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The Arswards for 1999
Doll Part writes "Ars' year-end Arswards are up, and they look back at geek life this past year and talk about things that have really made a difference. Linus is Person of the Year (predictable), but most their other entries are technologically provocative, and they try to remember the whole year, rather than just December. There's a really interesting bit about the start of the AOL madness, too. " One of the things that I particularly enjoy about the Arsawards is that you don't have to have released in 1999 - you just need to have made your impact in that year, like in the case of...oh. That'd be telling, wouldn't it?
I'd like to give Creative an award for releasing their drivers' source ahead of most everybody else in the hardware industry. I think they started the ball rolling. Now 3Com has to be the "biggest" company to release drivers - these will doubtless be VERY useful for encouraging corporate adoption of linux, but Creative started it.
I own one of the optical mice, actually I bought it the first day it was released in stores.
It has several issues people should know about though. It doesnt work on glass or reflective surfaces (the LED doesnt get picked up properly by the imager on them), also it doesnt work too well with glazed surfaces (like a shiny table surface), it does work really well on textured surfaces though, a mouse pad works well, so does a book cover etc.
It has some really bad problems with fast mouse moving though. You cant just move the mouse around ultra quick as one would in a game of quake. The optical "camera" inside the mouse cant track the surface fast enough, so it loses its tracking and the mouse goes crazy. Sucks. The only solution is the crank the mouse to a high resolution in whatever game your playing (assuming the game requires quick mousing).
The mouse also works great under windows (both USB and PS2), and works well under Linux (ps2), however it cannot function as a serial device, as the current supplied by the serial port is not enough to supply the LED and camera within the mouse, so using a PS2 to serial converter will not work.
All in all its a pretty neat device, and works with everything after a bit of tweaking. I personally hate cleaning ball mice, so I really like it.
KAMEL
though the printing press won the award, i wouldn't have said it had the impact it could (and did) have immediately, as much knowledge and its dissemination was still controlled by few sources (such as the catholic church) - no open sourcing until the 17th-18th centuries
i was surprised to see none of what i would consider the greatest technological inventions of our millenium got any considerable votage, namely:
the combustion engine. for obvious reasons.
the integrated circuit. for allowing the crunching down of technology into such a small space as to make computers, small electronic circuits and essentially every appliance we use today from microwaves to dishwashers to toasters and water meters, a possibility.
and last but definitely not least, and probably the top of all:
the toilet. the invention of the u-bend allowed for an amazing increase in santitation in the home, leading to greater quality of life for all concerned. look at countries that don't have a sewage disposal system comparable to the western world, and the impact it has in terms of disease and pollution. this simple device put paid to all that.
but all round, it is amazing to think how far we have come as a race in a thousand years. i think that calls for a drink! ooh! fermentation! damn, that was invented over a thousand years ago, wasn't it... *grin*
Fross
Since we are talking about Ars anyways, they have a good review of the mouse on their site that should answer your questions:
http://arstechnica.com/r eviews/4q99/msmouse/msmouse-1.html
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
It was the Celeron. Whatever intel did to make such damn high quality C300A's was great. They used technologies from P2 production and yet left the Celeron at 1.5 times less Mhz than the P2.
This left us with only one thing to do. OVERCLOCK. They tried to lock the bus to make it hard to do, but that didnt matter. With the advent of really nice 100Mhz FSB boards out there like the BH6 which was rock solid for overclocking, things just took off.
Now that Celerons up to 533are now being produced, with Intel 'doing the OC for us' by having them at 100Mhz bus now, those halcyon days are over. The C300A was just the BEST at overclocking. No need for any special cooling devices for me, and among a dozen friends that tried it, 11 of us succeeded - the other guy went and got a replacement that worked. The power/$ because of this is something the Athlon wont even match til prices fall this summer.
Or ARE the halcyon days over? According to this slashdot note about this article, there may be more such days ahead during the early release of the intel flipchip 500 and 550e, before they start streaming into high quality high speed high price chips, and lo end ones which wont OC. GET THEM AT THE START of the cycle.
If you arent running a server, the leeway intel has given for overclocking is just too large to ignore. If you consider it, the Athlon, while a technological marvel and all for the elegant solutions it employs to be compatible with a stupid x86 design (see this ARSTechnica comparison G4 vs Athlon) just does NOT give the same bang for the buck if you check it all out. (And REALLY, the Alpha is still an amazing chip, 64 bits and all, and heavily underused - and its years old.)
So if price/performance and x86 compatibility are all that matters, the Celeron300A was the best CPU deal of the year.
Math