I can understand if Apple doesn't want to let go of OS X like that, because they after all sell a lot of hardware this way, but isn't AmigaOS 4 is in such a horribly sorry state that Amiga Inc would only win on having it support other hardware platforms better? Yes, of course. That is if they were ever interested in making OS4 a profitable (or at least financially self-sustainable) product. It is clear that this was never their intention.
AInc had no interest in OS4, i.e. a continuation of the "classic" AmigaOS. Instead they believed it to be possible to live off simply owning the brand Amiga, and having it applied to games for mobile phones and a renamed version of Tao's "Intent" (also dead now, BTW).
Then came Hyperion, a small company that ported old Windows games to AmigaOS, MacOS and Linux, and nagged at AInc to get permission to make OS4. So far, so good. Unfortunately, they also brought along a hardware vendor, Eyetech, in the deal. OS4 had been reduced to a means for a shady computer dealer to resell outdated and dysfunctional $500 "Teron" motherboards for $900 with a new "AmigaOne" sticker to a tiny group of ignorant trademark fanatics.
AmigaOS was killed there and then (2002). They've had nearly 6 years to re-negotiate a new distribution scheme for OS4, one that doesn't include an unnecessary "hardware partner", but they've chosen not to do this. Neither did the following death of PowerPC (on the desktop, at least) seem to affect their perception of reality. The losses and ensuing lawsuits and bickering between these "AmigaOne Partners" is just sweet poetic justice. It's a bit sad that Eyetech got away from their "AmigaOne" scam with a relatively (for an "Amiga" company) hefty profit, but I doubt they'll be able to do business in the computer field again.
BTW, anything AInc/McEwen says about an "OS5" is just bullshit, of course. Why is this on Slashdot? Does the general/. audience really appreciate the entertainment value of all this, like we hardened Amiga community members do?
It seems to me that Google should arrange something like noarchive specifically for these news quotes. Then every news site can easily specify what to allow, and they have no reason to sue. Then it doesn't seem there's a reason to sue, as this is already implemented:
"To prevent all search engines from showing a "Cached" link for your site, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
To allow other search engines to show a "Cached" link, preventing only Google from displaying one, use the following tag: <META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> "
More on the insane licensing scheme here. As long as Amiga, Inc. refuse to let AmigaOS be sold for hardware that people already own or would actually consider buying, the whole AmigaOS4 project is a complete waste of time, money and enthusiasm.
(Yeah, yeah, I can hear the "it'd be pointless no matter how it's sold" comments already...)
Hey AC, even if the slashduh moderation system in reality is abused as a means to reward or punish opinions, and to reward or punish people, that's not its purpose. It's meant to be here for the benefit of the readers. If a post is informative, then it is informative regardless of who wrote it.
Wow, now that's much more userfriendly than simply having the same option in a capplet GUI! Thank you, GNOME HIG!
I'm (still) using GNOME. But that's despite the dumbing down and hoping you'll find the missing options in gconf, not thanks to it.
I don't think an option or a feature per se can be "confusing", only its explanation and implementation. Simply removing the option doesn't solve anything.
Why can't the HIG intelligentsia who is responsible for the crippling of GNOME introduce different levels of configurability and usability? Create a gconf key which all apps & capplets will look at and then display either "beginner", "default" or "expert" options? Then everyone is happy. The "experts" could get to choose e.g. the placement of window widgets and get a usable file selection dialog with a goddamn filename text entry field displayed by default, while the "beginners" won't have to be "confused" by seeing such things.
Why does Slashduh keep insisting on trying to report on the life sciences when it (the editors and story submitters) are so obviously clueless about the topic?
Needless to say, the Yahoo!/Reuters article was awful. "The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers."
No! The researchers said no such thing at all! They said that they have shown that there's a high plasma level of NGF in subjects who have recently fallen in love. That is all, and it's not surprising or ground breaking. We already know that love (and other emotions) are associated with varying levels of growth factors in general and neurotrophins in particular, along with a host of other changes in our chemistry. For example, here is a study showing that kissing affects immune responses by way of NGF. NGF is no "love molecule" any more than it is a "stress molecule" or a "healing molecule". NGF does not cause love or kissing! Quit being sensationalistic retards!
Slashdot supposedly reports "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Then why is it OK to report laymen's misconceptions about "love molecules", when it would be unacceptable to propagate e.g. laymen's misconceptions in the mainstream media about "hackers", or calling a harddisk a "virus device" (only because it can also store computer viruses)? Why is it OK to post biology news from Yahoo! instead of from the original source, when a submission containing just as vague, dumbed down and incorrect news from Yahoo! about e.g. the Linux kernel would never get published here (other than for comedic effect)?
I humbly suggest that Slashduh should quit reporting on other sciences than technology. You'll obviously never get it right or even know what actually is the stuff that matters in those news.
Well, I wasn't questioning whether this compound or others can or can not be harmful. Neither am I arguing against the fact that things that have been tested and found harmless will be re-evaluated as we gain practical/clinical and widespread experience and knowledge. I just thought it was obvious that stuff in toys and dental products ARE tested, at least that's what it's like over here (Sweden, EU).
Besides, how do we know that the photos of kids playing with bubbles on the website are not from an early test? Anyone recognise any missing orphans in those photos?:)
P.S: Normal DDT use is still considered mostly harmless to humans. (But not if ingested, of course! Still, you're not supposed to drink normal uncoloured soapbubble liquid either...) I believe DDT was banned mostly due to the then unforeseen ecological effects.
He's not an oncologist, nuclear physicist or even a programmer. He's a guy who invents toys, so I think you can rest assured that research on cancer, cold fusion or a dupe-preventing Search function for Slashduh have not been delayed by these soap bubbles.
Besides, every minute of those 11 years was apparently not spent on developing this product. RTFA.
But... is this product even safe? I'm not an organic chemist by any means, but it seems to me that you'd want to do a significant amount of testing on any new compound to make sure that it's not going to have any long-term negative effects.
Do you have any reason to doubt that there would be a significant amount of testing of chemicals in toys and toothpastes, or why do you ask?
I don't know exactly what lactone they're using. Could be interesting to know, as "a lactone" can be anything from menthol to some cytostatica (anti-tumor agents)...;)
Unfortunately, his spamming can only make Mac users look pathetic.
Isn't that why he's posting those embarrassing pics? Isn't that why someone took those photos to begin with, to poke fun at the stereotypical superficial pathetic clueless fashion-victim Apple fans*? And why do you say "unfortunately"?
*= Note the word "Apple fans". Sometimes I'm a Mac user myself, among many other platforms. I run Linux on my old G3 PowerBook anyway, since MacOS pre-X is an abomination.
AFAIK, calling "the box" CPU comes from when home computers ususally were all-in-one, i.e. integrated computer + keyboard and sometimes screen in one unit. For those computers that actually had separate keyboard et c. units, the "computer box" was referred to as the CPU.
Your co-workers aren't necessarily wrong, at least not if they're "old" experienced geeks.
The iPod part of the story was irrelevant, most of the rest of the story was untrue and/or misunderstood, and it wasn't interesting or news. This is what happens when when Slashdot jumps on anything with "iPod" in it no matter how asinine and pointless, combined with this alleged nerds' site's embarrassing trust in eg. CNN or Yahoo for news about science* or "doctors".
* = At least when it's about biology and medicine. It's alright to scoff at the mainstream media's dumbed-down reporting on eg. computer science or astronomy here, but the life sciences can apparently be covered by linking to Yahoo's latest stories which feature the words "DNA", "nanobots" or "iPod".:-P
Exactly. Yet another fellow physician stores DICOM files on removable media. This time the media brand is "iPod", and thus it gets on the frontpage of Slashduh.
Idiocy.
And Osirix is a Free equivalent to the Osiris DICOM handler. It has nothing to do with "enabling medical professionals to view medical images on their iPods". Regardless of what imaging and analysis software you use (and you use it on a PC/workstation!), it doesn't give a crap about the trademark of your storage media!
Science and Photoshop (or whatever other image processing method) goes very well together. The purpose of the pictures is to show something. Drawing an arrow in the picture or colouring an interesting structure is the same thing. Even laymen might have heard of e.g. Gram colouring of bacteria in light microscopy (even if they don't know that all scanning electron micrographs are really in grayscale and a HIV virion isn't Dangerously Red in reality...).
What doesn't go together, IMO, is photographic awards and Photoshop! The "enhancement" wasn't even limited to coloured SE-micrographs, there are even pure photo montages and screendumps!
Or why not go to the original source instead of trying to understand what the hell the dumbed-down popular press versions are trying to say (which can be difficult when the journalists don't know squat about the topic they're covering)?
Nature's news story, which summarizes the original article by Elvin et al. (You need to be sitting at a Nature subscriber institution to read the latter.)
"Accessible version of the British Library's Turning the Pages system for viewing our great books."
So they do understand that the proprietary-plugin-dependent version is inaccessible!:) Well, that's a start, I guess. Soon they might find out that it's unnecessary and pointless too.
But is this the fault of the drivers or of the hardware?
I'm no 3D API programmer, but my ignorant gut feeling says it's the drivers. I mean, in this perspective OpenGL and D3D are just different ways of telling the hardware to do the same thing, aren't they?
ATI R520: "Hmmm, I'm told to draw this line. OK, here we go... Hey, wait a minute! That was OpenGL who said that, not Direct3D! I'll shuffle this down the SLOW pipeline! Now I wouldn't mind taking five with a cup of coffee and a smoke."
Then again, if it's just the drivers, how come ATI don't just f-ing fix them (for Windows at least, I no longer have any illusions about their Linux "support") instead of staying well-deservedly infamous -- for as long as I have known their products -- for being slow on OGL?
If this is the case, this RedOwl can easily be fooled where there are multiple gunshots, especially in a battle field.
That was probably for demonstration purposes. TFA also mentioned that the system could discern between different types of weapons/ammunition being fired.
By the time a man reacts, the sniper could have fled, or worse, fired another shot at him.
Of course. That doesn't mean it's not useful to know where fire comes from. Even if a sniper (or whatever) would take out a whole exposed unit, there still would be "someone" (something...) left who could report exactly where the shots came from. Your response from eg. mortar artillery doesn't take many seconds to reach the general area. You would also become familiar with dangerous areas with popular sniper hideouts.
BTW, in the artillery we use both radar and sound detection to track enemy fire and firing positions. This is the same thing, but for smaller calibres.
Slashdot Mirror
AInc had no interest in OS4, i.e. a continuation of the "classic" AmigaOS. Instead they believed it to be possible to live off simply owning the brand Amiga, and having it applied to games for mobile phones and a renamed version of Tao's "Intent" (also dead now, BTW).
Then came Hyperion, a small company that ported old Windows games to AmigaOS, MacOS and Linux, and nagged at AInc to get permission to make OS4. So far, so good. Unfortunately, they also brought along a hardware vendor, Eyetech, in the deal. OS4 had been reduced to a means for a shady computer dealer to resell outdated and dysfunctional $500 "Teron" motherboards for $900 with a new "AmigaOne" sticker to a tiny group of ignorant trademark fanatics.
AmigaOS was killed there and then (2002). They've had nearly 6 years to re-negotiate a new distribution scheme for OS4, one that doesn't include an unnecessary "hardware partner", but they've chosen not to do this. Neither did the following death of PowerPC (on the desktop, at least) seem to affect their perception of reality. The losses and ensuing lawsuits and bickering between these "AmigaOne Partners" is just sweet poetic justice. It's a bit sad that Eyetech got away from their "AmigaOne" scam with a relatively (for an "Amiga" company) hefty profit, but I doubt they'll be able to do business in the computer field again.
BTW, anything AInc/McEwen says about an "OS5" is just bullshit, of course. Why is this on Slashdot? Does the general
Sorry, the link was missing in my post.
"To prevent all search engines from showing a "Cached" link for your site, place this tag in the <HEAD> section of your page:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
To allow other search engines to show a "Cached" link, preventing only Google from displaying one, use the following tag:
<META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> "
More on the insane licensing scheme here. As long as Amiga, Inc. refuse to let AmigaOS be sold for hardware that people already own or would actually consider buying, the whole AmigaOS4 project is a complete waste of time, money and enthusiasm.
(Yeah, yeah, I can hear the "it'd be pointless no matter how it's sold" comments already...)
Hey AC, even if the slashduh moderation system in reality is abused as a means to reward or punish opinions, and to reward or punish people, that's not its purpose. It's meant to be here for the benefit of the readers. If a post is informative, then it is informative regardless of who wrote it.
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ Lets you use original Windows drivers on linux. ... provided you run Linux on an x86 box, of course.
I'm (still) using GNOME. But that's despite the dumbing down and hoping you'll find the missing options in gconf, not thanks to it.
I don't think an option or a feature per se can be "confusing", only its explanation and implementation. Simply removing the option doesn't solve anything.
Why can't the HIG intelligentsia who is responsible for the crippling of GNOME introduce different levels of configurability and usability? Create a gconf key which all apps & capplets will look at and then display either "beginner", "default" or "expert" options? Then everyone is happy. The "experts" could get to choose e.g. the placement of window widgets and get a usable file selection dialog with a goddamn filename text entry field displayed by default, while the "beginners" won't have to be "confused" by seeing such things.
"... what would Slashdot consider to be good (or even essential) science fiction for teen and pre-teen girls?"
:)
Why don't you show them Slashdot's "Science" section? With the exception of "good (or even essential)", it's exactly what you're asking for!
Why does Slashduh keep insisting on trying to report on the life sciences when it (the editors and story submitters) are so obviously clueless about the topic?
To begin with, why the fuck is there a link to totally idiotic misinterpretations in the popular mainstream media instead of a link to an abstract of the original article in Journal of Psychoneuroendocrinology?
Needless to say, the Yahoo!/Reuters article was awful.
"The powerful emotions that bowl over new lovers are triggered by a molecule known as nerve growth factor (NGF), according to Pavia University researchers."
No! The researchers said no such thing at all!
They said that they have shown that there's a high plasma level of NGF in subjects who have recently fallen in love. That is all, and it's not surprising or ground breaking. We already know that love (and other emotions) are associated with varying levels of growth factors in general and neurotrophins in particular, along with a host of other changes in our chemistry. For example, here is a study showing that kissing affects immune responses by way of NGF. NGF is no "love molecule" any more than it is a "stress molecule" or a "healing molecule". NGF does not cause love or kissing! Quit being sensationalistic retards!
Slashdot supposedly reports "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Then why is it OK to report laymen's misconceptions about "love molecules", when it would be unacceptable to propagate e.g. laymen's misconceptions in the mainstream media about "hackers", or calling a harddisk a "virus device" (only because it can also store computer viruses)?
Why is it OK to post biology news from Yahoo! instead of from the original source, when a submission containing just as vague, dumbed down and incorrect news from Yahoo! about e.g. the Linux kernel would never get published here (other than for comedic effect)?
I humbly suggest that Slashduh should quit reporting on other sciences than technology. You'll obviously never get it right or even know what actually is the stuff that matters in those news.
Well, I found his concern valid.
:)
Well, I wasn't questioning whether this compound or others can or can not be harmful. Neither am I arguing against the fact that things that have been tested and found harmless will be re-evaluated as we gain practical/clinical and widespread experience and knowledge. I just thought it was obvious that stuff in toys and dental products ARE tested, at least that's what it's like over here (Sweden, EU).
Besides, how do we know that the photos of kids playing with bubbles on the website are not from an early test? Anyone recognise any missing orphans in those photos?
P.S: Normal DDT use is still considered mostly harmless to humans. (But not if ingested, of course! Still, you're not supposed to drink normal uncoloured soapbubble liquid either...) I believe DDT was banned mostly due to the then unforeseen ecological effects.
Scratch that, he is a programmer too. Yup, every Slashduh dupe is Zubbles' fault!
He's not an oncologist, nuclear physicist or even a programmer.
He's a guy who invents toys, so I think you can rest assured that research on cancer, cold fusion or a dupe-preventing Search function for Slashduh have not been delayed by these soap bubbles.
Besides, every minute of those 11 years was apparently not spent on developing this product. RTFA.
TFA is more about business than science, anyway.
But... is this product even safe? I'm not an organic chemist by any means, but it seems to me that you'd want to do a significant amount of testing on any new compound to make sure that it's not going to have any long-term negative effects.
;)
Do you have any reason to doubt that there would be a significant amount of testing of chemicals in toys and toothpastes, or why do you ask?
I don't know exactly what lactone they're using. Could be interesting to know, as "a lactone" can be anything from menthol to some cytostatica (anti-tumor agents)...
Lack of details? I'll say. A printer test that doesn't list the cost per page (or per 10x15 cm photo, for example) is a useless printer test IMO.
Nowadays, the price of the printer itself has been reduced to a symbolic starter fee for an ink cartridge subscription!
Unfortunately, his spamming can only make Mac users look pathetic.
Isn't that why he's posting those embarrassing pics? Isn't that why someone took those photos to begin with, to poke fun at the stereotypical superficial pathetic clueless fashion-victim Apple fans*? And why do you say "unfortunately"?
*= Note the word "Apple fans". Sometimes I'm a Mac user myself, among many other platforms. I run Linux on my old G3 PowerBook anyway, since MacOS pre-X is an abomination.
AFAIK, calling "the box" CPU comes from when home computers ususally were all-in-one, i.e. integrated computer + keyboard and sometimes screen in one unit. For those computers that actually had separate keyboard et c. units, the "computer box" was referred to as the CPU.
Your co-workers aren't necessarily wrong, at least not if they're "old" experienced geeks.
it's removable media with a preview.
:-P
So what?
The iPod part of the story was irrelevant, most of the rest of the story was untrue and/or misunderstood, and it wasn't interesting or news. This is what happens when when Slashdot jumps on anything with "iPod" in it no matter how asinine and pointless, combined with this alleged nerds' site's embarrassing trust in eg. CNN or Yahoo for news about science* or "doctors".
* = At least when it's about biology and medicine. It's alright to scoff at the mainstream media's dumbed-down reporting on eg. computer science or astronomy here, but the life sciences can apparently be covered by linking to Yahoo's latest stories which feature the words "DNA", "nanobots" or "iPod".
Exactly. Yet another fellow physician stores DICOM files on removable media. This time the media brand is "iPod", and thus it gets on the frontpage of Slashduh.
Idiocy.
And Osirix is a Free equivalent to the Osiris DICOM handler. It has nothing to do with "enabling medical professionals to view medical images on their iPods". Regardless of what imaging and analysis software you use (and you use it on a PC/workstation!), it doesn't give a crap about the trademark of your storage media!
Science and Photoshop (or whatever other image processing method) goes very well together. The purpose of the pictures is to show something. Drawing an arrow in the picture or colouring an interesting structure is the same thing. Even laymen might have heard of e.g. Gram colouring of bacteria in light microscopy (even if they don't know that all scanning electron micrographs are really in grayscale and a HIV virion isn't Dangerously Red in reality...).
What doesn't go together, IMO, is photographic awards and Photoshop! The "enhancement" wasn't even limited to coloured SE-micrographs, there are even pure photo montages and screendumps!
It's a "purdy picshurs" award.
Yeah, I thought the one from 1998 felt a bit dated too.
More than 10 years ago, Michael Davidson went looking to capture the beauty of microchip circuitry in photographs.
And here I was thinking this Slashdot story from exactly 2 years ago was a bit late...
Or why not go to the original source instead of trying to understand what the hell the dumbed-down popular press versions are trying to say (which can be difficult when the journalists don't know squat about the topic they're covering)?
Nature's news story, which summarizes the original article by Elvin et al. (You need to be sitting at a Nature subscriber institution to read the latter.)
"Accessible version of the British Library's Turning the Pages system for viewing our great books."
:)
So they do understand that the proprietary-plugin-dependent version is inaccessible!
Well, that's a start, I guess. Soon they might find out that it's unnecessary and pointless too.
But is this the fault of the drivers or of the hardware?
I'm no 3D API programmer, but my ignorant gut feeling says it's the drivers. I mean, in this perspective OpenGL and D3D are just different ways of telling the hardware to do the same thing, aren't they?
ATI R520: "Hmmm, I'm told to draw this line. OK, here we go... Hey, wait a minute! That was OpenGL who said that, not Direct3D! I'll shuffle this down the SLOW pipeline! Now I wouldn't mind taking five with a cup of coffee and a smoke."
Then again, if it's just the drivers, how come ATI don't just f-ing fix them (for Windows at least, I no longer have any illusions about their Linux "support") instead of staying well-deservedly infamous -- for as long as I have known their products -- for being slow on OGL?
[detected struck pieces of metal]
If this is the case, this RedOwl can easily be fooled where there are multiple gunshots, especially in a battle field.
That was probably for demonstration purposes. TFA also mentioned that the system could discern between different types of weapons/ammunition being fired.
By the time a man reacts, the sniper could have fled, or worse, fired another shot at him.
Of course. That doesn't mean it's not useful to know where fire comes from. Even if a sniper (or whatever) would take out a whole exposed unit, there still would be "someone" (something...) left who could report exactly where the shots came from. Your response from eg. mortar artillery doesn't take many seconds to reach the general area. You would also become familiar with dangerous areas with popular sniper hideouts.
BTW, in the artillery we use both radar and sound detection to track enemy fire and firing positions. This is the same thing, but for smaller calibres.