I predict that this won't happen until we come up with a DRM system that actually works. Content providers want to protect their media, and the law says they have that right. We as a society would be better off-- in the purely lazy, couch potato sense, of course-- with a good DRM infrastructure than without one. I will, of course, get senselessly flamed for this by people who wouldn't recognize a good DRM system if it bit them on the DVD player. Here's a hint: a good DRM system will protect consumers' rights just as much as it protects licensors' rights.
streaming video over IP
How do we fix the fact that this simply doesn't work very well? I've been of the opinion for some time that the best video-on-demand system would be a store-and-watch one. You request a movie or show and your STB/TV/player/whatever starts downloading it. Depending on your bandwidth, the program might take a minute to download or it might take a day. When it's downloaded, you can watch it.
Those of us who own TiVos kind of have this system already. I look at the list of programming that's available over the next several days and decide what I'd like to see. When it comes along, my TiVo records and caches it for me. I can then watch it at my leisure, as many times as I like until I decide to delete it. Couple this mode of operation-- particularly the "season pass" feature that lets you specify repeating program events-- with IP-based content delivery and we might have a winner.
Ultimately this loops back to DRM, though. I don't think content providers would be too excited about this idea unless they knew their rights would be protected, and obviously consumers won't be happy unless they know that their rights are also protected. Ergo, we require good DRM.
Not any more. Behold the wonder of digital television. Over-the-air TV now looks substantially better than digital cable because your local stations are throwing more bits out over the air than your cable provider is down the wire for the same program. If you have a new TV, you can see true high definition, but even if you don't you can still get a crystal-clear widescreen picture and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Even in an apartment, even off of a pair of rabbit ears.
Your local TV stations are probably already broadcasting digital TV; most people in the country are within range of at least one digital station, and for something like 40% of the country all of your local stations have already migrated.
So, how can the people of the net fight back to ensure that these messages stop, and more importantly, these people stop preying on the less-technically inclined?
You can't. What they're doing isn't illegal, and arguably it shouldn't be. And even if it were, they'd just move their operations off-shore.
This isn't really a free speech issue-- commercial speech isn't covered by the same rules that govern other forms of expression-- but what you're basically saying is, "Some people are saying something that I don't like. I know that I can just stop listening to them, but I want to do more. How can I fight back to ensure that they have to stop saying what they're saying?
Sorry. Can't, or at least shouldn't, be done.
Now, if you wanted to take a different tactic, you could approach Microsoft through the appropriate channels to request that the Messenger service be off by default, or to have them remove it altogether. That might or might not work, but you could try.
You also said "what people really want." I don't think anybody wants Apple to build Macs with Intel processors in 'em. They either want Apple to build Macs with binary-compatible Power4 processors in 'em (kind of happening soon), or they want Apple to release OS X for generic hardware (will never happen, probably).
Moving the Mac to an Intel CPU would be a bad thing for everybody. Bad for ISV's because they'd have to port, or at least rebuild and re-optimize, their apps, and bad for users because they'd be waiting on the ISV's.
Also, if Apple based their decisions on what people really wanted, we'd have had OS X on x86 a long time ago.
Do you want Apple to continuing to innovate and improve OS X, or do you want them to do out of business?
I'll go out on a limb here and say that unless a NeXT- or Be-like catastrophe overcomes them, Apple will never release an operating system for generic PC-style computers. If they do, it's all over but the shouting, and there won't even be much shouting.
someone at apple might just read this and see that there is a demand for ogg support and release an update
Dude, if Apple were making their decisions based on Slashdot articles, we'd all be running OS X for free on PC's bought from Wal-Mart. With Natalie Portman. In Soviet Russia. Profit!
Seriously, from Apple's perspective, demand for Ogg is so close to zero as to be irrelevant. Apple is pushing MP3 today, with iTunes and iPod, and AAC tomorrow. And if the rumors are to be believed, Apple has some really interesting things in store for on-line music delivery in the AAC format.
First off, the guy's page says he's doing this to learn and for fun. Good for him.
However, I'm a little afraid that somebody might latch onto this idea and say, "Gee, we should use this to help people migrate to Linux from Microsoft!" That would be a terrible idea.
It would be a terrible idea because it would give new users a false sense of familiarity. When somebody sits down at a new program or OS, they notice immediately that it's different, and they start learning. The contrast between old and new creates a kind of mental traction, something for the brain to hold on to: "Okay, in Windows I did this and then this, but this is Linux so I have to do that and that instead."
In a situation of false familiarity, though, everything is a little slippery. Because everything looks like something the user is already familiar with, the user naturally expects everything to work like the thing it resembles. When it doesn't, frustration sets in. "Okay, now I want to do this. Hey, it didn't work. But that's how I do it in Windows, and this is just like Windows. Why didn't it work? This is broken!"
Some folks seem to be under the mistaken impression that if the windows have the same chrome on them and the desktop has the same background and the fonts resemble each other, then the system will be easy to learn. In fact, just the opposite is true. The more you make X look like Y, the harder it will be for users who know Y to learn X.
Not at all - I was thinking the same thing. While a high-end PC can be built/set up to do this sort of processing, a high end Mac is already there, waiting to be bought.
Yeah, after I posted I thought of something else I should have added. In my opinion, there may be an occasion where building your own PC from component parts is absolutely the right thing to do. But more often than not, the time and effort you spend building your FrankenPC outweighs any possible benefits you gained from doing it yourself.
I speak from a certain degree of experience. A few years ago, I used to work for a company that sold, among other things, high-end video editing systems in the half-a-million-plus market. At one point we tried to diversify by selling hand-build low-end systems into the sub-$50,000 market as well. We assembled the computers from the best components available to save money, hand-picked the processors and I/O cards and whatnot, and then loaded them up with software like After Effects and Premiere and such. Our intent was to sell three or four of these little machines to every customer who bought a high-end system, and for a while it worked.
The hitch was, we encountered amazing problems getting our hand-built computers to work right. I believe the guys we had doing it really knew what they were doing, but we had problems starting with driver incompatibilities-- I think the HD I/O board's driver was incompatible with the HIPPI NIC driver, or some damn thing-- and getting more troublesome from there.
Long story short, we ended up losing money on every hand-build machine we sold, and we had some pretty unhappy customers for a while.
So then the boss decided that that was enough of that, and we started selling pre-assembled ZX10 workstations to do the same job. We had to cut our profit margins on them a little, because a computer that we previously built for $6,000 in parts was now costing us $11,000 to buy, but we spent far less time making 'em work. It turned out to be a better solution for us. Or so we thought.
Thing was, we still ended up with some unhappy customers. Even though the computers were pre-assembled and tested at the factory and whatnot, they still had problems. The HD I/O board set, from Matrox or some damn thing, wasn't reliable. The filesystems couldn't quite keep up and would sometimes drop frames. The audio I/O boards were plagued with AES sync problems, and the analog monitoring channels would sometimes just drop out for no reason until the operator rebooted. So even though our profits were up, our customers were still unhappy.
When Apple came out with the next-to-last generation of Power Macs, the first dual-processor ones, we finally said, "Screw this." We started selling Macs straight from Apple with no additional parts other than some RAM and an HD-SDI board from a company whose name I can't recall right now, with After Effects and Photoshop and Final Cut Pro and (later) Shake. I think we made about a hundred bucks on each of them. But we sold 'em like crazy, and the customers loved them. We even replaced a few FrankenPCs and ZX10s with Macs at our expense in order to salvage a few customer relationships.
(Incidentally, it was about this time that Intergraph sold their workstation business to SGI and the ZX10 stopped being available. So it's a good thing we made the switch when we did, otherwise we would have been up a creek.)
As far as I know, that company is still selling Macs alongside their $500,000+ editing and effects systems.
So that's where my recommendation comes from. If you want to get this kind of work done with the minimum of hassle, buy a Power Mac. Unless there's something that the Mac just can't do for you that a PC could-- which is unlikely, I think-- you'll be much happier with it.
I want to build a high-end workstation for video processing.
Not to sound contrarian, but you could always bypass all of these problems by buying a Power Mac. Dual processors, AGP graphics, built-in high-quality FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet, optional PCI cards for SDI and HD-SDI video I/O, optional internal ATA or SCSI RAID or external SCSI or FC RAID, and no audio sync problems. Plus, the power of UNIX, and you can run Shake, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and ProTools.
This is the part where you all mod me down as a troll, or flame me for recommending expensive hardware from a dying company.
Honestly, who'd write, "I went to various ATM's in the area?" That doesn't look right a'tall, no indeed. Not that I'd expect you to agree.
Actually, I do agree. The apostrophe rule comes from the Olden Dayes when abbreviations were actually written out with periods. Which is better, "A.T.M.s" or "A.T.M.'s?"
As to changing the Manual, I'll agree that the rule should be changed when the name of the candy is changed from "M&M's" to "M&Ms."
I'm a New Yorker, and as such I defer to the NY Times Style Guide over the Chicago Manual.
Style guides for newspapers and magazines, including the AP's style guide, describe an extremely simplified mode of writing, appropriate for mass communication media. I prefer the more conservative mode described by The University of Chicago Press. It's a preference thing.
If you google the phrase "DVD's", you'll get a message that says, "Did you mean: Dvds"
Oh, well, that's an appeal to authority that I can agree with.;-)
So I'm guessing you missed the subtle yet quite conclusive rebuttal to your argumentum ad verecundiam which is prominently displayed on the "New FAQs" page.
My deskside copy of the Manual is a 13th ed.; I had to go consult a more recent edition to get to the bottom of this. In editions more recent than my own, the Manual distinguishes between types of abbreviation: acronyms, initializations, and contractions. An acronym is meant to be spoken as a single word, like NASA or BART. Acronyms form their plurals with a single s, as in FAQs (pronounced "facks"). Initializations are pronounced as separate letters, like CD, ATM, or VCR. Initializations form their plurals with an apostrophe: CD's (pronounced "see dees").
When you start pronouncing "DVD" as a word, rather than as letters, you can drop the apostrophe.;-)
Now, would you like to split this hair still further, or shall we just agree to disagree?
I was under the impression that they weren't yet certain that today's HDTV tuners would be able to handle tomorrow's HDTV broadcasts.
That's not actually true at all. All the stuff related to HDTV signaling, from picture formats to audio encoding to the 8VSB transmission system, is defined by SMPTE standards. These are the same standards that govern old-fashioned TV. You can have the same degree of confidence in a new HDTV that you had in your old-fashioned TV.
Does it suck that we're forcing old-fashioned TV's into obsolescence? Yeah, kinda, but it's better than the alternative. And remember that you don't have to buy a new TV. You can get an HD set-top box for $90 today-- prices, of course, will drop over the next couple of years as demand increases-- that lets you watch digital broadcasts on your old-fashioned set. You won't get improved picture or sound, but you will at least get better reception than you get via analog TV today.
But the digital transition is set in stone; old-style television will cease to exist in the US in 2007. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we started to see PSA's from the FCC starting in the next year or so telling people that old-style TV is going away, and explaining the options.
Re:Why 4 bases?
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, none of these is an example of the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle is kind of a reverse causality; it says that X is true because if it were false, intelligent life in the universe (or on Earth, or in South Boston, or whatever your reference frame may be) could not exist. The fact that intelligent life does exist in that reference frame necessarily dictates (post hoc) that X be true.
For example, one might ask the question, "Why is gravity not an inverse cube relation instead of an inverse square relation?" Application of the weak anthropic principle would result in the conclusion that a universe in which gravity works along the inverse cube would be unable to support intelligent life, so if that were the case there would be no beings around to observe the fact. The fact that we are here making observations about gravity necessarily means-- though purely in an after-the-fact kind of way-- that gravity couldn't have acted along the inverse cube.
The question of particle decay can't be addressed by the anthropic principle. Whether the particle decayed today or yesterday would have no bearing on the existence of intelligent life in the universe, so it could have gone either way. We don't know why it happened yesterday and not today, but there's no evidence that it had to happen one way or the other.
The one about snowflakes actually has an answer. The structure of a snowflake is governed by its environment: air currents, particulate matter, instantaneous pressure and temperature on the microscopic scale: all of these things affect crystal formation. A snowflake looks just that way because of the sum of all the forces acting on it during its formation. Again, the anthropic principle doesn't apply.
As to why we have 10 fingers, the answer is even simpler: we have 10 fingers because our ancestors had 10 fingers, and they managed to live long enough to pass on their genes to us. If some outside force had made life hard for the 10-fingered among them, then some other group with a different number of fingers would have been better able to pass their genes on to their offspring, and as a result we'd have a different number of fingers today. It is, in fact, entirely possible that this may have happened at some point in the distant past, although I don't think the fossil record has anything to say on the subject.
The anthropic principle doesn't apply here because if having 10 fingers had been a liability in the past, there would still be somebody here to have this discussion. Having 10 fingers is not, as far as we know, a necessity for the existence of intelligent life.
Really, the weak anthropic principle by itself isn't terribly insightful. If you combine it with Everett's work in branching time and parallel universes, though, it starts to make a sort of sense. See, there is a universe out there for every possible state. There's a universe where gravity is an inverse cube relation. There's a universe where there is no gravity at all. There's a universe where gravity repels rather than attracts. The question arises, then, as to why we're in this universe and not any of those. The weak anthropic principle says that we exist in this universe because none of those other universes could have developed intelligent life. They're all possible in the absolute sense, but it's not possible for us to exist in them, so from our frame of reference, they're impossible.
Ultimately, this is navel-gazing. But it's entertaining navel-gazing.
Re:Binary computers? How long before base4 compute
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Binary is not only Simple, any Language using a larger Alphabet could be encoded using binary.
Uhm. I don't have any proof to back this up, but it seems obvious to me that any symbolic system can be encoded using any other symbolic system, as long as both systems are non-degenerate. It's all about arbitrary base arithmetic, right?
So, technical challenges aside, there's no purely mathematical reason why base 2 makes more sense than any other base.
Personally, I prefer to do all my math with base 1 arithmetic. It's a lot easier. 111 + 11111 = 11111111.
Re:I'm Not Convinced
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
I hereby moderate this post -1, Too Smart; Made Us All Look Bad.
Did you? It said, "Abbreviations with or without periods... for[m] the plural with an apostrophe and an s." Yeah, I let a typo slip in there, but it should have been clear from context.
Whether "DVD" now has an agreed-upon expansion or not, it is not a word. At best, it's a neologism coined from an abbreviation. As such, it has to follow the rules for an abbreviation.
Okay, I'll come clean and admit the whole purpose of this post was to write "Ss's".;-)
That's okay. The whole purpose of my post was just to pick a grammar nit, which is something that I happen to get a kick out of. Does it really matter? No. But I find it more entertaining than arguing about religion or politics, and almost as fun as talking about sports.;-)
At current prices, it'll be quite a while before Joe Sixpack will choose it over a standard TV.
Look more closely. Most of the TV's at the local Best Buy have HDTV tuners built in already, and are capable of displaying an HDTV picture. The picture may not be as good as you'd expect, depending on the quality of the tube or projector in the set, but it works.
I did a little last-minute Christmas shopping yesterday, and I out of my own curiosity I did a quick count. I didn't add up a total, but on each aisle there were more HD-compatible TVs than otherwise, except when I got down to the sub-20-inch models.
It is helpful to those who have been programming Unix systems longer than you've probably been alive. The fact that it may not be helpful to you isn't relevant.
No, it's not helpful in the slightest. The poster said he was looking for information on administering NetInfo. You pointed him to the NetInfo API documentation. You missed the boat, friend.
But why force us to use Objective C in the first place, when C++ is perfectly capable today of handling run-time dispatching?
Two reasons. One, all the work was already done for the Objective C API. Been around since the late 80's, at least. Two, it works better (faster, more efficiently, we have the technology) in Objective C than in C++.
I don't want to use Objective-C, and if there's no compelling reason to do so, I won't. I am saddled with knowing too many languages as it is.
Oh, sorry to hear you're so burdened by this overabundance of knowledge. Is that what makes you so whiny, or is it something else?
The only reason why OS X doesn't support older machines is because Jobs needed the money for his private jet.
Oh, quit trolling. This is apple.slashdot.org. Everybody here knows that Steve got his private jet as a gift from the board of directors. He didn't have to pay for it himself.
DESCRIPTION
These calls are the programming interface to NetInfo.
Typically, a handle (of type "void *") is allocated
through a call to ni_new, ni_open, or ni_connect. This
handle opens a connection to the given NetInfo domain.
Read calls may go to either the master or the clone
servers, while writes will always go to the master server.
If the master is unavailable, no writes can be performed.
The handle is then passed to one of several NetInfo rou-
tines for database operations and then freed using
ni_free. Several utility routines are also supplied which
operate on NetInfo data structures. These routines don't
require NetInfo handles.
Great advice, you jerk. If you're going to respond to something like this, the least you could do is offer help that's actually helpful. (Note: that link points to a 62-page, 1.9 MB PDF called "Understanding and Using NetInfo.")
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless cable
Uh... you mean like broadcast TV?
telco delivered video on demand
I predict that this won't happen until we come up with a DRM system that actually works. Content providers want to protect their media, and the law says they have that right. We as a society would be better off-- in the purely lazy, couch potato sense, of course-- with a good DRM infrastructure than without one. I will, of course, get senselessly flamed for this by people who wouldn't recognize a good DRM system if it bit them on the DVD player. Here's a hint: a good DRM system will protect consumers' rights just as much as it protects licensors' rights.
streaming video over IP
How do we fix the fact that this simply doesn't work very well? I've been of the opinion for some time that the best video-on-demand system would be a store-and-watch one. You request a movie or show and your STB/TV/player/whatever starts downloading it. Depending on your bandwidth, the program might take a minute to download or it might take a day. When it's downloaded, you can watch it.
Those of us who own TiVos kind of have this system already. I look at the list of programming that's available over the next several days and decide what I'd like to see. When it comes along, my TiVo records and caches it for me. I can then watch it at my leisure, as many times as I like until I decide to delete it. Couple this mode of operation-- particularly the "season pass" feature that lets you specify repeating program events-- with IP-based content delivery and we might have a winner.
Ultimately this loops back to DRM, though. I don't think content providers would be too excited about this idea unless they knew their rights would be protected, and obviously consumers won't be happy unless they know that their rights are also protected. Ergo, we require good DRM.
Not any more. Behold the wonder of digital television. Over-the-air TV now looks substantially better than digital cable because your local stations are throwing more bits out over the air than your cable provider is down the wire for the same program. If you have a new TV, you can see true high definition, but even if you don't you can still get a crystal-clear widescreen picture and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Even in an apartment, even off of a pair of rabbit ears.
Your local TV stations are probably already broadcasting digital TV; most people in the country are within range of at least one digital station, and for something like 40% of the country all of your local stations have already migrated.
Welcome to the 21st century.
So, how can the people of the net fight back to ensure that these messages stop, and more importantly, these people stop preying on the less-technically inclined?
You can't. What they're doing isn't illegal, and arguably it shouldn't be. And even if it were, they'd just move their operations off-shore.
This isn't really a free speech issue-- commercial speech isn't covered by the same rules that govern other forms of expression-- but what you're basically saying is, "Some people are saying something that I don't like. I know that I can just stop listening to them, but I want to do more. How can I fight back to ensure that they have to stop saying what they're saying?
Sorry. Can't, or at least shouldn't, be done.
Now, if you wanted to take a different tactic, you could approach Microsoft through the appropriate channels to request that the Messenger service be off by default, or to have them remove it altogether. That might or might not work, but you could try.
You also said "what people really want." I don't think anybody wants Apple to build Macs with Intel processors in 'em. They either want Apple to build Macs with binary-compatible Power4 processors in 'em (kind of happening soon), or they want Apple to release OS X for generic hardware (will never happen, probably).
Moving the Mac to an Intel CPU would be a bad thing for everybody. Bad for ISV's because they'd have to port, or at least rebuild and re-optimize, their apps, and bad for users because they'd be waiting on the ISV's.
And what about strategy game WC3?
There's not that much strategy involved in WarCraft 3. It's fun and all, but it's definitely not a game of strategy.
Also, if Apple based their decisions on what people really wanted, we'd have had OS X on x86 a long time ago.
Do you want Apple to continuing to innovate and improve OS X, or do you want them to do out of business?
I'll go out on a limb here and say that unless a NeXT- or Be-like catastrophe overcomes them, Apple will never release an operating system for generic PC-style computers. If they do, it's all over but the shouting, and there won't even be much shouting.
someone at apple might just read this and see that there is a demand for ogg support and release an update
Dude, if Apple were making their decisions based on Slashdot articles, we'd all be running OS X for free on PC's bought from Wal-Mart. With Natalie Portman. In Soviet Russia. Profit!
Seriously, from Apple's perspective, demand for Ogg is so close to zero as to be irrelevant. Apple is pushing MP3 today, with iTunes and iPod, and AAC tomorrow. And if the rumors are to be believed, Apple has some really interesting things in store for on-line music delivery in the AAC format.
Professional Jurors
You mean judges? Yeah, okay. Next!
Please enlighten us, then. How would you improve the jury system?
First off, the guy's page says he's doing this to learn and for fun. Good for him.
However, I'm a little afraid that somebody might latch onto this idea and say, "Gee, we should use this to help people migrate to Linux from Microsoft!" That would be a terrible idea.
It would be a terrible idea because it would give new users a false sense of familiarity. When somebody sits down at a new program or OS, they notice immediately that it's different, and they start learning. The contrast between old and new creates a kind of mental traction, something for the brain to hold on to: "Okay, in Windows I did this and then this, but this is Linux so I have to do that and that instead."
In a situation of false familiarity, though, everything is a little slippery. Because everything looks like something the user is already familiar with, the user naturally expects everything to work like the thing it resembles. When it doesn't, frustration sets in. "Okay, now I want to do this. Hey, it didn't work. But that's how I do it in Windows, and this is just like Windows. Why didn't it work? This is broken!"
Some folks seem to be under the mistaken impression that if the windows have the same chrome on them and the desktop has the same background and the fonts resemble each other, then the system will be easy to learn. In fact, just the opposite is true. The more you make X look like Y, the harder it will be for users who know Y to learn X.
Not at all - I was thinking the same thing. While a high-end PC can be built/set up to do this sort of processing, a high end Mac is already there, waiting to be bought.
Yeah, after I posted I thought of something else I should have added. In my opinion, there may be an occasion where building your own PC from component parts is absolutely the right thing to do. But more often than not, the time and effort you spend building your FrankenPC outweighs any possible benefits you gained from doing it yourself.
I speak from a certain degree of experience. A few years ago, I used to work for a company that sold, among other things, high-end video editing systems in the half-a-million-plus market. At one point we tried to diversify by selling hand-build low-end systems into the sub-$50,000 market as well. We assembled the computers from the best components available to save money, hand-picked the processors and I/O cards and whatnot, and then loaded them up with software like After Effects and Premiere and such. Our intent was to sell three or four of these little machines to every customer who bought a high-end system, and for a while it worked.
The hitch was, we encountered amazing problems getting our hand-built computers to work right. I believe the guys we had doing it really knew what they were doing, but we had problems starting with driver incompatibilities-- I think the HD I/O board's driver was incompatible with the HIPPI NIC driver, or some damn thing-- and getting more troublesome from there.
Long story short, we ended up losing money on every hand-build machine we sold, and we had some pretty unhappy customers for a while.
So then the boss decided that that was enough of that, and we started selling pre-assembled ZX10 workstations to do the same job. We had to cut our profit margins on them a little, because a computer that we previously built for $6,000 in parts was now costing us $11,000 to buy, but we spent far less time making 'em work. It turned out to be a better solution for us. Or so we thought.
Thing was, we still ended up with some unhappy customers. Even though the computers were pre-assembled and tested at the factory and whatnot, they still had problems. The HD I/O board set, from Matrox or some damn thing, wasn't reliable. The filesystems couldn't quite keep up and would sometimes drop frames. The audio I/O boards were plagued with AES sync problems, and the analog monitoring channels would sometimes just drop out for no reason until the operator rebooted. So even though our profits were up, our customers were still unhappy.
When Apple came out with the next-to-last generation of Power Macs, the first dual-processor ones, we finally said, "Screw this." We started selling Macs straight from Apple with no additional parts other than some RAM and an HD-SDI board from a company whose name I can't recall right now, with After Effects and Photoshop and Final Cut Pro and (later) Shake. I think we made about a hundred bucks on each of them. But we sold 'em like crazy, and the customers loved them. We even replaced a few FrankenPCs and ZX10s with Macs at our expense in order to salvage a few customer relationships.
(Incidentally, it was about this time that Intergraph sold their workstation business to SGI and the ZX10 stopped being available. So it's a good thing we made the switch when we did, otherwise we would have been up a creek.)
As far as I know, that company is still selling Macs alongside their $500,000+ editing and effects systems.
So that's where my recommendation comes from. If you want to get this kind of work done with the minimum of hassle, buy a Power Mac. Unless there's something that the Mac just can't do for you that a PC could-- which is unlikely, I think-- you'll be much happier with it.
I want to build a high-end workstation for video processing.
Not to sound contrarian, but you could always bypass all of these problems by buying a Power Mac. Dual processors, AGP graphics, built-in high-quality FireWire and Gigabit Ethernet, optional PCI cards for SDI and HD-SDI video I/O, optional internal ATA or SCSI RAID or external SCSI or FC RAID, and no audio sync problems. Plus, the power of UNIX, and you can run Shake, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and ProTools.
This is the part where you all mod me down as a troll, or flame me for recommending expensive hardware from a dying company.
Actually, I do agree. The apostrophe rule comes from the Olden Dayes when abbreviations were actually written out with periods. Which is better, "A.T.M.s" or "A.T.M.'s?"
As to changing the Manual, I'll agree that the rule should be changed when the name of the candy is changed from "M&M's" to "M&Ms."
;-)
I'm a New Yorker, and as such I defer to the NY Times Style Guide over the Chicago Manual.
;-)
;-)
Style guides for newspapers and magazines, including the AP's style guide, describe an extremely simplified mode of writing, appropriate for mass communication media. I prefer the more conservative mode described by The University of Chicago Press. It's a preference thing.
If you google the phrase "DVD's", you'll get a message that says, "Did you mean: Dvds"
Oh, well, that's an appeal to authority that I can agree with.
So I'm guessing you missed the subtle yet quite conclusive rebuttal to your argumentum ad verecundiam which is prominently displayed on the "New FAQs" page.
My deskside copy of the Manual is a 13th ed.; I had to go consult a more recent edition to get to the bottom of this. In editions more recent than my own, the Manual distinguishes between types of abbreviation: acronyms, initializations, and contractions. An acronym is meant to be spoken as a single word, like NASA or BART. Acronyms form their plurals with a single s, as in FAQs (pronounced "facks"). Initializations are pronounced as separate letters, like CD, ATM, or VCR. Initializations form their plurals with an apostrophe: CD's (pronounced "see dees").
When you start pronouncing "DVD" as a word, rather than as letters, you can drop the apostrophe.
Now, would you like to split this hair still further, or shall we just agree to disagree?
I was under the impression that they weren't yet certain that today's HDTV tuners would be able to handle tomorrow's HDTV broadcasts.
That's not actually true at all. All the stuff related to HDTV signaling, from picture formats to audio encoding to the 8VSB transmission system, is defined by SMPTE standards. These are the same standards that govern old-fashioned TV. You can have the same degree of confidence in a new HDTV that you had in your old-fashioned TV.
Does it suck that we're forcing old-fashioned TV's into obsolescence? Yeah, kinda, but it's better than the alternative. And remember that you don't have to buy a new TV. You can get an HD set-top box for $90 today-- prices, of course, will drop over the next couple of years as demand increases-- that lets you watch digital broadcasts on your old-fashioned set. You won't get improved picture or sound, but you will at least get better reception than you get via analog TV today.
But the digital transition is set in stone; old-style television will cease to exist in the US in 2007. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we started to see PSA's from the FCC starting in the next year or so telling people that old-style TV is going away, and explaining the options.
Actually, none of these is an example of the anthropic principle. The anthropic principle is kind of a reverse causality; it says that X is true because if it were false, intelligent life in the universe (or on Earth, or in South Boston, or whatever your reference frame may be) could not exist. The fact that intelligent life does exist in that reference frame necessarily dictates (post hoc) that X be true.
For example, one might ask the question, "Why is gravity not an inverse cube relation instead of an inverse square relation?" Application of the weak anthropic principle would result in the conclusion that a universe in which gravity works along the inverse cube would be unable to support intelligent life, so if that were the case there would be no beings around to observe the fact. The fact that we are here making observations about gravity necessarily means-- though purely in an after-the-fact kind of way-- that gravity couldn't have acted along the inverse cube.
The question of particle decay can't be addressed by the anthropic principle. Whether the particle decayed today or yesterday would have no bearing on the existence of intelligent life in the universe, so it could have gone either way. We don't know why it happened yesterday and not today, but there's no evidence that it had to happen one way or the other.
The one about snowflakes actually has an answer. The structure of a snowflake is governed by its environment: air currents, particulate matter, instantaneous pressure and temperature on the microscopic scale: all of these things affect crystal formation. A snowflake looks just that way because of the sum of all the forces acting on it during its formation. Again, the anthropic principle doesn't apply.
As to why we have 10 fingers, the answer is even simpler: we have 10 fingers because our ancestors had 10 fingers, and they managed to live long enough to pass on their genes to us. If some outside force had made life hard for the 10-fingered among them, then some other group with a different number of fingers would have been better able to pass their genes on to their offspring, and as a result we'd have a different number of fingers today. It is, in fact, entirely possible that this may have happened at some point in the distant past, although I don't think the fossil record has anything to say on the subject.
The anthropic principle doesn't apply here because if having 10 fingers had been a liability in the past, there would still be somebody here to have this discussion. Having 10 fingers is not, as far as we know, a necessity for the existence of intelligent life.
Really, the weak anthropic principle by itself isn't terribly insightful. If you combine it with Everett's work in branching time and parallel universes, though, it starts to make a sort of sense. See, there is a universe out there for every possible state. There's a universe where gravity is an inverse cube relation. There's a universe where there is no gravity at all. There's a universe where gravity repels rather than attracts. The question arises, then, as to why we're in this universe and not any of those. The weak anthropic principle says that we exist in this universe because none of those other universes could have developed intelligent life. They're all possible in the absolute sense, but it's not possible for us to exist in them, so from our frame of reference, they're impossible.
Ultimately, this is navel-gazing. But it's entertaining navel-gazing.
Binary is not only Simple, any Language using a larger Alphabet could be encoded using binary.
Uhm. I don't have any proof to back this up, but it seems obvious to me that any symbolic system can be encoded using any other symbolic system, as long as both systems are non-degenerate. It's all about arbitrary base arithmetic, right?
So, technical challenges aside, there's no purely mathematical reason why base 2 makes more sense than any other base.
Personally, I prefer to do all my math with base 1 arithmetic. It's a lot easier. 111 + 11111 = 11111111.
I hereby moderate this post -1, Too Smart; Made Us All Look Bad.
Did you read your own quote, Twirly?
;-)
;-)
Did you? It said, "Abbreviations with or without periods... for[m] the plural with an apostrophe and an s." Yeah, I let a typo slip in there, but it should have been clear from context.
Whether "DVD" now has an agreed-upon expansion or not, it is not a word. At best, it's a neologism coined from an abbreviation. As such, it has to follow the rules for an abbreviation.
Okay, I'll come clean and admit the whole purpose of this post was to write "Ss's".
That's okay. The whole purpose of my post was just to pick a grammar nit, which is something that I happen to get a kick out of. Does it really matter? No. But I find it more entertaining than arguing about religion or politics, and almost as fun as talking about sports.
At current prices, it'll be quite a while before Joe Sixpack will choose it over a standard TV.
Look more closely. Most of the TV's at the local Best Buy have HDTV tuners built in already, and are capable of displaying an HDTV picture. The picture may not be as good as you'd expect, depending on the quality of the tube or projector in the set, but it works.
I did a little last-minute Christmas shopping yesterday, and I out of my own curiosity I did a quick count. I didn't add up a total, but on each aisle there were more HD-compatible TVs than otherwise, except when I got down to the sub-20-inch models.
I'll just write code for a platform other than OS X.
From what I've heard so far, it sounds like we won't miss you one bit. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
It is helpful to those who have been programming Unix systems longer than you've probably been alive. The fact that it may not be helpful to you isn't relevant.
No, it's not helpful in the slightest. The poster said he was looking for information on administering NetInfo. You pointed him to the NetInfo API documentation. You missed the boat, friend.
But why force us to use Objective C in the first place, when C++ is perfectly capable today of handling run-time dispatching?
Two reasons. One, all the work was already done for the Objective C API. Been around since the late 80's, at least. Two, it works better (faster, more efficiently, we have the technology) in Objective C than in C++.
I don't want to use Objective-C, and if there's no compelling reason to do so, I won't. I am saddled with knowing too many languages as it is.
Oh, sorry to hear you're so burdened by this overabundance of knowledge. Is that what makes you so whiny, or is it something else?
The only reason why OS X doesn't support older machines is because Jobs needed the money for his private jet.
Oh, quit trolling. This is apple.slashdot.org. Everybody here knows that Steve got his private jet as a gift from the board of directors. He didn't have to pay for it himself.
Moron.