Macs have never had a 'clone market*'.
There have been "licensees".
There is a huge difference.
When IBM lost the clone battles Phoenix & everyone else were free to offer reverse-engineered work-alike PCs. Not just "mostly alike", just alike. Buy the same MS or whomever OS, install the same Lotus 123 or whathaveyou, it's all a commodity.
IBM later tried to recapture the market by redefining it with MicroChannel, their proprietary & well defended next-gen bus architecture. But the ISA market was too big and had enough momentum that IBM's efforts were doomed and look, 25 years later they're out of the PC market they helped create not having made a profit at it in years.
On the other hand Apple, after a few early skirmishes, never lost control of their products. Their architecture didn't lend itself to easy reengineering and there was rarely an eager alternative OS vender around to make non-MacOS boxes viable. Be, Yellow Dog, etc. never were more then novelties.
What Apple did do was, under contracted terms, sell their proprietary system ROMs & MacOS 7 to third parties for a licensing fee and per-unit compensation. The idea was that these nimbler & more aggressive partners would expand the Mac into markets Apple wasn't interested in or where it was unable to compete effectively (usually cost or distribution-wise).
However instead companies like Power Computing turned around and cannibalized Apple's domestic bread-&-butter Mac market by offering similar systems at price points slightly below Apples.
A few did expand the Mac into new markets - high-end multi-processor, etc. but by-and-large it was a financial disaster for Apple. They were already suffering from extremely poor supply chain management, a shrinking market, and high R&D costs; to then start supplying direct competitors with products that undercut their own was disastrous.
So when the opportunity arose with a new MacOS to change terms Apple did - they bought back their licenses and shut down the program. Most folks agree if they hadn't the company wouldn't have lasted another year.
*Yes, there were a few obscure attempts but it never amounted to a few hundred clone units total.
The folks at Arcitosh will be interested to hear that...
If you're just referring to AutoCAD, emphaticallynot knowing anything specific, my educated guess is they'll soon be reconsidering leaving the Mac market.
You're saying 90% of our highest elected law-makers are folks who received a reasonably difficult to obtain law degree and then got themselves admitted to a legal bar association or equivalent?
Say it ain't so!
No, we want folks writing laws who don't know jack-shit about the legal system, how it is constructed, how to be constructive within it, who couldn't be bothered to get themselves educated on it and then become certified. Apparently instead earning one's self a JD is automatically evil in your world? Right, instead we should have random folks ignorant of legal precedent & practice putting together the legal architecture for our nation.
Look, it ain't perfect, but as is often repeated it's better then the alternatives.
Next week, why we should replace all of the civil engineers designing bridges with 8 year olds who watched "Modern Marvels" on the Discovery Channel!
Not to be a killjoy, but overheating glycerin can potentially create toxic fumes - probably more gruesome then you want your party to end up...
A pre-built fog machine costs about US$20 at most larger stores and is temperature regulated so you don't poison anyone, making it a wiser investment then strapping your clothes iron, a drip mechanism, and a small fan together (quieter and easier to work with too!). Also keep in mind the fine glycerin smoke can trigger asthmatics & other folks with breathing problems, and leaves a thin greasy layer on EVERYTHING if used indoors (walls, ceilings, windows, dishware, flooring, into cabinets & rooms you thought were better sealed...)
While on the not-a-good-ideas theme don't go adding scents, colorings, or other "effects" to the fog. After being scalded on the hot plate and then blown around they never do more then smell nasty, gum up the works, and again, are potentially hazardous to inhale.
From a fella who spent a half hour prepping his for machines this afternoon my advice is outside, in a sheltered area (wind destroys it), and spooky but not pea-soup. The cooler trick is a good one, and a great use of an end-of-season beat up cheapy foam cooler. A chicken-wire tube between two holes, a load of ice, no fan needed, warm rising fog goes jetting in one end and comes out nearly as fast but spookier ground-hugging fog at the other end. You can even use a short bit of dryer hose if you need to 'pipe' the fog. Oh, and a black cloth hides the cooler, but leave the fogger exposed as they get very hot and need to be refilled occ. My favorite places are hemmed in by shrubs, which I hang some more black cloth around the bottoms to help dam in the ground fog. A bit of lighting helps to show up the fog, nothing like a red or purple glow fromn down low to add yet more atmosphere...
Sound also helps immeasurably! I use my collection of old came-with-it computer speakers, hidden up in trees and in shrubs, for effects. I plug them into old tape & CD players, then every hour do a circuit around the property restarting 'em. Mix your own audio, and don't be afraid of long periods of quiet rustling, or even silence, punctuated by loud effects. A surprise sound is scarier then walking up to a cacophony of moaning / creaking / screaming. Never underestimate the terror of a real person either; stationing an accomplice in a closet or bushes to make appropriate sounds is incredibly effective, just make sure they're up for a longish stint at it.
For other effects one of my preferred is the good old black light. You have to be careful however, many of the little purple holiday lights labeled "black light" don't actually emit any UV! Test anything you buy ASAP and bring it back for a refund if nothing glows. The best values are the medium tube lights, around US$15 for a 24" one with fixture. Or get a bunch of the incandescent bulbs for US$1 each and gang them up, stick in corners, behind props, use aluminum foil reflectors to direct their light.
For making stuff glow under black light the classic is any laundry whitener, "Whisk" is one of my favorites. Paint with it, rinse cloth in it, it's a powerful UV reflector (why your clothes look so bright when washed with it!) Many toothpastes are also dosed with strong UV reflectors, for that blinding-white-in-the-mirror effect (that dissipates down your throat within a few minutes).
However my personal favorite is black light hair spray. Found in many party supply shops this time of year it costs around US$2/can and goes on nearly transparent, perfect for applying stencils to surfaces (including windows & mirrors!), clothing, or body parts. Right now I've got garage windows full of cheap black & white 'haunted face' plastic masks sprayed with the stuff ready for the room-of-doom next week. Cost was a US$1 75 watt black light, 6 US$1 masks, and that US$2 can of hair spray. Same for my own hair and outfit this weekend out at adult parties, normal until the black lights go on then covered in
My understanding is this sort of filtering isn't practical on any of the consumer routers due to their limited memory. The applications load the email messages to scan them, and between the OS code, the scanning package, and the email being scanned there simply isn't enough memory to hold it all, even on the larger WRT54GS units.
My own hope is that Cisco's Linksys subsidiary eventually 'gets smart' and releases a combination WRT54GS / NSLU2 / PAP2 appliance, with more RAM, that is Linux-based and hackable. That, or some Lucky Factory No. 5 starts churning out the equivalent white boxes using just the chip manufacturer's reference implementations, gets it FCC'd, and sets 'em lose on the market.
Domes are great - in theory.
However most furnishings & furniture are rectangles and so don't fit up against the walls, thus there is lots of wasted space, and construction techniques on domes aren't nearly as well developed as they are for 'traditionial' homes. Couple that with difficult local codes and the stigma of living in the 'wierd poor house' and they're mostly a non-starter.
Concrete seems to be a good direction to go these days, and pre-made modular concrete homes are slowly becoming widely avaialble. With advances like insulating concrete and the like they can create quick, solid, reasonably cheap homes that 'look normal' and folk are comfortable iving in.
There's a battle going on in Boston, Ma. USA right now about a new level 4biodefense lab a local university and the CDC want to build downtown. The folks who will be running it are the same ones who recently accidentally infected themselves with tularemia. So far there's been lotsa opposition, this will only add to the concerns.
Apparently this isn't the first time international competition has resulted in dubious claims of "discovery". The most interesting part, IMHO, is:
Whatever the case, Adams utterly failed to communicate his results forcefully to his colleagues and to the world. A discovery does not consist merely of launching a tentative exploration of an interesting problem and producing some calculations; it also involves realizing that one has made a discovery and conveying it effectively to the scientific world
Emphasis mine. Interesting words in the era of "intellectual property".
BBC, as a publicly funded institution, much like PBS, obviously views broadcast completely different than a for-profit station.
Well, only sorta. While PBS has a US Gov't mandate less then 15% of it's funds come from the US Gov't. Over 85% of it's budget is from trusts, grants, merchadising, licensing, and "Viewers like you". That's vastly different from the BBC & it's "TV Tax".
besides being obvious, this is very nice, and a credit to the BBC for showing that sometimes publicly run things do get it right.
Well, yes, gladly enough there are some things some govt's. do get right. In the BBC's case much of their success has been due to their government independance, unlike the US where it appears that the constant harping against a percieved "left" bias has led to a culture of timidity & oversight.
**this is not an endorsement for state sponsored programs or wholesale socialism, because most of the time it sucks... but BBC seems to be doing it right, for a change.
Like the services of municipal water, lighting, roads, and libraries, that many folks reading this take for granted?
I really want google to do something like MSN direct. that watch was really cool and I was happy to pay $50.00 a year to get im messages on it as well as the other info and calendar data.
Honey, I don't wanna break it to you hard, but that is called a "Pager".
They've been around 30 years, are cheaper, offer more services, and better coverage then MSN Direct. Integration is easy, just send email to it.
If you've already moved into the '90's world of the "Cellphone" (they're gonna be popular!) look up something called "SMS". Via it you can not only get messages but send them, and can even SMS Google.
Sorry, but in a world with pagers at the low end and cellphones at the higher ends MSN Direct was just a stoopid idea that died a deserved death.
Apple eventually closed up access to the hardware documentation, so Be couldn't support it anymore.
That's BS.
A half dozen other alternative OS's were able to boot perfectly well on Apple's PPC boxes, including several still with us (YellowDog anyone?) None of them had the benefit of having hired away a bunch of Apple engineers...
No, the "difference" was that Intel's investment arm had just dumped a boatload of cash on the struggling Be, gotten a seat on their board, and maneuvered them to going x86. Rather then confess this to the faithful however Be decided to piss all over the company that had spurned 'em and claim Apple made 'em leave Mac/PPC (boohoo)
Lesson learned? It's hard enough for free OS's to compete against the MS juggernaut, much less pricey half-written 'multimedia' ones. At least Nextstep had a richer OS & development environment, some customers beyond the hobbyist market. Oh, and was able to convince Apple to pay them $400 million to take over Apple's OS R&D.
For those coming late to the saga here is some relevant mp3 player background:
Justin Frankel writes WinAmp, a nice free little Windows mp3 player that helps set off the mp3 revolution. AOL eventually buys it for oodles of $$$ and after lots of drama loses much of the development team & lets WinAmp languish.
SoundJam was written for the Mac by Bill Kincaid & Jeff Robbin. You can find a bit of history on it here.
It's competitor on the Mac was Audion, their story here.
SoundJam was eventually licensed to distributor house Cassidy & Green & and becomes SoundJam MP.
MS keeps upgrading Media Center to show off MS technologies and compete with Apple's limited QuickTime Player application.
Real is doing the same, if less successfully.
Apple goes shopping for an mp3 player to jumpstart their internal development. As Audion was already in talks with AOL for a Mac counterpart to WinAmp they weren't attractive.
Apple buys SoundJam MP from Cassidy & Green, hires Jeff Robbin as a developer, and a few months later it's descendant iTunes is born (Wikipedia entry).
iTunes is brought to MacOS X.
Apple introduces the iPod as the portable compliment to iTunes - their close integration is considored a key factor in it's success.
iTunes is brought cross-platform by porting chunks of Apple's UI & taking advantage of the already existing QuickTime for Windows tools.
Cassidy & Green closes.
the iTunes Store is rolled out offering the ability to download music from 5 big companies.
Steve Jobs announces the next version of iTunes will support Podcasting (a 3rd party quickly adds this onto the Windows version.)
Rumor has it a future version of iTunes will support a store for video.
So you misunderstood the article. You expressed that misunderstanding not just once but twice in your posting. They were simple unambiguous statements with the word "only". All I did was correct the misimpression, fairly politely.
So drop the 'tude and stop tossing up straw men.
I made no comment on requiring 100% efficacy, incremental improvement, requiring perfection, or anything else of the sort. There're no "shades of grey" bs, you just plain got it wrong and are apparently too childish to acknowledge that. Fine by me, my life goes on unaffected, but in the future how about a bit of public honesty, dignity, and courtesy?
Based on what I understand of nano-tech and the human body, I think we're going to see a lot more of this, and this will be the first medical nanotech revolution: Creating drugs that are targetted only at the things they are supposed to affect.
Except it's not.
These nano-particles with Folic Acid go into cells all over the body along (though apparently don't cross the blood/brain barrier). It's just that cancer cells pull in more FA, thus more nano-particles, thus more nanoparticle chemotherapy payload. However every cell that uses FA is getting some slight dose, proportionial to their FA usage.
So, contrary to your hopes, it is:
... flooding the entire body with something to affect.1% of it...
But thanks for posting, and the rest of your ideas are right on, if only you weren't 180 degrees wrong about the article.
When IBM lost the clone battles Phoenix & everyone else were free to offer reverse-engineered work-alike PCs. Not just "mostly alike", just alike. Buy the same MS or whomever OS, install the same Lotus 123 or whathaveyou, it's all a commodity.
IBM later tried to recapture the market by redefining it with MicroChannel, their proprietary & well defended next-gen bus architecture. But the ISA market was too big and had enough momentum that IBM's efforts were doomed and look, 25 years later they're out of the PC market they helped create not having made a profit at it in years.
On the other hand Apple, after a few early skirmishes, never lost control of their products. Their architecture didn't lend itself to easy reengineering and there was rarely an eager alternative OS vender around to make non-MacOS boxes viable. Be, Yellow Dog, etc. never were more then novelties.
What Apple did do was, under contracted terms, sell their proprietary system ROMs & MacOS 7 to third parties for a licensing fee and per-unit compensation. The idea was that these nimbler & more aggressive partners would expand the Mac into markets Apple wasn't interested in or where it was unable to compete effectively (usually cost or distribution-wise).
However instead companies like Power Computing turned around and cannibalized Apple's domestic bread-&-butter Mac market by offering similar systems at price points slightly below Apples.
A few did expand the Mac into new markets - high-end multi-processor, etc. but by-and-large it was a financial disaster for Apple. They were already suffering from extremely poor supply chain management, a shrinking market, and high R&D costs; to then start supplying direct competitors with products that undercut their own was disastrous.
So when the opportunity arose with a new MacOS to change terms Apple did - they bought back their licenses and shut down the program. Most folks agree if they hadn't the company wouldn't have lasted another year.
What has changed since then? Not much.
Apple now does charge for their OS upgrades, but makes no effort to enforce this. They've leveraged their R&D by adopting more standard components, adopting & using some open source code & development, and now moving to Intel-associated motherboards & CPUs. But to date they make their profit on selling the hardware & the rest is mostly part of the package.
So, Mac-clones?
Probably not. Apple is unlike Wintel - they sell the hardware and the OS: There's no advantage to their opening either end to competition. Heck for protection they could build their OS so it does something as trivial as look for an Apple-encoded string in a system firmware and sue the bagoobers outta anyone who tries to fake that.
Beyond that Apple has a long history of innovating in fundamental ways. While the development boxes they're shipping out now may be based on plain-jane Intel tech there's no promises that substantial parts of the Mactels won't be something fresh 'n funky - clever memory architecture, bus design, whatever - intractable hardware/OS interactions that homers & cloners can't easily reverse-engineer.
Time will tell, but Apple, it's officers & engineers, aren't stoopid; they're likely not looking to start giving away their crown jewels and undercutting their fiduciary responsibility no matter how many geek fan-boys want MacOS X on their hopped up Athlon-with-fins box. Me, I'll be looking forward to buying a Mactel someday, and not giving a damn what's inside of it as long as it-just-works.
I've got a cousin who does this, works exclusively for big companies, puts in meeting rooms for teleconferencing.
It's a pretty complex process involving getting all of the wiring in, the lighting rigged, cameras speced & set, sound adjusted, matching conferencing systems, etc. There's a lot of art to it, figuring out room layout & microphone placement so folks sound natural, nobody has to shout or whisper, noisy equipment is muffled, lighting works for cameras while not leaving everyone dazzled, etc.
Could you do it? Sure, with lots of trial & error.
However hire someone who does this all of the time & they'll keep you from going down dead-ends, give you real numbers to work with, know the vendors and their offerings. Almost none of this overlaps with networking, nor with consumer product experience you might have had, so really a pro is probably best.
BetaNews is running a story right now (which is showing adjacent to this story on/. if you're using the RSS feed boxes) titled Sony Launches Consumer HD Camcorder. Numbers in the article include $2,000, 1.5 pounds, 90 minutes of recording time on a single charge, 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, still picture 2.8 megapixel camera.
However there simply wasn't any outcry when the CITGO sign was erected as it placed across from several other equally garish signs in then rather honky-tonky Kenmore Square. Indeed the opposing "White Fuel" sign lived on through the 80's until the Hotel Buckminster was sold yet again and finally refurbished.
Furthermore it the time of the CITGO sign's erection Boston was just coming out of it's decades-long economic doldrums. For example Back Bay wasn't the blocks of fabulously expensive historical buildings it now is but then a rather dingy area full of students, cheap urban shops, and second rate apartments. Internationially known neighboring Boston University was a purely regional institution offering kids a hometown backup to power-houses Harvard & MIT.
Historical preservation was something for a few old objects & odd lots in Boston, a city happily razing it's West End & Scolley Square in the name of slum clearence & urban progress. Proud in it's new Central Artery "Highway in the Sky" cutting a swath through downtown, soon to meet up with an elaborate set of supporting highways running through & over other parts of the city. Enthused in thought of running an interstate "super highway" along the old rail lines, perhaps decking over the Back Bay trackage that divided it from the city.
The majority of the tracks became I-90, the ROW was covered with the Prudential Center, an overhead connector was built from Boyleston St. in the Fenway to Storrow Drive, forever sundering Kenmore Square from Back Bay. However the rest of the highways were never completed leaving these odd remnants and the cleared land, some of which eventually became the Southeast Corridor.)
The erection of yet another big lit sign was viewed as evidence of vibrancy, of economic activity, of a small bit of the Great White Way. If anything the signage met with approbation, appreciation of the small addt'l amount of light & activity it lent to the area (again, recall, it was by no means alone like it is now!)
So, glad you tried to put yourself in your ancestor's shoes, but unfortunately you wore your modern ones in assuming their opinions. Limiting commercial speech was an odd concept, urban beautification meant planting dogwoods, and yet another big lit sign meant progress to a tatty 'square' in a then backwater town.
LEDs emit light, directly or indirectly, only on a few narrow wavelengths. Therefore unless you're looking for just those few colors you're going to have to do mixing of multiple LEDs to get intermediate shades.
Complicating things further is that not all wavelengths are emitted equally strongly, and also that the human eye doesn't perceive all color equally strongly. This isn't a case of RGB, or CMY, it's a few off-variations of differing intensities.
Therefore to produce a specific shade, say Corporate Logo Color, Pantone #22578, isn't a no-brainer. The same is true for visually smoothly fading from shade to shade, it's not just a matter of turning down Bank A and turning up Bank B. Instead some calculations need to take place to make it all look decent, and that is the space where Color Kinetics has got their patents.
BTW, for those interested, Color Kinetics makes a home product series, "Sauce". These are night-lights & light bulb replacements that can be set to strobe, flicker, cross-fade in different ranges, etc. They're pricey at US $10-20, are available at many toy stores, and tend to crap out after a year or two of use (the blue goes.)
I use mine in my bathroom as a ever cross-fading night light, also set to one shade or another on on an empty white living room wall to 'punch it up'. I've friends who use their's for mood lighting in their bedroom.
first building is (I believe) the Biogen building right by Alliston Mass Pike exit.
The faux industrial building by the Allston exit of I90 is a Genzyme production facility, not associated with Biogen. All of Biogen's local offices are located around Kendall/Tech Square area (I'm former Biogen IT contractor).
FWIW, Ars was started by a bunch of Harvard folks, so the Cambridge/Boston backdrops aren't suprising. All of these are on or within a few block of Memorial Drive, which runs along the Charles River from Harvard to MIT.
Why on earth you would ever want to put a video clip into a word processor document? Isn't the point of a word processor document that you might want to print it out?
Er, no.
That is, unless you think all documents should only be read printed on dead tree & clay.
On the other hand I've no end of documents I've embedded material into. Spreadsheets that update dynamically. Stock and exchange rates with latest values. Sound files citing something in the speaker's own voice. Video files displaying the event in question. etc.
For that matter the material I produce is rarely printed out but probably stays in it's original binary format all of it's life-cycle. All of them are written so they still make sense stripped down to bare unformatted text but the non-text material does add hugely to their usefulness.
Screen-cams showing how to do something in an application. Quick audio notes when reviewing a document for a peer. Last week a Flash animation showing how NAT works to a relative, stuck in the middle of a letter.
Words aren't the only medium of communication. A picture is oftentimes worth a thousand words, a moving picture another order of magnitude of information density. So yes, it is helpful that a word processor is facile with more then just words.
A word processor needn't be a sound or video editing suite, or html editor, but embedding links, 3rd party objects, sound & video clips, all are expected of a modern application. Indeed your vocabulary even respects that; "documents" instead of "text files".
I reccomend the Linksys WRT54GS. It's about US$10 more then the G model but includes more memory you'll be able to take advantage of in the future. The router can be found online for around US$60 online or US$90 retail.
Then install the Sveasoft firmware. The shipping version is free, access to the beta version & support for it is US$20. Some folks dissaprove of this strategy but the FSF has green-lighted it and it does pay for the project.
QoS, VPN (endpoints), SSH, filtering, upped antennae power, it's all there. They've extended the Linksys web interface to handle most of the expanded functioniality and below that there's a real working Open Source Linux with a happy command line.
Sure it's not an old clunker running something else. It's also small, quiet, stable, wireless if you want to take advantage of that. I dunno about you but being able to replace a 24/7 big noisy hot box in my living space with a smaller quieter cooler one is worth the small premium.
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For those puzzled, RMS's Liberal comment is in reference to Canada's Liberal party.
There is a huge difference.
When IBM lost the clone battles Phoenix & everyone else were free to offer reverse-engineered work-alike PCs. Not just "mostly alike", just alike. Buy the same MS or whomever OS, install the same Lotus 123 or whathaveyou, it's all a commodity.
IBM later tried to recapture the market by redefining it with MicroChannel, their proprietary & well defended next-gen bus architecture. But the ISA market was too big and had enough momentum that IBM's efforts were doomed and look, 25 years later they're out of the PC market they helped create not having made a profit at it in years.
On the other hand Apple, after a few early skirmishes, never lost control of their products. Their architecture didn't lend itself to easy reengineering and there was rarely an eager alternative OS vender around to make non-MacOS boxes viable. Be, Yellow Dog, etc. never were more then novelties.
What Apple did do was, under contracted terms, sell their proprietary system ROMs & MacOS 7 to third parties for a licensing fee and per-unit compensation. The idea was that these nimbler & more aggressive partners would expand the Mac into markets Apple wasn't interested in or where it was unable to compete effectively (usually cost or distribution-wise).
However instead companies like Power Computing turned around and cannibalized Apple's domestic bread-&-butter Mac market by offering similar systems at price points slightly below Apples.
A few did expand the Mac into new markets - high-end multi-processor, etc. but by-and-large it was a financial disaster for Apple. They were already suffering from extremely poor supply chain management, a shrinking market, and high R&D costs; to then start supplying direct competitors with products that undercut their own was disastrous.
So when the opportunity arose with a new MacOS to change terms Apple did - they bought back their licenses and shut down the program. Most folks agree if they hadn't the company wouldn't have lasted another year.
*Yes, there were a few obscure attempts but it never amounted to a few hundred clone units total.
The folks at Arcitosh will be interested to hear that...
If you're just referring to AutoCAD, emphatically not knowing anything specific, my educated guess is they'll soon be reconsidering leaving the Mac market.
You're saying 90% of our highest elected law-makers are folks who received a reasonably difficult to obtain law degree and then got themselves admitted to a legal bar association or equivalent?
Say it ain't so!
No, we want folks writing laws who don't know jack-shit about the legal system, how it is constructed, how to be constructive within it, who couldn't be bothered to get themselves educated on it and then become certified. Apparently instead earning one's self a JD is automatically evil in your world? Right, instead we should have random folks ignorant of legal precedent & practice putting together the legal architecture for our nation.
Look, it ain't perfect, but as is often repeated it's better then the alternatives.
Next week, why we should replace all of the civil engineers designing bridges with 8 year olds who watched "Modern Marvels" on the Discovery Channel!
A pre-built fog machine costs about US$20 at most larger stores and is temperature regulated so you don't poison anyone, making it a wiser investment then strapping your clothes iron, a drip mechanism, and a small fan together (quieter and easier to work with too!). Also keep in mind the fine glycerin smoke can trigger asthmatics & other folks with breathing problems, and leaves a thin greasy layer on EVERYTHING if used indoors (walls, ceilings, windows, dishware, flooring, into cabinets & rooms you thought were better sealed...)
While on the not-a-good-ideas theme don't go adding scents, colorings, or other "effects" to the fog. After being scalded on the hot plate and then blown around they never do more then smell nasty, gum up the works, and again, are potentially hazardous to inhale.
From a fella who spent a half hour prepping his for machines this afternoon my advice is outside, in a sheltered area (wind destroys it), and spooky but not pea-soup. The cooler trick is a good one, and a great use of an end-of-season beat up cheapy foam cooler. A chicken-wire tube between two holes, a load of ice, no fan needed, warm rising fog goes jetting in one end and comes out nearly as fast but spookier ground-hugging fog at the other end. You can even use a short bit of dryer hose if you need to 'pipe' the fog. Oh, and a black cloth hides the cooler, but leave the fogger exposed as they get very hot and need to be refilled occ. My favorite places are hemmed in by shrubs, which I hang some more black cloth around the bottoms to help dam in the ground fog. A bit of lighting helps to show up the fog, nothing like a red or purple glow fromn down low to add yet more atmosphere...
Sound also helps immeasurably! I use my collection of old came-with-it computer speakers, hidden up in trees and in shrubs, for effects. I plug them into old tape & CD players, then every hour do a circuit around the property restarting 'em. Mix your own audio, and don't be afraid of long periods of quiet rustling, or even silence, punctuated by loud effects. A surprise sound is scarier then walking up to a cacophony of moaning / creaking / screaming. Never underestimate the terror of a real person either; stationing an accomplice in a closet or bushes to make appropriate sounds is incredibly effective, just make sure they're up for a longish stint at it.
For other effects one of my preferred is the good old black light. You have to be careful however, many of the little purple holiday lights labeled "black light" don't actually emit any UV! Test anything you buy ASAP and bring it back for a refund if nothing glows. The best values are the medium tube lights, around US$15 for a 24" one with fixture. Or get a bunch of the incandescent bulbs for US$1 each and gang them up, stick in corners, behind props, use aluminum foil reflectors to direct their light.
For making stuff glow under black light the classic is any laundry whitener, "Whisk" is one of my favorites. Paint with it, rinse cloth in it, it's a powerful UV reflector (why your clothes look so bright when washed with it!) Many toothpastes are also dosed with strong UV reflectors, for that blinding-white-in-the-mirror effect (that dissipates down your throat within a few minutes).
However my personal favorite is black light hair spray. Found in many party supply shops this time of year it costs around US$2/can and goes on nearly transparent, perfect for applying stencils to surfaces (including windows & mirrors!), clothing, or body parts. Right now I've got garage windows full of cheap black & white 'haunted face' plastic masks sprayed with the stuff ready for the room-of-doom next week. Cost was a US$1 75 watt black light, 6 US$1 masks, and that US$2 can of hair spray. Same for my own hair and outfit this weekend out at adult parties, normal until the black lights go on then covered in
My understanding is this sort of filtering isn't practical on any of the consumer routers due to their limited memory. The applications load the email messages to scan them, and between the OS code, the scanning package, and the email being scanned there simply isn't enough memory to hold it all, even on the larger WRT54GS units. My own hope is that Cisco's Linksys subsidiary eventually 'gets smart' and releases a combination WRT54GS / NSLU2 / PAP2 appliance, with more RAM, that is Linux-based and hackable. That, or some Lucky Factory No. 5 starts churning out the equivalent white boxes using just the chip manufacturer's reference implementations, gets it FCC'd, and sets 'em lose on the market.
Domes are great - in theory. However most furnishings & furniture are rectangles and so don't fit up against the walls, thus there is lots of wasted space, and construction techniques on domes aren't nearly as well developed as they are for 'traditionial' homes. Couple that with difficult local codes and the stigma of living in the 'wierd poor house' and they're mostly a non-starter. Concrete seems to be a good direction to go these days, and pre-made modular concrete homes are slowly becoming widely avaialble. With advances like insulating concrete and the like they can create quick, solid, reasonably cheap homes that 'look normal' and folk are comfortable iving in.
The Mass. Nurses Association has the best take I've read.
Apparently this isn't the first time international competition has resulted in dubious claims of "discovery". The most interesting part, IMHO, is:
Emphasis mine. Interesting words in the era of "intellectual property".
They've been around 30 years, are cheaper, offer more services, and better coverage then MSN Direct. Integration is easy, just send email to it.
If you've already moved into the '90's world of the "Cellphone" (they're gonna be popular!) look up something called "SMS". Via it you can not only get messages but send them, and can even SMS Google.
Sorry, but in a world with pagers at the low end and cellphones at the higher ends MSN Direct was just a stoopid idea that died a deserved death.
A half dozen other alternative OS's were able to boot perfectly well on Apple's PPC boxes, including several still with us (YellowDog anyone?) None of them had the benefit of having hired away a bunch of Apple engineers...
No, the "difference" was that Intel's investment arm had just dumped a boatload of cash on the struggling Be, gotten a seat on their board, and maneuvered them to going x86. Rather then confess this to the faithful however Be decided to piss all over the company that had spurned 'em and claim Apple made 'em leave Mac/PPC (boohoo)
Lesson learned? It's hard enough for free OS's to compete against the MS juggernaut, much less pricey half-written 'multimedia' ones. At least Nextstep had a richer OS & development environment, some customers beyond the hobbyist market. Oh, and was able to convince Apple to pay them $400 million to take over Apple's OS R&D.
So you misunderstood the article. You expressed that misunderstanding not just once but twice in your posting. They were simple unambiguous statements with the word "only". All I did was correct the misimpression, fairly politely.
So drop the 'tude and stop tossing up straw men.
I made no comment on requiring 100% efficacy, incremental improvement, requiring perfection, or anything else of the sort. There're no "shades of grey" bs, you just plain got it wrong and are apparently too childish to acknowledge that. Fine by me, my life goes on unaffected, but in the future how about a bit of public honesty, dignity, and courtesy?
These nano-particles with Folic Acid go into cells all over the body along (though apparently don't cross the blood/brain barrier). It's just that cancer cells pull in more FA, thus more nano-particles, thus more nanoparticle chemotherapy payload. However every cell that uses FA is getting some slight dose, proportionial to their FA usage.
So, contrary to your hopes, it is:
But thanks for posting, and the rest of your ideas are right on, if only you weren't 180 degrees wrong about the article.There have been "licensees".
There is a huge difference.
When IBM lost the clone battles Phoenix & everyone else were free to offer reverse-engineered work-alike PCs. Not just "mostly alike", just alike. Buy the same MS or whomever OS, install the same Lotus 123 or whathaveyou, it's all a commodity.
IBM later tried to recapture the market by redefining it with MicroChannel, their proprietary & well defended next-gen bus architecture. But the ISA market was too big and had enough momentum that IBM's efforts were doomed and look, 25 years later they're out of the PC market they helped create not having made a profit at it in years.
On the other hand Apple, after a few early skirmishes, never lost control of their products. Their architecture didn't lend itself to easy reengineering and there was rarely an eager alternative OS vender around to make non-MacOS boxes viable. Be, Yellow Dog, etc. never were more then novelties.
What Apple did do was, under contracted terms, sell their proprietary system ROMs & MacOS 7 to third parties for a licensing fee and per-unit compensation. The idea was that these nimbler & more aggressive partners would expand the Mac into markets Apple wasn't interested in or where it was unable to compete effectively (usually cost or distribution-wise).
However instead companies like Power Computing turned around and cannibalized Apple's domestic bread-&-butter Mac market by offering similar systems at price points slightly below Apples.
A few did expand the Mac into new markets - high-end multi-processor, etc. but by-and-large it was a financial disaster for Apple. They were already suffering from extremely poor supply chain management, a shrinking market, and high R&D costs; to then start supplying direct competitors with products that undercut their own was disastrous.
So when the opportunity arose with a new MacOS to change terms Apple did - they bought back their licenses and shut down the program. Most folks agree if they hadn't the company wouldn't have lasted another year.
What has changed since then? Not much.
Apple now does charge for their OS upgrades, but makes no effort to enforce this. They've leveraged their R&D by adopting more standard components, adopting & using some open source code & development, and now moving to Intel-associated motherboards & CPUs. But to date they make their profit on selling the hardware & the rest is mostly part of the package.
So, Mac-clones?
Probably not. Apple is unlike Wintel - they sell the hardware and the OS: There's no advantage to their opening either end to competition. Heck for protection they could build their OS so it does something as trivial as look for an Apple-encoded string in a system firmware and sue the bagoobers outta anyone who tries to fake that.
Beyond that Apple has a long history of innovating in fundamental ways. While the development boxes they're shipping out now may be based on plain-jane Intel tech there's no promises that substantial parts of the Mactels won't be something fresh 'n funky - clever memory architecture, bus design, whatever - intractable hardware/OS interactions that homers & cloners can't easily reverse-engineer.
Time will tell, but Apple, it's officers & engineers, aren't stoopid; they're likely not looking to start giving away their crown jewels and undercutting their fiduciary responsibility no matter how many geek fan-boys want MacOS X on their hopped up Athlon-with-fins box. Me, I'll be looking forward to buying a Mactel someday, and not giving a damn what's inside of it as long as it-just-works.
It's a pretty complex process involving getting all of the wiring in, the lighting rigged, cameras speced & set, sound adjusted, matching conferencing systems, etc. There's a lot of art to it, figuring out room layout & microphone placement so folks sound natural, nobody has to shout or whisper, noisy equipment is muffled, lighting works for cameras while not leaving everyone dazzled, etc.
Could you do it? Sure, with lots of trial & error.
However hire someone who does this all of the time & they'll keep you from going down dead-ends, give you real numbers to work with, know the vendors and their offerings. Almost none of this overlaps with networking, nor with consumer product experience you might have had, so really a pro is probably best.
BetaNews is running a story right now (which is showing adjacent to this story on /. if you're using the RSS feed boxes) titled Sony Launches Consumer HD Camcorder. Numbers in the article include $2,000, 1.5 pounds, 90 minutes of recording time on a single charge, 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio, still picture 2.8 megapixel camera.
However there simply wasn't any outcry when the CITGO sign was erected as it placed across from several other equally garish signs in then rather honky-tonky Kenmore Square. Indeed the opposing "White Fuel" sign lived on through the 80's until the Hotel Buckminster was sold yet again and finally refurbished.
Furthermore it the time of the CITGO sign's erection Boston was just coming out of it's decades-long economic doldrums. For example Back Bay wasn't the blocks of fabulously expensive historical buildings it now is but then a rather dingy area full of students, cheap urban shops, and second rate apartments. Internationially known neighboring Boston University was a purely regional institution offering kids a hometown backup to power-houses Harvard & MIT.
Historical preservation was something for a few old objects & odd lots in Boston, a city happily razing it's West End & Scolley Square in the name of slum clearence & urban progress. Proud in it's new Central Artery "Highway in the Sky" cutting a swath through downtown, soon to meet up with an elaborate set of supporting highways running through & over other parts of the city. Enthused in thought of running an interstate "super highway" along the old rail lines, perhaps decking over the Back Bay trackage that divided it from the city.
The majority of the tracks became I-90, the ROW was covered with the Prudential Center, an overhead connector was built from Boyleston St. in the Fenway to Storrow Drive, forever sundering Kenmore Square from Back Bay. However the rest of the highways were never completed leaving these odd remnants and the cleared land, some of which eventually became the Southeast Corridor.)
The erection of yet another big lit sign was viewed as evidence of vibrancy, of economic activity, of a small bit of the Great White Way. If anything the signage met with approbation, appreciation of the small addt'l amount of light & activity it lent to the area (again, recall, it was by no means alone like it is now!)
So, glad you tried to put yourself in your ancestor's shoes, but unfortunately you wore your modern ones in assuming their opinions. Limiting commercial speech was an odd concept, urban beautification meant planting dogwoods, and yet another big lit sign meant progress to a tatty 'square' in a then backwater town.
LEDs emit light, directly or indirectly, only on a few narrow wavelengths. Therefore unless you're looking for just those few colors you're going to have to do mixing of multiple LEDs to get intermediate shades.
Complicating things further is that not all wavelengths are emitted equally strongly, and also that the human eye doesn't perceive all color equally strongly. This isn't a case of RGB, or CMY, it's a few off-variations of differing intensities.
Therefore to produce a specific shade, say Corporate Logo Color, Pantone #22578, isn't a no-brainer. The same is true for visually smoothly fading from shade to shade, it's not just a matter of turning down Bank A and turning up Bank B. Instead some calculations need to take place to make it all look decent, and that is the space where Color Kinetics has got their patents.
BTW, for those interested, Color Kinetics makes a home product series, "Sauce". These are night-lights & light bulb replacements that can be set to strobe, flicker, cross-fade in different ranges, etc. They're pricey at US $10-20, are available at many toy stores, and tend to crap out after a year or two of use (the blue goes.)
I use mine in my bathroom as a ever cross-fading night light, also set to one shade or another on on an empty white living room wall to 'punch it up'. I've friends who use their's for mood lighting in their bedroom.
FWIW, Ars was started by a bunch of Harvard folks, so the Cambridge/Boston backdrops aren't suprising. All of these are on or within a few block of Memorial Drive, which runs along the Charles River from Harvard to MIT.
That is, unless you think all documents should only be read printed on dead tree & clay.
On the other hand I've no end of documents I've embedded material into. Spreadsheets that update dynamically. Stock and exchange rates with latest values. Sound files citing something in the speaker's own voice. Video files displaying the event in question. etc.
For that matter the material I produce is rarely printed out but probably stays in it's original binary format all of it's life-cycle. All of them are written so they still make sense stripped down to bare unformatted text but the non-text material does add hugely to their usefulness.
Screen-cams showing how to do something in an application. Quick audio notes when reviewing a document for a peer. Last week a Flash animation showing how NAT works to a relative, stuck in the middle of a letter.
Words aren't the only medium of communication. A picture is oftentimes worth a thousand words, a moving picture another order of magnitude of information density. So yes, it is helpful that a word processor is facile with more then just words.
A word processor needn't be a sound or video editing suite, or html editor, but embedding links, 3rd party objects, sound & video clips, all are expected of a modern application. Indeed your vocabulary even respects that; "documents" instead of "text files".
Then install the Sveasoft firmware. The shipping version is free, access to the beta version & support for it is US$20. Some folks dissaprove of this strategy but the FSF has green-lighted it and it does pay for the project.
QoS, VPN (endpoints), SSH, filtering, upped antennae power, it's all there. They've extended the Linksys web interface to handle most of the expanded functioniality and below that there's a real working Open Source Linux with a happy command line.
Sure it's not an old clunker running something else. It's also small, quiet, stable, wireless if you want to take advantage of that. I dunno about you but being able to replace a 24/7 big noisy hot box in my living space with a smaller quieter cooler one is worth the small premium.
Meatball Wiki page on GopherProtocol
A copy of the Gopher FAQ
MacOrchard page with TurboGopher VR