I've looked into the arguments that the moon landings are fakes. Every single argument that has been made has been countered, without exception.
For example, no stars in the pictures from the moon? Well, there wouldn't be - stars are very faint, and the exposure time for the film was insufficient to allow them to be seen.
Objects appearing to be over the top of the etched markings on the pictures? That's image-bleed caused by slight over-exposure - a well known photographic problem.
The flag waving? Well, of course it's going to wave when it's being moved around, that's simple physics, and will continue to wave for a while since there's no atmospheric resistance to help stop it.
And so on.
The simple reality is that it would have been harder to convincingly fake the moon landings than to go there.
Ico, the predecessor to Shadow of the Colossus, left me in tears.
The point of the game in Ico is to guide another character, Yorda, throughout the game. You have to look out for her and take care of her. This effectively forces you to create an emotional bond with her.
Few games have this ability though - they tend not to create a very strong emotional link between the player and the game characters.
Personally I wish they'd sort out their virtual memory system.
I used to use Navicat a great deal - a tool for talking to MySQL databases. Unfortunately it has a bug or two, and when executing some queries it will get into a state where it starts to eat memory and never stops. If you don't notice this is happening then you end up with an unusable machine - the Force Quit dialogue box will come up, eventually, but the machine will essentially be unresponsive. If you're fortunate enough to have a terminal session open from another computer then killing the growing task would solve the problem.
Similarly I had an XServe running my former company's web site. Apache hadn't been configured very well on this machine, and during periods of heavy demand a few too many apache instances would get spawned, eating up memory. Once again the machine would grind to a halt, inevitably making the problem of dealing with the demand worse. (Once very low limits were set on the number of Apache instances this machine performed OK.) We also had a linux web server which had a slower (single) processor and less memory, but when faced with similar loads it would cope admirably.
Here in the UK the price is now about £1 per litre. That translates to $7 per US gallon. This price has risen by about 5p per litre in the last month thanks chiefly to our good friends in Israel.
The exact deal that iTunes has with record labels isn't public. Having worked for an on-line digital music store I can tell you they're probably paying about 70% of each sale to the label.
The amount that the label then passes on to the artists in question is a matter for the label and not iTunes.
We already have "Global Dimming" going along with our global warming, which is already reducing the warming effect, yet we still have warming.
This proposal seems to be to radically increase the dimming we're already experiencing. The question is how much more dimming can the planet take without badly affecting the ecosphere? More dimming could make life for plants much harder, leading to an increase in desertification, making the warming problem worse.
It also of course doesn't address the root causes of the warming problem. As I see it this is a band-aid on a broken leg approach.
This "bit" of sea level rising... With all the warming that's happening there's a good chance that the major ice shelves in Antarctica could collapse. That, combined with Arctic ice melt, could easily lead to a 6 metre rise in sea level. This rise could be very rapid too, taking place over two years or less.
It is important to realise that a large proportion of the Earth's population lives near the coast. Many major cities and some entire countries would be wiped off the map, or at least very badly affected.
Similarly there is a large amount of farm land that sits at or below 6 metres above sea level, and that too will be at risk.
Welcome to a world where many many millions of people are displaced from there homes and there's not enough food to feed people.
Unfortunately it's impossible to predict when this will happen. The evidence is not looking good though.
I've recently done a load of cross-browser Web 2.0 stuff. Working on a Mac my primary platform is Safari which, as many will know, is one of a very limited number of browsers to pass the ACID test. It took me quite a while to get to grips with the idiosyncrasies of CSS itself (the specificity rules about which style will be used can be confusing and slightly counter-intuitive sometimes) but generally working with Safari was fine.
I checked and validated my HTML and CSS code against the W3C validation tools, and they all passed, which was nice. The next step was obviously to make sure that they rendered well inside IE and Firefox... This is where the pain began.
There are bugs and omissions in both IE and Firefox's CSS support. Quite how bad these failings will affect your page depends a very great deal on what HTML and CSS you are trying to use.
Personally I found it consistently easier to work around the failings of IE; I could get my new bits of HTML and CSS to work perfectly in IE with only minimal changes.
Whilst the reputation of Firefox is better, I consistently found it much harder to get my pages working properly. Trying to get items to display on the same line inside Firefox without getting forced below the preceding item can be incredibly tough, often requiring a custom work-around. In one case I found myself forced to throw away my (div using) code and re-write it using tables, since even after several hours of trying I couldn't get Firefox to render my page acceptably.
Many cities in the US have sidewalks only in restricted, isolated parts of the city. If you live somewhere without any sidewalks then walking isn't a practical transportation option.
The card used in the Swindon experiment, and many others around the world including New York IIRC, was called Mondex. It was primarily developed by the NatWest Bank in the UK, with HSBC joining the party later.
Mondex was a contact-based smart card system using ISO 7816 compliant cards. It was the only true stored value electronic purse card for quite some time and may still be so, the only one to allow direct card to card transfers of money. With essentially all other "electronic cash" cards you can only withdraw money from a bank, and pay money to a merchant - it's impossible to give a friend some money, whereas with Mondex this *is* possible. Most other electronic cash cards are essentially a souped up version of direct debit (pre-authorised) keeping a local on-card track of value stored in a shadow account at a bank.
Mondex ended up as part of Mastercard. The experimental roll-outs all finished several years ago.
Mondex' failure is essentially down to two factors. Firstly it required hardware and software to deal with the smart cards - this equipment inevitably costs money, and merchants were unwilling to shoulder the costs. The banks too were reluctant to pay for the costs. The other reason for failure is the transaction time - the fastest you could make a payment was about 10 seconds once a customer card was inserted into a card reader. This transaction speed, whilst it sounds OK, is unacceptable for paying for a bus ticket whilst boarding, for example.
This new scheme in France sounds very similar to Dexit, which people in Toronto may be familiar with. These type of schemes rely on terminals connected to central computers that track values in (shadow) accounts - the card itself stores no value, and has no record of its transactions. All the customer has is essentially an RFID tag, and transactions get confirmed by the customer placing their ID near a very short-range tag reader.
Yeah, we're told that IBM did promise Apple 3GHz chips, and they failed to deliver.
However the contention that Apple pissed off IBM is in part true. It's been fairly widely reported that Apple only ever placed small orders for G5 chips from IBM. Since because Apple insisted on being a small customer IBM couldn't commit it's fabs to large runs of G5 chips.
A side effect of this were shortages of G5 Macs, since Apple would sell them faster than IBM could deliver their orders.
Had Apple bitten the bullet and ordered large volumes of G5 chips there would have been more reason for IBM to commit resources to improving the G5 chip since they would have had clear guarantees that they would sell the chips.
As it goes, IBM went with the large orders - Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo - projects that guarantee to keep their fabs busy, and the money flowing in.
It is possible to write.NET applications on Mac OS X that use a Cocoa front-end. Part of the Mono project is Cocoa#, which allows use of most of Cocoa from within.NET.
There's no need to use Windows.Forms - there's even a few example apps that show you how to do things the Cocoa# way.
OK - that makes things clearer. Since I'd seen the BBC news report this morning I didn't bother to read the story.
We report sales of all items (individual tracks, albums, singles, and EPs) for which we have an ISRC or UPC/EAN code to the charting folks. This all goes into a single report - the charting people match up the codes with products and work out the charts from there. They enforce the rules for which charts certain material is eligible for - not us.
The charting folks aren't at all pissed with us. They're happy to get data from us.
I just hadn't been told that there had been any change to things, probably because there's no change as far as our systems are concerned.
These revised rules seem a bit silly though. This single has shown that the download charts can account for as many sales as the high street, and segregating out download-only sales creates an artificial division. In the case of this particular track it seems that it was available for sale on at least one download store from the 9th March - 3 weeks. It would be interesting to see their sales figures across all three of those weeks.
Shame that it's on Warner - as a pure MP3 store we don't it on our site since they're afraid of playing in a DRM-free format.
Readers must note that download-only tracks are not eligible for the UK chart, the rule is that the physical version must be released within one week of the download version. So, it's just a way to get an extra week in the top ten.
Really? Where did you hear this from?
I'm CTO at a download store in the UK and we report sales to the chart people, which contribute to the UK singles charts. The only requirement I know of for our reporting is that the track has an ISRC number. As far as I'm aware that's it - no additional requirement that a physical version must be available at all. We've reported sales on numerous download-only products to them.
Whilst Korea may be high up in broadband adoption, most people there have regular ADSL links, often running at just 2Mbps. There may be some faster links available, but none of my wife's family over there has them, or seem to know anything about them.
Of course since I'm not Korean, don't speak the language, and none of them are really geeks or have much interest in high speed data comms, or indeed speak good English, I haven't been able to spend a lot of time chatting with them about this.
As for much of Europe having 45-100Mbps, please, tell me where and how much. This is certainly not the case in the UK. The best we can get is 24Mbps ADSL if you live very close to an exchange, and the general max is 8Mbps.
I subscribe to an IPTV service in the UK called Homechoice. They've been running for about a decade now.
The presentation is much like any other cable TV system, but with a few added extras. I get the standard bunch of UK digital TV channels, plus a bunch of extra video on demand channels. There are variable packages - if I were paying for a more expensive package (I'm on the cheapest) I'd be getting their "C1" channel, and could pick to watch any episode from about 2 dozen different series seasons, such as Futurama, classic Star Trek, Buffy, Friends, Battlestar Galactica, West Wing, etc. That's their entertainment on-demand channel... There's also V:MX which is on-demand music, Scamp, for kids, and Discovery Factual On Demand, amongst others. Naturally there's also pay-for mainstream movies available too.
All this kind of stuff is of course standard on many cable systems - I had much the same on Rogers in Toronto.
One thing above Rogers is a feature called "Replay TV". On certain channels you'll see an "r" logo next to programs in the guide - those programs get stored for a week for you to replay when you feel like watching them. This is my favourite feature - it almost turns it into a DVR - although I don't get to choose which programs they record.
All this through my phone line, so I didn't have to get the road dug up for the cable company to put a line in. It works using ADSL, and the set-top box is my ADSL modem, so I just plug my computer into it and surf away. They currently offer up to 8mbit data connections, although they've got faster (24mbit) ADSL stuff in the pipeline.
Re:Good for Apply Maybe, good for Palm - NO!
on
Apple to Buy out Palm?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Palm Source is working on Palm OS.
Palm Source isn't owned by Palm. It's owned by a Japanese company whose name I can't remember.
It seems to me that unless something radical happens in US politics the USA will prevent quite a few areas of high-tech R&D happening within its borders. The process of banishing manufacturing is already progressing.
The end result of this seems obvious to me. People will still perform research in the areas that the US prohibits. The technology and products developed will still make their ways onto the US market - some may even be manufactured within the US, but license fees will have to be paid. Money will continue to flow out of the USA and the trade deficit will continue to increase.
A point will come where the worlds banks grow sick of this situation and stop proffering more credit to the USA. There will follow a major recession - probably the worst the world has ever seen. The world will be just fine, but the USA will no longer be the super-power it is now.
It's a shame really - the USA had such great promise, but it is being destroyed by religious fundamentalism. Not the first time we've seen that happen to a country in this world, and it won't be the last either. The founding fathers knew this was risk, so they tried to ensure it couldn't happen by the whole separation of church and state thing.
This comment is a great example of what is wrong with Slashdot's moderation system. As I write this the parent comment has a +5 insightful score - a comment that is clearly written by somebody who has not read the article and has no knowledge of the subject.
Had the poster had a knowledge of the Challenger disaster they should know that the problem was caused by an O-ring failure due to the temperature at launch being significantly below the designed operating temperature of said O-ring. The "two sticks of dynamite between a tank of incredibly flammable gasses" comment is childish at best, but really just demonstrates a lack of understanding. That kind of launch configuration has been used successfully before and since.
It is completely irrelevant to comment that more people die by getting hit by cars than rockets, and making such a comparison shows a clear lack of insight.
It was a big deal because it was a big screw-up - not so much as a distraction from "social conflict", although it will inevitably had some distracting effect and been exploited for that by the media and politicians as all such events are. The real issue and lesson is that NASA had systematic problems that meant that the engineers who knew there was a massive risk of mission failure were ignored. This was all exposed in the Challenger investigation - most clearly by the investigations of Richard Feynman.
This +5 comment is exactly why I want to be able to browse at +10.
There's a really simple reason why film subtitles omit jokes and get things wrong. It is almost never possible to directly translate from one language to another, so subtitles inevitably have to be an aproximation of the original speech in order to help match the pacing of the original film. They also have to not be too wordy, since the viewer needs to watch the film, as well as read the subtitles.
Language is about more than just words, it's about phrases too. A speakers choice of words and phrases gives an additional element of communication to their speech than just the underlying message they're trying to get across. Film subtitles cannot hope to convey anything but the basics and even printed texts suffer when translated.
Apple don't have the source code for Windows, Microsoft do. Apple could produce the Classic emulation layer in Mac OS X because they had the source code for Mac OS 9 available to them.
There are only two ways for Apple to do the rumoured "Red Box" - that's either to emulate the Windows API, just like WINE does, which as we all know isn't a fantastic solution. The other way is to run a full copy of Windows and use some virtualisation trickery, which would be a slightly better solution in terms of compatibility, but would require the user owning a copy of Windows.
IMHO neither approach is something that Apple is likely to do - it just doesn't make business sense.
All they deal with is how fast a chip can do raw maths, not how fast a computer will perform real-world tasks. For a more true picture on how the new Intel iMac squares up against the older G5 iMac check out this article.
In real world activities for Intel native binaries the Intel Core Duo iMac scores on average only between 20% and 30% faster than the speed of the single-core G5 iMac - which is somewhat less than the 2x improvement. The absolute best improvement they got was 84% faster. I'd expect better improvement had they put a dual core G5 in there instead.
Performance of Rosetta translated PowerPC code was less than half the G5. This is pretty bad.
The Core Duo makes some sense in the MacBook, but not so much for the iMac or other desktop Macs right now.
The US effectively only comitted troops to World War II after they had been attacked.
Before that time though they were still involved in the war effort, helping to manufacture equipment required and shipping that across to the UK. That remained the limit of their involvement until Pearl Harbour though.
Of course another factor here is that there's more to life than clock speed. There's what you want to do with your chip that counts too.
The comparison between a G5 and an Intel Core Duo is far from straight forward. Whilst Apple are trumpeting the new Intel based iMacs as being twice as fast as the PowerPC versions I'm sure that's not going to turn out to be entirely true. Benchmarks like specINT rarely give a true reflection of performance. There's also a great deal of code in Mac programs designed to use PowerPC's AltiVec, and it remains to be seen how well SSE3 will compare.
One really major issue with the new iMac is that Apple have moved from a 64-bit chip in the G5 to a 32-bit chip in the Intel Core Duo. If you're running stuff that requires 64-bit computation you're SOL with the new iMac.
Slashdot Mirror
You are having a laugh, right, and trolling us?
I've looked into the arguments that the moon landings are fakes. Every single argument that has been made has been countered, without exception.
For example, no stars in the pictures from the moon? Well, there wouldn't be - stars are very faint, and the exposure time for the film was insufficient to allow them to be seen.
Objects appearing to be over the top of the etched markings on the pictures? That's image-bleed caused by slight over-exposure - a well known photographic problem.
The flag waving? Well, of course it's going to wave when it's being moved around, that's simple physics, and will continue to wave for a while since there's no atmospheric resistance to help stop it.
And so on.
The simple reality is that it would have been harder to convincingly fake the moon landings than to go there.
Ico, the predecessor to Shadow of the Colossus, left me in tears.
The point of the game in Ico is to guide another character, Yorda, throughout the game. You have to look out for her and take care of her. This effectively forces you to create an emotional bond with her.
Few games have this ability though - they tend not to create a very strong emotional link between the player and the game characters.
Personally I wish they'd sort out their virtual memory system.
I used to use Navicat a great deal - a tool for talking to MySQL databases. Unfortunately it has a bug or two, and when executing some queries it will get into a state where it starts to eat memory and never stops. If you don't notice this is happening then you end up with an unusable machine - the Force Quit dialogue box will come up, eventually, but the machine will essentially be unresponsive. If you're fortunate enough to have a terminal session open from another computer then killing the growing task would solve the problem.
Similarly I had an XServe running my former company's web site. Apache hadn't been configured very well on this machine, and during periods of heavy demand a few too many apache instances would get spawned, eating up memory. Once again the machine would grind to a halt, inevitably making the problem of dealing with the demand worse. (Once very low limits were set on the number of Apache instances this machine performed OK.) We also had a linux web server which had a slower (single) processor and less memory, but when faced with similar loads it would cope admirably.
$5 per gallon for gasoline? I wish!
Here in the UK the price is now about £1 per litre. That translates to $7 per US gallon. This price has risen by about 5p per litre in the last month thanks chiefly to our good friends in Israel.
The exact deal that iTunes has with record labels isn't public. Having worked for an on-line digital music store I can tell you they're probably paying about 70% of each sale to the label.
The amount that the label then passes on to the artists in question is a matter for the label and not iTunes.
This idea seems rather dumb to me.
We already have "Global Dimming" going along with our global warming, which is already reducing the warming effect, yet we still have warming.
This proposal seems to be to radically increase the dimming we're already experiencing. The question is how much more dimming can the planet take without badly affecting the ecosphere? More dimming could make life for plants much harder, leading to an increase in desertification, making the warming problem worse.
It also of course doesn't address the root causes of the warming problem. As I see it this is a band-aid on a broken leg approach.
This "bit" of sea level rising... With all the warming that's happening there's a good chance that the major ice shelves in Antarctica could collapse. That, combined with Arctic ice melt, could easily lead to a 6 metre rise in sea level. This rise could be very rapid too, taking place over two years or less.
It is important to realise that a large proportion of the Earth's population lives near the coast. Many major cities and some entire countries would be wiped off the map, or at least very badly affected.
Similarly there is a large amount of farm land that sits at or below 6 metres above sea level, and that too will be at risk.
Welcome to a world where many many millions of people are displaced from there homes and there's not enough food to feed people.
Unfortunately it's impossible to predict when this will happen. The evidence is not looking good though.
I've recently done a load of cross-browser Web 2.0 stuff. Working on a Mac my primary platform is Safari which, as many will know, is one of a very limited number of browsers to pass the ACID test. It took me quite a while to get to grips with the idiosyncrasies of CSS itself (the specificity rules about which style will be used can be confusing and slightly counter-intuitive sometimes) but generally working with Safari was fine.
I checked and validated my HTML and CSS code against the W3C validation tools, and they all passed, which was nice. The next step was obviously to make sure that they rendered well inside IE and Firefox... This is where the pain began.
There are bugs and omissions in both IE and Firefox's CSS support. Quite how bad these failings will affect your page depends a very great deal on what HTML and CSS you are trying to use.
Personally I found it consistently easier to work around the failings of IE; I could get my new bits of HTML and CSS to work perfectly in IE with only minimal changes.
Whilst the reputation of Firefox is better, I consistently found it much harder to get my pages working properly. Trying to get items to display on the same line inside Firefox without getting forced below the preceding item can be incredibly tough, often requiring a custom work-around. In one case I found myself forced to throw away my (div using) code and re-write it using tables, since even after several hours of trying I couldn't get Firefox to render my page acceptably.
This seems like a good page that outlines the bugs in Mozilla/Firefox:
http://www.richinstyle.com/bugs/mozilla.html
Unfortunately there's not always clearly documented work-arounds for these bugs...
Oh for the bright future when all the browsers properly support CSS... The life of a cross-browser web site producer would be less painful.
Many cities in the US have sidewalks only in restricted, isolated parts of the city. If you live somewhere without any sidewalks then walking isn't a practical transportation option.
The card used in the Swindon experiment, and many others around the world including New York IIRC, was called Mondex. It was primarily developed by the NatWest Bank in the UK, with HSBC joining the party later.
Mondex was a contact-based smart card system using ISO 7816 compliant cards. It was the only true stored value electronic purse card for quite some time and may still be so, the only one to allow direct card to card transfers of money. With essentially all other "electronic cash" cards you can only withdraw money from a bank, and pay money to a merchant - it's impossible to give a friend some money, whereas with Mondex this *is* possible. Most other electronic cash cards are essentially a souped up version of direct debit (pre-authorised) keeping a local on-card track of value stored in a shadow account at a bank.
Mondex ended up as part of Mastercard. The experimental roll-outs all finished several years ago.
Mondex' failure is essentially down to two factors. Firstly it required hardware and software to deal with the smart cards - this equipment inevitably costs money, and merchants were unwilling to shoulder the costs. The banks too were reluctant to pay for the costs. The other reason for failure is the transaction time - the fastest you could make a payment was about 10 seconds once a customer card was inserted into a card reader. This transaction speed, whilst it sounds OK, is unacceptable for paying for a bus ticket whilst boarding, for example.
This new scheme in France sounds very similar to Dexit, which people in Toronto may be familiar with. These type of schemes rely on terminals connected to central computers that track values in (shadow) accounts - the card itself stores no value, and has no record of its transactions. All the customer has is essentially an RFID tag, and transactions get confirmed by the customer placing their ID near a very short-range tag reader.
Yeah, we're told that IBM did promise Apple 3GHz chips, and they failed to deliver.
However the contention that Apple pissed off IBM is in part true. It's been fairly widely reported that Apple only ever placed small orders for G5 chips from IBM. Since because Apple insisted on being a small customer IBM couldn't commit it's fabs to large runs of G5 chips.
A side effect of this were shortages of G5 Macs, since Apple would sell them faster than IBM could deliver their orders.
Had Apple bitten the bullet and ordered large volumes of G5 chips there would have been more reason for IBM to commit resources to improving the G5 chip since they would have had clear guarantees that they would sell the chips.
As it goes, IBM went with the large orders - Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo - projects that guarantee to keep their fabs busy, and the money flowing in.
It is possible to write .NET applications on Mac OS X that use a Cocoa front-end. Part of the Mono project is Cocoa#, which allows use of most of Cocoa from within .NET.
There's no need to use Windows.Forms - there's even a few example apps that show you how to do things the Cocoa# way.
OK - that makes things clearer. Since I'd seen the BBC news report this morning I didn't bother to read the story.
We report sales of all items (individual tracks, albums, singles, and EPs) for which we have an ISRC or UPC/EAN code to the charting folks. This all goes into a single report - the charting people match up the codes with products and work out the charts from there. They enforce the rules for which charts certain material is eligible for - not us.
The charting folks aren't at all pissed with us. They're happy to get data from us.
I just hadn't been told that there had been any change to things, probably because there's no change as far as our systems are concerned.
These revised rules seem a bit silly though. This single has shown that the download charts can account for as many sales as the high street, and segregating out download-only sales creates an artificial division. In the case of this particular track it seems that it was available for sale on at least one download store from the 9th March - 3 weeks. It would be interesting to see their sales figures across all three of those weeks.
Shame that it's on Warner - as a pure MP3 store we don't it on our site since they're afraid of playing in a DRM-free format.
Readers must note that download-only tracks are not eligible for the UK chart, the rule is that the physical version must be released within one week of the download version. So, it's just a way to get an extra week in the top ten.
Really? Where did you hear this from?
I'm CTO at a download store in the UK and we report sales to the chart people, which contribute to the UK singles charts. The only requirement I know of for our reporting is that the track has an ISRC number. As far as I'm aware that's it - no additional requirement that a physical version must be available at all. We've reported sales on numerous download-only products to them.
Whilst Korea may be high up in broadband adoption, most people there have regular ADSL links, often running at just 2Mbps. There may be some faster links available, but none of my wife's family over there has them, or seem to know anything about them.
Of course since I'm not Korean, don't speak the language, and none of them are really geeks or have much interest in high speed data comms, or indeed speak good English, I haven't been able to spend a lot of time chatting with them about this.
As for much of Europe having 45-100Mbps, please, tell me where and how much. This is certainly not the case in the UK. The best we can get is 24Mbps ADSL if you live very close to an exchange, and the general max is 8Mbps.
I subscribe to an IPTV service in the UK called Homechoice. They've been running for about a decade now.
The presentation is much like any other cable TV system, but with a few added extras. I get the standard bunch of UK digital TV channels, plus a bunch of extra video on demand channels. There are variable packages - if I were paying for a more expensive package (I'm on the cheapest) I'd be getting their "C1" channel, and could pick to watch any episode from about 2 dozen different series seasons, such as Futurama, classic Star Trek, Buffy, Friends, Battlestar Galactica, West Wing, etc. That's their entertainment on-demand channel... There's also V:MX which is on-demand music, Scamp, for kids, and Discovery Factual On Demand, amongst others. Naturally there's also pay-for mainstream movies available too.
All this kind of stuff is of course standard on many cable systems - I had much the same on Rogers in Toronto.
One thing above Rogers is a feature called "Replay TV". On certain channels you'll see an "r" logo next to programs in the guide - those programs get stored for a week for you to replay when you feel like watching them. This is my favourite feature - it almost turns it into a DVR - although I don't get to choose which programs they record.
All this through my phone line, so I didn't have to get the road dug up for the cable company to put a line in. It works using ADSL, and the set-top box is my ADSL modem, so I just plug my computer into it and surf away. They currently offer up to 8mbit data connections, although they've got faster (24mbit) ADSL stuff in the pipeline.
Palm Source is working on Palm OS.
Palm Source isn't owned by Palm. It's owned by a Japanese company whose name I can't remember.
Palm don't own their own OS these days.
All very true...
It seems to me that unless something radical happens in US politics the USA will prevent quite a few areas of high-tech R&D happening within its borders. The process of banishing manufacturing is already progressing.
The end result of this seems obvious to me. People will still perform research in the areas that the US prohibits. The technology and products developed will still make their ways onto the US market - some may even be manufactured within the US, but license fees will have to be paid. Money will continue to flow out of the USA and the trade deficit will continue to increase.
A point will come where the worlds banks grow sick of this situation and stop proffering more credit to the USA. There will follow a major recession - probably the worst the world has ever seen. The world will be just fine, but the USA will no longer be the super-power it is now.
It's a shame really - the USA had such great promise, but it is being destroyed by religious fundamentalism. Not the first time we've seen that happen to a country in this world, and it won't be the last either. The founding fathers knew this was risk, so they tried to ensure it couldn't happen by the whole separation of church and state thing.
I give it ten years. I could be wrong though.
Please don't confuse the scientific method with scientists. They are two separate and distinct things.
Personally I don't believe it is possible for a process to have ethics - that seems like a logical absurdity to me.
Everyone has their own set of ethics and their own morality, and that includes scientists.
This comment is a great example of what is wrong with Slashdot's moderation system. As I write this the parent comment has a +5 insightful score - a comment that is clearly written by somebody who has not read the article and has no knowledge of the subject.
Had the poster had a knowledge of the Challenger disaster they should know that the problem was caused by an O-ring failure due to the temperature at launch being significantly below the designed operating temperature of said O-ring. The "two sticks of dynamite between a tank of incredibly flammable gasses" comment is childish at best, but really just demonstrates a lack of understanding. That kind of launch configuration has been used successfully before and since.
It is completely irrelevant to comment that more people die by getting hit by cars than rockets, and making such a comparison shows a clear lack of insight.
It was a big deal because it was a big screw-up - not so much as a distraction from "social conflict", although it will inevitably had some distracting effect and been exploited for that by the media and politicians as all such events are. The real issue and lesson is that NASA had systematic problems that meant that the engineers who knew there was a massive risk of mission failure were ignored. This was all exposed in the Challenger investigation - most clearly by the investigations of Richard Feynman.
This +5 comment is exactly why I want to be able to browse at +10.
There's a really simple reason why film subtitles omit jokes and get things wrong. It is almost never possible to directly translate from one language to another, so subtitles inevitably have to be an aproximation of the original speech in order to help match the pacing of the original film. They also have to not be too wordy, since the viewer needs to watch the film, as well as read the subtitles.
Language is about more than just words, it's about phrases too. A speakers choice of words and phrases gives an additional element of communication to their speech than just the underlying message they're trying to get across. Film subtitles cannot hope to convey anything but the basics and even printed texts suffer when translated.
Apple != Microsoft.
Apple don't have the source code for Windows, Microsoft do. Apple could produce the Classic emulation layer in Mac OS X because they had the source code for Mac OS 9 available to them.
There are only two ways for Apple to do the rumoured "Red Box" - that's either to emulate the Windows API, just like WINE does, which as we all know isn't a fantastic solution. The other way is to run a full copy of Windows and use some virtualisation trickery, which would be a slightly better solution in terms of compatibility, but would require the user owning a copy of Windows.
IMHO neither approach is something that Apple is likely to do - it just doesn't make business sense.
CPU benchmarks lie.
All they deal with is how fast a chip can do raw maths, not how fast a computer will perform real-world tasks. For a more true picture on how the new Intel iMac squares up against the older G5 iMac check out this article.
In real world activities for Intel native binaries the Intel Core Duo iMac scores on average only between 20% and 30% faster than the speed of the single-core G5 iMac - which is somewhat less than the 2x improvement. The absolute best improvement they got was 84% faster. I'd expect better improvement had they put a dual core G5 in there instead.
Performance of Rosetta translated PowerPC code was less than half the G5. This is pretty bad.
The Core Duo makes some sense in the MacBook, but not so much for the iMac or other desktop Macs right now.
This is of course a simplification.
The US effectively only comitted troops to World War II after they had been attacked.
Before that time though they were still involved in the war effort, helping to manufacture equipment required and shipping that across to the UK. That remained the limit of their involvement until Pearl Harbour though.
Of course another factor here is that there's more to life than clock speed. There's what you want to do with your chip that counts too.
The comparison between a G5 and an Intel Core Duo is far from straight forward. Whilst Apple are trumpeting the new Intel based iMacs as being twice as fast as the PowerPC versions I'm sure that's not going to turn out to be entirely true. Benchmarks like specINT rarely give a true reflection of performance. There's also a great deal of code in Mac programs designed to use PowerPC's AltiVec, and it remains to be seen how well SSE3 will compare.
One really major issue with the new iMac is that Apple have moved from a 64-bit chip in the G5 to a 32-bit chip in the Intel Core Duo. If you're running stuff that requires 64-bit computation you're SOL with the new iMac.