celebrity, the news stories would never end. Plus there's the politics, and don't forget the politics.
1984 was a news buzzword throughout the 90's, but most of the ground was covered with the DPA, which applies to both companies and the government. If you hold information about people, you have to register under the DPA, so it's pretty hard to do any legal cloak-and-dagger stuff. You're also very restricted in what you can do with that info - it's hard to legally build up a database to sell (usual technique is those scratchcard things you get free with newspapers. Quite a lot of fine print on those, you'll see).
But fraud is a national pastime! If we didn't have our fraud, we'd have to go outside or watch TV or something to pass the time, and where's the fun in that?
We have several secure ways of identifying ourselves already. Passports being the most obvious example (it's a bugger to get one), but also driving licenses, tax numbers, etc. The real problem with the ID card is that it's a form of ID we'd be expected to carry all the time (which is a pain. And we're lazy). It wouldn't change the forms of ID various services require anyway. It's all about tracking: at the moment, your fingerprints aren't on file until you actually