RealBasic -- a VB-near clone with cross-platform development options that actually work, and which produces standalone.exes which don't require a magic set of DLLs to be installed correctly.
Extreme Basic -- an open source VB-like development tool which looks very promising, being developed by the original developer of RealBasic.
Hydrides currently achieve volumetric energy densities 50% better than liquid hydrogen (and safer than gasoline). There's no mention of this on the page you've linked -- but then the writer clearly has a pro-gasoline axe to grind.
There's no question that gasoline is the most convenient vehicle fuel available right now, but it's stupid not to look for alternatives -- including more fuel-efficient gasoline-powered vehicles, hybrids, and electric cars (of various kinds).
If you look at EDS's 5y share price graph, something bad happened to it in 2002 and it hasn't really done all that great since.
I guess it's trying to drum up some free publicity -- and -- like Secunia making pronouncements that OS X is less secure than XP (despite the fact that its own published results indicate no such thing) it never hurts to loudly claim something contrary to common wisdom to get some press (or at least get Slashdotted).
I don't know of anyone who makes an open standards based system using the the PowerPC architecture. IBM did release a reference design for a PPC based motherboard, but as far as I know no one every produced it.
CHRP, the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform is what you're looking for, and it's been around since before there were Apple PowerPCs. AFAIK most, if not all, the PowerPC-based workstations shipped by IBM, the BeBox, various third-party PowerPCs such as those from PowerComputing, and many of Apple's machines (even tody) are either compliant or as-close-to-compliant-as-makes-sense with this or evolutions of this standard (such that some fanatics Rhapsody/OS X were able to get it running on AIX PowerPC workstations).
I'm not going to paint myself into a corner with a proprietary system from anyone, let alone Apple.
Until I can make the computer from sand, copper ore, and crude oil using recipes downloaded from the internet (i.e. "The Diamond Age"), I don't see the useful distinction between being able to build a computer out of proprietary chips from one of, count them, two CPU manufacturers, a video card from one of, count them, two graphics card manufacturers, etc. and simply buying a computer that works.
"The Amiga was cheaper, had better graphics, stereo sound, would multi task, could have a hard drive partition bigger then 33 megs and access more than 640k of ram with out doing all sorts of strangeness."
The Amiga was badly marketed in a lot of ways beyond not spending money on advertising. 1) you couldn't get good displays for it (as in displays you'd want to work at for significant lengths of time, 2) you couldn't get good business software for it (e.g. it didn't have a decent word-processor or spreadsheet).
Marketing sometimes means figuring out what customers want or need and then selling it to them in an attractive package (image, price, perceived value, etc.). Commodore never really did that (with the Amiga -- they did it with the C64).
Adam and Eve are two separate but related libraries.
Adam allows you to express a bunch of things in terms of other things (e.g. this button's right edge needs to be 10 pixels left of that button's left edge OR this HSV setting is related to that RGB setting) and then have them automagically be kept updated. Neat.
Eve is a UI library. It seems to allow for automated layouts (as well as manual?) and depends on Adam for some of its functionality.
The first time you insert an audio CD you'll be asked if you want your Mac mini to launch iTunes. You can set iTunes to automatically rip and eject CDs (and pick the format).
I imagine you can probably get a cheap PC to do the same trick using WMP (although you'll have to fight the defaults harder to avoid locked up file formats).
Oh, but a Mac mini is *slightly* more expensive than this $400 one-trick-pony.
Does Apple even need TiVo?
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What does TiVo do that Apple needs? Anyone who thinks TiVo's video capture capabilities, UI, or ability to download TV timetables automatically represent some kind of magic strategic advantage is smoking something. Apple has all of this now, what they don't have, TiVo doesn't have either.
The key component missing from TiVo's business model is something Apple has already done with music -- replaced broadcast with play on demand. (This is probably why iPods don't have FM tuners, even though they could be added for insignificant cost -- Steve Jobs/Apple is simply anti-broadcast as a concept. You decide what you download / rip and play, not some random DJ or corporation.)
Many of the companies Apple cut deals with to make iTunes Music Store possible are the same companies it would have to cut deals with to make Mac Mini Video Store possible.
TiVo's model in a nutshell: If it gets broadcast, we'll make it easier for you to watch, kind of. But because the legalities are iffy, we'll place some weird artificial restrictions on what you can do with the recorded material. We haven't changed the relationship between the consumer and the content producer -- advertising is still paying for the broadcast, but our profitability is in large part predicated on screwing the advertiser.
iTMS model translated to video: If you own it, we'll let you RIP it (or at minimum play it for you). If you don't own it, we'll let you download it for a reasonable fee (and maybe burn it). You pay for the content, not the advertiser, and not your cable company. You get exactly what you want, when you want it, not a rough approximation with ads you can kind of skip over.
(Microsoft is "Vendor 1" in their database, you'll be pleased and amused to learn.)
I'm guessing Secunia likes to drum up publicity for itself by making press releases that run counter to the general wisdom, but their conclusions and announcements don't actually match their data.
E.g. on the Windows XP page, they show a pie graph that states XP Pro as having 0% (out of 67) severe issues, but then list several severe issues immediately below, one of which ("Windows Explorer / Internet Explorer Long Share Name Buffer Overflow") has not been patched (by their reckoning) in nine months. Maybe their Excel graphing skills are lacking...
The only mention of ActiveX states that Microsoft has fixed a problem whereby web pages can install arbitrary ActiveX plugins. As far as I know, it simply requires the user to click the "OK" button, which they're quite likely to do, given that they may well have to click it for legitimate reasons in the course of their daily job.
I think the review is too focussed on elites
on
Blink, Take 2
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· Score: 1
While the idea of mathematics "smelling" good or bad is interesting (and matches my own experience -- although we tended to talk in terms of looks and not smell), I think that it's equally interesting to look at less atypical subjects.
When a person looks at someone across the street and thinks "that person is up to no good" or turns a faucet and thinks "this feels like it's about to break" a whole lot of powerful subconscious reasoning is at work, and it's worth considering this, as well as the ability of academic researchers to bypass huge amounts of tedious work with a sudden insight ("yes, but the quantum case won't work out" says Albert Einstein to Richard Feynmann in "Surely you're joking..." -- something it takes his supervisor six weeks of difficult math to confirm).
When considering the value of intuition it's worth considering the cost/benefit. E.g. if you think "something doesn't look right" and investigate it, you might be wrong nine times out of ten, but the cost of those nine times might be miniscule to the benefit of the tenth. (Let's say you're a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant.) OTOH if you discard a line of research on the grounds it doesn't "smell right" you may be losing out on a Fields medal. There are entire fields of mathematics that don't "smell right" to large numbers of mathematicians. (Then there's the "Axiom of Choice" which doesn't smell right to many of us -- but smells no worse than its contradiction.)
TiVo probably deserves to die
on
Can TiVo be Saved?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As a recent TiVo customer (who bought a lifetime subscription) I can't say I'm enormously impressed.
First, key features that loyal customers raved about have been removed from more recent products (preseumably as a result of pressure from content-owners). So we have a product that in some ways is getting worse rather than better.
Second, I find the interface quite clumsy. (Sure, it's PRETTY.) It seems like every operation has extra, pointless steps (many of which are confirming non-destructive operations). There is no undo (you can't undelete a program you just deleted in error). The remote control is almost axially symmetric, meaning that in the dark it's quite easy to point it in exactly the wrong direction.
Third, the out-of-box experience is terrible. It initially needs several hours just to start working (I have no idea why) and it initially incorrectly identified where I live and refused to download the right TV timetable. Even when this was corrected, it continues to record infomercials and label them "Scrubs".
Finally, TiVo persistently tries to sell stuff to you.
TiVo's problems, I think, lie in (a) a failure to decide who their customer is and serve their needs and (b) a lack of attention to usability.
Item (a) is a strategic problem (they seem torn between wanting to partner with content providers, wanting to become a content provider and sell their own advertising space, and wanting to become a video napster 1.0), whereas (b) is tactical (they simply need to stop paying attention to their fawning fans and do some serious self-criticism).
I'm getting tired of Open Source folk proclaiming GIMP as being a useful substitute for Photoshop.
The GIMP is just too clunky to do good work with, as evinced by its ugly logo and sample documents. About the most creative thing anyone does with it is more-or-less trivial photo retouching that can be done in something like iPhoto or Elements.
And if you think that Elements has "80%" of Photoshop's functionality, you haven't used 90% of Photoshop's functionality.
There's a perfectly good way for taxing road use -- taxing gasoline. In general, this has a number of positive effects:
1) It taxes miles driven. 2) It's simple and robust. 3) It doesn't invade privacy. 4) It encourages fuel economical vehicles.
It is somewhat unfair on people who buy small, fuel inefficient vehicles -- such as porsches and BMWs. I think they can afford it.
It's ironic that the alleged reason for Oregon exploring this system is that they fear improved fuel economy will reduce gasoline tax revenue. If so, good -- raise gasoline taxes more: it will create a virtuous cycle of improved fuel efficiency and reduced road use.
The main benefit of a GPS-based tax system is that you can implement congestion tax (tax people for using popular roads at peak times). The big question is just how big a congestion tax you'll need to levy to have any useful effect (the difference between a car registration that only allows off-peak downtown driving and one that allows peak downtown driving in Singapore is tens of thousands of dollars...)
And, of course, the US Department of Defense is the world's largest command economy -- in effect a communist institution funded by taxes on a capitalist society.
It's not a question of needing to persuade folks not to use MS so much as denying them excuses for sticking with MS. After all, they're still claiming Macs are more expensive (based on sticker price) when they know perfectly well that a Mac's TCO is lower.
...given that it's based on a bizarrely awful franchise. But it's glacial and spends way too much time of side-plots that don't go anywhere (I mean, how long are those two gonna wander around randomly and to what purpose?)
A couple of days back they rated a hack that could theoretically forge you root access to a Mac OS X box if you (a) already had an account and (b) had physical access to the machine as 6.9/10.
Now we discover (really not surprisingly) that they themselves are a vector.
to be distinct. It adds suble bugs and achieves no positive purpose.
3) braces { } may be easy to type, but make it easy to lose track of which block they are closing. Pascal's "begin" and "end" are no more useful, but Modula-2 and modern Basics have block closures that make it easier to figure out where you are.
4) the preprocessor may be neat, but the ways it create problems are legion.
If you go back to Kay's observation that a programming language is, in essence, a user interface for functionality, c is a lousy user interface -- it's easy to make mistakes and hard to find and correct them.
Assuming that what we see is a standard portion of the universe
An astrophysicist, a physicist, and a mathematician are attending a conference in Scotland. During a break, they take a walk through some of the countryside, and come upon a black sheep.
"Aha," exclaims the astrophysicist. "I had no idea that all sheep in Scotland are black."
The physicist looks at her colleague in disbelief. "All sheep in Scotland are black? Are you nuts? We've only seen one sheep!"
The mathematician interrupts. "And only one side of that sheep."
...don't seem to be exactly unambiguous on the First Amendment. (You can't yell "fire" in a crowded movie house, right? Unless there is a fire. Who decides when you're in some sense yelling "fire" and whether there is on?) And don't even start on the second...
I'd expect you would get pretty poor results if you asked 100,000 kids to list the planets of the solar system in order out from the Sun or the chemical composition of salt -- expecting better on something as hazy as a constitutional amendment is silly.
The media is designed so that the laser that burns the data onto the CD can also create an image on the (far) side of the CD. It requires special media and special CD drives (of course) so who knows if it will become widely adopted, but a nice concept nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
Konfabulator is quite possibly the culprit, it is a spectacularly resource hungry program.
You could also try downloading FireFox or Opera and see if they have similar problems.
Or just launch a command line and run top and look for something using up a suspicious amount of cpu.
You might care to look at:
.exes which don't require a magic set of DLLs to be installed correctly.
RealBasic -- a VB-near clone with cross-platform development options that actually work, and which produces standalone
Extreme Basic -- an open source VB-like development tool which looks very promising, being developed by the original developer of RealBasic.
Hydrides currently achieve volumetric energy densities 50% better than liquid hydrogen (and safer than gasoline). There's no mention of this on the page you've linked -- but then the writer clearly has a pro-gasoline axe to grind.
There's no question that gasoline is the most convenient vehicle fuel available right now, but it's stupid not to look for alternatives -- including more fuel-efficient gasoline-powered vehicles, hybrids, and electric cars (of various kinds).
If you look at EDS's 5y share price graph, something bad happened to it in 2002 and it hasn't really done all that great since.
I guess it's trying to drum up some free publicity -- and -- like Secunia making pronouncements that OS X is less secure than XP (despite the fact that its own published results indicate no such thing) it never hurts to loudly claim something contrary to common wisdom to get some press (or at least get Slashdotted).
Well chances are if they *did* make one with FM, the one *without* FM would have FM but it would be disabled.
Then someone would figure out how to enable FM in the cheaper model and people would complain that Apple was screwing them...
I don't know of anyone who makes an open standards based system using the the PowerPC architecture. IBM did release a reference design for a PPC based motherboard, but as far as I know no one every produced it.
CHRP, the PowerPC Common Hardware Reference Platform is what you're looking for, and it's been around since before there were Apple PowerPCs. AFAIK most, if not all, the PowerPC-based workstations shipped by IBM, the BeBox, various third-party PowerPCs such as those from PowerComputing, and many of Apple's machines (even tody) are either compliant or as-close-to-compliant-as-makes-sense with this or evolutions of this standard (such that some fanatics Rhapsody/OS X were able to get it running on AIX PowerPC workstations).
CHRP Links
I'm not going to paint myself into a corner with a proprietary system from anyone, let alone Apple.
Until I can make the computer from sand, copper ore, and crude oil using recipes downloaded from the internet (i.e. "The Diamond Age"), I don't see the useful distinction between being able to build a computer out of proprietary chips from one of, count them, two CPU manufacturers, a video card from one of, count them, two graphics card manufacturers, etc. and simply buying a computer that works.
"The Amiga was cheaper, had better graphics, stereo sound, would multi task, could have a hard drive partition bigger then 33 megs and access more than 640k of ram with out doing all sorts of strangeness."
The Amiga was badly marketed in a lot of ways beyond not spending money on advertising. 1) you couldn't get good displays for it (as in displays you'd want to work at for significant lengths of time, 2) you couldn't get good business software for it (e.g. it didn't have a decent word-processor or spreadsheet).
Marketing sometimes means figuring out what customers want or need and then selling it to them in an attractive package (image, price, perceived value, etc.). Commodore never really did that (with the Amiga -- they did it with the C64).
Adam and Eve are two separate but related libraries.
Adam allows you to express a bunch of things in terms of other things (e.g. this button's right edge needs to be 10 pixels left of that button's left edge OR this HSV setting is related to that RGB setting) and then have them automagically be kept updated. Neat.
Eve is a UI library. It seems to allow for automated layouts (as well as manual?) and depends on Adam for some of its functionality.
Both depend on the boost C++ libraries.
The first time you insert an audio CD you'll be asked if you want your Mac mini to launch iTunes. You can set iTunes to automatically rip and eject CDs (and pick the format).
I imagine you can probably get a cheap PC to do the same trick using WMP (although you'll have to fight the defaults harder to avoid locked up file formats).
Oh, but a Mac mini is *slightly* more expensive than this $400 one-trick-pony.
What does TiVo do that Apple needs? Anyone who thinks TiVo's video capture capabilities, UI, or ability to download TV timetables automatically represent some kind of magic strategic advantage is smoking something. Apple has all of this now, what they don't have, TiVo doesn't have either.
The key component missing from TiVo's business model is something Apple has already done with music -- replaced broadcast with play on demand. (This is probably why iPods don't have FM tuners, even though they could be added for insignificant cost -- Steve Jobs/Apple is simply anti-broadcast as a concept. You decide what you download / rip and play, not some random DJ or corporation.)
Many of the companies Apple cut deals with to make iTunes Music Store possible are the same companies it would have to cut deals with to make Mac Mini Video Store possible.
TiVo's model in a nutshell: If it gets broadcast, we'll make it easier for you to watch, kind of. But because the legalities are iffy, we'll place some weird artificial restrictions on what you can do with the recorded material. We haven't changed the relationship between the consumer and the content producer -- advertising is still paying for the broadcast, but our profitability is in large part predicated on screwing the advertiser.
iTMS model translated to video: If you own it, we'll let you RIP it (or at minimum play it for you). If you don't own it, we'll let you download it for a reasonable fee (and maybe burn it). You pay for the content, not the advertiser, and not your cable company. You get exactly what you want, when you want it, not a rough approximation with ads you can kind of skip over.
Techworld has hilariously biased coverage of this:
"Apple shames itself again over security: Critical hole in Mac OS X patched three months late."
And it's interesting to look at Secunia's site (Secunia being the source of a lot of recent Microsoft apologism and Apple-bashing):
Macintosh OS X issues
Windows XP Professional Issues
(Microsoft is "Vendor 1" in their database, you'll be pleased and amused to learn.)
I'm guessing Secunia likes to drum up publicity for itself by making press releases that run counter to the general wisdom, but their conclusions and announcements don't actually match their data.
E.g. on the Windows XP page, they show a pie graph that states XP Pro as having 0% (out of 67) severe issues, but then list several severe issues immediately below, one of which ("Windows Explorer / Internet Explorer Long Share Name Buffer Overflow") has not been patched (by their reckoning) in nine months. Maybe their Excel graphing skills are lacking...
The only mention of ActiveX states that Microsoft has fixed a problem whereby web pages can install arbitrary ActiveX plugins. As far as I know, it simply requires the user to click the "OK" button, which they're quite likely to do, given that they may well have to click it for legitimate reasons in the course of their daily job.
While the idea of mathematics "smelling" good or bad is interesting (and matches my own experience -- although we tended to talk in terms of looks and not smell), I think that it's equally interesting to look at less atypical subjects.
When a person looks at someone across the street and thinks "that person is up to no good" or turns a faucet and thinks "this feels like it's about to break" a whole lot of powerful subconscious reasoning is at work, and it's worth considering this, as well as the ability of academic researchers to bypass huge amounts of tedious work with a sudden insight ("yes, but the quantum case won't work out" says Albert Einstein to Richard Feynmann in "Surely you're joking..." -- something it takes his supervisor six weeks of difficult math to confirm).
When considering the value of intuition it's worth considering the cost/benefit. E.g. if you think "something doesn't look right" and investigate it, you might be wrong nine times out of ten, but the cost of those nine times might be miniscule to the benefit of the tenth. (Let's say you're a safety inspector at a nuclear power plant.) OTOH if you discard a line of research on the grounds it doesn't "smell right" you may be losing out on a Fields medal. There are entire fields of mathematics that don't "smell right" to large numbers of mathematicians. (Then there's the "Axiom of Choice" which doesn't smell right to many of us -- but smells no worse than its contradiction.)
As a recent TiVo customer (who bought a lifetime subscription) I can't say I'm enormously impressed.
First, key features that loyal customers raved about have been removed from more recent products (preseumably as a result of pressure from content-owners). So we have a product that in some ways is getting worse rather than better.
Second, I find the interface quite clumsy. (Sure, it's PRETTY.) It seems like every operation has extra, pointless steps (many of which are confirming non-destructive operations). There is no undo (you can't undelete a program you just deleted in error). The remote control is almost axially symmetric, meaning that in the dark it's quite easy to point it in exactly the wrong direction.
Third, the out-of-box experience is terrible. It initially needs several hours just to start working (I have no idea why) and it initially incorrectly identified where I live and refused to download the right TV timetable. Even when this was corrected, it continues to record infomercials and label them "Scrubs".
Finally, TiVo persistently tries to sell stuff to you.
TiVo's problems, I think, lie in (a) a failure to decide who their customer is and serve their needs and (b) a lack of attention to usability.
Item (a) is a strategic problem (they seem torn between wanting to partner with content providers, wanting to become a content provider and sell their own advertising space, and wanting to become a video napster 1.0), whereas (b) is tactical (they simply need to stop paying attention to their fawning fans and do some serious self-criticism).
I'm getting tired of Open Source folk proclaiming GIMP as being a useful substitute for Photoshop.
The GIMP is just too clunky to do good work with, as evinced by its ugly logo and sample documents. About the most creative thing anyone does with it is more-or-less trivial photo retouching that can be done in something like iPhoto or Elements.
And if you think that Elements has "80%" of Photoshop's functionality, you haven't used 90% of Photoshop's functionality.
There's a perfectly good way for taxing road use -- taxing gasoline. In general, this has a number of positive effects:
1) It taxes miles driven.
2) It's simple and robust.
3) It doesn't invade privacy.
4) It encourages fuel economical vehicles.
It is somewhat unfair on people who buy small, fuel inefficient vehicles -- such as porsches and BMWs. I think they can afford it.
It's ironic that the alleged reason for Oregon exploring this system is that they fear improved fuel economy will reduce gasoline tax revenue. If so, good -- raise gasoline taxes more: it will create a virtuous cycle of improved fuel efficiency and reduced road use.
The main benefit of a GPS-based tax system is that you can implement congestion tax (tax people for using popular roads at peak times). The big question is just how big a congestion tax you'll need to levy to have any useful effect (the difference between a car registration that only allows off-peak downtown driving and one that allows peak downtown driving in Singapore is tens of thousands of dollars...)
And, of course, the US Department of Defense is the world's largest command economy -- in effect a communist institution funded by taxes on a capitalist society.
It's actually worse than that.
It's not a question of needing to persuade folks not to use MS so much as denying them excuses for sticking with MS. After all, they're still claiming Macs are more expensive (based on sticker price) when they know perfectly well that a Mac's TCO is lower.
...given that it's based on a bizarrely awful franchise. But it's glacial and spends way too much time of side-plots that don't go anywhere (I mean, how long are those two gonna wander around randomly and to what purpose?)
A couple of days back they rated a hack that could theoretically forge you root access to a Mac OS X box if you (a) already had an account and (b) had physical access to the machine as 6.9/10.
Now we discover (really not surprisingly) that they themselves are a vector.
C has several glaring flaws that other languages, such as Pascal and even Basic lack.
a riable
1) It promotes unreadable or easily misread code. The classic example is:
if (a = b) {
}
2) Case sensitivity for names allows idiotic things such as:
thisVariable
ThisVariable
Thisvariable
thisv
to be distinct. It adds suble bugs and achieves no positive purpose.
3) braces { } may be easy to type, but make it easy to lose track of which block they are closing. Pascal's "begin" and "end" are no more useful, but Modula-2 and modern Basics have block closures that make it easier to figure out where you are.
4) the preprocessor may be neat, but the ways it create problems are legion.
If you go back to Kay's observation that a programming language is, in essence, a user interface for functionality, c is a lousy user interface -- it's easy to make mistakes and hard to find and correct them.
I've been living in Santa Barbara with a Phoenix area code (using Vonage) for over a year, and I'm hardly an early adopter.
Assuming that what we see is a standard portion of the universe
An astrophysicist, a physicist, and a mathematician are attending a conference in Scotland. During a break, they take a walk through some of the countryside, and come upon a black sheep.
"Aha," exclaims the astrophysicist. "I had no idea that all sheep in Scotland are black."
The physicist looks at her colleague in disbelief. "All sheep in Scotland are black? Are you nuts? We've only seen one sheep!"
The mathematician interrupts. "And only one side of that sheep."
Pushing graphics over game design innovation is THE way to be successful in the games industry.
DOOM3 -- where's the innovative game play there?
Half-Life 2? -- ditto?
For that matter, where's the gameplay innovation in the DS? You can't look at two screens at once -- seems to me they're just recycling IP.
...don't seem to be exactly unambiguous on the First Amendment. (You can't yell "fire" in a crowded movie house, right? Unless there is a fire. Who decides when you're in some sense yelling "fire" and whether there is on?) And don't even start on the second...
I'd expect you would get pretty poor results if you asked 100,000 kids to list the planets of the solar system in order out from the Sun or the chemical composition of salt -- expecting better on something as hazy as a constitutional amendment is silly.
In case the site is slashdotted...
The media is designed so that the laser that burns the data onto the CD can also create an image on the (far) side of the CD. It requires special media and special CD drives (of course) so who knows if it will become widely adopted, but a nice concept nonetheless.
No clue as to resolution of the image.