Apple has not dropped OpenFireware at this point, they have simply not included it in the development boxes that are going out to Select and Premiere developers.
They have openly said that they are evaluating what they will do, and that their developer base was very much against using BIOS, and so they were looking at OpenFireware and EFI (Intel's competitor to OF that actually does much more).
To recap: nothing has been decided yet for the the boxes that will arrive a year from now. All the documentation and quotes you have heard are referring to the developer boxes, which it has been explicitly stated will be different from the final boxes.
Not in this case. The hardware to decode H.264 has not made it into video cards yet, although there have been a few announcements that it will. For the moment the decode part of this is completely software based.
Oh... and hardware based solutions often have severe restrictions (only at certain sizes, etc).
Boy am I glad that the schools in my area didn't do something similar... after all most of the research and development into the technologies behind advanced paper products (think feminine hygiene products) was done within 30 miles or so. Paper Chemistry was in the job title for about half my friends' fathers.
Rent the series. They will probably give a bit of the back story to get people going (especially since they seem to be expanding on River's... the fighting girl... backstory). The serie's creator said this this movie will take place about 6 months after the series left off.
The series is really worth watching, and I would recommend it even if the stories overlapped. I say that as a person who never saw an episode on TV, but watched it first through NetFlix, and then bought the DVDs.
And I wonder if in the run-up to the movie if the shows from the already completed series will make it back onto TV?
Sadly I did not see any evidence of the classic look from FireFly specifically:
the color scheme is very "cool" (color temprature... more blue), verses the much warmer scheme used in the series (more like the pallet from a western)
the series was famous for making special effect shots look like they were done with a hand-help camera: out of focus objects coming into focus, wild panning across the frame as if someone was trying to track with a moving object (rather than the perfect framing that is common), the point of view shaking with the "engine noise", etc..
many more close-ups of the actors. The series usually tried to keep groups in frame.
I hope that the preview is not representative of the final work we will see in September in this regard... I liked those aspects of the series. In any case... I will be there.
There is no such thing as "standard raw". "raw" is only a naming convention. Similarities between "raw" formats produced by different companies (or even different models) are purely coincidental.
So... since you are proposing that the Bible is the ultimate arbiter of what is right... then the clearest laws should be the 10 commandments, yes? So...
only Judeo-Christian-Muslim religions are allowed (first commandment... and there are good arguments saying that only Judaism qualifies, since the latter two put others in front of God)
You can't have a crucifix with the image of Jesus (since he is somewhat God... commandment 2)
People should be arrested for saying "Oh God" (third commandment)
Working on either Friday or Saturday (dependent)... that is punishable by what, stoning? (fourth commandment)
Didn't listen to your mother and take out the garbage... well time to go to jail (fifth)
murder, adultery, and stealing... ok, we have the middle as a civil offense, but these we are close on... (sixth, seventh, and eigth)
no lying/false accusations... well there goes politics... (ninth)
don't keep up with the Joneses... ok, we are in big trouble here
Ok... my scorecard says we are 3/10. Now if you are looking to live in such a society, I can recommend Iran... since they clearly recognize all 10, as do several other muslim states in that area.
Now, more realistically, many laws are similar all over because in order to have a working society there are a lot of things you simply have to forbid (murder, stealing, etc). These things are necessary for a society... that they happen to be "right" is secondary.
But, even as an atheist/agnostic (and a heterosexual), I recognize that some things are "rights", and that there is a "right/wrong" concept that is universal. What I will strongly disagree with is that a person's sexual preference (and the natural acting upon that) is "wrong". And I even more strongly object to the religious right's assertion that they have the authority to pronounce judgment on that.
To back up that last statement you can look to the Bible itself. In it God declares that only he can judge people. Also, if you look at the German translation (remember, this is all coming out of original ancient Greek writings about sermons delivered in ancient Aramaic) of the second commandment, you will get the idea that God did not want anyone presuming to know what he wanted/proporting to be his mouthpiece. Granted this does not work well with the Catholic Church and it's Pope(s)... (Russian and Greek Orthodoxes)
Your post was in response to a posting about Canada's constitution preventing the "discriminates against gay/lesbians", and was in a thread all about bin in Washington state about discrimination against the same group. Your post clearly implied that you felt that either of these could border on "turn[ing] from protecting the minority to submitting to them". Thus my reasoned reply.
Notice that I gave my reasons for my thinking, and that I did not resort to calling people names. Neither of which did you observe. My tone also was not ranting... but yours definitely is.
You asked a "REAL" question, I gave you a real reply, and you responded with a personal attack. Want to try that again?
How exactly is granting groups the same rights as others "submitting to them"? The original story is about a law that just prevents discrimination in things like hiring on the basis of sexual preference. No matter how I twist it, I can't come up with a reasonable viewpoint where that is a minority dominating the majority.
Now on a broader view there have been a number of arguments that movement like the ones to have homosexual civil unions or marriages are infringing on the beliefs of others who want to keep marriage "sacred". I have a hard time understanding this as in no case I am aware of are heterosexual unions being discouraged or altered in any way, they are just loosing their status as "the only".
On the other hand, the (inheritors of the) Christian Coalition is definitely trying to push their views that only heterosexual relationships are OK, and they are trying to do so through the law. Now I don't feel I have any legal right to challenge what is taught in churches, the same way that I don't feel that there is any legal right out there for people to challenge what goes on in people's bedrooms (murder, abuse, etc... not included).
On the specific subject of marrige, I have yet to hear a reasoned argument about why a homosexual couple should not be allowed to marry that does not base itself on one of three grounds: [list] [*]religious grounds (God said so... and it says so in only this one sentence of this translation of the Bible). [*]tradition (this is more often than not really the first one in disguise) [*]it would encourage the "homosexual lifestyle": promiscuity, sexual orgies, drugs, and usually vague other bad things (clearly unmarried heterosexuals don't do that... and wouldn't marriage/commitment tend to settle people down, even assuming that this was a valid stereotype in the fist place?... oh, and another disguise for the first one) [/list]
I have never seen a homosexual activist try and force someone into becoming a homosexual, but the reverse is commonly not true.... So... whom is trampling on who's rights?
Is that a decent answer?
PS... you have no legal rights to try and force the general culture to change, or not to change. The whole idea of the bill of rights was to keep this majority culture from crushing other opinions. A group is currently trying to use the law system to keep the culture from changing. We saw this same exact scenario when black and white people started marrying... with the exact same arguments and process (first it went bad, then it slowly got better).
Actually, no. The word "corporations" comes from the legal idea that the company is incorporated (made into a body) that is a legal entity/person. That whole process definitely is dependent on the existence of a government.
And if you examine US history a little closer you will discover that all of Columbus's voyages, and all of the original colonies where chartered businesses with writs from their respective monarchs empowering them to form a company to sail across the Atlantic. At that point there was the concept of a company charter: a document from the government (monarch) giving a reason why the company was created and setting terms for it's disbandment when the specific task was complete. Corporations still have charters, but they are now an anachronistic holdover.
As a kid my parents used to have a subscription and so I grew up reading the 'Monitor. There was a format change, and my parents didn't have the time, so there was a long period where I didn't read it at all.
Recently though, I happened on a quoting of an article somewhere and read one of their online issues. The next day I got myself a daily subscription to the dead tree edition (mailed to you) and am very happy with the decision. The articles are very well written (very rarely taken from Reuters or the AP), and always very careful about their bias (very unlike most media). And the reporters take the time to understand all of the issues, and don't just repeat the most sensational sound bytes from each side in order to be "balanced".
Despite being associated with a somewhat fringe church, their reporting is excelent and comprehensive. They do tend to take a non-the-world-is-going-to-end view on things, and there is one clearly marked article that has to do with "Christian Science" (the Curch of Christ, Scientist... wikipedia has a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_scienc e]good article[/url]), but that is sometimes also interesting.
I say this as a agnostic/atheist. Don't let the name dissuade you from what is probably the best weekday newspaper in the US (the New York Times would also be in the running, but is too much for me). Read one of the PDF papers that they will give you as a trial from their site, or check out some of the articles there.
The options were probably already figured into the price, and there was no evidence of the shuffles causing a decrease in earnings... margins in that area were up.
The real reason that things fell was the tradition that on good news Apple's stock goes down. This is bordering on a truism, and humorously in the past when the numbers were bad the stock went up initially.
I agree with you on FireFly, we can just hope that the move that is due out in September (Serenity) will re-ignite the TV series. But the fundamental flaw in FireFly was that the dialog an plots were too thoughtful. There is a chance that the darkness of Battlestar Galactica will allow the networks to give it a second chance though.
The information pages explicitly say that Java 1.4.2 will be shipping with 10.4 out of the gate. There have been rumors that 1.5/5/Tiger is being heavily worked on, and ther was even a rumor of a limited beta test, but no official word.
Interestingly, the info pages also mention that a lot of work has gone into speeding up the graphics on Java applications. This should be very good news, as that is the one slow aspect of Java on MacOS X.
Just to keep this on some bedrock of reality: This is not censorship. No-one is limiting your right to read or express yourself, what they are doing is limiting the protocols that are traveling though their (not yours... theirs) network. While you and I may disagree that this is the right course of action, it is not a morally or legally wrong course of action.
They are not limiting your freedoms, just your usage of their property. You do not have a right to access anything though their network, it is a privilege that they can choose to grant or not to grant.
Notice that he builds what people want to buy... not what they might think or say they want to buy... but what they actually want. That is the trick here.
Actually, they already have this. It is a nice grey bezel box that overlays the contents of the (now frozen) screen with messages in a number of languages telling you that you now need to restart your computer. If things really go pear shaped you also get kernel error messages marching down the left side of the screen in white letters with black block background.
But people don't see these messages often, they usually mean something is wrong with hardware (most often memory).
Just to rephrase the last part of your statement: The latest Pentium IV processors have such extremely long pipelines that "bubbles" in the flow cause huge performance penalties. Hyperthreading is an attempt to kill this penalty by allowing the processor to do unrelated work during this bubble, rather than effectively sitting idle during that time.
The G5 does have the longest pipeline of any PowerPC processor, but it is still short enough that "bubbles" are rarer and not the enormous penalty that they are on the Pentium. Therefore Hyperthreading is neither needed, nor would it be beneficial.
Saying that the G5 is not designed to benefit from pipelining is misleading.
I think there is some real room for Google to offer a new service, or rather to provide a high-profile better-interfaced offering just like they did with gmail. Namely I could see them offering WebDAV-based iCal (the format) hosting with a web interface. That way people using Apple's iCal and Mozilla's calendaring applications would have a place to publish their calendars to...
Apple does this with.Mac, so there is precedent, but there is a lot of room for improvements. And google can be a lot higher profile than.Mac. And with iCal rumored to have bi-directional syncing in 10.4 and Sunbird's ability to do some of that, the time is just about ripe for this type of service.
There is the little problem of how to make it pay for itself, but google seems to be very creative about how to use this sort of information for marketing purposes, and if they allowed people to link in commercial calendars (for example your favorite TV programs new shows, or the local rock climbing club, etc...) I could see this being a very viable advertising targeting tool.
Sadly the VPN part of 10.3 Server is really bad. Almost no documentation, and things don't actually do what you think they should do. I even spent a lot of time on the phone to Apple Support and (at least at the time) they had no documentation themselves (although there was a rumor of something in the pipe at the time... I was supposed to get a copy).
The $470 price is probably for volume purchases, and Apple does have some really nice setups for volume purchases for education institutions (remember the Apple Store for Eduction is for individual purchase, not institution buys). I would imaging that the 5 pack (or whatever Apple is doing these days) is a better price to educational institutions.
As an aside, back in the "gumdrop" iMac days the education channel was annoyed that the 5pack of iMacs had to be purchased with all 5 colors. I was working for a school that had red as our color, and we really wanted 5 packs of red iMacs, and we eve discussed opening them up to put school decals on the inside of the translucent case.
I am not sure about the CPU busses, but I know that DDR does not send multiple instructions per data cycle (in the example 200Mhz), but only allows for data that is ready to be transmitted on the other end of the cycle. Notice that this is data only! While the second bit of data is really nice, it is not nearly the same speed as a truly doubled clock rate. Of course it also does not have the RF penalties that that frequency would have either. It is an engineering tradeoff.
I would guess that the CPU busses have similar limitations, but have no real knowledge to back that up.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... you think that information might actually be in the article? Well, this is slashdot so that certainly doesn't matter....
Apple has not dropped OpenFireware at this point, they have simply not included it in the development boxes that are going out to Select and Premiere developers.
They have openly said that they are evaluating what they will do, and that their developer base was very much against using BIOS, and so they were looking at OpenFireware and EFI (Intel's competitor to OF that actually does much more).
To recap: nothing has been decided yet for the the boxes that will arrive a year from now. All the documentation and quotes you have heard are referring to the developer boxes, which it has been explicitly stated will be different from the final boxes.
Not in this case. The hardware to decode H.264 has not made it into video cards yet, although there have been a few announcements that it will. For the moment the decode part of this is completely software based.
Oh... and hardware based solutions often have severe restrictions (only at certain sizes, etc).
Boy am I glad that the schools in my area didn't do something similar... after all most of the research and development into the technologies behind advanced paper products (think feminine hygiene products) was done within 30 miles or so. Paper Chemistry was in the job title for about half my friends' fathers.
Rent the series. They will probably give a bit of the back story to get people going (especially since they seem to be expanding on River's... the fighting girl... backstory). The serie's creator said this this movie will take place about 6 months after the series left off.
The series is really worth watching, and I would recommend it even if the stories overlapped. I say that as a person who never saw an episode on TV, but watched it first through NetFlix, and then bought the DVDs.
And I wonder if in the run-up to the movie if the shows from the already completed series will make it back onto TV?
- the color scheme is very "cool" (color temprature... more blue), verses the much warmer scheme used in the series (more like the pallet from a western)
- the series was famous for making special effect shots look like they were done with a hand-help camera: out of focus objects coming into focus, wild panning across the frame as if someone was trying to track with a moving object (rather than the perfect framing that is common), the point of view shaking with the "engine noise", etc..
- many more close-ups of the actors. The series usually tried to keep groups in frame.
I hope that the preview is not representative of the final work we will see in September in this regard... I liked those aspects of the series. In any case... I will be there.There is no such thing as "standard raw". "raw" is only a naming convention. Similarities between "raw" formats produced by different companies (or even different models) are purely coincidental.
Ok... my scorecard says we are 3/10. Now if you are looking to live in such a society, I can recommend Iran... since they clearly recognize all 10, as do several other muslim states in that area.
Now, more realistically, many laws are similar all over because in order to have a working society there are a lot of things you simply have to forbid (murder, stealing, etc). These things are necessary for a society... that they happen to be "right" is secondary.
But, even as an atheist/agnostic (and a heterosexual), I recognize that some things are "rights", and that there is a "right/wrong" concept that is universal. What I will strongly disagree with is that a person's sexual preference (and the natural acting upon that) is "wrong". And I even more strongly object to the religious right's assertion that they have the authority to pronounce judgment on that.
To back up that last statement you can look to the Bible itself. In it God declares that only he can judge people. Also, if you look at the German translation (remember, this is all coming out of original ancient Greek writings about sermons delivered in ancient Aramaic) of the second commandment, you will get the idea that God did not want anyone presuming to know what he wanted/proporting to be his mouthpiece. Granted this does not work well with the Catholic Church and it's Pope(s)... (Russian and Greek Orthodoxes)
Your post was in response to a posting about Canada's constitution preventing the "discriminates against gay/lesbians", and was in a thread all about bin in Washington state about discrimination against the same group. Your post clearly implied that you felt that either of these could border on "turn[ing] from protecting the minority to submitting to them". Thus my reasoned reply.
Notice that I gave my reasons for my thinking, and that I did not resort to calling people names. Neither of which did you observe. My tone also was not ranting... but yours definitely is.
You asked a "REAL" question, I gave you a real reply, and you responded with a personal attack. Want to try that again?
PS... "party propaganda"? That one was funny....
*dooh*... wrong markup... *sigh*
How exactly is granting groups the same rights as others "submitting to them"? The original story is about a law that just prevents discrimination in things like hiring on the basis of sexual preference. No matter how I twist it, I can't come up with a reasonable viewpoint where that is a minority dominating the majority.
Now on a broader view there have been a number of arguments that movement like the ones to have homosexual civil unions or marriages are infringing on the beliefs of others who want to keep marriage "sacred". I have a hard time understanding this as in no case I am aware of are heterosexual unions being discouraged or altered in any way, they are just loosing their status as "the only".
On the other hand, the (inheritors of the) Christian Coalition is definitely trying to push their views that only heterosexual relationships are OK, and they are trying to do so through the law. Now I don't feel I have any legal right to challenge what is taught in churches, the same way that I don't feel that there is any legal right out there for people to challenge what goes on in people's bedrooms (murder, abuse, etc... not included).
On the specific subject of marrige, I have yet to hear a reasoned argument about why a homosexual couple should not be allowed to marry that does not base itself on one of three grounds:
[list]
[*]religious grounds (God said so... and it says so in only this one sentence of this translation of the Bible).
[*]tradition (this is more often than not really the first one in disguise)
[*]it would encourage the "homosexual lifestyle": promiscuity, sexual orgies, drugs, and usually vague other bad things (clearly unmarried heterosexuals don't do that... and wouldn't marriage/commitment tend to settle people down, even assuming that this was a valid stereotype in the fist place?... oh, and another disguise for the first one)
[/list]
I have never seen a homosexual activist try and force someone into becoming a homosexual, but the reverse is commonly not true.... So... whom is trampling on who's rights?
Is that a decent answer?
PS... you have no legal rights to try and force the general culture to change, or not to change. The whole idea of the bill of rights was to keep this majority culture from crushing other opinions. A group is currently trying to use the law system to keep the culture from changing. We saw this same exact scenario when black and white people started marrying... with the exact same arguments and process (first it went bad, then it slowly got better).
Actually, no. The word "corporations" comes from the legal idea that the company is incorporated (made into a body) that is a legal entity/person. That whole process definitely is dependent on the existence of a government.
And if you examine US history a little closer you will discover that all of Columbus's voyages, and all of the original colonies where chartered businesses with writs from their respective monarchs empowering them to form a company to sail across the Atlantic. At that point there was the concept of a company charter: a document from the government (monarch) giving a reason why the company was created and setting terms for it's disbandment when the specific task was complete. Corporations still have charters, but they are now an anachronistic holdover.
As a kid my parents used to have a subscription and so I grew up reading the 'Monitor. There was a format change, and my parents didn't have the time, so there was a long period where I didn't read it at all.
c e]good article[/url]), but that is sometimes also interesting.
Recently though, I happened on a quoting of an article somewhere and read one of their online issues. The next day I got myself a daily subscription to the dead tree edition (mailed to you) and am very happy with the decision. The articles are very well written (very rarely taken from Reuters or the AP), and always very careful about their bias (very unlike most media). And the reporters take the time to understand all of the issues, and don't just repeat the most sensational sound bytes from each side in order to be "balanced".
Despite being associated with a somewhat fringe church, their reporting is excelent and comprehensive. They do tend to take a non-the-world-is-going-to-end view on things, and there is one clearly marked article that has to do with "Christian Science" (the Curch of Christ, Scientist... wikipedia has a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_scien
I say this as a agnostic/atheist. Don't let the name dissuade you from what is probably the best weekday newspaper in the US (the New York Times would also be in the running, but is too much for me). Read one of the PDF papers that they will give you as a trial from their site, or check out some of the articles there.
Ya... that whole lack of Christmas in March thing really hurts the sales figures...
The options were probably already figured into the price, and there was no evidence of the shuffles causing a decrease in earnings... margins in that area were up.
The real reason that things fell was the tradition that on good news Apple's stock goes down. This is bordering on a truism, and humorously in the past when the numbers were bad the stock went up initially.
I agree with you on FireFly, we can just hope that the move that is due out in September (Serenity) will re-ignite the TV series. But the fundamental flaw in FireFly was that the dialog an plots were too thoughtful. There is a chance that the darkness of Battlestar Galactica will allow the networks to give it a second chance though.
The information pages explicitly say that Java 1.4.2 will be shipping with 10.4 out of the gate. There have been rumors that 1.5/5/Tiger is being heavily worked on, and ther was even a rumor of a limited beta test, but no official word.
Interestingly, the info pages also mention that a lot of work has gone into speeding up the graphics on Java applications. This should be very good news, as that is the one slow aspect of Java on MacOS X.
Just to keep this on some bedrock of reality: This is not censorship. No-one is limiting your right to read or express yourself, what they are doing is limiting the protocols that are traveling though their (not yours... theirs) network. While you and I may disagree that this is the right course of action, it is not a morally or legally wrong course of action.
They are not limiting your freedoms, just your usage of their property. You do not have a right to access anything though their network, it is a privilege that they can choose to grant or not to grant.
Notice that he builds what people want to buy... not what they might think or say they want to buy... but what they actually want. That is the trick here.
Actually, they already have this. It is a nice grey bezel box that overlays the contents of the (now frozen) screen with messages in a number of languages telling you that you now need to restart your computer. If things really go pear shaped you also get kernel error messages marching down the left side of the screen in white letters with black block background.
But people don't see these messages often, they usually mean something is wrong with hardware (most often memory).
Just to rephrase the last part of your statement: The latest Pentium IV processors have such extremely long pipelines that "bubbles" in the flow cause huge performance penalties. Hyperthreading is an attempt to kill this penalty by allowing the processor to do unrelated work during this bubble, rather than effectively sitting idle during that time.
The G5 does have the longest pipeline of any PowerPC processor, but it is still short enough that "bubbles" are rarer and not the enormous penalty that they are on the Pentium. Therefore Hyperthreading is neither needed, nor would it be beneficial.
Saying that the G5 is not designed to benefit from pipelining is misleading.
I think there is some real room for Google to offer a new service, or rather to provide a high-profile better-interfaced offering just like they did with gmail. Namely I could see them offering WebDAV-based iCal (the format) hosting with a web interface. That way people using Apple's iCal and Mozilla's calendaring applications would have a place to publish their calendars to...
.Mac, so there is precedent, but there is a lot of room for improvements. And google can be a lot higher profile than .Mac. And with iCal rumored to have bi-directional syncing in 10.4 and Sunbird's ability to do some of that, the time is just about ripe for this type of service.
Apple does this with
There is the little problem of how to make it pay for itself, but google seems to be very creative about how to use this sort of information for marketing purposes, and if they allowed people to link in commercial calendars (for example your favorite TV programs new shows, or the local rock climbing club, etc...) I could see this being a very viable advertising targeting tool.
Sadly the VPN part of 10.3 Server is really bad. Almost no documentation, and things don't actually do what you think they should do. I even spent a lot of time on the phone to Apple Support and (at least at the time) they had no documentation themselves (although there was a rumor of something in the pipe at the time... I was supposed to get a copy).
I wound up going for an external box.
I do have hopes for 10.4 Server....
The $470 price is probably for volume purchases, and Apple does have some really nice setups for volume purchases for education institutions (remember the Apple Store for Eduction is for individual purchase, not institution buys). I would imaging that the 5 pack (or whatever Apple is doing these days) is a better price to educational institutions.
As an aside, back in the "gumdrop" iMac days the education channel was annoyed that the 5pack of iMacs had to be purchased with all 5 colors. I was working for a school that had red as our color, and we really wanted 5 packs of red iMacs, and we eve discussed opening them up to put school decals on the inside of the translucent case.
I am not sure about the CPU busses, but I know that DDR does not send multiple instructions per data cycle (in the example 200Mhz), but only allows for data that is ready to be transmitted on the other end of the cycle. Notice that this is data only! While the second bit of data is really nice, it is not nearly the same speed as a truly doubled clock rate. Of course it also does not have the RF penalties that that frequency would have either. It is an engineering tradeoff.
I would guess that the CPU busses have similar limitations, but have no real knowledge to back that up.