Well, this is sort of a silly nerd question, but this *IS*/. after all...
How did they show the same print in four theaters simultaneously? I know nothing about the current state of theater technology, but this would seem to imply that there was some sort of optical beamsplitter that divides one projectors output between multiple screens. But that can't be how it's done, is it? Why would a theater even have a device like that, much less two of them? How could a single projector be bright enough to project in more than one screening room (I don't doubt a projector this bright could be made, but that's very different than one actually being deployed out in the field).
Seriously folks, has there *ever* in the history of Hollywood been a movie-from-a-scifi-novel which didn't actually rape-and-pillage the story in some way or other?
Well, 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind for me, although I guess one could easily argue that 2001 is not an adaptation of Childhood's End, but an original screenplay with a couple of elements lifted from the short story. And I guess it's a short story instead of a novel too.
But 2001 is a quality piece of sci-fi, don't you think? I personally really like Blade Runner as well as an anti-utopian view of the future, but it's not particularly impressive from the story point of view.
I second this thought, and I'm suprised that nobody else posted on this.
Can this "feature" really be attractive to anybody? I hope nobody thinks they're going to get laid because you can spot their deformed calculator keypad at a glance.:-)
I've had a number of Nokia phones in the past and have been thinking about getting a new one as my last one (6360) has been losing keypad reliability on one side. But these days, my single requirement - a keypad that actually works as a regular keypad seems to mean that I won't be getting another Nokia.
The odd thing to me is that it's hard enough to try to do SMS-style typing on a numeric pad already without warping the shape. The Nokia with the round key arrangement seems to pretty much preclude this completely.
r4bb1t is absolutely right here. People get up in arms because GMail says they will read your mail to index it and that seems like an invasion of privacy. In fact, there's nothing that would stop AIM from capturing all your IM chatter.
Except of course, that if they did that, there's a danger that they'll become liable for the content of the information that's passing through. This arose before when it went to the courts as to whether ISPs are liable when their accountholders harbor kiddie porn on the ISP's computers.
If AOL/AIM had the ability to scan for possible terrorist actions, porn, or the next Columbine, and DIDN'T intercede, then potentially they would be open to enormous damages. If you were a 9/11 victim and you found out that AIM was the facilitator for planning an attack (and I absolutely am not implying that!), you can bet that AOL would become a lawsuit target after everybody realized you won't get a multi-million dollar settlement from selling the terrorist's apartment junk.
This issue of possible liability will probably prevent Palisade from getting anywhere. I'm sure that AIM reserves the right to scan your IM, but probably zealously makes sure that it's not doing that. Now, when they get a subpoena from the Justice Nazis, that's a totally different question.
So where is it that you buy a PocketPC and equip it with 4GB of memory for less than $250? Maybe you were thinking of the "big" iPod? Can you buy 40GB of RAM for your PocketPC for less than $500?
mp3 music can be imperfect, but it's better than the movies that you'll be playing on your pda...
I volunteered as a judge a couple of years ago when the Intel STS had their finals in San Jose. As you interview all the candidates, you can definitely see that some of the students are coached in the area of expertise of a parent, some are directed by university staff that they study under, and some of these guys are just so smart that it's absolutely scary.
In that first category, there was an interesting coincidence that I knew and had indirectly worked with the father of one of the students. His project was related to image compression technology which is what his father did. He was conversant in the area, but you really got the feeling that his research had been very closely directed by his father.
You don't see the second type so much in computer science, but in areas like biology, you find that many of the students are working in college labs assisting researchers. This is about the only way that a high school student can study things like protein synthesis or recombinant DNA techniques - no high school would have the equipment or expertise. I guess nobody told them that they were too young to be working on their Ph.D, and that's good.
One of the outstanding projects in our year was a kid whose project had to do with modelling the chemical processes that are involved in doping semiconductors in fab. One of the other judges who had specific experience in this area was blown away by his work, and it was clear to everybody that interviewed him that he loved the topic, loved researching it, loved constructing the experiment, and clearly had gotten no help from anyone. He got high marks from all the judges (must have been about 80 judges in Computer Science alone, all professionals or college-level professors, no high-school teachers), but ultimately didn't advance because it was clear that his project was miscatagorized into computer science because it was a simulation when it probably should have been in Chemical Engineering or some sort of Materials Science.
If you ever get a chance to participate as a judge, or better yet as a mentor/sponsor, do it!
Also, just a note - this contest is sponsored by Intel now, but is the same contest that Westinghouse sponsored for many years.
When I read this, an interesting question popped up in my mind - there's an implication that you might end up in this database if you sued for malpractice and won.
Actually, I suspect that the public record would reflect if you brought suit against a doctor and *lost*, too.
A)If this database becomes something that doctors or insurance companies really use, then I doubt that they would draw much distinction between winning or losing a case. B) Even if the database was only for patients that prevailed against doctors, I wonder how clean the data would really stay. And fixing your history on this baby must really be a nightmare (as if fixing Experian or one of the other credit companies isn't bad enough).
I had a friend who purchased one of the very first Boxsters to arrive in the Silicon Valley. I went with a friend to visit it a couple of weeks after he got it.
He mentioned that the early production was really showing a lot of firmware bugs, and a really annoying design flaw.
After he had it a couple of days, he parked in his garage turned it off, got out and noticed that the little LCD annunciator panel in the bottom of the dash didn't turn off. He didn't think much about it at the time, but, of course, the battery was dead the next day.
No big deal, right? Wrongo. To charge the battery, you need to open the front hood. And to do so, you push the *electrically operated* hood release. Which doesn't work because you don't have electricity. That's OK, right? There must be a cable you can pull somewhere. Wrong again buddy, since the car is relatively "welded shut" (actually, from a theft standpoint, it would be pretty stupid if there was something like that to pull on).
The dealership didn't know much about these brand new cars yet, but they did already know about the problem and gave him a battery trickle charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket. I guess you could even charge the battery with it, but even if you're not that patient, it is enough juice to open the front hood. I believe a charger of this sort is standard equipment in the Boxter tool kit these days.
That Stratus story is hilarious! I know the battery is always a matter of design contention given it's great weight relative to most other car parts. I think the problem is that normal usage patterns (actually I guess this should be non-usage patterns) cause the battery to be more often replaced than something like a starter motor or fuel pump, so it sure is nice to be able to get to it.
I have a bunch of cars including a 1990 BMW 535i. I have to admit that I noticed that I didn't see the battery location under the hood other than a giant "+" terminal covered with a plastic cap for jump starts. Nothing in the trunk either. I did find out exactly where the battery was in truly specacular fashion one night. I was leaving work after dark, got in the car, turned the key... and the battery exploded in it's little compartment under the back seat. Literally blew the back seat bottom out of it's mounts, although it was housed under plastic shields that blocked the spew of battery acid.
I assume that I must have had a short somewhere that was causing the evolution of hydrogen gas. Or maybe my co-workers hated me more than they had let on.
The bad part about that location was that it's a bitch to clean up and my car still has a slightly barfy smell to it many, many years later (I think this must have happened 10 years ago).
Rule number one - if you're going to make an example of a company for your petty little war, don't pick the company that will be selling you brake pads and brake lines next month:
Clerk : Will that be all, sir? Just this replacement brake master cylinder?
Darl : Yes, thank you.
Clerk : May I have your name, sir?
Darl : Darl McBride
Clerk : [typing] Oh... Uh huh... Actually this isn't the right part sir. We do happen to have this special one for you right here, which is EXACTLY what you need.
Darl : Good. Because I really want my brakes to work well.
Clerk : Oh yes sir, this will really do the trick.
On our next episode of "You Picked the Wrong Target", SCO's legal team picks Allied Colonoscope Corporation to make their next example.
And in two weeks on a very special edition of "Wrong Target", Darl suffers a heart attack and discovers and mutters the immortal line "I didn't know defibrillators ran on Linux".
I personally think the overall complexity of the open source path is probably slightly higher than Windows these days, but on this scale of operation probably not radically different. Pick the wrong Windows integrator (strong on client or server side but not both) and it will be a painful migration.
One problem that I do see is that in strategic deals like this one, Microsoft has an advantage in that the corporation can "fix" a bad integrator choice by flooding the site with the money and knowledge needed to make this work. A big IT consultant can try to do the same thing, but that may require a big internal investment on their part - I'm not sure whether going back to a SUSe or RedHat with problems could create the same effect.
Of course, that's what MS would argue that their value-add is, and I don't know that I would completely disagree. I'm sure they're loading MS commandos into the Microsoft Air Force troop carriers in Redmond, waiting for Munich to ask for help.
If most open relays really are zombies, then I do agree - no real mechanism for enforcement. I genuinely don't know what the story is here.
In the recent past, it seemed that the spamming farms weren't giant machines, but they weren't mostly zombies either - wasn't that big US spammer in Texas or Florida just a guy with a T3 and a garage full of medium-sized servers? If that's the case, and you're being pounded with Viagra-grams from a guy with another garage in Indonesia, then this sort of "pay your tax or report to/dev/null" probably would work.
Of course, if such a system were enacted, then I guess the shift to zombie relays would accelerate.
I too believe that cooperation is needed, but it's needed as much from the CMU guy who feels he has the right to send his 30,000 e-mails out for free as it is from spammers. Charge me a penny for my e-mails or only allow 600 free outgoing messages a month. But please do something, because I'm pretty sure that my (insert mobile data device here - I have a Sidekick) will stop being useful when it's flooded with spam.
I totally agree with what your saying, but if a offshore ISP doesn't do anything accept send spam and faces being blacklisted because they ignore their bills, then it seems to me that this might actually have some leverage. If you were an offshore ISP that was 100% legitimate mass e-mail (a opt-in magazine headlines digest for instance) then you pay the mass mailing fee as part of your cost of doing business. If you have a mix of legit and UCE customers, then I think the pressure will be on you to pick a side and move (the pressure comes not from the US, but from your legit customers who are getting blocked out because of the spammers).
You mean there are Mac users that have portable players other than iPods?
Of course, there are, although I suspect that gap is closing with time. When the iPod came out, it was astronomically high in price relative to the RAM-based players that this whole thread started out on. Some people don't want to carry 5-40GB of music with them when they work out. A $150 Rio player was a good alternative then, less so today.
You mean iTunes for Mac actually supports these players? Are you sure?
Yup. On the Mac it will support any players that support AAC (a couple, I believe) and MP3 (all players). A good buddy of mine is a 100% Mac user which has left him so penniless that his player is an old Rio. Works fine, but wouldn't work on my Windows machine.
Why in the world would Apple want to support competing players for Windows users? It's a free product, it wouldn't be making them any money at all.
There are many, many reasons! Just because you don't pay for a product doesn't mean that they can't make money from it (did I really need to say this here?:-)). Today, Apple is the market leader in downloadable music, but doesn't make money on those 99cent downloads. But if they kept 70%, 80% or more of the market, that gives them the leverage with the music industry and customers to change the arithmetic of cost. You can bet that Amazon pounds UPS and the other parcel carriers down to insanely low prices and allow them to make a profit on a sale which might have been consumed by shipping costs for a smaller shipper. The profit on selling iPod hardware is sweet for Apple, but that doesn't mean that they don't intend to make music in the iTunes Music Store as well.
At the Super Bowl this year, Pepsi and Apple will roll out a 100 million song iTunes Music Store giveaway that will provide a great introduction to legal music downloads. They'll have a winning download code in 1 of every 4 bottles of Pepsi for 2 months. That will cause a lot of people to download iTunes, try it out, try browsing the store, and pick up some free tunes. For 96% of the world, they'll be amazed and amused. And they won't be able to put that music on their non-iPod mp3 player. The promotion is brilliant, but it's also about the worst lost opportunity that I could think of. Although it protects iPod hardware sales, I think the iPod would defend itself quite well against it's competition, even without the limitation - just as the cited article points out, the iPod devices are expensive, but are not expensive at all relative to their market segment (large capacity players). If a Windows user likes the iTMS experience, imagine the potential volume of sales had this restriction been lifted. Not to mention the licensing fee that Apple could probably have charged players for their variant of AAC.
I don't know where this online music sale market will go. But by opening the door to the low-end players right now, Apple also stands to gain when happy iTunes customers look to upgrade to a heavyweight player. True, this will open the door to serious competition down the line from 3rd party heavyweight players, but if Apple were licensing iTunes compatibility, they could always tilt the market slightly in their favor.
I don't know whether Pepsi is paying Apple for this promotion, or whether Apple is paying Pepsi, but had Apple changed this poor decision about third-party player support, they could certainly be guaranteeing that the next time that there's a promotion like this, that Apple would be the one collecting the partner's money, as long as they could deliver the enormous market share.
I visited Macworld this year and spent some hands on time with both the iPod and iPod Mini. Even though the previously separate control keys from the original iPod were consolidated with the "wheel", I greatly preferred the user experience of the Mini. The latest (3rd generation?) big iPod has a sort of virtual dial, and the "buttons" have no tactile feedback. The Mini overloads the functions on the dial, but does it with a tiny click which I found much easier to use.
So, even though I see the 15GB iPod is much more compelling from a value standpoint, I sort of suffer from the reverse problem - I'd rather have a Mini with an even larger drive but the same operating controls. That market is defintely going to be the last one served here!
Both iPods seem inferior at a glance to the very original iPod. It was too expensive and (now) not a good story on space, but the wheel (an actual physical control) was just awesome.
I think iTunes is pretty good too, but one of the things you rarely see mentioned here is that there's a huge gap in feature set between the Mac and Windows versions. No, it's not in the app or music libraries, it's in the support of players. The Mac version of iTunes supports any mp3 player capable of playing MP3 or AAC which is pretty much everybody if you don't want to play the music you bought at the iTMS (they're all AAC).
The Windows version of iTunes is identical in functionality to the Mac version if you have an iPod. But it appears that iTunes Windows won't sync with anything other than iPods.
Sadly, Apple is shooting itself in the foot here. Given a choice between iTunes and anything else, iTunes would clobber all comers. iTunes is well thought out and implemented, while the alternatives seem thrown together or hacky. But, if I can't organize my world on my PC and sync to my non-iPod, I just won't use iTunes no matter how good it is.
This protects Apple's iPod sales vs. the competition (on Macs, you've already paid your tribute to Apple when you got your Mac!) but at great cost. If iTunes in visibly better designed software than it's competitors, it's only a matter of time (and short time, I think) before the desirable interface aspects are ripped off. And just like productivity apps, you reach a point where adding more features and innovation has a diminishing return.
iPod profits pay for iTunes, so there's really no other way this can be. But I feel bad to see Apple miss a chance to really lock up their domination of the iTunes-like app world because of this business model. As an ex-Apple employee and Apple watcher, I hard to see this mistake being repeated - they really are poised to achieve a Windows-like stranglehold on the computer end of the formula, but by closing off the other players (that the cited article shows they can beat anyway!) they're marking themselves for death.
Well, I did make the original statement in a confusing way. I should have said "modern processors want to execute out of cache as much as possible".
You pretty much never want to run out of cache if you don't have to (it forces you to slow way down to access main RAM)! And you generally want to execute out of cache as much as you can (for the fastest possible execution). Superscalar processors (those with multiple execution units) depend on code and data being in cache for good performance - the pipeline will stall if you have a cache miss which means you stop for what effectively is "forever" waiting for the off-chip memory access.
For compute-intensive tasks big caches, burst accesses, and deep pipelines are the fast track to fast computation. There's just no way to crank up the speed of the memory subsystem as quickly as you can crank up the internal wiring of the CPU.
For data-intensive apps where information is scattered about with low locality (like a database), this on-chip caching isn't nearly as valuable.
Modern processors (which actually stretches back at least 10 years) really want to run out of cache as much as possible, both for instruction and data access. And they've never wanted to do it more than now when in the x86 world, the processor core and L1 cache are operating at 3200MHz vs. 400MHz for the RAM.
One thing that has to happen is that you make a bet on locality of execution (again both for instructions and data) and burst load a section of memory into the caches (L2 and L1, and sometimes even L3). In implementation terms, it takes some time to charge up the address bus, so you increase bandwidth and execution speed by charging up address n, but doing a quick read of n+1, n+2, n+3, and more on the latest CPUs. You only have to wiggle the two low-order address lines for the extra reads, so you don't pay the pre-charge penalty that you would for access randomly in memory.
That's good if you're right about locality and bad if you're wrong. That's what predictive branching in the processor and compiler optimizations are all about - tailoring execution to stay in cache as much as possible.
On a 64-bit processor, those burst moves really are twice as big and they really do take longer (the memory technology isn't radically different between 32- and 64-bit architectures, although right now it would be odd to see a cost-cutting memory system on a 64-bit machine). If all the accesses of the burst are actually used in execution, then both systems will show similar performance (the 64-bit will have better performance on things like vector opcodes, but for regular stuff, 1 cycle is 1 cycle). If only half of the bursted data is used, then the higher overhead of the burst will penalize the 64-bit processor.
If you're running a character based benchmark (I've never looked at gzip, but it seems like it must be char based), then it's going to be hard for the 64-bit app and environment to be a win until you figure out some optimization that utilizes the technology. If your benchmark was doing matrix ops on 64-bit ints, then you'll probably find that that Opteron, Itanium, or UltraSparc will be pretty hard to touch.
A hammer isn't the right tool for every job as much as you'd like it to be. I actually think that the cited article was a reasonable practical test of performance, but extrapolating from that would be like commenting on pounding nails with a saw - it's just a somewhat irrelevant measure.
I guess I'm violently agreeing with renehollan's comment about speed bumps - apps that can benefit from an architectural change are as important as more concrete details such as compiler optimizations.
"But will the car plug the meter when I run out of time?"
Geez, at 60 mpg in the city, they ought to let you park for free just on principle. Of course, I guess the "principle" of metered parking is to collect revenue.
In California, Zero Emission Vehicles (not the Prius, but now-obsolete electric cars) can drive in the diamond lane with only one driver.
A telephone is pretty crafty if you start with wires and magnets. It's a lot less crafty if you start with wire and magnets in the form of a working telephone!
The Abekas wasn't just capable of doing what a Tivo does, it did *exactly* all those time-shifting functions. [I'll add here that there may have been similar devices that predated the Abekas.] Apple didn't use theirs that way, but tv production rigs did - the box continues to digitize and store live video while you're pausing or jogging through what's already on disk. No, it didn't have a TV tuner attached to it, or an electronic program guide, but if the Tivo innovation was time shifting or using a disk as the stream store, there was no invention there at all.
Because Tivo is GPL-based, I believe that the their streaming video codecs and real-time kernal mods are released as source. Although it was certainly no breeze to write that code (especially considering the limited resources of the Tivo box), nobody should hand them a patent for being able to perform multiple reads and writes on a big file (that's all the digital store is).
I know the electronic program guide is licensed from Gemstar/TVGuide, so that's not an invention either.
I'm sure that there are a number of good novel innovations there that have valid patents, but the weight of the prior art is greatly stacked against them for the obvious stuff.
This thread is making me retch (no, not just this post, but the followups as well).
Back in the 1980's I worked at Apple when Apple spent a lot of money on all the shiny new professional toys to figure out inspirations for consumer products. This included stuff like a $120,000 Silicon Graphics workstation (the very first model!) and a complete first-generation digital video setup that took D1 cartridges that seemed to be as big as a lunch tray.
One of the really fun toys was something that actually got a lot of use. It was an Abekas digital frame store. Apple used it to assemble computer graphic animations, frame by frame with no wet film, which was a pretty big deal back then. But most of these units were sitting in trucks at football games, as they were the devices used for the cutting edge slo-motion display.
Inside the box, it was a flash digitizer and a fast group of hard drives. Outside the box, it looked an acted like a studio VCR, with play, pause, ff, rewind buttons and a big shuttle/jog knob. Video goes in and you can stop or scroll through it, forward or backward or stop with high quality.
What's a Tivo? It's exactly the same technology that was commonly in use in video production studios for years prior to the formation of the company. I wouldn't be suprised to find that some of the Tivo technologists came from companies that made these sorts of products.
Time shift and multiple stream input and output are all common features in studio effects boxes and have been for a long time.
The ability to do this in a consumer device was a reality for a couple years now with three big things coming together to make that happen - 1) relatively cheap large (10's of GB) hard drives, 2)real time compression asics, and 3)Linux which allowed tivo to build a multitasking, multithreaded OS without having to roll one from scratch or pay bucks to Wind River.
Making the device wasn't novel at all, but it's not suprising that it was patentable because they focused on consumerizing aspects rather than the established technology. And I think the implementation is pretty good.
The interesting question is whether you ought to be able to get a patent for a system who's prototype can be assembled from existing devices.
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Well, this is sort of a silly nerd question, but this *IS* /. after all...
How did they show the same print in four theaters simultaneously? I know nothing about the current state of theater technology, but this would seem to imply that there was some sort of optical beamsplitter that divides one projectors output between multiple screens. But that can't be how it's done, is it? Why would a theater even have a device like that, much less two of them? How could a single projector be bright enough to project in more than one screening room (I don't doubt a projector this bright could be made, but that's very different than one actually being deployed out in the field).
Enquiring nerd minds want to know!
Well, 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind for me, although I guess one could easily argue that 2001 is not an adaptation of Childhood's End, but an original screenplay with a couple of elements lifted from the short story. And I guess it's a short story instead of a novel too.
But 2001 is a quality piece of sci-fi, don't you think? I personally really like Blade Runner as well as an anti-utopian view of the future, but it's not particularly impressive from the story point of view.
I second this thought, and I'm suprised that nobody else posted on this.
:-)
Can this "feature" really be attractive to anybody? I hope nobody thinks they're going to get laid because you can spot their deformed calculator keypad at a glance.
I've had a number of Nokia phones in the past and have been thinking about getting a new one as my last one (6360) has been losing keypad reliability on one side. But these days, my single requirement - a keypad that actually works as a regular keypad seems to mean that I won't be getting another Nokia.
The odd thing to me is that it's hard enough to try to do SMS-style typing on a numeric pad already without warping the shape. The Nokia with the round key arrangement seems to pretty much preclude this completely.
r4bb1t is absolutely right here. People get up in arms because GMail says they will read your mail to index it and that seems like an invasion of privacy. In fact, there's nothing that would stop AIM from capturing all your IM chatter.
Except of course, that if they did that, there's a danger that they'll become liable for the content of the information that's passing through. This arose before when it went to the courts as to whether ISPs are liable when their accountholders harbor kiddie porn on the ISP's computers.
If AOL/AIM had the ability to scan for possible terrorist actions, porn, or the next Columbine, and DIDN'T intercede, then potentially they would be open to enormous damages. If you were a 9/11 victim and you found out that AIM was the facilitator for planning an attack (and I absolutely am not implying that!), you can bet that AOL would become a lawsuit target after everybody realized you won't get a multi-million dollar settlement from selling the terrorist's apartment junk.
This issue of possible liability will probably prevent Palisade from getting anywhere. I'm sure that AIM reserves the right to scan your IM, but probably zealously makes sure that it's not doing that. Now, when they get a subpoena from the Justice Nazis, that's a totally different question.
No, I started at Stanford in (gulp) 1978. Old, yes, very old.
I must admit that "Peter Wang" isn't that weird of a name, so there are probably many of them. And I feel bad for all of them.
My junior year roommate in college was Peter Wang. At the end of the year, when we gave out the "house awards", he won "Most Redundant Name".
I thought he had it bad, but it's nothing compared to you, John.
Uh huh...
So where is it that you buy a PocketPC and equip it with 4GB of memory for less than $250? Maybe you were thinking of the "big" iPod? Can you buy 40GB of RAM for your PocketPC for less than $500?
mp3 music can be imperfect, but it's better than the movies that you'll be playing on your pda...
I volunteered as a judge a couple of years ago when the Intel STS had their finals in San Jose. As you interview all the candidates, you can definitely see that some of the students are coached in the area of expertise of a parent, some are directed by university staff that they study under, and some of these guys are just so smart that it's absolutely scary.
In that first category, there was an interesting coincidence that I knew and had indirectly worked with the father of one of the students. His project was related to image compression technology which is what his father did. He was conversant in the area, but you really got the feeling that his research had been very closely directed by his father.
You don't see the second type so much in computer science, but in areas like biology, you find that many of the students are working in college labs assisting researchers. This is about the only way that a high school student can study things like protein synthesis or recombinant DNA techniques - no high school would have the equipment or expertise. I guess nobody told them that they were too young to be working on their Ph.D, and that's good.
One of the outstanding projects in our year was a kid whose project had to do with modelling the chemical processes that are involved in doping semiconductors in fab. One of the other judges who had specific experience in this area was blown away by his work, and it was clear to everybody that interviewed him that he loved the topic, loved researching it, loved constructing the experiment, and clearly had gotten no help from anyone. He got high marks from all the judges (must have been about 80 judges in Computer Science alone, all professionals or college-level professors, no high-school teachers), but ultimately didn't advance because it was clear that his project was miscatagorized into computer science because it was a simulation when it probably should have been in Chemical Engineering or some sort of Materials Science.
If you ever get a chance to participate as a judge, or better yet as a mentor/sponsor, do it!
Also, just a note - this contest is sponsored by Intel now, but is the same contest that Westinghouse sponsored for many years.
When I read this, an interesting question popped up in my mind - there's an implication that you might end up in this database if you sued for malpractice and won.
Actually, I suspect that the public record would reflect if you brought suit against a doctor and *lost*, too.
A)If this database becomes something that doctors or insurance companies really use, then I doubt that they would draw much distinction between winning or losing a case. B) Even if the database was only for patients that prevailed against doctors, I wonder how clean the data would really stay. And fixing your history on this baby must really be a nightmare (as if fixing Experian or one of the other credit companies isn't bad enough).
I had a friend who purchased one of the very first Boxsters to arrive in the Silicon Valley. I went with a friend to visit it a couple of weeks after he got it.
He mentioned that the early production was really showing a lot of firmware bugs, and a really annoying design flaw.
After he had it a couple of days, he parked in his garage turned it off, got out and noticed that the little LCD annunciator panel in the bottom of the dash didn't turn off. He didn't think much about it at the time, but, of course, the battery was dead the next day.
No big deal, right? Wrongo. To charge the battery, you need to open the front hood. And to do so, you push the *electrically operated* hood release. Which doesn't work because you don't have electricity. That's OK, right? There must be a cable you can pull somewhere. Wrong again buddy, since the car is relatively "welded shut" (actually, from a theft standpoint, it would be pretty stupid if there was something like that to pull on).
The dealership didn't know much about these brand new cars yet, but they did already know about the problem and gave him a battery trickle charger that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket. I guess you could even charge the battery with it, but even if you're not that patient, it is enough juice to open the front hood. I believe a charger of this sort is standard equipment in the Boxter tool kit these days.
That Stratus story is hilarious! I know the battery is always a matter of design contention given it's great weight relative to most other car parts. I think the problem is that normal usage patterns (actually I guess this should be non-usage patterns) cause the battery to be more often replaced than something like a starter motor or fuel pump, so it sure is nice to be able to get to it.
I have a bunch of cars including a 1990 BMW 535i. I have to admit that I noticed that I didn't see the battery location under the hood other than a giant "+" terminal covered with a plastic cap for jump starts. Nothing in the trunk either. I did find out exactly where the battery was in truly specacular fashion one night. I was leaving work after dark, got in the car, turned the key... and the battery exploded in it's little compartment under the back seat. Literally blew the back seat bottom out of it's mounts, although it was housed under plastic shields that blocked the spew of battery acid.
I assume that I must have had a short somewhere that was causing the evolution of hydrogen gas. Or maybe my co-workers hated me more than they had let on.
The bad part about that location was that it's a bitch to clean up and my car still has a slightly barfy smell to it many, many years later (I think this must have happened 10 years ago).
Rule number one - if you're going to make an example of a company for your petty little war, don't pick the company that will be selling you brake pads and brake lines next month:
Clerk : Will that be all, sir? Just this replacement brake master cylinder?
Darl : Yes, thank you.
Clerk : May I have your name, sir?
Darl : Darl McBride
Clerk : [typing] Oh... Uh huh... Actually this isn't the right part sir. We do happen to have this special one for you right here, which is EXACTLY what you need.
Darl : Good. Because I really want my brakes to work well.
Clerk : Oh yes sir, this will really do the trick.
On our next episode of "You Picked the Wrong Target", SCO's legal team picks Allied Colonoscope Corporation to make their next example.
And in two weeks on a very special edition of "Wrong Target", Darl suffers a heart attack and discovers and mutters the immortal line "I didn't know defibrillators ran on Linux".
I agree with this completely.
I personally think the overall complexity of the open source path is probably slightly higher than Windows these days, but on this scale of operation probably not radically different. Pick the wrong Windows integrator (strong on client or server side but not both) and it will be a painful migration.
One problem that I do see is that in strategic deals like this one, Microsoft has an advantage in that the corporation can "fix" a bad integrator choice by flooding the site with the money and knowledge needed to make this work. A big IT consultant can try to do the same thing, but that may require a big internal investment on their part - I'm not sure whether going back to a SUSe or RedHat with problems could create the same effect.
Of course, that's what MS would argue that their value-add is, and I don't know that I would completely disagree. I'm sure they're loading MS commandos into the Microsoft Air Force troop carriers in Redmond, waiting for Munich to ask for help.
If most open relays really are zombies, then I do agree - no real mechanism for enforcement. I genuinely don't know what the story is here.
/dev/null" probably would work.
In the recent past, it seemed that the spamming farms weren't giant machines, but they weren't mostly zombies either - wasn't that big US spammer in Texas or Florida just a guy with a T3 and a garage full of medium-sized servers? If that's the case, and you're being pounded with Viagra-grams from a guy with another garage in Indonesia, then this sort of "pay your tax or report to
Of course, if such a system were enacted, then I guess the shift to zombie relays would accelerate.
I too believe that cooperation is needed, but it's needed as much from the CMU guy who feels he has the right to send his 30,000 e-mails out for free as it is from spammers. Charge me a penny for my e-mails or only allow 600 free outgoing messages a month. But please do something, because I'm pretty sure that my (insert mobile data device here - I have a Sidekick) will stop being useful when it's flooded with spam.
Is this proposal really that ineffectual?
I totally agree with what your saying, but if a offshore ISP doesn't do anything accept send spam and faces being blacklisted because they ignore their bills, then it seems to me that this might actually have some leverage. If you were an offshore ISP that was 100% legitimate mass e-mail (a opt-in magazine headlines digest for instance) then you pay the mass mailing fee as part of your cost of doing business. If you have a mix of legit and UCE customers, then I think the pressure will be on you to pick a side and move (the pressure comes not from the US, but from your legit customers who are getting blocked out because of the spammers).
Am I missing something important here?
Of course, there are, although I suspect that gap is closing with time. When the iPod came out, it was astronomically high in price relative to the RAM-based players that this whole thread started out on. Some people don't want to carry 5-40GB of music with them when they work out. A $150 Rio player was a good alternative then, less so today.
You mean iTunes for Mac actually supports these players? Are you sure?
Yup. On the Mac it will support any players that support AAC (a couple, I believe) and MP3 (all players). A good buddy of mine is a 100% Mac user which has left him so penniless that his player is an old Rio. Works fine, but wouldn't work on my Windows machine.
Why in the world would Apple want to support competing players for Windows users? It's a free product, it wouldn't be making them any money at all.
There are many, many reasons! Just because you don't pay for a product doesn't mean that they can't make money from it (did I really need to say this here? :-)). Today, Apple is the market leader in downloadable music, but doesn't make money on those 99cent downloads. But if they kept 70%, 80% or more of the market, that gives them the leverage with the music industry and customers to change the arithmetic of cost. You can bet that Amazon pounds UPS and the other parcel carriers down to insanely low prices and allow them to make a profit on a sale which might have been consumed by shipping costs for a smaller shipper. The profit on selling iPod hardware is sweet for Apple, but that doesn't mean that they don't intend to make music in the iTunes Music Store as well.
At the Super Bowl this year, Pepsi and Apple will roll out a 100 million song iTunes Music Store giveaway that will provide a great introduction to legal music downloads. They'll have a winning download code in 1 of every 4 bottles of Pepsi for 2 months. That will cause a lot of people to download iTunes, try it out, try browsing the store, and pick up some free tunes. For 96% of the world, they'll be amazed and amused. And they won't be able to put that music on their non-iPod mp3 player. The promotion is brilliant, but it's also about the worst lost opportunity that I could think of. Although it protects iPod hardware sales, I think the iPod would defend itself quite well against it's competition, even without the limitation - just as the cited article points out, the iPod devices are expensive, but are not expensive at all relative to their market segment (large capacity players). If a Windows user likes the iTMS experience, imagine the potential volume of sales had this restriction been lifted. Not to mention the licensing fee that Apple could probably have charged players for their variant of AAC.
I don't know where this online music sale market will go. But by opening the door to the low-end players right now, Apple also stands to gain when happy iTunes customers look to upgrade to a heavyweight player. True, this will open the door to serious competition down the line from 3rd party heavyweight players, but if Apple were licensing iTunes compatibility, they could always tilt the market slightly in their favor.
I don't know whether Pepsi is paying Apple for this promotion, or whether Apple is paying Pepsi, but had Apple changed this poor decision about third-party player support, they could certainly be guaranteeing that the next time that there's a promotion like this, that Apple would be the one collecting the partner's money, as long as they could deliver the enormous market share.
I visited Macworld this year and spent some hands on time with both the iPod and iPod Mini. Even though the previously separate control keys from the original iPod were consolidated with the "wheel", I greatly preferred the user experience of the Mini. The latest (3rd generation?) big iPod has a sort of virtual dial, and the "buttons" have no tactile feedback. The Mini overloads the functions on the dial, but does it with a tiny click which I found much easier to use.
So, even though I see the 15GB iPod is much more compelling from a value standpoint, I sort of suffer from the reverse problem - I'd rather have a Mini with an even larger drive but the same operating controls. That market is defintely going to be the last one served here!
Both iPods seem inferior at a glance to the very original iPod. It was too expensive and (now) not a good story on space, but the wheel (an actual physical control) was just awesome.
I think iTunes is pretty good too, but one of the things you rarely see mentioned here is that there's a huge gap in feature set between the Mac and Windows versions. No, it's not in the app or music libraries, it's in the support of players. The Mac version of iTunes supports any mp3 player capable of playing MP3 or AAC which is pretty much everybody if you don't want to play the music you bought at the iTMS (they're all AAC).
The Windows version of iTunes is identical in functionality to the Mac version if you have an iPod. But it appears that iTunes Windows won't sync with anything other than iPods.
Sadly, Apple is shooting itself in the foot here. Given a choice between iTunes and anything else, iTunes would clobber all comers. iTunes is well thought out and implemented, while the alternatives seem thrown together or hacky. But, if I can't organize my world on my PC and sync to my non-iPod, I just won't use iTunes no matter how good it is.
This protects Apple's iPod sales vs. the competition (on Macs, you've already paid your tribute to Apple when you got your Mac!) but at great cost. If iTunes in visibly better designed software than it's competitors, it's only a matter of time (and short time, I think) before the desirable interface aspects are ripped off. And just like productivity apps, you reach a point where adding more features and innovation has a diminishing return.
iPod profits pay for iTunes, so there's really no other way this can be. But I feel bad to see Apple miss a chance to really lock up their domination of the iTunes-like app world because of this business model. As an ex-Apple employee and Apple watcher, I hard to see this mistake being repeated - they really are poised to achieve a Windows-like stranglehold on the computer end of the formula, but by closing off the other players (that the cited article shows they can beat anyway!) they're marking themselves for death.
And then, I won't have any space on my iPod Mini to put them!
Well, I did make the original statement in a confusing way. I should have said "modern processors want to execute out of cache as much as possible". You pretty much never want to run out of cache if you don't have to (it forces you to slow way down to access main RAM)! And you generally want to execute out of cache as much as you can (for the fastest possible execution). Superscalar processors (those with multiple execution units) depend on code and data being in cache for good performance - the pipeline will stall if you have a cache miss which means you stop for what effectively is "forever" waiting for the off-chip memory access. For compute-intensive tasks big caches, burst accesses, and deep pipelines are the fast track to fast computation. There's just no way to crank up the speed of the memory subsystem as quickly as you can crank up the internal wiring of the CPU. For data-intensive apps where information is scattered about with low locality (like a database), this on-chip caching isn't nearly as valuable.
Oh, now I'll *cough* a little too.
Modern processors (which actually stretches back at least 10 years) really want to run out of cache as much as possible, both for instruction and data access. And they've never wanted to do it more than now when in the x86 world, the processor core and L1 cache are operating at 3200MHz vs. 400MHz for the RAM.
One thing that has to happen is that you make a bet on locality of execution (again both for instructions and data) and burst load a section of memory into the caches (L2 and L1, and sometimes even L3). In implementation terms, it takes some time to charge up the address bus, so you increase bandwidth and execution speed by charging up address n, but doing a quick read of n+1, n+2, n+3, and more on the latest CPUs. You only have to wiggle the two low-order address lines for the extra reads, so you don't pay the pre-charge penalty that you would for access randomly in memory.
That's good if you're right about locality and bad if you're wrong. That's what predictive branching in the processor and compiler optimizations are all about - tailoring execution to stay in cache as much as possible.
On a 64-bit processor, those burst moves really are twice as big and they really do take longer (the memory technology isn't radically different between 32- and 64-bit architectures, although right now it would be odd to see a cost-cutting memory system on a 64-bit machine). If all the accesses of the burst are actually used in execution, then both systems will show similar performance (the 64-bit will have better performance on things like vector opcodes, but for regular stuff, 1 cycle is 1 cycle). If only half of the bursted data is used, then the higher overhead of the burst will penalize the 64-bit processor.
If you're running a character based benchmark (I've never looked at gzip, but it seems like it must be char based), then it's going to be hard for the 64-bit app and environment to be a win until you figure out some optimization that utilizes the technology. If your benchmark was doing matrix ops on 64-bit ints, then you'll probably find that that Opteron, Itanium, or UltraSparc will be pretty hard to touch.
A hammer isn't the right tool for every job as much as you'd like it to be. I actually think that the cited article was a reasonable practical test of performance, but extrapolating from that would be like commenting on pounding nails with a saw - it's just a somewhat irrelevant measure.
I guess I'm violently agreeing with renehollan's comment about speed bumps - apps that can benefit from an architectural change are as important as more concrete details such as compiler optimizations.
Hey, I love Monty Python too, but it completely blows me away that anybody could type that all and *still* be the first post!
In California, Zero Emission Vehicles (not the Prius, but now-obsolete electric cars) can drive in the diamond lane with only one driver.
Crazy situations, but wouldn't you be looking for the Candid Camera when you get a call from Smart & Biggar that say that they represent Microsoft?
Bill Gates and company probably don't care, but they lawyers are probably personally sick of last name puns and have gone postal!
Perhaps I wasn't clear in my long diatribe...
A telephone is pretty crafty if you start with wires and magnets. It's a lot less crafty if you start with wire and magnets in the form of a working telephone!
The Abekas wasn't just capable of doing what a Tivo does, it did *exactly* all those time-shifting functions. [I'll add here that there may have been similar devices that predated the Abekas.] Apple didn't use theirs that way, but tv production rigs did - the box continues to digitize and store live video while you're pausing or jogging through what's already on disk. No, it didn't have a TV tuner attached to it, or an electronic program guide, but if the Tivo innovation was time shifting or using a disk as the stream store, there was no invention there at all.
Because Tivo is GPL-based, I believe that the their streaming video codecs and real-time kernal mods are released as source. Although it was certainly no breeze to write that code (especially considering the limited resources of the Tivo box), nobody should hand them a patent for being able to perform multiple reads and writes on a big file (that's all the digital store is).
I know the electronic program guide is licensed from Gemstar/TVGuide, so that's not an invention either.
I'm sure that there are a number of good novel innovations there that have valid patents, but the weight of the prior art is greatly stacked against them for the obvious stuff.
This thread is making me retch (no, not just this post, but the followups as well).
Back in the 1980's I worked at Apple when Apple spent a lot of money on all the shiny new professional toys to figure out inspirations for consumer products. This included stuff like a $120,000 Silicon Graphics workstation (the very first model!) and a complete first-generation digital video setup that took D1 cartridges that seemed to be as big as a lunch tray.
One of the really fun toys was something that actually got a lot of use. It was an Abekas digital frame store. Apple used it to assemble computer graphic animations, frame by frame with no wet film, which was a pretty big deal back then. But most of these units were sitting in trucks at football games, as they were the devices used for the cutting edge slo-motion display.
Inside the box, it was a flash digitizer and a fast group of hard drives. Outside the box, it looked an acted like a studio VCR, with play, pause, ff, rewind buttons and a big shuttle/jog knob. Video goes in and you can stop or scroll through it, forward or backward or stop with high quality.
What's a Tivo? It's exactly the same technology that was commonly in use in video production studios for years prior to the formation of the company. I wouldn't be suprised to find that some of the Tivo technologists came from companies that made these sorts of products.
Time shift and multiple stream input and output are all common features in studio effects boxes and have been for a long time.
The ability to do this in a consumer device was a reality for a couple years now with three big things coming together to make that happen - 1) relatively cheap large (10's of GB) hard drives, 2)real time compression asics, and 3)Linux which allowed tivo to build a multitasking, multithreaded OS without having to roll one from scratch or pay bucks to Wind River.
Making the device wasn't novel at all, but it's not suprising that it was patentable because they focused on consumerizing aspects rather than the established technology. And I think the implementation is pretty good.
The interesting question is whether you ought to be able to get a patent for a system who's prototype can be assembled from existing devices.