Time to start writing the Pixar obit. Disney is a far larger company and its corporate culture will crush Pixar like a bug. Jobs was able to take Apple over from the inside when NeXT got eaten: but unlike Apple, Disney is a foreign company that Jobs has never run before and does not understand. Get ready for more installments of The Incredibles on Ice. And Pixar's first movie failure.
There are several major Dems with massive contributions from Abromoff's clients in exchange for access.
Money for access is not a crime. It's called "Lobbying". When you have evidence that any Democrats received illegal campaign or operation contributions from these clients, please wake me up. On the other hand, there is a profound collection of evidence -- from Abramoff himself no less -- that quite a number of Republicans received such contributions. From him.
When a machine can say "I am." I will defend its soul and free will as much as I would that of any meatbag, but until then the "mechanistic humans" school are just a cover for those who would like to enslave human beings.
It's also unfortunate that AI research has been sidetracked by robotics.
Interst in robotics is largely a response, by researchers and by their now-aware DARPA PMs, that nothing really crunchy has come out of GOFAI ("Good Old Fashioned AI") for quite a while. I personally think robotics is spawned by the attempt to do Soft AI, and GOFAI's hard-AI proponents have taken it on the chin. GOFAI folks can talk all they want about semantic models, but robot people actually get robots to do things.
Put more succinctly, even NSA (Cycorp's biggest customer) has realized that there' not much interesting that Cyc can really do.
Abramoff's client's donations are the primary issue in both the RNC and the DNC.
Well, that's just false. The issue is not what Abramoff's clients (the indian tribes) gave independent of Abramoff. The issue is what Abramoff gave or arranged to be given through his firm. Here's the nutshell version: indian tribe casinos have given to both sides for a long time. After Abramoff started representing them, they started giving ot the Democrats rather less than they used to. And furthermore, Abramoff basically bilked the indian tribes of money, routing it to himself and to Republicans (and only Republicans) through corrupt deals. The tribes' money to Democrats appears to be clean, just as it always had been. Abramoff's rerouting to Republicans is the center of the scandal.
This wouldn't be all that big of a deal except that the Washington Post's reporter, so-called "Steno Sue" (for her tendency to repeat White House propaganda verbatim), repeated the White House propaganda that the indian tribes gave money to both sides, even though what the tribes gave is not at issue. She didn't mention that the item of interest to the law at present is Abramoff's own dealings.
Liberal blogs properly complained that Steno Sue was trying to hide the Republican scandal by surrounding it in donations that weren't illegal, improper, or of interest to the legal eagles. Howell's response was: Steno Sue told facts. Liberal response: yes, but she didn't tell the facts that actually made up the news. Instead she told propaganda. Howell's response: don't bother me again about it. Liberal's response: um, you're the ombudsman aren't you? It's your job to be bothered. Howell's response: I'm not going to talk to the public any more. Liberal's response: you're the freaking ombudsman. Washington Post's response: shut down the blog.
I think that's a fairly accurate summary of what happened. It looks to me that Washington Post has majorly, big-time blown it, first by allowing Steno Sue to "cover" this story (so to speak), then by hiring Howell to be an Ombudsman Who Refuses to Do Her Job.
Mark was also influential in the IMAP protocol and U Washington's MailManager software. And though he was not liked in comp.sys.next.* (_really_ not liked), you can't argue with what he produced.
Here's quite an illuminating link on google groups.
It's possible this was a dictionary attack. But Occam's razor suggests to me a more likely reason: Comcast had either stupidaly posted the email address in a public location automatically, or Comcast had handed the email address automatically to less savory types. I strongly suspect the former.
You might do well to check postings by Mark Crispin in the comp.sys.next.* USENET archives, sometime around 1988-1992. NeXT developed an early version of mail with fonts, colors, rulers (margins/tabs/spacing/justification.etc.), embedded pictures (TIFF, PostScript), attached files in arbitrary locations in the text, a picture of the sender, and embedded sound clips. Basically the program created an RTF file with attachments, tar'd it up, uuencoded it, and sent it as a plaintext message. Worked perfectly -- if you had a NeXT computer to read it on! To my knowledge, no other system had email even remotely as sophisticated as this.
Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico. He spent a lot of time on the NeXT USENET lists posting vitriol about how much better MIME was going to be than NeXTmail. In retrospect the postings, and responses, give a lot of insight into how MIME was shaped, developed, and of course how it was influenced by NeXTmail.
Let's put it another way. There are N doors. One of them has the prize. Each door has a 1/N probability of holding the prize. When you pick a door, you partition the set of doors into two subsets:
The door you chose. (1/N probability in total)
All the other doors. ((N-1)/N probability in total)
Once you have set this partition, Monte Hall makes his move: reduce all the doors in the second set until there's only one door left. That's what he always does, and the composition of the second set was determined by you, not him. He is forced to work with that set.
So now you still have two sets:
The door you chose. (still 1/N probability in total)
All the other doors (still (N-1)/N probability in total) now reduced to a single door
You must have one of the G5's that's not water-cooled. The water-cooled ones, when at full blast, bring up the fans a little, but when the water cooling kicks in, the fans die away again.
Due to its fan design, the G5 is much quieter than the G4 in standard use, and much much much much quieter than the final G4 revision (the QuickSilver).
I'm confused. Is Einstein a hardware emulator for the ARM CPU and Newton hardware (vaguely similar to, say, arcem), which requires a copy of the Newton ROM image to run?
Yes.
Unless there is work happening on a free reimplementation of the Newton OS, I'd say the platform is pretty much dead.
Caligrapher is the software you're talking about. That was the early, embarassing HWR system for the Newton. Apple supplanted that in NewtonOS 2.0 with an Apple-designed HWR system called "Rosetta" which is still the best anywhere. You can play with Rosetta on the Mac by the way, if you have a graphics tablet. On OS X it's called "Inkwell".
PalmOS is just as multitasking as anything Apple made before 2001.
Um. The Newton has a preemptive multitasking operating system written in C++. On top of that, the NewtonScript apps are in an event-driven cooperative single-thread environment; but a C++ thread can and does poke through. For example, handwriting scribbling still runs even when the NewtonScript layer is completely hung.
If you don't mind, allow me (a former Newton developer, and current computer science professor) to provide a slightly more informed take on the situation.
The reason everyone in the Newton community is excited about the emulator is not that it enables us to revive our Newtons, but that it gives us an easy migration mechanism. Newton owners have been frustrated as hell with the god-awful interfaces running on current PDAs. PalmOS is astonishingly profoundly primitive. And PocketPC is just about the worst interface I have ever seen on a platform. Generally it takes about twice to three times as many pen interactions to get a given action performed on the PocketPC as it does on the Newton.
I've used them all. A lot. And the Newton 2.1 OS is hands down the best PDA interface. And let's not kid ourselves: there still isn't a handwriting recognition system available that's as good as Rosetta. And the Newton UI is built around handwriting as a text entry mechanism along with a keyboard, unlike Palm and WinCE's traditional (and bad) character-entry-only event mechanism. And the Newton is fast. The MessagePad 2000 ran on a 167MHz StrongARM (predecessor to the XScale) in 1997.
So Newton users are stuck with a great but aging OS trapped inside hardware that is breaking down and falling apart. Most of us have FrankenNewtons at this stage. What the emulator will do is allow us to move our environments to a new PDA and still be able to use our old software, data, and UI, while using the new PDA's OS for new things. That's a big deal.
Plus, I might add, Einstein makes for a nice development environment.
You do realize that the regenerative breaking has nothing to do with Toyota's infringement, right? It's the planetary gearbox linking an infinite-torque motor with a torque-bound motor in order to simulate a CVT for an electric and gas motor. That's the item that's been patented that Toyota copied (or reinvented) wholesale.
Why should I pay more for a Prius just because a boat motor guy came up with the same technology???
Because this guy came up with it first. You seem to think that patents are a bad thing. Patents are a necessary evil: they delivered us from the hellish world of guild secrets. That was, and is, a very very good thing. But oh yes, you're two hundred years to young to remember that. Since you're such a young whippersnapper, let me introduce you to a patent-free world: China. Where if I invent something useful, bigger military-associated firms will copy my invention and run me out before I can recoup my invention costs. Think much unique is invented in China? Think again. [I've lived there, btw]
I'm not saying that this is not cool stuff. I've heard great things about the Prius. But variable torque converters are common, brushless motors are common, Neodymium Iron Boron (NeFe B) magnets are common, generators are common, but my cookie recipe is patented for them, huh? Google those terms if you don't believe me.
Glass is a very common substance, and it's made of sand, which is really common. Tungsten is used for a variety of purposes, having the highest melting point of any metal. Vacuum is pretty common, being everywhere in space, and Argon is 1% of our atmosphere. Iron is a really common metal too.
Yet the lightbulb was patentable. That damn Thomas Edison.
Slashdot Mirror
And 7 billion? That's all Pixar's worth? Geez.
Interst in robotics is largely a response, by researchers and by their now-aware DARPA PMs, that nothing really crunchy has come out of GOFAI ("Good Old Fashioned AI") for quite a while. I personally think robotics is spawned by the attempt to do Soft AI, and GOFAI's hard-AI proponents have taken it on the chin. GOFAI folks can talk all they want about semantic models, but robot people actually get robots to do things.
Put more succinctly, even NSA (Cycorp's biggest customer) has realized that there' not much interesting that Cyc can really do.
This wouldn't be all that big of a deal except that the Washington Post's reporter, so-called "Steno Sue" (for her tendency to repeat White House propaganda verbatim), repeated the White House propaganda that the indian tribes gave money to both sides, even though what the tribes gave is not at issue. She didn't mention that the item of interest to the law at present is Abramoff's own dealings.
Liberal blogs properly complained that Steno Sue was trying to hide the Republican scandal by surrounding it in donations that weren't illegal, improper, or of interest to the legal eagles. Howell's response was: Steno Sue told facts. Liberal response: yes, but she didn't tell the facts that actually made up the news. Instead she told propaganda. Howell's response: don't bother me again about it. Liberal's response: um, you're the ombudsman aren't you? It's your job to be bothered. Howell's response: I'm not going to talk to the public any more. Liberal's response: you're the freaking ombudsman. Washington Post's response: shut down the blog.
I think that's a fairly accurate summary of what happened. It looks to me that Washington Post has majorly, big-time blown it, first by allowing Steno Sue to "cover" this story (so to speak), then by hiring Howell to be an Ombudsman Who Refuses to Do Her Job.
Ah they've changed them fairly recently then. But the Mighty Mouse has four buttons, not two.
Here's quite an illuminating link on google groups.
It's possible this was a dictionary attack. But Occam's razor suggests to me a more likely reason: Comcast had either stupidaly posted the email address in a public location automatically, or Comcast had handed the email address automatically to less savory types. I strongly suspect the former.
You might do well to check postings by Mark Crispin in the comp.sys.next.* USENET archives, sometime around 1988-1992. NeXT developed an early version of mail with fonts, colors, rulers (margins/tabs/spacing/justification.etc.), embedded pictures (TIFF, PostScript), attached files in arbitrary locations in the text, a picture of the sender, and embedded sound clips. Basically the program created an RTF file with attachments, tar'd it up, uuencoded it, and sent it as a plaintext message. Worked perfectly -- if you had a NeXT computer to read it on! To my knowledge, no other system had email even remotely as sophisticated as this.
Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico. He spent a lot of time on the NeXT USENET lists posting vitriol about how much better MIME was going to be than NeXTmail. In retrospect the postings, and responses, give a lot of insight into how MIME was shaped, developed, and of course how it was influenced by NeXTmail.
Which Mac would this be again? I guess I gotta go return all my defective one-button-only Mac purahcses.
I don't now if the 128 had this available or not: but the Apple ][ had a z80 daughtercard available for a long time.
Once you have set this partition, Monte Hall makes his move: reduce all the doors in the second set until there's only one door left. That's what he always does, and the composition of the second set was determined by you, not him. He is forced to work with that set.
So now you still have two sets:
Which set will you choose?
You must have one of the G5's that's not water-cooled. The water-cooled ones, when at full blast, bring up the fans a little, but when the water cooling kicks in, the fans die away again.
Because NewtonOS was designed around handwriting recognition? It sure is fun trying to write with my mouse, you know.
Who marked this guy a troll? It was hillarious! I particularly loved the Rockhurst College bit.
Due to its fan design, the G5 is much quieter than the G4 in standard use, and much much much much quieter than the final G4 revision (the QuickSilver).
Caligrapher is the software you're talking about. That was the early, embarassing HWR system for the Newton. Apple supplanted that in NewtonOS 2.0 with an Apple-designed HWR system called "Rosetta" which is still the best anywhere. You can play with Rosetta on the Mac by the way, if you have a graphics tablet. On OS X it's called "Inkwell".
Compared to this, PalmOS is pittiful.
If you don't mind, allow me (a former Newton developer, and current computer science professor) to provide a slightly more informed take on the situation.
The reason everyone in the Newton community is excited about the emulator is not that it enables us to revive our Newtons, but that it gives us an easy migration mechanism. Newton owners have been frustrated as hell with the god-awful interfaces running on current PDAs. PalmOS is astonishingly profoundly primitive. And PocketPC is just about the worst interface I have ever seen on a platform. Generally it takes about twice to three times as many pen interactions to get a given action performed on the PocketPC as it does on the Newton.
I've used them all. A lot. And the Newton 2.1 OS is hands down the best PDA interface. And let's not kid ourselves: there still isn't a handwriting recognition system available that's as good as Rosetta. And the Newton UI is built around handwriting as a text entry mechanism along with a keyboard, unlike Palm and WinCE's traditional (and bad) character-entry-only event mechanism. And the Newton is fast. The MessagePad 2000 ran on a 167MHz StrongARM (predecessor to the XScale) in 1997.
So Newton users are stuck with a great but aging OS trapped inside hardware that is breaking down and falling apart. Most of us have FrankenNewtons at this stage. What the emulator will do is allow us to move our environments to a new PDA and still be able to use our old software, data, and UI, while using the new PDA's OS for new things. That's a big deal.
Plus, I might add, Einstein makes for a nice development environment.
You do realize that the regenerative breaking has nothing to do with Toyota's infringement, right? It's the planetary gearbox linking an infinite-torque motor with a torque-bound motor in order to simulate a CVT for an electric and gas motor. That's the item that's been patented that Toyota copied (or reinvented) wholesale.
Yet the lightbulb was patentable. That damn Thomas Edison.
What do you get when you merge Apple with IBM?
IBM.