This seems to be entirely for the benefit of Microsoft - their wanting to secure a regular income, with the benefits to the customer a distant second.
If Microsoft pulled an iTunes, and offered me an up-to-date version of Word and Excel for $5 a month, I'd probably be really interested, but alas, that's not anything like what they're offering.
They're not really selling software as a service, they're selling space on SMB servers and a one-click action in Office to put your data on it. Your data is what they want, since that's what YOU created and is of value to YOU, and if you use their service enough, you'll eventually have some much data and unmigratable meta-content you won't be able to move it if a better solution comes along.
The one thing MediaWiki is missing for me (I often try to roll out wikis for projects at work) is rich text editing in the browser, at least on par with writely, as well as spreadsheet integration. The fact that you can open documents on a Sharepoint server in your fat client editor and have everything magically find its way back to the cloud thingy is quite a win. Writely and Google spreadsheets are still pretty primitive, at about the level of Office 4.
Is there any OpenOffice-Mediwiki middleware out there? Seems like the perfect FOSS response to Sharepoint, something that would allow editing on the client, keep things synchronized on the cloud or whatever, announce changes through unified messaging to observers, etc etc. Apple's leopard server is supposed to have a wiki with a browser-based rich text editor (probably so their iPhone users don't feel left out), and it's also supposed to be open source, but I'm not sure that's as full-stack as Sharepoint at the moment (even if, in the end, it's the better solution for most, on account of its price).
Oh I'm fully aware of the primary metaphor. In the 1970s the Chinese were a seemingly-irreconcilable enemy, and for Bush the real enemy is the Democrats -- Bin Laden's bad, but at least he can SHOOT at him! The enemy that dwells within, daring to attack his prerogatives as military commander-in-chief, these are the one's who could cause the real damage, surely.
Hell, while they're at it, they should add a scientist general, and do the same damn thing.
Note well Virginia congressman Tom Davis at the hearing:
"It's tough trying to define where you be a team player and where you speak out, and you try to balance that every day. But we have politicians who run the government, and not scientists."
I think the main point of the hearings are, "What's the point in having these people if they're political appointees and can't generally say what they want to, anyways?" What is the role of a surgeon-general? He has a few formal duties, but if he/she isn't allowed to do health advocacy, the job is mostly a sinecure. Particularly in the current administration, who'd rather any difficult or complicated health advise be run past Tony Snow, to make sure it all jives with the current presentation of reality.
Also remember that congress had a Office of Technology Assessment, which performed a scientific advisory role for congress, and congress defunded it in 1995.
It seems like the job is faintly ludicrous if the president considers health advocacy to be political discourse. We'd be better off if scientists independently were more vocal and active in politics. So I guess I agree with you, sortof.
Only Nixon can go to China. If Kissinger goes, he'll be discredited. Only the big dog can make such a beau geste. If Bush commends the special olympics, point Bush. If Bush's lackey commends the special olympics, no point.
Because some of us, deep down, believe that with hard work, determination, and a little luck, we just might be the lucky guy stealing BILLIONS of dollars someday. I think many Americans, your correspondent not included, see such a transaction as nothing more than a prerogative of one in power. To the victor go the spoils; of course, George and Dick are certainly testing the extremes of the principle.
My understanding of it is that his treatment was a little different.
Satcher got slapped for advocating public policy, namely allowing drug addicts to exchange their used hypodermic needles for clean ones, no questions asked, at public health clinics.
Elders got slapped, and eventually fired, for advocating a certain manner of sex education, a particularly outlandish one (and quite unnecessary).
I heard Carmona on the radio yesterday, and he was told that he was forbidden from even appearing at events. He was not advocating allowing fetal stem cell research, he just wanted to hold "town hall meetings" where he explained what a fetal stem cell was, and he was still forbidden. Particularly telling, Carmona was forbidden to appear and give a speech at the Special Olympics, because doing a favor for the Special Olympics was considered unallowable, on account of the fact that the Kennedys are strong supporters of it.
It's all in his interview, and the White House doesn't deny a word of it.
The keyboard "stinks" for me. I could not type well, but I only gave it half an hour. I see a lot of frustration in my future if I get an iPhone.
But for usefulness, the five way rocker is great. I don't need a stylus anymore, once you know how to get around in all the Palm applications.
I appreciate your opinion, I just didn't find my experience to be the same. After my disappointment with the 650, I am never buying another Palm (unless they seriously change their act), ditto Nokia (the 6822 seemed like a good idea at the time).
It might be because, despite his 'level head,' he's happy to say that he's not buying one before he even begins discussing it, uses words like 'stinky', makes a bunch of criticisms based on his personal usage patterns, and pointedly makes specific criticisms of the iPhone in his cons while making only the most brief and glib observations in his pros, including repeating 'slick GUI' twice in a flip sort of way, deliberately trying to tweak Apple's ad campaign.
I guess he says "It's a show stopper for me!" as if this isn't meant to be a review, but why publish it? He clearly uses his Treo as a laptop, given all the extra shareware he's loading on it, while other users, say, people who own laptops, will probably use it more like a non-corporate blackberry (it does have push email, using open standards no less, you just need a mail server that responds to IMAP IDLE properly, or setup a yahoo account and forward through that.)
I know why he had so much trouble with the keyboard: he'd decided beforehand he didn't want it to work, and so it didn't. For what it's worth, I hated the 5-way rocker on my Treo 650, I'd constantly be accidently calling people from my pocket. I do regret not having tethering.
Everybody's so quick to throw that 'stupid' word around.
I have on more than one occasion run into code that looks like this (pseudo-code):
Array myResults = Array(); Array products = MY_FAVORITE_ORM.all_rows_for_entity('products'); for product in products { if (product.price < 2.99) { myResults.push(product); } }
This works a hell of a lot slower than a SELECT, and this is just a stupid example. You're much more likely to run into it when people are building big honking summaries: they run a ton faster if you know how to build nested SELECTS and how to GROUP by one thing and ORDER by another while further knowing the difference between an INNER JOIN and a LEFT OUTER JOIN. But a lot of people don't, so they just use the language to do the summarizing.
There are other nastier things that can happen, particularly when people try to use ORMs to do what TRIGGERS usually do, and so on.
They only put it in the first revs of the Intel Macs. This uname indicates that you're running a PowerPC Xserve, which has a very powerful copy protection system hardwired-- namely, an obscure niche IBM-manufactured game console CPU:D
"The "Trusted Platform Module," or TPM, is a computer chip embedded inside Intel-based Macs to prevent the Intel-based version of Mac OS X from running on non-Apple hardware. (during installation of Mac OS X, Mac OS X interfaces with the TPM. If Mac OS X finds that the TPM doesn't exist, Mac OS X refuses to install or run.)"
That is what their site says, but I'm able to install Tiger with store box DVDs onto computers that don't have a TPM. I'd love to see the backtrace that they used to deduce the installer was checking for the TPM, considering you have to install your own TPM driver in order to even make use of an installed one.
I believe Gruber was misinformed on the issue (first time that ever happened, surely.) My Intel Macbook and Intel Mac Pro do not have a TPM:
$ ioreg | grep tpm
$ ioreg | grep TPM
$ ioreg | grep infineon
I'm not just taking ioreg's word for it, at least in the case of the Mac Pro. I've opened it and can't find an infineon or any other unaccounted-for LPC IC.
Just because it's hard for J. Random Cracker to get an OS running on a hardware platform it's not supported on, without the source code. doesn't mean someone's lying. Further, the teardowns of the iPhone available on the internet include no mention of a trusted platform module, which is a physical artifact, not an "implementation."
(Let us not forget of course, the presence of the Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X device, whose manifestation and theory of operation remain shrouded in mystery;P)
It looks a lot like an old forth/open firmware prompt, kind of like on PowerMacs. On PowerMacs you could get a list like this when you booted while holding down some magic keys. You could even open a remote session on your open firmware if you set a server running on the target machine (this required physical access to the target machine at boot time).
If this is really what it looks like, then it's really low-level access to the hardware. OTOH, it requires physical access to the iPhone, and once you got the thing up the bootloader is likely to blow away most of the low-level environment. The real crown jewels would be decryption of the binaries on the phone, plus breaking the various validations and checksums the iphone's doing before it runs, so yous could patch them to do your evil, but that's a bigger hack.
That's not how it works. Any sinusoidal wave up to 1/2 the sampling frequency is reproduced perfectly, because samples are transformed with a sin(x)/x reconstruction filter before it hits the DAC. You never hear the steppy nature of the samples, because the waveform for any sinusoidal wave beneath the nyquist frequency can be reproduced perfectly. See Whittaker-Shannon interpolation formula on wikipedia.w
Well yes and no. If you give someone a hearing test, and send the headphones a tone at 30 kHz, no normal human will raise their hand. On the other hand, if you send them a 3 kHz tone with a 30 kHz overtone, and the overtone to their left ear is +20 deg late in phase, they're likely to say that the sound they're hearing is coming from their right side.
The CD sampling rate has to be larger than about 40 kHz to fulfill the Nyquist criterion that requires sampling at twice the maximum analog frequency, which is about 20 kHz for audio.
As many audiophiles will tell you, though humans cannot generally perceive tones above 20kHz, they are able to use high-frequency information for things like localization, and an entire high-resolution sound recording market, based on 96 and 192 kHz recording formats is built around it. The quote from the website above sort of tries to reason the 44.1 issue backwards: why didn't they just do 44.0 or (44.2 even?) if they were trying to find a sample rate that didn't convert so well? Particularly when the best analogue formats, like 30 ips 2 inch tape, can record up to 30 kHz?
Here's the story my recording engineering teachers passed down to me, accept it if you wish:
A long time ago the only way you could make a digital recording (without building a cleanroom or spending $10 grand on a 1 Gig hard drive) was to take your digital bit-stream and record it on some kind of helical video tape. Sony was the first company to sell these devices, which were basically black boxes with audio in on one side, and video out on the other; you would then take this video signal (which looks like "checkerboard" noise on a TV) and send it to a VCR to record. The best commonly-available video recording format at the time was 3/4" U-Matic.
U-Matic can record the full 525 lines of an NTSC image at (nominally) 30 frames/sec. In tests, the Sony engineers found they could squeeze about 47,040 bits into a frame. (There's some way this worked out into an integer number of bits per an integer number of lines, but I can't remember the math right now. It averages about 90 bits per line.)
So, if you have 47,040 bits per frame, you have 1,411,200 bits per second, which is 176,400 bytes/sec, which is the data rate of 44.1 kHz stereo PCM. The system also works for PAL, which only runs at 25 video frames per second, but has 625 line to record on, making up the difference.
I don't know Prince's exact arrangement at all, but I know that when an artist signs a recording deal with a label, one of the obligatory clauses makes the artist promise not to sell his music himself; deals with labels are always exclusive, and if you just sell your CDs yourself they'd consider that competing.
When I was doing more music stuff, every now and then you hear some story about a new hip-hop artist who was getting no $$$ from the label for his album due to the bulllshit deal, and was selling CD-Rs by the hundreds out of the back of his Escalade on street corners and to little shops that wouldn't ask questions. (or was that an episode of Law and Order? It was both.)
I'm not sure how this applies when you GIVE AWAY the CD, however.
It's hard to say exactly what this will all be about right now, but features of OS X 10.5 server will include:
A calendaring server built on a standards-compliant implementation of CalDAV, Including automated conflict resolution.
A directory server built on a standards-compliant implementation of LDAP, including calendar integration for scheduling conference rooms, locations, and resources.
Exchange does a bunch of other things, but these are the core things, and the OS X server implementation promises to be more standards-compliant. The big question is wether or not the iphone would be able to bind to an LDAP server for contacts (and if you'd want it to, given the available AT&T data plans), and if it would be able to synchronize its calendars from the phone, as opposed to just thru isync, allowing you to schedule resources and people through the phone.
It's a common thing where I am, since all of our systems are built for one main application (Pro Tools) that you usually use in a one-window fullscreen mode, and you do a lot of side-scrolling, thus the dock gets in the way if it's at the bottom. The left edge is a compromise, since you're trading horizontal real estate, unless you have a wide monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft pulled an iTunes, and offered me an up-to-date version of Word and Excel for $5 a month, I'd probably be really interested, but alas, that's not anything like what they're offering.
They're not really selling software as a service, they're selling space on SMB servers and a one-click action in Office to put your data on it. Your data is what they want, since that's what YOU created and is of value to YOU, and if you use their service enough, you'll eventually have some much data and unmigratable meta-content you won't be able to move it if a better solution comes along.
The one thing MediaWiki is missing for me (I often try to roll out wikis for projects at work) is rich text editing in the browser, at least on par with writely, as well as spreadsheet integration. The fact that you can open documents on a Sharepoint server in your fat client editor and have everything magically find its way back to the cloud thingy is quite a win. Writely and Google spreadsheets are still pretty primitive, at about the level of Office 4.
Is there any OpenOffice-Mediwiki middleware out there? Seems like the perfect FOSS response to Sharepoint, something that would allow editing on the client, keep things synchronized on the cloud or whatever, announce changes through unified messaging to observers, etc etc. Apple's leopard server is supposed to have a wiki with a browser-based rich text editor (probably so their iPhone users don't feel left out), and it's also supposed to be open source, but I'm not sure that's as full-stack as Sharepoint at the moment (even if, in the end, it's the better solution for most, on account of its price).
Oh I'm fully aware of the primary metaphor. In the 1970s the Chinese were a seemingly-irreconcilable enemy, and for Bush the real enemy is the Democrats -- Bin Laden's bad, but at least he can SHOOT at him! The enemy that dwells within, daring to attack his prerogatives as military commander-in-chief, these are the one's who could cause the real damage, surely.
Note well Virginia congressman Tom Davis at the hearing:
I think the main point of the hearings are, "What's the point in having these people if they're political appointees and can't generally say what they want to, anyways?" What is the role of a surgeon-general? He has a few formal duties, but if he/she isn't allowed to do health advocacy, the job is mostly a sinecure. Particularly in the current administration, who'd rather any difficult or complicated health advise be run past Tony Snow, to make sure it all jives with the current presentation of reality.
Also remember that congress had a Office of Technology Assessment, which performed a scientific advisory role for congress, and congress defunded it in 1995.
It seems like the job is faintly ludicrous if the president considers health advocacy to be political discourse. We'd be better off if scientists independently were more vocal and active in politics. So I guess I agree with you, sortof.
Only Nixon can go to China. If Kissinger goes, he'll be discredited. Only the big dog can make such a beau geste. If Bush commends the special olympics, point Bush. If Bush's lackey commends the special olympics, no point.
Because some of us, deep down, believe that with hard work, determination, and a little luck, we just might be the lucky guy stealing BILLIONS of dollars someday. I think many Americans, your correspondent not included, see such a transaction as nothing more than a prerogative of one in power. To the victor go the spoils; of course, George and Dick are certainly testing the extremes of the principle.
My understanding of it is that his treatment was a little different.
It's all in his interview, and the White House doesn't deny a word of it.
Malaria, West Nile Virus,, Dengue Fever, just to name a few.
I appreciate your opinion, I just didn't find my experience to be the same. After my disappointment with the 650, I am never buying another Palm (unless they seriously change their act), ditto Nokia (the 6822 seemed like a good idea at the time).
I don't play chess, but there are options.
It might be because, despite his 'level head,' he's happy to say that he's not buying one before he even begins discussing it, uses words like 'stinky', makes a bunch of criticisms based on his personal usage patterns, and pointedly makes specific criticisms of the iPhone in his cons while making only the most brief and glib observations in his pros, including repeating 'slick GUI' twice in a flip sort of way, deliberately trying to tweak Apple's ad campaign.
I guess he says "It's a show stopper for me!" as if this isn't meant to be a review, but why publish it? He clearly uses his Treo as a laptop, given all the extra shareware he's loading on it, while other users, say, people who own laptops, will probably use it more like a non-corporate blackberry (it does have push email, using open standards no less, you just need a mail server that responds to IMAP IDLE properly, or setup a yahoo account and forward through that.)
I know why he had so much trouble with the keyboard: he'd decided beforehand he didn't want it to work, and so it didn't. For what it's worth, I hated the 5-way rocker on my Treo 650, I'd constantly be accidently calling people from my pocket. I do regret not having tethering.
Everybody's so quick to throw that 'stupid' word around.
I have on more than one occasion run into code that looks like this (pseudo-code):
This works a hell of a lot slower than a SELECT, and this is just a stupid example. You're much more likely to run into it when people are building big honking summaries: they run a ton faster if you know how to build nested SELECTS and how to GROUP by one thing and ORDER by another while further knowing the difference between an INNER JOIN and a LEFT OUTER JOIN. But a lot of people don't, so they just use the language to do the summarizing.
There are other nastier things that can happen, particularly when people try to use ORMs to do what TRIGGERS usually do, and so on.
Hmm... C++ ... Mapping algorithms... religious war.... MFC!....
He's clearly working on Microsoft's google maps killer! =D
They only put it in the first revs of the Intel Macs. This uname indicates that you're running a PowerPC Xserve, which has a very powerful copy protection system hardwired-- namely, an obscure niche IBM-manufactured game console CPU :D
That is what their site says, but I'm able to install Tiger with store box DVDs onto computers that don't have a TPM. I'd love to see the backtrace that they used to deduce the installer was checking for the TPM, considering you have to install your own TPM driver in order to even make use of an installed one.
I believe Gruber was misinformed on the issue (first time that ever happened, surely.) My Intel Macbook and Intel Mac Pro do not have a TPM:
$ ioreg | grep tpm
$ ioreg | grep TPM
$ ioreg | grep infineon
I'm not just taking ioreg's word for it, at least in the case of the Mac Pro. I've opened it and can't find an infineon or any other unaccounted-for LPC IC.
Just because it's hard for J. Random Cracker to get an OS running on a hardware platform it's not supported on, without the source code. doesn't mean someone's lying. Further, the teardowns of the iPhone available on the internet include no mention of a trusted platform module, which is a physical artifact, not an "implementation."
(Let us not forget of course, the presence of the Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X device, whose manifestation and theory of operation remain shrouded in mystery ;P)
It looks a lot like an old forth/open firmware prompt, kind of like on PowerMacs. On PowerMacs you could get a list like this when you booted while holding down some magic keys. You could even open a remote session on your open firmware if you set a server running on the target machine (this required physical access to the target machine at boot time).
If this is really what it looks like, then it's really low-level access to the hardware. OTOH, it requires physical access to the iPhone, and once you got the thing up the bootloader is likely to blow away most of the low-level environment. The real crown jewels would be decryption of the binaries on the phone, plus breaking the various validations and checksums the iphone's doing before it runs, so yous could patch them to do your evil, but that's a bigger hack.
That's not how it works. Any sinusoidal wave up to 1/2 the sampling frequency is reproduced perfectly, because samples are transformed with a sin(x)/x reconstruction filter before it hits the DAC. You never hear the steppy nature of the samples, because the waveform for any sinusoidal wave beneath the nyquist frequency can be reproduced perfectly. See Whittaker-Shannon interpolation formula on wikipedia.w
Well yes and no. If you give someone a hearing test, and send the headphones a tone at 30 kHz, no normal human will raise their hand. On the other hand, if you send them a 3 kHz tone with a 30 kHz overtone, and the overtone to their left ear is +20 deg late in phase, they're likely to say that the sound they're hearing is coming from their right side.
As many audiophiles will tell you, though humans cannot generally perceive tones above 20kHz, they are able to use high-frequency information for things like localization, and an entire high-resolution sound recording market, based on 96 and 192 kHz recording formats is built around it. The quote from the website above sort of tries to reason the 44.1 issue backwards: why didn't they just do 44.0 or (44.2 even?) if they were trying to find a sample rate that didn't convert so well? Particularly when the best analogue formats, like 30 ips 2 inch tape, can record up to 30 kHz?
Here's the story my recording engineering teachers passed down to me, accept it if you wish:
A long time ago the only way you could make a digital recording (without building a cleanroom or spending $10 grand on a 1 Gig hard drive) was to take your digital bit-stream and record it on some kind of helical video tape. Sony was the first company to sell these devices, which were basically black boxes with audio in on one side, and video out on the other; you would then take this video signal (which looks like "checkerboard" noise on a TV) and send it to a VCR to record. The best commonly-available video recording format at the time was 3/4" U-Matic.
U-Matic can record the full 525 lines of an NTSC image at (nominally) 30 frames/sec. In tests, the Sony engineers found they could squeeze about 47,040 bits into a frame. (There's some way this worked out into an integer number of bits per an integer number of lines, but I can't remember the math right now. It averages about 90 bits per line.)
So, if you have 47,040 bits per frame, you have 1,411,200 bits per second, which is 176,400 bytes/sec, which is the data rate of 44.1 kHz stereo PCM. The system also works for PAL, which only runs at 25 video frames per second, but has 625 line to record on, making up the difference.
I think, given the length of this thread, the original posters point it proven, QED.
I own an iPhone too, you insensitive clod!
-signed, a Morlock.
I don't know Prince's exact arrangement at all, but I know that when an artist signs a recording deal with a label, one of the obligatory clauses makes the artist promise not to sell his music himself; deals with labels are always exclusive, and if you just sell your CDs yourself they'd consider that competing.
When I was doing more music stuff, every now and then you hear some story about a new hip-hop artist who was getting no $$$ from the label for his album due to the bulllshit deal, and was selling CD-Rs by the hundreds out of the back of his Escalade on street corners and to little shops that wouldn't ask questions. (or was that an episode of Law and Order? It was both.)
I'm not sure how this applies when you GIVE AWAY the CD, however.
It's hard to say exactly what this will all be about right now, but features of OS X 10.5 server will include:
Exchange does a bunch of other things, but these are the core things, and the OS X server implementation promises to be more standards-compliant. The big question is wether or not the iphone would be able to bind to an LDAP server for contacts (and if you'd want it to, given the available AT&T data plans), and if it would be able to synchronize its calendars from the phone, as opposed to just thru isync, allowing you to schedule resources and people through the phone.
GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE 01123 10021 57204 12810 92292 84613 01281 71920 88172 77182 77128 72182 81100 82127 72168 89121 DIT DIT DAH
It's a common thing where I am, since all of our systems are built for one main application (Pro Tools) that you usually use in a one-window fullscreen mode, and you do a lot of side-scrolling, thus the dock gets in the way if it's at the bottom. The left edge is a compromise, since you're trading horizontal real estate, unless you have a wide monitor.