His excuse for the seat -- which struck me as plausible -- was that he was forced to sleep in his car. What with him being near broke, and being told he couldn't stay in his mother's house.
Is it what I'd do? No. But I can see myself coming to the decision that it was a legitimate choice.
Everything he did that was "suspicious" falls into that category -- not what I'd do, but I can understand the logic behind it.
But then, like Hans, I'm weird. Geeky and nerdy, even.
Different articles. First link is about a company that can convert ethanol to gasoline. (And the advantage of that is that you don't have to buy a new car -- your existing car, which runs on gasoline and not ethanol, will still work with the new fuel.)
The fourth link is about converting cellulose (i.e., plant material) into something that seems to resemble gasoline. The 100% efficiency they're talking about isn't thermodynamic -- they're talking about doing 100% of the conversion that is possible, when they're doing 50% of it right now.
I still don't trust it; as someone above commented, with gasoline costing more than $3/gallon in the US right now, being able to do it for $2/gallon would mean they could raise as much financing as they could produce. (On the other hand: one of the reasons gasoline is so expensive in the US is because of the refineries, and this stuff would -- one presumes -- still need to be refined. And might need a different refinery, which would raise the cost even more. The article, sadly, doesn't give any significant details.)
The normal ADC NDA says the same thing, and that has never prevented anyone from distributing application source code. (One can argue that the third-party books which describe the API cover this -- but books always lag behind, and I've never seen anyone worried that they'll be sued by Apple for distributing their application source code before any third-party books describing the APIs they're using are out.)
Of course, I'm neither a lawyer nor Apple (and certainly not an Apple lawyer), so I can't speak definitively... but common sense seems to say this is a red herring.
It's not the same command set -- it's a subset of it. It's not the same interface -- it's encapsulated in different bits. It's not the same semantics -- SCSI can return a different set of errors (okay, that's partially due to it being just a subset of the commands).
IDE, FW, and USB all use slightly different subsets. And then they have their own commands on top of all of that. (E.g., FireWire does disk I/O by writing to a mailbox on the drive, which then does the I/O to the host. That is not SCSI.)
It's like saying C is the same as C++, because it's a subset with largely similar semantics.
ATAPI (aka IDE) and SATA are not SCSI... they just use a subset of the same commands. So does Firewire, by the way.
(E.g., the command for "write data at block #foo" is the same sequence of bytes in IDE and SCSI. This is roughly equivalent to building an editor that uses the vi commands for insertion and deletion, but the emacs commands for cursor movement and searching. Okay, not a great analogy, but it's short notice:).)
Having a large command-set overlap is very nice for driver writers -- it means that they don't have to learn a whole lot of new semantics, and can just crib some of the existing code they have. But the protocols involved are vastly different -- you can't just port a SCSI driver to run on IDE; you have to write an IDE driver, where the requests just happen to be the same as the SCSI ones.
(Unless you write your SCSi code that way. FreeBSD, for example, uses the umass framework to provide USB and FireWire storage functionality. But that code was written to send the requests off to be encapsulated as needed.)
Sure... SCSI gives you the ability to have more drives per controller. And if you don't have NCQ on the SATA drive, SCSI is going to be quite a bit faster (assuming roughly-equivalent data rates, of course -- not comparing SCSI-I to SATA here:)).
For most people, however, SATA is probably good enough. And USB for when they need some extra (but much slower) storage.
Server people, however still like SCSI. Even if it's Serial-Attached SCSI these days;). (But a bunch of SATA drives in a FibreChannel RAID box is still a way to go.)
What makes you think Apple didn't see it as a "shot across their bow"? Given the relationship between Google and Apple (remember who is on Apple's Board of Directors), I'm sure Apple executives were well aware of Google's plans, in quite a lot of detail.
And if Android is a success, then Apple can provide a version for the iPhone. That's a big "if," however.
And while people "are going to write good software for Android"... people are also going to write bad software for it. And even horrible and embarassing and dangerous software for it. That's the curse of an open environment -- while it's a good thing, in the long run, its also a pretty bad thing 90% of the time.
Both Android and the iPhone are different approaches to the problem, and I am glad both exist.
There isn't an "attempted copyright infringement" law, or at least I don't believe there is. (Is there a conspiracy charge that can be used?) So it's not illegal until copying actually happens. That, however, is not what the RIAA has been arguing, to various degrees of success.
The interesting thing is that -- based on my own experiences -- writing that documentation will help internally at least as much as externally.
Need to rewrite something from scratch? Now you have a specification instead of having to scour the old code. Changed the code, and the behaviour has changed? Now you have a specification you can use as a reference, or -- if you put version numbers into the protocol or file format -- modify and go forward.
Undocumented code happens most places. Being forced to document it (either by internal policy or external court order:)) is painful, but still good.
I called Feinstein's office yesterday; I asked what I needed to do to get my Senator to vote to give me retroactive immunity from breaking the law. They wouldn't answer.
I've called all my lawmakers. I've called the current top-three Presidential candidates. I've given money to the ACLU. (I've told Feinstein, Boxer, and Lofgren that I will not be giving any money to the California Democratic Party as long as Feinstein is in office.)
I don't know what else I can do. I don't know what else I have the energy to do -- time after time, any attempt to prevent this country from turning into a police state or an autocracy is beaten aside. And too often simply by elected officials simply giving up.
I think you're confused -- a "yes" vote was to amend the proposed bill to strip out retroactive immunity for the telcos. So Obama voted to uphold the rule of law, while McCain voted to allow the law to be broken without penalty. And Hillary didn't vote at all.
It's not clear from TFA whether the card they are referring to is the gift card, or the Starbuck's-branded credit card. My money (pardon the pun) is on the latter.
No, most of those are the advantages Apple can give their customers with carrier exclusivity.
What Apple gets from carrier exclusivity is the ability to get a portion of the monthly charges from the carrier. Based on reports, Apple gets a significant portion of the customer's monthly payment to AT&T (and O2 in the UK, and T-Mobile in France, and...); they would not be able to do that without the exclusivity.
Even $10/month from the customer means that Apple would be getting an additional $240 over the course of the 2-year contract; that's a pretty significant reason to continue to push for exclusivity for a while.
I don't regret my HD-DVD player or media purchases. They work for now, and by the time they stop working, either I'll be able to replace most of them, or i won't care enough. (Right now, if Heroes comes out on BR, I'll probably buy that to replace the HD-DVD version; when my HD-DVD player dies, I'll also replace the Planet Earth set with the BR version, because it's the prettiest thing I have in high-def.)
I never particularly cared about the "format war"; I figured that BR would probably win, but it'd take a bit longer. Now, though, I'm expecting it to be dead by June. Ah well. Poor Toshiba.
The part that caught my eye was: no non-Netflix videos are allowed?
The site is slashdotted already, so I can't look at it. And I don't use Netflix at all... can someone confirm that? It seems remarkably unlikely. (But, then, so do a lot of things related to DRM:).)
While not commenting on the "feature" in question -- one thing that.Mac does give you, that you didn't list, is the "Back to My Mac" feature for 10.5. This is actually pretty nice: I can (barring firewalls in the way:)) connect to my Mac at home while I'm elsewhere, both for file-sharing and screen-sharing.
You also get iChat encryption for.Mac accounts. But there are other clients to do this -- the BtMM thing is very impressive. (Remember, it works through NAT. Most of the time, anyway.:))
I can't guess for anyone whether that's worth $99/year... but when you need it, it is pretty nice to have.
I'm not sure how to look at my iDisk from a web browser, so I am not sure what's going on with that. I'm still looking, however.
FW800 is backwards compatible with FW400. The connector, however, is not.
This is a good thing, because the FW800 connector will be the same one used for FW3200 (or whatever it ends up being called:)).
You can, however, get an adapter pretty easily and cheaply. This will allow your FW800 device to plug into your FW400 chain (and run at 400Mbits/sec)... or your FW400 device to plug into your FW800 chain (and, while it will run at 400Mbits/sec, your FW800 devices will still be able to run at 800Mbits/sec!).
You can also run FW800 over Cat5 cable, and there are small, plastic, optical cables available for it. (The auto industry uses FW quite a bit -- or did, anyway, I'm not sure if they're still using it. The real-time capabilities were very important to htem.)
One of the big advantages FW has over USB is that a device can request, and get, a specific bandwidth. So, for example, a video camera can say, "I need to have 19mbits/sec." And if it can, then it'll get that -- and nothing on the bus will be able to take it away until it releases it.
When doing real-time applications such as video, this is pretty important.
I've got a drive with USB 2.0, FW400, FW800, and eSATA connectors. (It's a LaCie "quadra," if anyone is interested.)
In terms of performance, that's pretty much the order, there -- USB is slow, despite it's claims of 480mbits/sec. FW800 and eSATA get me about 85MBytes/sec reading from the raw device; writing appears to be a bit slower, but that was going through the filesystem, so I'll do another test on a drive I don't mind wiping out:).
As with SCSI, the big advantage the faster FW speeds have is that you can have multiple devices chained. So you can have six or seven disks on the chain, and not worry about running out of bandwidth. eSATA doesn't give me that advantage.
It's a bit of reading between the lines. Wikipedia has some links to press releases about Comedy Central shows becoming unionized; the story (based on various comments made over the years, sorry I don't have a hard reference) seems to be that Stewart's conract with Comedy Central was up, and the multiple networks were trying to woo him. CC couldn't afford the cash others were offering, so Stewart and his production company got other concessions, including allowing the writers to join the union.
It's apocryphal, but does match the public actions and comments by Stewart and company. (And this includes CC, who does seem to be going up on the coolness scale:).)
Apples and oranges. First, South Park isn't a union show, so the WGA has no impact on it. (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are, because Jon Stewart was in a superior negotiation position a few years ago, and that was one of his demands.)
Second, if there's no advertising, and the episode isn't paid for by the viewer... the WGA's current demands would still mean they get nothing in this case. It would be "promoational," and, unlike what the major networks are doing, truly seems to be.
The problem the WGA has, which is certainly reasonable, is when a network claims a showing is "promotional," but they've sold advertising for it. So the network makes money, but the writers (and -- I believe -- actors, and director) don't get anything for it.
For situations where the user pays (e.g., buying from iTunes), the writers currently do get paid, I believe on the same scale that they do for DVDs.
I bought the dvd the day it came out
on
Futurama Returns!
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I was rather disappointed with it. It had some funny moments, for sure, but for the most part, we were bored. Maybe we had too-high expectations (Godfellas is my favourite episode, and we'd just watched it on Cartoon Network), but it was just... enh. Not really bad, but not particularly good. Not something that would make me want to bring the series back from the dead.
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His excuse for the seat -- which struck me as plausible -- was that he was forced to sleep in his car. What with him being near broke, and being told he couldn't stay in his mother's house.
Is it what I'd do? No. But I can see myself coming to the decision that it was a legitimate choice.
Everything he did that was "suspicious" falls into that category -- not what I'd do, but I can understand the logic behind it.
But then, like Hans, I'm weird. Geeky and nerdy, even.
Different articles. First link is about a company that can convert ethanol to gasoline. (And the advantage of that is that you don't have to buy a new car -- your existing car, which runs on gasoline and not ethanol, will still work with the new fuel.)
The fourth link is about converting cellulose (i.e., plant material) into something that seems to resemble gasoline. The 100% efficiency they're talking about isn't thermodynamic -- they're talking about doing 100% of the conversion that is possible, when they're doing 50% of it right now.
I still don't trust it; as someone above commented, with gasoline costing more than $3/gallon in the US right now, being able to do it for $2/gallon would mean they could raise as much financing as they could produce. (On the other hand: one of the reasons gasoline is so expensive in the US is because of the refineries, and this stuff would -- one presumes -- still need to be refined. And might need a different refinery, which would raise the cost even more. The article, sadly, doesn't give any significant details.)
It's amazing how many things are 5-10 years away.
I found the patent via a Mac rumour site.
The main point of difference appears to be the touch screen, but I admit I'm not great at reading patents.
Note that this is also just a patent application; it hasn't been granted yet.
The normal ADC NDA says the same thing, and that has never prevented anyone from distributing application source code. (One can argue that the third-party books which describe the API cover this -- but books always lag behind, and I've never seen anyone worried that they'll be sued by Apple for distributing their application source code before any third-party books describing the APIs they're using are out.)
Of course, I'm neither a lawyer nor Apple (and certainly not an Apple lawyer), so I can't speak definitively... but common sense seems to say this is a red herring.
It's not the same command set -- it's a subset of it. It's not the same interface -- it's encapsulated in different bits. It's not the same semantics -- SCSI can return a different set of errors (okay, that's partially due to it being just a subset of the commands).
IDE, FW, and USB all use slightly different subsets. And then they have their own commands on top of all of that. (E.g., FireWire does disk I/O by writing to a mailbox on the drive, which then does the I/O to the host. That is not SCSI.)
It's like saying C is the same as C++, because it's a subset with largely similar semantics.
ATAPI (aka IDE) and SATA are not SCSI... they just use a subset of the same commands. So does Firewire, by the way.
(E.g., the command for "write data at block #foo" is the same sequence of bytes in IDE and SCSI. This is roughly equivalent to building an editor that uses the vi commands for insertion and deletion, but the emacs commands for cursor movement and searching. Okay, not a great analogy, but it's short notice :).)
Having a large command-set overlap is very nice for driver writers -- it means that they don't have to learn a whole lot of new semantics, and can just crib some of the existing code they have. But the protocols involved are vastly different -- you can't just port a SCSI driver to run on IDE; you have to write an IDE driver, where the requests just happen to be the same as the SCSI ones.
(Unless you write your SCSi code that way. FreeBSD, for example, uses the umass framework to provide USB and FireWire storage functionality. But that code was written to send the requests off to be encapsulated as needed.)
Sure... SCSI gives you the ability to have more drives per controller. And if you don't have NCQ on the SATA drive, SCSI is going to be quite a bit faster (assuming roughly-equivalent data rates, of course -- not comparing SCSI-I to SATA here :)).
For most people, however, SATA is probably good enough. And USB for when they need some extra (but much slower) storage.
Server people, however still like SCSI. Even if it's Serial-Attached SCSI these days ;). (But a bunch of SATA drives in a FibreChannel RAID box is still a way to go.)
What makes you think Apple didn't see it as a "shot across their bow"? Given the relationship between Google and Apple (remember who is on Apple's Board of Directors), I'm sure Apple executives were well aware of Google's plans, in quite a lot of detail.
And if Android is a success, then Apple can provide a version for the iPhone. That's a big "if," however.
And while people "are going to write good software for Android"... people are also going to write bad software for it. And even horrible and embarassing and dangerous software for it. That's the curse of an open environment -- while it's a good thing, in the long run, its also a pretty bad thing 90% of the time.
Both Android and the iPhone are different approaches to the problem, and I am glad both exist.
There isn't an "attempted copyright infringement" law, or at least I don't believe there is. (Is there a conspiracy charge that can be used?) So it's not illegal until copying actually happens. That, however, is not what the RIAA has been arguing, to various degrees of success.
The interesting thing is that -- based on my own experiences -- writing that documentation will help internally at least as much as externally.
Need to rewrite something from scratch? Now you have a specification instead of having to scour the old code. Changed the code, and the behaviour has changed? Now you have a specification you can use as a reference, or -- if you put version numbers into the protocol or file format -- modify and go forward.
Undocumented code happens most places. Being forced to document it (either by internal policy or external court order :)) is painful, but still good.
The correct word is "hypothesis." Until it gets tested, and then it can be a theory.
(Obviously, we need a commercial-length, musical, animated short that explains how a hypothesis becomes a theory.)
I called Feinstein's office yesterday; I asked what I needed to do to get my Senator to vote to give me retroactive immunity from breaking the law. They wouldn't answer.
I've called all my lawmakers. I've called the current top-three Presidential candidates. I've given money to the ACLU. (I've told Feinstein, Boxer, and Lofgren that I will not be giving any money to the California Democratic Party as long as Feinstein is in office.)
I don't know what else I can do. I don't know what else I have the energy to do -- time after time, any attempt to prevent this country from turning into a police state or an autocracy is beaten aside. And too often simply by elected officials simply giving up.
What else should I do be doing?
I think you're confused -- a "yes" vote was to amend the proposed bill to strip out retroactive immunity for the telcos. So Obama voted to uphold the rule of law, while McCain voted to allow the law to be broken without penalty. And Hillary didn't vote at all.
My apologies if I misunderstood your comment.
It's not clear from TFA whether the card they are referring to is the gift card, or the Starbuck's-branded credit card. My money (pardon the pun) is on the latter.
No, most of those are the advantages Apple can give their customers with carrier exclusivity.
What Apple gets from carrier exclusivity is the ability to get a portion of the monthly charges from the carrier. Based on reports, Apple gets a significant portion of the customer's monthly payment to AT&T (and O2 in the UK, and T-Mobile in France, and ...); they would not be able to do that without the exclusivity.
Even $10/month from the customer means that Apple would be getting an additional $240 over the course of the 2-year contract; that's a pretty significant reason to continue to push for exclusivity for a while.
I'm lucky -- I was able to afford both.
I don't regret my HD-DVD player or media purchases. They work for now, and by the time they stop working, either I'll be able to replace most of them, or i won't care enough. (Right now, if Heroes comes out on BR, I'll probably buy that to replace the HD-DVD version; when my HD-DVD player dies, I'll also replace the Planet Earth set with the BR version, because it's the prettiest thing I have in high-def.)
I never particularly cared about the "format war"; I figured that BR would probably win, but it'd take a bit longer. Now, though, I'm expecting it to be dead by June. Ah well. Poor Toshiba.
Ah.... Thank you very much. That explains it pretty well.
The part that caught my eye was: no non-Netflix videos are allowed?
The site is slashdotted already, so I can't look at it. And I don't use Netflix at all... can someone confirm that? It seems remarkably unlikely. (But, then, so do a lot of things related to DRM :).)
While not commenting on the "feature" in question -- one thing that .Mac does give you, that you didn't list, is the "Back to My Mac" feature for 10.5. This is actually pretty nice: I can (barring firewalls in the way :)) connect to my Mac at home while I'm elsewhere, both for file-sharing and screen-sharing.
You also get iChat encryption for .Mac accounts. But there are other clients to do this -- the BtMM thing is very impressive. (Remember, it works through NAT. Most of the time, anyway. :))
I can't guess for anyone whether that's worth $99/year... but when you need it, it is pretty nice to have.
I'm not sure how to look at my iDisk from a web browser, so I am not sure what's going on with that. I'm still looking, however.
FW800 is backwards compatible with FW400. The connector, however, is not.
This is a good thing, because the FW800 connector will be the same one used for FW3200 (or whatever it ends up being called :)).
You can, however, get an adapter pretty easily and cheaply. This will allow your FW800 device to plug into your FW400 chain (and run at 400Mbits/sec)... or your FW400 device to plug into your FW800 chain (and, while it will run at 400Mbits/sec, your FW800 devices will still be able to run at 800Mbits/sec!).
You can also run FW800 over Cat5 cable, and there are small, plastic, optical cables available for it. (The auto industry uses FW quite a bit -- or did, anyway, I'm not sure if they're still using it. The real-time capabilities were very important to htem.)
One of the big advantages FW has over USB is that a device can request, and get, a specific bandwidth. So, for example, a video camera can say, "I need to have 19mbits/sec." And if it can, then it'll get that -- and nothing on the bus will be able to take it away until it releases it.
When doing real-time applications such as video, this is pretty important.
I've got a drive with USB 2.0, FW400, FW800, and eSATA connectors. (It's a LaCie "quadra," if anyone is interested.)
In terms of performance, that's pretty much the order, there -- USB is slow, despite it's claims of 480mbits/sec. FW800 and eSATA get me about 85MBytes/sec reading from the raw device; writing appears to be a bit slower, but that was going through the filesystem, so I'll do another test on a drive I don't mind wiping out :).
As with SCSI, the big advantage the faster FW speeds have is that you can have multiple devices chained. So you can have six or seven disks on the chain, and not worry about running out of bandwidth. eSATA doesn't give me that advantage.
It's a bit of reading between the lines. Wikipedia has some links to press releases about Comedy Central shows becoming unionized; the story (based on various comments made over the years, sorry I don't have a hard reference) seems to be that Stewart's conract with Comedy Central was up, and the multiple networks were trying to woo him. CC couldn't afford the cash others were offering, so Stewart and his production company got other concessions, including allowing the writers to join the union.
It's apocryphal, but does match the public actions and comments by Stewart and company. (And this includes CC, who does seem to be going up on the coolness scale :).)
Apples and oranges. First, South Park isn't a union show, so the WGA has no impact on it. (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are, because Jon Stewart was in a superior negotiation position a few years ago, and that was one of his demands.)
Second, if there's no advertising, and the episode isn't paid for by the viewer... the WGA's current demands would still mean they get nothing in this case. It would be "promoational," and, unlike what the major networks are doing, truly seems to be.
The problem the WGA has, which is certainly reasonable, is when a network claims a showing is "promotional," but they've sold advertising for it. So the network makes money, but the writers (and -- I believe -- actors, and director) don't get anything for it.
For situations where the user pays (e.g., buying from iTunes), the writers currently do get paid, I believe on the same scale that they do for DVDs.
I was rather disappointed with it. It had some funny moments, for sure, but for the most part, we were bored. Maybe we had too-high expectations (Godfellas is my favourite episode, and we'd just watched it on Cartoon Network), but it was just... enh. Not really bad, but not particularly good. Not something that would make me want to bring the series back from the dead.