I think apple should change the name to "butthead vendor" like they did when Carl Sagan objected to his name as project code word and they changed it it Butthead Astronomer.
Taking the initiative I want to google bomb Tiger direct by linking it to the name Butthead Vendor to Tiger Direct.
Perhaps things havve gotten better, but my first experience with darwin ports was enough to never ever want to try it again.
The darwin ports I tried out was very un-mac like. Instead of putting all its installs in a single container (like fink uses/sw) it spewed them linux-like all over the place. spewing into/usr and/etc and/bin and/local and who knows where else, probably into the fonts folder I would guess. Surgically Removing it was so painful I just decided to re-install.
One of the problems in removing it is that it overwrote basic darwin commands like tar and make and replaced them with its own versions. This was immediately noticable because all of my development applications, including fink, dies immediately since the make did not support the same flags as the default Mac os X make.
Their attitude seems to be this is about making darwin in to gnu-darwin and not into making it an add on to OSX so it just takes over.
I hope they have figured out this is bad idea if they are trying to play in the OXS arena. or equivalently that they at least warn people that installing it is like getting a tatoo you cant remove.
But is annoyed me so much I will never bother trying their software to find out if they changed this.
Given all the problems with time travel altering its own future one has to escape this paradox. One approach is to design the conferrence with plausible deniability.
FOr example, it occurs on april 1, and everyone is required to wear a mask. That way no matter what you said about the future there would be enough kooks at the meeting making prognostications that yours would be indistinguishable at the time. The masks would prevent the contemporary kooks from being identified and thus the future folk identified by process of elimination.
perhaps everyone could be issued a time-coded hash key, so they could prove to the people of their own (future) time period that they had been there.
Oh I forgot to mention automatic Dimensional typing. namely if I were to divide a variable of type meters with one of type seconds then I get a variable of type (meters/second). these will be real types so that other parts of the program can type check. Now that will make the mathematical error checking really tight.
Obviously one can get something like this with overloads on operators but that can become prohibitive in C++ since one can imagine multiplying and dividing many things on a single line of code and in many possible permuations with many possible parenthetical clauses. This will take care of this. In particular Mass*Distancs*Distance/seconds will be the same type as (Distance/seconds)*mass*distance. Trying to do that by overloading * would make you puke.
Boy it looks like not a single poster actually read the desgin documents. Sheesh... slashdot!
Anyhow here's a few of the cool things.
First all variable transactions will be atomic so that you can write parallel code with no locking or syncroization.
Parallelism is in it from the start. The assumption will be thousands of threads running on multiple processors. All loops will be done in parallel--you actaully will have to request serial loop order execution if you want it.
data types can be contain distributed data. this fits the multi-processor design.
It's more than unicode they are talking about. The IDE will support full 2-dimensional mathematical notation. That is it will look like TeX mathematics. If you write a Summation from 1 to N then it will display a summation symbol with I = 1 on the bottom and N on the top. Likewise division will have a numerator with a line under it and a denominnator below it. Ifwrite a matrix traspose the thre will be a matrix symbol with a superscripted T. Also there will not be any Asterix to denot multiplications. Mathematicians dont use these. If two variables are adjacent it means multiply.
Now the cool thing is all those will be due to the IDE not the language. if you open it in emacs it will stillbe editable in ascii.
The point of the excersize is that the code should look like the pseudo-code you find in a mathematics journals. The examples they give comapare a math journal spec to the real code and to code from a non-mathematcal language like C++. There is huge difference in readability. Any mathematician coud debug it without knowing the language.
Optimization will emphasize allowing one to work with objects without losing the speed of primitives.
The language syntax will be extensible not frozen by the complier.
so does AOL and yahoo also have these sorts of breeches from time to time? or is this just another MS exclusive?
Not trying to flame here but there is always this raging debate on whether MS is the brand for those desiring insecure solutions or if its just a matter of size making it a media of exponential viral growth. We have one key data point which is that its' web server technology gets hacked more than say, Apache. It's important since Apache is as big as MS in that, neutralizing partly the size issue (al beit Apache is less homgenous than MS server so it's not perfect)
Now we have an IM data point. This is more interesting since here we do have three homgenous IM sources of large size AOL, MS and Yahoo. So I wonder how often these other brands get hacked. Anyone know?
Now here's a real opportunity for a GNU license. Since Cell's carry their own genomes (and plasmids) one is in effect distributing the source code when you distribute the bugs. Plus there's the real opportunity for Viral Marketing (yes I know mr Bio nazi, bacteria are not viruses).
Actually what I find interesting here is not the applications but the opportunity to study something that is intermediate to a single cellular organism community and a multi-cellualr organism: Geometrically coupled, self organizing communities that communicate. Presumably the plasmids that cause this to happen will quickly find their way out of the lab and into the wild. At some point some natural community will find some selective advantage in being a tightly coupled community.
Since the the communication protocols they are developing are inteded to allow computation, it is plausible that the advantage some cwild community will derive from this will be based on non-trivial computation. Thus Thinking structures in bacteria may evolve from this.
You wont just think you have a cold. Rather your cold may have a think. (yes mr bio nazi I know colds are viruses)
Hey everyone, put a link on your site with the key word "Butt-Head Vendor" directed to tiger Direct. Let's see if we can get the top page rank on Google for Butt-Head Vendor to be tiger direct.
Some may recall famous mac operating system that was named "carl Sagan" and then changed to "Butthead astronomer" when Sagan sued for his trademark name. Later it was changed to just "BHA".
then when you try to access the your URL with a subdirectory rather than parsing the request it tries to go to the subdirectory on the go_daddy_server which of course does not exist and the user gets a 404 from go-daddy_server. What idiots. I now use Name_zero.com as my registrar which correctly forwards.
2) to manipulate your account you have to use a web browser and their admin portal. Yet their portal does not render correctly in all browsers making it impossible to use most browasers on a macintosh.
3) their tech support is unresponsive. they take days to respond, they respond with boiler plate answers that make no sense and cant deal with real issues like #1 because they are just an answering machine not actual adminsitrators or deisgners.
BAsically go daddy sucks unless all you want is your name registers to your own host and not say name forwarding.
If you invent a process and patent it, it can actually make it more likely that the invention will be developed to market by a third party. What happens is that the inventor lacks the wherewithall to commericalize and invention. If they publish it freely then it may not get developed because it woul dnot give anyone a competative advantage to invest in developing it, since another company could copy the marketed product. On the otherhand if a company can buy an exclusive right to a patent it could well be worth the effort of commercializing.
thus most patents are not aimed at enriching the inventor gratuitously but creating a value that protects further investment in the patent. This is the classic public good argument that privatization of public property is often in the public good.
As someone who has patents on laser radar methods that are about to expire. I can say I have no idea if people are using my techinuqes in their product or not. How in the hell would I be able to find out. I could not even afford to buy one of the many lidar instruments on the market and check. Even if I could, it would be hard to tell if it was or was not in use. It would be like trying to see if a certain patented math algorithm were encoded inside a computer chip in hardware. So I wait hoping that maybe at the last second I see a paper or something that mentions that someone is using the methods. But discovering your patent is being abused is serendiptous. Thus if you believe in patents then you need to put most of the burden on the people who use methods without checking for patents on them. This is of course an almost equally difficult task. The better solution might be higher thresholds for patent claims.
The editors changed my submission omitting key details.
The pattent issue is not cut and dried. Nor is neccessarily absurd patetn abuse. The pattent has two inventors. The first inventor, Dr Chen, is the developer of the Fast Cosine Transform and its applications to compression. Thus the fact that this pattent is based on the Fast Cosine transform is proof that prior art did not exist. The second inventor was also on the JPEG commission that created the standard, so it's reasonableto guess this techinology was put in the standard. The trouble is Dr. Chen published the compression algorithm a year before the patent was filed. In the US, the rule of thumb is you have a year to patent an idea after disclosing it, but exceptions can be granted.
In this case the patent is mainly about compression and transmission of video. So its the combination of things not just the Cosine Transform.
However a close reading of the patent claims shows that it also contains technology useful for still compression like jpeg. The fact that this is buried in the complex details may account for why it took so long for the assignee of the patent to get around to claiming it.
The interesting thing here is that Forgent is willing to sel the patent. It already tried to sell the patent to Compaq. So in theory microsoft could pull a coup here not by breaking the patent but by purchasing it and thereby owning Jpeg. The fact that it already produces a revenue stream sort of underlies that. I also know that I the mpeg compression algorithm may also be based on Fast Cosine Transforms. THere is weaker chance it could be used to claim ownership of mpeg.
the 0.25 v is the potential drop per hydrogen atom produced. it scales. a 100 gallon reactor would have the same potential drop as a 1 gallon reactor. the cost scales too. just multiply atoms per second * 0.25v / 1.6e18 (atoms/coulomb). you dont need to know the current just the voltage and you can compute the power per volume.
A zillion posts here say that stating it uses 0.25v without stating the power used is meaningless. Well it's not. Well actually it's not what wou need to know. more on this in a second.
Hydrogen is produced when the bacteria exchanges a proton for an electron at the anode. The proton becomes the hydrogen.
thus it is one for one. For every hydrogen produced you have one electron dropping through a 0.25v external potential.
If other processes are also transferring protons then that's still hydrogen. So one electron passed means some proton contianing species ended up on the electrode. as long as you can make sure that those are mainly hydrogen and not some weird thing (say a metal or sodium or soduim), then you dont care.
So basically its a 0.25 volt cost atom produced.
Now to the numbers:
One mole of electrons is the same as 96,500 Coulombs. So producing 96,500 would require about 25 kilo joules of energy. A mole of hydrogen, if I recall correctly, contains 280KJ of energy of which 230KJ is extracable as work (rest has to to to heat to pay the boltzman tax).
Of course the bacteria can also produce hydrogen on it's own. THe problem is the build up of reaction products that shut down the process. the current is used to help the bacteria get rid of these so the reaction can go to completetion producing hydrogen. Thus if I read this right in steady state we are indeed exchaning electrons for each hydrogen. The problem would then be if the bacteria is instead exchanging electrons for methane or something we dont want.
While it's not Embedding in the usual sense fo the word, it basically is a proof how the mac mini formfactor encourages embedding. A previous Slashdot story referred to IBM's paper on the uses of the Mac Mini as both an embedded device and as it's own development platform. This story shows how the form factor slides easily into a modest 2U industrial model suited for rack mount width or as a kiosk. One could easily treat these like OEM parts.
The Slashdot editors are flamebaiting us. Not to mention it's a Dupe.
This calls for a completely off topic but intelligent thread to be started. How about this one:
Casemodded mac mini doubles it's disk performance
This guy case modded his mac mini putting into an old centris pizza-box. The faster disks and CD boosted performance 20% to 70% on AV things like DVD-copy and CD-to-AIFF and file copying. Overall Xbench-disk gives the set up a 2x performance enhancement.
so the new Official discussion topics are:
1) wow cool retro case mod for $10
2) Did apple cripple the mini just to make it cool?
And is that bad really. After all it is quiet and welcome in the living room something many people would pay a LOT for. Performance is not all.
When enough sellers lose sales (and their reputations) because of this, the problem will die out
Actually that's a fallacy. There's a long established principle in economics that whenever the cost of discernment reaches a critical level the cheap crappy look-alike beats the high quality product. This becomes a run-away situation as the economies of scale kick in as well, making the price differnetial larger and the market flooded with more lousy product increasing the consumers cost of discenrment.
This of course does not hold for all product, nor all cases since strategic marketing is indeed how one overcomes this and instills the need for quality or features on a consumer.
""Well, I've done the math. I think it's a modest number if you could sell a couple thousand, when you look at snowmobiles and quads and those things -- not cars," says Norris. "That's a big market. But if we sold say a couple thousand, $50,000 a piece, that's a billion dollars." "
Slashdot Mirror
Taking the initiative I want to google bomb Tiger direct by linking it to the name Butthead Vendor to Tiger Direct.
ANd here I'm linking Apple to Tiger and to Tiger Direct.
I urge you to join me in adding links. Put these in your sig for the next month so they are all over slashdot!
I confused darwin-ports with gnu-darwin which have the same logo. my bad. gnu-darwin is the poisonous one.
Perhaps things havve gotten better, but my first experience with darwin ports was enough to never ever want to try it again.
/sw) it spewed them linux-like all over the place. spewing into /usr and /etc and /bin and /local and who knows where else, probably into the fonts folder I would guess. Surgically Removing it was so painful I just decided to re-install.
The darwin ports I tried out was very un-mac like. Instead of putting all its installs in a single container (like fink uses
One of the problems in removing it is that it overwrote basic darwin commands like tar and make and replaced them with its own versions. This was immediately noticable because all of my development applications, including fink, dies immediately since the make did not support the same flags as the default Mac os X make.
Their attitude seems to be this is about making darwin in to gnu-darwin and not into making it an add on to OSX so it just takes over.
I hope they have figured out this is bad idea if they are trying to play in the OXS arena. or equivalently that they at least warn people that installing it is like getting a tatoo you cant remove.
But is annoyed me so much I will never bother trying their software to find out if they changed this.
apparently he does not know this is all a virtual world. Don't ruin it for him.
FOr example, it occurs on april 1, and everyone is required to wear a mask. That way no matter what you said about the future there would be enough kooks at the meeting making prognostications that yours would be indistinguishable at the time. The masks would prevent the contemporary kooks from being identified and thus the future folk identified by process of elimination.
perhaps everyone could be issued a time-coded hash key, so they could prove to the people of their own (future) time period that they had been there.
Obviously one can get something like this with overloads on operators but that can become prohibitive in C++ since one can imagine multiplying and dividing many things on a single line of code and in many possible permuations with many possible parenthetical clauses. This will take care of this. In particular Mass*Distancs*Distance/seconds will be the same type as (Distance/seconds)*mass*distance. Trying to do that by overloading * would make you puke.
Anyhow here's a few of the cool things. First all variable transactions will be atomic so that you can write parallel code with no locking or syncroization.
Parallelism is in it from the start. The assumption will be thousands of threads running on multiple processors. All loops will be done in parallel--you actaully will have to request serial loop order execution if you want it.
data types can be contain distributed data. this fits the multi-processor design.
It's more than unicode they are talking about. The IDE will support full 2-dimensional mathematical notation. That is it will look like TeX mathematics. If you write a Summation from 1 to N then it will display a summation symbol with I = 1 on the bottom and N on the top. Likewise division will have a numerator with a line under it and a denominnator below it. Ifwrite a matrix traspose the thre will be a matrix symbol with a superscripted T. Also there will not be any Asterix to denot multiplications. Mathematicians dont use these. If two variables are adjacent it means multiply.
Now the cool thing is all those will be due to the IDE not the language. if you open it in emacs it will stillbe editable in ascii.
The point of the excersize is that the code should look like the pseudo-code you find in a mathematics journals. The examples they give comapare a math journal spec to the real code and to code from a non-mathematcal language like C++. There is huge difference in readability. Any mathematician coud debug it without knowing the language.
Optimization will emphasize allowing one to work with objects without losing the speed of primitives.
The language syntax will be extensible not frozen by the complier.
I'v never "gotten" IM. never even tried it. I could never see why it was better than a phone call. Anyone care to explain this to me?
Not trying to flame here but there is always this raging debate on whether MS is the brand for those desiring insecure solutions or if its just a matter of size making it a media of exponential viral growth. We have one key data point which is that its' web server technology gets hacked more than say, Apache. It's important since Apache is as big as MS in that, neutralizing partly the size issue (al beit Apache is less homgenous than MS server so it's not perfect)
Now we have an IM data point. This is more interesting since here we do have three homgenous IM sources of large size AOL, MS and Yahoo. So I wonder how often these other brands get hacked. Anyone know?
Now here's a real opportunity for a GNU license. Since Cell's carry their own genomes (and plasmids) one is in effect distributing the source code when you distribute the bugs. Plus there's the real opportunity for Viral Marketing (yes I know mr Bio nazi, bacteria are not viruses).
Actually what I find interesting here is not the applications but the opportunity to study something that is intermediate to a single cellular organism community and a multi-cellualr organism: Geometrically coupled, self organizing communities that communicate. Presumably the plasmids that cause this to happen will quickly find their way out of the lab and into the wild. At some point some natural community will find some selective advantage in being a tightly coupled community.
Since the the communication protocols they are developing are inteded to allow computation, it is plausible that the advantage some cwild community will derive from this will be based on non-trivial computation. Thus Thinking structures in bacteria may evolve from this.
You wont just think you have a cold. Rather your cold may have a think. (yes mr bio nazi I know colds are viruses)
Perhaps the first program will be a cellular Autonoma simmulation. They could program it to play the game of Life.
Hey everyone, put a link on your site with the key word "Butt-Head Vendor" directed to tiger Direct. Let's see if we can get the top page rank on Google for Butt-Head Vendor to be tiger direct.
Some may recall famous mac operating system that was named "carl Sagan" and then changed to "Butthead astronomer" when Sagan sued for his trademark name. Later it was changed to just "BHA".
I used to be a go daddy customer but quit for some good reasons. The problems I had were the following:
it fails to forward it!!!!!
1) incorrect forwarding of subdirectory links:
example: if you set up a name forwarding of say
mydomainname.com --> myhostname.com
then if you try to access any sub_directory
mydomainname.com/CGI/somthing.jsp
That's right! you CANNOT access any subdirectory whatsoever. the only file you can access is index.html in the top level.
Here's what those dumbshits did. when you set up name forwarding they register your name with a go-daddy IP
mydomainname.com --> go-daddy_server.com/mydomainname
then when you try to access the your URL with a subdirectory rather than parsing the request it tries to go to the subdirectory on the go_daddy_server which of course does not exist and the user gets a 404 from go-daddy_server.
What idiots. I now use Name_zero.com as my registrar which correctly forwards.
2) to manipulate your account you have to use a web browser and their admin portal. Yet their portal does not render correctly in all browsers making it impossible to use most browasers on a macintosh.
3) their tech support is unresponsive. they take days to respond, they respond with boiler plate answers that make no sense and cant deal with real issues like #1 because they are just an answering machine not actual adminsitrators or deisgners.
BAsically go daddy sucks unless all you want is your name registers to your own host and not say name forwarding.
"Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. ...seriously"
Anyone else heard of this?thus most patents are not aimed at enriching the inventor gratuitously but creating a value that protects further investment in the patent. This is the classic public good argument that privatization of public property is often in the public good.
As someone who has patents on laser radar methods that are about to expire. I can say I have no idea if people are using my techinuqes in their product or not. How in the hell would I be able to find out. I could not even afford to buy one of the many lidar instruments on the market and check. Even if I could, it would be hard to tell if it was or was not in use. It would be like trying to see if a certain patented math algorithm were encoded inside a computer chip in hardware. So I wait hoping that maybe at the last second I see a paper or something that mentions that someone is using the methods. But discovering your patent is being abused is serendiptous. Thus if you believe in patents then you need to put most of the burden on the people who use methods without checking for patents on them. This is of course an almost equally difficult task. The better solution might be higher thresholds for patent claims.
I was in a hurry to get those corrections posted so I typed fast.
In this case the patent is mainly about compression and transmission of video. So its the combination of things not just the Cosine Transform.
However a close reading of the patent claims shows that it also contains technology useful for still compression like jpeg. The fact that this is buried in the complex details may account for why it took so long for the assignee of the patent to get around to claiming it.
The interesting thing here is that Forgent is willing to sel the patent. It already tried to sell the patent to Compaq. So in theory microsoft could pull a coup here not by breaking the patent but by purchasing it and thereby owning Jpeg. The fact that it already produces a revenue stream sort of underlies that. I also know that I the mpeg compression algorithm may also be based on Fast Cosine Transforms. THere is weaker chance it could be used to claim ownership of mpeg.
the 0.25 v is the potential drop per hydrogen atom produced. it scales. a 100 gallon reactor would have the same potential drop as a 1 gallon reactor. the cost scales too. just multiply atoms per second * 0.25v / 1.6e18 (atoms/coulomb). you dont need to know the current just the voltage and you can compute the power per volume.
Hydrogen is produced when the bacteria exchanges a proton for an electron at the anode. The proton becomes the hydrogen.
thus it is one for one. For every hydrogen produced you have one electron dropping through a 0.25v external potential.
If other processes are also transferring protons then that's still hydrogen. So one electron passed means some proton contianing species ended up on the electrode. as long as you can make sure that those are mainly hydrogen and not some weird thing (say a metal or sodium or soduim), then you dont care.
So basically its a 0.25 volt cost atom produced.
Now to the numbers: One mole of electrons is the same as 96,500 Coulombs. So producing 96,500 would require about 25 kilo joules of energy. A mole of hydrogen, if I recall correctly, contains 280KJ of energy of which 230KJ is extracable as work (rest has to to to heat to pay the boltzman tax).
Of course the bacteria can also produce hydrogen on it's own. THe problem is the build up of reaction products that shut down the process. the current is used to help the bacteria get rid of these so the reaction can go to completetion producing hydrogen. Thus if I read this right in steady state we are indeed exchaning electrons for each hydrogen. The problem would then be if the bacteria is instead exchanging electrons for methane or something we dont want.
I cant quite figure out the abstract of the science paper but it sounds like they get about 80% of what they want.
While it's not Embedding in the usual sense fo the word, it basically is a proof how the mac mini formfactor encourages embedding. A previous Slashdot story referred to IBM's paper on the uses of the Mac Mini as both an embedded device and as it's own development platform. This story shows how the form factor slides easily into a modest 2U industrial model suited for rack mount width or as a kiosk. One could easily treat these like OEM parts.
This calls for a completely off topic but intelligent thread to be started. How about this one:
Casemodded mac mini doubles it's disk performance
This guy case modded his mac mini putting into an old centris pizza-box. The faster disks and CD boosted performance 20% to 70% on AV things like DVD-copy and CD-to-AIFF and file copying. Overall Xbench-disk gives the set up a 2x performance enhancement.
so the new Official discussion topics are:
1) wow cool retro case mod for $10
2) Did apple cripple the mini just to make it cool?
And is that bad really. After all it is quiet and welcome in the living room something many people would pay a LOT for. Performance is not all.
Actually that's a fallacy. There's a long established principle in economics that whenever the cost of discernment reaches a critical level the cheap crappy look-alike beats the high quality product. This becomes a run-away situation as the economies of scale kick in as well, making the price differnetial larger and the market flooded with more lousy product increasing the consumers cost of discenrment.
This of course does not hold for all product, nor all cases since strategic marketing is indeed how one overcomes this and instills the need for quality or features on a consumer.
By the way, go stick your signature.
""Well, I've done the math. I think it's a modest number if you could sell a couple thousand, when you look at snowmobiles and quads and those things -- not cars," says Norris. "That's a big market. But if we sold say a couple thousand, $50,000 a piece, that's a billion dollars." "
Uh no that would be 100 million dollars.