They can't provide it for cable companies because TiVo would have to support their individual formats and they all want to introduce their proprietary boxes.
One word. "CableCard". HD cable is sufficiently standard, they just aren't using the same signaling as over-the-air HD. Just provide an HD-ready TiVO that can use a CableCard to auth with the head-end gear, and... where's the problem? They really do need HD (particularly HD cable) support, and fast - I'd rather have a TiVO than the relatively shabby cable company DVR, but without HD support, it's not that attractive anymore.
Hence why it's said that with UNIX, easy tasks are easy and hard tasks are doable, but with Windows, easy tasks are simple, and hard tasks start at $29.95. The Windows mentality orbits around "packaged goods" for everything. I prefer the UNIX/Linux way - it may not be as pretty, but it lets you do things your own way, whatever your reason may be for doing so, rather than having to drop money left and right for everything you do, and be stuck with someone else's (frequently backward) way of thinking about your problem.
But you can't honestly say all this ID bullshit makes any sense. People point to "Oh, what about the 9/11 hijackers!" - but they HAD valid government-issued IDs. How do you think they got on the planes? And now, after it's been pretty roundly proven that that did absolutely jack, we're going to say "well, that didn't work before, but now we're going to be even bigger assholes about it! That'll fix 'em!"... and what will that achieve? Just what it did before - that's right, _nothing_. Obviously this is not the solution to the problem. There are more than a few opinions about what the real solution is (I have a few myself), but making secret laws requiring stupid, useless policies to be enforced, and not letting the average citizen (who's supposed to be able to participate in government!) read the laws and understand them isn't solving anything.
Agreed. I've been quite happy with my 46" Toshiba CRT projection TV - HD network series look awesome, as well as sports and Discovery HD. The only thing I've had to do is periodically hand-calibrate color convergence, but that's not abnormal from what I understand.
Why would anyone, then, put in the time and effort to port it, if neither they nor anyone else should actually use it? I type this on a PowerBook Pismo running Debian, which I've had for about a year and a half. I really think that most of the hyper-critical posts are just OS X nutjobs so far - yes yes, we're happy you love OS X so much, but go hump Steve Jobs' leg elsewhere please, and let us use the hardware we like with the OS we like, and if that doesn't sit well with you? Just feel secure in that we're "wasting money" to run our preferred OS on a very nice processor architecture. Whatever helps you sleep at night, eh?
The GUI, and most of the really interesting hardware drivers (especially the display drivers). Most of the open-source stuff is just groundwork - while it's nice of them to release it and all that, it's not _that_ exciting, given full context.
Actually, some of the _really_ new G5 variants have a newer (liquid?) cooling system. This has to be controlled by the running OS (hence, OS X), otherwise the system actually will burn itself to a crisp. Last I knew, the Linux kernel developers were trying to glean enough information to write kernel support to control this cooling system, so you could run Linux on the systems without turning them into expensive paperweights, but I hadn't heard if they actually worked it out or not.
Having seen the final episode of season one (and I'm in the US), I can say that he's not really giving anything in particular away about how it ends. You really will have to see it for yourself.
Oh, and if you happen to follow SG-1... you should really download 8x18 while you can, even if you aren't going to watch it right away, since Sci-Fi didn't opt for the 90-minute episode. (While we're giving out non-spoiler spoilers...:)
Actually you don't have to have BootX; I have a PowerMac 7500 at home (with a dual 604e/180 CPU card in it), and I use quik to boot the system. It can be a bit difficult to set up (unfortunately, since OldWorld OpenFirmware versions are broken in assorted painful ways), but I've not had any reason to boot into MacOS on it, so everything is happy now.
Solaris does the same thing on SPARC64 hardware; the thing with SPARC64 hardware (unlike x86 versus x86_64) is that a 32-bit compiled binary will generally run faster due to smaller datatypes being used for _everything_, but otherwise the code runs pretty much the same, and you won't notice a difference. If you're a purist, on arches like PPC64 and SPARC64, a 64-bit userland might be a nicety, but it doesn't affect the performance of the system in any positive fashion; whereas with x86_64, the increase in registers and other functionality you get with 64-bit binaries nets a fairly universal performance gain over x86 (32-bit) binaries.
Re:A special flop the Slashdot crowd will apprecia
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, A/UX _was_ SysV UNIX. OS X is a BSD derivative, but apparently back in the day that A/UX was an idea about to materialize, everyone thought SysV was the way to go...
Actually yes, you still can; I have a PowerBook Pismo (the Bronze keyboard + FireWire), and I've done exactly that. You have to do the swap within a minute or so of pulling the battery, but you can swap them while the machine is suspended. It's really a handy feature. (Actually, I didn't know how far back that feature went in the history of PowerBooks. Certainly an interesting tidbit.)
Sure, except for the fact that Flash video doesn't play accelerated - on _any_ platform. I've dealt with FLV content at my job, and I've noticed the output is always fuzzy and blocky, and never plays smoothly, because Flash doesn't use even basic hardware video acceleration features, like hardware YUV colorspace conversion and hardware scaling backends. It's just so underwhelming to watch FLV, whether on Windows, MacOS X or Linux.
Yes, and Darwin runs on very few systems. It has to have an Intel PIIX IDE controller - it's the only one it supports. I think it supports one, maybe 2, SCSI controllers. I don't think you're going to have a lot of general success running Darwin on i386... unless you're lucky.
You can't "patch" the binary OS; there are fundamental changes that have to be made about how page tables and certain supervisor-only operations are done. Microsoft Research UK actually ported the XP kernel to Xen 1.2, reportedly, but due to licensing restrictions, it won't be released publicly (and I suspect from higher-up pressure to make sure that their VirtualPC stuff is the preferred virtualization environment for use with Windows).
Windows isn't as portable as all that, really. One thing of note about _every_ processor architecture that Windows was ported to back in the 3.1/3.5x/4.0 days either was, or could be switched to, little endian mode. MIPS, PPC, and Alpha (which was used in 32-bit mode) - all of the above either came in a little-endian variant (MIPS), or could be switched into a little-endian mode on the fly (Alpha and PPC).
Linux, on the other hand, uses the native ordering mode on Alpha and PPC, and has builds for both little-endian and big-endian MIPS processors. It's not dependent on 32-bit mode, byte ordering, or other x86-alike properties to port it to other arches. What's the point of porting to another architecture if you're going to enable a bunch of compatibility hacks to make it behave as much as possible like an old, broken one? I don't think that's portability, really.
bloat - yea, my windows install still fits onto a single CD which is more then most linux distros can say.
Sure, as long as you don't intend to do anything useful with the machine once you've installed the OS. A typical Linux distribution includes a variety of applications - Windows's included set of "applications" (and I use that term loosely) is slightly better than nothing, but only slightly.
its user interfaces - many, and each one worse then the one before.
I find Gnome 2.8 to be just fine, thanks; on a server, if you need a "user interface", maybe you should be reconsidering what you're doing, or pay someone who knows what they're doing. (I work for a company that provides dedicated servers, and I've seen some people buy Windows dedicated servers, and be like "uh... now what?" - these are people who really should pay an admin...)
its functionality - which is non-existent unless you dedicate your life to your OS, believe it or not, some of us actually use our computer to get work done.
Strangely, I can get things done, and quickly, on a Linux machine (like the PowerBook I have on my lap, running Debian), and find Windows to be bloated and slow, and mostly impossible to use, on systems where I can actually use it. I guess if you're used to Windows, then you can work better on it; it's been years since I used Windows on anything resembling a regular basis, and I couldn't be happier.
That's not the only one - three perfectly good architectures have had to die in Intel's misguided quest to make IA-64 the unifying force of the 64-bit CPU world:
- DEC/Compaq Alpha/AXP
- HP PA-RISC
- MIPS64
Unfortunately that's whittled down the research, development, and improvement in the 64-bit sphere. Obviously AMD's development of x86_64 has changed that, and SPARC64 and PPC64 are keeping new blood flowing, as it were.
Of course, IA-64's time is (obviously) not long for this world - everyone who's taken any interest in it outside of Intel has realized how ridiculous the architecture is, and are putting this lame horse out to pasture.
Maybe someone will resurrect Alpha... maybe it's not too late yet.
What we really need are good extensions to HTML for forms. Better validation and help are all things that can be done descriptively, rather than by running executable code on the user's machine. HTML forms are lame; they can't even set up a field that must, say, have five numeric digits and must be filled in. You could do that on IBM green-screen terminals thirty years ago.
Isn't this what XForms promises to do? Provide extensions that allow you (the developer) to more explicitly specify what a form is supposed to contain, at the same time making it more dynamic and flexible?
Also look out for hawks, depending on where you live - a hawk got one of my parents' cats, after another had tried to take off with him a few years prior, and he ended up with big holes in his back for a couple months after that. He (Ed) was a big cat too...
Well, not all cats have balls... mine used to, of course, but no longer does. Hasn't changed his holy-terror hardcore attitude tho. He's still as patently insane as the day I got him.
Well, it doesn't sound like _all_ of Sun is against Linux - Sun, as with any corporation, is made up of many units, with differing aims. Some parts of Sun, if not friendly toward Linux, are at least indifferent toward Linux - it seems the part of the company that develops their SPARC hardware, in particular, thinks it's just fine - it's another OS to run on their hardware.
However, the division that handles the Solaris OS really seems to have a bug up its butt over Linux - I'm guessing this is mostly because Linux (and other open-source/Free software OSes) have pretty much eaten Solaris x86's lunch, for some time now. I can certainly understand why... and geez, now Solaris x86 is the underdog. With slacking support from commercial software vendors, it's not looking so hot.
They definitely need to get their heads on straight and check their attitudes at the door - unlike in years past, the UN*X world needs to unite and succeed, not bicker and fight over "mine mine mine!"
Slashdot Mirror
They can't provide it for cable companies because TiVo would have to support their individual formats and they all want to introduce their proprietary boxes.
One word. "CableCard". HD cable is sufficiently standard, they just aren't using the same signaling as over-the-air HD. Just provide an HD-ready TiVO that can use a CableCard to auth with the head-end gear, and... where's the problem? They really do need HD (particularly HD cable) support, and fast - I'd rather have a TiVO than the relatively shabby cable company DVR, but without HD support, it's not that attractive anymore.
Hence why it's said that with UNIX, easy tasks are easy and hard tasks are doable, but with Windows, easy tasks are simple, and hard tasks start at $29.95. The Windows mentality orbits around "packaged goods" for everything. I prefer the UNIX/Linux way - it may not be as pretty, but it lets you do things your own way, whatever your reason may be for doing so, rather than having to drop money left and right for everything you do, and be stuck with someone else's (frequently backward) way of thinking about your problem.
But you can't honestly say all this ID bullshit makes any sense. People point to "Oh, what about the 9/11 hijackers!" - but they HAD valid government-issued IDs. How do you think they got on the planes? And now, after it's been pretty roundly proven that that did absolutely jack, we're going to say "well, that didn't work before, but now we're going to be even bigger assholes about it! That'll fix 'em!"... and what will that achieve? Just what it did before - that's right, _nothing_. Obviously this is not the solution to the problem. There are more than a few opinions about what the real solution is (I have a few myself), but making secret laws requiring stupid, useless policies to be enforced, and not letting the average citizen (who's supposed to be able to participate in government!) read the laws and understand them isn't solving anything.
Agreed. I've been quite happy with my 46" Toshiba CRT projection TV - HD network series look awesome, as well as sports and Discovery HD. The only thing I've had to do is periodically hand-calibrate color convergence, but that's not abnormal from what I understand.
It's not _that_ "Inquirer", actually...
Why would anyone, then, put in the time and effort to port it, if neither they nor anyone else should actually use it? I type this on a PowerBook Pismo running Debian, which I've had for about a year and a half. I really think that most of the hyper-critical posts are just OS X nutjobs so far - yes yes, we're happy you love OS X so much, but go hump Steve Jobs' leg elsewhere please, and let us use the hardware we like with the OS we like, and if that doesn't sit well with you? Just feel secure in that we're "wasting money" to run our preferred OS on a very nice processor architecture. Whatever helps you sleep at night, eh?
The GUI, and most of the really interesting hardware drivers (especially the display drivers). Most of the open-source stuff is just groundwork - while it's nice of them to release it and all that, it's not _that_ exciting, given full context.
Actually, some of the _really_ new G5 variants have a newer (liquid?) cooling system. This has to be controlled by the running OS (hence, OS X), otherwise the system actually will burn itself to a crisp. Last I knew, the Linux kernel developers were trying to glean enough information to write kernel support to control this cooling system, so you could run Linux on the systems without turning them into expensive paperweights, but I hadn't heard if they actually worked it out or not.
Having seen the final episode of season one (and I'm in the US), I can say that he's not really giving anything in particular away about how it ends. You really will have to see it for yourself.
:)
Oh, and if you happen to follow SG-1... you should really download 8x18 while you can, even if you aren't going to watch it right away, since Sci-Fi didn't opt for the 90-minute episode. (While we're giving out non-spoiler spoilers...
Actually you don't have to have BootX; I have a PowerMac 7500 at home (with a dual 604e/180 CPU card in it), and I use quik to boot the system. It can be a bit difficult to set up (unfortunately, since OldWorld OpenFirmware versions are broken in assorted painful ways), but I've not had any reason to boot into MacOS on it, so everything is happy now.
Solaris does the same thing on SPARC64 hardware; the thing with SPARC64 hardware (unlike x86 versus x86_64) is that a 32-bit compiled binary will generally run faster due to smaller datatypes being used for _everything_, but otherwise the code runs pretty much the same, and you won't notice a difference. If you're a purist, on arches like PPC64 and SPARC64, a 64-bit userland might be a nicety, but it doesn't affect the performance of the system in any positive fashion; whereas with x86_64, the increase in registers and other functionality you get with 64-bit binaries nets a fairly universal performance gain over x86 (32-bit) binaries.
Actually, A/UX _was_ SysV UNIX. OS X is a BSD derivative, but apparently back in the day that A/UX was an idea about to materialize, everyone thought SysV was the way to go...
Actually yes, you still can; I have a PowerBook Pismo (the Bronze keyboard + FireWire), and I've done exactly that. You have to do the swap within a minute or so of pulling the battery, but you can swap them while the machine is suspended. It's really a handy feature. (Actually, I didn't know how far back that feature went in the history of PowerBooks. Certainly an interesting tidbit.)
Sure, except for the fact that Flash video doesn't play accelerated - on _any_ platform. I've dealt with FLV content at my job, and I've noticed the output is always fuzzy and blocky, and never plays smoothly, because Flash doesn't use even basic hardware video acceleration features, like hardware YUV colorspace conversion and hardware scaling backends. It's just so underwhelming to watch FLV, whether on Windows, MacOS X or Linux.
Yes, and Darwin runs on very few systems. It has to have an Intel PIIX IDE controller - it's the only one it supports. I think it supports one, maybe 2, SCSI controllers. I don't think you're going to have a lot of general success running Darwin on i386... unless you're lucky.
You can't "patch" the binary OS; there are fundamental changes that have to be made about how page tables and certain supervisor-only operations are done. Microsoft Research UK actually ported the XP kernel to Xen 1.2, reportedly, but due to licensing restrictions, it won't be released publicly (and I suspect from higher-up pressure to make sure that their VirtualPC stuff is the preferred virtualization environment for use with Windows).
Windows isn't as portable as all that, really. One thing of note about _every_ processor architecture that Windows was ported to back in the 3.1/3.5x/4.0 days either was, or could be switched to, little endian mode. MIPS, PPC, and Alpha (which was used in 32-bit mode) - all of the above either came in a little-endian variant (MIPS), or could be switched into a little-endian mode on the fly (Alpha and PPC).
Linux, on the other hand, uses the native ordering mode on Alpha and PPC, and has builds for both little-endian and big-endian MIPS processors. It's not dependent on 32-bit mode, byte ordering, or other x86-alike properties to port it to other arches. What's the point of porting to another architecture if you're going to enable a bunch of compatibility hacks to make it behave as much as possible like an old, broken one? I don't think that's portability, really.
bloat - yea, my windows install still fits onto a single CD which is more then most linux distros can say.
Sure, as long as you don't intend to do anything useful with the machine once you've installed the OS. A typical Linux distribution includes a variety of applications - Windows's included set of "applications" (and I use that term loosely) is slightly better than nothing, but only slightly.
its user interfaces - many, and each one worse then the one before.
I find Gnome 2.8 to be just fine, thanks; on a server, if you need a "user interface", maybe you should be reconsidering what you're doing, or pay someone who knows what they're doing. (I work for a company that provides dedicated servers, and I've seen some people buy Windows dedicated servers, and be like "uh... now what?" - these are people who really should pay an admin...)
its functionality - which is non-existent unless you dedicate your life to your OS, believe it or not, some of us actually use our computer to get work done.
Strangely, I can get things done, and quickly, on a Linux machine (like the PowerBook I have on my lap, running Debian), and find Windows to be bloated and slow, and mostly impossible to use, on systems where I can actually use it. I guess if you're used to Windows, then you can work better on it; it's been years since I used Windows on anything resembling a regular basis, and I couldn't be happier.
That's not the only one - three perfectly good architectures have had to die in Intel's misguided quest to make IA-64 the unifying force of the 64-bit CPU world:
- DEC/Compaq Alpha/AXP
- HP PA-RISC
- MIPS64
Unfortunately that's whittled down the research, development, and improvement in the 64-bit sphere. Obviously AMD's development of x86_64 has changed that, and SPARC64 and PPC64 are keeping new blood flowing, as it were.
Of course, IA-64's time is (obviously) not long for this world - everyone who's taken any interest in it outside of Intel has realized how ridiculous the architecture is, and are putting this lame horse out to pasture.
Maybe someone will resurrect Alpha... maybe it's not too late yet.
What we really need are good extensions to HTML for forms. Better validation and help are all things that can be done descriptively, rather than by running executable code on the user's machine. HTML forms are lame; they can't even set up a field that must, say, have five numeric digits and must be filled in. You could do that on IBM green-screen terminals thirty years ago.
Isn't this what XForms promises to do? Provide extensions that allow you (the developer) to more explicitly specify what a form is supposed to contain, at the same time making it more dynamic and flexible?
Hah. I'd peg that as sort of (well, more like _way_) on the low side... but then I'm a pessimistic bastard like that.
Also look out for hawks, depending on where you live - a hawk got one of my parents' cats, after another had tried to take off with him a few years prior, and he ended up with big holes in his back for a couple months after that. He (Ed) was a big cat too...
and in soviet russia our kittens own us.
No, I'm pretty sure that applies everywhere else as well...
Well, not all cats have balls... mine used to, of course, but no longer does. Hasn't changed his holy-terror hardcore attitude tho. He's still as patently insane as the day I got him.
Well, it doesn't sound like _all_ of Sun is against Linux - Sun, as with any corporation, is made up of many units, with differing aims. Some parts of Sun, if not friendly toward Linux, are at least indifferent toward Linux - it seems the part of the company that develops their SPARC hardware, in particular, thinks it's just fine - it's another OS to run on their hardware.
However, the division that handles the Solaris OS really seems to have a bug up its butt over Linux - I'm guessing this is mostly because Linux (and other open-source/Free software OSes) have pretty much eaten Solaris x86's lunch, for some time now. I can certainly understand why... and geez, now Solaris x86 is the underdog. With slacking support from commercial software vendors, it's not looking so hot.
They definitely need to get their heads on straight and check their attitudes at the door - unlike in years past, the UN*X world needs to unite and succeed, not bicker and fight over "mine mine mine!"