While there are many reasons to explore space let me address a very good one. Kepping russian missile scientist employed in a make work project with a useful product.
its' absurdly cheap at the price. missile technology like WMD needs to be kept under wraps. Analyises have shown that missile envy spreads like a bad cold. thay is the moment one country gets a 300 mile mislie that overlaps his neighbor, then poof all the neighbors want it, and it grows quadratically.
building good missiles is supposedly hard (i would not know), but if so its a genie we should try to keep in the bottle.
plus its a good model for the other areas of the fomer soviet union we care about like bio weaponeers and nuclear scientists. the world would be well advise to emoply these people weel. or just buy them a retirement villa. wahtever. getting these people off line is CHEAP compared to cleaning up after the possible damage one of them could do.
Umm...I wont critisize Michael brent, since no doubt he is the victium here of the usual confused tech reporting and hyper-press release. But the author of the article does not seem to appreciate that this is NOTHING NEW. this is what EVERYONE in the buisness does. 60% of all genese in every genome are annotated by sequence similarity to other genomes. using evolutionary distance and sequence substitution is what EVERYBODY does. there almost isn't another way. Indeed that's where all the researchin the field lies, figuring out another way besides sequences imilarity to recognize genes.
So what did he doe that was original. Well We'll never know from the article since its content free. One could speculate from the hints in the article that hes is concentrating on gene finding and not gene annotation. the difference is that in eucariots as opposed to bacteria, its harder to actually spot genes in the DNA. thus any trick you can to hep you spot genes is helpful. but it's not earthshaking.
on a mac the cost of the software is folded into to cost of hardware both directly and indirectly. Additionally macs have a higher level of quality (just compare their video screens, or the layout of the Xserve to other vendors) and also a higer level of initial specifications (firewrire, digital video, combo drives). So even if macs moved to X86 hardware they would be still "expensive".
Ask youself this. how is possible the microsoft with 30x larger market share, and draconian liscening charges more than twice as much for its OS than mac does? PLus the macs come with software that costs many hundreds of dollars on a PC for comparable quaility apps. from time to time they have even bundled an office program.
Now we all know that mac apps far and away are higher quality than their MS clones. (heck due to the competiotn even MS software is better on a mac than on a PC) So how can mac do this with such limited revenue?
Well other than sheer cleverness, its probably also because they are making their money on the hardware. secondly they are keeping their costs down on software development by having a rich and consisten hardware spec so they dont have to support a zillion mutually incompatible different bioses and devices. so yeah, the hardware costs more. but your software costs less and its more usable, and the hardware is more consistent user freindly.
switching to the X86 would not drive down macs costs appreciably. they would still have a tiny market share to defray their research costs.
on a mac the cost of the software is folded into to cost of hardware both directly and indirectly. Additionally macs have a higher level of quality (just compare their video screens, or the layout of the Xserve to other vendors) and also a higer level of initial specifications (firewrire, digital video, combo drives). So even if macs moved to X86 hardware they would be still "expensive".
Ask youself this. how is possible the microsoft with 30x larger market share, and draconian liscening charges more than twice as much for its OS than mac does? PLus the macs come with software that costs many hundreds of dollars on a PC for comparable quaility apps. from time to time they have even bundled an office program.
Now we all know that mac apps far and away are higher quality than their MS clones. (heck due to the competiotn even MS software is better on a mac than on a PC) So how can mac do this with such limited revenue?
Well other than sheer cleverness, its probably also because they are making their money on the hardware. so yeah, the hardware costs more. but your software costs less and its more usable.
switching to the X86 would not drive down macs costs appreciably. they would still have a tiny market share to defray their research costs.
The short answer seems to be "get a mac". Ease of use, standard ways of doing things, tendency to failsafe even if it wont let you eject the disk, and desscriptive error messages are the hallmarks of mac's human interface. even the computers cost more because in part they have higher standard for fabrication and higher level of standard features (fire wire, ethernet) so the software and users can count on commonality in operation and fewer options to choose from.
microsoft on the otherhand has won the market by doing exactly the opposite. Proliferation of features. Constantly changing features. This permits both the embrace-and-extend and the planned obsolescene (word 5 cant open word 6). It also muddies the waters so much thet people give up any buy the product with the most features rather than the product that integrates its features the best. And it lets them release code as they go, no need to plan ahead, just slam out the next feature.
This is not an isolated effect. its well documented in economics theory under the rubric "bad apples drive out the good". meaning when the buyer has insuffient information to make a comparison between good and bad before the purchase, then it becomes a race to the bottom, or a race for irrelevant aspects that a buyer can judge.
I am reminded of Dilbert Interviewing the elbonians for iso9000 compliance with a documented software development feature:
Dilbert: so what is your process for code development?
Elbonian1: We hold a village meeting and boast of our skill and curse the devil spawned end user.
Elbonian2: sometime we juggle
Elbonian1: Then we slam out some code and fo roller skating
The amazing part is that as long as they always follow their process they are ISO 9000 level 2 compliant. They might even generate uniformly better code than someone without a process.
Wow thanks. so then I'm guessing that "quicktime" in addition to defining a file format also defines a codec.
that is to say while a sorensen codec with mpeg-4 file format might be said to be a "quicktime file" it is merely in "quicktime format".
conversely a true and pure "quciktime file" uses a bonifide quciktime codec and stores it in quicktime format.
this might be clearer if I cut to the chase. I want to find a format that generic Windows users can view by low bandwidth streaming video without having to download and install apples quicktime plugin. My first guess was that maybe they could view MPeg-4. But even if this was true I was not happy with the quality. Next I tried AVI. but the file size was 10X larger. I tried to make a jpeg sequence but this turned out to not be what I expected it was not a single jpeg motion picture file but instead about 5 thousand individual jpegs in a directory; one for each frame. I haven't tried anything else yet, but my next guess would be to try a sorenson codec in mpeg-4 format on the export setting panel.
I'm a bit of a newb on this and I've been hunting around for tips on this but it seems most of the tips are imovie-1 or 2 specific and dont quite translate. even apples help for imovie 3 referes to a jpeg movie which seems to be absent feature.
the story says the "consensus" on the accelerate your mac bulliten board is that imovie sucks. Not true. read the article.
I think the people having problems are ones using obsolete imovie2 plug ins or camera drivers.
I would say that rest of the people are posting some non-problem but simple issues thay are discovering unexpectedly
like - "imovie3" cares about file permissions more than "imovie2", or - it complained it could not locate my mp3s on my fire wire disk that was turned off. Or - it was slow the first time I ran it. Or
i accidentally dragged the sound track and my audio became out of synch (well duh!).
Whoop tee doo. this also sounds like the false alarms sounded when safari came out.
I'm using imovie 3 on a mac for several days not on a powerbook g4. it is working reasonably well, Except I did experience two application-suddenly-quit during rendering of transitions/effects. But I have not lost any work or had any problem importing DV,.mov clips, ,.mp3 audio, or.jpg pictures. Nor has it split my clips wrong. If I have other programs running in the background sometimes the playback will mometarily glitch but that's to be expected when you are heavily multitasking I think.
But I would not regress to 2.0 the feature set and the ease of use are fantastic.
I've been playing with exporting to different formats. the odd thing I have noticed is that quicktime format when compressed to the same level is superior to Mpeg-4. I find this odd. is not quicktime now mpeg-4 under the hood?
the other thing I am puzzling over is that when I export a movie in quick time I got two files one was the 4.4 megabyte file I asked for and the other was a 156KByte file hiding in the project directory. When I play them they are identical. What the heck is this lite weight 156K movie or why is the 4.4MB one so bloated. I suspect this has something to do with the export settings for "movie, self contained" versus "movie only" but cant confirm this. can anyone shed any light?
After reading what I thought was an insightful clarification I did some more digging, and now I have to disagree with you.
According to the schmitt bio:
Prior to joining..., Mr. Schmidt was the Chief Security Officer for Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA. While there, he oversaw the Security Strategies group, insuring the development of a trusted computing environment via auditing, policy, best practices and incubation of security products and practices.
this does not sound like network security per se to me
We all tend to guilty of going-with-what-we-know. So his past is a relevant to gussing his future policy. Thus his involvement with microsoft and aspects of trusted computing are troubling. Another statement from his bio that i'd like to know more about is
Mr. Schmitt....has been instrumental in the creation of public/private partnerships and information sharing iniatives
what sort of information sharing? Sharing as in the TIA's notion of it? or sharing as government databses need better integration? Given his FBI and Airforce 'crime information warfare' background it is probably safe to assume that he would see lack of integration as an impediment to law enfocement would like better sharing of confidential data amongst law inforcement. Not an entirely bad idea if safe gaurded and until it reaches the TIA sort of level.
Other than second guessing what I exepct will be the promotion of policy I wont like, the remainder of his Bio plainly says he is technically qualified for both the techincal, policial, manegerial, and policy aspects of cyber security. Few people would be as qualified to adminsitrate the office. I think I would just feel better if he were the deputy and someone else was setting policy.
True but the specific cases you name (SSH, Stuffit, Apache third party apps) were all security hole fixes. So you can believe these were scrutinized out the wazoo. I'm not opposed to that. But contrast that with the lastest update of imovie 3. that was just a pure update. if we had 3rd party vendors doing that, it would be ripe for exploitation and the result would be root level acces to every mac in the world in a matter of a week. not somthing to take lightly.
I absolutely am crazy about software update. I use it with my servers (Xserves) and generally there's an update out before I even know there's a security hole needing a patch. We have not even had to hire a professional sysadmin. Just little old me and the mac admin tools keep me in good shape. I still have not figured out how to set up Ldap or raid on my linux boxes but it's a two-click snap on the macs.
With fink I can keep my unix apps up to date, and not worry about a bunch of cruft filling up my/usr/bin and/lib (one reason I hate gnu-darwin). And software update keeps my apples apps up to date.
but what I really wish I had was something to keep my MS apps up todate. after all 99.9% of all the security holes are in those. That's one reason I adopt apple apps every time they emit a new one (safari means I can get rid of IE, keynote means I can get rid of powerpoint). (I wonder if keynote will use software update?)
But the thing I worry about is that software update (and fink update) are barn door sized security holes. I trust apple not to screw up. And I weakly trust fink project. But if third party apps were allowed to use software update I'd be a little bit worried about getting trojaned.
I think maybe they need to have some sort of MD5 registry hosted by apple if they want to let third parties use this mechanism.
So all I know is what steve jobs tells me. And jobs said at mac world that the A standard was dead beacuse it was not backward compatible and G was backward compatible with B (and just as speedy as A). Apparently MS and the INtel gang are going with A (e.g. the smart screens use it). So can anyone explain this to me. What is the merit of A over G. Also do A or G do anything to address weak WEP security?
Indeed its possible to imagine that rendevous could recognize liscence agreements. for example, perhaps it would only allow one user access at a time. thus just as only one person can read a book at a time, only one person could listen to a given legally purchased mp3 at time. But you could lend the song to as many peole as you wanted just not at the smae time.
Maybe sony would get wise and say for an extra buck give you a cd with a 10-user site liscence.
There are some architechtural differences that make this much different than lime wire.
first you are not getting a copy of the music. you are literally sharing it much like people in the same room share the music that is filling the room. The music resides on someone elses hard disk, when they go away (unplug from the internet ) your access to the music vanishes. You dont wind up with a copy.
Moreover rendevous is not globe spanning. instead it is local to your immediate network neighborhood. You only sharing music with people who have a fairly tightly defined relationship to you. compare this to limewire, where you and ndugu from nigeria may be swapping copies of brittany's latest. It is instead more analogous to being in a big building and looking at books on other people's shelves to see if you want to borrow one.
such use might still violate a EULA but probably not violate FAIR USE and thus is unlikey to be challenged (since a loss my invaldate the broader restrictions of the EULA.)
Apple's ancient hypercard system used a tabbed interface to access dynamic pages. This would seem to be a clear example of widely published prior ART. Hypercard could also be a web interface too, though it was more (and less) than that.
let's see now. 32 pieces, 16 of which are highly mobile. assume that for any given non-pawn about half the board is available to it.
this leads to something like 32! = ~ 10^35 possible combinations of putting the non pawns on the board. as pieces are taken this number changes. e.g. if we are down to 8 pieces its something like 8!(32!)/(24!) =~ 10^16 board combinations. And this is ignoring pawns.
maybe I got my combinatorics wrong. anyone want to check me?
Any one recall magnetic bubble memory? Iwas the last person at IBM working on this in the 80's when they dropped it because although it was cool, disk drives were where the money was. Fujitsu worked on it a little longer, but eventually flash memory ate its lunch (application space)
it was cool. it worked like this a slab of magnetic material could have small (circular) islands of magnetism. from above this looks like a sea of dots on a surface.
Now onto the surface one writes a set of T shapped (or chevron shapped) pieces of permaloy. thousands of these in rows. The manetic bubbles are attracted to the edges of these T's and stick to them. When a transverse magnetic field is applied the T's become bar magnets and the bubbles move to one end to the bar margnet. rotate the magnetic filed the the bubbles move from one side of the T to the other. If the magnetic field is strong enough they will Jump from one T to the text. seen from above the magnetic bubbles march in lock step from one T to the next each rotation of the magnetic field.
ones and zeros are encoded either as presensce or absence of bubbles in the series of marching bubbles, or better yet by using higher order magnetization patterns within each bubble (N-bits per bubble).
since the materials are transparent and the bubbles are optically active, you can read out the bubbles with light. These things were built as large bucket brigades, just as CCD chips often are. You dont try to address a location on the chip directly. instead to determine the value of a bit, you shffle the whole marching line along until that bit position reaches your detector and you read it out. Thus its a serial access device (with many read heads). It's all solid state. the media is fixed (does not spin), instead the bits in the media move!!!
the problem was that these things were slower than Ram, and faster than hard drives. they were denser then ram but not as fast as harddrives. thus they had a niche rolle as non-volatile hard drive caches. their role as non-volatile memeory got squezed out by flash memory on the low end and harddrives on the high end.
Your response to my post osrt of defines the essential point. 50 years ago a chess playing computer that could play well, regardless of winning, was a good test of AI. it tooks lots of reasoning to overcome the limits of processing power. These days its not a good test anymore because the problem can be brute forced rather than reasoned, and as I pointed out, the problem itself is hard for humans too.
thus AI needs to be a moving target, with each a successive goal to be picked as it becomes feasible. Each being closer to the thing humans are good at. to propose soccer 50 years ago would be absurd. now its not so absurd. Someday, having it steal your girlfreind may not be absurd.
It seems to me that if you want to pit man versus machine you should pick something that is easy for a man to do. Chess is relatively hard for most humans. Thus by definiton it is not something humans are good at. So making this a test of machine prowsess is exactly the wrong test.
to put this another way, if the contest were to factor 20 digt numbers, no one woul dbe surprised if the machine beat a human. it would be a stupid test. Just like chess.
a better test would be a face recognition contest. Or if we need to make it a real game then how about soccer?
After I wrote the parent post, I recalled something douglas adams wrote about. He described a big desk that was actually a computer. You sat at the desk and tried to solve you problem. the computer watched you and after a while figured out what the problem you wanted to solve was. then it solved it. Nearly all the computer power was spent wathcing you and infereing your problem. Not quite the same as what I was saying but a remarkable instance of it.
Y'know I spell an type like crap, and it really cheeses me off when people respond to that alone and then add no valuable comments of their own. But your response is fantastic. I love it. You should follow me around, I'll probably spew some more gems for you.
though may it should have been 'pig iron' rather than 'big iron'.
Slashdot Mirror
its' absurdly cheap at the price. missile technology like WMD needs to be kept under wraps. Analyises have shown that missile envy spreads like a bad cold. thay is the moment one country gets a 300 mile mislie that overlaps his neighbor, then poof all the neighbors want it, and it grows quadratically.
building good missiles is supposedly hard (i would not know), but if so its a genie we should try to keep in the bottle.
plus its a good model for the other areas of the fomer soviet union we care about like bio weaponeers and nuclear scientists. the world would be well advise to emoply these people weel. or just buy them a retirement villa. wahtever. getting these people off line is CHEAP compared to cleaning up after the possible damage one of them could do.
So what did he doe that was original. Well We'll never know from the article since its content free. One could speculate from the hints in the article that hes is concentrating on gene finding and not gene annotation. the difference is that in eucariots as opposed to bacteria, its harder to actually spot genes in the DNA. thus any trick you can to hep you spot genes is helpful. but it's not earthshaking.
yawn
on a mac the cost of the software is folded into to cost of hardware both directly and indirectly. Additionally macs have a higher level of quality (just compare their video screens, or the layout of the Xserve to other vendors) and also a higer level of initial specifications (firewrire, digital video, combo drives). So even if macs moved to X86 hardware they would be still "expensive".
Ask youself this. how is possible the microsoft with 30x larger market share, and draconian liscening charges more than twice as much for its OS than mac does? PLus the macs come with software that costs many hundreds of dollars on a PC for comparable quaility apps. from time to time they have even bundled an office program.
Now we all know that mac apps far and away are higher quality than their MS clones. (heck due to the competiotn even MS software is better on a mac than on a PC) So how can mac do this with such limited revenue?
Well other than sheer cleverness, its probably also because they are making their money on the hardware. secondly they are keeping their costs down on software development by having a rich and consisten hardware spec so they dont have to support a zillion mutually incompatible different bioses and devices. so yeah, the hardware costs more. but your software costs less and its more usable, and the hardware is more consistent user freindly.
switching to the X86 would not drive down macs costs appreciably. they would still have a tiny market share to defray their research costs.
on a mac the cost of the software is folded into to cost of hardware both directly and indirectly. Additionally macs have a higher level of quality (just compare their video screens, or the layout of the Xserve to other vendors) and also a higer level of initial specifications (firewrire, digital video, combo drives). So even if macs moved to X86 hardware they would be still "expensive". Ask youself this. how is possible the microsoft with 30x larger market share, and draconian liscening charges more than twice as much for its OS than mac does? PLus the macs come with software that costs many hundreds of dollars on a PC for comparable quaility apps. from time to time they have even bundled an office program. Now we all know that mac apps far and away are higher quality than their MS clones. (heck due to the competiotn even MS software is better on a mac than on a PC) So how can mac do this with such limited revenue? Well other than sheer cleverness, its probably also because they are making their money on the hardware. so yeah, the hardware costs more. but your software costs less and its more usable. switching to the X86 would not drive down macs costs appreciably. they would still have a tiny market share to defray their research costs.
The short answer seems to be "get a mac". Ease of use, standard ways of doing things, tendency to failsafe even if it wont let you eject the disk, and desscriptive error messages are the hallmarks of mac's human interface. even the computers cost more because in part they have higher standard for fabrication and higher level of standard features (fire wire, ethernet) so the software and users can count on commonality in operation and fewer options to choose from.
microsoft on the otherhand has won the market by doing exactly the opposite. Proliferation of features. Constantly changing features. This permits both the embrace-and-extend and the planned obsolescene (word 5 cant open word 6). It also muddies the waters so much thet people give up any buy the product with the most features rather than the product that integrates its features the best. And it lets them release code as they go, no need to plan ahead, just slam out the next feature.
This is not an isolated effect. its well documented in economics theory under the rubric "bad apples drive out the good". meaning when the buyer has insuffient information to make a comparison between good and bad before the purchase, then it becomes a race to the bottom, or a race for irrelevant aspects that a buyer can judge.
I am reminded of Dilbert Interviewing the elbonians for iso9000 compliance with a documented software development feature:
Dilbert: so what is your process for code development?
Elbonian1: We hold a village meeting and boast of our skill
and curse the devil spawned end user.
Elbonian2: sometime we juggle
Elbonian1: Then we slam out some code and fo roller skating
The amazing part is that as long as they always follow their process they are ISO 9000 level 2 compliant. They might even generate uniformly better code than someone without a process.
Wow thanks.
so then I'm guessing that "quicktime" in addition to defining a file format also defines a codec.
that is to say while a sorensen codec with mpeg-4 file format might be said to be a "quicktime file" it is merely in "quicktime format".
conversely a true and pure "quciktime file" uses a bonifide quciktime codec and stores it in quicktime format.
this might be clearer if I cut to the chase. I want to find a format that generic Windows users can view by low bandwidth streaming video without having to download and install apples quicktime plugin.
My first guess was that maybe they could view MPeg-4. But even if this was true I was not happy with the quality. Next I tried AVI. but the file size was 10X larger. I tried to make a jpeg sequence but this turned out to not be what I expected it was not a single jpeg motion picture file but instead about 5 thousand individual jpegs in a directory; one for each frame. I haven't tried anything else yet, but my next guess would be to try a sorenson codec in mpeg-4 format on the export setting panel.
I'm a bit of a newb on this and I've been hunting around for tips on this but it seems most of the tips are imovie-1 or 2 specific and dont quite translate. even apples help for imovie 3 referes to a jpeg movie which seems to be absent feature.
the story says the "consensus" on the accelerate your mac bulliten board is that imovie sucks. Not true. read the article.
I think the people having problems are ones using obsolete imovie2 plug ins or camera drivers.
I would say that rest of the people are posting some non-problem but simple issues thay are discovering unexpectedly
like
- "imovie3" cares about file permissions more than "imovie2",
or
- it complained it could not locate my mp3s on my fire wire disk that was turned off. Or
- it was slow the first time I ran it.
Or
i accidentally dragged the sound track and my audio became out of synch (well duh!).
Whoop tee doo. this also sounds like the false alarms sounded when safari came out.
I'm using imovie 3 on a mac for several days not on a powerbook g4. it is working reasonably well, Except I did experience two application-suddenly-quit during rendering of transitions/effects. But I have not lost any work or had any problem importing DV, .mov clips, , .mp3 audio, or .jpg pictures. Nor has it split my clips wrong. If I have other programs running in the background sometimes the playback will mometarily glitch
but that's to be expected when you are heavily multitasking I think.
But I would not regress to 2.0 the feature set and the ease of use are fantastic.
I've been playing with exporting to different formats. the odd thing I have noticed is that quicktime format when compressed to the same level is superior to Mpeg-4. I find this odd. is not quicktime now mpeg-4 under the hood?
the other thing I am puzzling over is that when I export a movie in quick time I got two files one was the 4.4 megabyte file I asked for and the other was a 156KByte file hiding in the project directory. When I play them they are identical. What the heck is this lite weight 156K movie or why is the 4.4MB one so bloated. I suspect this has something to do with the export settings for "movie, self contained" versus "movie only" but cant confirm this. can anyone shed any light?
Where do you want to go today?
Not here at home that's for sure.
According to the schmitt bio: Prior to joining..., Mr. Schmidt was the Chief Security Officer for Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA. While there, he oversaw the Security Strategies group, insuring the development of a trusted computing environment via auditing, policy, best practices and incubation of security products and practices.
this does not sound like network security per se to meWe all tend to guilty of going-with-what-we-know. So his past is a relevant to gussing his future policy. Thus his involvement with microsoft and aspects of trusted computing are troubling. Another statement from his bio that i'd like to know more about is
Mr. Schmitt ....has been instrumental in the creation of public/private partnerships and information sharing iniatives
what sort of information sharing? Sharing as in the TIA's notion of it? or sharing as government databses need better integration? Given his FBI and Airforce 'crime information warfare' background it is probably safe to assume that he would see lack of integration as an impediment to law enfocement would like better sharing of confidential data amongst law inforcement. Not an entirely bad idea if safe gaurded and until it reaches the TIA sort of level.
Other than second guessing what I exepct will be the promotion of policy I wont like, the remainder of his Bio plainly says he is technically qualified for both the techincal, policial, manegerial, and policy aspects of cyber security. Few people would be as qualified to adminsitrate the office. I think I would just feel better if he were the deputy and someone else was setting policy.
I posted the original story. But this is an insightful clarification.
True but the specific cases you name (SSH, Stuffit, Apache third party apps) were all security hole fixes. So you can believe these were scrutinized out the wazoo. I'm not opposed to that. But contrast that with the lastest update of imovie 3. that was just a pure update. if we had 3rd party vendors doing that, it would be ripe for exploitation and the result would be root level acces to every mac in the world in a matter of a week. not somthing to take lightly.
With fink I can keep my unix apps up to date, and not worry about a bunch of cruft filling up my /usr/bin and /lib (one reason I hate gnu-darwin). And software update keeps my apples apps up to date.
but what I really wish I had was something to keep my MS apps up todate. after all 99.9% of all the security holes are in those. That's one reason I adopt apple apps every time they emit a new one (safari means I can get rid of IE, keynote means I can get rid of powerpoint). (I wonder if keynote will use software update?)
But the thing I worry about is that software update (and fink update) are barn door sized security holes. I trust apple not to screw up. And I weakly trust fink project. But if third party apps were allowed to use software update I'd be a little bit worried about getting trojaned.
I think maybe they need to have some sort of MD5 registry hosted by apple if they want to let third parties use this mechanism.
Wait dont slash dot the site yet. I'm trying to download mine and its going too slowly!
So all I know is what steve jobs tells me. And jobs said at mac world that the A standard was dead beacuse it was not backward compatible and G was backward compatible with B (and just as speedy as A). Apparently MS and the INtel gang are going with A (e.g. the smart screens use it). So can anyone explain this to me. What is the merit of A over G. Also do A or G do anything to address weak WEP security?
Maybe sony would get wise and say for an extra buck give you a cd with a 10-user site liscence.
first you are not getting a copy of the music. you are literally sharing it much like people in the same room share the music that is filling the room. The music resides on someone elses hard disk, when they go away (unplug from the internet ) your access to the music vanishes. You dont wind up with a copy.
Moreover rendevous is not globe spanning. instead it is local to your immediate network neighborhood. You only sharing music with people who have a fairly tightly defined relationship to you. compare this to limewire, where you and ndugu from nigeria may be swapping copies of brittany's latest. It is instead more analogous to being in a big building and looking at books on other people's shelves to see if you want to borrow one.
such use might still violate a EULA but probably not violate FAIR USE and thus is unlikey to be challenged (since a loss my invaldate the broader restrictions of the EULA.)
Apple's ancient hypercard system used a tabbed interface to access dynamic pages. This would seem to be a clear example of widely published prior ART. Hypercard could also be a web interface too, though it was more (and less) than that.
maybe I got my combinatorics wrong. anyone want to check me?
http://starfish.rcsri.org/rcs/bubble/info.html
it was cool. it worked like this a slab of magnetic material could have small (circular) islands of magnetism. from above this looks like a sea of dots on a surface.
Now onto the surface one writes a set of T shapped (or chevron shapped) pieces of permaloy. thousands of these in rows. The manetic bubbles are attracted to the edges of these T's and stick to them. When a transverse magnetic field is applied the T's become bar magnets and the bubbles move to one end to the bar margnet. rotate the magnetic filed the the bubbles move from one side of the T to the other. If the magnetic field is strong enough they will Jump from one T to the text. seen from above the magnetic bubbles march in lock step from one T to the next each rotation of the magnetic field.
ones and zeros are encoded either as presensce or absence of bubbles in the series of marching bubbles, or better yet by using higher order magnetization patterns within each bubble (N-bits per bubble).
since the materials are transparent and the bubbles are optically active, you can read out the bubbles with light. These things were built as large bucket brigades, just as CCD chips often are. You dont try to address a location on the chip directly. instead to determine the value of a bit, you shffle the whole marching line along until that bit position reaches your detector and you read it out. Thus its a serial access device (with many read heads). It's all solid state. the media is fixed (does not spin), instead the bits in the media move!!!
the problem was that these things were slower than Ram, and faster than hard drives. they were denser then ram but not as fast as harddrives. thus they had a niche rolle as non-volatile hard drive caches. their role as non-volatile memeory got squezed out by flash memory on the low end and harddrives on the high end.
thus AI needs to be a moving target, with each a successive goal to be picked as it becomes feasible. Each being closer to the thing humans are good at. to propose soccer 50 years ago would be absurd. now its not so absurd. Someday, having it steal your girlfreind may not be absurd.
to put this another way, if the contest were to factor 20 digt numbers, no one woul dbe surprised if the machine beat a human. it would be a stupid test. Just like chess.
a better test would be a face recognition contest. Or if we need to make it a real game then how about soccer?
After I wrote the parent post, I recalled something douglas adams wrote about. He described a big desk that was actually a computer. You sat at the desk and tried to solve you problem. the computer watched you and after a while figured out what the problem you wanted to solve was. then it solved it. Nearly all the computer power was spent wathcing you and infereing your problem. Not quite the same as what I was saying but a remarkable instance of it.
though may it should have been 'pig iron' rather than 'big iron'.