Thank God, that someone has seen the light and banned this genetic monsters. I think it's wrong to genetically alter any living being since it is not our place to decide what a species should or shouldn't do.
I hope that you are already boycotting other "genetic monsters" created by older methods of genetic engineering (selective breeding of spontaneous mutants that would normally die or fail to reproduce). These include corn, lima beans, bananas and plantains, virtually all identified breeds of dogs and cats, many ornamental fish, milk from dairy cows, most grains, etc., etc.
It kind of irks me that the person who coins a word gets more credit than a person who talked about the actual process--nearly thirty years prior.
Drexler has always been at pains to credit Feynman; indeed, he cites Feynman in the letter exchange referred to in the article. I can remember ever seeing a general article on the subject that did not begin with Feynman. On the other hand, despite being an early visionary, Feynman never really pursued the serious development of nanotechnology. It remains to be seen whether Drexler's contributions to the field will be more substantive than Feynman's, but at minimum he deserves credit for reviving interest in the subject at a time when the technology is mature enough to make some real progress. Even Smalley credits Drexler for getting him interested, even though he doesn't buy the rest of Drexler's vision of the future of nanotech.
For example, NBC has adjusted the schedule of their Thursday lineup [pvrblog.com] by a minute or two so the Season Passes won't work. (For example, if you have a Season Pass for "ER" which starts at 9:58p, then TiVo will not automatically record "CSI" which runs from 9p-10p.)
It's a dangerous game. NBC is implicitly betting that "ER" is so highly valued by viewers than not only all other shows in its (nominal) time slot, but also all other shows in the preceding time slot. That's a lot of weight to put on a shown in its umteenth season. A lot of TiVo owners will respond by simply downgrading ER's priority below whatever shows are in the 9-10 slot.
Not too simple indeed, since I run Mac OS X 10.1.5 and there is no application called "Directory Access".
Yes, perhaps they'll eventually come out with an advisory for the people who are lagging two generations behind on their OS version and who are on untrusted networks. Not too surprising that they dealt with the bulk of current users first.
It's very complicated. You run Directory Access and a window comes up with a series of checkboxes. Then you have to uncheck the ones Apple says to uncheck.
This problem is rather simple... Operating systems such as Windows and MacOS X (don't troll me with Darwin) are commonly developed inside corporate environments, and a direct connection to the internet rather than a firewalled lan is the exception, rather than the rule.
Neither is it much concern to the typical home user who either connects directly to DSL or cable modem, or at worst uses his own short-range WiFi with some level of security. Currently, it is mainly a concern for traveling businessmen who take their WiFi equipped laptops to Starbucks or a convention center and connect from there. It will probably become more of an issue as such semi-public WiFi nodes become more common.
Your capitalist point of view is too simplistic. The economical sustainability of an industry is completely irrelevant to its ethical implications or whether or not someone is exploited. Just take a look at the meat industry, or any of the industries which uses underpayed workers in the third world (bordering to slavery sometimes) to see that economics and ethics have nothing to do with each other.
However, true slave labor aside, even when such employment is "exploitive" (in the sense that most of the profits go to management middlemen rather than workers, or in the sense that other people elsewhere are paid much better to do the same thing), in a capitalistic system such work virtually always improves the economic conditions of the workers. That's why people choose to do the work--because they are better off doing it and getting paid a pittance than not doing it and getting paid nothing. Conversely, those who seek to end "exploitation" for "ethical" reasons usually end up worsening the economic conditions of the formerly "exploited" workers.
Somebody who was honestly concerned about exploitation of garment or sex workers would not be trying to abolish their trade, but rather working to improve working conditions for those in that industry. It is a safe bet that what workers in foreign garment factories want is not for Westerners to stop buying their products (thereby throwing them out of work), but rather for their employers to be pressured to provide improved working conditions--shorter hours, better wages and benefits, job security and retraining. In other words, the same things that workers in every other industry want, but keeping in mind that demanding true parity with Western labor standards is just another way of throwing them out of work.
You can't have a system that allows a voter to verify their vote in such a way that they can't take a photo of the ballot, reciept or whatever is there?
This system does exactly that. The voter can verify in th polling booth that the ballot reads correctly before they pull it apart and turn half of it over to be shredded. Both halves are "munged" so that they can only be read in combination. Separately, each half constitutes a coded receipt that can be used to verify that the vote was counted, but not to determine what it was.
My personal opinion, however, is that those who aren't prepared to stand for their vote might as well not get one anyway though. "I'm for freedom, as long as I don't have to do anything."
So if you aren't brave enough to run the risk of being targetted by the death squads who might be going around torturing and murdering guys who voted from the wrong candidate, you don't deserve to have your vote counted? We tend to think of civilized coercion like an employer checking your vote, but there has been worse in our own history. A system must be robust enough to handle the worst case.
I appreciate the thought the author put into the idea, but why the need to make something as simple as a multiple-choice questionnaire into a massive computer technology festival anyway? Simple optical technology to quickly count such things has existed and been used by schools since the 1970s, and is now cheap and proven.
Unfortunately, mere counting is the easiest part of the problem. How do you verify that the machine is correctly recording the counts? How do you verify that all of the counts from all of the machines are included in the final tally? And how do you detect the occasional malfunctioning optical counter? How do you deal with voter error, such as imperfectly marked ballots?
I'd appreciate a two-copy printed receipt though, so when I put my ballot in and it goes bleep-bleep, I could confirm that it recorded what I voted and I could put one receipt in a box for confirmation if there's a dispute, and take the other with me.
And what happens if outside the polling station is your employer, or somebody who paid you to vote a particular way, who demands to see your receipt? This scheme provides a receipt that you can use to verify your vote was counted, but nobody else can use (even with your cooperation) to verify that you voted in a particular way.
Apple should have had a fix for this sooner or at least issued a Knowledgebase article
Looks like Apple didn't want to publicize it themselves, since they waited until the exploit was published to issue a KnowledgeBase advisory. (Basically, it just says to turn off LDAP in Directory Access if you are on an untrusted network).
NetInfo is the standard method used with OSX Server to associate a user with a home folder on a server. However, one does not necessarily have to use DHCP to locate the server. It is also possible to specify a particular server by IP address.
It is not acceptible design for a device with a part that will wear out during the useful life of the device not having that part serviceable.
Nevertheless, this is fairly routine with products containing rechargeable batteries. The instructions for my Norelco electric razor (which probably cost as much as a low-end iPod) includes a procedure for "safe disposal" of the rechargeable batteries, and explicitly states that the batteries cannot be replaced. Many other such products have batteries that are technically replaceable (by an authorized service center, not the consumer), but for which the cost of replacement is so high that it usually makes more sense to replace the product.
Oh, you are talking about the Applesoft shape tables. Those were basically useless for animated games, because Applesoft was just too slow. Hardly any games used Applesoft, except for some early turn-based adventure-type and strategy games (I think one of the first games in the Ultima series used Applesoft).
As much as I am an Apple fan (I have no less than six Apple IIs in my basement at the moment), the Apple II's graphics paled in comparison to the C64's.
Yes, later home computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga and the Atari 800 made game programming much easier, as they provided hardware sprites, background scrolling, and simple sound synthesizers, all of which had to be implemented in software on the Apple II. For an Apple II game to be monitoring an analog joystick, playing a recognizable tune, and moving multiple "sprites" around on the screen was a real tour de force of assembly language programming.
You're right about the speaker, but the Apple II could not, in strictest terms, handle sprites. That is to say, there was no way to create a shape that could be drawn to the hi-res screen independently of the background. "Shape tables" had to either be XOR'ed with the background or overwrite it completely.
"Sprite engines" for the Apple II were implemented entirely in software. Because there was no way to rapidly write an arbitrary sprite to the screen at an arbitrary bit position independent of byte boundaries (not to mention the Apple II's awkward pixel position dependent color scheme) sprites had to be stored as tables of pre-shifted bitmaps (these are the "shape tables" you mention) for every possible position within a byte. Fortunately, another one of the strengths of the 6502 was very fast table lookup. Early games used an XOR scheme, which allowed the background to be restored by rewriting the same sprite, but produced ugly artifacts where colors overlapped. Later games used buffers to restore the background. Add-on hardware sprite boards never penetrated significantly into the market, and were not widely used by games.
They were around, but never as influential as the Apple II or the TRS-80. The PET was attractively priced, but was hurt by its calculator style "chiclet" keys. When I was trying to decide on my first PC, the contenders in my price range (excluding some impressive but expensive hobbyist systems) were the Apple II+, the PET, the TRS-80, and the Exidy Sorcerer (I think the Sinclair was also available, although I did not seriously consider it). I ended up with the Apple because I wanted to write a scientific graphic program, and only the Apple offered true bit mapped graphics.
Yes, I remember laboriously loading Flight Simulator into my Apple II+ from cassette. It ran in wire-frame graphics at maybe 10 fps or so, but was an amazing achievement for its time and hardware.
Re:TRS-80 Z-80 chip far superior to the Apple 6502
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A 6502 at 1 Mhz could at least control a floppydrive
And this was the feature that made it possible for the Apple II to have a low-cost floppy drive. Steve Wozniak designed a "dumb" floppy controller, using only a handful of chips, that worked by using the Apple II's cpu as the controller. The fact that the cpu directly read individual bits off the floppy and controlled the floppy hardware at a low level made possible some truly baroque copy-protection schemes.
The Apple II was also the only PC of its time to offer a true bit mapped "color" display--another of Wozniak's innovations. Every other PC of the time had only character-mapped graphics. This feature made the Apple the game machine of its era, although as with the floppy drive, everything from sprite movement to the individual cycles of the speaker had to be controlled directly by the cpu.
From what I understand, you CAN'T even try to run newer Mac software on older Mac hardware. It's the way Apple does things
No, this isn't true at all. I have ancient beige G3's running Jaguar (they won't run Panther, but that is still a long run). Every Mac subsequent to those (basically, everything since Apple introduced the USB port) runs all current software
He said to search for complaints in the Apple Support section. The only place to find user complaints in Apple Support is the Discussion section.
In general, this is a very useful area to search if you are having problems. Problems--and often solutions--frequently show up here well before being officially acknowledged by Apple (not casting blame here; Apple needs to be sure before they speak up). For example, the problem with the ethernet connections in 10.2.8 for dual-450 G4's was diagnosed, and a fix provided, the same day the upgrade was released.
Did even one of those myriad people who bounce around enough while jogging to skip the read head ever report damage to the hard drive? No?
Do you know that they haven't? Considering that such an event would typically be described by most users simply as "My iPod quit working"? I've certainly heard of iPods failing. Do you know for a fact that none of those failures were due to head crashes?
In the Apple discussion groups, my search on "jogging" yielded 85 messages, most of which seemed to be from people complaining about the iPod skipping, freezing, or resetting when they were jogging (or in one case, just running on a treadmill). And the author of the article explicitly said that he did not know whether jogging could damage the hard disk, but he worried about it, given the speed of disk rotation. It does seem like a reasonable concern, especially if routine jogging (at least for some people) jars the unit so badly that it has trouble reading the data. After all, a hard disk's head has to ride very close to the disk surface. If it can be jarred badly enough so that it can't read, is a head crash really out of the question?
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I hope that you are already boycotting other "genetic monsters" created by older methods of genetic engineering (selective breeding of spontaneous mutants that would normally die or fail to reproduce). These include corn, lima beans, bananas and plantains, virtually all identified breeds of dogs and cats, many ornamental fish, milk from dairy cows, most grains, etc., etc.
Drexler has always been at pains to credit Feynman; indeed, he cites Feynman in the letter exchange referred to in the article. I can remember ever seeing a general article on the subject that did not begin with Feynman. On the other hand, despite being an early visionary, Feynman never really pursued the serious development of nanotechnology. It remains to be seen whether Drexler's contributions to the field will be more substantive than Feynman's, but at minimum he deserves credit for reviving interest in the subject at a time when the technology is mature enough to make some real progress. Even Smalley credits Drexler for getting him interested, even though he doesn't buy the rest of Drexler's vision of the future of nanotech.
Yes, perhaps they'll eventually come out with an advisory for the people who are lagging two generations behind on their OS version and who are on untrusted networks. Not too surprising that they dealt with the bulk of current users first.
Somebody who was honestly concerned about exploitation of garment or sex workers would not be trying to abolish their trade, but rather working to improve working conditions for those in that industry. It is a safe bet that what workers in foreign garment factories want is not for Westerners to stop buying their products (thereby throwing them out of work), but rather for their employers to be pressured to provide improved working conditions--shorter hours, better wages and benefits, job security and retraining. In other words, the same things that workers in every other industry want, but keeping in mind that demanding true parity with Western labor standards is just another way of throwing them out of work.
This system does exactly that. The voter can verify in th polling booth that the ballot reads correctly before they pull it apart and turn half of it over to be shredded. Both halves are "munged" so that they can only be read in combination. Separately, each half constitutes a coded receipt that can be used to verify that the vote was counted, but not to determine what it was.
Apple should have had a fix for this sooner or at least issued a Knowledgebase article
Looks like Apple didn't want to publicize it themselves, since they waited until the exploit was published to issue a
KnowledgeBase advisory. (Basically, it just says to turn off LDAP in Directory Access if you are on an untrusted network).
NetInfo is the standard method used with OSX Server to associate a user with a home folder on a server. However, one does not necessarily have to use DHCP to locate the server. It is also possible to specify a particular server by IP address.
Yes, all we have to go on is Apple's past record of continuing to provide security fixes for previous versions of OS X and OS 9.
Nevertheless, this is fairly routine with products containing rechargeable batteries. The instructions for my Norelco electric razor (which probably cost as much as a low-end iPod) includes a procedure for "safe disposal" of the rechargeable batteries, and explicitly states that the batteries cannot be replaced. Many other such products have batteries that are technically replaceable (by an authorized service center, not the consumer), but for which the cost of replacement is so high that it usually makes more sense to replace the product.
Oh, you are talking about the Applesoft shape tables. Those were basically useless for animated games, because Applesoft was just too slow. Hardly any games used Applesoft, except for some early turn-based adventure-type and strategy games (I think one of the first games in the Ultima series used Applesoft).
As much as I am an Apple fan (I have no less than six Apple IIs in my basement at the moment), the Apple II's graphics paled in comparison to the C64's.
Yes, later home computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga and the Atari 800 made game programming much easier, as they provided hardware sprites, background scrolling, and simple sound synthesizers, all of which had to be implemented in software on the Apple II. For an Apple II game to be monitoring an analog joystick, playing a recognizable tune, and moving multiple "sprites" around on the screen was a real tour de force of assembly language programming.
"Sprite engines" for the Apple II were implemented entirely in software. Because there was no way to rapidly write an arbitrary sprite to the screen at an arbitrary bit position independent of byte boundaries (not to mention the Apple II's awkward pixel position dependent color scheme) sprites had to be stored as tables of pre-shifted bitmaps (these are the "shape tables" you mention) for every possible position within a byte. Fortunately, another one of the strengths of the 6502 was very fast table lookup. Early games used an XOR scheme, which allowed the background to be restored by rewriting the same sprite, but produced ugly artifacts where colors overlapped. Later games used buffers to restore the background. Add-on hardware sprite boards never penetrated significantly into the market, and were not widely used by games.
They were around, but never as influential as the Apple II or the TRS-80. The PET was attractively priced, but was hurt by its calculator style "chiclet" keys. When I was trying to decide on my first PC, the contenders in my price range (excluding some impressive but expensive hobbyist systems) were the Apple II+, the PET, the TRS-80, and the Exidy Sorcerer (I think the Sinclair was also available, although I did not seriously consider it). I ended up with the Apple because I wanted to write a scientific graphic program, and only the Apple offered true bit mapped graphics.
Yes, I remember laboriously loading Flight Simulator into my Apple II+ from cassette. It ran in wire-frame graphics at maybe 10 fps or so, but was an amazing achievement for its time and hardware.
And this was the feature that made it possible for the Apple II to have a low-cost floppy drive. Steve Wozniak designed a "dumb" floppy controller, using only a handful of chips, that worked by using the Apple II's cpu as the controller. The fact that the cpu directly read individual bits off the floppy and controlled the floppy hardware at a low level made possible some truly baroque copy-protection schemes.
The Apple II was also the only PC of its time to offer a true bit mapped "color" display--another of Wozniak's innovations. Every other PC of the time had only character-mapped graphics. This feature made the Apple the game machine of its era, although as with the floppy drive, everything from sprite movement to the individual cycles of the speaker had to be controlled directly by the cpu.
No, this isn't true at all. I have ancient beige G3's running Jaguar (they won't run Panther, but that is still a long run). Every Mac subsequent to those (basically, everything since Apple introduced the USB port) runs all current software
I refer you to the lengthy thread in the Apple Discussion Groups, entitled,
"Does anyone NOT have problems while jogging?"
In general, this is a very useful area to search if you are having problems. Problems--and often solutions--frequently show up here well before being officially acknowledged by Apple (not casting blame here; Apple needs to be sure before they speak up). For example, the problem with the ethernet connections in 10.2.8 for dual-450 G4's was diagnosed, and a fix provided, the same day the upgrade was released.
Do you know that they haven't? Considering that such an event would typically be described by most users simply as "My iPod quit working"? I've certainly heard of iPods failing. Do you know for a fact that none of those failures were due to head crashes?
Pure FUD, nothing more.
In the Apple discussion groups, my search on "jogging" yielded 85 messages, most of which seemed to be from people complaining about the iPod skipping, freezing, or resetting when they were jogging (or in one case, just running on a treadmill). And the author of the article explicitly said that he did not know whether jogging could damage the hard disk, but he worried about it, given the speed of disk rotation. It does seem like a reasonable concern, especially if routine jogging (at least for some people) jars the unit so badly that it has trouble reading the data. After all, a hard disk's head has to ride very close to the disk surface. If it can be jarred badly enough so that it can't read, is a head crash really out of the question?