One button was absolutely 100% the correct choice in 1984. Early experiments with 3 buttons (old X, Windows v1,2,3) were totally miserable. "You want buttons? You can't handle buttons!"
So if Apple were REALLY interested in human-machine interface instead of branding and marketing, they would make slick interfaces with the uber-configurability of G/E
Amen, brother. I watched Steve play with his toys for 2 hours on Wednesday, and the 2nd biggest disappointment was that OS X probably won't let you modify The Look very much. The new colorful bubbly UI is kind of cute, and Steve really has saved the Mac, but after QuickTime4, Sherlock2, and the color "tangerine", I can't trust his judgement when it comes to interface design.
For example, my friend Stephan is totally red-green color blind. The OS X "traffic light" metaphor for window controls will be a massive problem for him. He'd be much Much MUCH happier with the UI he uses in LinuxPPC.
FWIW, my #1 disappointment was the complete lack of new or improved hardware. What I really Really REALLY hoped Steve would say:
the G4 line bumps back to its original stated speeds of 400/450/500. Motorola should be ashamed about this!!! And the re-pipelined 700MHz chip is also a ways off.
the iBook gets 64Mb RAM and a bigger HD. It's such a huge success, and chip prices have come down. Also, replace the Tangerine!
Pismo, the new Powerbook!!! Or failing that, at least give a $200-500 price break on Lombard
Japanese game companies often throw parodies of famous people into their products, especially for domestic distribution. Then the names get changed for export -- UnGeller becomes Alakazam. I'd love to know why they do that.
For example, in the Street Fighter video game the disgraced former boxer was named M. Bison (parodying Mike Tyson), the über-villain was Vega, etc. Then when they brought it to the USA their legal department got a bit worried, so they rotated a bunch of names one space to the left.
why someone would want to prevent there computer from being able to do a DoS ?
Umm...because we're responsible Netizens? Because less network abuse overall implies less network abuse affecting me, my family & my colleagues? I suppose you also ask why guns should have trigger locks, since that limits their ability to do certain things (e.g. kill people).
Altruism aside, if my Mac is putting out fewer garbage packets, then there's more bandwidth available for things that I want to do. Also, if Macs are less attractive to malicious crackers, then that's A Good Thing for several easy reasons.
I'll repeat a quote from mentat.com that I saw in yesterday's discussion:
MPS is the native STREAMS on Apple Mac OS, Novell NetWare, Wind River VxWorks,Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, Digital UNIX, and other many leading computer and embedded operating systems.
According to available info, MPS is where the Mac Attack exploit was found. What other systems will also amplify similar packet attacks?
why is this different? The 1500b packet? Is MacOS 9 unique in this?
No, it's basically the same. Other network devices that use Mentat's stream code, or similarly designed code, will also produce 1500b responses. The only thing that's vaguely new here is that previous to OS9, Macs were exceedingly unlikely to be used in flood attacks.
I defer to a recently-received email from Geoff Duncan, technical editor of Tidbits.com:
*****
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:06:31 -0800 From: Geoff Duncan Subject: Re: Mac DoS Attack
While the attack outlined by Copeland is feasible, it's worth noting the 1500-byte ICMP responses he describes are not isolated to Mac OS 9, and are more-or-less standard practice in a number of networking implementations, regardless of whether those are based on Mentat's STREAMS. Macs running Mac OS 9 are by no means the only systems which demonstrate this behavior; in fact, I can easily make a number of dedicated routers behave the same way. If I were a cracker intent on causing damage with this sort of attack, why would I bother to locate Macintoshes on DSL or cable modem networks when I can utilize the same behaviors in thousands of routers all over the Internet, each of which is presumably easy to locate and has reasonable (or excessive) amounts of bandwidth at its disposal?
The amplification attack Copeland describes involved gaining root access to a box with a big pipe - probably something running a flavor of Linux, Unix, or NT - and creating home-make forged packets. There are a number of potentially devastating attacks that can be launched under those circumstances that have nothing to do with Macs. TidBITS has been treated to a small selection of these sorts of attacks for the last several weeks. Calling for Mac OS 9 computers to be patched or taken off the net is not going to solve the problem or eliminate the feasibility of the attack Copeland describes.
Also, Copeland's speculation that the datagrams he detected are probes pursuant to Macintosh-specific News Year's Eve attacks are best described as unsubstantiated speculation. At worst, they might be described as irresponsible. I would hope any further coverage this report gains in the Macintosh press will be more objective than what's currently playing on the standard "rumor" sites.
Guy: I want that drug that makes your dick big. Rx.com: Special on Viagra, free Spanish Fly with every order! Please transmit your prescription. Guy: This guy needs Vaigro whatever. Signed, a reel docter. Rx.com: order automatically processed. After the package arrives, he's dead of a heart attack 30 minutes later. Oops!
Even if most of us aren't that stupid, the point is there are a lot of dangerous drug interactions that often get caught by the local pharmacist. With an Rx.com, you have no guarantee that the company has a legal pharmacist on staff, or that they will have assets in the US (insert your country of residence here) when your next of kin sues them.
Meanwhile, the majority (by number) of Rx.coms exist solely to facilitate improper drug transactions. Perhaps that doesn't bother you, but the government itself would be negligent if it didn't try to stop them.
AFAIK, Compaq makes valid points about Alpha vs Itanium, but it's still just a corporate press release. I'm sure Alpha has plenty of drawbacks that the paper silently omits.
As we all know, product quality is only one (small) factor in product success. Aside from the usual Marketing and FUD wars, the real test will be software support. What OSes, what Apps, what real world uses will run on these chips?
If a CPU shits in the woods, but no one writes native code, does it make a sound?
To paraphrase Winston Churchill -- "Real is the worst proprietary multimedia format, except for all the others". For those of us who don't use M$ Windows, I'd rather endure Real than have no links at all. Hmm...is there a QuickTime Player for Linux?
This morning I was hit with my wseekly request to purchase toner
Sam Khouri is easily my least favorite spammer due to his sheer persistence. Why won't he die? Why hasn't he been shut down yet? I've contacted his email relayers, and his provider. I've auto-redialed his 800 number to run up his phone bill. I've asked friends in Atlanta to harrass him at home. But he keeps on spamming.
It has a windows port, a linux/unix port, and a MacOS port.... Best of all, it's free.
Actually, they don't have a MacOS port. Instead Junkbuster suggests using LinuxPPC.
A far simpler solution is turn off image loading and scripting in your email client. In Eudora it's two easy clicks in the Settings menu. The only bad thing is that images are enabled by default.
We had planned to see Sleepy Hollow, but when we saw posters that said DOGMA IS BLASPHEMOUS TO OUR LORD and a giant Jesus picture, we said we had to see Dogma instead. I want to thank those protesters. Without them, I would have not seen Dogma!
Bingo. Protesters trying to prevent a creative work from being seen always do the exact opposite. For example, Salman Rushdie. I read some of his earlier work, and it was so-so. But then the Ayatollah puts a death threat on him -- that's amazing publicity that money can't buy. His career is assured in an instant.
The great thing about protesters is that they're so very stupid, and they do it over and over again. Mapplethorpe in Cincinatti, various mediocre artists in New York, etc, raking in the bucks from the closed-minded town criers.
But in the specific case of Dogma, It was quite enjoyable and actually uplifted my lapsed religious beliefs. Aside from the constant obscenity, my very Catholic mother would probably enjoy the movie's strong moral message.
Meanwhile, I'm under huge peer pressure that I still haven't seen either Being John Malkovich or American Beauty. Well, it's almost the weekend...
once someone is labeled a pontential killer, I wonder what they will do with them. Force them to become jocks?
Nah, just transfer them to the new maximum security school next to the old industrial park. You see, these smart kids are disillusioned and angry because they've been oppressed and bullied by peers, teachers, and administrators since elementary school. So obviously the answer is to oppress them some more, until their spirit is properly broken. Then they'll behave like proper social units.
I love the language used in the profile: does the student "have experience with chronic bullying?" Such lovely doubletalk -- they're not hunting for the INFLICTERS of arbitrary violence (who will grow up to be vice principals or middle managers). Mosaic wants to proactively punish the VICTIMS, before they retaliate. TheOnion did a fabulous satire on this topic
quantum physics are pretty out there, and the devices will be doubtless very hard to miniaturize.
Nah, the core of a quantum crypto system is supercooled atoms arranged in a line, just a handful of microns.
The real problem is that serious QC might be impossible. In theory, a QC can crack an X-bit key in seconds, you just need an equal number of Qubits (laser-excited atoms) in the line. In practice, building a large QC might be exponentially difficult -- if it gets twice as hard to keep things straight every time you add one Qubit, then QC will never be usable.
governments that basically posess information omnipotence could drastically alter the balances of world power that we currently have.
Depends. QC could do arbitrarily horrible things to any E-commerce that uses standard encryption. Which only means that if QC ever works, the banking industry will pay whatever it takes to get quantum encryption. But there are still plenty of valid ways to protect information. Aside from one time pads, groups could keep their important data on privately owned fibre. Can't crack what you can't access.
For example, the US government already has information omnipotence relative to countries like Yugoslavia or Iraq. I'm confident that the NSA can crack any encryption scheme they use. Nevertheless, we still can't track down Iraqi anthrax, or blow up Milosevic in his sleep. All the computers under Fort Meade can't read a sheet of paper in a sealed envelope in an officer's pocket.
This is one time where MS was actually on the side of open standards.
Not entirely. It's also true to say that M$ was just looking for a free ride on AOL's database server. Keeping track of who & where has a price tag. An open IM standard would be nice, but who foots the bill?
space is mostly empty anyway, so collisions in our neighbourhood would be extremely rare
No. According to brane theory, all these parallel universes share a common gravitational field. Over the course of 10-20 billion years, matter will move down in gravity wells. Objects in separate universes WILL end up orbiting each other. It's not about rarity, it's about inevitability.
Entire galaxies would likely be overlayed on one another. The stars & clusters involved would show exceedingly non-physical trajectories. It would be VERY observable.
"Oh dear, I appear to have accidentally ripped the fabric of space-time. Damn.":-P When some bright lad tries to split the graviton, I'm outta here.
I hoped that someone would take that bait. Groups of protestors have tried to shut down various particle accelerators using that exact claim. "If they rip open space or make a black hole, it will destroy the world/universe!" BZZT.
Dr. Lykken is correct, a micro black hole would evaporate itself to x-rays in infinitesimal time. Furthermore, such events happen ALL THE TIME, out in space. Fusion reactions inside active stars, or plate tectonics on a neutron star, or cosmic rays striking our atmosphere, or thousands of other effects -- all of them release energy and produce particle events that are MUCH more powerful than anything our puny accelerators are capable of.
The earth, the sun, and the universe are still here just fine. It's NOT a problem.
This theory claims that there are arbitrarily many parallel universes, separated by micron distances along additional dimensions. While strong, weak & electromagnetic forces are confined to our layer, gravity works across all dimensions simultaneously. And THAT is a HUGE problem.
What happens when a parallel universe star passes close to (or directly across) an object in our universe? Gravity would ramp up to insane amounts with no visible cause. Stars would be thrown out of galactic orbit, or ripped apart by tidal forces. If a few ordinary stars (like our Sun) happened to line up, the combined gravity could form a black hole where none should exist.
The fact is, in all of our history of astronomy, we have not seen this happen. But with thousands/billions/googols of parallel branes, it should be a statistical certainty. We would have already seen gravitational interference in the objects of our solar system, a million times over.
The only solution, which the article briefly mentions, is that ALL of the other universes must have tremendously lower densities than ours. This strikes me as inelegant to the extreme. A much more likely solution is that this brane theory is flat out wrong.
Ack. I've never been so much as a "softcore" action gamer, but even so I really don't see the need for that much horsepower just to play shoot-em-up fantasies as hyper-realistically (oxymoron intended) as possible.
But deep end video chipsets do have a purpose just a short ways down the road. True immersive VR worlds. 3D gogglevision with lag time well below the perception threshold (10ms, perhaps?). Gibson-esque Cyberspace. The Matrix.
Between screaming video and fast wires, the technology is almost here. How long will it take for the content to follow?
Since this topic has COMPLETELY diverged into a general discussion of Macs, I'm going to jump in here.
I am a rabid Mac advocate, and I agree completely that the VAIO kicks ass in terms of design. Steve Jobs currently has a four lines of hardware: desktop vs portable, consumer vs pro -- iMac, iBook, PowerMac, PowerBook. He really Really REALLY ought to add two more.
First would be a subnotebook about the size of a VAIO, with no removable media drives, just a bunch of ports. Second would be a division of the PowerMac into desktop (cheaper, smaller) and supertower (huge, with 6 PCI slots and a bunch of open bays).
But back to the topic of iMacs & Linux -- it's a good thing that's beneficial to everyone (except M$ probably). Linux gets a wider audience, while Macs get a cheap & preemptive OS alternative. Why all the anger?
That press release sure implied that the two methods can be multiplied together, but I'd bet good money that it just ain't so. The 160Gbps test used a laser that was tuned for sending very quickly on a single frequency. The 1022 channel test used a DIFFERENT laser that was tuned for shifting rapidly between frequencies.
Also notice that Bell didn't mention a damn thing about the bit rate on the multichannel test. For all we know, those 1022 signals could be running at 2400 baud. And both tests were based on single lasers. Can they convince hundreds of these lasers to play nice and merge signals onto a single fiber? What the press release DIDN'T say leaves much to be desired, so far.
Yes. Although Bradbury's writing is usually considered SF, it really contains very little true science. His imaginary futures tended to be as woefully inaccurate as the typical blunders of Star Trek or X-Files. The more I learned about science, the less Bradbury I could read with a straight face.
His tales were often powerful and moving, but to me they would be moreso if he knew what he was talking about. For example, I saw Dogma this weekend. I doubt anyone else in the theater had read (or even heard of) Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels, but I had, and I really appreciated Kevin Smith's attention to detail.
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15 years later, both users and developers can handle the 2nd button. Ge t a 2+ button scroll mouse instead
Amen, brother. I watched Steve play with his toys for 2 hours on Wednesday, and the 2nd biggest disappointment was that OS X probably won't let you modify The Look very much. The new colorful bubbly UI is kind of cute, and Steve really has saved the Mac, but after QuickTime4, Sherlock2, and the color "tangerine", I can't trust his judgement when it comes to interface design.
For example, my friend Stephan is totally red-green color blind. The OS X "traffic light" metaphor for window controls will be a massive problem for him. He'd be much Much MUCH happier with the UI he uses in LinuxPPC.FWIW, my #1 disappointment was the complete lack of new or improved hardware. What I really Really REALLY hoped Steve would say:
Ah well. So it goes.
Japanese game companies often throw parodies of famous people into their products, especially for domestic distribution. Then the names get changed for export -- UnGeller becomes Alakazam. I'd love to know why they do that.
For example, in the Street Fighter video game the disgraced former boxer was named M. Bison (parodying Mike Tyson), the über-villain was Vega, etc. Then when they brought it to the USA their legal department got a bit worried, so they rotated a bunch of names one space to the left.
Umm...because we're responsible Netizens? Because less network abuse overall implies less network abuse affecting me, my family & my colleagues? I suppose you also ask why guns should have trigger locks, since that limits their ability to do certain things (e.g. kill people).
Altruism aside, if my Mac is putting out fewer garbage packets, then there's more bandwidth available for things that I want to do. Also, if Macs are less attractive to malicious crackers, then that's A Good Thing for several easy reasons.
I'll repeat a quote from mentat.com that I saw in yesterday's discussion:
MPS is the native STREAMS on Apple Mac OS, Novell NetWare, Wind River VxWorks,Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, IBM AIX, Digital UNIX, and other many leading computer and embedded operating systems.According to available info, MPS is where the Mac Attack exploit was found. What other systems will also amplify similar packet attacks?
No, it's basically the same. Other network devices that use Mentat's stream code, or similarly designed code, will also produce 1500b responses. The only thing that's vaguely new here is that previous to OS9, Macs were exceedingly unlikely to be used in flood attacks.
No. As far as Macs are concerned, this bug is specific to the version of OpenTransport in OS9.0
I defer to a recently-received email from Geoff Duncan, technical editor of Tidbits.com:
*****
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 13:06:31 -0800
From: Geoff Duncan
Subject: Re: Mac DoS Attack
While the attack outlined by Copeland is feasible, it's worth noting the 1500-byte ICMP responses he describes are not isolated to Mac OS 9, and are more-or-less standard practice in a number of networking implementations, regardless of whether those are based on Mentat's STREAMS. Macs running Mac OS 9 are by no means the only systems which demonstrate this behavior; in fact, I can easily make a number of dedicated routers behave the same way. If I were a cracker intent on causing damage with this sort of attack, why would I bother to locate Macintoshes on DSL or cable modem networks when I can utilize the same behaviors in thousands of routers all over the Internet, each of which is presumably easy to locate and has reasonable (or excessive) amounts of bandwidth at its disposal?
The amplification attack Copeland describes involved gaining root access to a box with a big pipe - probably something running a flavor of Linux, Unix, or NT - and creating home-make forged packets. There are a number of potentially devastating attacks that can be launched under those circumstances that have nothing to do with Macs. TidBITS has been treated to a small selection of these sorts of attacks for the last several weeks. Calling for Mac OS 9 computers to be patched or taken off the net is not going to solve the problem or eliminate the feasibility of the attack Copeland describes.
Also, Copeland's speculation that the datagrams he detected are probes pursuant to Macintosh-specific News Year's Eve attacks are best described as unsubstantiated speculation. At worst, they might be described as irresponsible. I would hope any further coverage this report gains in the Macintosh press will be more objective than what's currently playing on the standard "rumor" sites.
*****
Guy: I want that drug that makes your dick big.
Rx.com: Special on Viagra, free Spanish Fly with every order! Please transmit your prescription.
Guy: This guy needs Vaigro whatever. Signed, a reel docter.
Rx.com: order automatically processed.
After the package arrives, he's dead of a heart attack 30 minutes later. Oops!
Even if most of us aren't that stupid, the point is there are a lot of dangerous drug interactions that often get caught by the local pharmacist. With an Rx.com, you have no guarantee that the company has a legal pharmacist on staff, or that they will have assets in the US (insert your country of residence here) when your next of kin sues them.
Meanwhile, the majority (by number) of Rx.coms exist solely to facilitate improper drug transactions. Perhaps that doesn't bother you, but the government itself would be negligent if it didn't try to stop them.
AFAIK, Compaq makes valid points about Alpha vs Itanium, but it's still just a corporate press release. I'm sure Alpha has plenty of drawbacks that the paper silently omits.
As we all know, product quality is only one (small) factor in product success. Aside from the usual Marketing and FUD wars, the real test will be software support. What OSes, what Apps, what real world uses will run on these chips?
If a CPU shits in the woods, but no one writes native code, does it make a sound?
To paraphrase Winston Churchill -- "Real is the worst proprietary multimedia format, except for all the others". For those of us who don't use M$ Windows, I'd rather endure Real than have no links at all. Hmm...is there a QuickTime Player for Linux?
Sam Khouri is easily my least favorite spammer due to his sheer persistence. Why won't he die? Why hasn't he been shut down yet? I've contacted his email relayers, and his provider. I've auto-redialed his 800 number to run up his phone bill. I've asked friends in Atlanta to harrass him at home. But he keeps on spamming.
Any suggestions from the angry geek crowd?
Actually, they don't have a MacOS port. Instead Junkbuster suggests using LinuxPPC.
A far simpler solution is turn off image loading and scripting in your email client. In Eudora it's two easy clicks in the Settings menu. The only bad thing is that images are enabled by default.
I want to thank those protesters. Without them, I would have not seen Dogma!
Bingo. Protesters trying to prevent a creative work from being seen always do the exact opposite. For example, Salman Rushdie. I read some of his earlier work, and it was so-so. But then the Ayatollah puts a death threat on him -- that's amazing publicity that money can't buy. His career is assured in an instant.
The great thing about protesters is that they're so very stupid, and they do it over and over again. Mapplethorpe in Cincinatti, various mediocre artists in New York, etc, raking in the bucks from the closed-minded town criers.
But in the specific case of Dogma, It was quite enjoyable and actually uplifted my lapsed religious beliefs. Aside from the constant obscenity, my very Catholic mother would probably enjoy the movie's strong moral message.
Meanwhile, I'm under huge peer pressure that I still haven't seen either Being John Malkovich or American Beauty. Well, it's almost the weekend...
Nah, just transfer them to the new maximum security school next to the old industrial park. You see, these smart kids are disillusioned and angry because they've been oppressed and bullied by peers, teachers, and administrators since elementary school. So obviously the answer is to oppress them some more, until their spirit is properly broken. Then they'll behave like proper social units.
I love the language used in the profile: does the student "have experience with chronic bullying?" Such lovely doubletalk -- they're not hunting for the INFLICTERS of arbitrary violence (who will grow up to be vice principals or middle managers). Mosaic wants to proactively punish the VICTIMS, before they retaliate. TheOnion did a fabulous satire on this topic
Nah, the core of a quantum crypto system is supercooled atoms arranged in a line, just a handful of microns.
The real problem is that serious QC might be impossible. In theory, a QC can crack an X-bit key in seconds, you just need an equal number of Qubits (laser-excited atoms) in the line. In practice, building a large QC might be exponentially difficult -- if it gets twice as hard to keep things straight every time you add one Qubit, then QC will never be usable.
governments that basically posess information omnipotence could drastically alter the balances of world power that we currently have.Depends. QC could do arbitrarily horrible things to any E-commerce that uses standard encryption. Which only means that if QC ever works, the banking industry will pay whatever it takes to get quantum encryption. But there are still plenty of valid ways to protect information. Aside from one time pads, groups could keep their important data on privately owned fibre. Can't crack what you can't access.
For example, the US government already has information omnipotence relative to countries like Yugoslavia or Iraq. I'm confident that the NSA can crack any encryption scheme they use. Nevertheless, we still can't track down Iraqi anthrax, or blow up Milosevic in his sleep. All the computers under Fort Meade can't read a sheet of paper in a sealed envelope in an officer's pocket.
Not entirely. It's also true to say that M$ was just looking for a free ride on AOL's database server. Keeping track of who & where has a price tag. An open IM standard would be nice, but who foots the bill?
No. According to brane theory, all these parallel universes share a common gravitational field. Over the course of 10-20 billion years, matter will move down in gravity wells. Objects in separate universes WILL end up orbiting each other. It's not about rarity, it's about inevitability.
Entire galaxies would likely be overlayed on one another. The stars & clusters involved would show exceedingly non-physical trajectories. It would be VERY observable.
I hoped that someone would take that bait. Groups of protestors have tried to shut down various particle accelerators using that exact claim. "If they rip open space or make a black hole, it will destroy the world/universe!" BZZT.
Dr. Lykken is correct, a micro black hole would evaporate itself to x-rays in infinitesimal time. Furthermore, such events happen ALL THE TIME, out in space. Fusion reactions inside active stars, or plate tectonics on a neutron star, or cosmic rays striking our atmosphere, or thousands of other effects -- all of them release energy and produce particle events that are MUCH more powerful than anything our puny accelerators are capable of.
The earth, the sun, and the universe are still here just fine. It's NOT a problem.
This theory claims that there are arbitrarily many parallel universes, separated by micron distances along additional dimensions. While strong, weak & electromagnetic forces are confined to our layer, gravity works across all dimensions simultaneously. And THAT is a HUGE problem.
What happens when a parallel universe star passes close to (or directly across) an object in our universe? Gravity would ramp up to insane amounts with no visible cause. Stars would be thrown out of galactic orbit, or ripped apart by tidal forces. If a few ordinary stars (like our Sun) happened to line up, the combined gravity could form a black hole where none should exist.
The fact is, in all of our history of astronomy, we have not seen this happen. But with thousands/billions/googols of parallel branes, it should be a statistical certainty. We would have already seen gravitational interference in the objects of our solar system, a million times over.
The only solution, which the article briefly mentions, is that ALL of the other universes must have tremendously lower densities than ours. This strikes me as inelegant to the extreme. A much more likely solution is that this brane theory is flat out wrong.
Ack. I've never been so much as a "softcore" action gamer, but even so I really don't see the need for that much horsepower just to play shoot-em-up fantasies as hyper-realistically (oxymoron intended) as possible.
But deep end video chipsets do have a purpose just a short ways down the road. True immersive VR worlds. 3D gogglevision with lag time well below the perception threshold (10ms, perhaps?). Gibson-esque Cyberspace. The Matrix.
Between screaming video and fast wires, the technology is almost here. How long will it take for the content to follow?
Since this topic has COMPLETELY diverged into a general discussion of Macs, I'm going to jump in here.
I am a rabid Mac advocate, and I agree completely that the VAIO kicks ass in terms of design. Steve Jobs currently has a four lines of hardware: desktop vs portable, consumer vs pro -- iMac, iBook, PowerMac, PowerBook. He really Really REALLY ought to add two more.
First would be a subnotebook about the size of a VAIO, with no removable media drives, just a bunch of ports. Second would be a division of the PowerMac into desktop (cheaper, smaller) and supertower (huge, with 6 PCI slots and a bunch of open bays).
But back to the topic of iMacs & Linux -- it's a good thing that's beneficial to everyone (except M$ probably). Linux gets a wider audience, while Macs get a cheap & preemptive OS alternative. Why all the anger?
I'm waiting for the TPB. Hardcover comics are just painfully expensive. But meanwhile, are there any other Gaiman goodies now?
That press release sure implied that the two methods can be multiplied together, but I'd bet good money that it just ain't so. The 160Gbps test used a laser that was tuned for sending very quickly on a single frequency. The 1022 channel test used a DIFFERENT laser that was tuned for shifting rapidly between frequencies.
Also notice that Bell didn't mention a damn thing about the bit rate on the multichannel test. For all we know, those 1022 signals could be running at 2400 baud. And both tests were based on single lasers. Can they convince hundreds of these lasers to play nice and merge signals onto a single fiber? What the press release DIDN'T say leaves much to be desired, so far.
Yes. Although Bradbury's writing is usually considered SF, it really contains very little true science. His imaginary futures tended to be as woefully inaccurate as the typical blunders of Star Trek or X-Files. The more I learned about science, the less Bradbury I could read with a straight face.
His tales were often powerful and moving, but to me they would be moreso if he knew what he was talking about. For example, I saw Dogma this weekend. I doubt anyone else in the theater had read (or even heard of) Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels, but I had, and I really appreciated Kevin Smith's attention to detail.