Re:Who you gonna buy, what laws you gonna allow?
on
Digital TV Approaches
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· Score: 2
There's a flaw in your argument, unfortunately. The consumer electronics market out there is not even close to a free market. In a free market, quality and features will be as near as possible to what the customer wants in order to convince them to buy your product. But what if those features and qualities are harmful to another part of your business? Sony is a perfect example. Because they are a content producer as well as a consumer electronics manufacturer, they can leverage their position in both markets to force features into the products that users don't necissarily want. They're willing to take a hit in sales on their electronics side in order to protect their profits on the content side.
There is also a pretty good chance that the vast majority of consumers will not know enough about the technologies in question to be able to understand their impact until after they purchase the product. By then, it's too late. In this first round of digital TV products, this will be particularly important because there AREN'T any products out there that would allow you to record a digital TV stream anyways. By the time that products like those come out, it might be too late, since most people would have purchased a TV that didn't allow them to use it.
You've pretty much answered your own question. BBEdit is the #1 stand-alone text editor on the Mac, for HTML and for programming in just about any language. I personally use the built-in editor in Codewarrior which is not quite as feature-complete as BBEdit as a text editor, but has source-browser integration.
It might actually work if the library ran as a separate process with its own resources, but I'm going way off topic. Bring this up on a kernel development list and see what kind of responce you get.
If you take a close look at MacOSX, you might notice that this is how MacOSX manages parts of its security. There is a security server that can give root privileges to programs that require it (such as installers and configuration programs) while running in a separate address space.
A firewire network is not restricted to a single 'host'. Several computers can be plugged into a firewire network and share the peripherals on it. Similarly, the computers can communicate with each other as well. The only problem I can see is that only one computer can actually mount a drive at the same time. However, a system that would allow a second computer to mount a drive if the first failed should be trivial to implement.
While I haven't tried this either, a glance at their website makes me think this is a somewhat elaborate hoax.
First, the name of the thing is ekafemulator. Turn the first 4 letters around. fake.
Next, their troubleshooting page is practically non-sequetor and references a bad URL on sony's site which they conveniently don't bother to put into an anchor tag (so you need to copy/paste it to try it).
Finally, it seems rather unlikely that a 500mhz PIII can emulate a PS2.
Don't you need something around a 500mhz PIII just to emulate an N64??
Sounds fishy to me...
Well, using their figure of 1 hour at 240VAC@100A, which is 24 kwh, and my local (British Columbia) electricity cost of $0.06/kwh, that comes to $1.44 per 100 miles.
With gas prices at $0.80 a LITRE here (roughly 4L to the gallon), and a super-efficient 56mpg car, that translates to close to $6.40 per 100 miles.
Assuming you commute to work and put roughly 10,000 miles a year on your car, that works out to about $500 per year.
Assuming a lifetime of about 200,000 miles for either type of car, you save: $10,000 over the life of the car in my region in fuel costs alone. (Maintainance costs are a whole other argument. I think fewer parts and less drivetrain complexity equates to cheaper maintainance, but the batteries could offset that, so I'll call it a wash for this exercise.)
Yes, the inaccuracy of the variables I chose are probably pretty high, but at least this gives you SOME idea of when an EV becomes economically attractive.
True, but think of it this way:
When those plants grew, where did the CO2 come from? The atmosphere.
Where does it go when it rots?
The atmosphere.
The amounts?
The same.
You're simply adding and removing atmospheric CO2 from a relatively SMALL amount of biomass.
It's not like you're dredging up carbon that took millions of years to accumulate from deep underground and suddenly releasing it into the atmosphere at once, like petrol does.
Should read: Security hole in some IMPLEMENTATIONS
on
Security Hole In TCP
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· Score: 2
If you read the article carefully, it says that this could be used to exploit TCP stacks that use a POOR or PREDICTABLE random number generator to generate the ISN. It also says that because this has been known for so long, there are questions about if there are any TCP stacks around that are exploitable.
My guess would be that someone out there found a particular implementation that had this problem and from there, started asking questions about if the problem exists in other implementations.
If the TCP protocol standard specifies that the ISN needs to be 'random', or at least a good psudorandom, than this is a failure of the implementation if it does not follow that spec, NOT a statement that 'TCP', as a protocol, has a security hole.
If you're not getting hired it's because you (pick any one or more):...
Are unwilling to realize that you gotta pay your dues before you become Bill Gates
Uhh... It would be hard to say that Bill Gates payed his dues before he became, well, Bill Gates. He has a rich father who's connections got him into schools that he dropped out of (wasn't it more than once?). His first huge break as Microsoft happened 1) as a huge fluke and 2) because he was dishonest. First off, IBM wanted DR-DOS as their OS, but the creator wasn't home when IBM knocked on his door and his wife refused to let him in. So, they went to Microsoft instead. Secondly, when he did speak to IBM, he was asked if he had a working OS ready. He told them, "Yes, it's almost ready", even though he had been writing BASIC compilers until then and (AFAIK) had never touched OS code before. So, he went out, purchased a cheap clone of DR-DOS (QD-DOS) for $10000, slapped the name "MS-DOS" on it and the rest is history.
So, don't try to convince the world that Bill Gates got where he is now by "paying his dues", because it's simply not true.
The Internet has vastly decreased the value of data.
Decreased the value of data, or decreased the cost of data? The data still has the same intrinsic value to the person searching for it, but has a much smaller associated cost to retrieve.
I think the adage, "The enemy of your enemy is your friend" applies in this case.
Slashdot is definately linux, or at least OSS -centric. Both the Macintosh and Linux/OSS have the potential to affect Microsoft's consumer and server OS markets.
Microsoft is, in fact, somewhat schizophrenic towards Apple, and vice-versa, since 1) Microsoft knows that Apple is a lucrative market for selling Office, and Microsoft makes more money selling Office than it does their OS. 2) Apple knows that Microsoft and Intel comprise their main platform competition, but also know that many people would NOT buy a Mac unless Office was availible for it.
Despite the fact that Apple and Microsoft "kissed and made up" a few years ago, and Microsoft made an investment in Apple, I believe that APPLE would have the most to gain if Redmond got phase-shifted into another dimension, since Apple currently offers the --ONLY other practical solution for a consumer computer--.
So, I think it's pretty obvious to most people here that Microsoft and Apple are still, basically, 'enemies', and that since the OSS community usually views Microsoft as the 'enemy', that makes them a -mutual- enemy.
Additionally, one could say that Apple is even 'Open Source Friendly', and has yet to take any legal action against any open source project that is not blatently flaunting its disregard for Apple's ownership of its own artwork (sorry, folks, but cutting and pasting Apple's buttons/widgets and turning them into a theme for E, I don't think reasonably qualifies as 'fair use').
Therefore, if Apple gains a piece of ammunition to potentially use against Microsoft, I think the crowd here would be more accepting of that, than if Microsoft had gained a piece of ammunition against Apple (for example, if Microsoft claimed the same patent before Apple had).
Wow! They even give you a Usenet porn primer in their presentation on Law Enforcement on the internet! Their slides show various newsgroups including: alt.sex.masterbation.pictures.female.teen and alt.sex.bondage!
http://www.users.qwest.net/~lawenforcement/LawEnfo rce1.pdf pages 18-21
>As for having the necessary source code
>shipping "for years" (huh?), where'd you hear
>that?
Actually, the MkLinux project (no longer being maintained by Apple) was, in fact, started "years" ago, when the 6/7/8100 non-PCI PPC models were still being sold.
I agree with the parent poster that this is a cop-out by Be and that the management is quite immaturely using Apple as a scapegoat.
Re:This has (almost) been done before...
on
Digital Doodling
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· Score: 2
Just to add to this, the article says that the IBM machine isn't even designed for handwriting recognition, but rather, images. This seems like a pretty big piece of missing functionality. It seems the least they could do is to exploit more of the potential of a setup like this by simply adding handwriting recognition to it...
Actually, writing code directly within JSP is no longer the 'preferred' method for writing JSP. Or at least it is unnecissary. I have written an entire web application development system (very similiar to Apple's WebObjects) using servlets and JSP. The JSP side of things is a template system using custom JSP tags for all of its interface components. All of the logic of the system is built using custom classes on top of a specialized servlet.
Anybody who's used WebObjects should understand what I mean. This is, in fact, an open source project. It's currently fairly mature, quite stable and feature-ful, but I have not had time to set up a site, clean up the code and make it 'presentable'. If you're interested in helping, please send me an email.
I don't think you're being completely fair to Macromedia. I'm just going to compare PHP and JSP here, since those are the two systems that I use most frequently.
Most of the 'support' of JSP in Dreamweaver is in database access. Dreamweaver gives you the tools to automatically script JDBC accesses within your page. Why can this be done for JSP but not PHP? Simple. JSP has a universal database access system, JDBC. If Macromedia were to support PHP they would have to individually support each and every different database, since use of each database requires a slightly different set of functions. Completely impractical. Until a generic set of database functions are added to PHP, I see no reason why Macromedia would support it.
If all the support you need is for Macromedia to understand that:
<?php
?>
blocks of code should not be touched, you can add this yourself into dreamweaver without much difficulty.
Maybe I'm being a little bit naive, but wouldn't it be possible to simply write a preprocessor that followed your rules and spat out a completed/etc/groups file as a result? Then your solution would be portable and would require no new additions to any other systems.
>What happens on a Mac when your little four-letter-codes have a collision? What happens if two programs have the same app code?
Apple maintains a database of all creator codes. Each creator code is a 32 bit number. You can search their database to see if the one you want is taken. If it's not, you simply request it and it is given to you.
Actually... There was a LARGE controversy about this here in Canada, and stores were warned that there might be a huge tax, though they were never told what it was, even though they were told to start collecting for it before they had decided what it was going to be. So, not surprisingly, just before this kicked in, there was a HUGE run on blank CDs in the country. There was such a protest, though, that they ended up taxing 'regular' CD-Rs only $0.25 or so and put the big tax on "audio" CD-Rs, about $1.75. What is the difference between a regular CD-R and and Audio CD-R, you ask? Well, Audio CD-Rs are marked with some identifier that allows them to be played on certain new audio equipment (namely, some Sony equipment, I believe). This same equipment will NOT play regular CD-Rs. That sure sounds like a 'feature' that the consumer asked for. In any case, this falls under a digital home recording act, so now it is perfectly legal to copy CDs and give them to your friends. It could have been MUCH worse.
Yes, you can run samba on a powermac using linux.
Actually, you can even run a SMB compatible file server on a PowerMac using MacOS with a utility called DAVE.
Or alternatively, you can make Windows support Appletalk and Appleshare using PC/MacLan.
On that note, Linux also can support Appletalk, as a client and a server.
This reminds me of a April Fools joke that went around many years ago (1993, 94?) that Apple was going to completely replace the keyboard with the mouse. Instead of typing with the keyboard, you would have a graphical wheel on the screen that you would drag to rotate. Rotating the wheel would scroll through the characters. When you got to the one you wanted, you clicked. I mean, seriously, where do they take an annoucement about handwriting recognition for the Mac becoming availible and suddenly translate that into "Apple is doing away with the keyboard" That's silly.
I dual-boot OSX DP4 at the moment and I have some experience porting over various unix programs. How hard is it, do you ask? Well, it's DEAD easy. All of your common libraries are there to use (ncurses, for example) and all of the common development tools are there (gcc, autoconf, etc...) Many programs will compile and install fine with just a: ./configure make make install
For the ones that won't, you'll probably just need to do something like: ./configure --host=freebsd
or something similiar to have the script get some sort of handle of what type of system you're running. At the most, I've had to modify the configure.in to tell it where to find things that are in non-standard locations (the Java libraries, for example).
I'd say 99% of these issues will go away whenever a revision of autoconf comes out that automatically knows something about OSX (Apple changed the uname between OSX Server and DP4, for example).
I'm very serious when I say that right NOW (in this pre-release version) you WON'T be disappointed when it comes to porting over command-line tools.
I believe the licencing issues you have mentioned are as of now, moot. Apple stated that the original reason that it could not continue with its Yellow Box system (a system that allowed almost any OpenStep program to be simply recompiled, and run on Windows) was because of licencing fees/issues from Adobe. As I understand it, PS and PDF are very different beasts when it comes to licencing from Adobe. I do not know the details, but I believe it is quite possible to write a proper PDF display system without any help or fees from Adobe. I believe this goes for the name "PDF", as well, which anyone can use, whereas "PostScript" requires a licence from Adobe if you wish to use the name. As far as OpenGL, there are no licencing issues there that haven't already been dealt with in the UNIX world. Just call it something other than OpenGL, like hmm... for example, MesaGL. You get the idea. Once Apple releases some more documentation on their Display PDF system, it may become practical to re-engineer it. Apple may, in fact, support it in some way. I wouldn't expect them to give away ALL the crown jewels, but it WOULD be in their best interest if the rest of the world used system at least half-way to Aqua to make it fairly easy to port between the two systems.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a flaw in your argument, unfortunately. The consumer electronics market out there is not even close to a free market. In a free market, quality and features will be as near as possible to what the customer wants in order to convince them to buy your product. But what if those features and qualities are harmful to another part of your business? Sony is a perfect example. Because they are a content producer as well as a consumer electronics manufacturer, they can leverage their position in both markets to force features into the products that users don't necissarily want. They're willing to take a hit in sales on their electronics side in order to protect their profits on the content side.
There is also a pretty good chance that the vast majority of consumers will not know enough about the technologies in question to be able to understand their impact until after they purchase the product. By then, it's too late. In this first round of digital TV products, this will be particularly important because there AREN'T any products out there that would allow you to record a digital TV stream anyways. By the time that products like those come out, it might be too late, since most people would have purchased a TV that didn't allow them to use it.
You've pretty much answered your own question. BBEdit is the #1 stand-alone text editor on the Mac, for HTML and for programming in just about any language. I personally use the built-in editor in Codewarrior which is not quite as feature-complete as BBEdit as a text editor, but has source-browser integration.
A firewire network is not restricted to a single 'host'. Several computers can be plugged into a firewire network and share the peripherals on it. Similarly, the computers can communicate with each other as well. The only problem I can see is that only one computer can actually mount a drive at the same time. However, a system that would allow a second computer to mount a drive if the first failed should be trivial to implement.
While I haven't tried this either, a glance at their website makes me think this is a somewhat elaborate hoax.
First, the name of the thing is ekafemulator. Turn the first 4 letters around. fake.
Next, their troubleshooting page is practically non-sequetor and references a bad URL on sony's site which they conveniently don't bother to put into an anchor tag (so you need to copy/paste it to try it).
Finally, it seems rather unlikely that a 500mhz PIII can emulate a PS2.
Don't you need something around a 500mhz PIII just to emulate an N64??
Sounds fishy to me...
Yep. That's right. :-)
She refused to let them in.
And yes, CP/M, not DR-DOS.
My duh.
Well, using their figure of 1 hour at 240VAC@100A, which is 24 kwh, and my local (British Columbia) electricity cost of $0.06/kwh, that comes to $1.44 per 100 miles.
With gas prices at $0.80 a LITRE here (roughly 4L to the gallon), and a super-efficient 56mpg car, that translates to close to $6.40 per 100 miles.
Assuming you commute to work and put roughly 10,000 miles a year on your car, that works out to about $500 per year.
Assuming a lifetime of about 200,000 miles for either type of car, you save: $10,000 over the life of the car in my region in fuel costs alone. (Maintainance costs are a whole other argument. I think fewer parts and less drivetrain complexity equates to cheaper maintainance, but the batteries could offset that, so I'll call it a wash for this exercise.)
Yes, the inaccuracy of the variables I chose are probably pretty high, but at least this gives you SOME idea of when an EV becomes economically attractive.
True, but think of it this way:
When those plants grew, where did the CO2 come from? The atmosphere.
Where does it go when it rots?
The atmosphere.
The amounts?
The same.
You're simply adding and removing atmospheric CO2 from a relatively SMALL amount of biomass.
It's not like you're dredging up carbon that took millions of years to accumulate from deep underground and suddenly releasing it into the atmosphere at once, like petrol does.
If you read the article carefully, it says that this could be used to exploit TCP stacks that use a POOR or PREDICTABLE random number generator to generate the ISN. It also says that because this has been known for so long, there are questions about if there are any TCP stacks around that are exploitable.
My guess would be that someone out there found a particular implementation that had this problem and from there, started asking questions about if the problem exists in other implementations.
If the TCP protocol standard specifies that the ISN needs to be 'random', or at least a good psudorandom, than this is a failure of the implementation if it does not follow that spec, NOT a statement that 'TCP', as a protocol, has a security hole.
So, don't try to convince the world that Bill Gates got where he is now by "paying his dues", because it's simply not true.
I think the adage, "The enemy of your enemy is your friend" applies in this case.
Slashdot is definately linux, or at least OSS -centric. Both the Macintosh and Linux/OSS have the potential to affect Microsoft's consumer and server OS markets.
Microsoft is, in fact, somewhat schizophrenic towards Apple, and vice-versa, since 1) Microsoft knows that Apple is a lucrative market for selling Office, and Microsoft makes more money selling Office than it does their OS. 2) Apple knows that Microsoft and Intel comprise their main platform competition, but also know that many people would NOT buy a Mac unless Office was availible for it.
Despite the fact that Apple and Microsoft "kissed and made up" a few years ago, and Microsoft made an investment in Apple, I believe that APPLE would have the most to gain if Redmond got phase-shifted into another dimension, since Apple currently offers the --ONLY other practical solution for a consumer computer--.
So, I think it's pretty obvious to most people here that Microsoft and Apple are still, basically, 'enemies', and that since the OSS community usually views Microsoft as the 'enemy', that makes them a -mutual- enemy.
Additionally, one could say that Apple is even 'Open Source Friendly', and has yet to take any legal action against any open source project that is not blatently flaunting its disregard for Apple's ownership of its own artwork (sorry, folks, but cutting and pasting Apple's buttons/widgets and turning them into a theme for E, I don't think reasonably qualifies as 'fair use').
Therefore, if Apple gains a piece of ammunition to potentially use against Microsoft, I think the crowd here would be more accepting of that, than if Microsoft had gained a piece of ammunition against Apple (for example, if Microsoft claimed the same patent before Apple had).
Wow! They even give you a Usenet porn primer in their presentation on Law Enforcement on the internet! Their slides show various newsgroups including: alt.sex.masterbation.pictures.female.teen and alt.sex.bondage! http://www.users.qwest.net/~lawenforcement/LawEnfo rce1.pdf pages 18-21
>As for having the necessary source code
>shipping "for years" (huh?), where'd you hear
>that?
Actually, the MkLinux project (no longer being maintained by Apple) was, in fact, started "years" ago, when the 6/7/8100 non-PCI PPC models were still being sold.
I agree with the parent poster that this is a cop-out by Be and that the management is quite immaturely using Apple as a scapegoat.
Just to add to this, the article says that the IBM machine isn't even designed for handwriting recognition, but rather, images. This seems like a pretty big piece of missing functionality. It seems the least they could do is to exploit more of the potential of a setup like this by simply adding handwriting recognition to it...
Actually, writing code directly within JSP is no longer the 'preferred' method for writing JSP. Or at least it is unnecissary. I have written an entire web application development system (very similiar to Apple's WebObjects) using servlets and JSP. The JSP side of things is a template system using custom JSP tags for all of its interface components. All of the logic of the system is built using custom classes on top of a specialized servlet.
Anybody who's used WebObjects should understand what I mean. This is, in fact, an open source project. It's currently fairly mature, quite stable and feature-ful, but I have not had time to set up a site, clean up the code and make it 'presentable'. If you're interested in helping, please send me an email.
I don't think you're being completely fair to Macromedia. I'm just going to compare PHP and JSP here, since those are the two systems that I use most frequently.
Most of the 'support' of JSP in Dreamweaver is in database access. Dreamweaver gives you the tools to automatically script JDBC accesses within your page. Why can this be done for JSP but not PHP? Simple. JSP has a universal database access system, JDBC. If Macromedia were to support PHP they would have to individually support each and every different database, since use of each database requires a slightly different set of functions. Completely impractical. Until a generic set of database functions are added to PHP, I see no reason why Macromedia would support it.
If all the support you need is for Macromedia to understand that:
<?php
?>
blocks of code should not be touched, you can add this yourself into dreamweaver without much difficulty.
Maybe I'm being a little bit naive, but wouldn't it be possible to simply write a preprocessor that followed your rules and spat out a completed /etc/groups file as a result? Then your solution would be portable and would require no new additions to any other systems.
Just when I wish I had some moderation points...
Thank you for this intelligent and thoughtful post.
Someone please mod this up.
>What happens on a Mac when your little four-letter-codes have a collision? What happens if two programs have the same app code?
Apple maintains a database of all creator codes. Each creator code is a 32 bit number. You can search their database to see if the one you want is taken. If it's not, you simply request it and it is given to you.
Actually... There was a LARGE controversy about this here in Canada, and stores were warned that there might be a huge tax, though they were never told what it was, even though they were told to start collecting for it before they had decided what it was going to be. So, not surprisingly, just before this kicked in, there was a HUGE run on blank CDs in the country. There was such a protest, though, that they ended up taxing 'regular' CD-Rs only $0.25 or so and put the big tax on "audio" CD-Rs, about $1.75. What is the difference between a regular CD-R and and Audio CD-R, you ask? Well, Audio CD-Rs are marked with some identifier that allows them to be played on certain new audio equipment (namely, some Sony equipment, I believe). This same equipment will NOT play regular CD-Rs. That sure sounds like a 'feature' that the consumer asked for. In any case, this falls under a digital home recording act, so now it is perfectly legal to copy CDs and give them to your friends. It could have been MUCH worse.
Yes, you can run samba on a powermac using linux.
Actually, you can even run a SMB compatible file server on a PowerMac using MacOS with a utility called DAVE.
Or alternatively, you can make Windows support Appletalk and Appleshare using PC/MacLan.
On that note, Linux also can support Appletalk, as a client and a server.
This reminds me of a April Fools joke that went around many years ago (1993, 94?) that Apple was going to completely replace the keyboard with the mouse.
Instead of typing with the keyboard, you would have a graphical wheel on the screen that you would drag to rotate. Rotating the wheel would scroll through the characters. When you got to the one you wanted, you clicked.
I mean, seriously, where do they take an annoucement about handwriting recognition for the Mac becoming availible and suddenly translate that into "Apple is doing away with the keyboard"
That's silly.
I dual-boot OSX DP4 at the moment and I have some experience porting over various unix programs.
How hard is it, do you ask?
Well, it's DEAD easy. All of your common libraries are there to use (ncurses, for example) and all of the common development tools are there (gcc, autoconf, etc...)
Many programs will compile and install fine with just a:
./configure
make
make install
For the ones that won't, you'll probably just need to do something like:
./configure --host=freebsd
or something similiar to have the script get some sort of handle of what type of system you're running. At the most, I've had to modify the configure.in to tell it where to find things that are in non-standard locations (the Java libraries, for example).
I'd say 99% of these issues will go away whenever a revision of autoconf comes out that automatically knows something about OSX (Apple changed the uname between OSX Server and DP4, for example).
I'm very serious when I say that right NOW (in this pre-release version) you WON'T be disappointed when it comes to porting over command-line tools.
I believe the licencing issues you have mentioned are as of now, moot. Apple stated that the original reason that it could not continue with its Yellow Box system (a system that allowed almost any OpenStep program to be simply recompiled, and run on Windows) was because of licencing fees/issues from Adobe.
As I understand it, PS and PDF are very different beasts when it comes to licencing from Adobe. I do not know the details, but I believe it is quite possible to write a proper PDF display system without any help or fees from Adobe. I believe this goes for the name "PDF", as well, which anyone can use, whereas "PostScript" requires a licence from Adobe if you wish to use the name.
As far as OpenGL, there are no licencing issues there that haven't already been dealt with in the UNIX world. Just call it something other than OpenGL, like hmm... for example, MesaGL. You get the idea.
Once Apple releases some more documentation on their Display PDF system, it may become practical to re-engineer it. Apple may, in fact, support it in some way. I wouldn't expect them to give away ALL the crown jewels, but it WOULD be in their best interest if the rest of the world used system at least half-way to Aqua to make it fairly easy to port between the two systems.