Back in 1981, Apple landed in legal trouble with "Apple Corps", the Beatles' record label. In November 1981, they agreed that Apple Computer could continue to do business under that name, so long as they didn't make any attempt to enter the music business.
Later, I believe around when System 7 came along, the Apple Corps lawyers got pissed off again because of the OS' new sound capabilities; the story (or maybe urban legend) goes that an Apple engineer renamed one of the alert sounds Sosumi, and told them it meant "lack of any musical qualities whatsoever" in Japanese.
So if the Apple Corps was upset about some cheesy System 7 alert sounds, imagine how they'd feel about Apple buying a record label. That is, if they're still around and if their agreement with Apple is still in effect.
If Apple Corps and their legal agreement are still potent, one would think that this would have prevented them from manufacturing the iPod and from developing their alleged music service as well. So it's likely that the Apple Corps stuff no longer matters. Still, interesting to think about.
T-15E+9 years until the universe closes!
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 1
Because an AI would basically be immortal, it would also need to find a way to survive the ultimate collapse and recycling of our own universe.
This is exactly what the goal of the AI Durandal in Marathon was. He concluded that since he was essentially immortal, and he could theoretically accomplish anything given enough time, the only constraint on his power was the eventual end of the universe. So his goal was to find a way to escape closure.
Interesting that a computer game had better treatment of an AI's inner thoughts and goals than most of the books and movies mentioned in the article.
Songs will be played from the participants' hard drive, rather than illegally swapped.
So, you're going to be streaming MP3s to ten people at once? The bandwidth requirements for that are going to narrow their market considerably. That would kill my 768k/128k ADSL, it would almost certainly kill a cable modems' outgoing bandwidth, and you could forget about dialup entirely.
So do they expect these "trendy teens" to also be fantastically rich and have their own personal T3 lines?
For most windows users, IE and Outlook are frequently used functions.
Sure, most Windows users spend a lot of time using IE and Outlook, but to my knowledge they don't spend a lot of time opening them; they just open them once upon logging in and keep them open.
I personally think a single key macro for alt-tab would be more useful on Windows than mail and internet keys.
The poster has plainly demonstrated that he is neither a Unix person nor a Mac person, which makes me wonder why he is using an iBook.
The back-tick key is indispensable for 'nesting' commands in a single line. And the tilde as a shortcut for $HOME.
Plus, on Macs (and maybe on Windows too) the back-tick is used in the sequence to produce characters with a grave accent. Anyone who has written documents in French won't call this key "useless".
I looked at my iBook keyboard, and the only key I saw that could possibly be described as a "funny double-s shape" is the command key. Uh, this is the primary modifier for keyboard shortcuts on Macintosh systems. If the poster really "never uses it", then he must do absolutely everything with the mouse, in which case he has no right to complain about keyboards being inefficient.
As for special keys for special functions, though, I've got to agree and wonder why PC makers seem to have been so slow to adopt these. The six (I think) year old Sun Type 5 keyboard I'm typing this on has keys for volume adjustment, cut, copy, paste, sending windows to the front, and so on.
Although they're a pain in the ass to get working in window managers other than CDE or Sun's version of GNOME, they're much quicker to use than ctrl-C and ctrl-V.
This is the direction I'd like to see keyboard layouts progress in: custom keys that are bound to frequently used functions that normally require a modifier, such as copying and pasting, or a trip to another window, such as changing the volume or ejecting removable media. Sun got it right a long time ago; Apple's newer keyboards are getting there, with volume, brightness, and eject keys.
Most PC keyboard makers, though, seem more interesting in making keys that open IE or Outlook.
I remember a couple of years ago a friend and I were discussing all the various "pessimistic sci-fi" fantasies that were coming true: things like Palladium, TIA (with its interesting choice of emblems), biometric identification in airports, and so forth. He joked that in a few more years, we'd be living inside a cyberpunk novel.
And now, what do you know, William Gibson writing books set in the present day.
Joking aside, I'm looking forward to reading this, although I'm not sure it will be very good. I'm not sure if Gibson has enough computer knowledge to portray the real "cyberspace" convincingly; and I wonder if constraining himself to reality will dampen the dark, surreal imagery that, in my opinion, is the strongest point of his books.
Nonsense. I can easily hack into a UNIX system without nothing more than a floppy disk and the power switch.
Not if the PROM is configured to require a password to boot from an alternate device, or to boot up at all.
Even if you use something like SSH or SSL, that only products you between the two endpoints. When one of the end-points (the client you are using, in thise case) is insecure, a secured data tunnel is worthless. Indeed, your keys/passwords/etc. can be stolen quite easily.
Or you can use a one-time password system like S/Key for authentication. That's what I do whenever it's necessary for me to log in to my machine at home from campus, anyway.
Of course, this doesn't help you with email or website logins, but it's a step in the right direction.
I doubt if we'll ever see online banking, webmail and so forth adopt more secure authentication mechanisms, but maybe after enough fiascos like this, universities and libraries might adopt a dumb terminals-and-smartcards approach (such as SunRays).
Personally, I thought the first book was quite good, and it was the later ones (which were written MUCH later and with a co-author), that started throwing in bullshit.
The first book was just human scientists exploring a mysterious abandoned spacecraft; the subsequent books abandoned the tone of scientific investigation and built up Rama to cosmic significance until the authors had no choice but to show us the ridiculous "revelation" we get in the last book.
I think the movie could be good if it followed the tone and content of its namesake, Rendezvous with Rama. That certainly wouldn't be the Hollywood thing to do, though.
It looks like to me like their problem is with the specific Java VM on Solaris, and the Java team's unwillingness to fix JRE bugs as opposed to adding new features. Not with the Java language itself and not with Solaris itself.
Furthermore, they don't advocate abandoning Java in favor of Python; the theoretical performance of the two languages is the same, so they compare the actual performance to show that the JRE is unnecessarily slowing Java apps down.
I think the poster was much too eager to bash Sun to actually bother reading the memo.
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I don't think this could possibly happen.
Back in 1981, Apple landed in legal trouble with "Apple Corps", the Beatles' record label. In November 1981, they agreed that Apple Computer could continue to do business under that name, so long as they didn't make any attempt to enter the music business.
Later, I believe around when System 7 came along, the Apple Corps lawyers got pissed off again because of the OS' new sound capabilities; the story (or maybe urban legend) goes that an Apple engineer renamed one of the alert sounds Sosumi, and told them it meant "lack of any musical qualities whatsoever" in Japanese.
So if the Apple Corps was upset about some cheesy System 7 alert sounds, imagine how they'd feel about Apple buying a record label. That is, if they're still around and if their agreement with Apple is still in effect.
If Apple Corps and their legal agreement are still potent, one would think that this would have prevented them from manufacturing the iPod and from developing their alleged music service as well. So it's likely that the Apple Corps stuff no longer matters. Still, interesting to think about.
This is exactly what the goal of the AI Durandal in Marathon was. He concluded that since he was essentially immortal, and he could theoretically accomplish anything given enough time, the only constraint on his power was the eventual end of the universe. So his goal was to find a way to escape closure.
Interesting that a computer game had better treatment of an AI's inner thoughts and goals than most of the books and movies mentioned in the article.
A group can have no more than ten members
Songs will be played from the participants' hard drive, rather than illegally swapped.
So, you're going to be streaming MP3s to ten people at once? The bandwidth requirements for that are going to narrow their market considerably. That would kill my 768k/128k ADSL, it would almost certainly kill a cable modems' outgoing bandwidth, and you could forget about dialup entirely.
So do they expect these "trendy teens" to also be fantastically rich and have their own personal T3 lines?
Sure, most Windows users spend a lot of time using IE and Outlook, but to my knowledge they don't spend a lot of time opening them; they just open them once upon logging in and keep them open.
I personally think a single key macro for alt-tab would be more useful on Windows than mail and internet keys.
The poster has plainly demonstrated that he is neither a Unix person nor a Mac person, which makes me wonder why he is using an iBook.
The back-tick key is indispensable for 'nesting' commands in a single line. And the tilde as a shortcut for $HOME.
Plus, on Macs (and maybe on Windows too) the back-tick is used in the sequence to produce characters with a grave accent. Anyone who has written documents in French won't call this key "useless".
I looked at my iBook keyboard, and the only key I saw that could possibly be described as a "funny double-s shape" is the command key. Uh, this is the primary modifier for keyboard shortcuts on Macintosh systems. If the poster really "never uses it", then he must do absolutely everything with the mouse, in which case he has no right to complain about keyboards being inefficient.
As for special keys for special functions, though, I've got to agree and wonder why PC makers seem to have been so slow to adopt these. The six (I think) year old Sun Type 5 keyboard I'm typing this on has keys for volume adjustment, cut, copy, paste, sending windows to the front, and so on.
Although they're a pain in the ass to get working in window managers other than CDE or Sun's version of GNOME, they're much quicker to use than ctrl-C and ctrl-V.
This is the direction I'd like to see keyboard layouts progress in: custom keys that are bound to frequently used functions that normally require a modifier, such as copying and pasting, or a trip to another window, such as changing the volume or ejecting removable media. Sun got it right a long time ago; Apple's newer keyboards are getting there, with volume, brightness, and eject keys.
Most PC keyboard makers, though, seem more interesting in making keys that open IE or Outlook.
I remember a couple of years ago a friend and I were discussing all the various "pessimistic sci-fi" fantasies that were coming true: things like Palladium, TIA (with its interesting choice of emblems), biometric identification in airports, and so forth. He joked that in a few more years, we'd be living inside a cyberpunk novel.
And now, what do you know, William Gibson writing books set in the present day.
Joking aside, I'm looking forward to reading this, although I'm not sure it will be very good. I'm not sure if Gibson has enough computer knowledge to portray the real "cyberspace" convincingly; and I wonder if constraining himself to reality will dampen the dark, surreal imagery that, in my opinion, is the strongest point of his books.
Not if the PROM is configured to require a password to boot from an alternate device, or to boot up at all.
Even if you use something like SSH or SSL, that only products you between the two endpoints. When one of the end-points (the client you are using, in thise case) is insecure, a secured data tunnel is worthless. Indeed, your keys/passwords/etc. can be stolen quite easily.
Or you can use a one-time password system like S/Key for authentication. That's what I do whenever it's necessary for me to log in to my machine at home from campus, anyway.
Of course, this doesn't help you with email or website logins, but it's a step in the right direction.
I doubt if we'll ever see online banking, webmail and so forth adopt more secure authentication mechanisms, but maybe after enough fiascos like this, universities and libraries might adopt a dumb terminals-and-smartcards approach (such as SunRays).
Personally, I thought the first book was quite good, and it was the later ones (which were written MUCH later and with a co-author), that started throwing in bullshit.
The first book was just human scientists exploring a mysterious abandoned spacecraft; the subsequent books abandoned the tone of scientific investigation and built up Rama to cosmic significance until the authors had no choice but to show us the ridiculous "revelation" we get in the last book.
I think the movie could be good if it followed the tone and content of its namesake, Rendezvous with Rama. That certainly wouldn't be the Hollywood thing to do, though.
It looks like to me like their problem is with the specific Java VM on Solaris, and the Java team's unwillingness to fix JRE bugs as opposed to adding new features. Not with the Java language itself and not with Solaris itself.
Furthermore, they don't advocate abandoning Java in favor of Python; the theoretical performance of the two languages is the same, so they compare the actual performance to show that the JRE is unnecessarily slowing Java apps down.
I think the poster was much too eager to bash Sun to actually bother reading the memo.