For those confused it's not unusual for a product that has had profound influence on the Television Industry to recieve an Emmy. Communications Satellites have been honored, videocards have been honored, DVD technology has been honored, MPEG has been honored, now it's Apple's FireWire high-speed digital interconnect.
Why Apple for it's FireWire and not IEEE for it's same 1394-1995 spec or Sony for it's i.Link (again the same)? Because Apple is the one that did the development and the popularizing of the technology thus their holding the majority of the patents & controlling the licensing.)
First of all, Mac OS X uses the BSD Mach Microkernel (developed by Rick Rashid.. now VP of research for MS) instead of the a traditional monolithic UNIX kernel! It has a lot of the GNU and BSD tools included with it, but after all, GNU's not UNIX!
MacOS X is unix, at least insofar as anyone cares. It's certified to use the Unix trademark, it's listed in unix family tree, it walks and talks and quacks like a unix so yeah, it's a unix. There are pendants out there who will argue this-or-that "isn't unix" and the rest of usinix just ignores them and gets on with life.
As to your various other claims there is no "BSD Mach Microkernel" though MacOS X is based on a derivative of the Mach microkernel originally developed at CMU (I know - those three letter school acronyms all sound alike..)
As usual John Siracusa brings up excellent points. However there are a few places that perhaps he's glossed over or disagrees with that I feel could be important:
John argues that the OS can handle flattening files and creating file extensions when they are written to transports & filesystems that don't support the MacOS metadata properly.
This relies on the MacOS always having appropriate mappings between filetype/creator codes and those annoying DOS extensions - not something that is always possible. Furthermore in an increasingly networked future it's not always assured that files will pass directly in & out through the OS but rather will likely just as often come & go through alternate transports, all of which would have to all be rewritten to support this. As this enforced-extension functionality is already standard in many applications it seems reasonable to simply codify it there then rewrite everything else, particularly as the creating application will have far more insight into the appropriate extension then the OS could.
John argues that the user should always have control over a file's naming and not the OS, yet acknowledges that renaming-with-extensons will often be required in a networked multi-OS environment.
Personally I would always prefer any extension-addition be made and clearly communicated when I explicitly create a file and not later when it passes in and out of MacOS-metadata-supporting networks and filesystems. Just as John is appalled at the proposal for hiding these extensions from the user's view I'd be appalled at their being automagically added to my file's names at some later date when they may get moved around or viewed from another OS. At least when I name a file "whiz" and the application insists on creating it as "whiz.bang" I know about it, I don't find out later that my "whiz" is that on some servers and "whiz.bang" on others or it's "whiz" for the other Mac users and "whiz.bang" to the *nix & Wintel folks.
Finally John views the possibility of Apple moving from it's MacOS X HFS+ native filesystem to some other with alarm; I see this as evolution.
HFS+ is a fine filesystem but it's unique in an increasingly unnecessary way. Other more modern filesystems are being created and if MacOS X is to remain current it needs to keep up and take advantage of these advances. Journaling filesystems are poised to become a standard feature of modern *nix implementations - should Apple lock themselves out of this? Furthermore it's not obvious that new filesystems will necessarily obviate the MacOS-metadata (ReiserFS seems particularly well poised to eventually incorporate much of this) but preparing for all eventualities seems wise.
Apple no longer lives in it's own comfortable bubble. It's now a peer OS in world increasingly sophisticated and fast-moving. Having grafted MacOS's strengths onto the Next operating system Apple has now entered the rejuvenated unix environment and needs to compete not only on it's own terms but also on those of the other modern operating systems.
While it remains important to retain those strengths that have made MacOS such a survivor it's also necessary to not hobble it with dependencies on unnecessary Apple-only limitations. Flexibility is the order of the day and this includes some reasonable level of filesystem versatility. Apple already supports a variety of filesystems now it's come time to allow for the possibility of multiple "native" ones while retaining much of it's vaunted metadata strengths.
Re:Believe it or not...
on
Dorm Storm?
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· Score: 2
Of course the unspoken assumption is that "The Ape With No Name" is a heterosexual male in search of a partner.
Travel isn't *that* expensive, particularly out to the places these folks would be going. Regarding the "key person" theory this is basic testing at a Nat'l Lab, either there's backup or J. Shmoe will make it for the good of their career.
As to onsite, I don't want to be around the day something breaks loose. In desert there's no big need for a containment building and no big huhu if one were to fail.
Finally - for those worried about dsert ecology putting a small crater here & there isn't gonna hurt much outside the very local area (explosives in the open don't do all that much damage unless they're specialized for such.) We put holes in the desert every day in places like 29 Palms training artillery, this isn't much different. Heck the roads to/from the sites likely have more significent effect.
I mean, aside from the sheer niftyness of it it's not like the US is particularly short of places where one can blow things up, particularly relatively low-yield ordinance like nuclear weaponry triggers. We're not talking the bombs themselves, just the bombs-that-trigger-the-BOMBS.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to rent one of those cheap hunter's-hotels out in the middle of nowhere next to some federal lands, truck out the hardware and send the researchers on a field trip every so often?
Heck, there's always the Nevada deserts where the original testing took place above-ground and the later stuff below. It's already got facilities and there's not a lot of call for the area these days.
If you follow the discussion links posted earlier in this thread the development of OV4QT (my lazy acronym) is fairly well documented.
From as far as I've gotten it appears there's an issue (and it may have been resolved - I'm still reading through July and am in way above my head) that OV-compressed material isn't strictly linear but instead information can be spread out within the stream. Thus there's a certian amount of read-ahead/reassemble/playback that's still a bit dodgy implementing in the QT environment. This may be the source of the discrepancy you're noting. Or I could be (likely) completely off.
Anyway the developer discussion makes for interesting reading and I expect that investing the 45 minutes or so to go through it and catch up would be time well invested, particularly if you're looking to really understand and take advantage of OV4QT.
Since QuickTime is a well documented, widely used, open-ended architecture and is so pervasively supported in MacOS making Ogg Vorbis availiable in iTunes (or anywhere else in the MacOS & it's applications) shouldn't be difficult.
See http://developer.apple.com/quicktime for details. Indeed Apple even has a program where they'll put you on their updates system and as an at-need component download. With that in place simply sending someone an Ogg Vorbis-encoded file would trigger their getting the codec automagically.
The language laws are complex and constantly misrepresented (for example the OLF's own staff & director was applying a typeface-size rule that was entirely specious.) However for commercial sites they must offer comperable material in French.
They may not actually do any business within the province (example a high-tech software package that is only applicable to specific engineering practices not used in Quebec) but they must support hypothetical if impossible quebecois customers.The situation for non-profit sites is less clear but is likely the same, personal sites are apparently yet to be determined.
This is all new territory for the OLF and of course they like to make up "law" as they go along but for now it's usually best just to host one's material out of province.
As to knowing French, no you're not required and indeed there are many native Montrealers who don't have a working knowledge. However to run a business it's required as the provincial government works only in French and there are laws regarding the use of French within offices over a certian size, French in business communications, etc. Certianly it makes life much easier.
Finally the majority of the population that simply doesn't speak English, particularly outside of downtown Montreal. I lived in a farm town 45 minutes North of Montreal and any unidentified English material (newspapers, catalogs, magazines) went into my mailbox, particularly if they were tech-related. I was one of the few anglophones in town, the only tech one, and the small post office knew it.
The way I explain it to visitors is that Anglophones are like spanish-speakers in Texas or Florida. There's a bunch, particularly in the city but it's a second class society with the minority newpspers, minority TV stations, etc. The west island (Isle de Montreal) is heavily anglophone and there the street language is English but it's like a suburban barrio, drive a few blocks and the stop signs revert to "Arret".
Perhaps this is your laundry list, half of this I don't see most geeks caring tremendously about.
Computers in schools? What's the percentage of geeks with larvae? Sure theres a bunch but most geeks earn enough to see their kids are in good schools.
No advertising in the schools? Oh yeah - "Not gonna move to Ottawa - They've got Coke in their schools!" I'm sure Corel & Nortel recruiters field this issue all the time...
Bicycle paths? Aren't bicycles those things most geeks hang on walls as some sort of trophies? Sure there are some bicycling nuts but they're mostly like those silly sea kayaks in the Pacific Northwest many geeks have and only used twice in 10 years (but love to try & drop into the conversation to impress MOTAS.)
Hostility against big ISPs? Most geeks just want cheap, relaible, fast & customer service from an ISP that knows NTP from NNTP - couldn't care less if it comes from Rogers, Cox, or anyone else incl. Mom-n-Pop-ISP.
Etc.
If you're in Eastern Mass. AT&T's lying
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Broadband Crackdown
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· Score: 3, Interesting
AT&T "Customer Service" is claiming that their Acceptable Use Policy forbids servers. This is not true for all customers; I know it's not true at least for the former customers of MediaOne in Eastern Massachusetts.
Posting to ATT/RR Home Page on transition to Excited@Home:
New Service Subscriber Agreement
Your AT&T Road Runner home page will automatically change to the new content provided by AT&T @Home on June 30, 2001. Effective with the elimination of the Road Runner content, the AT&T Road Runner Service Subscriber Agreement will be replaced with the AT&T@Home Subscriber Agreement. You can see the new agreement at http://help.broadband.att.com/support under the Policies section of Answers to Questions. Because you are not using @Home software, the @Home End User License Agreement attached to the end of your new agreement will not apply to you.
(b) FTP/HTTP Service Setup. Customer should be aware that when using the Service to access the Internet or any other online network or service, there are certain applications, such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server or HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) server, which may be used to allow other Service users and Internet users to gain access to Customer's computer. If Customer chooses to run such applications, Customer should take the appropriate security measures. Neither AT&T nor @Home Network shall have any liability whatsoever for any claims, losses, actions, damages, suits or proceedings resulting from, arising out of or otherwise relating to the use of such applications by Customer, including without limitation, damages resulting from others accessing Customer's computer.
(c) File and Print Sharing. The Service functions as a Local Area Network (LAN) in that each Customer is a node on the network. As such, users outside the Customer's home may be able to access the Customer's computer. As well, some software includes capabilities that permit other users across a network such as the Service and the Internet to gain access to the Customer's computer and to the software, files and data stored on the computer. For example, operating systems such as Windows 95 and Apple Macintosh include file sharing and print sharing capabilities which, when enabled, will permit other users to gain access to the Customer's computer even if the Customer is not using the Service. AT&T therefore recommends that the Customer connect only a single computer to the Service and that the Customer disable file and print sharing and other capabilities that allow users to gain access to the Customer's computer. Any Customer who chooses to participate in the Service using other than a single computer or who chooses to enable capabilities such as file sharing, print sharing, or other capabilities that allow users to gain access to the Customer's computer, hereby acknowledges and agrees that the Customer does so at the Customer's own risk, and that neither AT&T nor @Home Network shall have any liability whatsoever for any claims, losses, actions, damages, suits or proceedings arising out of or otherwise relating to such use by the Customer.
And furthermore from the same document:
11. Miscellaneous
(b) Amendment. AT&T may, in it sole discretion, change, modify, add or remove portions of this Agreement, and the Service provided thereunder, at any time. AT&T will notify Customer of any such changes by posting notice of such changes on the Service, or sending notice via e-mail, postal mail or other means. Customer's continued use of the Service following notice of such change shall be deemed to be Customer's acceptance of any such modification. If Customer does not agree to any such modification, Customer must immediately stop using the Service and notify AT&T that Customer is terminating this Agreement in accordance with Section 7(a) of this Agreement. Customer will then be entitled to a refund of any unused portion of any monthly Service fee that has been paid in advance.
Did anyone else get notification before port 80 was blocked? The above policies certianly still seem to be in effect; they're still posted and they clearly imply customers may run HTTP & FTP servers at their own risk.
As an American living in Montreal 5 years after NYC, DC, & Boston here's a few other points:
LOTS of ethnic restaurant (something lacking in Ottawa) Absolutely true. Fantastic food everywhere and open 'till late.
Cheapest electricity in North America. Granted, you need a lot to heat in the winter:) Also note that most buildings are almost uninsulated and the general housing stock is somewhat elderly.
Very low cost of rent. My apartment (5 rooms) cost me 485 CDN$ (1 CDN$ ==.65 US$) Again, the housing is generally a step or two below US standards. This means fewer amenities, smaller rooms, more worn buildings, etc.
Nightlife extraordinaire (not quite NYC, but close) Actually I'd say better then Gulliani-era NYC. Plus much more accessible & much cheaper though after awhile Comedy Festival / Carrifiesta / Jazz Festival / Grand Prix / Gay Pride / Franco Follies / Fete Nationale / St. Patrick's / etc. get to be a bit much.
Lots of taxes break for new business. See the Cité du Multimédia in particular. Lots (lots!) of government meddling in businesses. Some industries get big breaks, free buildings, employees underwritten, big grants, etc. & others don't. Success is as much about currying political favor & the public teat as it is about sales.
Low crime rate, although it tend to worsen IMHO. By US standards very low crime rates. When I first moved to Montreal I thought from watching TV news they must be the worst drivers in the word. Then I realized that without the US's daily parade of gunshots & the like single-car accidents were as close as they could come to "if it bleeds it leads" stories.
Broadband available (both cable and DSL) On the other hand the service isn't all that great & the language police can go after you if your website is in the province & isn't sufficiently bilingual.
Downside include :
Low wage, high taxes In my case I figured about 1/2 US rates before the exchange rate.
Weather Long cold winters although the city is designed to handle them, all enclosed subway, vast "Underground City". Frankly I find winters in Montreal to be less of a hassle then in Boston as the plowing on streets & sidewalks is fantastic and sidewalk obstructions are intelligently kept against buildings.
Sluggish economy Canada's economy lags the US's, Quebec's lags the rest of Canada's.
No high tech spearhead, like Nortel in Ottawa. Has numerous businesses like SoftImage, ZeroKnowledge, chemical, pharmaceutical & aviation businesses plus lots of Nortel but no, no overwhelming ones like Corel or Nortel HQ. On the other hand this may well be a plus.
Other things to consider are the hell of the language laws and the effect they'll have on your trying to run a business, the grossly intrusive government bureaucracy and the highest taxes in North America. Then there's the issue of the separtist government and their determination to create a pure Quebec of only francophones; the common racist & antisemetic feelings. Another is the lingering laws that forbid grocery stores (even very big ones) from having more then four staff late night or after regular hours on Sundays and that stores close early including malls.
Also being in Canadia US companies overlook or avoid services up here: no TiVo service, expensive shipping across the border, anything that requires a Zip code to confirm won't work, etc.
It's a fantastic place to live but I wouldn't try to start a business here. Did I mention the highest taxes in North America?
No brainwasher got to me - I'm a gay man who along with likely a lot of straight folks wishes slugs like you would dry up in the sun & blow away. However failing that you're a perfect study as to why strong local communities & laws protecting folks from discrimination are important and how they're critical to developing a high tech community.
As to your employer being wiser to fire the non-whatever-you-are folks and going with your sort: Post their email address and I'm sure someone would be happy to pass your comment along.
Moderators: Read the original before calling this one - I refuse to dignify it with quoting but also refuse to let this sort of garbage go unchallenged. It's on topic because it's exactly the sort of issues that make one place attractive to high-tech employers/employees & others not.
Here's a list of some of the items I've seen of import to Geeks:
A strong gay community with good protections. Seriously, lots of high tech folks are lgbt? and it's an issue. I know Austin Texas took a hit when they repealed some protections, folks from companies like Apple declined transfers on that basis.
The same for ethnic communities. Lots of Geeks are Indian or Pakastani or SE Asian - good cultural resources like night clubs and resturaunts serving home food & grocery stores with the same are important.
Late night services. This means having more then the cliché "Quik-E-Mart" a few miles away. Good big grocery stores that are open 24 hours are important. Hardware stores & electronic stores are that are open late also are big pluses too. Municipalities can curb their "Blue Laws" and do what they can to support 24/7 services that match many Geek lifestyles.
Students. Students support lots of services that Geeks also take advantage of. This covers everything from take-out to music stores to a good university library nearby.
Office space that is used to Geek needs. This means 24 hour access - none of those silly heat/ac cuts off 10pm-6am policies. Leases that can start small and grow. Electrical supplies that can support 2 or 3 computers per employee.
Housing. Geeks want housing that can have cables run through it & a bunch of computers in the odd corners - 1930's wiring will not cut it. Houses are better then apartments - semi-furnished is always popular. Semi-adult room-mates are common and the local ordinances shouldn't be written to prevent this. Also leases that start on some synchronized date (Sept. 1 for Boston or June 1 for Montreal) are anathama.
Network access. This means Cable or DSL that is fast, reliable, & reasonably priced without onerous burdons. No servers-forbidden policies or blocked ports or exortinate "Business Rates" for a fixed address or multiple address. This is directly controllable by a municipality when they negotiate their licenses.
Boosting pageviews
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Mac Rants
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
In order to help/. boost it's ever-dropping revenue I've come up with a number of strategies:
Pop-under ads. Everyone needs an X10 whatsits.
Flash ads. The advertisers needn't know many/.'ers don't have a Flash plugin installed.
Ressurect old flamewars. Mac vs PC. CPU Architectures. How many mouse-buttons. Window managers. Big or little endian. ANSI C. Open Sourcing . BSD vs Sys V.
Articles on old/obscure products with fanatical followings. Amiga. Tandy CoCo. VMS. CP/M. Z80. Toss these folks a bone to gnaw on.
Use misleading headlines or mischaracterize stories. Chapter-11 means "going down in flames." Wall Street Journal saying "Linux not for everyone" is "Capitalist pigs bash plucky OS".
Report on a topic. Follow up with how the topic is overhyped. Followup yet again pointing out how the topic is really important. Repeat ad infinitum. see "Code Red" for tips on this strategy.
Report on "interviews" where someone has selectively edited together various public statements. See Sony Pictures on how to use clips to attribute misleading sayings ("Planet of The Apes... not... as bad... thought.")
In orfer to boost pageviews these strategies will be rolled out on a daily basis. Expect to see one application every 24 hours. Should our income not rise as projected we will then have to move on to targetted marketing projects with our new "partners".
Company that makes a small email client that runs under DOS & Win3.11 (dates it.) A faxing gateway package is added to the mix. They were also a major vendor of email gateways.
One day there's a tour of the company being given (customers, venture capitol, who knows) and one of the Tech Support staff is asked to show off the faxing feature. She obliges, sends a short note with an attachment to the fax machine down the hall. Folks stand around chatting about this 'n that waiting for the fax to pop out - it's taking several minutes.
One of the other TS'ers notices the delay which shouldn't happen so he quietly wanders down the hall to check the hardware. There's a problem with the email server so the TS'er runs an abbreviated checklist, identifies the blockage, clears it than as a shortcut to make the demo look good points the outgoing queue to the fax machine.
A few seconds later the back-up of email starts to pour out of the fax machine - the first item being a senior sales person's resume, followed by another senior persons resume off to a different company, then an off-color joke, then a second resume from the first senior sales person to a different address...
The tour moved on very quickly to a different part of the company, several staff were missing the next day.
A prominent science education institution with a Departmental Director who wasn't too closely involved with the actual operation of his department. One of his department's major functions was to produce various optical effects for projection. The effects were primarily optical but generally including various mechanical parts and were invariably built from odd parts stripped from things like grade school filmstrip projectors.
One day the Director is giving a tour to someone or other and wanders into the effects lab. There he proudly details the various statistics, the quality of the work, and how he hasn't a clue of how any of it gets done (a source of pride?) In order to demonstrate the impressive technologies we use & his distance from the actual work he reaches out to a partially completed assembly, grabs a random part, and asks the senior lab employee what it is.
The laconic answer: "...That's the plug Jack..." The Director pauses his babbling to actually look at what he's holding, realizes it's a standard 3-prong electrical plug, drops it and moves along embarrassed he's just picked the one item that anyone would recognize.
I'm on the home leg of a long business trip. Seated next to me on the aircraft is some recent graduate excited to be flying in the front of the aircraft and bubbling with enthusiasm. As I flew constantly I was in my usual dress-down outfit of jeans, t-shirt, backpack with combat-boots hanging off (the suitcases with dress-up stuff had all been shipped.)
Recent-MBA is clearly dismayed I'm not his peer ('cause I'm not wearing a shiny suit like his) but can't contain his excitement at his flight. He's on his way to interview at a prestigious company for an important role in a new project of theirs. It's all very hush-hush but the company is planning to etc. & then etc. and the competition will be surprised because etc...
The next day I make a point of wandering by the conference room as my former seatmate comes out from his interview, is introduced to me as one of the key people making the project he's interviewed for happen, etc. It was cruel but the look on his face when he realized I'm the stranger he'd spilled our confidential details to the day before...
Policy about what to tell employee candidates was reiterated soon thereafter.
Internationally renowned company that among its many businesses makes medical instruments. As part of a complete product refresh the products are being made networkable (innovative at the time.) While the networked functions were simply to be data recording and not a primary feature of the products (indeed they were entirely intended as sizzle, there was little need for them outside of some research applications) nonetheless many regulatory hoops had to be leapt.
One day a number of folks are in from some alphabet-organization and are to be given a demo of one of our new whatsits. Due to building renovations the fancy conference room with the deluxe seating and controlled-environment demo facility (local network with only the relevant hardware on it) isn't available. Therefore the demo is simply made standing around in a part of the manufacturing facility that will be used for this product, there's also a setup here for it to be tested with when it goes into production.
Everyone is standing around, Marketing has explained how medical equipment looking half-melted would change our paradigm, QA folks have just explained how a failure-states of the product are all safe, blah blah blah.when the whatits is plugged in, hooked up & turned on. Some drone is assigned to have his relevant medical stats recorded as everyone watches the screen and a server in the corner presumably makes a record - but it doesn't.
Indeed upon examination it appears that the networking side of the whatsits isn't working at all. Ahh - it's a prototype, must have put a bad one of the hand-modified network-support cards in. Several more are plugged in but none work either. Folks are looking very nervous, it appears that there's something substantially wrong, the guests are being polite but tension is in the air...
Finally a certain IT contractor (ahem) has the idea to plug in a local PC and see if it can log in to the demo server properly. It can't either. Quickly fingers are pointed at a bad server, folks grin and talk about the luck of the demo, etc. and the party moves on to tour some other part of the project. Unlucky IT staff on hand for the demo are given charge of making this damn thing work ASAP, preferably before these folks leave at the end of the afternoon. They play with the server, fiddle with settings, try various inane things. Then try the same with the local PC. Still no go -it's all hosed. Eventually the IT Contractor escapes the tour and makes it back, starts troubleshooting in a more structured way.
There's a problem with the network. There's a problem with the impedance (thin-net.) There's a break somewhere. An examination of the cable is made tracing it through the area's ceiling. Suddenly a mysterious white wire is discovered jammed into an unused T-connector. It's followed along into an engineering office, along a bench of test equipment, behind a number of large instruments, and onto... a radio antenna. Some engineer has decided to get better reception by hooking into the unused-as-yet network in that part of manufacturing; it's enough to bollix everything.
The wire is yanked loose from the connector, the tour circles back around for a successful for the demo and our intrepid Contractor announces he's taking three days off, suddenly confident his contract will be renewed.
Nobody is "required" to do squat about email that comes with a destruct-request. If we truly were required then I could then bill the senders for time & services rendered.
All those stupid notices do is communicate that whoever resposible for them has poor grasp of this area of the law and/or is trying to bs folks into playing along.
The information contained in this document is proprietary and confidential and may not be transmitted to others in any form without the express written consent of me. Contravention of this shall result in substantial penalties. To avoid litigation empty your wallet of all high value bills & email them to me.
When I was Manager at The Computer Museum we had the code in the backroom on papertape. Since then I've seen it floating around for the PDP-1 emulators. It was in machine code so there was no source/compile/binary path.
As The Computer Museum (neé The Digital Computer Museum (Digital as in DEC)) had a full working PDP-1 out on permanent display for special occasions (or for Big Donors which is the same thing) we'd fire it all up & let folks play on the original hardware.
Speaking as not-a-big-gamer it was fun, challenging, impressively responsive. Invariably it was a crowd pleaser to both young and old alike. Considering that "glass teletypes" were a novelty when Spacewar debuted the vector-graphics & fluid motion were undoubtably a revalation to most folks.
Trivia:
"Spacewar" is widely considered the first computer arcade game. Defining "first" is always a tricky business as there's always someone coming out of the woodwork with a one-off they built presumably years before or with something else in mind but it could be interpreted as, etc.
We often stored a spare bag of vomit-cleanup in the large interior of the (unplugged) PDP-1. Nothing to do with the PDP-1 it was just the most convenient place in that gallery. However occ. when showing off the PDP-1 to guests (who'd often worked on it) they were startled to see it when we'd open the case.
The PDP-1 monitor was a hexagonal case with a circular display. The hexagon-enclosing-a-circle later became the logo for DECUS, the Digital Equipment Corporation User Group.
Why would you care about Apple's ROMs? Not even Apple ships ROMs anymore (they've been replaced by the "New World ROM" that's just code loaded into RAM. Apple only keeps that much for it's MacOS
As Macs are all Open Firmware I can't imagine why you'd still be mucking about with the ROMS. Miss the past half decade?
Starts out car sized at the top of the atmosphere, ends up baseball-sized or smaller at the bottom if anything at all makes it to the surface (depends on trajectory, composition, and how the thing ablates.)
B'cause they not propelled (or are you of the "Greys" school of thought?)
Objects generally enter the atmosphere at 10-30Kps if they're asteroidial in origin, 40-70Kps if cometary. If they're big enough aerodynamic effects are negligable - that's a couple hundred meters in diameter & would have disasterous effect upon impact.
However for objects below 50 meters the atmosphere is all crucial - they'll often get so chewed up that nothing makes it down coherent (depends on trajectory, composition and how it comes apart.)
As this object was only a few meters in size initially it's unlikely (though not impossible) that anything recognizable made it to the surface. Certianly it was well within the size limit at which it would have been slowed to it's terminal velocity.
Once folks get away from this idea that we're talking about giant objects slamming into the surface at impossible speeds it all becomes much more realistic. Meteors are bright, they're definitely very impressive coming down, but all of that energy is from the object slowing & ablating.
In this case one could simulate the impact by dropping a frozen cannonball or dense rock from a 30 story or so height, possibly just tossing some gravel or ball bearings, most likely dust. Not exactly gonna cause disaster in the county huh?
Objects in space don't contend with an atmosphere. For ones under a 50m diameter this is a crucial difference, for ones over 100m not so important. For more details see this posting.
Slashdot Mirror
Why Apple for it's FireWire and not IEEE for it's same 1394-1995 spec or Sony for it's i.Link (again the same)? Because Apple is the one that did the development and the popularizing of the technology thus their holding the majority of the patents & controlling the licensing.)
As to your various other claims there is no "BSD Mach Microkernel" though MacOS X is based on a derivative of the Mach microkernel originally developed at CMU (I know - those three letter school acronyms all sound alike..)
Mach's " Principal Investigator " was Rick Rashid, with Avadis "Avie" Tevanian who was " principal designer and engineer of the Mach operating system. BTW Avie Tevanian left CMU to continue the development of Mach at Next and is now Sr. VP of SW Engineering at Apple.
First of all I'm neither clueless nor a Mac evangelist, second off... Just where is your "second of all?* Most units sold
- John argues that the OS can handle flattening files and creating file extensions when they are written to transports & filesystems that don't support the MacOS metadata properly.
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John argues that the user should always have control over a file's naming and not the OS, yet acknowledges that renaming-with-extensons will often be required in a networked multi-OS environment.
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Finally John views the possibility of Apple moving from it's MacOS X HFS+ native filesystem to some other with alarm; I see this as evolution.
Apple no longer lives in it's own comfortable bubble. It's now a peer OS in world increasingly sophisticated and fast-moving. Having grafted MacOS's strengths onto the Next operating system Apple has now entered the rejuvenated unix environment and needs to compete not only on it's own terms but also on those of the other modern operating systems.This relies on the MacOS always having appropriate mappings between filetype/creator codes and those annoying DOS extensions - not something that is always possible. Furthermore in an increasingly networked future it's not always assured that files will pass directly in & out through the OS but rather will likely just as often come & go through alternate transports, all of which would have to all be rewritten to support this. As this enforced-extension functionality is already standard in many applications it seems reasonable to simply codify it there then rewrite everything else, particularly as the creating application will have far more insight into the appropriate extension then the OS could.
Personally I would always prefer any extension-addition be made and clearly communicated when I explicitly create a file and not later when it passes in and out of MacOS-metadata-supporting networks and filesystems. Just as John is appalled at the proposal for hiding these extensions from the user's view I'd be appalled at their being automagically added to my file's names at some later date when they may get moved around or viewed from another OS. At least when I name a file "whiz" and the application insists on creating it as "whiz.bang" I know about it, I don't find out later that my "whiz" is that on some servers and "whiz.bang" on others or it's "whiz" for the other Mac users and "whiz.bang" to the *nix & Wintel folks.
HFS+ is a fine filesystem but it's unique in an increasingly unnecessary way. Other more modern filesystems are being created and if MacOS X is to remain current it needs to keep up and take advantage of these advances. Journaling filesystems are poised to become a standard feature of modern *nix implementations - should Apple lock themselves out of this? Furthermore it's not obvious that new filesystems will necessarily obviate the MacOS-metadata (ReiserFS seems particularly well poised to eventually incorporate much of this) but preparing for all eventualities seems wise.
While it remains important to retain those strengths that have made MacOS such a survivor it's also necessary to not hobble it with dependencies on unnecessary Apple-only limitations. Flexibility is the order of the day and this includes some reasonable level of filesystem versatility. Apple already supports a variety of filesystems now it's come time to allow for the possibility of multiple "native" ones while retaining much of it's vaunted metadata strengths.
As to onsite, I don't want to be around the day something breaks loose. In desert there's no big need for a containment building and no big huhu if one were to fail.
Finally - for those worried about dsert ecology putting a small crater here & there isn't gonna hurt much outside the very local area (explosives in the open don't do all that much damage unless they're specialized for such.) We put holes in the desert every day in places like 29 Palms training artillery, this isn't much different. Heck the roads to/from the sites likely have more significent effect.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to rent one of those cheap hunter's-hotels out in the middle of nowhere next to some federal lands, truck out the hardware and send the researchers on a field trip every so often?
Heck, there's always the Nevada deserts where the original testing took place above-ground and the later stuff below. It's already got facilities and there's not a lot of call for the area these days.
If you follow the discussion links posted earlier in this thread the development of OV4QT (my lazy acronym) is fairly well documented.
From as far as I've gotten it appears there's an issue (and it may have been resolved - I'm still reading through July and am in way above my head) that OV-compressed material isn't strictly linear but instead information can be spread out within the stream. Thus there's a certian amount of read-ahead/reassemble/playback that's still a bit dodgy implementing in the QT environment. This may be the source of the discrepancy you're noting. Or I could be (likely) completely off.
Anyway the developer discussion makes for interesting reading and I expect that investing the 45 minutes or so to go through it and catch up would be time well invested, particularly if you're looking to really understand and take advantage of OV4QT.
-- Michael
See http://developer.apple.com/quicktime for details. Indeed Apple even has a program where they'll put you on their updates system and as an at-need component download. With that in place simply sending someone an Ogg Vorbis-encoded file would trigger their getting the codec automagically.
They may not actually do any business within the province (example a high-tech software package that is only applicable to specific engineering practices not used in Quebec) but they must support hypothetical if impossible quebecois customers.The situation for non-profit sites is less clear but is likely the same, personal sites are apparently yet to be determined.
This is all new territory for the OLF and of course they like to make up "law" as they go along but for now it's usually best just to host one's material out of province.
As to knowing French, no you're not required and indeed there are many native Montrealers who don't have a working knowledge. However to run a business it's required as the provincial government works only in French and there are laws regarding the use of French within offices over a certian size, French in business communications, etc. Certianly it makes life much easier.
Finally the majority of the population that simply doesn't speak English, particularly outside of downtown Montreal. I lived in a farm town 45 minutes North of Montreal and any unidentified English material (newspapers, catalogs, magazines) went into my mailbox, particularly if they were tech-related. I was one of the few anglophones in town, the only tech one, and the small post office knew it.
The way I explain it to visitors is that Anglophones are like spanish-speakers in Texas or Florida. There's a bunch, particularly in the city but it's a second class society with the minority newpspers, minority TV stations, etc. The west island (Isle de Montreal) is heavily anglophone and there the street language is English but it's like a suburban barrio, drive a few blocks and the stop signs revert to "Arret".
Computers in schools? What's the percentage of geeks with larvae? Sure theres a bunch but most geeks earn enough to see their kids are in good schools.
No advertising in the schools? Oh yeah - "Not gonna move to Ottawa - They've got Coke in their schools!" I'm sure Corel & Nortel recruiters field this issue all the time...
Bicycle paths? Aren't bicycles those things most geeks hang on walls as some sort of trophies? Sure there are some bicycling nuts but they're mostly like those silly sea kayaks in the Pacific Northwest many geeks have and only used twice in 10 years (but love to try & drop into the conversation to impress MOTAS.)
Hostility against big ISPs? Most geeks just want cheap, relaible, fast & customer service from an ISP that knows NTP from NNTP - couldn't care less if it comes from Rogers, Cox, or anyone else incl. Mom-n-Pop-ISP.
Etc.
Partially quoted from:
Which states: And furthermore from the same document: Did anyone else get notification before port 80 was blocked? The above policies certianly still seem to be in effect; they're still posted and they clearly imply customers may run HTTP & FTP servers at their own risk.roadrunner.techtalk.general
3B709BDA.3480@mediaone.net.invalid
chelm@mediaone.net.invalid wrote:
- LOTS of ethnic restaurant (something lacking in Ottawa)
- Cheapest electricity in North America. Granted, you need a lot to heat in the winter
:)
- Very low cost of rent. My apartment (5 rooms) cost me 485 CDN$ (1 CDN$ ==
.65 US$)
- Nightlife extraordinaire (not quite NYC, but close)
- Lots of taxes break for new business. See the Cité du Multimédia in particular.
- Low crime rate, although it tend to worsen IMHO.
- Broadband available (both cable and DSL)
Downside include :Absolutely true. Fantastic food everywhere and open 'till late.
Also note that most buildings are almost uninsulated and the general housing stock is somewhat elderly.
Again, the housing is generally a step or two below US standards. This means fewer amenities, smaller rooms, more worn buildings, etc.
Actually I'd say better then Gulliani-era NYC. Plus much more accessible & much cheaper though after awhile Comedy Festival / Carrifiesta / Jazz Festival / Grand Prix / Gay Pride / Franco Follies / Fete Nationale / St. Patrick's / etc. get to be a bit much.
Lots (lots!) of government meddling in businesses. Some industries get big breaks, free buildings, employees underwritten, big grants, etc. & others don't. Success is as much about currying political favor & the public teat as it is about sales.
By US standards very low crime rates. When I first moved to Montreal I thought from watching TV news they must be the worst drivers in the word. Then I realized that without the US's daily parade of gunshots & the like single-car accidents were as close as they could come to "if it bleeds it leads" stories.
On the other hand the service isn't all that great & the language police can go after you if your website is in the province & isn't sufficiently bilingual.
- Low wage, high taxes
- Weather
- Sluggish economy
- No high tech spearhead, like Nortel in Ottawa.
Other things to consider are the hell of the language laws and the effect they'll have on your trying to run a business, the grossly intrusive government bureaucracy and the highest taxes in North America. Then there's the issue of the separtist government and their determination to create a pure Quebec of only francophones; the common racist & antisemetic feelings. Another is the lingering laws that forbid grocery stores (even very big ones) from having more then four staff late night or after regular hours on Sundays and that stores close early including malls.In my case I figured about 1/2 US rates before the exchange rate.
Long cold winters although the city is designed to handle them, all enclosed subway, vast "Underground City". Frankly I find winters in Montreal to be less of a hassle then in Boston as the plowing on streets & sidewalks is fantastic and sidewalk obstructions are intelligently kept against buildings.
Canada's economy lags the US's, Quebec's lags the rest of Canada's.
Has numerous businesses like SoftImage, ZeroKnowledge, chemical, pharmaceutical & aviation businesses plus lots of Nortel but no, no overwhelming ones like Corel or Nortel HQ. On the other hand this may well be a plus.
Also being in Canadia US companies overlook or avoid services up here: no TiVo service, expensive shipping across the border, anything that requires a Zip code to confirm won't work, etc.
It's a fantastic place to live but I wouldn't try to start a business here. Did I mention the highest taxes in North America?
As to your employer being wiser to fire the non-whatever-you-are folks and going with your sort: Post their email address and I'm sure someone would be happy to pass your comment along.
Moderators: Read the original before calling this one - I refuse to dignify it with quoting but also refuse to let this sort of garbage go unchallenged. It's on topic because it's exactly the sort of issues that make one place attractive to high-tech employers/employees & others not.
- Pop-under ads. Everyone needs an X10 whatsits.
- Flash ads. The advertisers needn't know many
/.'ers don't have a Flash plugin installed.
- Ressurect old flamewars. Mac vs PC. CPU Architectures. How many mouse-buttons. Window managers. Big or little endian. ANSI C. Open Sourcing . BSD vs Sys V.
- Articles on old/obscure products with fanatical followings. Amiga. Tandy CoCo. VMS. CP/M. Z80. Toss these folks a bone to gnaw on.
- Use misleading headlines or mischaracterize stories. Chapter-11 means "going down in flames." Wall Street Journal saying "Linux not for everyone" is "Capitalist pigs bash plucky OS".
- Report on a topic. Follow up with how the topic is overhyped. Followup yet again pointing out how the topic is really important. Repeat ad infinitum. see "Code Red" for tips on this strategy.
- Report on "interviews" where someone has selectively edited together various public statements. See Sony Pictures on how to use clips to attribute misleading sayings ("Planet of The Apes... not... as bad... thought.")
In orfer to boost pageviews these strategies will be rolled out on a daily basis. Expect to see one application every 24 hours. Should our income not rise as projected we will then have to move on to targetted marketing projects with our new "partners".One day there's a tour of the company being given (customers, venture capitol, who knows) and one of the Tech Support staff is asked to show off the faxing feature. She obliges, sends a short note with an attachment to the fax machine down the hall. Folks stand around chatting about this 'n that waiting for the fax to pop out - it's taking several minutes.
One of the other TS'ers notices the delay which shouldn't happen so he quietly wanders down the hall to check the hardware. There's a problem with the email server so the TS'er runs an abbreviated checklist, identifies the blockage, clears it than as a shortcut to make the demo look good points the outgoing queue to the fax machine.
A few seconds later the back-up of email starts to pour out of the fax machine - the first item being a senior sales person's resume, followed by another senior persons resume off to a different company, then an off-color joke, then a second resume from the first senior sales person to a different address...
The tour moved on very quickly to a different part of the company, several staff were missing the next day.
One day the Director is giving a tour to someone or other and wanders into the effects lab. There he proudly details the various statistics, the quality of the work, and how he hasn't a clue of how any of it gets done (a source of pride?) In order to demonstrate the impressive technologies we use & his distance from the actual work he reaches out to a partially completed assembly, grabs a random part, and asks the senior lab employee what it is.
The laconic answer: "...That's the plug Jack..." The Director pauses his babbling to actually look at what he's holding, realizes it's a standard 3-prong electrical plug, drops it and moves along embarrassed he's just picked the one item that anyone would recognize.
Recent-MBA is clearly dismayed I'm not his peer ('cause I'm not wearing a shiny suit like his) but can't contain his excitement at his flight. He's on his way to interview at a prestigious company for an important role in a new project of theirs. It's all very hush-hush but the company is planning to etc. & then etc. and the competition will be surprised because etc...
The next day I make a point of wandering by the conference room as my former seatmate comes out from his interview, is introduced to me as one of the key people making the project he's interviewed for happen, etc. It was cruel but the look on his face when he realized I'm the stranger he'd spilled our confidential details to the day before...
Policy about what to tell employee candidates was reiterated soon thereafter.
One day a number of folks are in from some alphabet-organization and are to be given a demo of one of our new whatsits. Due to building renovations the fancy conference room with the deluxe seating and controlled-environment demo facility (local network with only the relevant hardware on it) isn't available. Therefore the demo is simply made standing around in a part of the manufacturing facility that will be used for this product, there's also a setup here for it to be tested with when it goes into production.
Everyone is standing around, Marketing has explained how medical equipment looking half-melted would change our paradigm, QA folks have just explained how a failure-states of the product are all safe, blah blah blah.when the whatits is plugged in, hooked up & turned on. Some drone is assigned to have his relevant medical stats recorded as everyone watches the screen and a server in the corner presumably makes a record - but it doesn't.
Indeed upon examination it appears that the networking side of the whatsits isn't working at all. Ahh - it's a prototype, must have put a bad one of the hand-modified network-support cards in. Several more are plugged in but none work either. Folks are looking very nervous, it appears that there's something substantially wrong, the guests are being polite but tension is in the air...
Finally a certain IT contractor (ahem) has the idea to plug in a local PC and see if it can log in to the demo server properly. It can't either. Quickly fingers are pointed at a bad server, folks grin and talk about the luck of the demo, etc. and the party moves on to tour some other part of the project. Unlucky IT staff on hand for the demo are given charge of making this damn thing work ASAP, preferably before these folks leave at the end of the afternoon. They play with the server, fiddle with settings, try various inane things. Then try the same with the local PC. Still no go -it's all hosed. Eventually the IT Contractor escapes the tour and makes it back, starts troubleshooting in a more structured way.
There's a problem with the network. There's a problem with the impedance (thin-net.) There's a break somewhere. An examination of the cable is made tracing it through the area's ceiling. Suddenly a mysterious white wire is discovered jammed into an unused T-connector. It's followed along into an engineering office, along a bench of test equipment, behind a number of large instruments, and onto... a radio antenna. Some engineer has decided to get better reception by hooking into the unused-as-yet network in that part of manufacturing; it's enough to bollix everything.
The wire is yanked loose from the connector, the tour circles back around for a successful for the demo and our intrepid Contractor announces he's taking three days off, suddenly confident his contract will be renewed.
All those stupid notices do is communicate that whoever resposible for them has poor grasp of this area of the law and/or is trying to bs folks into playing along.
When I was Manager at The Computer Museum we had the code in the backroom on papertape. Since then I've seen it floating around for the PDP-1 emulators. It was in machine code so there was no source/compile/binary path.
As The Computer Museum (neé The Digital Computer Museum (Digital as in DEC)) had a full working PDP-1 out on permanent display for special occasions (or for Big Donors which is the same thing) we'd fire it all up & let folks play on the original hardware.
Speaking as not-a-big-gamer it was fun, challenging, impressively responsive. Invariably it was a crowd pleaser to both young and old alike. Considering that "glass teletypes" were a novelty when Spacewar debuted the vector-graphics & fluid motion were undoubtably a revalation to most folks.
Trivia:
Wonder how open the hardware will be. It'd be great to port Apple's open-source Darwin over to another PPC box.
Starts out car sized at the top of the atmosphere, ends up baseball-sized or smaller at the bottom if anything at all makes it to the surface (depends on trajectory, composition, and how the thing ablates.)
Objects generally enter the atmosphere at 10-30Kps if they're asteroidial in origin, 40-70Kps if cometary. If they're big enough aerodynamic effects are negligable - that's a couple hundred meters in diameter & would have disasterous effect upon impact.
However for objects below 50 meters the atmosphere is all crucial - they'll often get so chewed up that nothing makes it down coherent (depends on trajectory, composition and how it comes apart.)
As this object was only a few meters in size initially it's unlikely (though not impossible) that anything recognizable made it to the surface. Certianly it was well within the size limit at which it would have been slowed to it's terminal velocity.
Once folks get away from this idea that we're talking about giant objects slamming into the surface at impossible speeds it all becomes much more realistic. Meteors are bright, they're definitely very impressive coming down, but all of that energy is from the object slowing & ablating.
In this case one could simulate the impact by dropping a frozen cannonball or dense rock from a 30 story or so height, possibly just tossing some gravel or ball bearings, most likely dust. Not exactly gonna cause disaster in the county huh?
The Higgs Boson likely exists & Element 118 may well be possible, we just don't have proof of them yet.
Please don't editorialize innacurately.