I agree that bundling shared code is an elegent solution. It is a shame that the GNUStep Guys can't go this route. I would love to see a framworks and Display Ghostscript based GNUStep distro, running over the Linux kernel and with a GNU compatibility layer. Such a layer would be similar to Apple's BSD layer with unix-like shared resource support. A totally free implementation of OpenStep with near full OS X source compatibility and the ability to build cross platform fat binaries....drool.
I should also add that, even as a OSX lover, there are crossplatform problems. I find the browser in OSX for browsing Windows shares rather weak. It misses many servers.
I find it is incapable of browsing a routed network. When I add a WINS server to the config only the WINS server is browseable. When I remove it I can browse my own subnet normally. I have repeatedly berated my Apple rep over this, but they don't want to fix it.
ah a masshole I see, why can't you guys just stay home, send your money up here, and stop clogging our turnpike and beaches . . . that's the quebecer's job
Because our wallets are so heavy with our left over IPO money that no shipping agent will carry them. We need to trailer them up personally. Kind of like you guys with your potatos.
You just prefer the quebecois because they are more likely to follow your blatantly false directions.;-)
We do have a Top 500 supercomputer(i'm working on the research project), with its replacement on the drawing board, so please no electricity and running water jokes
My friend grew up in Maine, and they were so poor they had to build their supercomputer out of sticks.
Sorry, couldn't help it. The whole Masshole vs. Maniac thing don'tcha know.
I took my amp to a shop and wanted to buy a new set of tubes. I swapped out all their preamp tubes and wasn't happy. Then I swapped some power amp tubes - WOW did that make a difference. There was more flexibility in the tone with power amp tubes than with preamp tubes.
Absolutely. Also power amp tubes, typically 6L6s in the US, give a much smoother tone when overdriven. The 12AX7s you find in preamps sound at once thinner and more jagged in saturation. I remember when I was young some company came out with a tube distortion pedal. I looked at the specs and it had a single 12AX7 inside. I figured it wouldn't sound good. When I did finally hear one I was unimpressed.
Many amp models only take the preamp stage distortion into account. They neglect the power amp stage distortion, which is where the key to the sound is. This is where the guitar becomes a living breathing thing.
I agree. But in the hands of a good EE the preamp can work wonders too. That was what amazed me about my hot-rodded Music Man. My amp guy rewired the hybrid preamp to squeeze every bit of solid state odd harmonics nastiness out of it, then drove the power amp enough to balance it with yummy soft serve 6L6 warmth. It was like a Boogie gone bad.
The new Marshalls don't have near the same sound as the old 60s models. I heard a '69 plexi and can confirm that they have a unique bark that no new Marshall or amp modeler has yet to approximate.
I agree, although I've never been that big a Marshall fan. I've heard modified Marshalls that blew stock ones out of the water. Maybe you could get more of that bark with different cones. Some people also swear that EL34 equipped Marshalls sound warmer than 6L6 driven ones.
IMO the acid test of amp modellers is the "Boogie" model, aka "California" to avoid trademark infringement. My 1979 Mesa Boogie MkIIa still kicks their digital ass, nothing comes close to the real thing. I'm primarily a keyboard player but I can still hear the difference. The one that does come close is Tech21.
I love Boogies. They are the only off the rack amps I really like for every day use.
It would have been good for me (back in the day) because I only wanted classic amp sounds as effects to complement my own sound, which derives from heavily customized amps. There never were any off the rack amps which did what I wanted, although some Boogies were close. I found a mad scientist (well, mad engineer anyway) who built me the amp of my dreams. Turns out I was a hybrid guy. I wanted EL34C (or at least 6L6) warmth (even harmonics) combined with solid state edge (odd harmonics). We went with old Music Man combo amps, which have hybrid preamps (mostly solid state with one 12AX7) and tube power amps. He also added a stereo effects loop, which I sent to a stock Roland Jazz Chorus for the clean sound. In between the channels I typically used a couple of microseconds delay or microtonal harmonization to fatten the sound even more. The end result was HUGE. It inspired outfreakage in everyone I ever played with.
Is to do a spin off with "Faith" Eliza Dushku's charachter. She will be coming back for the final 5 episodes, and its the perfect lead in. Josh Wheedon has been in talks with her from all accounts. I think with a edgier, sexier slayer a spin off could do quite well.
It also makes sense because the slayer line runs through Faith, not Buffy. B has been a dead end since the Master killed her. The line ran from her through Kendra to Faith. That is why we didn't get yet another slayer the last time she died.
Eliza Dushku is awefully pretty. Plus she's from Boston (Watertown).
I'll take another look at the OS X Client -- at the time I looked at it, and made the decision to play around with MRJAppBuilder for the first time based on my initial frustrations with it.
I'm still using 6.30.314 (build 60841). Maybe you tried the public beta? It was pretty bad. Many features were missing (encryption, printing etc.) and stability was poor. I went with the Java client at that point.
I don't know if this will be any help, but our network admins set up the various citrix instances so that our print preferences would follow our profiles across a number of published apps. The way they did this was to create a "Print" instance that users connect to first and mapped to whatever printers that the users want to connect to -- for example, my default printer is Adobe PDF Printer, which has a default save to my private directory on a file server. All of our printers are served via several print servers, so what a new Citrix user does is log in to the "Print" instance, map their printers, and then any published app they log into with their NT account, they get the printers as set up in the "Print" instance.
Yeah, that ain't gonna happen in our environment, mainly for political reasons. Luckily we upgraded to XP, so it isn't an issue. The Metaframe XP print architecture is a big improvement over the previous system. It seems to be a purely pass through system. So you configure printing on the client OS and it just works. No need to select printers on the Metaframe side. That works with the Carbon client but not the Java one.
I'll have to nose around Ximian's site more: if they've got a connector API, that lends itself to all sorts of alternate solutions - thanks for the info.
I may have been exagerating there, but I am certain they are open to third party clients. I base this on things I heard Nat Freidman say at a conference, but I forget the details. If you are really interested in doing something like that, I suggest e-mailing Nat or Miquel or whomever and asking.
Note: if you do this, don't use the OS X Citrix client -- it's buggy as hell. Grab the Java version.
Really? I certainly haven't found the Carbonized client to be any buggier than the Java one. Plus I've never been able to get the Java client to print. If you have I'd love to know how.
I've been running this on my OSX box for about a year now, and it works great, whether I'm in the office or logged into our domain (either VPN or Dial-up).
I used it as our standard client until the native version arrived. Using MRJAppBuilder, it only took a couple of minutes to whip up.app bundles for each of our published apps, sourcing parameters from.ini files inside the bundles themselves. I had to do that because of MRJ's inability to parse quotes, which broke any published apps with spaces in their names. Anyway, I find the native client faster and more reliable.
While Ximian looks promising, they don't appear to have any interest in developing for OS X, and unless they can present a really compelling argument for why I should do so (other than, "we're not Micro$oft"), I don't see why I should give them $60 for their product as opposed to $90 for straight from the horse's.
Naturally they don't want to port Evolution themselves, as it is GPLed. However, if we ported it ourselves they would be happy to port Connector. I guess I would want to see which was better (Entourage or Evolution) on the platform. One bonus to Evolution is that anyone can write their own connector for it. If Ximian went out of business or dropped OS X support there would still be hope. Likewise, I think they publish an API for Connector, so you could also write a new client that worked with it.
Connector is a proprietary product distributed in binary form. There are no OS X binaries. Nat Freidman has said Ximian would port it if there was enough demand, but considering Evolution barely runs on OS X under X11, much less under the native APIs, that demand does not yet exist. With this announcement, it is unlikely it ever will.
I suspect the Exchange widget for Entourage will work the same way Connector does, provideing webDAV/XML services to the client via Exchange 2000's Outlook Web Access facility.
'Public Domain (AKA "freeware")- help yourself, there are no strings attached;'
According to convention, experience, common sense and the FSF Free Software Definition,
freeware is not public domain software. It is propriestary software distributed as gratis binaries without source.
No Nobel prize winner at all
on
The Future of Money
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Michael was referring to Robert Mundell, who sits on the summit's advisoryboard and won the 1999 Bank of Sweden Price for Economic sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Often Mistaken for a Nobel Prize, because the Nobel Foundation disingenuously treats it as such in their announcements and on their web site, this award has nothing whatsoever to do with Alfred Nobel, his endowment or his vision. The award is totally politicized, disproportionately awarded to the U of Chicago school, and frequently goes to fringe cranks like Ronald Coase.
The great economist Gunnar Myrdal, who sat on the board of the Bank of Sweden, argued for the prize's abolition. In 1974 Myrdal shared the award with Freidrich Hayek. Basically, Myrdal felt that if ideologue hacks like Freidman and Hayek won the prize it was meaningless.
Nothing against Mundell, but that prize is a load of crap.
Last year Dan/Homer introduced Paul Krassner at a speaking engagement in LA. Krassner wanted to put it on an album but after reviewing the material, Fox declined. They don't seem to restrict him from posting it on his web site. Check it out. Unfortunately it is in Real. You'd think Krassner would distribute it in Ogg Vorbis.
I thought they reported this here, but a cursory/. search returned nothing.
I loved the engineering on those 851-916s, but the look never really grabbed me. I can see why others liked them. Among the Cagiva era Ducatis I have a soft spot for the 1990 750S (a.k.a. the Nuevo Sport). I got a leftover one brand new for $6700 in 1993, but it was stolen several years ago. sniff.
When I was in college my local welder offered to sell me his near perfect Laverda 750 SFC for $1100. I happened to have exactly that much in the bank but stupidly chose to spend it on food and rent. Consequently, I ended up an old fart with a BMW R100S. But at least it has R90S paint, rear sets, a lightened flywheel, 40mm Del'Ortos and an R100S solo seat. There is hope for me yet.
Now that I think about it, I think the SFC is my favorite bike ever. From an asthetic standpoint anyway.
All MV Augusta GP bikes and the Vincent Black Lightning are more pleasing to my eye than a DB7. Frankly almost any Italian bike made between 1946 and 1980 is. Not to mention most British bikes made between 1919 (can't neglect the Brough Superior or Flying Squirrel) and 1970.
I used "proprietary" in the Slashdot sense: something that was invented by a company instead of by a university or a teenager or something.;-)
It sounds like you are referring to preceding comments regarding Rendezvous/ZeroConf being open, so I'll go ahead and call you on another protocol.
Actually, and in all seriousness, it's like AppleTalk for IP. AppleTalk was great, but had problems, not the least of which being that it was proprietary.
AppleTalk is not proprietary. It is a published and documented standard. Off the top of my head I can think of three free and two third party proprietary implementations of it. In fact, Apple is so open with the protocol stack that you will see Apple employees answering questions on the netatalk mailing lists, and even contributing patches to the netatalk project. Can't get much less proprietary than that. But yeah, in/. lingo I guess it is proprietary.
I figured you knew this and were just generalizing.
That offset crank pins thing is a pet peeve of mine. Honda used to brag about it on the Shadow motor. But it was just a kludge for overcoming inherent design deficiencies in the crappy (fake) Harley engine layout. Why not just use a decent engine design (OK, I know why, marketing).
All else is not equal, though. The 12 cyl has three times as many pistons, probably 3 times as many valves, which means a lot more mass in the engine needs to be accelerated during the course of each revolution. In theory, there ought to be no difference, but in practice mechanical engines are terribly inefficient, and increasing the number of moving parts increases the inefficiency.
OTOH, it introduces other efficiencies, such as the increased valver perimeter you mentioned and better combustion. That is why Honda wasted so much money developing oval piston V4s in the eighties. Grand Prix rules prohibited them from using more than four cylinders, but to be competitive with a four stroke they felt a V8 was necessary. So they build a V8 with four cylinders. In the end it was a total flop, but the pistons sure looked cool.
BTW, he coolest four stroke bike of all time was the Moto Guzzi V8 of the fifties. At the top end it was as fast as GP bikes of the early eighties, although that was largely due to superior aerodynamics, which were later banned.
More cylinders allow for smoother running by reducing the number of degrees of crankshaft rotation between ignition events. (With a little geometry it can easily be shown why it's hard to beat an eight cylinder in this regard.)
I agree with everything you say except this. Smoothness is not a simple case of more is better. Crank timing is key, and in fact you typical straight four with a 180 degree crank has perfect primary balance. The V6 does well in form factor, crank strength and secondary balance. But my feeling is that a straight four with a well designed couterbalancer to cancel secondary vibration should be smoother than your average V6. Of course a straight six with a 180 degree crank will be even smoother. In fact the straight six is a great engine layout if you don't care about size. Its disadvantages vs. the V6 are length, crank whip at high rotational speeds and cooling.
I'm a two wheel guy, so I don't have a lot of real world examples at my fingertips (I can only think of one V6 motorcycle ever made, a Laverda). However I do remember the Magliazzi brothers recommending the Nissan L4 over the V6 in the new Altima based on smoothness and overall performance.
Don't think Gimp. Think OpenOffice. Think Mozilla. Think apps that people actually want on the Mac.
Evolution is a GTK+ app and OS X users in Exchange shops desperately need it (and Connector). All the MS-centric solutions for OS X Exchange connectivity suck.
I'm pretty happy with the CarbonCFM port of Mozilla and ecstatic about Chimera. OO is well on its way to a Carbon (IIRC) port and is not GTK based anyway (again, IIRC).
I knew this was in the works, but a release is good news. Hopefully it will lead to a port of the top app on my OS X wish list, Ximian Evolution. If Evolution runs natively on OS X it will be very easy to drum up enough demand to get Ximian to port Connector. Then OS X users will no longer need to run crappy Outlook 2001 under crappy Classic.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that bundling shared code is an elegent solution. It is a shame that the GNUStep Guys can't go this route. I would love to see a framworks and Display Ghostscript based GNUStep distro, running over the Linux kernel and with a GNU compatibility layer. Such a layer would be similar to Apple's BSD layer with unix-like shared resource support. A totally free implementation of OpenStep with near full OS X source compatibility and the ability to build cross platform fat binaries....drool.
You just prefer the quebecois because they are more likely to follow your blatantly false directions.
Absolutely. Also power amp tubes, typically 6L6s in the US, give a much smoother tone when overdriven. The 12AX7s you find in preamps sound at once thinner and more jagged in saturation. I remember when I was young some company came out with a tube distortion pedal. I looked at the specs and it had a single 12AX7 inside. I figured it wouldn't sound good. When I did finally hear one I was unimpressed. I agree. But in the hands of a good EE the preamp can work wonders too. That was what amazed me about my hot-rodded Music Man. My amp guy rewired the hybrid preamp to squeeze every bit of solid state odd harmonics nastiness out of it, then drove the power amp enough to balance it with yummy soft serve 6L6 warmth. It was like a Boogie gone bad. I agree, although I've never been that big a Marshall fan. I've heard modified Marshalls that blew stock ones out of the water. Maybe you could get more of that bark with different cones. Some people also swear that EL34 equipped Marshalls sound warmer than 6L6 driven ones. I love Boogies. They are the only off the rack amps I really like for every day use.
It would have been good for me (back in the day) because I only wanted classic amp sounds as effects to complement my own sound, which derives from heavily customized amps. There never were any off the rack amps which did what I wanted, although some Boogies were close. I found a mad scientist (well, mad engineer anyway) who built me the amp of my dreams. Turns out I was a hybrid guy. I wanted EL34C (or at least 6L6) warmth (even harmonics) combined with solid state edge (odd harmonics). We went with old Music Man combo amps, which have hybrid preamps (mostly solid state with one 12AX7) and tube power amps. He also added a stereo effects loop, which I sent to a stock Roland Jazz Chorus for the clean sound. In between the channels I typically used a couple of microseconds delay or microtonal harmonization to fatten the sound even more. The end result was HUGE. It inspired outfreakage in everyone I ever played with.
It also makes sense because the slayer line runs through Faith, not Buffy. B has been a dead end since the Master killed her. The line ran from her through Kendra to Faith. That is why we didn't get yet another slayer the last time she died.
Eliza Dushku is awefully pretty. Plus she's from Boston (Watertown).
I was a big Buffybot fan. Second best robot Warren ever made. I agree about the bones. SMG used to be attractive when she had a little meat on her.
Hmm...after the John Scofield album of the same name?
Great record.
Yeah, that ain't gonna happen in our environment, mainly for political reasons. Luckily we upgraded to XP, so it isn't an issue. The Metaframe XP print architecture is a big improvement over the previous system. It seems to be a purely pass through system. So you configure printing on the client OS and it just works. No need to select printers on the Metaframe side. That works with the Carbon client but not the Java one.
I may have been exagerating there, but I am certain they are open to third party clients. I base this on things I heard Nat Freidman say at a conference, but I forget the details. If you are really interested in doing something like that, I suggest e-mailing Nat or Miquel or whomever and asking.
Really? I certainly haven't found the Carbonized client to be any buggier than the Java one. Plus I've never been able to get the Java client to print. If you have I'd love to know how.
I used it as our standard client until the native version arrived. Using MRJAppBuilder, it only took a couple of minutes to whip up
Naturally they don't want to port Evolution themselves, as it is GPLed. However, if we ported it ourselves they would be happy to port Connector. I guess I would want to see which was better (Entourage or Evolution) on the platform. One bonus to Evolution is that anyone can write their own connector for it. If Ximian went out of business or dropped OS X support there would still be hope. Likewise, I think they publish an API for Connector, so you could also write a new client that worked with it.
Connector is a proprietary product distributed in binary form. There are no OS X binaries. Nat Freidman has said Ximian would port it if there was enough demand, but considering Evolution barely runs on OS X under X11, much less under the native APIs, that demand does not yet exist. With this announcement, it is unlikely it ever will.
I suspect the Exchange widget for Entourage will work the same way Connector does, provideing webDAV/XML services to the client via Exchange 2000's Outlook Web Access facility.
This articel stumbles at the gate:
'Public Domain (AKA "freeware")- help yourself, there are no strings attached;'
According to convention, experience, common sense and the FSF Free Software Definition, freeware is not public domain software. It is propriestary software distributed as gratis binaries without source.
Michael was referring to Robert Mundell, who sits on the summit's advisoryboard and won the 1999 Bank of Sweden Price for Economic sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Often Mistaken for a Nobel Prize, because the Nobel Foundation disingenuously treats it as such in their announcements and on their web site, this award has nothing whatsoever to do with Alfred Nobel, his endowment or his vision. The award is totally politicized, disproportionately awarded to the U of Chicago school, and frequently goes to fringe cranks like Ronald Coase.
The great economist Gunnar Myrdal, who sat on the board of the Bank of Sweden, argued for the prize's abolition. In 1974 Myrdal shared the award with Freidrich Hayek. Basically, Myrdal felt that if ideologue hacks like Freidman and Hayek won the prize it was meaningless.
Nothing against Mundell, but that prize is a load of crap.
Last year Dan/Homer introduced Paul Krassner at a speaking engagement in LA. Krassner wanted to put it on an album but after reviewing the material, Fox declined. They don't seem to restrict him from posting it on his web site. Check it out. Unfortunately it is in Real. You'd think Krassner would distribute it in Ogg Vorbis.
I thought they reported this here, but a cursory
I loved the engineering on those 851-916s, but the look never really grabbed me. I can see why others liked them. Among the Cagiva era Ducatis I have a soft spot for the 1990 750S (a.k.a. the Nuevo Sport). I got a leftover one brand new for $6700 in 1993, but it was stolen several years ago. sniff.
When I was in college my local welder offered to sell me his near perfect Laverda 750 SFC for $1100. I happened to have exactly that much in the bank but stupidly chose to spend it on food and rent. Consequently, I ended up an old fart with a BMW R100S. But at least it has R90S paint, rear sets, a lightened flywheel, 40mm Del'Ortos and an R100S solo seat. There is hope for me yet.
Now that I think about it, I think the SFC is my favorite bike ever. From an asthetic standpoint anyway.
All MV Augusta GP bikes and the Vincent Black Lightning are more pleasing to my eye than a DB7. Frankly almost any Italian bike made between 1946 and 1980 is. Not to mention most British bikes made between 1919 (can't neglect the Brough Superior or Flying Squirrel) and 1970.
Actually, I prefer the DB5 to the DB7.
It sounds like you are referring to preceding comments regarding Rendezvous/ZeroConf being open, so I'll go ahead and call you on another protocol.
AppleTalk is not proprietary. It is a published and documented standard. Off the top of my head I can think of three free and two third party proprietary implementations of it. In fact, Apple is so open with the protocol stack that you will see Apple employees answering questions on the netatalk mailing lists, and even contributing patches to the netatalk project. Can't get much less proprietary than that. But yeah, in
Boy Scouts schmoi scouts, I'm sure they mean Birmingham Small Arms.
I figured you knew this and were just generalizing.
That offset crank pins thing is a pet peeve of mine. Honda used to brag about it on the Shadow motor. But it was just a kludge for overcoming inherent design deficiencies in the crappy (fake) Harley engine layout. Why not just use a decent engine design (OK, I know why, marketing).
OTOH, it introduces other efficiencies, such as the increased valver perimeter you mentioned and better combustion. That is why Honda wasted so much money developing oval piston V4s in the eighties. Grand Prix rules prohibited them from using more than four cylinders, but to be competitive with a four stroke they felt a V8 was necessary. So they build a V8 with four cylinders. In the end it was a total flop, but the pistons sure looked cool.
BTW, he coolest four stroke bike of all time was the Moto Guzzi V8 of the fifties. At the top end it was as fast as GP bikes of the early eighties, although that was largely due to superior aerodynamics, which were later banned.
I agree with everything you say except this. Smoothness is not a simple case of more is better. Crank timing is key, and in fact you typical straight four with a 180 degree crank has perfect primary balance. The V6 does well in form factor, crank strength and secondary balance. But my feeling is that a straight four with a well designed couterbalancer to cancel secondary vibration should be smoother than your average V6. Of course a straight six with a 180 degree crank will be even smoother. In fact the straight six is a great engine layout if you don't care about size. Its disadvantages vs. the V6 are length, crank whip at high rotational speeds and cooling.
I'm a two wheel guy, so I don't have a lot of real world examples at my fingertips (I can only think of one V6 motorcycle ever made, a Laverda). However I do remember the Magliazzi brothers recommending the Nissan L4 over the V6 in the new Altima based on smoothness and overall performance.
Evolution is a GTK+ app and OS X users in Exchange shops desperately need it (and Connector). All the MS-centric solutions for OS X Exchange connectivity suck.
I'm pretty happy with the CarbonCFM port of Mozilla and ecstatic about Chimera. OO is well on its way to a Carbon (IIRC) port and is not GTK based anyway (again, IIRC).
I knew this was in the works, but a release is good news. Hopefully it will lead to a port of the top app on my OS X wish list, Ximian Evolution. If Evolution runs natively on OS X it will be very easy to drum up enough demand to get Ximian to port Connector. Then OS X users will no longer need to run crappy Outlook 2001 under crappy Classic.
You mean like this?
Although, Aqua is just a theme. What you are talking about is Quartz.