Apple Computers was originally banned from doing anything music related by their agreement with Apple Records. They were allowed to make system beeps, but nothing more. As you can imagine, that created problems when they wanted to add a software synth to their computers in the form of QuickTime. So, before they actually published anything with MIDI capabilities, they paid Apple Records a fairly large amount of money to rescind the agreement and never sue them again. This is also why the iPod is legal, iTunes is legal, and that system sound is named sosumi (pronounced so-sue-me).
This all happened quite some time before they ever released QuickTime. It's almost as ignorant as asking a Mormon how many wives he plans to have.
Most of that only applies to the software that uses the TCPA chips. If you don't use a TCPA aware OS, then you shouldn't have to worry about it controlling everything. Sort of like now, really.
If, for instance, I have a TCPA approved x86 motherboard, I should be able to install Windows 2000 with no problem and Windows itself would just ignore the TCPA capabilities of the board. Now, if they aren't backwards compatible such that you can't use non-TCPA software, then I do oppose it, but as long as I can run whatever software on it that I want, then I'm still in control. I could always trash Windows for Linux or IE for Mozilla Firebird. The point of having the hardware would then become the apps that you specificaly get because they support TCPA stuff.
I can't imagine the boards not being backwards compatible, because that would REALLY torpedo sales. If a new TCPA enabled computer couldn't use old software that the company has paid good money for, then there is no way that the company is going to buy it. I actually know a company that uses a $15,000 per license piece of software on Windows 2000 machines. If TCPA didn't lock out older software, then they would upgrade in a heartbeat, but if it did, then they wouldn't upgrade even if they were paid to take the hardware.
Exactly. Everyone has been saying "trusted computing" like it's entirely bad. Really, it could improve security A LOT for everything, not just Windows. I would think that all of the tinfoil hats would WANT TCPA approved motherboards because they have all sorts of nifty encryption and such implemented in hardware, thus making it harder for the government to steal their computer's brainwaves. I would certainly get a TCPA approved mobo if its other features were comparable to my current board. Quite frankly, I'm a bit paranoid, so I would like the extra security. As long as my OS didn't try to take control from me, that is.
Didn't IBM release a set of specs and the source for drivers for a TCPA chip a while ago? That should let Linux take full advantage of the cool hardware.
Re:I need a G5 to keep track of all the claims
on
G5 Benchmark Roundup
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· Score: 1
Here's something odd that I noticed about Apple's new systems. You can only get the RAM is pairs of the same value. I wonder if this is just an artificial restriction in Apple's online store or if it's some hardware trick that they used to keep the G5 fed. I'm betting on the latter.
What do you mean, "a good guy discovered this"? Do you actually think that anybody who would exploit it would TELL us that he could exploit it? Honestly.
Biometric identification is inherently flawed because it relies on things that cannot easily be changed (i.e., without major surgery), but that can be reproduced. This has been known for years. They even use similar situations on TV shows (Paul Milander, anyone?).
I only saw my guidance counselor twice. The first time was to check that I had all of my required classes taken care of so that I could take whatever I wanted to my senior year. The second time was her telling me that I hadn't and would, therefore, need to switch a few classes around.
I specifically asked about technology credits and whether I had enough. She told me that I did. Then, part of the way through the first trimester, she called me in and said that I needed to drop a non-essential class and take a technology credit. At first, she was adamant that I take Business Computer Information Systems (read: How To Use Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access), but I quickly got that changed to computer programming. I never want to use another console based development environment again, but at least I didn't have to deal with people putting carriage returns after every line in Word.
Anyway, she maintained throughout that she never told me that I didn't have to take any more technology credits. She probably put something like "Paranoid delusional - thinks that I'm out to get him. Next Hitler!" or something equally crazy. I should really go and get that from my high school. If nothing else, it'll give me something to laugh at.
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours Did gym and Gibbs in the wake. All mimes were the borrowers, And the moderate Belgrade. "Beware the tablespoon my son, The teeth that bite, the Claus that catch. Beware the Subjects bird, and shred The serious Bandwidth!" He took his Verbal sword in hand: Long time the monitors fog he sought, So rested he by the Tumbled tree, And stood a while in thought. And as in selfish thought he stood, The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame, Came stifling through the trigger wood, And troubled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and though, The Verbal blade went thicker shade. He left it dead, and with its head, He went gambling back. "And host Thai slash the tablespoon? Come to my arms my bearish boy. Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!" He charted in his joy. Teas Willis, and the sticky tours Did gym and Gibbs in the wake. All mimes were the borrowers, And the moderate Belgrade.
That one is by far my favorite. It was obtained by writing Jabberwocky on a Newton OMP (Original Message Pad). Those had the worst HWR imaginable. The 130 actually had pretty good recognition accuracy and the 2X00 is simply phenomenal.
I got to see a Cray up close and personal a few times. They have one running the lights and such at Disney World (what a horrible waste), then there's one on display in a museum that I went to. I forget where it was. Possibly Los Alamos? Well, I never actually got to use one, but it amazed me that the wires sometimes had loops to make sure that all of the wires were the same length so that the bits from one part would hit another part at the same time.
Anyway, I haven't seen a Connection Machine, either. I wonder how much it would cost to have one built using modern materials and technology. With the.09 micron manufacturing spec, far more than 16 of those cores should fit on a single chip. Of course, the vast majority of the volume of the CM-1 was taken up by the processor interconnects, so it can't be reduced too much without making the entire thing one giant chip. It takes a lot of wire to make a 12th dimensional cube.
I love all those trolls that ask why Apple claims that their computers are "supercomputers". What standard do they use to determine supercomputer status, they ask. The fact is that they use the US governmentâ(TM)s standard. For quite some time, Macintosh computers were powerful enough to be considered weapons by the United States. It was illegal to export them to quite a few countries. When the prices on computers that fit that criterion dropped enough that the majority of computer sales were 'weapons grade computers', that law was changed.
My Mac Classic has a SuperDrive. It's a 3.5" floppy drive that handles 750kB and 1.5MB (I think those are the numbers, anyway) disks. My PowerBook 5300 has one, too. Since Apple doesn't make any machines with floppies anymore, they figured that they could call another drive the SuperDrive.
The SuperDisk was, indeed, that 120 MB floppy drive.
I've seen on other pages that Apple actually makes $.30 per song sold. Using these numbers for distribution, that implies that $.10 per song goes to the credit card companies as the transaction fee.
Well, Apple works with indiependant labels, but labels can only join by invitation. That's why CD Baby's offer is so cool. They said that they were invited to sell their music on the iTMS and that they would sign independant bands and sell their music as a pipeline into the iTMS. Pretty cool of them.
You think that a seatbelt is too much? I've used a flight sim where the entire physical interface is the cockpit of an F-16 that was decommissioned. It has the original stick along with all of the gauges, meters, and displays that go inside the cockpit. They all work and interface flawlessly with the sim software. I really wish that I could find a computer joystick that simulated the one inside an F-16 well, but all of the computer joysticks that I can find move WAY too much. A real F-16's stick moves perhaps three degrees in any given direction as opposed to the Sidewinder, which moves more like 30. Sticks like that take a lot of practice to use effectively, but they work very well once you're used to them.
As if that's not expensive enough, the software end of the sim that I'm talking about is run by no less than seven 42U racks full of SGI computers. The display is a set of three high-resolution projection monitors that give you about an 85 degree field of view. Theyâ(TM)re about 4 feet tall and perhaps six feet away. The only real problem is that things look a little odd when moving from one display to another.
I really don't want to think about how much this thing costs to run, let alone how much it cost to build.
Well, I really doubt that whatever that is is a progress bar. It's probably a bandwidth meter or something similar. Possibly some sort of brightness meter that changes as the camera automaticaly adjusts the brightness to get the best picture. It looks sort of like a button, which implies that it is user adjustable, so it could control the FPS of the camera.
It just doesn't make any sense at all to have a progress bar there, so why would they put one there? It must be something else.
I don't like the look of the new windows, either. I think that Apple should stick with their UI guidelines. The metal looks nice (I like how the buttons look slightly inset), but it really conflicts with Aqua.
Well, I'm going to wait at least until Monday before I pass any serious judgement on Panther.
I see no technological reason that this could not be used to print a joint other than that joints aren't bone-on-bone contact, so you would need some of the tissue that normally sits between them. Unless it can be printed or grown too, that is.
What would be really cool is combining this with various cloning and accelerated cell growth technologies to build an entire replacement bone in a matter of weeks as opposed to 18 months. Kind of like growing a new heart valve or another unrejectable replacement part from the recipient's own cells. Of course, that kind of growth is mostly in the labratory now, but from what I've read and seen, the two are a perfect match for replacing hips and such.
Apple actually DID distribute 12" PowerBooks about a week or two before the keynote where Steve announced them. They were in big cardboard boxes that said in big bold letters "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, ON PAIN OF YOUR JOB". The people at the local Apple Store listened to the keynote and then when they got a call telling them to open the boxes, they essentially said, "Cool. It's what he just announced."
Keep in mind that Apple Stores are an extension of the online Apple Store. They have most of the same stuff and the physical stores have plenty of people ready to demo the Macs on a moment's notice. And don't forget the Mac Geniuses.
IBM has been mass-producing the 970 for months now. They've been putting them into blade servers that they're going to start selling soon. Apple isn't going to have a processor supply problem deploying these computers.
The buttons that aren't really buttons are sort of like laptop trackpads. They use capacitance to detect your finger and then act. They can be fabricated quite thin (see the third generation iPods for an example), but since there is no tactile feedback telling you when the button is pressed, they aren't particularly good for touch-typing keyboards. Also, since there is no physical button to press, it is much easier to accidentally press a few buttons at a time.
Apple has been using this technology for years. The G4 Cube had a power spot on its case that when touched by a finger would light up and turn the computer on. Their displays did something similar a while ago, but I haven't seen the newer displays, so I don't know if they still do. In fact, touching the power spot on the displays would put your computer to sleep by default. Pretty cool for people who put their computers in inaccessible places.
Sure, they worked on it, but they only released the fruits of their labor in countries where Unisys doesn't have a patent on LZW. In fact, I'm guessing that most of the work if not all of it was probably done out of the States and in a country without such asinine IP laws.
I wonder if Unisys could get a copyright on LZW code and thereby own it for another few centuries.
Fascinating. So this is similar to a retrovirus in that it inserts its own genetic code into the host's, right? How were you able to separate the modified bacteria from the unmodified? I would imagine that releasing the unmodified bacteria onto the plants would harm them rather than make them taste like wintergreen.
I did some genetic modification to E. Coli a year ago as a part of a biology class. We inserted a gene from a jellyfish that made the bacteria glow in the presence of a particular sugar and another gene that made it resistant to an antibiotic. We then spread the antibiotic on some agar plates and cultured the bacteria on them. Pretty soon, we had dozens of colonies and they all glowed. Since we used E. Coli, we didn't have to do much other than mix the bacteria and the DNA and then heat shock them.
You really need to read a copy of the space shuttle operator's manual. The astronauts have to do EVERYTHING, including program the computers while they're in space because they don't have enough storage to hold all of the software to operate the instruments. Now, perhaps the Russians have automated their spacecraft, but ours haven't changed at all since the space shuttles were first built.
Really, the space shuttle isn't much more advanced than the Apollo capsule. Surely you don't think that the men on Apollo 13 and the ground crew that got them home did "pretty much zilcho".
Re:That would be a natural ceiling
on
42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 1
I could have sworn that I had seen 45 mps somewhere. Well, thanks for posting that.
Re:That would be a natural ceiling
on
42-Volt Autos
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· Score: 1
Actually, light moves at different speeds depending on what it's going through. For instance, some scientists pushed a laser through a Bose-Einstein condensate and slowed it to something like 45 miles per second. I forgot the exact number because it's been a while since I saw that article.
Neutrinos, on the other hand, have no mass (recent experiments seem to indicate that they do, but it's immeasurably small), so they move through anything with the same speed unless they hit something straight on. A neutrino has a 50-50 chance of passing through a light-year of solid lead.
Yes, 5 seconds per frame IS a big deal. I do some rendering and it takes FOREVER to render just 1 second of DV quality (720*480 at 29.97 FPS) footage. Last time I did a big render, it took about 55 seconds per frame, so that's almost half an hour for a single second of video. If I was able to shave 5 seconds per frame off, that translates to 2.5 minutes per second of rendered video. It doesn't sound like much, but every little bit helps when you're rendering 45 seconds of video.
Unfortunately, Maya's good renderer doesn't use my graphics hardware. It's really too bad because I have a GeForce 4 Ti 4400 and I'm sure that it would speed up my renderings a lot.
Of course, Weta's old cluster is a lot better than anything I'm ever going to be working with, but they also render at obscene resolutions to keep things like Gollum looking smooth and crisp. I wonder how fast their new cluster renders.
Eventually, they should upgrade the iBook (or more likely replace it with another model), but Final Cut Express is a $300 app. Not too many home users are willing to drop that kind of cash on a single program AND aren't willing to spend it on a better computer. Plus, I don't know too many people who do FCE level video editing at home in the first place. iMovie is powerful enough for the average home user editing video of the kids.
Photoshop runs just fine on an iBook. Sure, the effects are faster on a better processor, but they're pretty snappy, even on the low-end iBooks. And that's the full version, not just Elements. I've tried Elements on my Windows computer, and it doesn't seem very different from the whole thing. A few filters and such aren't there, but the basic stuff certainly is. The average home user doesn't need most of the filters at all. When I was retouching digital photos for my mom, I just used the airbrush, dodge, burn, and the average sampling eyedropper. I was able to digitally shave people, remove red-eye, and even remove objects (for instance a mechanical pencil from my step-dad's pocket). I can't imagine a home user needing to do much more than that.
Of course, some of the filters look cool, so they would want to use those. However, saying that those need to be fast is like saying that it is necessary that I be able to render 720*480 scenes in real-time. Sure, I do rendering as a hobby, but I know that it isn't supposed to be very fast without a huge render farm.
I personally think that they aren't going to do anything with the iBook other than move it to Gobi, but later they will introduce a far more powerful laptop for home users. Possibly G4 based, but then again, possibly not. They could conceivably tack an Altivec unit onto the 750 and have quite a processor.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple Computers was originally banned from doing anything music related by their agreement with Apple Records. They were allowed to make system beeps, but nothing more. As you can imagine, that created problems when they wanted to add a software synth to their computers in the form of QuickTime. So, before they actually published anything with MIDI capabilities, they paid Apple Records a fairly large amount of money to rescind the agreement and never sue them again. This is also why the iPod is legal, iTunes is legal, and that system sound is named sosumi (pronounced so-sue-me).
This all happened quite some time before they ever released QuickTime. It's almost as ignorant as asking a Mormon how many wives he plans to have.
Most of that only applies to the software that uses the TCPA chips. If you don't use a TCPA aware OS, then you shouldn't have to worry about it controlling everything. Sort of like now, really.
If, for instance, I have a TCPA approved x86 motherboard, I should be able to install Windows 2000 with no problem and Windows itself would just ignore the TCPA capabilities of the board. Now, if they aren't backwards compatible such that you can't use non-TCPA software, then I do oppose it, but as long as I can run whatever software on it that I want, then I'm still in control. I could always trash Windows for Linux or IE for Mozilla Firebird. The point of having the hardware would then become the apps that you specificaly get because they support TCPA stuff.
I can't imagine the boards not being backwards compatible, because that would REALLY torpedo sales. If a new TCPA enabled computer couldn't use old software that the company has paid good money for, then there is no way that the company is going to buy it. I actually know a company that uses a $15,000 per license piece of software on Windows 2000 machines. If TCPA didn't lock out older software, then they would upgrade in a heartbeat, but if it did, then they wouldn't upgrade even if they were paid to take the hardware.
Exactly. Everyone has been saying "trusted computing" like it's entirely bad. Really, it could improve security A LOT for everything, not just Windows. I would think that all of the tinfoil hats would WANT TCPA approved motherboards because they have all sorts of nifty encryption and such implemented in hardware, thus making it harder for the government to steal their computer's brainwaves. I would certainly get a TCPA approved mobo if its other features were comparable to my current board. Quite frankly, I'm a bit paranoid, so I would like the extra security. As long as my OS didn't try to take control from me, that is.
Didn't IBM release a set of specs and the source for drivers for a TCPA chip a while ago? That should let Linux take full advantage of the cool hardware.
Here's something odd that I noticed about Apple's new systems. You can only get the RAM is pairs of the same value. I wonder if this is just an artificial restriction in Apple's online store or if it's some hardware trick that they used to keep the G5 fed. I'm betting on the latter.
What do you mean, "a good guy discovered this"? Do you actually think that anybody who would exploit it would TELL us that he could exploit it? Honestly.
Biometric identification is inherently flawed because it relies on things that cannot easily be changed (i.e., without major surgery), but that can be reproduced. This has been known for years. They even use similar situations on TV shows (Paul Milander, anyone?).
I only saw my guidance counselor twice. The first time was to check that I had all of my required classes taken care of so that I could take whatever I wanted to my senior year. The second time was her telling me that I hadn't and would, therefore, need to switch a few classes around.
I specifically asked about technology credits and whether I had enough. She told me that I did. Then, part of the way through the first trimester, she called me in and said that I needed to drop a non-essential class and take a technology credit. At first, she was adamant that I take Business Computer Information Systems (read: How To Use Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access), but I quickly got that changed to computer programming. I never want to use another console based development environment again, but at least I didn't have to deal with people putting carriage returns after every line in Word.
Anyway, she maintained throughout that she never told me that I didn't have to take any more technology credits. She probably put something like "Paranoid delusional - thinks that I'm out to get him. Next Hitler!" or something equally crazy. I should really go and get that from my high school. If nothing else, it'll give me something to laugh at.
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.
"Beware the tablespoon my son,
The teeth that bite, the Claus that catch.
Beware the Subjects bird, and shred
The serious Bandwidth!"
He took his Verbal sword in hand:
Long time the monitors fog he sought,
So rested he by the Tumbled tree,
And stood a while in thought.
And as in selfish thought he stood,
The tablespoon, with eyes of Flame,
Came stifling through the trigger wood,
And troubled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and though,
The Verbal blade went thicker shade.
He left it dead, and with its head,
He went gambling back.
"And host Thai slash the tablespoon?
Come to my arms my bearish boy.
Oh various day! Cartoon! Cathay!"
He charted in his joy.
Teas Willis, and the sticky tours
Did gym and Gibbs in the wake.
All mimes were the borrowers,
And the moderate Belgrade.
That one is by far my favorite. It was obtained by writing Jabberwocky on a Newton OMP (Original Message Pad). Those had the worst HWR imaginable. The 130 actually had pretty good recognition accuracy and the 2X00 is simply phenomenal.
I got to see a Cray up close and personal a few times. They have one running the lights and such at Disney World (what a horrible waste), then there's one on display in a museum that I went to. I forget where it was. Possibly Los Alamos? Well, I never actually got to use one, but it amazed me that the wires sometimes had loops to make sure that all of the wires were the same length so that the bits from one part would hit another part at the same time.
.09 micron manufacturing spec, far more than 16 of those cores should fit on a single chip. Of course, the vast majority of the volume of the CM-1 was taken up by the processor interconnects, so it can't be reduced too much without making the entire thing one giant chip. It takes a lot of wire to make a 12th dimensional cube.
Anyway, I haven't seen a Connection Machine, either. I wonder how much it would cost to have one built using modern materials and technology. With the
I love all those trolls that ask why Apple claims that their computers are "supercomputers". What standard do they use to determine supercomputer status, they ask. The fact is that they use the US governmentâ(TM)s standard. For quite some time, Macintosh computers were powerful enough to be considered weapons by the United States. It was illegal to export them to quite a few countries. When the prices on computers that fit that criterion dropped enough that the majority of computer sales were 'weapons grade computers', that law was changed.
My Mac Classic has a SuperDrive. It's a 3.5" floppy drive that handles 750kB and 1.5MB (I think those are the numbers, anyway) disks. My PowerBook 5300 has one, too. Since Apple doesn't make any machines with floppies anymore, they figured that they could call another drive the SuperDrive.
The SuperDisk was, indeed, that 120 MB floppy drive.
I've seen on other pages that Apple actually makes $.30 per song sold. Using these numbers for distribution, that implies that $.10 per song goes to the credit card companies as the transaction fee.
Oops. I misspelled "indiependant". Stupid me.
Well, Apple works with indiependant labels, but labels can only join by invitation. That's why CD Baby's offer is so cool. They said that they were invited to sell their music on the iTMS and that they would sign independant bands and sell their music as a pipeline into the iTMS. Pretty cool of them.
You think that a seatbelt is too much? I've used a flight sim where the entire physical interface is the cockpit of an F-16 that was decommissioned. It has the original stick along with all of the gauges, meters, and displays that go inside the cockpit. They all work and interface flawlessly with the sim software. I really wish that I could find a computer joystick that simulated the one inside an F-16 well, but all of the computer joysticks that I can find move WAY too much. A real F-16's stick moves perhaps three degrees in any given direction as opposed to the Sidewinder, which moves more like 30. Sticks like that take a lot of practice to use effectively, but they work very well once you're used to them.
As if that's not expensive enough, the software end of the sim that I'm talking about is run by no less than seven 42U racks full of SGI computers. The display is a set of three high-resolution projection monitors that give you about an 85 degree field of view. Theyâ(TM)re about 4 feet tall and perhaps six feet away. The only real problem is that things look a little odd when moving from one display to another.
I really don't want to think about how much this thing costs to run, let alone how much it cost to build.
Well, I really doubt that whatever that is is a progress bar. It's probably a bandwidth meter or something similar. Possibly some sort of brightness meter that changes as the camera automaticaly adjusts the brightness to get the best picture. It looks sort of like a button, which implies that it is user adjustable, so it could control the FPS of the camera.
It just doesn't make any sense at all to have a progress bar there, so why would they put one there? It must be something else.
I don't like the look of the new windows, either. I think that Apple should stick with their UI guidelines. The metal looks nice (I like how the buttons look slightly inset), but it really conflicts with Aqua.
Well, I'm going to wait at least until Monday before I pass any serious judgement on Panther.
I see no technological reason that this could not be used to print a joint other than that joints aren't bone-on-bone contact, so you would need some of the tissue that normally sits between them. Unless it can be printed or grown too, that is.
What would be really cool is combining this with various cloning and accelerated cell growth technologies to build an entire replacement bone in a matter of weeks as opposed to 18 months. Kind of like growing a new heart valve or another unrejectable replacement part from the recipient's own cells. Of course, that kind of growth is mostly in the labratory now, but from what I've read and seen, the two are a perfect match for replacing hips and such.
Apple actually DID distribute 12" PowerBooks about a week or two before the keynote where Steve announced them. They were in big cardboard boxes that said in big bold letters "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL TUESDAY, JANUARY 7, ON PAIN OF YOUR JOB". The people at the local Apple Store listened to the keynote and then when they got a call telling them to open the boxes, they essentially said, "Cool. It's what he just announced."
Keep in mind that Apple Stores are an extension of the online Apple Store. They have most of the same stuff and the physical stores have plenty of people ready to demo the Macs on a moment's notice. And don't forget the Mac Geniuses.
IBM has been mass-producing the 970 for months now. They've been putting them into blade servers that they're going to start selling soon. Apple isn't going to have a processor supply problem deploying these computers.
The buttons that aren't really buttons are sort of like laptop trackpads. They use capacitance to detect your finger and then act. They can be fabricated quite thin (see the third generation iPods for an example), but since there is no tactile feedback telling you when the button is pressed, they aren't particularly good for touch-typing keyboards. Also, since there is no physical button to press, it is much easier to accidentally press a few buttons at a time.
Apple has been using this technology for years. The G4 Cube had a power spot on its case that when touched by a finger would light up and turn the computer on. Their displays did something similar a while ago, but I haven't seen the newer displays, so I don't know if they still do. In fact, touching the power spot on the displays would put your computer to sleep by default. Pretty cool for people who put their computers in inaccessible places.
Sure, they worked on it, but they only released the fruits of their labor in countries where Unisys doesn't have a patent on LZW. In fact, I'm guessing that most of the work if not all of it was probably done out of the States and in a country without such asinine IP laws.
I wonder if Unisys could get a copyright on LZW code and thereby own it for another few centuries.
Fascinating. So this is similar to a retrovirus in that it inserts its own genetic code into the host's, right? How were you able to separate the modified bacteria from the unmodified? I would imagine that releasing the unmodified bacteria onto the plants would harm them rather than make them taste like wintergreen.
I did some genetic modification to E. Coli a year ago as a part of a biology class. We inserted a gene from a jellyfish that made the bacteria glow in the presence of a particular sugar and another gene that made it resistant to an antibiotic. We then spread the antibiotic on some agar plates and cultured the bacteria on them. Pretty soon, we had dozens of colonies and they all glowed. Since we used E. Coli, we didn't have to do much other than mix the bacteria and the DNA and then heat shock them.
You really need to read a copy of the space shuttle operator's manual. The astronauts have to do EVERYTHING, including program the computers while they're in space because they don't have enough storage to hold all of the software to operate the instruments. Now, perhaps the Russians have automated their spacecraft, but ours haven't changed at all since the space shuttles were first built.
Really, the space shuttle isn't much more advanced than the Apollo capsule. Surely you don't think that the men on Apollo 13 and the ground crew that got them home did "pretty much zilcho".
I could have sworn that I had seen 45 mps somewhere. Well, thanks for posting that.
Actually, light moves at different speeds depending on what it's going through. For instance, some scientists pushed a laser through a Bose-Einstein condensate and slowed it to something like 45 miles per second. I forgot the exact number because it's been a while since I saw that article.
Neutrinos, on the other hand, have no mass (recent experiments seem to indicate that they do, but it's immeasurably small), so they move through anything with the same speed unless they hit something straight on. A neutrino has a 50-50 chance of passing through a light-year of solid lead.
They already DO promote open source. They GPLed the plugin that they used to go from Maya to RenderMan. Pretty cool of them, isn't it?
The plugin is here:
http://www.nomadicmonkey.com/tools.html
Yes, 5 seconds per frame IS a big deal. I do some rendering and it takes FOREVER to render just 1 second of DV quality (720*480 at 29.97 FPS) footage. Last time I did a big render, it took about 55 seconds per frame, so that's almost half an hour for a single second of video. If I was able to shave 5 seconds per frame off, that translates to 2.5 minutes per second of rendered video. It doesn't sound like much, but every little bit helps when you're rendering 45 seconds of video.
Unfortunately, Maya's good renderer doesn't use my graphics hardware. It's really too bad because I have a GeForce 4 Ti 4400 and I'm sure that it would speed up my renderings a lot.
Of course, Weta's old cluster is a lot better than anything I'm ever going to be working with, but they also render at obscene resolutions to keep things like Gollum looking smooth and crisp. I wonder how fast their new cluster renders.
Good points.
Eventually, they should upgrade the iBook (or more likely replace it with another model), but Final Cut Express is a $300 app. Not too many home users are willing to drop that kind of cash on a single program AND aren't willing to spend it on a better computer. Plus, I don't know too many people who do FCE level video editing at home in the first place. iMovie is powerful enough for the average home user editing video of the kids.
Photoshop runs just fine on an iBook. Sure, the effects are faster on a better processor, but they're pretty snappy, even on the low-end iBooks. And that's the full version, not just Elements. I've tried Elements on my Windows computer, and it doesn't seem very different from the whole thing. A few filters and such aren't there, but the basic stuff certainly is. The average home user doesn't need most of the filters at all. When I was retouching digital photos for my mom, I just used the airbrush, dodge, burn, and the average sampling eyedropper. I was able to digitally shave people, remove red-eye, and even remove objects (for instance a mechanical pencil from my step-dad's pocket). I can't imagine a home user needing to do much more than that.
Of course, some of the filters look cool, so they would want to use those. However, saying that those need to be fast is like saying that it is necessary that I be able to render 720*480 scenes in real-time. Sure, I do rendering as a hobby, but I know that it isn't supposed to be very fast without a huge render farm.
I personally think that they aren't going to do anything with the iBook other than move it to Gobi, but later they will introduce a far more powerful laptop for home users. Possibly G4 based, but then again, possibly not. They could conceivably tack an Altivec unit onto the 750 and have quite a processor.