Most of the oxygen your car uses to burn today's gas comes from the atmosphere already (if your gas has ethanol added, the ethanol also provides some oxygen). CO is much less abundant though so getting it concentrated enough without having nitrogen contamination present could be an expensive technical problem that confines production to large factories as opposed to consumers being able to have their own fuel generators. You sure don't want a bunch of contaminating ammonia in your gas.
You wouldn't use any arable land, you just have a molecular biologist stick the gene into E coli and then mass produce it in a giant tank. Or some variant of that process depending on how fussy the enzyme is (apparently it is fairly fussy but it would be produced using this sort of technique, not by isolating it from plants).
Another category of states includes states like Pennsylvania which do not collect use tax through income tax forms, but the income tax packets they mail you contain warnings that you are required to file separate use tax forms (which, of course, nobody does).
"I'm surprised he has anything like this at all on his personal site."
As a good troll he sometimes has to *pretend* that he is interested in truth and fairness. Why else do you think he bought an iMac?
I would point out though that the header at the top of his page appears on all his pages, so it is possible he "forgot" to remove it from that particular page. Which still wouldn't excuse not crediting the original source but it would be less nefarious.
I've been using my Mac a lot lately and I'm really, really disappointed in the performance, especially at the disk and network i/o performace.
Well, do you think that has to do with the hardware, or the software? Apple is using the same hard disks and network controllers everyone else uses. The problem is Mac OS 9, not the hardware. I don't think these sorts of concerns should sour you on Mac OS X.
"Seems like the brewing war could be averted by the simple act of Congress laying out exactly what is and isn't fair use"
Unfortunately that's a mess Congress prefers to avoid. They'll do it if necessary but they'd rather not. See the following article, for example: http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770,66 43_9,00.html
''At what point should Congress consider legislative action to ensure that there is access to music at a reasonable price with the artist compensated?'' Hatch asked at the end of the session. ''I'm willing to consider compulsory license and a clarification of fair use'' -- the latter presumably including giving tapes to spouses and friends. Asked after the hearing about the Herculean prospect of defining fair use, Leahy blanched and said, ''Now, that's one of the areas where the devil lies in the details.''
"If you're serious, buy seriously. Get the most expensive G4 Apple will sell you, w/ about a gig of RAM, DVD and Firewire everything, that fancy Cinema Display, and one huge-ass hard drive. About $10,000, I'd guess (+another $3-6K for software). "
Unless you have serious inhibitions about opening up a computer case--and the G4 is really easy--then buying the RAM and drives from Apple is just a *big* waste of money. Their RAM and hard disk prices are outrageous. You can save quite a bit by buying the memory from a dedicated memory vendor, and the drives from a dedicated drive vendor. That means places like The Chip Merchant, Crucial Technology, and MegaHaus, not general places like MacWarehouse... the general mail order catalogs have prices that are approximately as much of a rip-off as Apple's. The big PC vendors also overcharge on these items, although not as badly as Apple does.
I just bought a G4/450, build-to-order with the least amount of RAM and smallest drive Apple offers. If they offered a RAM-less, diskless G4, I'd have gone for that.
"It works good for small& longer video clips up to about 18min..after that its no good due to 2Gb limit on filesystem?"
The HFS+ filesystem itself doesn't have a 2 gig file size limit, but until recently the system calls Apple provided for accessing HFS+ disks did have that limit.
Apple removed that limit in Mac OS 9.0, but most software hasn't yet been updated to use the new filesystem calls that support larger files.
If you want to bother the vendor of the software you're using, you can remind them that the docs on the new system calls are available here: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/Files /FileManager/filemanager.html This preliminary document describes the File Manager application programming interfaces introduced in Mac OS 9. These interfaces allow your application to access files larger than 2GB and use long Unicode filenames. The Mac OS 9 File Manager programming interfaces are emulated for volume formats that don't support these interfaces directly.
I think you got it backwards... If you are going to use IDE at all (which in video editing I'd say is a bad plan) it should be to hold the software... Software is read off of disk once each time you launch the app and never read again. The place were you want low cpu utilization (where scsi excels) is when the cpu is busy with... oh say compression/video capture tasks... and thats when their is high disk activity as well because you are streaming data to it...
Does anybody actually use their CPU to compress video as it's being captured these days? Either you capture raw video with no compression and then compress it later after editing, or if you have a good capture card your video card automatically compresses the data before it's passed along to the CPU. IDE is okay for capture.
Bill's birthday is also the 28th, according to the Quick Links page at macweek.com! How hilarious. Maybe Linus should call him and sing him a happy birthday song.;-)
"The G4 will probably be king for publishing, like you said, although that's about ALL it will be best at. That's fine. With an ATI 3D card, the G4 will never be good at real-time 3D rendering, the video subsystem just doesn't have the horsepower"
Of course, the PC hardware isn't any good for that either. If you want real-time 3D rendering get a nice Unix workstation with a high-end 3D graphics card.
"Keep in mind that Apple is re-writing OpenGL, Quickdraw, Quicktime, and other OS components to take advantage of Altivec. So once that code gets out (probably with OS X if not sooner) it will provide dramatic speed-ups of all apps that do intensive graphics operations. "
Given that Apple apparently used QuickTime video compression to good effect against a PIII machine in its demos today, I would expect that QT at least ought to have it with the release of OS9...
"Show me SPEC_int and SPEC_fp for CPU performance, application suite benchmarks for system level performance, and a few game benchmarks."
Well, Motorola and IBM both seem to be more or less ignoring SPEC these days. Go over to www.specbench.org and note how there aren't any results available there for the G3, let alone the G4.
And what "application suite" do you want to use? Microsoft Office? Microsoft doesn't exactly produce fast Macintosh software. Would you want to benchmark a Linux system with Microsoft apps? I thought not.
Don't you also trust the results of tests with the applications you use on a daily basis? Those should be a lot more useful to you than SPEC.
"and for some reason they haven't posted that."
Well, I don't know if there are numbers available for them to quote. I can't find any G4 SPEC numbers at www.motorola.com, and the PPC SPEC results at www.specbench.org are woefully dated.
I have a hard time taking specbench.org seriously these days given that they don't even have ANY results for the PowerPC 750 (aka G3) let alone the G4. The most recent numbers they have are some ~333 Mhz 604e numbers submitted by IBM, and those numbers are getting pretty old. If major CPU manufacturers quit submitting SPEC results SPEC will not be very useful any more.
"For a machine whose performance no PIII or Athlon can touch at any price?"
Not really true unless Apple starts shipping multiprocessor boxes. Anyway, the $1599 machine doesn't have AGP and has half the memory bandwidth of the more expensive models. It also can't hold as much RAM (limited to 1 gig) and has some other minor shortcomings. I think I will hold out for one of the fancier G4s that has these things.
Personally I think Macromedia's Shockwave Audio exporter produces the best quality files. It's several times slower than other encoders, but if the highest quality is what you want (and presumably it is since the whole point of MP3 is saving space vs. raw uncompressed sound... using SWA exporter lets you use lower bitrates w/o losing as much quality) then I think it's the way to go.
I'm not sure what form this is available in for x86 machines. It's available from Macromedia as a free plug-in for SoundEdit 16 (a Macintosh sound editor). For most people who don't have SoundEdit, there is a nice program here that interfaces with the plug-in. This program also strips the proprietary header info that the Macromedia plug-in adds to encoded files. See http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d2linjo/mp3/
Re:The land of the free (well, maybe not...)
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 1
Oh, sorry, your were talking about the *other* bill. I should have gone to bed already.:-)
Re:The land of the free (well, maybe not...)
on
New Cyberlaws
·
· Score: 1
Morpheous wrote:
"What the hell is this country coming to? This smacks of censorship. What happened to free speech?"
It's protection of trademarks. More draconian versions of this bill were thankfully rejected. This one, for example, still permits traditional things like parody/criticism (the news article I read on this bill mentioned www.pepsibloodbath.com, which is allowed under this bill but wouldn't have been under some other proposed versions of the bill).
"Er, it doesn't have Macintosh support as far as I can tell..."
There really is only Mac backup program worth a darn... Dantz's Retrospect and Retrospect Express. You may already be familiar with it but what you may not know is... It will back up to an FTP server, so you can back up all your Macs onto a Unix system.
I use the FTP backup option (the data is sent to a Digital Unix machine) and it works quite well.
It saves all the Mac-specific goodies for you. And it writes multiple files per backup, so there is no problem if the FTP server has a 2-gig file size limit. (It seems to adjust the file size based on connection speed. For LAN backups it uses 16 meg files.)
" I mean, for one thing, they didn't need to get any sort of large, obvious genetic sample, they could have simply picked up bits of dead skin that the away team left behind."
Well, PCR is quite error-prone, so it would be better to have a large sample of real DNA. Of course, that's assuming that this advanced civilization had nothing better than crude 1990s PCR techniques for DNA amplification.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the oxygen your car uses to burn today's gas comes from the atmosphere already (if your gas has ethanol added, the ethanol also provides some oxygen). CO is much less abundant though so getting it concentrated enough without having nitrogen contamination present could be an expensive technical problem that confines production to large factories as opposed to consumers being able to have their own fuel generators. You sure don't want a bunch of contaminating ammonia in your gas.
You wouldn't use any arable land, you just have a molecular biologist stick the gene into E coli and then mass produce it in a giant tank. Or some variant of that process depending on how fussy the enzyme is (apparently it is fairly fussy but it would be produced using this sort of technique, not by isolating it from plants).
Another category of states includes states like Pennsylvania which do not collect use tax through income tax forms, but the income tax packets they mail you contain warnings that you are required to file separate use tax forms (which, of course, nobody does).
"I'm surprised he has anything like this at all on his personal site." As a good troll he sometimes has to *pretend* that he is interested in truth and fairness. Why else do you think he bought an iMac? I would point out though that the header at the top of his page appears on all his pages, so it is possible he "forgot" to remove it from that particular page. Which still wouldn't excuse not crediting the original source but it would be less nefarious.
"Titanium is common enough that it's used as an ingredient in paint. " Titanium dioxide is also a common ingredient in suntan lotion.
Well, do you think that has to do with the hardware, or the software? Apple is using the same hard disks and network controllers everyone else uses. The problem is Mac OS 9, not the hardware. I don't think these sorts of concerns should sour you on Mac OS X.
Unfortunately that's a mess Congress prefers to avoid. They'll do it if necessary but they'd rather not. See the following article, for example:
http://www.inside.com/story/Story_Cached/0,2770,6
''At what point should Congress consider legislative action to ensure that there is access to music at a reasonable price with the artist compensated?'' Hatch asked at the end of the session. ''I'm willing to consider compulsory license and a clarification of fair use'' -- the latter presumably including giving tapes to spouses and friends. Asked after the hearing about the Herculean prospect of defining fair use, Leahy blanched and said, ''Now, that's one of the areas where the devil lies in the details.''
CdotZinger wrote:
"If you're serious, buy seriously. Get the most expensive G4 Apple will sell you, w/ about a gig of RAM, DVD and Firewire everything, that fancy Cinema Display, and one huge-ass hard drive. About $10,000, I'd guess (+another $3-6K for software). "
Unless you have serious inhibitions about opening up a computer case--and the G4 is really easy--then buying the RAM and drives from Apple is just a *big* waste of money. Their RAM and hard disk prices are outrageous. You can save quite a bit by buying the memory from a dedicated memory vendor, and the drives from a dedicated drive vendor. That means places like The Chip Merchant, Crucial Technology, and MegaHaus, not general places like MacWarehouse... the general mail order catalogs have prices that are approximately as much of a rip-off as Apple's. The big PC vendors also overcharge on these items, although not as badly as Apple does.
I just bought a G4/450, build-to-order with the least amount of RAM and smallest drive Apple offers. If they offered a RAM-less, diskless G4, I'd have gone for that.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
s /FileManager/filemanager.html
"It works good for small& longer video clips up to about 18min..after that its no good due to 2Gb limit on filesystem?"
The HFS+ filesystem itself doesn't have a 2 gig file size limit, but until recently the system calls Apple provided for accessing HFS+ disks did have that limit.
Apple removed that limit in Mac OS 9.0, but most software hasn't yet been updated to use the new filesystem calls that support larger files.
If you want to bother the vendor of the software you're using, you can remind them that the docs on the new system calls are available here:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/File
This preliminary document describes the File Manager application programming interfaces introduced in Mac OS 9. These interfaces allow your application to access files larger than 2GB and use long Unicode filenames. The Mac OS 9 File Manager programming interfaces are emulated for volume formats that don't support these interfaces directly.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
I think you got it backwards... If you are going to use IDE at all (which in video editing I'd say is a bad plan) it should be to hold the
software... Software is read off of disk once each time you launch the app and never read again. The place were you want low cpu
utilization (where scsi excels) is when the cpu is busy with... oh say compression/video capture tasks... and thats when their is high disk
activity as well because you are streaming data to it...
Does anybody actually use their CPU to compress video as it's being captured these days? Either you capture raw video with no compression and then compress it later after editing, or if you have a good capture card your video card automatically compresses the data before it's passed along to the CPU. IDE is okay for capture.
The *Rant* is right... B. subtilis is probably the most widely studied species of bacteria after E. coli.
The Wired article makes it sound like some new species has been discovered. Way off the mark!
Bill's birthday is also the 28th, according to the Quick Links page at macweek.com! How hilarious. Maybe Linus should call him and sing him a happy birthday song. ;-)
Blah... As I recall, Music Boulevard (may it rest in peace) had this feature several years ago.
I have no problem with software patents for things that are truly novel and that advance the field they are in... this is not one of those things.
An anonymous coward wrote:
"The customer is
always right, and the customers immediately hated the lack of support for floppies in the iMac."
Which neatly explains why Apple has sold over 2 million iMacs, right???
CausticPuppy wrote:
"The G4 will probably be king for publishing, like you said, although that's about ALL it will be best at. That's fine.
With an ATI 3D card, the G4 will never be good at real-time 3D rendering, the video subsystem just doesn't have the horsepower"
Of course, the PC hardware isn't any good for that either. If you want real-time 3D rendering get a nice Unix workstation with a high-end 3D graphics card.
binarybits wrote:
"Keep in mind that Apple is re-writing OpenGL, Quickdraw, Quicktime, and other OS components to take advantage of Altivec. So once that code gets
out (probably with OS X if not sooner) it will provide dramatic speed-ups of all apps that do intensive graphics operations. "
Given that Apple apparently used QuickTime video compression to good effect against a PIII machine in its demos today, I would expect that QT at least ought to have it with the release of OS9...
An anonymous coward wrote:
"Show me SPEC_int and SPEC_fp for CPU performance, application suite benchmarks for system level performance, and a few game benchmarks."
Well, Motorola and IBM both seem to be more or less ignoring SPEC these days. Go over to www.specbench.org and note how there aren't any results available there for the G3, let alone the G4.
And what "application suite" do you want to use? Microsoft Office? Microsoft doesn't exactly produce fast Macintosh software. Would you want to benchmark a Linux system with Microsoft apps? I thought not.
guacamole wrote:
"The only CPU benchmark I trust is spec95,"
Don't you also trust the results of tests with the applications you use on a daily basis? Those should be a lot more useful to you than SPEC.
"and for some reason they haven't posted that."
Well, I don't know if there are numbers available for them to quote. I can't find any G4 SPEC numbers at www.motorola.com, and the PPC SPEC results at www.specbench.org are woefully dated.
I have a hard time taking specbench.org seriously these days given that they don't even have ANY results for the PowerPC 750 (aka G3) let alone the G4. The most recent numbers they have are some ~333 Mhz 604e numbers submitted by IBM, and those numbers are getting pretty old. If major CPU manufacturers quit submitting SPEC results SPEC will not be very useful any more.
"For a machine whose performance no PIII or Athlon can touch at any price?"
Not really true unless Apple starts shipping multiprocessor boxes. Anyway, the $1599 machine doesn't have AGP and has half the memory bandwidth of the more expensive models. It also can't hold as much RAM (limited to 1 gig) and has some other minor shortcomings. I think I will hold out for one of the fancier G4s that has these things.
Personally I think Macromedia's Shockwave Audio exporter produces the best quality files. It's several times slower than other encoders, but if the highest quality is what you want (and presumably it is since the whole point of MP3 is saving space vs. raw uncompressed sound... using SWA exporter lets you use lower bitrates w/o losing as much quality) then I think it's the way to go.
I'm not sure what form this is available in for x86 machines. It's available from Macromedia as a free plug-in for SoundEdit 16 (a Macintosh sound editor). For most people who don't have SoundEdit, there is a nice program here that interfaces with the plug-in. This program also strips the proprietary header info that the Macromedia plug-in adds to encoded files. See http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d2linjo/mp3/
Oh, sorry, your were talking about the *other* bill. I should have gone to bed already. :-)
Morpheous wrote:
"What the hell is this country coming to? This smacks of censorship. What happened to free speech?"
It's protection of trademarks. More draconian versions of this bill were thankfully rejected. This one, for example, still permits traditional things like parody/criticism (the news article I read on this bill mentioned www.pepsibloodbath.com, which is allowed under this bill but wouldn't have been under some other proposed versions of the bill).
Donald Ball wrote:
"Er, it doesn't have Macintosh support as far as I can tell..."
There really is only Mac backup program worth a darn... Dantz's Retrospect and Retrospect Express. You may already be familiar with it but what you may not know is... It will back up to an FTP server, so you can back up all your Macs onto a Unix system.
I use the FTP backup option (the data is sent to a Digital Unix machine) and it works quite well.
It saves all the Mac-specific goodies for you. And it writes multiple files per backup, so there is no problem if the FTP server has a 2-gig file size limit. (It seems to adjust the file size based on connection speed. For LAN backups it uses 16 meg files.)
" I mean, for one thing, they didn't need to get any sort of large, obvious genetic sample, they could have simply picked up bits of dead skin that the away team left behind."
Well, PCR is quite error-prone, so it would be better to have a large sample of real DNA. Of course, that's assuming that this advanced civilization had nothing better than crude 1990s PCR techniques for DNA amplification.