I hate to break out some bad news, but frankly, Linux in its current form is still not ready for prime time when it comes to the average home user. While setup has improved a lot in terms of ease of use, trying to do things like kernel upgrades and other code upgrades can still be a pretty tricky proposition at times. And I don't think the average home user wants to tackle the formidable command-line interface of Linux, which uses frequently confusing UNIX commands.
The Linux crowd really needs to support the likes of Eazel, which is developing the Nautilus GUI working under GNOME to substantially make it easier for the average person to use Linux. (It helps that Eazel has Andy Hertzfeld--who developed much of the ideas for the original Macintosh interface--working on the project.)
Once Linux has a consistent, easy-to-use GUI interface, the ability to easily update the OS code without a finicky kernel recompile and the ability to recognize and configure itself to use new hardware in a "hot docked" fashion over the USB and IEEE-1394 connections, THEN I will consider it a serious contender against Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP. In short, Linux is getting better, but it's still got a ways to go.
I hope you run like heck before all the Linux bigots flame you.:-)
Personally, I think the reason why Microsoft is so successful is the very fact that it was Microsoft's inclusion easy-to-setup networking features in both NIC and dial-up form in Windows 95 that really kicked off the explosive use of the Internet as we know it today. Before Windows 95, setting up your computer to connect to a Internet Service Provider was a very tricky situation, what with the fussy setup of Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.1x.
Netscape made a lot of money in the early Windows 95 days because they got their Navigator 2.0x browser to work as a WIN32 API application; it took Microsoft a year before they released Internet Explorer 3.0, which matched Netscape's efforts.
What really killed Netscape was the fact that Netscape could not keep up with the improvements in Internet Explorer; by the time IE 5.0 came out, Netscape was way behind the times. So far, Netscape 6.0x is nowhere as fast and is far more resource hungry than IE 5.5 Service Pack 1.
Microsoft has something that few other companies have, and that is an excellent Usability Lab that does research into how to make programs easier to use. Note that IE 5.5 SP1 has a very "polished" feel because of this, while Netscape 6.0x feels like a mish-mash of menus in comparison.
The Linux crowd really needs to back the efforts of companies like Eazel, which seeks to create an easy-to-use, "polished feel" GUI for Linux running under GNOME. The fact that ex-Apple developer Andy Hertzfeld (one of the world's most foremost experts in GUI design) is doing much of the work on the Eazel Nautilus interface gives me hope that Linux will within a few years be able to successfully compete with Windows in terms of easy of installation and use.
With the price of 30 gigabyte ATA-100 hard drives approaching US$120, the issue of disk storage for music is no longer an issue. Especially with.MP3 format and the new Open Source music formats now in development, which stores high-quality music at a rate of one megabyte/minute or less.
This is why somebody should be kicking the RIAA around and tell them you can make a profit on online music sales if you price it at a rate of eight US cents per minute (US$4.80 per hour). With online sales, you can subtract out the major overhead of stamping out CD's, manufacturing the packaging and shipping the completed CD's to retailer.
I think one of the reasons why there seem to be much haggling over Napster is the very fact that here in the USA, the average album-length audio CD costs anywhere between US$13 to US$17. In some countries, it's even MORE expensive: the cost of an album-length CD in Japan is around 3000 yen (about US$26 at current exchange rates).
This, in my opinion, is pretty much extortion pricing for music. I can understand the high prices of audio CD's during the early days of the format when pressing plants are few and very expensive to setup, but we've advanced technology to the point that commercial-quality CD's are actually less expensive to manufacture than the old vinyl LP's.
Anyone who's taken a first-year college course in economics know this is essentially cartel pricing. Because there is much incentive to undercut cartel pricing, that's why things like Napster and Gnutella came into being.
The RIAA needs to stop sticking its proverbial head in the sand and do what should have been done a long ago: lower the price of the average album-length audio CD to between US$8 and US$9. And the RIAA should propose a standard to sell music digitally online at a rate of around eight US cents per minute, which would translate to about US$4.80 per hour.
With digital music distribution like that, the record companies could actually make a massive windfall from online sales. Imagine having their entire music collection stored on high-bandwidth servers, and sold to customers at a rate of eight cents per minute. Remember, you don't need to factor in the cost of CD production and packaging, which means much less overhead and bigger profits.
In short, the RIAA shouldn't be fighting technology, they should be finding a way to embrace it.
I'm surprised that Sluggy Freelance was not mentioned, either.
Remember, Sluggy Freelance has been around since August 1997, a veritable old-timer in terms of online comic strips. I believe it came out about the same time as the first User Friendly strips.
The only major online comic strip older than Sluggy Freelance I know of is Bill Holbrook's KEVIN AND KELL, which (I think) was originally distributed on CompuServe a little bit more than ten years ago.
Re:The web is reinvigorating comics.
on
Web-Based Comics
·
· Score: 2
I absolutely agree!:-)
Comic strips like Kevin and Kell, Sluggy Freelance, MegaTokyo, and several others could not exist in the world of the syndicates because they often have subjects that the syndicates would reject outright as either "violating standards" or too obscure.
Well, trying to collect royalties on that basis is NOT going to work.
If you saw my posting on the message thread about Rambus, I said that the famous U.S. v. United Shoe Machinery Company case from 1945 put an end to this way to keep down competitors. What Rambus is trying to do is exactly what United Shoe tried to do to its competition back in the first half of the 20th Century--use its critical patents on shoe-making machinery to destroy the competition. It would be akin to Eli Lilly enforcing its patent on Prozac to the point that no competitive product (Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Remeron, etc.) could come to market.
What United Shoe Machinery Company did during the first half of the 20th Century was because they held several critical patents on shoe-making machines, they used those patents to forcefully kill all the competition in against them.
The US DoJ got wind of this, and they went after United Shoe. That resulted in the famous 1945 decision that ruled United Shoe could not use the patent laws to eliminate competitors.
Imagine if Eli Lilly had forcefully enforced their patent on Prozac like United Shoe did; it would have effectively killed off competitive anti-depressants like Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Remeron, etc.
I personally think what Rambus is trying to do is run what amounts to an extortion scheme using the patent laws as a shield.
Unfortunately for them, the case I mentioned earlier invalidated that idea, and Rambus will find out very quickly this is NOT going to work. In fact, the DoJ may even go after Rambus for violating the Racketeering, Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Federal statutes for putting pressure on other memory manufacturers so brazenly.
I think Rambus could have tough going defending its patents because of one famous legal precedent: U.S. v. United Shoe Machinery Company (1945), which ruled that a company cannot use the patent laws to engage in legal practices to shut out competitors.
What Rambus is engaging in right now is almost a perfect reflection on what United Shoe tried to do to any shoemaking company that violated United Shoe's various patents on shoemaking machines in the first half of the 20th Century.
The sad thing about bookstores here in the Bay Area is that a lot of the local stores like Books, Inc., Printer's Ink and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books have been wiped out by Barnes & Noble and to a lesser extent Borders Books.:-(
There are some book stores that have survived, but they have to specialize in order to do so: Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, CA and The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, CA are good examples of this.
Some independent bookstores like Cody's in Berkeley and one in the North Beach section of San Francisco (I think it's called Northern Lights) survive because of their strong, always-returning clientele.
But like it or not, the superstore age is here to stay. The small, independent stores just cannot compete against the like of Wal-Mart, Price/Costco, Home Depot, etc. because the superstores can get volume discounts on a vast scale.
But getting back on topic:) , I think some smaller ISP's can survive if they can ally themselves with a broadband infrastructure provider. I believe that is the case in many cases, and I do know here in the Bay Area, Earthlink and Prodigy.Net have bundling deals with SBC/PacBell so you can use Earthlink or Prodigy as your ISP but use PacBell ADSL lines.
What I find interesting about people complaining about Barnes & Noble knocking off the little bookstores is that B&N has a huge variety of books and magazines available you couldn't get at any mom and pop bookstore. I'm a fancier for British aviation magazines and only a store as big as B&N could stock them.
I think the problem with the mom and pop ISP's is that they don't have the money and/or resources to get access to high-speed Internet connections such as DSL lines, cable modem lines, satellite dish systems or the new line-of-sight wireless antenna systems. It's only the big companies that have the resources to put up these methods of Internet access to your home.
The problem right now is that in order to do broadband Internet access, you need the infrastructure in place to do this. That, alas, is extremely expensive and small ISP's cannot get the money to get access to these lines for their customers.
Note that here in the Bay Area, only SBC-approved ISP's get access to DSL connections (Earthlink, Prodigy.net, PacBell Internet and a few others). And of course the only approved ISP for cable modems is Excite@Home.
Boy, you better run real fast with your remarks.;-)
I personally look at all the major industrial-grade Internet applications running out there on the major shopping web sites and most of them are running on Sun Solaris, not exactly an Open Source operating system.
The Linux crowd sometimes also forget that the big Internet sites run OpenBSD, NOT Linux (a good example is Yahoo!). Let's see how long before Linux 2.4.x's I/O throughput improvements will allow it to run high-volume Internet sites on a large scale.
The UBC prank seems totally unimaginative compared to some of the hacks pulled off by California Institute of Technology (CalTech) students.
Who could forget when someone hacked the scoreboard at the Rose Bowl so during the Rose Bowl game it showed CalTech winning over MIT? I saw this on live TV some years ago and that was a real classic.
But still, perhaps the most famous hack of all time (IMHO!:-) ) is one time a small group of CalTech students hacked a grandstand placard display from a college team back east. Done back in the days before computers were common, the result was that during a game at the Rose Bowl when the team's fans held up the placards, instead of the something of the colors of the home team it really spelled out CALTECH.
For one thing, an ekranoplane would make a lot of noise from the jet engines needed to keep the vehicle riding on that cushion of air. And it needs quite a lot of them--and that means lots of fuel burned. I remember the most common Russian design had a big turboprop engine on the tail for forward motion and two NK-8 turbofan engines in the front to create the air cushion--quiet that won't be!
Also, I'm not sure if the Russians really bothered to fly an ekranoplane in rough seas. I don't think the air cushioning effect is going to work if you have 3 meter or higher waves.
Besides the fact that the Pokémon franchise continues to be pretty strong, Nintendo are taking steps to start catering to an older audience. Look at the upcoming GameCube and Game Boy Advance--both gaming platforms are ready to play more sophisticated games we normally associate with PlayStation or Dreamcast. The neat thing about Game Boy Advance is the fact you can use your current Game Boy cartridges with no problems, and in fact the Game Boy Advance unit can even function as a GameCube controller!
It will be very interesting to see how Sega implements the next version of the NFL2Kx series of football games on GameCube; it will definitely have the great gameplay of NFL2K1 plus graphics quality definitely equal to what EA Sports did with Madden NFL 2001.
I am a bit saddened that Sega is no longer in the console business.
I mean, the Dreamcast had some truly wonderful games on it: Soul Calibur, NFL2K/NFK2K1, Jet Grind Radio, Samba di Amigo, Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, Grandia II, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, the underrated Power Stone, Dead or Alive 2, and several others. I'm hoping that the games I've mentioned will be revived on other gaming platforms in the next few years.
The thing that really killed Sega was the fact they were not able to overcome the marketing power of Sony. The very name "Sony" has such as strong level of recognition that even with the current PlayStation 2 shortages they still can out-market Sega very easily.
Right now, it appears that only Microsoft and Nintendo have a chance to take on Sony, Microsoft from the high end with Xbox and Nintendo from the low end with GameCube and Game Boy Advance. I believe that Game Boy Advance will be the thing that keeps Nintendo alive in the next few years.
Actually, I do know that Eurostar has now nearly twice the people going between London and Paris as flying between London Heathrow/Gatwick and Paris/Charles de Gaulle airports. Eurostar is one reason why the hovercraft that used to ply the English Channel no longer do so.:(
The trip between London and Paris by Eurostar will be reduced by nearly 38 minutes when the new high-speed line from London's Waterloo International Station to Folkestone (the English side entrance to the tunnel) is completed in 2002.
Actually, Paris-Lyon is short-distance enough that a TGV does make sense, because I believe it takes about 2.5 hours nowadays to travel that distance by TGV.
It'll be interesting to see how much air traffic between Paris and Marseille is affected once the TGV line from Paris to Marseille allows for all high-speed running.
I think while it's nice that finally we'll see a major commercial application of maglev technology, the problem is that the cost of a Transrapid maglev on a per kilometer basis is WAY too expensive for what it does.
Already, a breakthrough announced in late 1999 promises to make Transrapid obselete; a bunch of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers trying to develop a better way to launch rockets into space cheaply came up with maglev system that uses mostly cheap permanent magnets to move the train along without the very precise engineering that the Transrapid needs.
They're now in the process of scaling up the technology to see if it will work on a larger scale; if it does, the US could actually take the lead on maglev research since the US will have by far the least expensive technology necessary to build a maglev train that goes between 400 and 500 km/h (248 to 310 mph).
Maglev's could drastically change transportation as we know it. Imagine going from downtown Chicago to downtown Minneapolis in under two hours, or Atlanta to Miami via Orlando, FL in just under three hours. It could make short-distance air travel obselete on any corridor where the maglev train is running.
Well, there is a real good reason why Sun wants the Java VM to work on the WIN32 API first: that is -85 percent- of the market for desktop computers and small servers.
Sun may dislike Microsoft but frankly, Sun knows that for Java to be significant they -have- to be able to run on the most popular OS platform by a long, long way.
Don't be surprised that this settlement may result in a deal for a Sun-certified Java VM to be part of Internet Explorer 6.0, or at least provide direct hooks to work under IE 6.0.
Java NEEDS to be able to run under Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000 because that's -85 percent- of the market for desktop and small server computers out there.
In short, if you want to make money with any commercial product based on Java, you have to be WIN32 API compatible in the first place. That's why even Sun's own work on Java have to include WIN32 API support, because despite what Sun thinks of Microsoft, they know that the vast majority of Java installations have to run under Windows, like it or not.:)
I think one thing that hurts Linux is that there is too MUCH choice when it comes to what you can do with Linux.
The result can be an absolute nightmare, especially on large IT organizations that need ease of OS installation and maintainance. That's why Solaris and Windows NT/2000 are still doing well even in face of "cheap" competition from Linux. Even Linux that is pre-loaded on commercial systems are usually the commercial distributions from Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera, etc.
You can create a "homebrewed" Linux, but unless you're extremely familiar with the innards of Linux it is a major hassle to maintain--and very likely beyond the skill of the majority of computer users out there. It should be noted that the supposedly "home-brewed" versions of Linux distributed for use on college campuses are usually modified versions of commercial distributions from Red Hat, Mandrake, S.u.S.E., TurboLinux, Caldera, and so on.
The lack of stadium-style seating and THX-quality sound are two of the reasons I don't GO to the Century 16 Mountain View.
The other reason is that traffic and parking around that theater is horrible, especially in evening hours. I'd rather go to the Century 25 in Union Landing and Century 20 at Great Mall, where parking IS very plentiful and the sound system is obvious top-notch.:-)
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Pete,
I hate to break out some bad news, but frankly, Linux in its current form is still not ready for prime time when it comes to the average home user. While setup has improved a lot in terms of ease of use, trying to do things like kernel upgrades and other code upgrades can still be a pretty tricky proposition at times. And I don't think the average home user wants to tackle the formidable command-line interface of Linux, which uses frequently confusing UNIX commands.
The Linux crowd really needs to support the likes of Eazel, which is developing the Nautilus GUI working under GNOME to substantially make it easier for the average person to use Linux. (It helps that Eazel has Andy Hertzfeld--who developed much of the ideas for the original Macintosh interface--working on the project.)
Once Linux has a consistent, easy-to-use GUI interface, the ability to easily update the OS code without a finicky kernel recompile and the ability to recognize and configure itself to use new hardware in a "hot docked" fashion over the USB and IEEE-1394 connections, THEN I will consider it a serious contender against Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP. In short, Linux is getting better, but it's still got a ways to go.
I hope you run like heck before all the Linux bigots flame you. :-)
Personally, I think the reason why Microsoft is so successful is the very fact that it was Microsoft's inclusion easy-to-setup networking features in both NIC and dial-up form in Windows 95 that really kicked off the explosive use of the Internet as we know it today. Before Windows 95, setting up your computer to connect to a Internet Service Provider was a very tricky situation, what with the fussy setup of Trumpet Winsock for Windows 3.1x.
Netscape made a lot of money in the early Windows 95 days because they got their Navigator 2.0x browser to work as a WIN32 API application; it took Microsoft a year before they released Internet Explorer 3.0, which matched Netscape's efforts.
What really killed Netscape was the fact that Netscape could not keep up with the improvements in Internet Explorer; by the time IE 5.0 came out, Netscape was way behind the times. So far, Netscape 6.0x is nowhere as fast and is far more resource hungry than IE 5.5 Service Pack 1.
Microsoft has something that few other companies have, and that is an excellent Usability Lab that does research into how to make programs easier to use. Note that IE 5.5 SP1 has a very "polished" feel because of this, while Netscape 6.0x feels like a mish-mash of menus in comparison.
The Linux crowd really needs to back the efforts of companies like Eazel, which seeks to create an easy-to-use, "polished feel" GUI for Linux running under GNOME. The fact that ex-Apple developer Andy Hertzfeld (one of the world's most foremost experts in GUI design) is doing much of the work on the Eazel Nautilus interface gives me hope that Linux will within a few years be able to successfully compete with Windows in terms of easy of installation and use.
Larazus,
.MP3 format and the new Open Source music formats now in development, which stores high-quality music at a rate of one megabyte/minute or less.
With the price of 30 gigabyte ATA-100 hard drives approaching US$120, the issue of disk storage for music is no longer an issue. Especially with
This is why somebody should be kicking the RIAA around and tell them you can make a profit on online music sales if you price it at a rate of eight US cents per minute (US$4.80 per hour). With online sales, you can subtract out the major overhead of stamping out CD's, manufacturing the packaging and shipping the completed CD's to retailer.
Folks,
I think one of the reasons why there seem to be much haggling over Napster is the very fact that here in the USA, the average album-length audio CD costs anywhere between US$13 to US$17. In some countries, it's even MORE expensive: the cost of an album-length CD in Japan is around 3000 yen (about US$26 at current exchange rates).
This, in my opinion, is pretty much extortion pricing for music. I can understand the high prices of audio CD's during the early days of the format when pressing plants are few and very expensive to setup, but we've advanced technology to the point that commercial-quality CD's are actually less expensive to manufacture than the old vinyl LP's.
Anyone who's taken a first-year college course in economics know this is essentially cartel pricing. Because there is much incentive to undercut cartel pricing, that's why things like Napster and Gnutella came into being.
The RIAA needs to stop sticking its proverbial head in the sand and do what should have been done a long ago: lower the price of the average album-length audio CD to between US$8 and US$9. And the RIAA should propose a standard to sell music digitally online at a rate of around eight US cents per minute, which would translate to about US$4.80 per hour.
With digital music distribution like that, the record companies could actually make a massive windfall from online sales. Imagine having their entire music collection stored on high-bandwidth servers, and sold to customers at a rate of eight cents per minute. Remember, you don't need to factor in the cost of CD production and packaging, which means much less overhead and bigger profits.
In short, the RIAA shouldn't be fighting technology, they should be finding a way to embrace it.
I'm surprised that Sluggy Freelance was not mentioned, either.
Remember, Sluggy Freelance has been around since August 1997, a veritable old-timer in terms of online comic strips. I believe it came out about the same time as the first User Friendly strips.
The only major online comic strip older than Sluggy Freelance I know of is Bill Holbrook's KEVIN AND KELL, which (I think) was originally distributed on CompuServe a little bit more than ten years ago.
I absolutely agree! :-)
Comic strips like Kevin and Kell, Sluggy Freelance, MegaTokyo, and several others could not exist in the world of the syndicates because they often have subjects that the syndicates would reject outright as either "violating standards" or too obscure.
It really is a rebirth of the comic strip.
Well, trying to collect royalties on that basis is NOT going to work.
If you saw my posting on the message thread about Rambus, I said that the famous U.S. v. United Shoe Machinery Company case from 1945 put an end to this way to keep down competitors. What Rambus is trying to do is exactly what United Shoe tried to do to its competition back in the first half of the 20th Century--use its critical patents on shoe-making machinery to destroy the competition. It would be akin to Eli Lilly enforcing its patent on Prozac to the point that no competitive product (Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Remeron, etc.) could come to market.
Brian,
What United Shoe Machinery Company did during the first half of the 20th Century was because they held several critical patents on shoe-making machines, they used those patents to forcefully kill all the competition in against them.
The US DoJ got wind of this, and they went after United Shoe. That resulted in the famous 1945 decision that ruled United Shoe could not use the patent laws to eliminate competitors.
Imagine if Eli Lilly had forcefully enforced their patent on Prozac like United Shoe did; it would have effectively killed off competitive anti-depressants like Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Remeron, etc.
I personally think what Rambus is trying to do is run what amounts to an extortion scheme using the patent laws as a shield.
Unfortunately for them, the case I mentioned earlier invalidated that idea, and Rambus will find out very quickly this is NOT going to work. In fact, the DoJ may even go after Rambus for violating the Racketeering, Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Federal statutes for putting pressure on other memory manufacturers so brazenly.
I think Rambus could have tough going defending its patents because of one famous legal precedent: U.S. v. United Shoe Machinery Company (1945), which ruled that a company cannot use the patent laws to engage in legal practices to shut out competitors.
What Rambus is engaging in right now is almost a perfect reflection on what United Shoe tried to do to any shoemaking company that violated United Shoe's various patents on shoemaking machines in the first half of the 20th Century.
The sad thing about bookstores here in the Bay Area is that a lot of the local stores like Books, Inc., Printer's Ink and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books have been wiped out by Barnes & Noble and to a lesser extent Borders Books. :-(
:) , I think some smaller ISP's can survive if they can ally themselves with a broadband infrastructure provider. I believe that is the case in many cases, and I do know here in the Bay Area, Earthlink and Prodigy.Net have bundling deals with SBC/PacBell so you can use Earthlink or Prodigy as your ISP but use PacBell ADSL lines.
There are some book stores that have survived, but they have to specialize in order to do so: Future Fantasy in Palo Alto, CA and The Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley, CA are good examples of this.
Some independent bookstores like Cody's in Berkeley and one in the North Beach section of San Francisco (I think it's called Northern Lights) survive because of their strong, always-returning clientele.
But like it or not, the superstore age is here to stay. The small, independent stores just cannot compete against the like of Wal-Mart, Price/Costco, Home Depot, etc. because the superstores can get volume discounts on a vast scale.
But getting back on topic
What I find interesting about people complaining about Barnes & Noble knocking off the little bookstores is that B&N has a huge variety of books and magazines available you couldn't get at any mom and pop bookstore. I'm a fancier for British aviation magazines and only a store as big as B&N could stock them.
I think the problem with the mom and pop ISP's is that they don't have the money and/or resources to get access to high-speed Internet connections such as DSL lines, cable modem lines, satellite dish systems or the new line-of-sight wireless antenna systems. It's only the big companies that have the resources to put up these methods of Internet access to your home.
You hit it on the nose. :o)
The problem right now is that in order to do broadband Internet access, you need the infrastructure in place to do this. That, alas, is extremely expensive and small ISP's cannot get the money to get access to these lines for their customers.
Note that here in the Bay Area, only SBC-approved ISP's get access to DSL connections (Earthlink, Prodigy.net, PacBell Internet and a few others). And of course the only approved ISP for cable modems is Excite@Home.
Boy, you better run real fast with your remarks. ;-)
I personally look at all the major industrial-grade Internet applications running out there on the major shopping web sites and most of them are running on Sun Solaris, not exactly an Open Source operating system.
The Linux crowd sometimes also forget that the big Internet sites run OpenBSD, NOT Linux (a good example is Yahoo!). Let's see how long before Linux 2.4.x's I/O throughput improvements will allow it to run high-volume Internet sites on a large scale.
Yawn. :-)
:-) ) is one time a small group of CalTech students hacked a grandstand placard display from a college team back east. Done back in the days before computers were common, the result was that during a game at the Rose Bowl when the team's fans held up the placards, instead of the something of the colors of the home team it really spelled out CALTECH.
The UBC prank seems totally unimaginative compared to some of the hacks pulled off by California Institute of Technology (CalTech) students.
Who could forget when someone hacked the scoreboard at the Rose Bowl so during the Rose Bowl game it showed CalTech winning over MIT? I saw this on live TV some years ago and that was a real classic.
But still, perhaps the most famous hack of all time (IMHO!
I'm not sure if this is a great idea, though.
For one thing, an ekranoplane would make a lot of noise from the jet engines needed to keep the vehicle riding on that cushion of air. And it needs quite a lot of them--and that means lots of fuel burned. I remember the most common Russian design had a big turboprop engine on the tail for forward motion and two NK-8 turbofan engines in the front to create the air cushion--quiet that won't be!
Also, I'm not sure if the Russians really bothered to fly an ekranoplane in rough seas. I don't think the air cushioning effect is going to work if you have 3 meter or higher waves.
I think Nintendo will do okay.
Besides the fact that the Pokémon franchise continues to be pretty strong, Nintendo are taking steps to start catering to an older audience. Look at the upcoming GameCube and Game Boy Advance--both gaming platforms are ready to play more sophisticated games we normally associate with PlayStation or Dreamcast. The neat thing about Game Boy Advance is the fact you can use your current Game Boy cartridges with no problems, and in fact the Game Boy Advance unit can even function as a GameCube controller!
It will be very interesting to see how Sega implements the next version of the NFL2Kx series of football games on GameCube; it will definitely have the great gameplay of NFL2K1 plus graphics quality definitely equal to what EA Sports did with Madden NFL 2001.
I am a bit saddened that Sega is no longer in the console business.
I mean, the Dreamcast had some truly wonderful games on it: Soul Calibur, NFL2K/NFK2K1, Jet Grind Radio, Samba di Amigo, Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, Grandia II, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, the underrated Power Stone, Dead or Alive 2, and several others. I'm hoping that the games I've mentioned will be revived on other gaming platforms in the next few years.
The thing that really killed Sega was the fact they were not able to overcome the marketing power of Sony. The very name "Sony" has such as strong level of recognition that even with the current PlayStation 2 shortages they still can out-market Sega very easily.
Right now, it appears that only Microsoft and Nintendo have a chance to take on Sony, Microsoft from the high end with Xbox and Nintendo from the low end with GameCube and Game Boy Advance. I believe that Game Boy Advance will be the thing that keeps Nintendo alive in the next few years.
Actually, I do know that Eurostar has now nearly twice the people going between London and Paris as flying between London Heathrow/Gatwick and Paris/Charles de Gaulle airports. Eurostar is one reason why the hovercraft that used to ply the English Channel no longer do so. :(
The trip between London and Paris by Eurostar will be reduced by nearly 38 minutes when the new high-speed line from London's Waterloo International Station to Folkestone (the English side entrance to the tunnel) is completed in 2002.
Actually, Paris-Lyon is short-distance enough that a TGV does make sense, because I believe it takes about 2.5 hours nowadays to travel that distance by TGV.
It'll be interesting to see how much air traffic between Paris and Marseille is affected once the TGV line from Paris to Marseille allows for all high-speed running.
I think while it's nice that finally we'll see a major commercial application of maglev technology, the problem is that the cost of a Transrapid maglev on a per kilometer basis is WAY too expensive for what it does.
Already, a breakthrough announced in late 1999 promises to make Transrapid obselete; a bunch of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers trying to develop a better way to launch rockets into space cheaply came up with maglev system that uses mostly cheap permanent magnets to move the train along without the very precise engineering that the Transrapid needs.
They're now in the process of scaling up the technology to see if it will work on a larger scale; if it does, the US could actually take the lead on maglev research since the US will have by far the least expensive technology necessary to build a maglev train that goes between 400 and 500 km/h (248 to 310 mph).
Maglev's could drastically change transportation as we know it. Imagine going from downtown Chicago to downtown Minneapolis in under two hours, or Atlanta to Miami via Orlando, FL in just under three hours. It could make short-distance air travel obselete on any corridor where the maglev train is running.
Well, there is a real good reason why Sun wants the Java VM to work on the WIN32 API first: that is -85 percent- of the market for desktop computers and small servers.
Sun may dislike Microsoft but frankly, Sun knows that for Java to be significant they -have- to be able to run on the most popular OS platform by a long, long way.
Don't be surprised that this settlement may result in a deal for a Sun-certified Java VM to be part of Internet Explorer 6.0, or at least provide direct hooks to work under IE 6.0.
Java NEEDS to be able to run under Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000 because that's -85 percent- of the market for desktop and small server computers out there.
:)
In short, if you want to make money with any commercial product based on Java, you have to be WIN32 API compatible in the first place. That's why even Sun's own work on Java have to include WIN32 API support, because despite what Sun thinks of Microsoft, they know that the vast majority of Java installations have to run under Windows, like it or not.
I think one thing that hurts Linux is that there is too MUCH choice when it comes to what you can do with Linux.
The result can be an absolute nightmare, especially on large IT organizations that need ease of OS installation and maintainance. That's why Solaris and Windows NT/2000 are still doing well even in face of "cheap" competition from Linux. Even Linux that is pre-loaded on commercial systems are usually the commercial distributions from Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera, etc.
You can create a "homebrewed" Linux, but unless you're extremely familiar with the innards of Linux it is a major hassle to maintain--and very likely beyond the skill of the majority of computer users out there. It should be noted that the supposedly "home-brewed" versions of Linux distributed for use on college campuses are usually modified versions of commercial distributions from Red Hat, Mandrake, S.u.S.E., TurboLinux, Caldera, and so on.
The lack of stadium-style seating and THX-quality sound are two of the reasons I don't GO to the Century 16 Mountain View.
:-)
The other reason is that traffic and parking around that theater is horrible, especially in evening hours. I'd rather go to the Century 25 in Union Landing and Century 20 at Great Mall, where parking IS very plentiful and the sound system is obvious top-notch.