I'm still using an app I wrote for System 7 and subsequently lost the source code for in a disk debacle. It was last compiled in 1993 and runs today under OS X 10.4 on a dual G5.
Maybe "no longer growing", but certainly not "dead". 68K apps have been supported on the PPC architecture via the Classic emulator app since the conversion to PPC started.
While not many companies still bother to ship 68K versions of their products, Apple has supported their customers' software investments and will continue to do so with the Rosetta real-time instruction translator and universal binary formats.
PPC software will last a lot longer than PPC hardware. For some years after the last PPC Mac ceases production, there will be support for PPC apps under OS X.
However, as it's clear that 68K support WILL be dead when OS X 10.5 rolls out, I'm starting to reverse-engineer my few remaining 68K apps in Cocoa...
The thing about Apple's support for legacy apps is that the internals of their system designs are sufficiently encapsulated that new features can be introduced without breaking legacy support (newer features will most likely be ignored by the legacy support) and without hobbling the design of the new features. One of the niceties of good software design.
We have a plethora of conflicting role models for this in our society.
For instance, while a house with no doors in the frames is still technically a "closed" facility and uninvited entry may be characterized as breaking and entering. And most of us utilize (snail-)mailboxes without any sort of lock, recognizing that it is a federal crime to mess with someone else's mail. Most things are like this. You don't have to lock your car for it to be "stolen". Use of an unattended, unsecured bicycle is treated as theft -- and nobody disputes that.
However, in the case of copyright and trademark protection (i.e., things which may be characterized as "information assets"), if the owner does not take overt action to protect his trademark/copyright, he may lose it. The act of filing to obtain the rights to the trademark/copyright does not constitute an intent to protect.
The degree of protection required to secure those assets is immaterial -- only evidence of some effort to defend it is required.
Internet access, in the wake of 9-11, has been cranked up there on a par with postal mail and domiciles by the legislative folks, placing some well defined rules on the boundaries placed around internet access.
So if you want to share a WiFi connection, be sure to have some sort of signed agreement that grants bandwidth access to all the signatories. I suspect that Speakeasy's provision that each participant in one of its shared WiFi connections be separately billed by them might be construed as the minimum level of documented agreement among the folks sharing a connection, but IANAL.
It would be best to consult a lawyer and draw up some sort of agreement before entering into a co-operative internet access arrangement. My guess is that the fine print on most ISP agreements explicitly prohibits shared use of the bandwidth, unless otherwise stated, as in the case of Speakeasy.
If there were a contractual agreement to share bandwidth that violated the terms of the ISP agreement, my guess is that the party holding the agreement with the ISP would be just as liable as those the bandwidth is being shared with if there were ever any sort of problems, and would be subject to being dropped or sued by the ISP upon discovery of such a prohibited activity.
Again, IANAL -- but if you would agree to pay me for my uninformed musings... well, I'll take the cash but my liabilty stops there, because, as I have previously stated, IANAL.
... Google maps of fictional places? I can see all kinds of tie-ins to (e)book publishing -- imagine if the Marauder's Map in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets could be accessed by the reader at any point in the story, of the potential of interactive maps of Narnia or (Alice in) Wonderland in drawing the reader into the story a bit more, blurring the boundaries between reading and gaming.
Seems like all it would take is for Google to accept the publisher's business, and post the maps.
as a ravenous, hyper-competent business enterprise that arose from the arena of personal computing to become the global juggernaut that it is today.
That might be true, except for the part about "competent" and the unspoken assumption that the PC marketplace they conquered is in any way, shape or form comparable to an established industry, where the markets are well-understood and the players are all tough characters with a string of corporate corpses in their respective pasts.
If one looks at the many attempts by Microsoft to enter any "mature" industry, you find them pouring tons of money down the drain in an attempt to overwhelm their target market -- it's what worked in the nascent PC industry, where their competitors were either too small to match them dollar for dollar, or chose not to lower profitability to compete in a (wrongly-perceived) niche market, and they expect the same formula to work elsewhere.
Except that it doesn't. In established industries, the major players are too big to be bought or have their access to their markets blocked by the types of schemes Microsoft used to gain control of the PC business. The competition they now face has the wherewithal to do battle with Microsoft on every front, and other lines of business to fund those efforts, just as Microsoft uses the profits from its personal computer software monopoly to back its plays.
Don't get me wrong -- they have boatloads of cash, and a competent player with a long view would deploy that strategically and slowly become a force in the target market over time. But not Microsoft -- they storm the beaches throwing money everywhere. And when the dust settles, they're in about the same place as they started, minus a few hundred million (or billion) bucks.
They have a sufficiently adequate income that they can repeatedly do this and not sink the company. But until they get over their notion that they can win every war the same way they won their first war, they will gain no ground.
And that's why they're not "competent" -- they don't learn. Even in their own kingdom -- the PC software markets -- they were late to recognize the importance of the internet, and late to recognize that system security had become a major issue. If and when a quality user experience becomes a major hot button to their customers, they will be the last ones to get the message. They do *not* represent where innovation comes from in the PC markets, and have no idea where those markets are headed.
There are not a lot of corporations that are a hundred years old. Markets change, and every change becomes an opportunity for a company to fail. I doubt that there will be a Microsoft in 2075, as it will pass into history along with the PC.
... and you've fed him for a day, and another day, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and...
Teach a man to fish, and [insert your own punchline here]
Pretty sad, when I can't even proofread my own submissions to a forum on correctness in spelling and grammar.
I tried, really I did. I think it was a case of seeing what I intended to write, rather than what I actually did write.
What I meant to say was 'Do there exist sites for those who are "obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy?"'
Perhaps this explains the high level of egregious spelling and grammar errors seen in Slashdot postings. While a spellchecker would be an offensive and meddlesome crutch, just allowing the submitter to correct their own posts might go a long way toward making the Slashdot audience seem a bit more literate. Displaying the posting input in the same font size as the preview/main text would also be helpful.
One wonders if keeping Slashdot use at a certain level of irritability serves the purposes of Cmdr Taco & Co, as a more bland reader interaction would be less popular.
1) Slashdot responder's age vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
2) Slashdot responder's IQ (or any other measure of purported "intelligence", such as highest degree attained in a formal educational system, or SAT scores (verbal and math as a tuple, Thank You)) vs the same metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
3) Slashdot responder's income vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
4) Slashdot responder's political affiliation vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
Slashdot responder's karma rating vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Why yes, I was educated as an engineer in my undergraduate degree -- why do you ask?
... to be able to distinguish between the hardware (or meatware) comprising a computer and the software that utilizes the underlying physical framework.
Or for that matter, to realize that such things as analog computers exist, and can be simulated on digital computers.
That said, I do find the Cornell researchers' conclusions interesting, as there is a wealth of data that suggests that our input data is delivered/sampled discretely, and not in continuous streams.
It's pretty widely recognized that we are mainly visually based, and that our "view" of reality is an interpretation of the data by the brain, and not necessarily a precise interpretation at that.
The missing pieces are filled in by our minds (and I'm not about to be drawn into a discussion of whether the mind is consciousness, meatware or programming -- there is simply not sufficient information known at this point to make it more than a wild guess) based on what the mind expects to be there. Such expectations may be based on experience, neuroses, or urban legends.
Could a digital computer be constructed to perform (simulate) this process? IBM seems to think so, at least at the more fundamental levels, 'cause they're building one.
So while we may have analog computers progessing discrete/sampled data feeds nesteled in our skills, IBM is working on building a digital computer to simulate an analog meatware facility that processes data in discrete chunks.
I suppose it's not too much to see that once the fundamental processes are understood, a considerably streamlined execution of those processes will be possible, although such a result would be in no way whatsoever similar to a human consciousness -- assuming such a thing were to be self-aware, the differing processing speeds of the various internal domains would render the entirely of the thing to be something completely different than a human mind.
It might be a super-smart ant, or something approaching an omniscient being, or it might just get bored and turn itself off. No way to know without performing the experiment.
If "creating" is the thing that makes Wil's soul-sails fill with the wind, I would think that directing is where he would be heading, as writer's are just as ham-strung as actors in the visual media circus.
Oh, that's right -- I forgot there are venues for writing other than screenplays and scripts.
Silly me.
I still think that he might enjoy taking a spin at the director's chair. Who knows? He might be the next Clint Eastwood. (that sound is Wil Wheaton's ego exploding)
"WMD was not proven false... Terrorist ties were also not proven false...."
References, Please?
Without pretty iron-clad substantiation, this is pretty much just blind ranting, similar to such things as "There is no proof we ever landed on the Moon" and "America is full of terrorists just waiting to strike".
Given the documented attempts at false reporting such as the Jessica Lynch "rescue", and our ability to chase down Saddaam Hussein (who was a lot easier to hide than a bunker full of WMD), one has to look upon your statements and wonder exactly what planet you come from.
Unless of course, your response is just a troll and I have bitten into it hook, linke and sinker.
Try losing your real shirt (or life) when your physical realm takes a hit.
Just ask the folks who had their physical realm impacted by the tsumani, or people who've had their villages burned in genocidal cleansing operations around the globe.
Wanna bet their real estate valuations took a hit?
There are events that governments are powerless to prevent, or protect their citizens from.
I see no difference here between the physical and virtual realms. There are certainly differences, but they do not involve economics or security.
I don't believe, given the seemingly incredible stoopidity of the folks minding the store, that I would accept ANY claims about what the "intruder" did or did not do -- it seems to me to be at least equally possible that, upon discovering that they had an unwelcome guest, the investigating Keystone Cop accidently deleted the user accounts himself, and decided to blame it on this poor sap.
Or the system may have been damaged weeks or months previously, with anything wrong being attributed to our clueless doofus UFO-hunter.
And exactly how was he caught? Did he finally manage to locate the single installation that had some effective security?
I'd want to see the logs before I made any accusations in this case, which seems like a comedic episode of the X-Files.
If indeed his access was entirely through sloppy security management/mismanagement on the part of our armed forces (gasp! how could it be?!?), then it seems like the "damages" assessed to him for "track(ing) down and fix(ing)" their crap should by rights, be billable to them as consulting fees and paid to this ufo-hunting whacko.
The real threat to security here is to allow the idiots who were responsible for security of those systems to keep their jobs.
So it looks like, instead of fixing the real cause of the problems, he's gonna be interrogated in Guantanamo Bay for the rest of his life -- while the REAL bad guys are now alerted to the fact that our defense security is managed by morons.
I think Apple would be delighted to have Microsoft release Windows for x86 Macs. In fact, if Microsoft doesn't do it, I'll bet Apple offers the option of having Windows preinstalled in a bootable partition, alongside OS X in a dual-boot setup.
Of course, that option will fully reflect the cost of adding Windows to the machine.
Remember, Apple is primarily in the hardware business. Just as iTunes is a way to sell iPods, OS X is a way to sell Macs. If they can use Windows to sell Macs, they will.
I'll bet that the notion of an Apple-to-Apple comparison of Windows vs OS X on the same hardware (on the same machine!), with the OS X costs hidden and Windows costs prominently displayed, keeps Bill Gates awake at night.
However, there's no chance that such a machine will ever be officially "Certified for Windows" by Microsoft. So they'll have to do without the sticker on the box, and will probably have to take Microsoft to court when Microsoft adds code to make Windows crash when run on an x86 Mac.
Please explain to me how Apple is going to sell PPC-based Macs from this point forward? As I understand it, If you bought a Mac today, come 2007 the software will be Intel-only, as the entire Apple product line will be Pentium-based.
They took care of extending the useful life of the existing software via Rosetta, but so far as I can tell, existing hardware -- NEW existing hardware -- has an 18 month time horizon.
Were there guarantees of fat binaries of OS X for the next N releases of OS X and I missed it? And even if that were so, unless 3rd party software makers also go that route, supporting 2 different instruction sets for free, you're still going to run into instances of software being released that doesn't run on your 18-month-old Powermac.
Unless the Rosetta code translation is bidirectional, which I don't believe it was presented as such.
So who will buy a Mac that becomes anchored in the past in 18 months?
I guess this is how Steve plans to use Apple's huge cash position -- they'll tread water and sell iPods for the next 12-18 months.
IBM is now something like two years behind on its promised 3 Ghz chips.
Funny -- IBM seems to have no problem promising 3.2 GHz triple-core and 8-core PPC derivative cpus to Microsoft and Sony, in pretty huge volumes -- but we'll have to wait until year-end to see if they deliver on those promises.
IBM seems to have dropped the ball on supplying the dual core 970fx chip to Apple, which was probably the last straw, on top of IBM's continuing lack of interest in pursuing low power G5 designs suitable for notebook use.
IBM has also said that their fab capacity is "booked" for the foreseeable future, which pretty well rules out any chance of Apple being able to achieve any kind of market share increase via IBM.
Looks a lot like Apple is being squeezed out, similar to the days when Microsoft would gain market share by consuming all the shelf space in stores, except that this would be IBM doing the screwing in collusion with Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Sony. I expect Sony to get most of its CELL processors either in-house or from Toshiba). Once upon a time, IBM had "allocation rules" to prevent smaller customers from being squeezed out by larger ones.
... which is not in evidence, is the only thing needed.
I gotta love the NASA admin's comment,
"If you ask anyone in this country, 'Do you believe that the United States should cede the moon to say the Chinese, Europeans, Russians, whoever?' I bet you the answer would be, 'No,'" he said.
I guess they don't mind outsourcing all the work to the "Chinese, Europeans, Russians, whomever", as the way technical employment is going in this country, there will be no US science grads to do the work!
Or maybe this is the plan to provide boomer techies retirement jobs to keep them going when Social Security is sucked dry...
... that neither the Pittburgh Gazzette nor Roland Piquepaille's summary gives other than the barest reference to the existing, FDA-approved technology developed by Israeli-based Given Imaging to do this sort of thing, the PillCam.
The PillCam is a small capsule containing a camera, light, battery, and wireless transmitter that sends images to a receiver belt worn by the patient as the capsule tumbles its way through the intestinal tract.
The only thing new offered in this bit of "news", is the thought of attempting to put legs on the capsule and overcome the natural peristaltic movement of the capsule through the intestines by stabbing the intestinal walls to move around and shoot more images of something interesting.
It's something I view as a very questionable long shot at best, given the additional power required to actively position the thing, and the notion that having pointy legs sticking out inside one's intestines might not be the safest way to investigate intestinal problems.
... REXX is yet another interpretive scripting language, one that is exceedingly clear and non-cryptic -- one can return to a REXX script you wrote a decade ago and understand it (try that with perl!).
And REXX has a much easier learning curve than something like perl, even easier (IMHO) than plain vanilla unix hell scripting. If you're in a large group or a group with a high turnover, you could do a lot worse than selecting REXX as a scripting standard.
For specifics as to why you might choose REXX over another scripting language in your toolkit, it has tremendous parsing capabilities (you can specify a template when you read text from the input stream, and have REXX bust up the incoming text to fit the template, adjusting case if desired) as well as very nice ways of dealing with arrays ("stems" in REXX parlance).
One of the niceties of using REXX in the mainframe world was that you could specify the environment a command string would be interpreted in. Not quite AppleScript, where you can direct scriptable apps to do your bidding, but the next best thing.
This allows you to co-opt other portions of your system to do the work for you, and not reinvent the wheel at every turn. Think of this as the "script as conductor" philosophy of scripting.
But REXX is also capable of functioning as a standalone programming environment. In the mainframe realm, I've done socket programming, dynamic sql, screen painting and more file conversions than I want to think about using REXX. I do code using a fair assortment of compiled languages, but when it's crunch time, nothing beats a good interpretive scripting facility to deliver the goods in a timely manner.
Sadly, aside from the unix/dos command shell, I don't believe many other environments are generally supported under non-mainframe REXX (I don't believe I've ever seen REXX operating as an EMACS macro, for example), but given the flexibility of the unix shell environment, that is generally sufficient.
The thing most people forget about when they talk about Microsoft's "death" is that a big cash balance gives you extra lives in the (real) reality. To extinguish Microsoft, you would first have to drain their cash hoard.
For all practical purposes, Microsoft is invulnerable.
Even if today's computing industry were to disappear tomorrow, Microsoft has sufficient cash resources to re-make itself many times in other industries.
This is basically why we have antitrust laws, as there's no other way that a company can be deconstructed to allow new sprouts of innovation to be permitted to grow and blossom -- but as we have seen, Microsoft has already dealt with that, and has the judiciary well in hand.
One of the fundamental notions of free markets is that competition between players (companies) is an efficient means to both select the best products/ideas and to bring them to the consumer at the lowest cost. When a single player "wins", becoming dominant over all other players in an industry, it it the government's role to break them up into competing entities, and thus restore the proper operation of the free marketplace.
Textbook theory breaks down when asked to consider the case where a monopoly gains effective control over the government.
In the fullness of time, such organizations are likely to rot from within, and become vulnerable to toppling from unexpected directions. Meanwhile, the rate of progress in the industry owned by the monopoly grinds to a near-halt, as the monopoly feeds upon the consumers unimpeded by the watchdogs of competition.
Slashdot Mirror
dead end like 68K?
I'm still using an app I wrote for System 7 and subsequently lost the source code for in a disk debacle. It was last compiled in 1993 and runs today under OS X 10.4 on a dual G5.
Maybe "no longer growing", but certainly not "dead". 68K apps have been supported on the PPC architecture via the Classic emulator app since the conversion to PPC started.
While not many companies still bother to ship 68K versions of their products, Apple has supported their customers' software investments and will continue to do so with the Rosetta real-time instruction translator and universal binary formats.
PPC software will last a lot longer than PPC hardware. For some years after the last PPC Mac ceases production, there will be support for PPC apps under OS X.
However, as it's clear that 68K support WILL be dead when OS X 10.5 rolls out, I'm starting to reverse-engineer my few remaining 68K apps in Cocoa...
The thing about Apple's support for legacy apps is that the internals of their system designs are sufficiently encapsulated that new features can be introduced without breaking legacy support (newer features will most likely be ignored by the legacy support) and without hobbling the design of the new features. One of the niceties of good software design.
... rope will hang you!
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We have a plethora of conflicting role models for this in our society.
For instance, while a house with no doors in the frames is still technically a "closed" facility and uninvited entry may be characterized as breaking and entering. And most of us utilize (snail-)mailboxes without any sort of lock, recognizing that it is a federal crime to mess with someone else's mail. Most things are like this. You don't have to lock your car for it to be "stolen". Use of an unattended, unsecured bicycle is treated as theft -- and nobody disputes that.
However, in the case of copyright and trademark protection (i.e., things which may be characterized as "information assets"), if the owner does not take overt action to protect his trademark/copyright, he may lose it. The act of filing to obtain the rights to the trademark/copyright does not constitute an intent to protect.
The degree of protection required to secure those assets is immaterial -- only evidence of some effort to defend it is required.
Internet access, in the wake of 9-11, has been cranked up there on a par with postal mail and domiciles by the legislative folks, placing some well defined rules on the boundaries placed around internet access.
So if you want to share a WiFi connection, be sure to have some sort of signed agreement that grants bandwidth access to all the signatories. I suspect that Speakeasy's provision that each participant in one of its shared WiFi connections be separately billed by them might be construed as the minimum level of documented agreement among the folks sharing a connection, but IANAL.
It would be best to consult a lawyer and draw up some sort of agreement before entering into a co-operative internet access arrangement. My guess is that the fine print on most ISP agreements explicitly prohibits shared use of the bandwidth, unless otherwise stated, as in the case of Speakeasy.
If there were a contractual agreement to share bandwidth that violated the terms of the ISP agreement, my guess is that the party holding the agreement with the ISP would be just as liable as those the bandwidth is being shared with if there were ever any sort of problems, and would be subject to being dropped or sued by the ISP upon discovery of such a prohibited activity.
Again, IANAL -- but if you would agree to pay me for my uninformed musings... well, I'll take the cash but my liabilty stops there, because, as I have previously stated, IANAL.
... Google maps of fictional places? I can see all kinds of tie-ins to (e)book publishing -- imagine if the Marauder's Map in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets could be accessed by the reader at any point in the story, of the potential of interactive maps of Narnia or (Alice in) Wonderland in drawing the reader into the story a bit more, blurring the boundaries between reading and gaming.
Seems like all it would take is for Google to accept the publisher's business, and post the maps.
as a ravenous, hyper-competent business enterprise that arose from the arena of personal computing to become the global juggernaut that it is today.
That might be true, except for the part about "competent" and the unspoken assumption that the PC marketplace they conquered is in any way, shape or form comparable to an established industry, where the markets are well-understood and the players are all tough characters with a string of corporate corpses in their respective pasts.
If one looks at the many attempts by Microsoft to enter any "mature" industry, you find them pouring tons of money down the drain in an attempt to overwhelm their target market -- it's what worked in the nascent PC industry, where their competitors were either too small to match them dollar for dollar, or chose not to lower profitability to compete in a (wrongly-perceived) niche market, and they expect the same formula to work elsewhere.
Except that it doesn't. In established industries, the major players are too big to be bought or have their access to their markets blocked by the types of schemes Microsoft used to gain control of the PC business. The competition they now face has the wherewithal to do battle with Microsoft on every front, and other lines of business to fund those efforts, just as Microsoft uses the profits from its personal computer software monopoly to back its plays.
Don't get me wrong -- they have boatloads of cash, and a competent player with a long view would deploy that strategically and slowly become a force in the target market over time. But not Microsoft -- they storm the beaches throwing money everywhere. And when the dust settles, they're in about the same place as they started, minus a few hundred million (or billion) bucks.
They have a sufficiently adequate income that they can repeatedly do this and not sink the company. But until they get over their notion that they can win every war the same way they won their first war, they will gain no ground.
And that's why they're not "competent" -- they don't learn. Even in their own kingdom -- the PC software markets -- they were late to recognize the importance of the internet, and late to recognize that system security had become a major issue. If and when a quality user experience becomes a major hot button to their customers, they will be the last ones to get the message. They do *not* represent where innovation comes from in the PC markets, and have no idea where those markets are headed.
There are not a lot of corporations that are a hundred years old. Markets change, and every change becomes an opportunity for a company to fail. I doubt that there will be a Microsoft in 2075, as it will pass into history along with the PC.
Oh, I see. Nevermind.
... and you've fed him for a day, and another day, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and ...
Teach a man to fish, and [insert your own punchline here]
1276 comments, and only 46 ranked at 4 or above.
Awash in incoherent rantings.
Probably evidence of heavy metal poisoning at a national level. Damn terrorists.
I tried, really I did. I think it was a case of seeing what I intended to write, rather than what I actually did write.
What I meant to say was 'Do there exist sites for those who are "obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy?"'
Perhaps this explains the high level of egregious spelling and grammar errors seen in Slashdot postings. While a spellchecker would be an offensive and meddlesome crutch, just allowing the submitter to correct their own posts might go a long way toward making the Slashdot audience seem a bit more literate. Displaying the posting input in the same font size as the preview/main text would also be helpful.
One wonders if keeping Slashdot use at a certain level of irritability serves the purposes of Cmdr Taco & Co, as a more bland reader interaction would be less popular.
1) Slashdot responder's age vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
2) Slashdot responder's IQ (or any other measure of purported "intelligence", such as highest degree attained in a formal educational system, or SAT scores (verbal and math as a tuple, Thank You)) vs the same metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
3) Slashdot responder's income vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
4) Slashdot responder's political affiliation vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
Slashdot responder's karma rating vs some metric of spelling+grammar correctness.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Why yes, I was educated as an engineer in my undergraduate degree -- why do you ask?
Do there exists sites for those who are "obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy?"
How about with a healthy(?) dose of sometimes-informed opinionated ranting thrown in?
Or for that matter, to realize that such things as analog computers exist, and can be simulated on digital computers.
That said, I do find the Cornell researchers' conclusions interesting, as there is a wealth of data that suggests that our input data is delivered/sampled discretely, and not in continuous streams.
It's pretty widely recognized that we are mainly visually based, and that our "view" of reality is an interpretation of the data by the brain, and not necessarily a precise interpretation at that.
The missing pieces are filled in by our minds (and I'm not about to be drawn into a discussion of whether the mind is consciousness, meatware or programming -- there is simply not sufficient information known at this point to make it more than a wild guess) based on what the mind expects to be there. Such expectations may be based on experience, neuroses, or urban legends.
Could a digital computer be constructed to perform (simulate) this process? IBM seems to think so, at least at the more fundamental levels, 'cause they're building one. So while we may have analog computers progessing discrete/sampled data feeds nesteled in our skills, IBM is working on building a digital computer to simulate an analog meatware facility that processes data in discrete chunks.
I suppose it's not too much to see that once the fundamental processes are understood, a considerably streamlined execution of those processes will be possible, although such a result would be in no way whatsoever similar to a human consciousness -- assuming such a thing were to be self-aware, the differing processing speeds of the various internal domains would render the entirely of the thing to be something completely different than a human mind.
It might be a super-smart ant, or something approaching an omniscient being, or it might just get bored and turn itself off. No way to know without performing the experiment.
If "creating" is the thing that makes Wil's soul-sails fill with the wind, I would think that directing is where he would be heading, as writer's are just as ham-strung as actors in the visual media circus.
Oh, that's right -- I forgot there are venues for writing other than screenplays and scripts.
Silly me.
I still think that he might enjoy taking a spin at the director's chair. Who knows? He might be the next Clint Eastwood. (that sound is Wil Wheaton's ego exploding)
Terrorist ties were also not proven false.
References, Please?
Without pretty iron-clad substantiation, this is pretty much just blind ranting, similar to such things as "There is no proof we ever landed on the Moon" and "America is full of terrorists just waiting to strike".
Given the documented attempts at false reporting such as the Jessica Lynch "rescue", and our ability to chase down Saddaam Hussein (who was a lot easier to hide than a bunker full of WMD), one has to look upon your statements and wonder exactly what planet you come from.
Unless of course, your response is just a troll and I have bitten into it hook, linke and sinker.
Try losing your real shirt (or life) when your physical realm takes a hit.
Just ask the folks who had their physical realm impacted by the tsumani, or people who've had their villages burned in genocidal cleansing operations around the globe.
Wanna bet their real estate valuations took a hit?
There are events that governments are powerless to prevent, or protect their citizens from.
I see no difference here between the physical and virtual realms. There are certainly differences, but they do not involve economics or security.
I don't believe, given the seemingly incredible stoopidity of the folks minding the store, that I would accept ANY claims about what the "intruder" did or did not do -- it seems to me to be at least equally possible that, upon discovering that they had an unwelcome guest, the investigating Keystone Cop accidently deleted the user accounts himself, and decided to blame it on this poor sap.
Or the system may have been damaged weeks or months previously, with anything wrong being attributed to our clueless doofus UFO-hunter.
And exactly how was he caught? Did he finally manage to locate the single installation that had some effective security?
I'd want to see the logs before I made any accusations in this case, which seems like a comedic episode of the X-Files.
If indeed his access was entirely through sloppy security management/mismanagement on the part of our armed forces (gasp! how could it be?!?), then it seems like the "damages" assessed to him for "track(ing) down and fix(ing)" their crap should by rights, be billable to them as consulting fees and paid to this ufo-hunting whacko.
The real threat to security here is to allow the idiots who were responsible for security of those systems to keep their jobs.
So it looks like, instead of fixing the real cause of the problems, he's gonna be interrogated in Guantanamo Bay for the rest of his life -- while the REAL bad guys are now alerted to the fact that our defense security is managed by morons.
I think Apple would be delighted to have Microsoft release Windows for x86 Macs. In fact, if Microsoft doesn't do it, I'll bet Apple offers the option of having Windows preinstalled in a bootable partition, alongside OS X in a dual-boot setup.
Of course, that option will fully reflect the cost of adding Windows to the machine.
Remember, Apple is primarily in the hardware business. Just as iTunes is a way to sell iPods, OS X is a way to sell Macs. If they can use Windows to sell Macs, they will.
I'll bet that the notion of an Apple-to-Apple comparison of Windows vs OS X on the same hardware (on the same machine!), with the OS X costs hidden and Windows costs prominently displayed, keeps Bill Gates awake at night.
However, there's no chance that such a machine will ever be officially "Certified for Windows" by Microsoft. So they'll have to do without the sticker on the box, and will probably have to take Microsoft to court when Microsoft adds code to make Windows crash when run on an x86 Mac.
Um... gee, in this file I d/l'ed from the 'net, I can't seem to find the CPU_TYPE field...
WhatDoIdoNow?
Please explain to me how Apple is going to sell PPC-based Macs from this point forward? As I understand it, If you bought a Mac today, come 2007 the software will be Intel-only, as the entire Apple product line will be Pentium-based.
They took care of extending the useful life of the existing software via Rosetta, but so far as I can tell, existing hardware -- NEW existing hardware -- has an 18 month time horizon.
Were there guarantees of fat binaries of OS X for the next N releases of OS X and I missed it? And even if that were so, unless 3rd party software makers also go that route, supporting 2 different instruction sets for free, you're still going to run into instances of software being released that doesn't run on your 18-month-old Powermac.
Unless the Rosetta code translation is bidirectional, which I don't believe it was presented as such.
So who will buy a Mac that becomes anchored in the past in 18 months?
I guess this is how Steve plans to use Apple's huge cash position -- they'll tread water and sell iPods for the next 12-18 months.
Funny -- IBM seems to have no problem promising 3.2 GHz triple-core and 8-core PPC derivative cpus to Microsoft and Sony, in pretty huge volumes -- but we'll have to wait until year-end to see if they deliver on those promises.
IBM seems to have dropped the ball on supplying the dual core 970fx chip to Apple, which was probably the last straw, on top of IBM's continuing lack of interest in pursuing low power G5 designs suitable for notebook use.
IBM has also said that their fab capacity is "booked" for the foreseeable future, which pretty well rules out any chance of Apple being able to achieve any kind of market share increase via IBM.
Looks a lot like Apple is being squeezed out, similar to the days when Microsoft would gain market share by consuming all the shelf space in stores, except that this would be IBM doing the screwing in collusion with Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Sony. I expect Sony to get most of its CELL processors either in-house or from Toshiba). Once upon a time, IBM had "allocation rules" to prevent smaller customers from being squeezed out by larger ones.
I gotta love the NASA admin's comment,
I guess they don't mind outsourcing all the work to the "Chinese, Europeans, Russians, whomever", as the way technical employment is going in this country, there will be no US science grads to do the work!
Or maybe this is the plan to provide boomer techies retirement jobs to keep them going when Social Security is sucked dry...
The PillCam is a small capsule containing a camera, light, battery, and wireless transmitter that sends images to a receiver belt worn by the patient as the capsule tumbles its way through the intestinal tract.
The only thing new offered in this bit of "news", is the thought of attempting to put legs on the capsule and overcome the natural peristaltic movement of the capsule through the intestines by stabbing the intestinal walls to move around and shoot more images of something interesting.
It's something I view as a very questionable long shot at best, given the additional power required to actively position the thing, and the notion that having pointy legs sticking out inside one's intestines might not be the safest way to investigate intestinal problems.
... REXX is yet another interpretive scripting language, one that is exceedingly clear and non-cryptic -- one can return to a REXX script you wrote a decade ago and understand it (try that with perl!).
And REXX has a much easier learning curve than something like perl, even easier (IMHO) than plain vanilla unix hell scripting. If you're in a large group or a group with a high turnover, you could do a lot worse than selecting REXX as a scripting standard.
For specifics as to why you might choose REXX over another scripting language in your toolkit, it has tremendous parsing capabilities (you can specify a template when you read text from the input stream, and have REXX bust up the incoming text to fit the template, adjusting case if desired) as well as very nice ways of dealing with arrays ("stems" in REXX parlance).
One of the niceties of using REXX in the mainframe world was that you could specify the environment a command string would be interpreted in. Not quite AppleScript, where you can direct scriptable apps to do your bidding, but the next best thing.
This allows you to co-opt other portions of your system to do the work for you, and not reinvent the wheel at every turn. Think of this as the "script as conductor" philosophy of scripting.
But REXX is also capable of functioning as a standalone programming environment. In the mainframe realm, I've done socket programming, dynamic sql, screen painting and more file conversions than I want to think about using REXX. I do code using a fair assortment of compiled languages, but when it's crunch time, nothing beats a good interpretive scripting facility to deliver the goods in a timely manner.
Sadly, aside from the unix/dos command shell, I don't believe many other environments are generally supported under non-mainframe REXX (I don't believe I've ever seen REXX operating as an EMACS macro, for example), but given the flexibility of the unix shell environment, that is generally sufficient.
I agree with you 100%.
The thing most people forget about when they talk about Microsoft's "death" is that a big cash balance gives you extra lives in the (real) reality. To extinguish Microsoft, you would first have to drain their cash hoard.
For all practical purposes, Microsoft is invulnerable.
Even if today's computing industry were to disappear tomorrow, Microsoft has sufficient cash resources to re-make itself many times in other industries.
This is basically why we have antitrust laws, as there's no other way that a company can be deconstructed to allow new sprouts of innovation to be permitted to grow and blossom -- but as we have seen, Microsoft has already dealt with that, and has the judiciary well in hand.
One of the fundamental notions of free markets is that competition between players (companies) is an efficient means to both select the best products/ideas and to bring them to the consumer at the lowest cost. When a single player "wins", becoming dominant over all other players in an industry, it it the government's role to break them up into competing entities, and thus restore the proper operation of the free marketplace.
Textbook theory breaks down when asked to consider the case where a monopoly gains effective control over the government.
In the fullness of time, such organizations are likely to rot from within, and become vulnerable to toppling from unexpected directions. Meanwhile, the rate of progress in the industry owned by the monopoly grinds to a near-halt, as the monopoly feeds upon the consumers unimpeded by the watchdogs of competition.