Yup - make a TFT with the same pixel size as your Dell and the same physical dimensions as this Tosh, and you'd be looking at a 17" widescreen 1960x1280. Oooo, that would be sweet... as it is, this thing looks like an old laptop that's been hit with an enbigulator ray.
okay, what gives with laptop manufacturers and screen resolutions? I've got a 12.1" XGA screen on my laptop, and it has a physical dot pitch of about 105DPI. This monster screen has a dot pitch around 95DPI, if that. I've seen 10" XGA screens which have beautiful crisp pixels (you're talking about 128DPI on those things - Toshiba used to make a laptop with one, in fact). If you built a 17" widescreen TFT with the same dot pitch as one of those, you'd be looking at a laptop with some 1800x1100 pixels. That would be worth doing. But it seems as TFTs get larger, the resolution gets lower, and we end up with beautiful screens like the Apple cinema displays being let down by the fact that their pixels are huge.
Why would I want a laptop with a bigger screen than my 12.1" one if I don't actually get that many more pixels?
I think it might have more to do with the unique and peculiar phenomenon called 'Radio 4'. You have to understand, this is a radio station like no other in the world. Its news coverage makes most broadsheet newspapers of international standing look like supermarket tabloids; its factual programming ranges from farming to education to natural history to technology to science to history to art without missing a beat; it has been the starting point for some of the most innovative comedy ever to come out of britain; it broadcasts a daily soap opera set in a small country village that has been running for over 50 years (and whose theme tune can mysteriously be instantly recited by any british person even if they've never heard it); it carries the shipping forecast of the british meteorological office; and it features no advertising or jingles at all (unless you can call the sound of 'big ben' chiming the hour, or 'the pips' (a strange sequence of electronic beeps that mark the hour), or the national anthem at closedown, jingles...)
The point is, investigating internet spam is as much to be expected from radio four as interviewing a man who's devoted his life to the study of finches, or broadcasting a group of grown men sitting in a theatre reciting the names of london underground stations in accordance with some arcane set of rules.
They probably followed the investigation with a reading from a novel by Hanif Kureishi and a half hour documentary on the history of beekeeping. And then the shipping forecast.
Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.... easterly, becoming more northerly later, rising.
The BBC sees its role as providing balance. You have to view its output in the context of the overall media environment in the UK, and indeed globally.
The BBC may appear to only present one side, or to push one perspective at the expense of others in its own coverage, but generally this will be because the side it is presenting is not otherwise represented in the mainstream media. So, for example, its presentation of Israeli issues is meant to add information to the debate within the UK on Israel/palestine that is not found from other sources, particularly TV news sources such as ITN and Sky news. (incidentally, ITN, which is the main provider of news for commercial TV in the UK, walks a very strange line in its news presentation, providing a conservative (small c) perspective on international politics in its news broadcasts on ITV, and a more liberal perspective in its channel 4 coverage)
This often means the BBC takes what can be seen as an 'anti-government' position, simply because most ocmmercial news doesn't tackle the government on issues, and the BBC's remit is to fill in that gap in the national debate.
That said, they're not making a great showing at the moment in this petty fight with downing street over 'dody dossiers' and 'sexing up'... it's all rather embarrassing, and sounds like it was based on somewhat flaky journalism.
Depends what you mean by projects 'of a comparable size'. Obviously, if you mean 'having a similar sized development team', then I guess they probably do have about the same amount of peer review, don't they?
Actualy, there's a good architecture underneath Exchange, fighting to get out from underneath all the cruft it's acquired over each successive revision.
Exchange is, you're right, a generic datastore - which makes the inexcusable mistake of being based on a JET back-end, but we'll ignore that blunder. It provides functionality for clients to store data-items, according to client-defined schemas, with client-defined access semantics, for client-defined purposes. One of the clients is outlook, and it uses Exchange to store notes, contacts, appointments, and so on. Another client is the MTA, which uses exchange's datastore to store messages. Outlook also knows how to view these messages, so outlook is able to also act as a mail client. Exchange enables these different clients to interact with the same store, and share information.
If MS wanted to enable Outlook to store recipes in exchange, they wouldn't have to alter exchange, just fiddle with Outlook, and Exchange could happily store recipes too.
The thing is, that's a beautifully generic architecture, and with the right APIs it could be a powerful thing indeed. Unfortunately, ADSI and CDO are not the right APIs.
There's a great opportunity here to create a user-account centric XML-based datastore (probably based on SOAP messaging?) that can be used to create collaborative clients. Allow calendaring apps to submit iCal objects, email apps to read vCard objects to detemrine recipient addresses, and create XML email objects. Then create an MTA that reads email objects and sends them, and creates email objects representing mails it receives.
Make it transactional, message-based, and use a resilient, open format for storing the data, and you've got a powerful open equivalent to Exchange.
"the First three films in the Indiana Jones Trilogy will be released"
Since, in any rational universe, a trilogy doesn't have a 'first three films', shouldn't that be the 'increasingly inaccurately named Indiana Jones Trilogy'?
Well, part of the problem is that it undermines the entire purpose of patents in the first place. If people aren't looking at the patent database - in fact, if people are actively avoiding research in the patent DB - then the purpose of patents (granting a person a temporary monopoly over the exploitation of an invention in exchange for their publication of the invention) is totally undermined, since the publication effectively never happens.
The reason for patents is to encourage the spread and reuse of ideas, while allowing for an enforceable funneling of royalties in the form of license fees to the original inventor of the idea.
But if people can't read about patented ideas, consider licensing and using them, and build on them to make new, bigger ideas, then patenting is benefitting nobody but the lawyers who go round extracting royalties after the fact.
friends don't let friends install MS junk, your sig says... surely Microsoft-hating husbands don't let their wives open hotmail accounts? For someone accusing MS of duplicity and double standards, your own standards seem pretty flexible...
If you don't like MS sticking ads into hotmail messages, don't use them - it's not hard. It's not like you don't have other options for email.
So damn Microsoft for making your life worse by providing your wife with a free e-mail address. And damn them even more for suing spammers because its in their interests do do so (no company - not the most benevolent corporation in the world - would launch a legal action against spammers out of sheer public spiritedness - for a start, it's kinda hard to get a court to rule in your favour if the person you're suing has done nothing to harm you)
As to your linked post, well.. if your ISP blocks port 25 traffic, change ISPs. Demand an ISP with an open routing policy. You may have to pay for the privilege, but if enough people do it, market forces will change that. Remember that connecting to the internet through someone else's server is always a privilege, not a fundamental human right, though, and it's up to them to choose what conditions they offer that service under.
You're moaning about MS forcing you to look at hotmail ads, and lobbying small ISPs to shut their gateways to outbound port 25 traffic, but it seems like pretty easy stuff to get around to me.
Re:Hate Flash too - Re:As much as I hate to say it
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Well, sorry to say, but PDF is part of the web too. Just as Flash is. HTML is not (any more than, say, GIF and JPEG, or PDF for that matter) a privileged part of the web infrastructure - it is simply a file format that is well suited to the web - but it's also used in any number of other scenarios (offline documentation, such as JavaDocs spring to mind). The web is agnostic about what format the documents transmitted across it take, which is why it is able to support such diverse technologies as WML applications, Flash games, and web services.
If you want to fill a web server full of word DOC files, you can - and the HTTP infrastructure will happily support you in your endeavours. The fact that you aren't providing content in a format suited to web browser clients is neither here nor there - it's your prerogative to do as you will on your web server.
The mistake a lot of people make is thinking that 'The Web' is an interconnected collection of HTML documents distributed across a number of servers. In some ways, 'The Web' is much more than that, and in some ways much less. 'The Web' is no more than an infrastructure based on HTTP that allows client programs to request resources from servers statelessly. HTML is a technology that exploits the web infrastructure to interconnect resources using hypertext principles. In other words, the infrastructure of 'The Web' enables the development of hypertext browsers and hypertext content providers, giving us the experience of browsing that we have all got used to. But at the same time, 'The web' can be used for much much more. You have to get away from thinking about the web as consisting of 'pages' and see it instead as a universal addressing mechanism for electronic resources. Every URL identifies a particular resource. Nobody said those resources had to be web pages, though.
The assumption that the resource at the end of every HTTP URL should be renderable in a basic unmodified web browser is really pretty outdated. Yes, for a helluvalot of URLs (perhaps most), it makes sense to present the resource you return in a format renderable in everything from Lynx up. But that doesn't prevent parts of the web (that is to say, a selection of HTTP addressable resources) being designed to be viewed using specific browsers, or even non-browser clients (look at Apple's iTunes store, for example - there's a powerful HTTP user-agent that accesses resources a web browser wouldn't know what to do with).
So, if somebody chooses to return Flash from a particular URL, you've no more right to complain about their decision in doing so than you have about their returning you a 404 error code from another URL, or a GIF from another one. It's not you that gets to choose what resources are returned from each URL in their address space.
Re:Hate Flash too - Re:As much as I hate to say it
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The web is about HTTP requests and responses. If I send a GET request to a particular box, and get a piece of content back, it's up to the owner of that box to choose what that content is. It is their right, for example, to send you a stream of plain text. It is their right to send you properly formatted netscape-specific HTML 2.0 complete with tags. It is their right to send you an MP3 file, or a JPEG, or an HTML 4.0 page containing a link to an embedded Flash movie. Provided their server tells you the MIME type of the data it's sending, gives you a properly formatted HTTP response, and conforms to the relevant RFCs, they've done their job.
At the same time, in choosing to do any of these things, they have to take account of the fact that the source of the HTTP request could be anything - a mobile phone, a search engine robot, any kind of web browser. They don't have to do anything particularly to deal with this if they don't wish - they just take the risk that the client won't understand their response.
That's what's so beautiful about the web - HTTP requests just say 'I want this resource'. It's that simple. HTTP servers return the resource, and leave it up to the client to interpret it. If the client can't interpret it, well, then the resource wasn't intended for that client, and it shouldn't have asked for it in the first place.
The web isn't about content - it's about resources at locations.
It's not simply integration that's the issue here. Can you buy a Ford Taurus without an engine? Can you buy a Sony CD Walkman without headphones? Can you buy a modern electronic washing machine without its firmware pre-installed?
Selling products in combination is not, generally, illegal - it's your prerogative to sell items in whatever comination you choose. What is illegal is exploiting a monopoly position to create artifical barriers to entry. Even then, the AOL MS settlement (an out of court settlement) doesn't make it clear that MS actually did exploit its monopoly to kill Netscape. If I set up a company creating alternative engines for Ford Taurus cars, frankly, I can't complain that Ford sells cars with engines pre-installed. I can complain if Ford prevents garages from taking Tauruses, putting my engines into them, and selling them (but there's still nothing wrong with that garage having to buy cars complete with the engine from Ford). Similarly, the garages can complain if Ford won't let them sell GM cars off the same forecourt. It's these sorts of restrictions that the DOJ case covered, and that MS was found guilty of.
So, there is really nothing wrong with MS bundling software in with the operating system, so long as they don't try to restrict the options of resellers. Similarly, there's nothing wrong with Apple selling macs with OS X included, so long as they don't object to resellers taking OS X off and putting, say, Linux on instead.
Now, how this applies to Apple restricting the use of their official spare parts is an interesting question... is it fair of them to say 'we sell these parts to our official authorised dealers for specific purposes'? Well, that's a tough one. Apple aren't a monopoly supplier of computer hardware - although they are the only supplier of those particular parts - which means they can't be considered to be exploiting a monopoly to create artificial barriers to entry. But it is a little underhand. Frankly, the best bet is for them to simply set spare part prices so high that it's not economical to use them to construct a competing product, as is done in the auto industry.
Hmm... I think that might be a slight overestimate. There's 7.9E28 addresses in the IPv6 address space. Avogadro's number (the number of atoms in a mole (no, not the mammal, the quantity of matter) is of the order of 6E23. So, IPv6 has enough addresses to give one IP address to each molecule in about 1.3e5 moles of molecules.
1.3e5 moles of molecules have a mass of (1.3e5 x (the average atomic mass of the molecules in question)) grams, or 130 x the average atomic mass kilos.
Say your sample of molecules consisted mostly of water (like most biological matter), the average atomic mass of the molecules would be pretty close to 18 atomic mass units, and the mass in question would be around 2340kg.
In other words, IPv6 has a large enough address space to give an IP address to every molecule in about 2340kg of water. At a guess, I'd say that was about the mass of a medium sized whale (the big blue ones get into five figure masses, but we're talking more like a young humpback here).
So no, not quite enough for every molecule on the planet - sorry.
If it makes you feel better, it is enough to give over a billion IP addresses to every grain of sand on every beach on the planet, which just goes to show quite how amazingly small atoms turn out to be.
> It reminds me of a story I read where someone travels back in time to avert a disaster and each time a bigger disaster results from the intervention until finally the person goes back and allows the first disaster to take place. Lesser of two evils I guess.
Making History, by Stephen Fry, is a great example of this storyline (although I assume it wasn't the first).
I think you'll find I said that I make a living selling intellectual property rights to things I create - rights I wouldn't have if it weren't possible for me to own intellectual property in the first place.
No matter how high you set the quality, pretty much any JPEG engine I've come across will still lose some data (albeit not perceptually significant data). Granted, you can - theoretically - generate completely lossless JPEGs, but most graphics packages - even on their highest quality settings - don't give you that option.
You are right, though, that for photographic imagery, you should use JPEG, and forget about the loss if you want small image files. But I always make a point of re-saving digital photos as PNGs as soon as I've got them off the camera, so I have a fixed, immutable set of pixel data to work from. Take a JPEG, open it up, rotate it ninety degrees, resave it - you've lost another bit of the original data. Open it again, crop it, resave, you've lost a bit more data. Open it again, change the colour balance, re-save it, you've lost a little more data. Using JPEG as a working image format is a little like using MP3 as a sound format while editing audio.
The impressive deal with PNG is that its format is extensible and modular, which means it could be used to support multiple channels, different colour models, like LAB or CMYK, or as a basis for complex metadata-based image formats for GIS or scientific applications. It already includes gamma and colour profile support... the kinds of features you expect from TIFF, but are really way beyond what you'd hope for from what was, after all, billed as a replacement for GIF. PNG deserves to get a lot more attention, particularly from the open source community, and tools like GIMP, which could find PNG provides a great open standard on which to base file formats for image storage.
Oh dear - what passes for insight these days is really sad.
To answer your question:
> let me ask you all something, how much intellectual property do each of you own?
Well, in the last week, I produced three whitepapers, a few tens of thousands of lines of code, and a couple of proposals, all of which are my intellectual property (or were, until I sold them, naturally). I've also written books, a shed load of web content, and I'm generating more intellectual property as I type right now. So, it turns out I own a lot of intellectual property. Many of the people who post on this site regularly create intellectual property, often in the form of code. It's a lot more common than you might think.
Intellectual property laws are what enable me to make a living doing creative things that I enjoy, like coding and writing. I don't think there's any reduction in my creativity and freedom caused by IP law - precisely the opposite. I also don't think my making a living selling my ability to write or code infringes your freedoms or creativity.
In other words, please engage your brain before posting a rant against something you don't understand.
large file size versus GIF or JPEG? Hardly. Take a 24 bit RGB image as your source, and find the format that provides the best reproduction of the original image in the least amount of space. PNG wins hands down. GIF can't reproduce the colour depth, JPEG can't reproduce the original pixels reliably without balloning the file size way beyond the PNG.
PNG is actually about the best lossless image format out there - better compression than TIFF LZW, and just as flexible.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a couple of excellent columns on Rubik's cube and variations on the theme for his Metamagical Themas column in Scientific American back in the eighties (you can buy his collected columns in this book). In particular, he talks about the various ways you can modify the basic 3x3x3 cube concept - for example, 4x4x4 cubes, 3x3x3 tetrahedra, alternate colour schemes, and so on (along the way, investigating the spark of inspiration that encourages people to try out different variations on a theme - something he refers to elsewhere in his books as 'conceptual slippage' - this hypercube would be a 'slip' along a different axis to those hofstadter explores - I'm sure he'd appreciate it:) ). He goes into plenty of detail about the mathematical approaches you can use to solving the cube, and some intriguing analogues to subatomic physics that crop up in the maths of rubik... anybody wanting an introduction to the kinds of topics the people behind this hypercube are exploring could do worse than to read those articles.
There's also some excellent stuff in that book on Lisp, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, Alan Turing, and nuclear war... great selection of articles by an extremely interesting mind.
If you want Photoshop for personal use, and can't afford the full deal, buy Photoshop Elements. If you want to find out what the difference is between Elements and the full package, you can get a save-disabled demo of Photoshop from the Adobe website to try out.
Seems to me Adobe have been working pretty hard to give you options that don't involve breaking their licence terms and still getting to use their software.
If you still object, then take a look at GIMP. I see no reason for pirating Photoshop.
That's a noble tradition. I seem to remember that in around 1969, US estimates of the NVA death toll in the Vietnam war actually exceeded the population of Vietnam at the time.
It's possible that Vietnamese people are just particularly fond of messing up censuses and surveys, and are the kind of folks who send back those consumer survey forms, claiming to have an income in excess of $100000 a year, no indoor plumbing, and to be planning on buying four game consoles in the next six months.
The Internet is not an extension of the American constitution, and all this talk of rights and property is really rather childish. The poster you're responding to made the quite reasonable point that software which automatically patches itself reduces the burden of complexity on users who don't want to take the time to understand the internet and the security threats which lurk therein.
When I take my car in to a full service garage, with friendly staff, to take a look at the exhaust, say, the guy might also say 'oh, I topped up the pressure on your left front tyre, and filled up the radiator'. My reaction then would not be 'how dare you infringe my inalienable rights! That's MY car, and I object to you fiddling around with the tyres and the radiator you bastard!'
In fact, from most people's perspective, automatic patching is a bit like having your car washed and vacuumed out, the oil checked, the tyres reinflated, and fuel topped up, every time you park up and go shopping, without you even needing to know it's happening, or getting charged for the service. Why would you object to a car that did that?
I suppose, technically, it would be criminal trespass and scumbag stealth tactics, but personally I think it might be quite nice...
Slashdot Mirror
Yup - make a TFT with the same pixel size as your Dell and the same physical dimensions as this Tosh, and you'd be looking at a 17" widescreen 1960x1280. Oooo, that would be sweet... as it is, this thing looks like an old laptop that's been hit with an enbigulator ray.
okay, what gives with laptop manufacturers and screen resolutions? I've got a 12.1" XGA screen on my laptop, and it has a physical dot pitch of about 105DPI. This monster screen has a dot pitch around 95DPI, if that. I've seen 10" XGA screens which have beautiful crisp pixels (you're talking about 128DPI on those things - Toshiba used to make a laptop with one, in fact). If you built a 17" widescreen TFT with the same dot pitch as one of those, you'd be looking at a laptop with some 1800x1100 pixels. That would be worth doing. But it seems as TFTs get larger, the resolution gets lower, and we end up with beautiful screens like the Apple cinema displays being let down by the fact that their pixels are huge.
Why would I want a laptop with a bigger screen than my 12.1" one if I don't actually get that many more pixels?
I think it might have more to do with the unique and peculiar phenomenon called 'Radio 4'. You have to understand, this is a radio station like no other in the world. Its news coverage makes most broadsheet newspapers of international standing look like supermarket tabloids; its factual programming ranges from farming to education to natural history to technology to science to history to art without missing a beat; it has been the starting point for some of the most innovative comedy ever to come out of britain; it broadcasts a daily soap opera set in a small country village that has been running for over 50 years (and whose theme tune can mysteriously be instantly recited by any british person even if they've never heard it); it carries the shipping forecast of the british meteorological office; and it features no advertising or jingles at all (unless you can call the sound of 'big ben' chiming the hour, or 'the pips' (a strange sequence of electronic beeps that mark the hour), or the national anthem at closedown, jingles...)
The point is, investigating internet spam is as much to be expected from radio four as interviewing a man who's devoted his life to the study of finches, or broadcasting a group of grown men sitting in a theatre reciting the names of london underground stations in accordance with some arcane set of rules.
They probably followed the investigation with a reading from a novel by Hanif Kureishi and a half hour documentary on the history of beekeeping. And then the shipping forecast.
Dogger, Fisher, German Bight.... easterly, becoming more northerly later, rising.
The BBC sees its role as providing balance. You have to view its output in the context of the overall media environment in the UK, and indeed globally.
The BBC may appear to only present one side, or to push one perspective at the expense of others in its own coverage, but generally this will be because the side it is presenting is not otherwise represented in the mainstream media. So, for example, its presentation of Israeli issues is meant to add information to the debate within the UK on Israel/palestine that is not found from other sources, particularly TV news sources such as ITN and Sky news. (incidentally, ITN, which is the main provider of news for commercial TV in the UK, walks a very strange line in its news presentation, providing a conservative (small c) perspective on international politics in its news broadcasts on ITV, and a more liberal perspective in its channel 4 coverage)
This often means the BBC takes what can be seen as an 'anti-government' position, simply because most ocmmercial news doesn't tackle the government on issues, and the BBC's remit is to fill in that gap in the national debate.
That said, they're not making a great showing at the moment in this petty fight with downing street over 'dody dossiers' and 'sexing up'... it's all rather embarrassing, and sounds like it was based on somewhat flaky journalism.
'Corporation' historically, in Britain, has always referred to a public body. 'working for the corporation' meant working for the local authority.
Nowadays, the only corporation most people know about is the beeb, so the etymology's lost on most.
Ironic, then, that MTV relies on privately owned space technology to do a significant part of its broadcasting work globally...
Depends what you mean by projects 'of a comparable size'. Obviously, if you mean 'having a similar sized development team', then I guess they probably do have about the same amount of peer review, don't they?
Actualy, there's a good architecture underneath Exchange, fighting to get out from underneath all the cruft it's acquired over each successive revision.
Exchange is, you're right, a generic datastore - which makes the inexcusable mistake of being based on a JET back-end, but we'll ignore that blunder. It provides functionality for clients to store data-items, according to client-defined schemas, with client-defined access semantics, for client-defined purposes. One of the clients is outlook, and it uses Exchange to store notes, contacts, appointments, and so on. Another client is the MTA, which uses exchange's datastore to store messages. Outlook also knows how to view these messages, so outlook is able to also act as a mail client. Exchange enables these different clients to interact with the same store, and share information.
If MS wanted to enable Outlook to store recipes in exchange, they wouldn't have to alter exchange, just fiddle with Outlook, and Exchange could happily store recipes too.
The thing is, that's a beautifully generic architecture, and with the right APIs it could be a powerful thing indeed. Unfortunately, ADSI and CDO are not the right APIs.
There's a great opportunity here to create a user-account centric XML-based datastore (probably based on SOAP messaging?) that can be used to create collaborative clients. Allow calendaring apps to submit iCal objects, email apps to read vCard objects to detemrine recipient addresses, and create XML email objects. Then create an MTA that reads email objects and sends them, and creates email objects representing mails it receives.
Make it transactional, message-based, and use a resilient, open format for storing the data, and you've got a powerful open equivalent to Exchange.
"the First three films in the Indiana Jones Trilogy will be released"
Since, in any rational universe, a trilogy doesn't have a 'first three films', shouldn't that be the 'increasingly inaccurately named Indiana Jones Trilogy'?
Well, part of the problem is that it undermines the entire purpose of patents in the first place. If people aren't looking at the patent database - in fact, if people are actively avoiding research in the patent DB - then the purpose of patents (granting a person a temporary monopoly over the exploitation of an invention in exchange for their publication of the invention) is totally undermined, since the publication effectively never happens.
The reason for patents is to encourage the spread and reuse of ideas, while allowing for an enforceable funneling of royalties in the form of license fees to the original inventor of the idea.
But if people can't read about patented ideas, consider licensing and using them, and build on them to make new, bigger ideas, then patenting is benefitting nobody but the lawyers who go round extracting royalties after the fact.
friends don't let friends install MS junk, your sig says... surely Microsoft-hating husbands don't let their wives open hotmail accounts? For someone accusing MS of duplicity and double standards, your own standards seem pretty flexible...
If you don't like MS sticking ads into hotmail messages, don't use them - it's not hard. It's not like you don't have other options for email.
So damn Microsoft for making your life worse by providing your wife with a free e-mail address. And damn them even more for suing spammers because its in their interests do do so (no company - not the most benevolent corporation in the world - would launch a legal action against spammers out of sheer public spiritedness - for a start, it's kinda hard to get a court to rule in your favour if the person you're suing has done nothing to harm you)
As to your linked post, well.. if your ISP blocks port 25 traffic, change ISPs. Demand an ISP with an open routing policy. You may have to pay for the privilege, but if enough people do it, market forces will change that. Remember that connecting to the internet through someone else's server is always a privilege, not a fundamental human right, though, and it's up to them to choose what conditions they offer that service under.
You're moaning about MS forcing you to look at hotmail ads, and lobbying small ISPs to shut their gateways to outbound port 25 traffic, but it seems like pretty easy stuff to get around to me.
Well, sorry to say, but PDF is part of the web too. Just as Flash is. HTML is not (any more than, say, GIF and JPEG, or PDF for that matter) a privileged part of the web infrastructure - it is simply a file format that is well suited to the web - but it's also used in any number of other scenarios (offline documentation, such as JavaDocs spring to mind). The web is agnostic about what format the documents transmitted across it take, which is why it is able to support such diverse technologies as WML applications, Flash games, and web services.
If you want to fill a web server full of word DOC files, you can - and the HTTP infrastructure will happily support you in your endeavours. The fact that you aren't providing content in a format suited to web browser clients is neither here nor there - it's your prerogative to do as you will on your web server.
The mistake a lot of people make is thinking that 'The Web' is an interconnected collection of HTML documents distributed across a number of servers. In some ways, 'The Web' is much more than that, and in some ways much less. 'The Web' is no more than an infrastructure based on HTTP that allows client programs to request resources from servers statelessly. HTML is a technology that exploits the web infrastructure to interconnect resources using hypertext principles. In other words, the infrastructure of 'The Web' enables the development of hypertext browsers and hypertext content providers, giving us the experience of browsing that we have all got used to. But at the same time, 'The web' can be used for much much more. You have to get away from thinking about the web as consisting of 'pages' and see it instead as a universal addressing mechanism for electronic resources. Every URL identifies a particular resource. Nobody said those resources had to be web pages, though.
The assumption that the resource at the end of every HTTP URL should be renderable in a basic unmodified web browser is really pretty outdated. Yes, for a helluvalot of URLs (perhaps most), it makes sense to present the resource you return in a format renderable in everything from Lynx up. But that doesn't prevent parts of the web (that is to say, a selection of HTTP addressable resources) being designed to be viewed using specific browsers, or even non-browser clients (look at Apple's iTunes store, for example - there's a powerful HTTP user-agent that accesses resources a web browser wouldn't know what to do with).
So, if somebody chooses to return Flash from a particular URL, you've no more right to complain about their decision in doing so than you have about their returning you a 404 error code from another URL, or a GIF from another one. It's not you that gets to choose what resources are returned from each URL in their address space.
The web is about HTTP requests and responses. If I send a GET request to a particular box, and get a piece of content back, it's up to the owner of that box to choose what that content is. It is their right, for example, to send you a stream of plain text. It is their right to send you properly formatted netscape-specific HTML 2.0 complete with tags. It is their right to send you an MP3 file, or a JPEG, or an HTML 4.0 page containing a link to an embedded Flash movie. Provided their server tells you the MIME type of the data it's sending, gives you a properly formatted HTTP response, and conforms to the relevant RFCs, they've done their job.
At the same time, in choosing to do any of these things, they have to take account of the fact that the source of the HTTP request could be anything - a mobile phone, a search engine robot, any kind of web browser. They don't have to do anything particularly to deal with this if they don't wish - they just take the risk that the client won't understand their response.
That's what's so beautiful about the web - HTTP requests just say 'I want this resource'. It's that simple. HTTP servers return the resource, and leave it up to the client to interpret it. If the client can't interpret it, well, then the resource wasn't intended for that client, and it shouldn't have asked for it in the first place.
The web isn't about content - it's about resources at locations.
It's not simply integration that's the issue here. Can you buy a Ford Taurus without an engine? Can you buy a Sony CD Walkman without headphones? Can you buy a modern electronic washing machine without its firmware pre-installed?
Selling products in combination is not, generally, illegal - it's your prerogative to sell items in whatever comination you choose. What is illegal is exploiting a monopoly position to create artifical barriers to entry. Even then, the AOL MS settlement (an out of court settlement) doesn't make it clear that MS actually did exploit its monopoly to kill Netscape. If I set up a company creating alternative engines for Ford Taurus cars, frankly, I can't complain that Ford sells cars with engines pre-installed. I can complain if Ford prevents garages from taking Tauruses, putting my engines into them, and selling them (but there's still nothing wrong with that garage having to buy cars complete with the engine from Ford). Similarly, the garages can complain if Ford won't let them sell GM cars off the same forecourt. It's these sorts of restrictions that the DOJ case covered, and that MS was found guilty of.
So, there is really nothing wrong with MS bundling software in with the operating system, so long as they don't try to restrict the options of resellers. Similarly, there's nothing wrong with Apple selling macs with OS X included, so long as they don't object to resellers taking OS X off and putting, say, Linux on instead.
Now, how this applies to Apple restricting the use of their official spare parts is an interesting question... is it fair of them to say 'we sell these parts to our official authorised dealers for specific purposes'? Well, that's a tough one. Apple aren't a monopoly supplier of computer hardware - although they are the only supplier of those particular parts - which means they can't be considered to be exploiting a monopoly to create artificial barriers to entry. But it is a little underhand. Frankly, the best bet is for them to simply set spare part prices so high that it's not economical to use them to construct a competing product, as is done in the auto industry.
Hmm... I think that might be a slight overestimate. There's 7.9E28 addresses in the IPv6 address space. Avogadro's number (the number of atoms in a mole (no, not the mammal, the quantity of matter) is of the order of 6E23. So, IPv6 has enough addresses to give one IP address to each molecule in about 1.3e5 moles of molecules.
1.3e5 moles of molecules have a mass of (1.3e5 x (the average atomic mass of the molecules in question)) grams, or 130 x the average atomic mass kilos.
Say your sample of molecules consisted mostly of water (like most biological matter), the average atomic mass of the molecules would be pretty close to 18 atomic mass units, and the mass in question would be around 2340kg.
In other words, IPv6 has a large enough address space to give an IP address to every molecule in about 2340kg of water. At a guess, I'd say that was about the mass of a medium sized whale (the big blue ones get into five figure masses, but we're talking more like a young humpback here).
So no, not quite enough for every molecule on the planet - sorry.
If it makes you feel better, it is enough to give over a billion IP addresses to every grain of sand on every beach on the planet, which just goes to show quite how amazingly small atoms turn out to be.
No, Zuid Afrika got .za
> It reminds me of a story I read where someone travels back in time to avert a disaster and each time a bigger disaster results from the intervention until finally the person goes back and allows the first disaster to take place. Lesser of two evils I guess.
Making History, by Stephen Fry, is a great example of this storyline (although I assume it wasn't the first).
I think you'll find I said that I make a living selling intellectual property rights to things I create - rights I wouldn't have if it weren't possible for me to own intellectual property in the first place.
No matter how high you set the quality, pretty much any JPEG engine I've come across will still lose some data (albeit not perceptually significant data). Granted, you can - theoretically - generate completely lossless JPEGs, but most graphics packages - even on their highest quality settings - don't give you that option.
You are right, though, that for photographic imagery, you should use JPEG, and forget about the loss if you want small image files. But I always make a point of re-saving digital photos as PNGs as soon as I've got them off the camera, so I have a fixed, immutable set of pixel data to work from. Take a JPEG, open it up, rotate it ninety degrees, resave it - you've lost another bit of the original data. Open it again, crop it, resave, you've lost a bit more data. Open it again, change the colour balance, re-save it, you've lost a little more data. Using JPEG as a working image format is a little like using MP3 as a sound format while editing audio.
The impressive deal with PNG is that its format is extensible and modular, which means it could be used to support multiple channels, different colour models, like LAB or CMYK, or as a basis for complex metadata-based image formats for GIS or scientific applications. It already includes gamma and colour profile support... the kinds of features you expect from TIFF, but are really way beyond what you'd hope for from what was, after all, billed as a replacement for GIF. PNG deserves to get a lot more attention, particularly from the open source community, and tools like GIMP, which could find PNG provides a great open standard on which to base file formats for image storage.
Oh dear - what passes for insight these days is really sad.
To answer your question:
> let me ask you all something, how much intellectual property do each of you own?
Well, in the last week, I produced three whitepapers, a few tens of thousands of lines of code, and a couple of proposals, all of which are my intellectual property (or were, until I sold them, naturally). I've also written books, a shed load of web content, and I'm generating more intellectual property as I type right now. So, it turns out I own a lot of intellectual property. Many of the people who post on this site regularly create intellectual property, often in the form of code. It's a lot more common than you might think.
Intellectual property laws are what enable me to make a living doing creative things that I enjoy, like coding and writing. I don't think there's any reduction in my creativity and freedom caused by IP law - precisely the opposite. I also don't think my making a living selling my ability to write or code infringes your freedoms or creativity.
In other words, please engage your brain before posting a rant against something you don't understand.
large file size versus GIF or JPEG? Hardly. Take a 24 bit RGB image as your source, and find the format that provides the best reproduction of the original image in the least amount of space. PNG wins hands down. GIF can't reproduce the colour depth, JPEG can't reproduce the original pixels reliably without balloning the file size way beyond the PNG.
PNG is actually about the best lossless image format out there - better compression than TIFF LZW, and just as flexible.
Douglas Hofstadter wrote a couple of excellent columns on Rubik's cube and variations on the theme for his Metamagical Themas column in Scientific American back in the eighties (you can buy his collected columns in this book). In particular, he talks about the various ways you can modify the basic 3x3x3 cube concept - for example, 4x4x4 cubes, 3x3x3 tetrahedra, alternate colour schemes, and so on (along the way, investigating the spark of inspiration that encourages people to try out different variations on a theme - something he refers to elsewhere in his books as 'conceptual slippage' - this hypercube would be a 'slip' along a different axis to those hofstadter explores - I'm sure he'd appreciate it :) ). He goes into plenty of detail about the mathematical approaches you can use to solving the cube, and some intriguing analogues to subatomic physics that crop up in the maths of rubik... anybody wanting an introduction to the kinds of topics the people behind this hypercube are exploring could do worse than to read those articles.
There's also some excellent stuff in that book on Lisp, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, Alan Turing, and nuclear war... great selection of articles by an extremely interesting mind.
If you want Photoshop for personal use, and can't afford the full deal, buy Photoshop Elements. If you want to find out what the difference is between Elements and the full package, you can get a save-disabled demo of Photoshop from the Adobe website to try out.
Seems to me Adobe have been working pretty hard to give you options that don't involve breaking their licence terms and still getting to use their software.
If you still object, then take a look at GIMP. I see no reason for pirating Photoshop.
That's a noble tradition. I seem to remember that in around 1969, US estimates of the NVA death toll in the Vietnam war actually exceeded the population of Vietnam at the time.
It's possible that Vietnamese people are just particularly fond of messing up censuses and surveys, and are the kind of folks who send back those consumer survey forms, claiming to have an income in excess of $100000 a year, no indoor plumbing, and to be planning on buying four game consoles in the next six months.
Oh please.
The Internet is not an extension of the American constitution, and all this talk of rights and property is really rather childish. The poster you're responding to made the quite reasonable point that software which automatically patches itself reduces the burden of complexity on users who don't want to take the time to understand the internet and the security threats which lurk therein.
When I take my car in to a full service garage, with friendly staff, to take a look at the exhaust, say, the guy might also say 'oh, I topped up the pressure on your left front tyre, and filled up the radiator'. My reaction then would not be 'how dare you infringe my inalienable rights! That's MY car, and I object to you fiddling around with the tyres and the radiator you bastard!'
In fact, from most people's perspective, automatic patching is a bit like having your car washed and vacuumed out, the oil checked, the tyres reinflated, and fuel topped up, every time you park up and go shopping, without you even needing to know it's happening, or getting charged for the service. Why would you object to a car that did that?
I suppose, technically, it would be criminal trespass and scumbag stealth tactics, but personally I think it might be quite nice...