The i860 did see some use in the workstation world as a graphics accelerator. It was used, for instance, in the NeXTDimension, where it ran a cut-down version of the Mach kernel running a complete PostScript.
The NeXTdimension ran a custom kernel which presented a set of Mach interfaces for porting code from the NeXT Mach environment. The kernel was closer to a modern DSP kernel (iTron) than Mach. The NeXTdimension card ran a device-specific back end for Display PostScript, but did not run a complete PostScript implementation. It did run an Interactive Renderman back end as well.
Back in 1977 this proposal was made and shot down. James Kingsbury, director of the Science and Engineering Directorate at the Marshall Space Flight Center proposed that a major space platform could be placed in Earth orbit in less time than earlier believed, using the Space Shuttle's External Tank.
Sen. Bill Proxmire (D-Wis.) didn't much care for the idea, and let it be known that NASA would suffer funding cuts should they try to put an External Tank in orbit. He was not exactly a fan of manned spaceflight, and manned space stations in particular. He also killed the Saturn V program, to make sure we wouldn't have the heavy lift capacity to do serious space construction:
"Proxmire saw to it that the entire Saturn V production and assembly line was shut down in the early 1970s, requiring even the destruction of the machinery and tooling necessary to build the rocket... In his grief over the destruction of his biggest and best rocket, Wernher von Braun, who lobbied Congress hard for a reprieve, told me in one of our last conversations that he considered it among the stupidest things this country--which he dearly loved and I'd never before heard him criticize--had ever done. I agreed... Why would any forward-thinking nation actually destroy its own leading-edge technology?... I'm still angry about it and will be until my dying day." -- Gordon Cooper, "Leap of Faith"
An entry goes in the annual report supplement for proxy votes. The 62.27% of shares held by institutions and insiders goes along with the board to vote against it. Most of the folks getting the proxy statement don't bother to register a vote.
If as many as half register a proxy vote, and all of them vote in favor, that's a whopping 18.87% of shares in favor. Proposal fails...
Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
I would suggest that if there were to be such a crash program, they would be far better served by picking one good software architect with at least three such projects under his/her belt, and giving that person absolute authority over who else would work on the project, and what changes would be made.
Solar installations raise similar issues, related primarily to siting. The best solar power generation locations are those with little overcast, relatively close to the equator. That makes the Southwest United States a good location, but the combination of all that construction and the permanent shading of huge regions of the desert will be fought as causing more ecological damage.
Yes, solar power sats and a microwave downlink to an 'antenna farm' would cause much less damage. The land under the antenna grid can be safely farmed, and the power density (watts/square foot) would be lower than direct sunlight. That won't stop the 'deadly microwave radiation' . http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/2004/Electroma gnetic-Fields-EMF1jun04.htm (Note that Arthur is someone who would be much better off if he took his medication. Seriously.)
I think alternate energy sources, from wind and geothermal though powersats, AND nuclear fission plants, would be a good thing. Never assume that the politically correct choice will be the best one, though, or that it will be blessed by all.
I suspect that his sketch won't do so well in the courts. That both designs display using a Miller column browser (with different content!) and can show an image won't be sufficient.
Design patents prohibit a third-party from making, selling or using a product of the protected design. To infringe a design patent, the infringing container and the container shape shown in the design patent must look alike to the eye of the ordinary observer.
In Gorham v. White (1871), the Supreme Court set the standard for design patent infringement:
"If, in the eye of an ordinary observer, giving such attention as a purchaser usually gives, two designs are substantially the same, if the resemblance is such as to deceive such an observer, inducing him to purchase one supposing it to be the other, the first one patented is infringed by the other."
Just having similar functions and a vaguely similar appearance is not sufficient, as shown by the amusing "Colida v. Sharp Electronics and Audiovox" (Fed. Cir. March 9, 2005):
The functional features described in a design patent are not particularly relevant. (They would be in a functional patent, of course.) To infringe on a design patent, the infringing product has to look so much like his sketch that the infringing product would deceive the customer into thinking it was the patented product.
An example of a product which might be found to infringe on a well-known design patent might be:
This is the same fun-loving government that conducted the 'Land Reform Campaign', in which thousands were executed for the crime of owning land, and tens of thousands of family members died in forced labor 'reeducation' camps.
(Estimates of direct executions range from 5,000 to 50,000, and deaths in labor camps from 50,000 to 500,000. Numbers at the high end of the range are suspect, as they were reported in what appear to be propaganda pieces.)
The government there still operates forced labor police "re-education camps," which provide cheap labor as subcontractors for commercial ventures.
Remember that before you try on a pair of Nikes or Reeboks.
In an outbreak of benchmark over correctness, many drive manufacturers implement firmware that reports a write as being complete even though the data is in the drive's cache memory, and not on disk yet. Mac OS X provides fcntl(F_FULLFSYNC) which issues a command to the drives to flush all buffered data to stable storage (the platters).
See, Apple has some real Old School engineers around. Folks that cut their teeth on nastiness like 1/4 track steppers and laser-marked disks, and that moved on to modern crypto. (And if you don't know what I'm talking about, just move along, lad.)
Fun fact about really good engineers. As they get older, they may get slower, but they tend to make up for it in wiliness. The current crop of 1337 haX0rz seem to be pretty good at reverse engineering hash functions for license strings. I doubt their sk1llz with a logic analyzer and storage scope, though.
... Microsoft is also considering a more direct attack on Apple, seeking rights from copyright holders to give subscribers a new, Microsoft-formatted version of any song they've purchased from the iTunes store so those songs can be played on devices other than an iPod.
Because we all know how the recording industry loves to give away copies of music for free, rather than sell them over and over.
I remember when that crate of CDs arrived to replace all those LPs, so I wouldn't have to buy them again. What a bunch of nice folks...
Is there any limit to the number of framebuffers? i.e. can Alice, Bob, and Carol simultaneously have their own VNC sessions while Dave is actually at the Mac running his own session?
No limit on the number of framebuffers, beyond the limits of available memory and address space. Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave can all use the system at the same time.
Try with Mac OS X 10.3 or later. If there are no display devices on-line the window server will create a virtual framebuffer.
In Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4, fast user switching gets a related feature. When a user session is switched off-screen, if a screen watching program such as OSXvnc-server is running, the off-screen session will get a virtual framebuffer so that it can be remote-operated while another user session or a login window is on the hardware console.
Try running OSXvnc.app, for example, and switching users. A remote VNC viewer will be able to connect to the session switched off-screen, so you can continue working from a remote location. When you set this up, make sure you set up a password for access and take the usual security precautions for a remote-controlled system.
The window server event system inspects the state of the connection owning the topmost non-transperent window content under the mouse cursor hot spot. If that connection indicates the app it belongs to has not processed events within the allowed delay time (3 seconds), then the wait cursor is presented, as a UI cue that the app under the cursor is not responsive.
This overrides the cursor setting for the app that is foreground or 'has focus'.
Actually, it's not just the foreground app. The wait cursor indicates that whatever app that owns the window currently under the mouse cursor has had pending, unprocessed events for over three seconds.
You can still switch to another application. Swinging the cursor over a window of a background app that was unresponsive will give you quick feedback in the form of the wait cursor if that app is still unresponsive.
Funny, however, how the rendering scheme and virtualization of graphics card memmory sounds awfully like the new, and currently shipping, graphics engine in Apple's OS X. (Quartz and Quartz Extreme.)
No, no, no! They are nothing like each other. If you look at the diagrams, you'll see that the Longhorn graphics pipelines run from top to bottom, whereas the Mac OS X graphics pipelines run left to right.
In Stephenson's "Snow Crash" we have infomogul L Bob Rife fretting over his programmers going home with HIS precious intellectual property in their heads:
"See, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control information no matter where it is--on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads."
His solution is... novel, and happens to involve ships in international waters.
This sounds oddly familiar. I'm not at all sure I'd take a job with these people.
Actually, these are undocumented SPIs, Systems Programming Interfaces. SPIs exist in many layered systems, and are intended to provide functionality used to implement higher level mechanisms.
In Mac OS X, for example, the CGS SPIs provide functionality used by the Carbon, Cocoa, and Java environments. (You didn't really think Carbon and Cocoa somehow each implemented their own window systems, did you?) The SPIs are private because, simply, the functionality they provide is pretty raw, low level stuff. Using the private SPIs behind the back of an application could readily lead ti inconsistent state in an application, leading to exciting events such as the Spontaneous Program Logic Application Termination (SPLAT).
"Documentation' for some of these really low level SPIs may consist of sophisticated mechanisms along the lines of "Hey! Andrew! How's this supposed to work?" (Yes, everything should be documented, and preferably folded into a CASE system that won't let you compile anything until the documentation is written. After all, that's how the LINUX kernel is managed, right?)
Slashdot Mirror
The i860 did see some use in the workstation world as a graphics accelerator. It was used, for instance, in the NeXTDimension, where it ran a cut-down version of the Mach kernel running a complete PostScript.
The NeXTdimension ran a custom kernel which presented a set of Mach interfaces for porting code from the NeXT Mach environment. The kernel was closer to a modern DSP kernel (iTron) than Mach. The NeXTdimension card ran a device-specific back end for Display PostScript, but did not run a complete PostScript implementation. It did run an Interactive Renderman back end as well.
Will Creative be sending refunds to those that bought their players?
Will both people that bought Dell DJs be getting refunds?
Back in 1977 this proposal was made and shot down. James Kingsbury, director of the Science and Engineering Directorate at the Marshall Space Flight Center proposed that a major space platform could be placed in Earth orbit in less time than earlier believed, using the Space Shuttle's External Tank.
Sen. Bill Proxmire (D-Wis.) didn't much care for the idea, and let it be known that NASA would suffer funding cuts should they try to put an External Tank in orbit. He was not exactly a fan of manned spaceflight, and manned space stations in particular. He also killed the Saturn V program, to make sure we wouldn't have the heavy lift capacity to do serious space construction:
"Proxmire saw to it that the entire Saturn V production and assembly line was shut down in the early 1970s, requiring even the destruction of the machinery and tooling necessary to build the rocket... In his grief over the destruction of his biggest and best rocket, Wernher von Braun, who lobbied Congress hard for a reprieve, told me in one of our last conversations that he considered it among the stupidest things this country--which he dearly loved and I'd never before heard him criticize--had ever done. I agreed... Why would any forward-thinking nation actually destroy its own leading-edge technology?... I'm still angry about it and will be until my dying day."
-- Gordon Cooper, "Leap of Faith"
An entry goes in the annual report supplement for proxy votes. The 62.27% of shares held by institutions and insiders goes along with the board to vote against it. Most of the folks getting the proxy statement don't bother to register a vote.
If as many as half register a proxy vote, and all of them vote in favor, that's a whopping 18.87% of shares in favor. Proposal fails...
and not a project manager.
t h
They allocate a billion dollars worth of programmers to shine and polish it for a year...
Uh huh...
A team of Microsoft's best coders working on a project they all believed in could, I am sure, do great stuff.
Bill, I'd like to introduce you to Fred Brooks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Mon
Brook's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
I would suggest that if there were to be such a crash program, they would be far better served by picking one good software architect with at least three such projects under his/her belt, and giving that person absolute authority over who else would work on the project, and what changes would be made.
I'll consider any reasonable offers...
The good news is that we won't have to worry about Gator being ported to Linux or other operating systems now...
CAUTION: Post contains politically incorrect crimethink.
/ bdes/altamont/altamont.html
a gnetic-Fields-EMF1jun04.htm (Note that Arthur is someone who would be much better off if he took his medication. Seriously.)
which is why they advocate for safe technology (wind and solar power) that is economically and environmentally responsible
Note that wind power, particularly high density sited systems capable of powering more than a farmhouse, have their own consequences: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/programs
Solar installations raise similar issues, related primarily to siting. The best solar power generation locations are those with little overcast, relatively close to the equator. That makes the Southwest United States a good location, but the combination of all that construction and the permanent shading of huge regions of the desert will be fought as causing more ecological damage.
Yes, solar power sats and a microwave downlink to an 'antenna farm' would cause much less damage. The land under the antenna grid can be safely farmed, and the power density (watts/square foot) would be lower than direct sunlight. That won't stop the 'deadly microwave radiation' . http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/2004/Electrom
I think alternate energy sources, from wind and geothermal though powersats, AND nuclear fission plants, would be a good thing. Never assume that the politically correct choice will be the best one, though, or that it will be blessed by all.
I suspect that his sketch won't do so well in the courts. That both designs display using a Miller column browser (with different content!) and can show an image won't be sufficient.
n _patents_.html
Design patents prohibit a third-party from making, selling or using a product of the protected design. To infringe a design patent, the infringing container and the container shape shown in the design patent must look alike to the eye of the ordinary observer.
In Gorham v. White (1871), the Supreme Court set the standard for design patent infringement:
"If, in the eye of an ordinary observer, giving such attention as a purchaser usually gives, two designs are substantially the same, if the resemblance is such as to deceive such an observer, inducing him to purchase one supposing it to be the other, the first one patented is infringed by the other."
Just having similar functions and a vaguely similar appearance is not sufficient, as shown by the amusing "Colida v. Sharp Electronics and Audiovox" (Fed. Cir. March 9, 2005):
http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2005/03/desig
The functional features described in a design patent are not particularly relevant. (They would be in a functional patent, of course.) To infringe on a design patent, the infringing product has to look so much like his sketch that the infringing product would deceive the customer into thinking it was the patented product.
An example of a product which might be found to infringe on a well-known design patent might be:
http://www2.luxpro.com.tw/e_575d.htm
This is the same fun-loving government that conducted the 'Land Reform Campaign', in which thousands were executed for the crime of owning land, and tens of thousands of family members died in forced labor 'reeducation' camps.
(Estimates of direct executions range from 5,000 to 50,000, and deaths in labor camps from 50,000 to 500,000. Numbers at the high end of the range are suspect, as they were reported in what appear to be propaganda pieces.)
The government there still operates forced labor police "re-education camps," which provide cheap labor as subcontractors for commercial ventures.
Remember that before you try on a pair of Nikes or Reeboks.
ridiculousfish has the correct answer.
e b/msg00072.html
In an outbreak of benchmark over correctness, many drive manufacturers implement firmware that reports a write as being complete even though the data is in the drive's cache memory, and not on disk yet. Mac OS X provides fcntl(F_FULLFSYNC) which issues a command to the drives to flush all buffered data to stable storage (the platters).
Dominic Giampaolo posted a detailed description of this on the Darwin mailing list last February. http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-dev/2005/F
See, Apple has some real Old School engineers around. Folks that cut their teeth on nastiness like 1/4 track steppers and laser-marked disks, and that moved on to modern crypto. (And if you don't know what I'm talking about, just move along, lad.)
Fun fact about really good engineers. As they get older, they may get slower, but they tend to make up for it in wiliness. The current crop of 1337 haX0rz seem to be pretty good at reverse engineering hash functions for license strings. I doubt their sk1llz with a logic analyzer and storage scope, though.
Because we all know how the recording industry loves to give away copies of music for free, rather than sell them over and over.
I remember when that crate of CDs arrived to replace all those LPs, so I wouldn't have to buy them again. What a bunch of nice folks...
In the UK, first steel is being cut this year for two new aircraft carriers, to be delivered in 2012 and 2015.
Big projects can take a long time to be completed. Make them government projects to be done by defense contractors, and it can take even longer.
No limit on the number of framebuffers, beyond the limits of available memory and address space. Alice, Bob, Carol, and Dave can all use the system at the same time.
Try with Mac OS X 10.3 or later. If there are no display devices on-line the window server will create a virtual framebuffer.
In Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4, fast user switching gets a related feature. When a user session is switched off-screen, if a screen watching program such as OSXvnc-server is running, the off-screen session will get a virtual framebuffer so that it can be remote-operated while another user session or a login window is on the hardware console.
Try running OSXvnc.app, for example, and switching users. A remote VNC viewer will be able to connect to the session switched off-screen, so you can continue working from a remote location. When you set this up, make sure you set up a password for access and take the usual security precautions for a remote-controlled system.
It turns out that the whole "ST: Enterprise" series was just another holodeck malfunction.
Cancel EVERY series after 13 episodes!
Keeps production costs down, improving margin on later DVD sales!
Mac OS X is a 'click to focus' system, not a 'point to focus' system.
This turns out not to be the case.
The window server event system inspects the state of the connection owning the topmost non-transperent window content under the mouse cursor hot spot. If that connection indicates the app it belongs to has not processed events within the allowed delay time (3 seconds), then the wait cursor is presented, as a UI cue that the app under the cursor is not responsive.
This overrides the cursor setting for the app that is foreground or 'has focus'.
Actually, it's not just the foreground app. The wait cursor indicates that whatever app that owns the window currently under the mouse cursor has had pending, unprocessed events for over three seconds.
You can still switch to another application. Swinging the cursor over a window of a background app that was unresponsive will give you quick feedback in the form of the wait cursor if that app is still unresponsive.
If you like, think of Bonjour/ZeroConf as finishing UPnP and making it play well with current Internet Engineering Task Force standards.
UPnP can be made to do similar things on it's own, if you write enough wrapper code...
This is what happens when you read too many of Spider Robinson's short stories in one sitting.
No, no, no! They are nothing like each other. If you look at the diagrams, you'll see that the Longhorn graphics pipelines run from top to bottom, whereas the Mac OS X graphics pipelines run left to right.
They're orthogonal to each other...
In Stephenson's "Snow Crash" we have infomogul L Bob Rife fretting over his programmers going home with HIS precious intellectual property in their heads:
"See, it's the first function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even doing that. So we're working on refining our management techniques so that we can control information no matter where it is--on our hard disks or even inside the programmers' heads."
His solution is... novel, and happens to involve ships in international waters.
This sounds oddly familiar. I'm not at all sure I'd take a job with these people.
Actually, these are undocumented SPIs, Systems Programming Interfaces. SPIs exist in many layered systems, and are intended to provide functionality used to implement higher level mechanisms.
In Mac OS X, for example, the CGS SPIs provide functionality used by the Carbon, Cocoa, and Java environments. (You didn't really think Carbon and Cocoa somehow each implemented their own window systems, did you?) The SPIs are private because, simply, the functionality they provide is pretty raw, low level stuff. Using the private SPIs behind the back of an application could readily lead ti inconsistent state in an application, leading to exciting events such as the Spontaneous Program Logic Application Termination (SPLAT).
"Documentation' for some of these really low level SPIs may consist of sophisticated mechanisms along the lines of "Hey! Andrew! How's this supposed to work?" (Yes, everything should be documented, and preferably folded into a CASE system that won't let you compile anything until the documentation is written. After all, that's how the LINUX kernel is managed, right?)