Why would someone still be using 10.1? That really was a version of OSX not quite ready for prime time. It had the advantage of being better than 10.0 only. Seriously, anyone with 10.1 really ought to upgrade. It would be well worth it.
I believe that the problems with reproduction were found to be due to imperfections in the platinum. This meant that where the platinum came from was important to the experiment. Once this was discovered it was able to be reproduced. As I recall the imperfections were important in enabling the fusion to take place. The real big problem way back in the early 90's was that you had chemists making claims about nuclear physics without being able to give nuclear physicists the kind of information they wanted. Once again a lot of that information has been provided as well.
I've not followed it for a while. But last I heard they were making a lot of progress.
As others have pointed out the real problem was how it was announced and politicized. Had there been far more caution and less press I think it wouldn't have left such a bad taste in everyone mouth.
I think the problem is that this modifies the software. Then if Real's code sucks (see the majority of their code on Windows) Apple gets blamed and not Real. I think there ought to be some reason to have control over ones software in this situation. Apple has an investment to to iPod's interface.
If it were just about hacking the iPod then all those various hacks you can find on the net wouldn't be there. This is about Real pretending to simply be providing interoperability while they are really modifying the operating system without telling people that's what they are doing.
I honestly wonder how they calculate this? I daresay that the majority of people using P2P networks share their music shares which probably are around 1000 files or more. I just have a hard time seeing that most are sharing that many movies and pieces of software. i.e. those sharing movies almost certainly are also sharing songs.
What I suspect they did is just scanned for not music files. They then end up with all these small files - sometimes the content of you system directory - that dumbnits share or people trying to get a certain GB shared limit share. Yet if they count each.ini file and other such thing as a different software file, of course the number of files will outnumber music. But is that a real accurate count of movies and software shared?
i.e. shouldn't they count software packages and movies shared rather than *files* shared?
Perhaps they aren't making this mistake. But given their statistics something just smells fishy. I'd like to see their methadology.
I thought Apple's gcc was slightly different than the regular gcc - especially in terms of PPC optimizations. If true, then the code output won't be quite the same, will it?
On a related note, back before when I had used Macs some company had some tiny stickers to go on the front vertical face of the keys that had the extended characters on them. i.e. the characters you type with the option key. That way you didn't have to bring up keycaps to see what keys to get weird European characters. (Even more of a pain now in Panther now that keycaps is gone -- you have to get the international menu up with its ass ugly non-anti-aliased flags)
Anyone know if anyone makes those stickers?
I thought the Trade Federation were supposed to be French. They had a vaguely French like accent and looked like frogs.
I never saw the Asian parallels myself.
This is a bit of a big deal though. Contrast it to say OSX which comes with a compiler and development system that requires no royalties or costs. Admittedly most software for Linux is Opensource of one sort or an other so KDE's limits aren't that big a deal. But if Linux wants shareware and commercial ware and wants it running under KDE then this will make a difference.
Yes the big boys probably aren't going to port to Linux any time soon anyway. And if they did the license wouldn't really bother them much. But for smaller coders hoping to recoup some of the development costs this will make a difference. So you are left primarily with Opensource zealots doing development. That's working, of course. So I can't criticize too much. But Linux is missing a lot compared to other platforms.
There's really nothing like Applescript on Linux. On Windows it is closest to Visual Basic for Applications. However, in my opinion, it is far more usable than that for a variety of reasons. (One of which is Applescript is fairly ubiquitous and easy to use)
Hypercard is long dead. Supercard which originally was basically Hypercard with color (way back in the Sys7 days) is still around. I've not used it, but it is up at version 4.1.2.
GUI scripting can do this with Applescript. Both Quickeys and the shareware iKey are very powerful and useful, although there do appear to be speed issues relative to the Sys9 version. For quick and dirty tasks as well as mapping scripts to a function key or key stroke both of them are excellent. I actually have mind run various text formating programs written in Python on my selection. Great for dealing with email quotations.
BTW - I think you misunderstand what the author meant by "semantic level." Instead of buttons or menus you deal directly with what those represent. i.e. instead of doing "click the button OK" you'd do something like "start indexing my_folder". The latter is much easier to read and understand. Dealing with the GUI is dealing with often ambiguous representations of underlying processes. Apple added GUI scripting primarily so you could script everything including those programs that didn't support Applescript.
One problem that many have mentioned (and which brought this about) is that Apple itself has only halfhearted support for Applescript in most of its applications. Mail in particular, while supporting it, has glaring ommissions that still haven't been resolved.
Applescript is very problematic, yet powerful at the same time. It is quite a bit more powerful (and accessable) than say trying to script windows applications with com objects. On the other hand as the article mentions, it's English syntax is a huge drawback. Why? Because the grammar is vague and ambiguous and a dictionary is of little use without knowing the grammar. It really is frustrating building scripts.
There is, of course, an alternative. Do "Applescripts" in Python or Perl. They are very powerful, don't have the limits of Applescript, and most importantly are fairly easy to write. Yes you'll probably still end up looking things up far too often for the applications you wish to script. But once you have a few classes/functions for needed functions you'll be off.
I should add that I also agree that lack of recordability is a big limitation of OSX Applescript versus Sys9 Applescript. On the other hand being able to use all those Unix programs is a huge benefit. Seriously with Python, Applescript and Fink I feel like I can do almost anything.
Unfortunately this upgrade doesn't yet add any substantial context menu support. (Right mouse click for those of you corrupted by XP)
For instance to delete an entry you can either hit the delete key on the keyboard or go up to the Edit menu and select Delete. But you can't right-click on the entry and delete. I'm rather surprised at this lackluster context menu support now after all these years with many OSX application by Apple! For instance iTunes has excellent context menu support now. Yet even applications that support context menu, such as Address Book, often have glaring omissions such as "delete" menus.
That's true. Look at OSX. I wonder if Apple would have gone that route if things weren't as free as BSD made them. Would Unix even have been as widespread without the BSD approach in the early 80's? It's hard to say.
This is a good point. And I don't just think in the big corporate embedded systems. How about some lowend consumer grade automated routers or cutters? I know lots of people with home woodshops who'd love that. There are lots of little markets like that where Linux could do great.
Of course everyone wants the bigger companies, but I think if they could demo products outside of traditional geek tools they could really generate more interest for bigger companies.
Peircean semiotics are very relevant to computer science. One of the best resources are the writings of John Sowa who has written a lot on them. John Sowa's Home Page Yeah the home page is ugly as sin, but he makes very important points. I've used his writings a lot. And of course Peircean semiotics, unlike traditional structuralism, have more in common with deconstruction and Derrida than most think. It's just that Peirce writes in relatively clear language that those of a more scientific bent can understand.
Don't make the error of confusing subjective with sollipsism. Sollipsism says that my thinking about it makes the universe. Subjective means that it is my unique experiences that are important. It doesn't deny that there is some "absolute" that comes crashing in on me. i.e. when I hit my knee on the table.
Sollipsism and relativism are dangerous. Subjectivity is important to keep in mind, if only to recognize the errors it often creates in our thought.
"linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate," means the same as "I cannot utter a word of English."
Perhaps another way to state his idea is "I cannot utter a word of English and have anyone understand what I am trying to say"? I'm not sure how his idea is either bad logic or bad rhetoric.
That's not accurate either. A better way of saying it is to say that you can't understand a complete or total meaning of what is being said. An other way this is often put is that there is only say-ing and not a said.
The basic analysis that I think fits what Derrida is doing can be found in the analysis of death and metaphysics in Heidegger's _Being and Time_. While Heidegger also is being so careful so as to be confusion, the basic idea is this. To speak of metaphysics (a discourse where entities are complete or determinate) there must be an end to a discussion. No more *new* can be understood or expressed about the entity. It is complete. Thus the possibility of metaphysics requires an end or death. Yet to be able to quote or use a text implies that it is not yet dead. Thus this can't be true. So we have to move to a view of ontology which fundamentally involves incompleteness or indeterminism.
The error most make is to assume that indeterminacy involves total indeterminacy. Yet clearly we communicate and understand. So this is obviously false. However I don't think Derrida (or Heidgger, Levinas, or others) argue for this. So it is the attack of a strawman.
A different way of putting it is in terms of realism. Consider speaking about a person. The meaning of that term I use to communicate is *not* limited by my understanding. When I say "George went outside" clearly I mean the real person George and not simply what I understand by George. But the meaning of George is always unfinished. A 100 years from now someone may have some new understanding of George in terms of those future current events. So the meaning of any term is always unfinished and this means all things I say are unfinished. They have new meanings which are fundamentally entailed by my intents because I intend in terms of real entities.
When put that way deconstruction is far less controversial.
Derrida's assertions really aren't that radical. You can find many elements of them in Peirce 60 - 80 years earlier. (And in his critique of Saussure Derrida mentions Peirce a lot).
Rather than saying "indeterminate" simply say "incomplete." There is a common view in many fields that when you say anything the meaning is total and finished. Derrida simply points out that this isn't the case. Further he tries to analyze the logic of what enables meaning. But he is often cast as being opposed to truth or meaning. This isn't the case and he has emphatically denied it. I like the way Eco puts it. Derrida finds non-obvious truths as well as stating common truths from non-obvious points of view.
The problem is that most in the humanities aren't really able to deal well with careful rigorous thinking. So Deconstruction is amazingly abused in literature and the social sciences. But those abuses have more in common with Margaret Mead and the tendencies towards relativism that arose out of anthropology than the kind of philosophy espounded by Derrida.
Derrida's weakness is that he seems only willing to speak in terms of a deconstruction of the questions at hand. It is rather rare that he speaks clearly. You can see this in his answers to questions about 9/11 that were widely quoted on the net. This is unfortunate as it propagates the idea of his being focused in on obsfusication and gibberish. While I don't know why he does this (and he certainly makes mistakes in such offhand comments) I suspect it is because he is concerned about the ethical implications of deconstruction. A lot of criticisms in France about deconstruction relate to how it deals with human actions. It appears to really offer nothing. (And I think it does that. I don't understand why an analysis of linguistic ought to have ethical implications) He, however, clearly wants an ethical theory in the more French tradition. I think he largely failed in this. But his attempts to find some larger purpose certainly are interesting. (_The Gift of Death_ being the most interesting)
While this is funny, I suspect that some of these technologies are testing the waters for the future. I think the MPAA sees the difficulties of the RIAA and knows they can't dawdle around like the RIAA did. The future is in broadband and if they don't get the video equivalent of iTMS going then they'll end up in a world of hurt. While video downloads aren't significant now, look at all the advertising they are doing to cut things off at the pass.
The problem is that a iTMS equivalent for video requires some level of TV/Computer convergence. Yet I think Steve Jobs is right that people don't want a computer on their video system. You interact with the two quite differently. The solution to this is to use the computer to get the content and then have a component in your stereo/video system to play it. I suspect we'll see more of these. The first generation really aren't quite there yet.
The interesting question to me is what Apple has planned for this. While I fully agree with Jobs' critique of the Microsoft Media Center and look-a-likes, there clearly is some relationship. If Apple gets in there and makes a deal with the MPAA that would be great for them. Unfortunately I suspect Microsoft may trump Apple or Real here and get videos in WMP9 format with that awful interface and approach to things.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would someone still be using 10.1? That really was a version of OSX not quite ready for prime time. It had the advantage of being better than 10.0 only. Seriously, anyone with 10.1 really ought to upgrade. It would be well worth it.
I believe that the problems with reproduction were found to be due to imperfections in the platinum. This meant that where the platinum came from was important to the experiment. Once this was discovered it was able to be reproduced. As I recall the imperfections were important in enabling the fusion to take place. The real big problem way back in the early 90's was that you had chemists making claims about nuclear physics without being able to give nuclear physicists the kind of information they wanted. Once again a lot of that information has been provided as well.
I've not followed it for a while. But last I heard they were making a lot of progress.
As others have pointed out the real problem was how it was announced and politicized. Had there been far more caution and less press I think it wouldn't have left such a bad taste in everyone mouth.
If obscurity were the reason for such few exploits then we'd expect there to be many more attacks on Apache than there are.
Microsoft has tons of videos that they host on the front page of MSN that won't play on my Mac.
I was under the assumption that they modified the iPod's firmware to play their own data format.
I think the problem is that this modifies the software. Then if Real's code sucks (see the majority of their code on Windows) Apple gets blamed and not Real. I think there ought to be some reason to have control over ones software in this situation. Apple has an investment to to iPod's interface.
If it were just about hacking the iPod then all those various hacks you can find on the net wouldn't be there. This is about Real pretending to simply be providing interoperability while they are really modifying the operating system without telling people that's what they are doing.
I honestly wonder how they calculate this? I daresay that the majority of people using P2P networks share their music shares which probably are around 1000 files or more. I just have a hard time seeing that most are sharing that many movies and pieces of software. i.e. those sharing movies almost certainly are also sharing songs.
What I suspect they did is just scanned for not music files. They then end up with all these small files - sometimes the content of you system directory - that dumbnits share or people trying to get a certain GB shared limit share. Yet if they count each .ini file and other such thing as a different software file, of course the number of files will outnumber music. But is that a real accurate count of movies and software shared?
i.e. shouldn't they count software packages and movies shared rather than *files* shared?
Perhaps they aren't making this mistake. But given their statistics something just smells fishy. I'd like to see their methadology.
I had the Velvet Revolver CD and it ripped fine as well. Of course that was on a Mac so perhaps its only PC users who had trouble?
I thought Apple's gcc was slightly different than the regular gcc - especially in terms of PPC optimizations. If true, then the code output won't be quite the same, will it?
On a related note, back before when I had used Macs some company had some tiny stickers to go on the front vertical face of the keys that had the extended characters on them. i.e. the characters you type with the option key. That way you didn't have to bring up keycaps to see what keys to get weird European characters. (Even more of a pain now in Panther now that keycaps is gone -- you have to get the international menu up with its ass ugly non-anti-aliased flags) Anyone know if anyone makes those stickers?
I thought the Trade Federation were supposed to be French. They had a vaguely French like accent and looked like frogs. I never saw the Asian parallels myself.
Yes the big boys probably aren't going to port to Linux any time soon anyway. And if they did the license wouldn't really bother them much. But for smaller coders hoping to recoup some of the development costs this will make a difference. So you are left primarily with Opensource zealots doing development. That's working, of course. So I can't criticize too much. But Linux is missing a lot compared to other platforms.
Actually let me take that back somewhat. DCOP attempts to do something like Applescript or VBA. It only works with KDE but I believe it has limited support. Basically it lets you automate any KDE application. However few apps really provide much interface to DCOP. In a way Gambas is a little nicer than Applescript, due to the language. (It is basic like VBA) The big thing about Applescript on OSX though is how many applications are scriptable.
Supercard
It looks quite native for OSX and has a trial version you can download. If you miss Hypercard you may like it.
BTW - I think you misunderstand what the author meant by "semantic level." Instead of buttons or menus you deal directly with what those represent. i.e. instead of doing "click the button OK" you'd do something like "start indexing my_folder". The latter is much easier to read and understand. Dealing with the GUI is dealing with often ambiguous representations of underlying processes. Apple added GUI scripting primarily so you could script everything including those programs that didn't support Applescript.
One problem that many have mentioned (and which brought this about) is that Apple itself has only halfhearted support for Applescript in most of its applications. Mail in particular, while supporting it, has glaring ommissions that still haven't been resolved.
There is, of course, an alternative. Do "Applescripts" in Python or Perl. They are very powerful, don't have the limits of Applescript, and most importantly are fairly easy to write. Yes you'll probably still end up looking things up far too often for the applications you wish to script. But once you have a few classes/functions for needed functions you'll be off.
I should add that I also agree that lack of recordability is a big limitation of OSX Applescript versus Sys9 Applescript. On the other hand being able to use all those Unix programs is a huge benefit. Seriously with Python, Applescript and Fink I feel like I can do almost anything.
For instance to delete an entry you can either hit the delete key on the keyboard or go up to the Edit menu and select Delete. But you can't right-click on the entry and delete. I'm rather surprised at this lackluster context menu support now after all these years with many OSX application by Apple! For instance iTunes has excellent context menu support now. Yet even applications that support context menu, such as Address Book, often have glaring omissions such as "delete" menus.
That's true. Look at OSX. I wonder if Apple would have gone that route if things weren't as free as BSD made them. Would Unix even have been as widespread without the BSD approach in the early 80's? It's hard to say.
Of course everyone wants the bigger companies, but I think if they could demo products outside of traditional geek tools they could really generate more interest for bigger companies.
Peircean semiotics are very relevant to computer science. One of the best resources are the writings of John Sowa who has written a lot on them. John Sowa's Home Page Yeah the home page is ugly as sin, but he makes very important points. I've used his writings a lot. And of course Peircean semiotics, unlike traditional structuralism, have more in common with deconstruction and Derrida than most think. It's just that Peirce writes in relatively clear language that those of a more scientific bent can understand.
Sollipsism and relativism are dangerous. Subjectivity is important to keep in mind, if only to recognize the errors it often creates in our thought.
That's not accurate either. A better way of saying it is to say that you can't understand a complete or total meaning of what is being said. An other way this is often put is that there is only say-ing and not a said.
The basic analysis that I think fits what Derrida is doing can be found in the analysis of death and metaphysics in Heidegger's _Being and Time_. While Heidegger also is being so careful so as to be confusion, the basic idea is this. To speak of metaphysics (a discourse where entities are complete or determinate) there must be an end to a discussion. No more *new* can be understood or expressed about the entity. It is complete. Thus the possibility of metaphysics requires an end or death. Yet to be able to quote or use a text implies that it is not yet dead. Thus this can't be true. So we have to move to a view of ontology which fundamentally involves incompleteness or indeterminism.
The error most make is to assume that indeterminacy involves total indeterminacy. Yet clearly we communicate and understand. So this is obviously false. However I don't think Derrida (or Heidgger, Levinas, or others) argue for this. So it is the attack of a strawman.
A different way of putting it is in terms of realism. Consider speaking about a person. The meaning of that term I use to communicate is *not* limited by my understanding. When I say "George went outside" clearly I mean the real person George and not simply what I understand by George. But the meaning of George is always unfinished. A 100 years from now someone may have some new understanding of George in terms of those future current events. So the meaning of any term is always unfinished and this means all things I say are unfinished. They have new meanings which are fundamentally entailed by my intents because I intend in terms of real entities.
When put that way deconstruction is far less controversial.
Derrida's assertions really aren't that radical. You can find many elements of them in Peirce 60 - 80 years earlier. (And in his critique of Saussure Derrida mentions Peirce a lot). Rather than saying "indeterminate" simply say "incomplete." There is a common view in many fields that when you say anything the meaning is total and finished. Derrida simply points out that this isn't the case. Further he tries to analyze the logic of what enables meaning. But he is often cast as being opposed to truth or meaning. This isn't the case and he has emphatically denied it. I like the way Eco puts it. Derrida finds non-obvious truths as well as stating common truths from non-obvious points of view. The problem is that most in the humanities aren't really able to deal well with careful rigorous thinking. So Deconstruction is amazingly abused in literature and the social sciences. But those abuses have more in common with Margaret Mead and the tendencies towards relativism that arose out of anthropology than the kind of philosophy espounded by Derrida. Derrida's weakness is that he seems only willing to speak in terms of a deconstruction of the questions at hand. It is rather rare that he speaks clearly. You can see this in his answers to questions about 9/11 that were widely quoted on the net. This is unfortunate as it propagates the idea of his being focused in on obsfusication and gibberish. While I don't know why he does this (and he certainly makes mistakes in such offhand comments) I suspect it is because he is concerned about the ethical implications of deconstruction. A lot of criticisms in France about deconstruction relate to how it deals with human actions. It appears to really offer nothing. (And I think it does that. I don't understand why an analysis of linguistic ought to have ethical implications) He, however, clearly wants an ethical theory in the more French tradition. I think he largely failed in this. But his attempts to find some larger purpose certainly are interesting. (_The Gift of Death_ being the most interesting)
The problem is that a iTMS equivalent for video requires some level of TV/Computer convergence. Yet I think Steve Jobs is right that people don't want a computer on their video system. You interact with the two quite differently. The solution to this is to use the computer to get the content and then have a component in your stereo/video system to play it. I suspect we'll see more of these. The first generation really aren't quite there yet.
The interesting question to me is what Apple has planned for this. While I fully agree with Jobs' critique of the Microsoft Media Center and look-a-likes, there clearly is some relationship. If Apple gets in there and makes a deal with the MPAA that would be great for them. Unfortunately I suspect Microsoft may trump Apple or Real here and get videos in WMP9 format with that awful interface and approach to things.