> Or Android, a platform that announced its SDK and store before the iPhone, but can mange > to keep up with Apple nor attract similar interest from developers or users.
Let's try a fairer comparison: compare Android and iPhone 6 months after Sprint launches the (Android) Hero (October 11... 8 painfully long days to go...) and Verizon manages to cripple an iPhone enough to make its management happy. THEN it will be a fair comparison. Sprint's not the biggest, but they've got the hardest-core users. Verizon's huge, but are firm believers that "WinMo's not done 'till WiFi and the built-in GPS receiver won't run". Frankly, Verizon and Apple were made for each other.
Come next Sunday, the joy in SprintLand will make Microsoft's Win7 house parties look like calling hours at a funeral home;-)
> (Heck, Windows has pretty much _always_ had one of the most responsive UIs.)
(grabs paper towel to wipe Diet Mountain Dew from the display... AFTER blowing as much as possible from nose once the coughing stopped)
Windows has always had one of the easiest-to-hang UIs (with the possible exception of pre-OSX MacOS and PalmOS) of any modern OS, thanks to Microsoft's retarded architectural philosophy of putting the application in charge of managing its own UI effects and redrawing itself on demand. It's why a badly-written Win32 app can't be minimized, usually can't have its window moved, might swallow its mouse pointer, and needs ctrl-alt-delete to be involuntarily killed. It allows the consequences of that braindamaged app to spread beyond the application itself, and affect the working of every OTHER running application, too.
It's why a 20+ year old Amiga running at 7.16MHz had a UI that was, in many ways, more responsive than Windows running on a 3GHz quadcore i7. Intuition (the Amiga's window manager) was completely indifferent to the state of running applications. If you clicked a close gadget, it XOR'ed the nanosecond you clicked the button, and returned to normal the moment you released it. The app itself might have crashed beyond repair 20 minutes earlier, and the gesture might achieve nothing besides the visual indication of a close-gadget click, but at least there was zero doubt in your mind that the click was made. If you saw the colors invert, and the app didn't close, you knew INSTANTLY it was hopeless, and just cycled the power. There was no "did Windows see my mouse click?" ambiguity.
Ditto, for window moves. If an app died a horrible death and froze, you could still move the window, and its contents obediently moved right along with it. The hardware didn't care... bitmap bits were bitmap bits. You could cover and uncover the window, and it looked exactly like it did before. Unlike Windows, Intuition genuinely didn't *care* whether the app was still working. It did its thing, and got out of the way. Compare that to Vista, XP, and just about everything since the invention of Active Desktop... where you might not even be able to show the Start menu for ~45 seconds if something in a web page being requested by FIREFOX (an app completely unrelated to Windows) or IE causes a fractured DNS lookup to hang Explorer's stupid, brain-damaged single-threaded name resolver that gets used for everything from DNS lookups to figuring out the meaning of "C:\" It's not *quite* as bad under SMP as it used to be with a single core/CPU... but it still happens, and it's still incredibly annoying when it does.
> First of all, do you think tetrachromats know they perceive colors differently?
Actually, yes. I read about an interview with a British woman who's believed to be a genuine tetrachromat. One thing that came up was the fact that color photographs and TV never look "right" to her. Prior to learning about tetrachromaticy, she always just thought she was "picky".
The 20-bit example is a good one. I'm actually trichromanomalous. In terms that make sense to most Slashdotters, most people with statistically normal color perception have roughly 17-bit green, 16-bit red, and 15-bit blue fidelity. I'm missing a red bit. The result is that I made it to my mid-20s before ever finding out there was officially anything wrong. Up to then, I just thought I had bad taste in colors. It turns out, my taste is as good as everyone else's... there's just a slightly wider range of reds that I think look good with a given mixture of blue and green than most. If I take a Munsell color test (the one where you have little cylinders that vary by a subtle fraction of a shade and have to be quickly arranged without scrutiny), I screw up the last two in the red-green series about 50% of the time... they both look like grayish peachy-beige. It happens because the frequency of my main red peak is slightly higher (and closer to my green peak) than 99.9% of the population's. In other words, I'm part of the group that's worse than 99.9%, but within the best 99.99%.
I'll never mistake a red traffic light for a green one, but I'm paralyzed with fear anytime I have to make decisions about color. The hardest part about remodeling my living room wasn't replacing the drywall, rewiring the entertainment wiring, or the custom moulding... it was picking the damn shades of off-white for the walls, ceiling, and trim. I agonized over it for weeks, driven by mortal fear that I'd accidentally pick a subtly brownish-beige that was too pink, or a subtly creamy-white that was too green. For subtly-anomalous trichromats, beige is a deadly minefield of potential embarrassments.
> So? Glasses to filter out all but visible light (today's visible light) should be trivial. Just like those blue & red 3D glasses.
Women believed to be tetrachromatic don't see light trichromats can't see... they recognize two variants of "green" as being different, the same way green and red are different to you. If you were genuinely tetrachromatic in the sense the women are believed to be, TV, film, photographs, and printed images would almost ALWAYS look like shit to you, because the "green" would be "wrong" in ways you couldn't really explain.
Here's an example: suppose you were a trichromat, living in a world where 94% of the population couldn't distinguish between red and green, and for all intents and purposes "yellow" was just a darker or brighter shade of red/green. Color film wouldn't be based on red, green, and blue... it would be based on blue and yellow. Your RGB monitor would be a BY monitor. To everyone else, the whole idea of "RGB" would be silly, because they could get the exact same image quality from just blue and yellow. You'd be the unfortunate person who kept babbling about there being a difference between "red" and "green", and that they were somehow different from the color everyone else knew as "yellow". Anyway, getting back to the example, a tetrachromatic woman wouldn't want RGB... she'd want RGgB, where "G" and "g" were slightly different frequencies of green. An RGB monitor to a tetrachromat would look just as artificial, fake, and bad as a Blue-Yellow monitor designed for deutranopes and protanopes would to you.
> Could you imagine being able to see halfway down the IR spectrum, or well past UV on the other end
IR might be do-able, but UV is almost structurally impossible for the human eye to meaningfully view. The spectral peak of "blue" cones is actually closer to violet than blue. If you look at a sensitivity curve for human blue cones, you'll notice that its peak is just slightly above violet, and its lower third is simply chopped off or attenuated away. The problem is the cornea -- it blocks most UV light. What the cornea doesn't block, the fluid inside the eye absorbs and scatters. There have been reports that people who've had cataract surgery are able to perceive UV as hazy, diffuse "purplish-yellow" light. The idea that something can be purple and yellow is strange, but not as crazy as it sounds when you consider that the color we call "purple" is NOTHING like spectral violet, and is actually an artifact of human vision caused by a nonlinear slope in blue sensitivity. There's a tiny area where the upper end of blue overlaps with the lower end of red, with a small ripple in blue that introduces just enough error in that region to make purple possible.
There's another problem: chromatic aberration. Ever notice that you can make a fake 3d-like pic using pure red and pure blue, so the blue parts seem to be floating in space compared to the red? That's chromatic aberration at work. The cornea can only focus light from a relatively narrow band. The lower you go, the less-focused the light would be. Similar distortion would become problematic in the infrared range, though not as quickly as at the blue end.
> The difference between then and now is that the political climate was one of "We must beat the Russians at all costs" - > as such alot of people got to play with the frontiers of knowledge. We're at a point in history where international > struggles don't contribute much to the space programme. Business does. We're in a recession, and the space programme > is at the mercy of budget cuts
And that's precisely why the first human to set foot on Mars will almost certainly be planting a Chinese flag on it as his first official act. China has lots of money, and it wants international prestige so badly it hurts. It's willing to spend whatever it costs, and hurl as many ships in the general direction of Mars as it takes until one manages to make it there... and hopefully (for the astronauts involved) back.
The big question is what will happen after they finally succeed. I put the smart money on, "declare they own a small chunk of Mars, offer to recognize similar claims from anyone else who manages to get settlers there, and announce that Chinese-made space ships just like the one that got THEM there are available for sale to the highest bidders, complete with trained Chinese pilots if need be, ready to launch almost immediately after purchase."
On the other hand, there's an alternate ending that's probably more likely: Chinese astronauts will land on Mars, plant the flag, dominate the news for a few weeks, then have some catastrophic accident on the way home that causes a political backlash of risk-aversion in China (after all, its greatest national heroes would have just died). If that happens, it could easily be a hundred years or more before the next humans set foot on Mars. The moment "do it at any cost" sentiment evaporates in China, the countries then willing to do whatever it takes to get to Mars will develop other interests to pursue, instead.
Why? There's no glory in being the first loser (#2) in any race. It's why the Soviet Union didn't make the moon its #1 priority after the first Americans landed on the moon -- it was too late to be #1, and nobody was in any position to put them at risk of being #3. Without the Soviet Union nipping at its heels, the US lost interest in the moon, and nobody has been there ever since. IMHO, there will probably be human footprints on Mars, its moons, and quite possibly Venus, long before the next humans set foot on the moon. Nobody is going to spend trillions of dollars to be #2, when there are halfway-reachable places where up and coming superpowers can still win the "First There" trophy.
Plus, there's another good explanation of why enthusiasm for the Moon faded after Apollo, and anyone who's ever worked for a startup with revolutionary new product knows what I'm about to give as an example: it's a lot easier to hack something together well enough to work for a demo than it is to make something production-worthy. I can absolutely guarantee that if Apollo had gone on with the same technology much longer, there absolutely would have been fatalities at some point. Every single trip to the moon was a major dice roll, and one or two of them are well-documented as having come within milliseconds of "snake eyes". In order for the presence of Americans living on the moon to become less newsworthy than a lunar-American contestant winning American Idol, lots of really, really major (and ungodly expensive) improvements would have had to be made. The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria might have brought the first non-Scandinavian European explorers to America in relatively dinky wooden boats, but Europeans weren't moving to America en masse until steamships were safely making the trip to New York in a week or two.
> or EXT3 or another obscure Linux system that may be superior tech wise, > it simply won't work on any non-Linux system.
Shhhh. Don't let my desktop PC find out. It runs Vista, and my terrabyte bulk data drive is formatted with ext2, mounted with ext2ifs, and Windows hasn't complained about it yet...
Officially, yes. You needed a piece of hardware whose legally-mandated role was to host a set of genuine Mac ROMs and allow them to be read into the Amiga (before A-Max itself overwrote chunks of them with its own code).
As a practical matter, no. I know lots of people who had A-Max... and I don't know a single person who actually had the hardware they were officially supposed to need in order to make it work.
From what I remember, it couldn't access the hard drive. I think it was because back then, Apple LITERALLY hardcoded the geometry of a specific Quantum SCSI hard drive into the OS, so the only viable way of making it work would have been to have bought the exact model of hard drive used in real Macs. Also, floppies were a problem... you had to format them on a real Mac using a program that basically marked the 2/3 of the disc that the Mac & Amiga drives couldn't mutually read as "bad" or "in use".
Looking back, it DOES seem crazy that they couldn't have just thunked the drive geometry with an Amiga-hosted translation layer... the only thing I can think of is that it would have taken too much ram and/or resources to work on the A500, and the idea of selling something that only worked on an A2000 or better with at least a meg of fast ram would have been unthinkable.
> Do they have UAE [amigaemulator.org] for the Iphone yet?
Uh oh... slippery slope time. The moment UAE exists, it'll be possible to launch A-MAX and go storming right into Apple's holiest sanctuary(*)
(*)For the uninitiated, A-MAX was a Macintosh emulator for the Amiga that ran some Mac software faster than a REAL Mac... conceptually, it was halfway between Xen and Wine. Nowhere near as hard as emulating a completely alien hardware platform (like the PC), but nowhere near as trivial as getting programs written for a Pet to run on a C-64. From what I remember, they basically copied MacOS into the Amiga's RAM, then overwrote its jumptable with pointers to code written for the Amiga. For example, when a Mac app wanted to display a file dialog, it ran native MacOS code up to the point where it had to render the graphics and landed on an overwritten jumptable pointer to graphics routines written for the Amiga's hardware. Program compatibility fell into two extremes: apps that used only published API calls ran almost perfectly, and apps that tried jumping directly to undocumented entry points or tried taking advantage of unofficial side effects that weren't guaranteed to work by Apple died a horrible death. As a practical matter, the main thing that broke compatibility was copy protection, and most apps that wouldn't work if you tried running legitimate copies ran flawlessly after they were cracked (the more things change... well, you know the rest... sigh...).
> Work backwards from the undisputed declining sales figures of the recording industry.
The main reason for declining sales is the fact that CD sales during the 90s were artificially boosted by people replacing records and tapes with CDs... then replacing them again when remastered CDs were released a few years later. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event for the recording industry that won't be repeated during our lifetimes.
People re-bought CDs they already owned in analog (or optimized-for-analog CDs) because they represented an epic improvement in quality by just about any meaningful standard over the analog media they replaced. Everything that's come out since CDs has only been cheaper, shittier-sounding, or intolerably-crippled by DRM.
Here's an idea for the music industry: ditch the DRM'ed formats, and roll out a music format on DVD media with 96KHz 32-bit stereo PCM. Make the discs gold-colored, call it something like "X-fi", and sell them for $24.95. You'll win on all counts -- genX'ers will go back into highschool mode and buy them to show off how rich they are and/or pretend they sound sufficiently better than 16-bit CDs to justify spending ~twice as much on them, and the fact that every disc will be ~4-8 gigabytes will serve as self-limiting DRM for the next decade or so. Just make sure they still have the MOST compelling consumer benefit intact (and reason why people who buy CDs still DO buy CDs): it's a flawless first-generation master to use for making all your "working" copies for everywhere else.
> So? A new harddisk is cheaper than a new laptop. And since you diligently maintained your backups...
Mod parent WAY up. It might be irrelevant for netbooks and cheap notebooks from Best Buy, but if you're talking about a kilobuck+ Macbook or high-end performance notebook, the hard drive isn't just one of its cheapest components... it's also one of its few components that can be easily replaced by end users, with a part that's readily-available even in small towns, often on sale, and frequently would result in improved performance over the original part. Try buying a new Thinkpad keyboard, Macbook case, or Dell motherboard at Best Buy on Sunday afternoon at some city in the midwestern US with a population of ~500k living within a fifty-mile radius. Hell, with the possible exceptions of Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Akihabara , I doubt whether there's anyplace you could walk into a retail store and buy stuff like that at all, let alone on a weekend.
> Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can > buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X. Once he understands how it > works (reverse engineering), he can then recreate that code in a higher language, say C. Copyright does not work here. > Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product. > Therefore having patents is necessary.
Admittedly, this applies directly to only the US (as far as I know), but in America, patents are constitutionally justified on purely utilitarian grounds. In theory, all it would take to completely abolish many patents would be a Supreme Court ruling that one or more laws passed by Congress empowering the USPTO to act on its behalf, and the policies enacted to enforce those laws, fail to advance this purpose (and ESPECIALLY if they actively harm it).
This is in direct contract to continental Europe, where they're historically been viewed as a moral right grounded in natural law.
Plus, it's not like decompiled code would be completely without protection just because it's not a literal copy of the original program code. If you disagree, just TRY publishing a book that even vaguely involves a young sorcerer named "Harry". Or, for that matter, a rodent named 'Mickey'. Or, for a really great double-whammy from two sets of lawyers, a teenage gerbil who goes to sorcery school and plays a lacrosse-like game on flying brooms that walk and carry buckets of water in their downtime...
> is there _any_ sport requiring strength, agility, or endurance where women are competitive with men?
MMA? (Mixed Martial Arts)
I'm not aware of any female heavyweights, but in the lighter weight classes, more than a few guys have ended up tapping out and losing by submission before they knew what happened. And, more often than not, if it's a public fight, had their MMA careers extinguished as a result (intellectually, everyone knows a man and woman of equal skill in the same weight class are more or less an even match at mixed martial arts, but culturally and emotionally, few things carry more stigma than getting your ass totally kicked by a girl...
^^^ Argh. That's what rushing to do a final post before going to bed does to you. Yeah, the leftmost column was 128, not 256 (goes to cut eye holes in brown paper bag);-)
> "They have never used a card catalog to find a book"
Yawn. I was a UM Freshman in 1992. At that point, I think the card catalog was still there, but there were OLD, tattered signs perched on top warning that it was no longer maintained (and apparently hadn't been maintained in years). My high school library had a card catalog, but that was because it sucked. The public library downtown had greenscreen terminals since middle school.
What does having been born in 1973 imply?
* We never understood why our parents got so excited by seeing moonwalkers on TV. Men had *always* been walking on the moon.
* We didn't notice the videogame crash of 1983, because we'd all moved on and gotten Commodore 64s for Christmas anyway. Six years later, shopping for Amiga toyz, it blew our minds that there were STILL stores selling stuff for the Atari 2600, even though we still thought the Colecovision and Vectrex were kind of cool in their own way.
* NES? Yawn. Amiga rulez. Well, ok... Sonic on the Genesis is kind of cool...
* A *Gameboy*?!? (Retch. Retch. Vomit.) They're for teenyboppers and poor kids. (pulls out Lynx)
* Sprites were invented for programming convenience.
* You mean assemblers weren't *always* two-pass?
* We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them, coloring in the squares where we wanted the pixel to be non-transparent, then added up the numbers above each row's darkened squares and added another DATA statement with 8 values separated by commas to define our custom characters.
* Unix was lame. It was like PCs, but worse, because at least PCs had primitive color and shitty games. Linux didn't become interesting until the internet and web servers made it relevant.
* When picking a foreign language to study in high school and/or college, German was the obvious choice. Spanish might have been practical, and French was the language of love, but German was the language of zer0daywar3z.
* We pissed off our parents by running a fake BBS off the family phone line for a week so we could spend more on a US Robotics HST 9600 baud modem than some of our friends paid for their first *cars*... and smile, because we were getting them for less than half price with the sysop discount.
* Every high school had at least one really, really insanely rich kid who put a car battery and rigged-up car phone in his locker his freshman year so he could act cool and call his answering machine at home between classes to check his messages. By 12th grade, it was officially forbidden by the school, and he got a detention the day his shiny new brick rang in history class.
* People around campus pointed at you, and called you "the laptop guy" because you had a 12-pound luggable in your backpack that was *almost* powerful enough to run WordPerfect for DOS without too much lag... as long as there was a power outlet nearby.
> I think that exploring space is really kind of pointless of boring compared to all > the earth based science and engineering one could do with the same amount of money.
You're forgetting the #1 reason it's important: Terrestrial asteroid impact. Right now, if a Chixilub-like asteroid hits anywhere on earth, it's likely to instantly set back human civilization and technology by AT LEAST a hundred years -- if we're lucky, and most humans aren't actually killed, and some anti-technology religious zealots don't end up in charge during the aftermath.
We'll have the benefit of knowing that things like digital audio, magnetic levitation, and antiviral/antibiotic drugs are possible, but if every semiconductor on Earth were destroyed by the EMP from a large asteroid event, it would be YEARS -- probably a decade or more -- until someone like Intel had the ability to make a 500MHz Pentium III, let alone a 3GHz quadcore i7. And that's the best, most wildly-optimistic scenario imaginable. A really bad impact event *could* conceivably send the few humans left back to the technological sophistication of the ancient Romans. Or worse. Set back food production and medical treatment far enough to kill off just about everyone older than 40 or so who survives the initial event within 5-10 years (from things people routinely survive NOW... appendicitis, pneumonia, first heart attacks, breast & testicular cancer, diabetes, etc), and massively thin out the ranks of everyone alive, period, and the seeds of civilization's rebirth might not live long enough to reboot it after the worst of the aftermath is over 5-10 years down the road. To someone born After Impact, with 95% of the Pre-Impact adult population dead, a TV and DVD player literally WOULD be magic if he or she actually saw one in operation.
Ergo, our Lunar and/or Martian insurance policy. Assuming they were able to become self-sufficient enough to survive the loss of their terrestrial supply chain, our technology would survive, and eventually make it back to Earth. Knowing human nature, they'd probably wait a hundred years, go back to "stone-age level" Earth, tell the humans they found that they're gods (possibly wearing funny masks and outfits, just to drive home the point), and enslave them... er, well, let's not dwell on that. The important thing is that with a little luck, if a "bad, but not planet-killing bad" event happened, there would hopefully be enough semiconductors and backed-up digital libraries on the Moon &/| Mars to recover within a few years.
Perfect example of death-by-patent: Trackpoint sticks below the spacebar. Your thumb is a MUCH better finger to use for manipulating a pointer stick... it's stronger, and it's a lot easier to execute fine isometric motions with it than with a hyperextended index finger. Unfortunately, Fujitsu included the below-the-spacebar position as part of its patent for a pointer, and nobody besides Sony has ever dared to risk an infringement lawsuit by putting an "IBM" Trackpoint in the "Fujitsu" position (Sony presumably has either a cross-licensing agreement, or feels safe from a lawsuit). The fact that Fujitsu's "stick" utterly sucks ass (slippery concave top, vs rubbery convex top... the exact opposite of the Trackpoint) is the icing on the cake.
Don't believe me that it's a better position? Try it sometime. Find a Thinkpad, then position your hands so your thumb is over the stick and give it a try. You'll be left cursing everyone responsible for putting the stick between "GHB" instead of below the spacebar.
> A.NET app isn't a native app anywhere, so it's a level playing field.
At least, until Intel, AMD, or somebody else adds native.CLR acceleration, kind of like ARM did with Jazelle.;-)
ARM had a bigger problem holding it back from Windows than raw speed -- RAM. It's dirt cheap on a PC, but hideously expensive on microcontrollers -- the universe where ARM dominates -- and the moment you decide to add a single byte of external RAM (SRAM, PSRAM, or otherwise) to a MCU design, you've just doubled to quadrupled the system's cost. That, more than anything, is what's killing embedded Java -- the CPU and its speed are the least of anyone's problems. You can buy a cheap ARM with enough onboard SRAM to run most embedded tasks written in C(++) or assembly for under $20 in single quantities, and slap it on a board with minimal external parts & due something useful with it.
The last time I checked, the most sinfully ram-laden ARM was made by Atmel, and had a whopping 256kB of it. That's *almost* enough memory to do something trivial in Java... except if you were doing something THAT trivial, you'd do it in C and build the hardware for $20 instead of $100. I think it's safe to say that implementing hardware CLR acceleration won't be much harder/easier OR more/less resource-demanding than hardware Java acceleration... and with Java, nothing determines the system's ultimate performance and cost more than the amount of RAM it has.
I'm sure ARM will fight a hard, valiant battle, but I think they're going to have a hard enough time fighting off x86-on-a-chip microcontrollers. I think there's already a German or Israeli company that's been showing off what's essentially a single-chip 386SX PC with a meg of RAM, VGA-ish graphics, and a reference BIOS that can make SD cards look like floppies and hard drives. Trust me... THAT more than anything scares the bejesus out of ARM, even MORESO because it's not even Intel that's pushing the embedded x86 envelope the hardest (Intel's earliest x86 patents are already expiring, and Intel ALSO happens to be one of the biggest manufacturers of ARM chips.
ARM didn't become pervasive because it was the cheapest or best... it became pervasive because it was good enough, cheap enough, and available in roughly equivalent form from multiple companies. If Atmel's factory in Singapore goes up in flames, there are dozens of other foundries making ARM chips that are roughly similar. Probably not identical, but nothing like the difference between x86 and M68k, or x86 and ARM. Multiple sources means you can get away with Just-in-Time supply-chain management, instead of having to order and stockpile chips months before you're ready to start using them.
> You're point about TVs is well taken, but remember that most TVs simply aren't in the same > size category as monitors, so there isn't much panel sharing going on.
I'd argue that's 99% of the reason why you can now get a 1920x1080 22" to 24" panel for *literally* just a few dollars more than a 17"-19" panel. A 17" panel isn't good for much BESIDES a computer display and a few ultra-niche laptops. Ditto, for most 19" panels (which are really the equivalent of a 15-17" 4:3 display when you get down to it). On the other hand, a 22-24" panel ends up being the same effective size as one of the most common sizes for low-end secondary TVs, as well as the larger-without-being-crazy end of computer displays.
Remember -- in the CRT era, computer monitors had much denser shadow masks than TV displays, so there wasn't as much potential for dual-use. You could either get a CRT with low dot pitch and bright display to use as a TV, or a CRT with a high dot pitch and dimmer display to use as a monitor. Making a non-HD CRT with higher dot pitch would have been counterproductive, because it would have looked just as blurry across the room, and would have been dimmer to boot.
In the case of TVs vs monitors, it's mainly a difference of backlighting. From what I understand, the practical limit of fluorescent/cold-cathode backlights is mainly, "How much power can you get away with drawing to light it up"? Use one that's highly efficient (but dimmer), or even LED-based, and you have a laptop display. Use one that's bright and burns power like a 500W early-90s halogen torchiere, and you have a cheap TV. Use one that falls somewhere in between, and you have a desktop monitor or small TV.
I had a VX1940w. Nice display (not counting its stuck-on green pixel in the lower right corner), until the backlight died ~3 weeks ago. It's under warranty and getting repaired/replaced and will be a birthday gift for my Dad in 2 weeks, but I had to spend almost 1/4 of its present value just to ship it back to Viewsonic. In the meantime, I bought an Acer H233H from CompUSA (a.k.a. Tiger Direct in Drag) for $179 on sale to replace it. For a 23" display that does 1920x1080, I'm pretty happy with it. I could have gotten the 24" for $229, but decided it wasn't worth an extra $50 for one additional inch and the same resolution.
As far as resolution goes, I'd have loved something like 2560x1440, but there are two factors that make it nearly impossible to buy a display with resolution higher than 1920x1080:
* TVs use 1920x1080 panels. Way more TVs get sold than PC monitors. All things equal, a panel that can be used to make EITHER a TV or a computer monitor will probably be cheaper than one that's only suitable for PC use. When it was a difference of $600 vs $750, the extra $150 was fairly easy to rationalize. When it's a difference like $199 vs $499, well... that's a big difference, and roughly the point where it becomes worthwhile to say "fuck it", buy two, and use them side by side in portrait mode.
* Single-data-rate DVI maxes out somewhere in the neighborhood of 1920x1080. I'm not sure whether 1920x1080 is slightly below its max, or pushing it slightly beyond its official max, but I know it's pretty close to the limit one way or another. Going higher means you need double data rate... which also probably means an ungodly expensive cable, and quite possibly a more expensive video card (unless you normally buy top of the line video cards).
Either way, it does kind of suck. I've always owned high-end monitors and ran resolutions that were significantly higher than the mainstream norm (1024x768@15", 1152x868 and 1280x1024 at 19"), and really do hate being stuck in the "1080 jail" like everyone else.
IMHO, half the problem lies with Windows, OS/X, and the mainstream Linux window managers... none of them have ever really come up with a good, low-drama low-ceremony way of actively managing dozens of small windows. Windows is more dysfunctional in that regard than the other two mainstream platforms... but not much. And recent incarnations of all three seem to actually be WORSE than their ugly predecessors, because they're NOW a lot pickier about precise mouse alignment for things like dragging and resizing. The visual cues keep getting smaller, and the sweet spots where you can click and have the Right Thing(tm) happen seem to be shrinking every year, too. In more than a few ways, a system with 3 portrait-mode displays side by side and a thirdparty app like MultiMon is MORE usable than a system with a single huge display of equal total resolution.
> And every bottle of anything I've ever seen that has acetameniphen in it says "Do not take in combination with alcohol".
And so does just about everything else remotely pharmaceutical in nature, regardless of whether or not it actually makes the slightest difference to the product's safety or effectiveness. Companies don't even bother to research it... the legal department makes them slap the "no alcohol" warning on whatever it is that they sell, just to give them a legal excuse if someone takes their product with alcohol and something bad happens. In the case of Tylenol, simultaneous consumption of alcohol truly IS dangerous, and can be deadly. But the fact that everything from aspirin to vitamins has a disclaimer on it somewhere warning users to not take it with alcohol has the same effect as endlessly crying "Wolf!" -- people see it, yawn, and ignore it.
Ditto, for the dosage warnings. Pick up any bottle of ibuprofen, read the stern warnings against taking more than 4 tablets in 24 hours, and laugh when you remember that prescription Motrin can exceed that total in a single DOSE. The problem is, by proclaiming limits that everyone who's ever had a kidney stone knows are complete bullshit, it cheapens and diminishes the effect of published limits that really DO matter... like the daily dosage limits for Tylenol.
Let's not forget the stern warnings against combining Tylenol with NSAIDs (like ibuprofen) on every package sold in America, despite the fact that in most other parts of the world, Tylenol (half the usual dose) + ibuprofen (normal dose) is seen as an obvious synergistic combination (the Tylenol diminishes the gastric pain caused by the ibuprofen). Plus, in the FDA's usual schizophrenic style, it's OK to combine Tylenol and ASPIRIN (good god)... as long as you ALSO include as much caffeine as two cans of Redbull. Omit the caffeine? Not approved. Substitute any other NSAID, like Naproxyn Sodium or Ibuprofen? Not approved.
Oh, the best of all... for nearly a decade before ibuprofen liquigels arrived in America, there was a secret alternative if you really needed instant liquid ibuprofen gratification: grape-flavored Children's Advil. The catch was, the FDA-mandated label tried *really hard* to make it sound like a product approved for children would somehow be deadly if consumed by anyone over the age of 12. Um, right.
> And of course, none of those analog-to-digital converter boxes can be battery powered, > so a battery-powered TV (yes, they do exist, generally in analog B&W) doesn't help....which is *precisely* why I bought a WinTV HVR-Q950: http://hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr950q.html
USB, receives both 8VSB and QAM digital OTA, is nevertheless capable of receiving NTSC & PAL (how useful that might be is open to debate, but it's there), and can even be used as a ghetto-fabulous video digitizer for composite video. It has Linux drivers, and works fine out of the box with Windows Media Center. Don't under-value the last one -- lots of USB tuner cards require proprietary apps to watch TV, which means the moment supporting the tuner ceases to be part of the company's grand strategic initiative for 3Q09, the tuner will be about as useful as a 256k flash drive, or HST 9600 baud modem once the next version of Windows comes out (seeing how basically every version of Windows since 98SE has catastrophically broken every scanner and capture card that existed 6 months prior to its release).
It's under a hundred bucks, and a 1.6GHz Netbook runs full-screen 1080i and 720p60 just fine, with 3-6 hours of battery life on a full charge. Plug a car adapter into a 12v rechargable battery (like the ones sold at Radio Shack for jumpstarting & have a cigarette lighter outlet on the side for good measure), and it'll probably last through the storm.
Not that I've given the matter much thought, of course;-)
The biggest single problem with Berne isn't the fact that copyright is automatic... it's the fact that it's automatic AND for near-eternity. The rationale for "automatic" is to protect it between the time that would otherwise elapse between creation and filing. The problem is that copyright is now effectively eternal in duration, which means everything not explicitly made public domain at some point is a likely future orphan work.
IMHO, everything should be automatically copyrighted for something like 18-30 months at creation. Beyond that, you should have to explicitly register it for an initial 25-year term, then re-register it during every 10th year for prices that double with each renewal. At some point, even "Steamboat Willie" would cost more to renew than it's worth to Disney. For everything else, if you found something worth publishing somewhere, you'd merely have to get a copy notarized and date-stamped, sit on it for the statutory initial automatic period, then do a documented diligent copyright search. If the search came up clean, it would give you an automatic defense against infringement and two options:
* cease publication & distribution immediately, and walk away owning nothing to anybody
* pay retroactive royalties at a statutory rate that would mostly be based on a percentage of revenue, and receive an automatic 1, 3, or 5 year compulsory license for the same terms (the 1-year license would have a low statutory rate, the 3 and 5 would be higher. The 1-year would enable you to clear inventory you already paid to produce; the 5-year would let you do business as usual without paying most of the money to the lawyers who'd otherwise be representing both sides.
Coupled with this would be a copyright office that maintained an online searchable archive somewhat like that of the patent office, to make it as easy as possible to do a good-faith diligent search for copyright status. In the case of things like books, it would work the way services used by college professors to detect plagiarism... you'd enter text excerpts, run a search, and see a list of likely matches with additional excerpts so you could determine whether further research was needed, or whether you just had to get the search results timestamped & digitally notarized to file away in case you needed them later.
Patents have been abused, but at least THEY eventually expire during the lifetimes of people who'll use or improve it. Enable people to pre-emptively challenge patents in court to get a public declaration that their use is non-infringing (so bullshit patents would quickly be blasted away), and the worst problems will fix themselves. Copyright law, on the other hand, is a complete clusterfuck disaster in its current state... and every "reform" since the 1970s has only made it worse (copyrighting BUILDINGS?!? Blueprints, ok... but even things like spatial layouts and conceptual floorplans? I could halfway rationalize patenting a staggeringly innovative new home layout, but granting a nearly-eternal monopoly on it is outrageous. If the same logic had been consistently applied since the 1900s, it would be infringing to build a single-family home with attached garage, 2-story foyer, and great room.
It depends on your viewpoint. Has Ubuntu saved the unwashed masses from the evil empire yet? Not really. On the other hand, I think it's safe to say that Ubuntu has become the overwhelmingly dominant distro of choice for just about any Linux use case that can be classified as "mainstream". After Red Hat kind of went astray, Mandrake went bye-bye, and Debian (brought into the limelight by Knoppix) decided that ideological purity was more important than being popular, there really WASN'T any distro that was an obvious choice to recommend by default to just about anyone interested in Linux. Gentoo? Good god. I've personally had hours of good clean & wholesome fun with it, but there's no way in *hell* I'd suggest it to my dad... or use it for anything meaningful at work in a context that could get me fired if things went disastrously wrong. Slackware? Yeah, you never forget your first... um... well, you know. But it's just a little more retro than I'd prefer now.
I'm still undecided as to whether i prefer Ubuntu or CentOS for servers, but for desktop use it's no contest whatsoever -- Ubuntu. That's not to say it's the best in every conceivable way... but it's good enough in enough ways. More importantly, it's the one distro with enough market inertia right now to have books dedicated to its specific details. Someone who's been building their own copy of KDE for 10 years probably doesn't need to know the exact directory paths on ${his-specific-distro}... but someone like... well... my dad *does* need to have it given to him in explicit detail. And frankly, even if I don't necessarily need click-by-click details anymore, having the examples in the book actually *work* DOES make things a lot nicer and more enjoyable. In fact, IMHO the "book advantage" *alone* is enough to recommend Ubuntu to just about everyone. When the day comes that they understand the Linux multiverse well enough to stray from the well-marked, illuminated and crowded path known as Ubuntu, they'll know it and be able to find their own way. Until then, Ubuntu.
> As long as you use CDMA providers like Verizon or Sprint.. > you will always be at the mercy of the hardare (and software on that hardware) > that THEY choose to let you use
Unfortunately, it's not quite that cut and dried. GSM lets you use any phone you stick your SIM in? Great... as long as you don't mind buying an $800 GPRS paperweight. AT&T's 3G network is 850MHz. T-Mobile's is 1750/2250. European 3G is 1950/2150. Unless the phone in question was explicitly designed to work on AT&T or T-Mobile, it's going to be useless for anything besides voice calls and text messages in the US. Some imported phones can't even do EDGE in the US. Will that eventually change? Hopefully. But right now, today, in mid-2009, America's two GSM operators are every bit as proprietary as Sprint and Verizon.
Making things worse is the fact that AT&T and T-Mobile's data networks basically suck at the moment, with regard to both coverage AND performance. It won't be like that forever (hopefully), and will probably be a lot better 6-18 months from now... but right now -- in mid-2009 -- they still mostly suck. Even if you're lucky enough to have decent 3G coverage in the city where you live, you're going to be suffering with EDGE or GPRS the moment you hit anyplace remotely rural.
The only companies that have anything remotely resembling high-speed wireless almost everywhere east of the Mississippi, and everywhere halfway urban west of it, are Sprint and Verizon. Of the two, Sprint is marginally less evil... but it's kind of like saying that HD-DVD was slightly less evil than Blu-Ray. Neither one supports R-UIM cards, and I have yet to hear about anyone getting a 100% foreign Chinese CDMA phone to do voice, text, AND EV-DO on Verizon (I've heard of a few who've gotten voice to work, but even text messages fail due to Verizon's nonstandard encoding). And, of course, short of somehow cloning a "real" Sprint phone's ESN to make it LOOK like a genuine Sprint phone to their network (breaking a few dozen MAJOR federal laws in the process that the FBI *does* tend to enforce rather aggressively), using a non-Sprint phone on Sprint isn't going to happen, period. (Sprint's "marginally less-evil" status comes from the fact that they don't forbid just about everything besides casual web browsing in their TOS).
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> Or Android, a platform that announced its SDK and store before the iPhone, but can mange
> to keep up with Apple nor attract similar interest from developers or users.
Let's try a fairer comparison: compare Android and iPhone 6 months after Sprint launches the (Android) Hero (October 11... 8 painfully long days to go...) and Verizon manages to cripple an iPhone enough to make its management happy. THEN it will be a fair comparison. Sprint's not the biggest, but they've got the hardest-core users. Verizon's huge, but are firm believers that "WinMo's not done 'till WiFi and the built-in GPS receiver won't run". Frankly, Verizon and Apple were made for each other.
Come next Sunday, the joy in SprintLand will make Microsoft's Win7 house parties look like calling hours at a funeral home ;-)
> (Heck, Windows has pretty much _always_ had one of the most responsive UIs.)
(grabs paper towel to wipe Diet Mountain Dew from the display... AFTER blowing as much as possible from nose once the coughing stopped)
Windows has always had one of the easiest-to-hang UIs (with the possible exception of pre-OSX MacOS and PalmOS) of any modern OS, thanks to Microsoft's retarded architectural philosophy of putting the application in charge of managing its own UI effects and redrawing itself on demand. It's why a badly-written Win32 app can't be minimized, usually can't have its window moved, might swallow its mouse pointer, and needs ctrl-alt-delete to be involuntarily killed. It allows the consequences of that braindamaged app to spread beyond the application itself, and affect the working of every OTHER running application, too.
It's why a 20+ year old Amiga running at 7.16MHz had a UI that was, in many ways, more responsive than Windows running on a 3GHz quadcore i7. Intuition (the Amiga's window manager) was completely indifferent to the state of running applications. If you clicked a close gadget, it XOR'ed the nanosecond you clicked the button, and returned to normal the moment you released it. The app itself might have crashed beyond repair 20 minutes earlier, and the gesture might achieve nothing besides the visual indication of a close-gadget click, but at least there was zero doubt in your mind that the click was made. If you saw the colors invert, and the app didn't close, you knew INSTANTLY it was hopeless, and just cycled the power. There was no "did Windows see my mouse click?" ambiguity.
Ditto, for window moves. If an app died a horrible death and froze, you could still move the window, and its contents obediently moved right along with it. The hardware didn't care... bitmap bits were bitmap bits. You could cover and uncover the window, and it looked exactly like it did before. Unlike Windows, Intuition genuinely didn't *care* whether the app was still working. It did its thing, and got out of the way. Compare that to Vista, XP, and just about everything since the invention of Active Desktop... where you might not even be able to show the Start menu for ~45 seconds if something in a web page being requested by FIREFOX (an app completely unrelated to Windows) or IE causes a fractured DNS lookup to hang Explorer's stupid, brain-damaged single-threaded name resolver that gets used for everything from DNS lookups to figuring out the meaning of "C:\" It's not *quite* as bad under SMP as it used to be with a single core/CPU... but it still happens, and it's still incredibly annoying when it does.
> First of all, do you think tetrachromats know they perceive colors differently?
Actually, yes. I read about an interview with a British woman who's believed to be a genuine tetrachromat. One thing that came up was the fact that color photographs and TV never look "right" to her. Prior to learning about tetrachromaticy, she always just thought she was "picky".
The 20-bit example is a good one. I'm actually trichromanomalous. In terms that make sense to most Slashdotters, most people with statistically normal color perception have roughly 17-bit green, 16-bit red, and 15-bit blue fidelity. I'm missing a red bit. The result is that I made it to my mid-20s before ever finding out there was officially anything wrong. Up to then, I just thought I had bad taste in colors. It turns out, my taste is as good as everyone else's... there's just a slightly wider range of reds that I think look good with a given mixture of blue and green than most. If I take a Munsell color test (the one where you have little cylinders that vary by a subtle fraction of a shade and have to be quickly arranged without scrutiny), I screw up the last two in the red-green series about 50% of the time... they both look like grayish peachy-beige. It happens because the frequency of my main red peak is slightly higher (and closer to my green peak) than 99.9% of the population's. In other words, I'm part of the group that's worse than 99.9%, but within the best 99.99%.
I'll never mistake a red traffic light for a green one, but I'm paralyzed with fear anytime I have to make decisions about color. The hardest part about remodeling my living room wasn't replacing the drywall, rewiring the entertainment wiring, or the custom moulding... it was picking the damn shades of off-white for the walls, ceiling, and trim. I agonized over it for weeks, driven by mortal fear that I'd accidentally pick a subtly brownish-beige that was too pink, or a subtly creamy-white that was too green. For subtly-anomalous trichromats, beige is a deadly minefield of potential embarrassments.
> So? Glasses to filter out all but visible light (today's visible light) should be trivial. Just like those blue & red 3D glasses.
Women believed to be tetrachromatic don't see light trichromats can't see... they recognize two variants of "green" as being different, the same way green and red are different to you. If you were genuinely tetrachromatic in the sense the women are believed to be, TV, film, photographs, and printed images would almost ALWAYS look like shit to you, because the "green" would be "wrong" in ways you couldn't really explain.
Here's an example: suppose you were a trichromat, living in a world where 94% of the population couldn't distinguish between red and green, and for all intents and purposes "yellow" was just a darker or brighter shade of red/green. Color film wouldn't be based on red, green, and blue... it would be based on blue and yellow. Your RGB monitor would be a BY monitor. To everyone else, the whole idea of "RGB" would be silly, because they could get the exact same image quality from just blue and yellow. You'd be the unfortunate person who kept babbling about there being a difference between "red" and "green", and that they were somehow different from the color everyone else knew as "yellow". Anyway, getting back to the example, a tetrachromatic woman wouldn't want RGB... she'd want RGgB, where "G" and "g" were slightly different frequencies of green. An RGB monitor to a tetrachromat would look just as artificial, fake, and bad as a Blue-Yellow monitor designed for deutranopes and protanopes would to you.
> Could you imagine being able to see halfway down the IR spectrum, or well past UV on the other end
IR might be do-able, but UV is almost structurally impossible for the human eye to meaningfully view. The spectral peak of "blue" cones is actually closer to violet than blue. If you look at a sensitivity curve for human blue cones, you'll notice that its peak is just slightly above violet, and its lower third is simply chopped off or attenuated away. The problem is the cornea -- it blocks most UV light. What the cornea doesn't block, the fluid inside the eye absorbs and scatters. There have been reports that people who've had cataract surgery are able to perceive UV as hazy, diffuse "purplish-yellow" light. The idea that something can be purple and yellow is strange, but not as crazy as it sounds when you consider that the color we call "purple" is NOTHING like spectral violet, and is actually an artifact of human vision caused by a nonlinear slope in blue sensitivity. There's a tiny area where the upper end of blue overlaps with the lower end of red, with a small ripple in blue that introduces just enough error in that region to make purple possible.
There's another problem: chromatic aberration. Ever notice that you can make a fake 3d-like pic using pure red and pure blue, so the blue parts seem to be floating in space compared to the red? That's chromatic aberration at work. The cornea can only focus light from a relatively narrow band. The lower you go, the less-focused the light would be. Similar distortion would become problematic in the infrared range, though not as quickly as at the blue end.
> The difference between then and now is that the political climate was one of "We must beat the Russians at all costs" -
> as such alot of people got to play with the frontiers of knowledge. We're at a point in history where international
> struggles don't contribute much to the space programme. Business does. We're in a recession, and the space programme
> is at the mercy of budget cuts
And that's precisely why the first human to set foot on Mars will almost certainly be planting a Chinese flag on it as his first official act. China has lots of money, and it wants international prestige so badly it hurts. It's willing to spend whatever it costs, and hurl as many ships in the general direction of Mars as it takes until one manages to make it there... and hopefully (for the astronauts involved) back.
The big question is what will happen after they finally succeed. I put the smart money on, "declare they own a small chunk of Mars, offer to recognize similar claims from anyone else who manages to get settlers there, and announce that Chinese-made space ships just like the one that got THEM there are available for sale to the highest bidders, complete with trained Chinese pilots if need be, ready to launch almost immediately after purchase."
On the other hand, there's an alternate ending that's probably more likely: Chinese astronauts will land on Mars, plant the flag, dominate the news for a few weeks, then have some catastrophic accident on the way home that causes a political backlash of risk-aversion in China (after all, its greatest national heroes would have just died). If that happens, it could easily be a hundred years or more before the next humans set foot on Mars. The moment "do it at any cost" sentiment evaporates in China, the countries then willing to do whatever it takes to get to Mars will develop other interests to pursue, instead.
Why? There's no glory in being the first loser (#2) in any race. It's why the Soviet Union didn't make the moon its #1 priority after the first Americans landed on the moon -- it was too late to be #1, and nobody was in any position to put them at risk of being #3. Without the Soviet Union nipping at its heels, the US lost interest in the moon, and nobody has been there ever since. IMHO, there will probably be human footprints on Mars, its moons, and quite possibly Venus, long before the next humans set foot on the moon. Nobody is going to spend trillions of dollars to be #2, when there are halfway-reachable places where up and coming superpowers can still win the "First There" trophy.
Plus, there's another good explanation of why enthusiasm for the Moon faded after Apollo, and anyone who's ever worked for a startup with revolutionary new product knows what I'm about to give as an example: it's a lot easier to hack something together well enough to work for a demo than it is to make something production-worthy. I can absolutely guarantee that if Apollo had gone on with the same technology much longer, there absolutely would have been fatalities at some point. Every single trip to the moon was a major dice roll, and one or two of them are well-documented as having come within milliseconds of "snake eyes". In order for the presence of Americans living on the moon to become less newsworthy than a lunar-American contestant winning American Idol, lots of really, really major (and ungodly expensive) improvements would have had to be made. The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria might have brought the first non-Scandinavian European explorers to America in relatively dinky wooden boats, but Europeans weren't moving to America en masse until steamships were safely making the trip to New York in a week or two.
> or EXT3 or another obscure Linux system that may be superior tech wise,
> it simply won't work on any non-Linux system.
Shhhh. Don't let my desktop PC find out. It runs Vista, and my terrabyte bulk data drive is formatted with ext2, mounted with ext2ifs, and Windows hasn't complained about it yet...
> Didn't A-MAX require hardware?
Officially, yes. You needed a piece of hardware whose legally-mandated role was to host a set of genuine Mac ROMs and allow them to be read into the Amiga (before A-Max itself overwrote chunks of them with its own code).
As a practical matter, no. I know lots of people who had A-Max... and I don't know a single person who actually had the hardware they were officially supposed to need in order to make it work.
From what I remember, it couldn't access the hard drive. I think it was because back then, Apple LITERALLY hardcoded the geometry of a specific Quantum SCSI hard drive into the OS, so the only viable way of making it work would have been to have bought the exact model of hard drive used in real Macs. Also, floppies were a problem... you had to format them on a real Mac using a program that basically marked the 2/3 of the disc that the Mac & Amiga drives couldn't mutually read as "bad" or "in use".
Looking back, it DOES seem crazy that they couldn't have just thunked the drive geometry with an Amiga-hosted translation layer... the only thing I can think of is that it would have taken too much ram and/or resources to work on the A500, and the idea of selling something that only worked on an A2000 or better with at least a meg of fast ram would have been unthinkable.
> Do they have UAE [amigaemulator.org] for the Iphone yet?
Uh oh... slippery slope time. The moment UAE exists, it'll be possible to launch A-MAX and go storming right into Apple's holiest sanctuary(*)
(*)For the uninitiated, A-MAX was a Macintosh emulator for the Amiga that ran some Mac software faster than a REAL Mac... conceptually, it was halfway between Xen and Wine. Nowhere near as hard as emulating a completely alien hardware platform (like the PC), but nowhere near as trivial as getting programs written for a Pet to run on a C-64. From what I remember, they basically copied MacOS into the Amiga's RAM, then overwrote its jumptable with pointers to code written for the Amiga. For example, when a Mac app wanted to display a file dialog, it ran native MacOS code up to the point where it had to render the graphics and landed on an overwritten jumptable pointer to graphics routines written for the Amiga's hardware. Program compatibility fell into two extremes: apps that used only published API calls ran almost perfectly, and apps that tried jumping directly to undocumented entry points or tried taking advantage of unofficial side effects that weren't guaranteed to work by Apple died a horrible death. As a practical matter, the main thing that broke compatibility was copy protection, and most apps that wouldn't work if you tried running legitimate copies ran flawlessly after they were cracked (the more things change... well, you know the rest... sigh...).
> Work backwards from the undisputed declining sales figures of the recording industry.
The main reason for declining sales is the fact that CD sales during the 90s were artificially boosted by people replacing records and tapes with CDs... then replacing them again when remastered CDs were released a few years later. It was a once-in-a-lifetime event for the recording industry that won't be repeated during our lifetimes.
People re-bought CDs they already owned in analog (or optimized-for-analog CDs) because they represented an epic improvement in quality by just about any meaningful standard over the analog media they replaced. Everything that's come out since CDs has only been cheaper, shittier-sounding, or intolerably-crippled by DRM.
Here's an idea for the music industry: ditch the DRM'ed formats, and roll out a music format on DVD media with 96KHz 32-bit stereo PCM. Make the discs gold-colored, call it something like "X-fi", and sell them for $24.95. You'll win on all counts -- genX'ers will go back into highschool mode and buy them to show off how rich they are and/or pretend they sound sufficiently better than 16-bit CDs to justify spending ~twice as much on them, and the fact that every disc will be ~4-8 gigabytes will serve as self-limiting DRM for the next decade or so. Just make sure they still have the MOST compelling consumer benefit intact (and reason why people who buy CDs still DO buy CDs): it's a flawless first-generation master to use for making all your "working" copies for everywhere else.
> So? A new harddisk is cheaper than a new laptop. And since you diligently maintained your backups...
Mod parent WAY up. It might be irrelevant for netbooks and cheap notebooks from Best Buy, but if you're talking about a kilobuck+ Macbook or high-end performance notebook, the hard drive isn't just one of its cheapest components... it's also one of its few components that can be easily replaced by end users, with a part that's readily-available even in small towns, often on sale, and frequently would result in improved performance over the original part. Try buying a new Thinkpad keyboard, Macbook case, or Dell motherboard at Best Buy on Sunday afternoon at some city in the midwestern US with a population of ~500k living within a fifty-mile radius. Hell, with the possible exceptions of Silicon Valley, Hong Kong, and Akihabara , I doubt whether there's anyplace you could walk into a retail store and buy stuff like that at all, let alone on a weekend.
> Copyrights are not enough. If X is the new innovative piece of code within a program, a competitor can
> buy the program, fire up a debugger, and look at the disassembled code for X. Once he understands how it
> works (reverse engineering), he can then recreate that code in a higher language, say C. Copyright does not work here.
> Then there are cases where the code is not that hard, and you can copy the idea by just looking at the end product.
> Therefore having patents is necessary.
Admittedly, this applies directly to only the US (as far as I know), but in America, patents are constitutionally justified on purely utilitarian grounds. In theory, all it would take to completely abolish many patents would be a Supreme Court ruling that one or more laws passed by Congress empowering the USPTO to act on its behalf, and the policies enacted to enforce those laws, fail to advance this purpose (and ESPECIALLY if they actively harm it).
This is in direct contract to continental Europe, where they're historically been viewed as a moral right grounded in natural law.
Plus, it's not like decompiled code would be completely without protection just because it's not a literal copy of the original program code. If you disagree, just TRY publishing a book that even vaguely involves a young sorcerer named "Harry". Or, for that matter, a rodent named 'Mickey'. Or, for a really great double-whammy from two sets of lawyers, a teenage gerbil who goes to sorcery school and plays a lacrosse-like game on flying brooms that walk and carry buckets of water in their downtime...
> is there _any_ sport requiring strength, agility, or endurance where women are competitive with men?
MMA? (Mixed Martial Arts)
I'm not aware of any female heavyweights, but in the lighter weight classes, more than a few guys have ended up tapping out and losing by submission before they knew what happened. And, more often than not, if it's a public fight, had their MMA careers extinguished as a result (intellectually, everyone knows a man and woman of equal skill in the same weight class are more or less an even match at mixed martial arts, but culturally and emotionally, few things carry more stigma than getting your ass totally kicked by a girl...
^^^ Argh. That's what rushing to do a final post before going to bed does to you. Yeah, the leftmost column was 128, not 256 (goes to cut eye holes in brown paper bag) ;-)
> "They have never used a card catalog to find a book"
Yawn. I was a UM Freshman in 1992. At that point, I think the card catalog was still there, but there were OLD, tattered signs perched on top warning that it was no longer maintained (and apparently hadn't been maintained in years). My high school library had a card catalog, but that was because it sucked. The public library downtown had greenscreen terminals since middle school.
What does having been born in 1973 imply?
* We never understood why our parents got so excited by seeing moonwalkers on TV. Men had *always* been walking on the moon.
* We didn't notice the videogame crash of 1983, because we'd all moved on and gotten Commodore 64s for Christmas anyway. Six years later, shopping for Amiga toyz, it blew our minds that there were STILL stores selling stuff for the Atari 2600, even though we still thought the Colecovision and Vectrex were kind of cool in their own way.
* NES? Yawn. Amiga rulez. Well, ok... Sonic on the Genesis is kind of cool...
* A *Gameboy*?!? (Retch. Retch. Vomit.) They're for teenyboppers and poor kids. (pulls out Lynx)
* Sprites were invented for programming convenience.
* You mean assemblers weren't *always* two-pass?
* We learned binary by drawing 8x8 grids, writing "256 | 128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1" over them, coloring in the squares where we wanted the pixel to be non-transparent, then added up the numbers above each row's darkened squares and added another DATA statement with 8 values separated by commas to define our custom characters.
* Unix was lame. It was like PCs, but worse, because at least PCs had primitive color and shitty games. Linux didn't become interesting until the internet and web servers made it relevant.
* When picking a foreign language to study in high school and/or college, German was the obvious choice. Spanish might have been practical, and French was the language of love, but German was the language of zer0daywar3z.
* We pissed off our parents by running a fake BBS off the family phone line for a week so we could spend more on a US Robotics HST 9600 baud modem than some of our friends paid for their first *cars*... and smile, because we were getting them for less than half price with the sysop discount.
* Every high school had at least one really, really insanely rich kid who put a car battery and rigged-up car phone in his locker his freshman year so he could act cool and call his answering machine at home between classes to check his messages. By 12th grade, it was officially forbidden by the school, and he got a detention the day his shiny new brick rang in history class.
* People around campus pointed at you, and called you "the laptop guy" because you had a 12-pound luggable in your backpack that was *almost* powerful enough to run WordPerfect for DOS without too much lag... as long as there was a power outlet nearby.
> I think that exploring space is really kind of pointless of boring compared to all
> the earth based science and engineering one could do with the same amount of money.
You're forgetting the #1 reason it's important: Terrestrial asteroid impact. Right now, if a Chixilub-like asteroid hits anywhere on earth, it's likely to instantly set back human civilization and technology by AT LEAST a hundred years -- if we're lucky, and most humans aren't actually killed, and some anti-technology religious zealots don't end up in charge during the aftermath.
We'll have the benefit of knowing that things like digital audio, magnetic levitation, and antiviral/antibiotic drugs are possible, but if every semiconductor on Earth were destroyed by the EMP from a large asteroid event, it would be YEARS -- probably a decade or more -- until someone like Intel had the ability to make a 500MHz Pentium III, let alone a 3GHz quadcore i7. And that's the best, most wildly-optimistic scenario imaginable. A really bad impact event *could* conceivably send the few humans left back to the technological sophistication of the ancient Romans. Or worse. Set back food production and medical treatment far enough to kill off just about everyone older than 40 or so who survives the initial event within 5-10 years (from things people routinely survive NOW... appendicitis, pneumonia, first heart attacks, breast & testicular cancer, diabetes, etc), and massively thin out the ranks of everyone alive, period, and the seeds of civilization's rebirth might not live long enough to reboot it after the worst of the aftermath is over 5-10 years down the road. To someone born After Impact, with 95% of the Pre-Impact adult population dead, a TV and DVD player literally WOULD be magic if he or she actually saw one in operation.
Ergo, our Lunar and/or Martian insurance policy. Assuming they were able to become self-sufficient enough to survive the loss of their terrestrial supply chain, our technology would survive, and eventually make it back to Earth. Knowing human nature, they'd probably wait a hundred years, go back to "stone-age level" Earth, tell the humans they found that they're gods (possibly wearing funny masks and outfits, just to drive home the point), and enslave them... er, well, let's not dwell on that. The important thing is that with a little luck, if a "bad, but not planet-killing bad" event happened, there would hopefully be enough semiconductors and backed-up digital libraries on the Moon &/| Mars to recover within a few years.
Perfect example of death-by-patent: Trackpoint sticks below the spacebar. Your thumb is a MUCH better finger to use for manipulating a pointer stick... it's stronger, and it's a lot easier to execute fine isometric motions with it than with a hyperextended index finger. Unfortunately, Fujitsu included the below-the-spacebar position as part of its patent for a pointer, and nobody besides Sony has ever dared to risk an infringement lawsuit by putting an "IBM" Trackpoint in the "Fujitsu" position (Sony presumably has either a cross-licensing agreement, or feels safe from a lawsuit). The fact that Fujitsu's "stick" utterly sucks ass (slippery concave top, vs rubbery convex top... the exact opposite of the Trackpoint) is the icing on the cake.
Don't believe me that it's a better position? Try it sometime. Find a Thinkpad, then position your hands so your thumb is over the stick and give it a try. You'll be left cursing everyone responsible for putting the stick between "GHB" instead of below the spacebar.
> A .NET app isn't a native app anywhere, so it's a level playing field.
At least, until Intel, AMD, or somebody else adds native .CLR acceleration, kind of like ARM did with Jazelle. ;-)
ARM had a bigger problem holding it back from Windows than raw speed -- RAM. It's dirt cheap on a PC, but hideously expensive on microcontrollers -- the universe where ARM dominates -- and the moment you decide to add a single byte of external RAM (SRAM, PSRAM, or otherwise) to a MCU design, you've just doubled to quadrupled the system's cost. That, more than anything, is what's killing embedded Java -- the CPU and its speed are the least of anyone's problems. You can buy a cheap ARM with enough onboard SRAM to run most embedded tasks written in C(++) or assembly for under $20 in single quantities, and slap it on a board with minimal external parts & due something useful with it.
The last time I checked, the most sinfully ram-laden ARM was made by Atmel, and had a whopping 256kB of it. That's *almost* enough memory to do something trivial in Java... except if you were doing something THAT trivial, you'd do it in C and build the hardware for $20 instead of $100. I think it's safe to say that implementing hardware CLR acceleration won't be much harder/easier OR more/less resource-demanding than hardware Java acceleration... and with Java, nothing determines the system's ultimate performance and cost more than the amount of RAM it has.
I'm sure ARM will fight a hard, valiant battle, but I think they're going to have a hard enough time fighting off x86-on-a-chip microcontrollers. I think there's already a German or Israeli company that's been showing off what's essentially a single-chip 386SX PC with a meg of RAM, VGA-ish graphics, and a reference BIOS that can make SD cards look like floppies and hard drives. Trust me... THAT more than anything scares the bejesus out of ARM, even MORESO because it's not even Intel that's pushing the embedded x86 envelope the hardest (Intel's earliest x86 patents are already expiring, and Intel ALSO happens to be one of the biggest manufacturers of ARM chips.
ARM didn't become pervasive because it was the cheapest or best... it became pervasive because it was good enough, cheap enough, and available in roughly equivalent form from multiple companies. If Atmel's factory in Singapore goes up in flames, there are dozens of other foundries making ARM chips that are roughly similar. Probably not identical, but nothing like the difference between x86 and M68k, or x86 and ARM. Multiple sources means you can get away with Just-in-Time supply-chain management, instead of having to order and stockpile chips months before you're ready to start using them.
> You're point about TVs is well taken, but remember that most TVs simply aren't in the same
> size category as monitors, so there isn't much panel sharing going on.
I'd argue that's 99% of the reason why you can now get a 1920x1080 22" to 24" panel for *literally* just a few dollars more than a 17"-19" panel. A 17" panel isn't good for much BESIDES a computer display and a few ultra-niche laptops. Ditto, for most 19" panels (which are really the equivalent of a 15-17" 4:3 display when you get down to it). On the other hand, a 22-24" panel ends up being the same effective size as one of the most common sizes for low-end secondary TVs, as well as the larger-without-being-crazy end of computer displays.
Remember -- in the CRT era, computer monitors had much denser shadow masks than TV displays, so there wasn't as much potential for dual-use. You could either get a CRT with low dot pitch and bright display to use as a TV, or a CRT with a high dot pitch and dimmer display to use as a monitor. Making a non-HD CRT with higher dot pitch would have been counterproductive, because it would have looked just as blurry across the room, and would have been dimmer to boot.
In the case of TVs vs monitors, it's mainly a difference of backlighting. From what I understand, the practical limit of fluorescent/cold-cathode backlights is mainly, "How much power can you get away with drawing to light it up"? Use one that's highly efficient (but dimmer), or even LED-based, and you have a laptop display. Use one that's bright and burns power like a 500W early-90s halogen torchiere, and you have a cheap TV. Use one that falls somewhere in between, and you have a desktop monitor or small TV.
I had a VX1940w. Nice display (not counting its stuck-on green pixel in the lower right corner), until the backlight died ~3 weeks ago. It's under warranty and getting repaired/replaced and will be a birthday gift for my Dad in 2 weeks, but I had to spend almost 1/4 of its present value just to ship it back to Viewsonic. In the meantime, I bought an Acer H233H from CompUSA (a.k.a. Tiger Direct in Drag) for $179 on sale to replace it. For a 23" display that does 1920x1080, I'm pretty happy with it. I could have gotten the 24" for $229, but decided it wasn't worth an extra $50 for one additional inch and the same resolution.
As far as resolution goes, I'd have loved something like 2560x1440, but there are two factors that make it nearly impossible to buy a display with resolution higher than 1920x1080:
* TVs use 1920x1080 panels. Way more TVs get sold than PC monitors. All things equal, a panel that can be used to make EITHER a TV or a computer monitor will probably be cheaper than one that's only suitable for PC use. When it was a difference of $600 vs $750, the extra $150 was fairly easy to rationalize. When it's a difference like $199 vs $499, well... that's a big difference, and roughly the point where it becomes worthwhile to say "fuck it", buy two, and use them side by side in portrait mode.
* Single-data-rate DVI maxes out somewhere in the neighborhood of 1920x1080. I'm not sure whether 1920x1080 is slightly below its max, or pushing it slightly beyond its official max, but I know it's pretty close to the limit one way or another. Going higher means you need double data rate... which also probably means an ungodly expensive cable, and quite possibly a more expensive video card (unless you normally buy top of the line video cards).
Either way, it does kind of suck. I've always owned high-end monitors and ran resolutions that were significantly higher than the mainstream norm (1024x768@15", 1152x868 and 1280x1024 at 19"), and really do hate being stuck in the "1080 jail" like everyone else.
IMHO, half the problem lies with Windows, OS/X, and the mainstream Linux window managers... none of them have ever really come up with a good, low-drama low-ceremony way of actively managing dozens of small windows. Windows is more dysfunctional in that regard than the other two mainstream platforms... but not much. And recent incarnations of all three seem to actually be WORSE than their ugly predecessors, because they're NOW a lot pickier about precise mouse alignment for things like dragging and resizing. The visual cues keep getting smaller, and the sweet spots where you can click and have the Right Thing(tm) happen seem to be shrinking every year, too. In more than a few ways, a system with 3 portrait-mode displays side by side and a thirdparty app like MultiMon is MORE usable than a system with a single huge display of equal total resolution.
> And every bottle of anything I've ever seen that has acetameniphen in it says "Do not take in combination with alcohol".
And so does just about everything else remotely pharmaceutical in nature, regardless of whether or not it actually makes the slightest difference to the product's safety or effectiveness. Companies don't even bother to research it... the legal department makes them slap the "no alcohol" warning on whatever it is that they sell, just to give them a legal excuse if someone takes their product with alcohol and something bad happens. In the case of Tylenol, simultaneous consumption of alcohol truly IS dangerous, and can be deadly. But the fact that everything from aspirin to vitamins has a disclaimer on it somewhere warning users to not take it with alcohol has the same effect as endlessly crying "Wolf!" -- people see it, yawn, and ignore it.
Ditto, for the dosage warnings. Pick up any bottle of ibuprofen, read the stern warnings against taking more than 4 tablets in 24 hours, and laugh when you remember that prescription Motrin can exceed that total in a single DOSE. The problem is, by proclaiming limits that everyone who's ever had a kidney stone knows are complete bullshit, it cheapens and diminishes the effect of published limits that really DO matter... like the daily dosage limits for Tylenol.
Let's not forget the stern warnings against combining Tylenol with NSAIDs (like ibuprofen) on every package sold in America, despite the fact that in most other parts of the world, Tylenol (half the usual dose) + ibuprofen (normal dose) is seen as an obvious synergistic combination (the Tylenol diminishes the gastric pain caused by the ibuprofen). Plus, in the FDA's usual schizophrenic style, it's OK to combine Tylenol and ASPIRIN (good god)... as long as you ALSO include as much caffeine as two cans of Redbull. Omit the caffeine? Not approved. Substitute any other NSAID, like Naproxyn Sodium or Ibuprofen? Not approved.
Oh, the best of all... for nearly a decade before ibuprofen liquigels arrived in America, there was a secret alternative if you really needed instant liquid ibuprofen gratification: grape-flavored Children's Advil. The catch was, the FDA-mandated label tried *really hard* to make it sound like a product approved for children would somehow be deadly if consumed by anyone over the age of 12. Um, right.
> And of course, none of those analog-to-digital converter boxes can be battery powered, ...which is *precisely* why I bought a WinTV HVR-Q950: http://hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hvr950q.html
> so a battery-powered TV (yes, they do exist, generally in analog B&W) doesn't help.
USB, receives both 8VSB and QAM digital OTA, is nevertheless capable of receiving NTSC & PAL (how useful that might be is open to debate, but it's there), and can even be used as a ghetto-fabulous video digitizer for composite video. It has Linux drivers, and works fine out of the box with Windows Media Center. Don't under-value the last one -- lots of USB tuner cards require proprietary apps to watch TV, which means the moment supporting the tuner ceases to be part of the company's grand strategic initiative for 3Q09, the tuner will be about as useful as a 256k flash drive, or HST 9600 baud modem once the next version of Windows comes out (seeing how basically every version of Windows since 98SE has catastrophically broken every scanner and capture card that existed 6 months prior to its release).
It's under a hundred bucks, and a 1.6GHz Netbook runs full-screen 1080i and 720p60 just fine, with 3-6 hours of battery life on a full charge. Plug a car adapter into a 12v rechargable battery (like the ones sold at Radio Shack for jumpstarting & have a cigarette lighter outlet on the side for good measure), and it'll probably last through the storm.
Not that I've given the matter much thought, of course ;-)
The biggest single problem with Berne isn't the fact that copyright is automatic... it's the fact that it's automatic AND for near-eternity. The rationale for "automatic" is to protect it between the time that would otherwise elapse between creation and filing. The problem is that copyright is now effectively eternal in duration, which means everything not explicitly made public domain at some point is a likely future orphan work.
IMHO, everything should be automatically copyrighted for something like 18-30 months at creation. Beyond that, you should have to explicitly register it for an initial 25-year term, then re-register it during every 10th year for prices that double with each renewal. At some point, even "Steamboat Willie" would cost more to renew than it's worth to Disney. For everything else, if you found something worth publishing somewhere, you'd merely have to get a copy notarized and date-stamped, sit on it for the statutory initial automatic period, then do a documented diligent copyright search. If the search came up clean, it would give you an automatic defense against infringement and two options:
* cease publication & distribution immediately, and walk away owning nothing to anybody
* pay retroactive royalties at a statutory rate that would mostly be based on a percentage of revenue, and receive an automatic 1, 3, or 5 year compulsory license for the same terms (the 1-year license would have a low statutory rate, the 3 and 5 would be higher. The 1-year would enable you to clear inventory you already paid to produce; the 5-year would let you do business as usual without paying most of the money to the lawyers who'd otherwise be representing both sides.
Coupled with this would be a copyright office that maintained an online searchable archive somewhat like that of the patent office, to make it as easy as possible to do a good-faith diligent search for copyright status. In the case of things like books, it would work the way services used by college professors to detect plagiarism... you'd enter text excerpts, run a search, and see a list of likely matches with additional excerpts so you could determine whether further research was needed, or whether you just had to get the search results timestamped & digitally notarized to file away in case you needed them later.
Patents have been abused, but at least THEY eventually expire during the lifetimes of people who'll use or improve it. Enable people to pre-emptively challenge patents in court to get a public declaration that their use is non-infringing (so bullshit patents would quickly be blasted away), and the worst problems will fix themselves. Copyright law, on the other hand, is a complete clusterfuck disaster in its current state... and every "reform" since the 1970s has only made it worse (copyrighting BUILDINGS?!? Blueprints, ok... but even things like spatial layouts and conceptual floorplans? I could halfway rationalize patenting a staggeringly innovative new home layout, but granting a nearly-eternal monopoly on it is outrageous. If the same logic had been consistently applied since the 1900s, it would be infringing to build a single-family home with attached garage, 2-story foyer, and great room.
It depends on your viewpoint. Has Ubuntu saved the unwashed masses from the evil empire yet? Not really. On the other hand, I think it's safe to say that Ubuntu has become the overwhelmingly dominant distro of choice for just about any Linux use case that can be classified as "mainstream". After Red Hat kind of went astray, Mandrake went bye-bye, and Debian (brought into the limelight by Knoppix) decided that ideological purity was more important than being popular, there really WASN'T any distro that was an obvious choice to recommend by default to just about anyone interested in Linux. Gentoo? Good god. I've personally had hours of good clean & wholesome fun with it, but there's no way in *hell* I'd suggest it to my dad... or use it for anything meaningful at work in a context that could get me fired if things went disastrously wrong. Slackware? Yeah, you never forget your first... um... well, you know. But it's just a little more retro than I'd prefer now.
I'm still undecided as to whether i prefer Ubuntu or CentOS for servers, but for desktop use it's no contest whatsoever -- Ubuntu. That's not to say it's the best in every conceivable way... but it's good enough in enough ways. More importantly, it's the one distro with enough market inertia right now to have books dedicated to its specific details. Someone who's been building their own copy of KDE for 10 years probably doesn't need to know the exact directory paths on ${his-specific-distro}... but someone like... well... my dad *does* need to have it given to him in explicit detail. And frankly, even if I don't necessarily need click-by-click details anymore, having the examples in the book actually *work* DOES make things a lot nicer and more enjoyable. In fact, IMHO the "book advantage" *alone* is enough to recommend Ubuntu to just about everyone. When the day comes that they understand the Linux multiverse well enough to stray from the well-marked, illuminated and crowded path known as Ubuntu, they'll know it and be able to find their own way. Until then, Ubuntu.
> As long as you use CDMA providers like Verizon or Sprint..
> you will always be at the mercy of the hardare (and software on that hardware)
> that THEY choose to let you use
Unfortunately, it's not quite that cut and dried. GSM lets you use any phone you stick your SIM in? Great... as long as you don't mind buying an $800 GPRS paperweight. AT&T's 3G network is 850MHz. T-Mobile's is 1750/2250. European 3G is 1950/2150. Unless the phone in question was explicitly designed to work on AT&T or T-Mobile, it's going to be useless for anything besides voice calls and text messages in the US. Some imported phones can't even do EDGE in the US. Will that eventually change? Hopefully. But right now, today, in mid-2009, America's two GSM operators are every bit as proprietary as Sprint and Verizon.
Making things worse is the fact that AT&T and T-Mobile's data networks basically suck at the moment, with regard to both coverage AND performance. It won't be like that forever (hopefully), and will probably be a lot better 6-18 months from now... but right now -- in mid-2009 -- they still mostly suck. Even if you're lucky enough to have decent 3G coverage in the city where you live, you're going to be suffering with EDGE or GPRS the moment you hit anyplace remotely rural.
The only companies that have anything remotely resembling high-speed wireless almost everywhere east of the Mississippi, and everywhere halfway urban west of it, are Sprint and Verizon. Of the two, Sprint is marginally less evil... but it's kind of like saying that HD-DVD was slightly less evil than Blu-Ray. Neither one supports R-UIM cards, and I have yet to hear about anyone getting a 100% foreign Chinese CDMA phone to do voice, text, AND EV-DO on Verizon (I've heard of a few who've gotten voice to work, but even text messages fail due to Verizon's nonstandard encoding). And, of course, short of somehow cloning a "real" Sprint phone's ESN to make it LOOK like a genuine Sprint phone to their network (breaking a few dozen MAJOR federal laws in the process that the FBI *does* tend to enforce rather aggressively), using a non-Sprint phone on Sprint isn't going to happen, period. (Sprint's "marginally less-evil" status comes from the fact that they don't forbid just about everything besides casual web browsing in their TOS).