What models where you using for the light dimmers/switches? I know the fancy ones (smarthome.com's upmarket range) go for as much as $60 each. That doesn't change your essential point but is still worth noting.
I don't think this will be a successful product. For $15k, I expect everything to be handled for me, including the electrical done by a properly licensed electrician. I think you could find an electrician to do this for a few hundred bucks, so why don't they simply add one to their crew?
If I'm going to pay prices that probably amount to MORE than a 100% markup, I expect real service in return. I think I would go with an independent person who's done this before and can subcontract the needed electrical work. If I have to be a general contractor and coordinate Best Buy and an independent electrician, I'd might as well buy the stuff separately and hook it up myself.
I wouldn't consider that ad credible, because I don't think they'd give up the clickwheel + button interface that has been their trademark since the beginning of iPod time.
I think that if Apple really wanted the iPhone trademark, they would have negotiated with Cisco to buy it, starting many moons ago when they first got serious about the product. I don't think it would have been terribly expensive since Cisco didn't even use it until their new line of VOIP phones came out, and I don't think iPhone has the brand power in that space that it would under Apple's ownership.
It's a very different type of enthusiasm, though. Looks like it's mainly about how to get linksys routers to do cool things. That is a very nice thing but it's totally different from the almost religious fervor with which Apple rumor sites work.
I wonder if this is because a religion needs its Devil, and of course Apple has a ready-made one in Microsoft:-). Insofar as I know, Linksys competes on a pretty level playing field with other routers.
This could be a problem with Windows Mobile, of course, but it could also be greatly constrained by RAM.
I have a 2.8ghz PC that can run Windows XP very well, but that's because I don't use it to browse random web sites and so it doesn't have the usual virus and spyware burden most such computers have.
When I checked out a Windows Mobile phone a while back, the biggest disadvantage was what looked like a user interface designed by Neanderthals. In particular, it seemed incredibly hard to use as a phone. Was this also part of your problem?
Would the increasing power of small devices possibly render this argument obsolete? I seem to remember reading about 300-odd mhz processors in these devices, and I know a 400mhz G4 can run Tiger pretty well.
After all, we just need to drive a tiny screen. That's a lot fewer pixels than you see on a MacBook or even the old Titanium PowerBook that ran on a 400mhz processor and 256mb RAM.
Well, you may have noticed that Sony's rootkit dispute cost it quite a bit of money.
If I buy a Sony-produced Blu-Ray DVD, stick it in my Windows Vista machine and find it just doesn't play well, or that the rest of my computer doesn't work properly, that's going to be the last Sony Blu-Ray DVD I buy until the situation is remedied.
I think the fellow who wrote the article noted that if things were this bad, he would just buy a crummy Chinese DVD player and forget about DVDs on his computer. Or, forget about buying DVDs, period.
I wonder what Apple's position on this is. On paper it seems like it's Apple's legal obligation to do the same thing or the content providers will sue. On the other hand, Apple runs the iTunes movie/music store and so they have a lever against the providers.
Finally, this isn't going to matter at all until VGA monitors go away. Insofar as I can tell, the picture on a VGA LCD panel looks identical to one on a DVI LCD panel. If this is so, then everyone will just use VGA connectors for their fancy LCD panels and nobody will ever notice this "protection". I know there are some people who think the digital connection makes a difference, but I think for the person on the street, as opposed to the gadget epicure, VGA will be fine, forever.
Have you tried the T-Mobile Sidekick (Danger)? It has the disadvantage of no third party development at all, but that does bring stability and immunity from tiresome virus problems. I had a friend with a Nokia phone that got a virus and she had no clue what to do. I was able to fix the problem for her after a bit of research but it was not a fun thing to go through, and her eventual fate was a $300 phone bill she couldn't pay. (She is in the Philippines and their data service is very expensive. And of course $300 was about a third of her monthly income).
I think the user interface is a bit cleaner than Pam, at least on the web browser. Email looks just like regular email, and the AIM client works great.
From a user perspective I liked it better than the Palm. Blackberry's pretty nice, too.
Has anyone mastered the keyboard of the Blackberry Pearl? I played with it for a few minutes in the store and just couldn't figure it out. The display is stunning, but I don't know if I could ever adjust to that keyboard...
The problem with the Zune is that they can't really fight too hard for market share because there is no profit in the unit beyond its purchase price. The record labels are not interested in cross-subsidizing it like game developers do in the case of game consoles. If this was not so, they could simply lower prices to buy market share; they cannot since the is almost no profit potential in it at a lower price point.
The Xbox arguably made some sense to develop; I don't see how the Zune makes any sense at all. In my opinion, they should have taken the resources expended on the Zune to make improvements in their mobile phone platform. A killer mobile phone platform has a lot more mass appeal and profit potential, and the smartphone field is still a place where there is a lot of room for improvement.
In other words, I think Microsoft should get ready to fight the next battle, against Apple's new phone initiative, instead of fighting the last one, which they already lost.
Based on Microsoft's mobile phones that I've looked at, I think they could be slaughtered by the iPhone, but I haven't tried one in a while, so it's possible they have improved.
The newer systems may not have even been made available online in any meaningful quantity. I checked at a couple of randomly selected online stores when the hype began and noticed that to get a PS3 you'd pretty much better try braving winter's chill since you won't be able to find one online.
Well, from the end user point of view, the big advantage of Vista would be Aero Glass.
95% of all corporate computers are incompatible with it. Further more, there is nothing likely to cause more pain and suffering in the IT world than an attempt at an OS upgrade. My personal judgement call would be that I would not upgrade to Vista; I would simply buy new computers with Vista preinstalled. Computers are so cheap nowadays that upgrading costs a healthy percentage of the cost of buying new equipment.
I'd be interested in how the corporate world compares to the consumer world, because I would expect a very similar perentage of consumer PCs would be incompatible with Vista, too.
I've been really curious about this and so I have visited the Dell web site. What a confusing world you PC folks live in! If I want to answer the question "What's the cheapest computer that will be compatible with Aero Glass?" I have to spend at least an hour and even after putting in that time I'm still confused. I think Dell may be confused too; their $3,600 top-end 20" "briefcase" computer is listed as "Windows Vista Ready", not "Windows Vista Premium Ready". I HOPE it's Windows Vista Premium Ready or the hapless buyers are going to crash straight into a wall when installing Vista. The specs make me THINK it's Premium Ready but who can really tell? You have to be a hardware engineer (or solid hardware hobbyist) to recognize the graphics cards used, and if you're in that category you'd might as well go down to Fry's and build your own.
It appears that the computers Dell is focusing on selling for this holiday season are incompatlbie with the most demanded feature (by consumers) of the operating system of the future. If you trust Dell and think they are going to sell you hardware that won't be hopelessly obsolete two months from now you are tragically mistaken.
If I wanted a computer from them, I would call them up on the phone and make SURE they knew what they were talking about and could build me a system that was definitely compatible with Vista. Because they seem to have made this information deliberately difficult to find on their web site, and I'm frankly disgusted by it.
When I worked in IT I found that many of my end users liked malware. It is, after all, designed to please the customer. So they like their little toolbars and their smiley faces and their email "enhancements". "No, I want my smiley! It's colorful!" they would tell me.
But sometimes the malware people went too far. I remember when I was called to an employee's computer and the start button and taskbar had both vanished! So I hit Google to search out for that problem, and it popped up a new window with search results from "zestyfind.com". They were all paid results, of course, which means they had nothing useful for this search (and most others, for that matter).
I was glad it popped up that window since that made it possible for me to find the thing by searching for zestyfind. I remember it took me hours and hours of painstakingly hideous work to remove that thing.
I understand things have gotten worse, so I'm just glad I'm no longer in IT and am almost exclusively on the Mac. Only time I ever use Windows is for compatibility testing, and that's just the way things should be.
I've always wanted to get a running PDP-11, but I've either not been able to afford it or not had the room for it. It looks like most of them nowadays are being torn apart to sell individual chips, panels and circuit boards on eBay, which I think is a bit sad.
I never had a better social life than when I ran a multiline BBS in the late 80s. Because of phone costs, people normally called from local communities and so there was generally a critical mass of people for parties and the like. And the ability to type directly to people instead of having it be line by line was somehow more personal than the Internet-based chat systems we have now. I think the whole setup was warmer and more personal, more of a community than a great city.
Now we just have great cities. It's cool to be able to look up anything we could ever want, but sometimes it seems a bit too soulless. On the other hand, American culture overall seems to have turned that way too, so I'm not sure what to blame.
6.3 was the same as 8.3 but with six characters for the base filename instead of eight.
The Digital Equipment PDP-11 operating systems (RT-11, etc) used it. CP/M copied this feature. In all fairness, in those days, every byte counted. The most common storage device was a 2.5 megabyte (not gigabyte!) cartridge drive called the RL02 that, alone, was bigger and heavier than the largest desktop computers available today.
It's amazing how much computing has progressed since then. You couldn't even put one typical MP3 file on that drive! You could, however, put a stripped-down version of early Unix on one. Of course it would have no luxury features like emacs or bash. In fact, I just checked the emacs binary on my MacOS X machine and found the binary was 30 megabytes, or TEN TIMES the capacity of that ancient hard drive!
That's a bit much, so I checked the Linux machine I host my site on. Even that emacs is 4mb.
Sometimes I'm nostalgic for those text-driven days. Somehow computing was more fun then, even though we could do a lot less. It is nice, though, that we very rarely fall into major constraints like memory limits and the like today unless we're doing something super-complex, like scientific computing or weather forecasting. Back in the day, you had to struggle constantly with the computer's tiny memory and pathetic address space, even if you wanted to write a simple text-based messaging application.
You are right. I looked it up and I fear my memory was playing tricks on me.
So CP/M is responsible for liberating us from the jail that was the 6.3 file system and putting us in a new, slightly less cramped, 8.3 jail.
It's interesting to note that on the Windows side, vestiges of 8.3 continued through Windows 2000 and I think even beyond. Even as of Windows XP (I have yet to see Vista since I switched to the Mac for my real work ages ago), the system directories were still polluted with thousands of cryptic 8.3 files.
I think there's a little more to the story than this. Qdos had some features that made it distinctly superior to CP/M, and CP/M itself was largely based on an even more ancient operating system.
For instance to copy a file, CP/M required that a program called PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program I think) be on a floppy disk in your computer. You could then use its arcane syntax:
A> pip *a:=b:foo.txt
Qdos had a copy command in memory so it didn't have to be ondisk. The syntax was also a little more intuitive:
A> copy foo.txt b:
I might add that if my memory serves the PIP command and CP/M's 6+3 file structure were copied from DEC's RT/11 operating system. Essentially, CP/M was RT/11 for microcomputers except it left out some of RT/11's nicer features, like background processing.
Qdos was a solid incremental improvement then. It added commands like 'copy', replaced the 6+3 file system with an 8+3 file system, and I'm sure there were other improvements I know little about.
The original developer of QDOS worked on and off for Microsoft for over a decade in total. He also founded other companies. It doesn't look like he's mad at Bill most likely because in the aggregate Bill paid him quite a bit of money as an employee, and by taking over one of his later companies. Although not as rich as Bill Gates, I'm sure he's very comfortable.
Apple customers tend to trust Steve Jobs and Apple not to let them down. We're used to computers that actually work well, smooth as silk purchasing and usage experiences and so on.
And guess what? So far Steve has been the most trustworthy person in an unscrupulous business. Even buying music CDs has been an adventure fraught with pain -- at least if you talk to some of Sony's customers. Ouch. Bye-bye CD.
Perhaps best of all by sticking with his $ 0.99 a song pricing, Steve has been an advocate for all buyers of digital music.
Living in a small town where the biggest CD retailer is Wal*Mart, I love the immediacy of ordering and paying for the music online and then receiving it right away, on my computer. I know some people don't like the digital quality sound, but I guess I don't have golden ears; I've played it on great stereo equipment and it's sounded perfect to me.
And the DRM is loose enough so it just doesn't affect me at all.
I've mislaid most of my music CDs but the music lives on in my computer and iPod - and that's how I like it.
So digital music is just fine and dandy with me and the iTunes Music Store is a great place.
As others have done, I went instantly to the section labelled "Browser", figuring it would contain, well, the browser, and ran into a whole collection of JavaScript files used for skinning and the like.
I have subsequently been straightened out by people who replied to my message earlier. It would appear that plenty of people who have seen the structure found it as baffling as I did, so I don't feel too bad.
Thanks for the tip! I find it interesting that another person who actually worked on it doesn't remember where it was, which makes me feel a bit better. Obviously I'm not alone.
So I glanced through a bit of it and I don't see it as that confusing, but it seems to be all wrappers around wrappers and I'll bet finding a section of it that actually does anything, and tracing through all the layers would be a titanic migraine despite the slick HTML cross-referencing scheme.
On the whole, then, I don't know if I'd call it bad, since I'm sure there are reasons why it would be written that way but difficult to work with seems like a given.
In my experience, any large software system is very, very difficult to get your hands around if you didn't create it yourself. If the source code looks bad to you, the odds are one reason is that you didn't write it yourself and so you don't understand the techniques used.
For example, I like dumping things in one directory instead of having anal directory structures that take time to navigate. Others prefer having things all in their place. Neither style is particularly right or wrong. My style probably doesn't scale well to projects done by more than one developer. Their style makes it more time-consuming to get to know the code.
But in any event, I can't pass judgement on this source code, since I can't find it. I looked through the source he linked to and I couldn't find a single C file. In fact, I couldn't find anything that seemed to deal with the browser's core funtionality, such as rendering pages or putting up menus or toolbars.
I didn't find anything about what I saw in the JavaScript that seemed too bad. It seemed reasonably straightforward to understand, but of course the numerous options made it more complex than I'd like. That's inevitable in this kind of project, so it's not really a fault.
Is there any kind of guide to the source code, that would explain where the heart of it is?
It seems very strange to see such high prices for the software on the street when it must be far cheaper for computer makers.
For instance, Dell, last time I looked, sold a $299 PC. Are they paying $199 for Windows XP Home, like we do in stores?
Obviously not. I've heard it's more like $25, and that sounds about right.
I'd love to get a $99 version of Windows Vista so I could take my eventually-to-be-purchased MacBook Pro and use Windows on it. That's still a huge markup over what the PC maker pays.
But to pay $299, the cost of a new PC, just to run it on my MacBook? That seems a bit off, doesn't it?
Now, I would think that if I bought my Macbook Pro, and paid $299 for Vista, Microsoft would be making about ten times what it does from the PC maker.
Is Apple soon to be a Windows OEM?
I guess they can't be technically, because the licenses require no alternative operating systems on the computers...
I would think Microsoft would be pretty happy to see these Mac customers and their full-margin purchases. Frankly, I feel like a sucker. I'd probably just buy a new PC for testing if it wasn't for the fact that I like to go out into the park and the coffee shop with my computer, and Parallels will let me keep doing that.
If your story was all there was to the iPod, tens of millions of them wouldn't have been sold. There are not that many rabid Apple fans in the world.
Creating a music player isn't the hard part. Creating a music player the public wants is. Before the iPod, few people even knew what a portable MP3 player was. Apple came up with the right combination of ideas to produce a major success. This took enormous discipline and attention to detail, that was way beyond anything previous MP3 player makers had done.
Your message doesn't make it clear that you even disagree with anything I said about the Zune. What are you actually trying to say?
Attacking me for being an Apple fan isn't going to make the Zune good.
I'd be curious to hear what you have against Apple. They do make polished, beautifully engineered products. Sometimes they are flawed, but generally those that use them really enjoy them.
You can protest the DRM scheme within the iTunes music store, but you can use iTunes and the iPod with non-DRM music, so I think of it as Apple giving us a choice but still leaving us with freedom to choose. You are probably aware that in earlier versions of PlaysForSure, Microsoft encoded everything into their DRM format before copying it to the player. Not Apple.
That doesn't seem like behaviour that deserves the "Spanish Inquisition" comment, so I'm curious to hear where that comes from.
I obviously agree with you entirely about Microsoft and PlaysForSure.
I'd like to read a good anti-Lomborg argument, but all the ones I've seen are arguing more against the man than the science.
If you have one link that summarizes the case against his work, instead of sending me off on an hours-long search adventure that I simply do not have time for, I'll read it.
And then when the install program crashed, the legendary picture of the cute oriental girl screaming like crazy. Some people said it looked like an orgasm, others said scream. I'm on the scream side personally.
I checked out the device at Wal*Mart and my view is that it looks cheap, especially compared to the iPod, and the advantages suggested in the promotional material were not significant. I'm surprised it's selling at all, but I guess some people just don't like Apple.
Finally, they seem to be awfully hard on their most loyal customers.
I find it inexplicable that they would not support existing music purchased through PlaysForSure stores. Sure, almost nobody bought it, but I would expect those people to have by far the greatest interest in a new Microsoft based music player. Rule one in customer service is not to make fools out of your best customers, who are precisely the people who bought into PlaysForSure.
And what's with not supporting Windows Vista? Who runs Windows Vista now but the few fans Microsoft has? Who would buy the Zune, and try to popularize it, other than the few people who have decided to put the Vista beta on their machines?
I know that if I were a Windows fan, I'd be running Vista today, and I'd be royally angry that my new Zune didn't work with it. Both those decisions are just plain hideous, and to the very users Microsoft should be pampering, not kicking in the teeth.
It's stuff like this that makes me very glad I'm a Mac user. I don't think Apple would ever make simple, elementary mistakes like this.
Slashdot Mirror
What models where you using for the light dimmers/switches? I know the fancy ones (smarthome.com's upmarket range) go for as much as $60 each. That doesn't change your essential point but is still worth noting.
I don't think this will be a successful product. For $15k, I expect everything to be handled for me, including the electrical done by a properly licensed electrician. I think you could find an electrician to do this for a few hundred bucks, so why don't they simply add one to their crew?
If I'm going to pay prices that probably amount to MORE than a 100% markup, I expect real service in return. I think I would go with an independent person who's done this before and can subcontract the needed electrical work. If I have to be a general contractor and coordinate Best Buy and an independent electrician, I'd might as well buy the stuff separately and hook it up myself.
D
I wouldn't consider that ad credible, because I don't think they'd give up the clickwheel + button interface that has been their trademark since the beginning of iPod time.
I think that if Apple really wanted the iPhone trademark, they would have negotiated with Cisco to buy it, starting many moons ago when they first got serious about the product. I don't think it would have been terribly expensive since Cisco didn't even use it until their new line of VOIP phones came out, and I don't think iPhone has the brand power in that space that it would under Apple's ownership.
D
It's a very different type of enthusiasm, though. Looks like it's mainly about how to get linksys routers to do cool things. That is a very nice thing but it's totally different from the almost religious fervor with which Apple rumor sites work.
:-). Insofar as I know, Linksys competes on a pretty level playing field with other routers.
I wonder if this is because a religion needs its Devil, and of course Apple has a ready-made one in Microsoft
D
This could be a problem with Windows Mobile, of course, but it could also be greatly constrained by RAM.
I have a 2.8ghz PC that can run Windows XP very well, but that's because I don't use it to browse random web sites and so it doesn't have the usual virus and spyware burden most such computers have.
When I checked out a Windows Mobile phone a while back, the biggest disadvantage was what looked like a user interface designed by Neanderthals. In particular, it seemed incredibly hard to use as a phone. Was this also part of your problem?
D
Why not?
Apple hasn't announced it yet, so we can still call it anything we want.
Certainly it's an unambiguous term. Everyone knows what it means when on an Apple enthusiast site. (Are there any Linksys-enthusiast sites?)
D
Would the increasing power of small devices possibly render this argument obsolete? I seem to remember reading about 300-odd mhz processors in these devices, and I know a 400mhz G4 can run Tiger pretty well.
After all, we just need to drive a tiny screen. That's a lot fewer pixels than you see on a MacBook or even the old Titanium PowerBook that ran on a 400mhz processor and 256mb RAM.
D
Well, you may have noticed that Sony's rootkit dispute cost it quite a bit of money.
If I buy a Sony-produced Blu-Ray DVD, stick it in my Windows Vista machine and find it just doesn't play well, or that the rest of my computer doesn't work properly, that's going to be the last Sony Blu-Ray DVD I buy until the situation is remedied.
I think the fellow who wrote the article noted that if things were this bad, he would just buy a crummy Chinese DVD player and forget about DVDs on his computer. Or, forget about buying DVDs, period.
I wonder what Apple's position on this is. On paper it seems like it's Apple's legal obligation to do the same thing or the content providers will sue. On the other hand, Apple runs the iTunes movie/music store and so they have a lever against the providers.
Finally, this isn't going to matter at all until VGA monitors go away. Insofar as I can tell, the picture on a VGA LCD panel looks identical to one on a DVI LCD panel. If this is so, then everyone will just use VGA connectors for their fancy LCD panels and nobody will ever notice this "protection". I know there are some people who think the digital connection makes a difference, but I think for the person on the street, as opposed to the gadget epicure, VGA will be fine, forever.
D
Have you tried the T-Mobile Sidekick (Danger)? It has the disadvantage of no third party development at all, but that does bring stability and immunity from tiresome virus problems. I had a friend with a Nokia phone that got a virus and she had no clue what to do. I was able to fix the problem for her after a bit of research but it was not a fun thing to go through, and her eventual fate was a $300 phone bill she couldn't pay. (She is in the Philippines and their data service is very expensive. And of course $300 was about a third of her monthly income).
...
I think the user interface is a bit cleaner than Pam, at least on the web browser. Email looks just like regular email, and the AIM client works great.
From a user perspective I liked it better than the Palm. Blackberry's pretty nice, too.
Has anyone mastered the keyboard of the Blackberry Pearl? I played with it for a few minutes in the store and just couldn't figure it out. The display is stunning, but I don't know if I could ever adjust to that keyboard
D
The problem with the Zune is that they can't really fight too hard for market share because there is no profit in the unit beyond its purchase price. The record labels are not interested in cross-subsidizing it like game developers do in the case of game consoles. If this was not so, they could simply lower prices to buy market share; they cannot since the is almost no profit potential in it at a lower price point.
The Xbox arguably made some sense to develop; I don't see how the Zune makes any sense at all. In my opinion, they should have taken the resources expended on the Zune to make improvements in their mobile phone platform. A killer mobile phone platform has a lot more mass appeal and profit potential, and the smartphone field is still a place where there is a lot of room for improvement.
In other words, I think Microsoft should get ready to fight the next battle, against Apple's new phone initiative, instead of fighting the last one, which they already lost.
Based on Microsoft's mobile phones that I've looked at, I think they could be slaughtered by the iPhone, but I haven't tried one in a while, so it's possible they have improved.
D
The newer systems may not have even been made available online in any meaningful quantity. I checked at a couple of randomly selected online stores when the hype began and noticed that to get a PS3 you'd pretty much better try braving winter's chill since you won't be able to find one online.
D
Well, from the end user point of view, the big advantage of Vista would be Aero Glass.
95% of all corporate computers are incompatible with it. Further more, there is nothing likely to cause more pain and suffering in the IT world than an attempt at an OS upgrade. My personal judgement call would be that I would not upgrade to Vista; I would simply buy new computers with Vista preinstalled. Computers are so cheap nowadays that upgrading costs a healthy percentage of the cost of buying new equipment.
I'd be interested in how the corporate world compares to the consumer world, because I would expect a very similar perentage of consumer PCs would be incompatible with Vista, too.
I've been really curious about this and so I have visited the Dell web site. What a confusing world you PC folks live in! If I want to answer the question "What's the cheapest computer that will be compatible with Aero Glass?" I have to spend at least an hour and even after putting in that time I'm still confused. I think Dell may be confused too; their $3,600 top-end 20" "briefcase" computer is listed as "Windows Vista Ready", not "Windows Vista Premium Ready". I HOPE it's Windows Vista Premium Ready or the hapless buyers are going to crash straight into a wall when installing Vista. The specs make me THINK it's Premium Ready but who can really tell? You have to be a hardware engineer (or solid hardware hobbyist) to recognize the graphics cards used, and if you're in that category you'd might as well go down to Fry's and build your own.
It appears that the computers Dell is focusing on selling for this holiday season are incompatlbie with the most demanded feature (by consumers) of the operating system of the future. If you trust Dell and think they are going to sell you hardware that won't be hopelessly obsolete two months from now you are tragically mistaken.
If I wanted a computer from them, I would call them up on the phone and make SURE they knew what they were talking about and could build me a system that was definitely compatible with Vista. Because they seem to have made this information deliberately difficult to find on their web site, and I'm frankly disgusted by it.
D
Interesting message - thanks!
When I worked in IT I found that many of my end users liked malware. It is, after all, designed to please the customer. So they like their little toolbars and their smiley faces and their email "enhancements". "No, I want my smiley! It's colorful!" they would tell me.
But sometimes the malware people went too far. I remember when I was called to an employee's computer and the start button and taskbar had both vanished! So I hit Google to search out for that problem, and it popped up a new window with search results from "zestyfind.com". They were all paid results, of course, which means they had nothing useful for this search (and most others, for that matter).
I was glad it popped up that window since that made it possible for me to find the thing by searching for zestyfind. I remember it took me hours and hours of painstakingly hideous work to remove that thing.
I understand things have gotten worse, so I'm just glad I'm no longer in IT and am almost exclusively on the Mac. Only time I ever use Windows is for compatibility testing, and that's just the way things should be.
D
I've always wanted to get a running PDP-11, but I've either not been able to afford it or not had the room for it. It looks like most of them nowadays are being torn apart to sell individual chips, panels and circuit boards on eBay, which I think is a bit sad.
I never had a better social life than when I ran a multiline BBS in the late 80s. Because of phone costs, people normally called from local communities and so there was generally a critical mass of people for parties and the like. And the ability to type directly to people instead of having it be line by line was somehow more personal than the Internet-based chat systems we have now. I think the whole setup was warmer and more personal, more of a community than a great city.
Now we just have great cities. It's cool to be able to look up anything we could ever want, but sometimes it seems a bit too soulless. On the other hand, American culture overall seems to have turned that way too, so I'm not sure what to blame.
D
6.3 was the same as 8.3 but with six characters for the base filename instead of eight.
The Digital Equipment PDP-11 operating systems (RT-11, etc) used it. CP/M copied this feature. In all fairness, in those days, every byte counted. The most common storage device was a 2.5 megabyte (not gigabyte!) cartridge drive called the RL02 that, alone, was bigger and heavier than the largest desktop computers available today.
It's amazing how much computing has progressed since then. You couldn't even put one typical MP3 file on that drive! You could, however, put a stripped-down version of early Unix on one. Of course it would have no luxury features like emacs or bash. In fact, I just checked the emacs binary on my MacOS X machine and found the binary was 30 megabytes, or TEN TIMES the capacity of that ancient hard drive!
That's a bit much, so I checked the Linux machine I host my site on. Even that emacs is 4mb.
Sometimes I'm nostalgic for those text-driven days. Somehow computing was more fun then, even though we could do a lot less. It is nice, though, that we very rarely fall into major constraints like memory limits and the like today unless we're doing something super-complex, like scientific computing or weather forecasting. Back in the day, you had to struggle constantly with the computer's tiny memory and pathetic address space, even if you wanted to write a simple text-based messaging application.
D
You are right. I looked it up and I fear my memory was playing tricks on me.
So CP/M is responsible for liberating us from the jail that was the 6.3 file system and putting us in a new, slightly less cramped, 8.3 jail.
It's interesting to note that on the Windows side, vestiges of 8.3 continued through Windows 2000 and I think even beyond. Even as of Windows XP (I have yet to see Vista since I switched to the Mac for my real work ages ago), the system directories were still polluted with thousands of cryptic 8.3 files.
D
I think there's a little more to the story than this. Qdos had some features that made it distinctly superior to CP/M, and CP/M itself was largely based on an even more ancient operating system.
For instance to copy a file, CP/M required that a program called PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program I think) be on a floppy disk in your computer. You could then use its arcane syntax:
A> pip
*a:=b:foo.txt
Qdos had a copy command in memory so it didn't have to be ondisk. The syntax was also a little more intuitive:
A> copy foo.txt b:
I might add that if my memory serves the PIP command and CP/M's 6+3 file structure were copied from DEC's RT/11 operating system. Essentially, CP/M was RT/11 for microcomputers except it left out some of RT/11's nicer features, like background processing.
Qdos was a solid incremental improvement then. It added commands like 'copy', replaced the 6+3 file system with an 8+3 file system, and I'm sure there were other improvements I know little about.
The original developer of QDOS worked on and off for Microsoft for over a decade in total. He also founded other companies. It doesn't look like he's mad at Bill most likely because in the aggregate Bill paid him quite a bit of money as an employee, and by taking over one of his later companies. Although not as rich as Bill Gates, I'm sure he's very comfortable.
D
Apple customers tend to trust Steve Jobs and Apple not to let them down. We're used to computers that actually work well, smooth as silk purchasing and usage experiences and so on.
And guess what? So far Steve has been the most trustworthy person in an unscrupulous business. Even buying music CDs has been an adventure fraught with pain -- at least if you talk to some of Sony's customers. Ouch. Bye-bye CD.
Perhaps best of all by sticking with his $ 0.99 a song pricing, Steve has been an advocate for all buyers of digital music.
Living in a small town where the biggest CD retailer is Wal*Mart, I love the immediacy of ordering and paying for the music online and then receiving it right away, on my computer. I know some people don't like the digital quality sound, but I guess I don't have golden ears; I've played it on great stereo equipment and it's sounded perfect to me.
And the DRM is loose enough so it just doesn't affect me at all.
I've mislaid most of my music CDs but the music lives on in my computer and iPod - and that's how I like it.
So digital music is just fine and dandy with me and the iTunes Music Store is a great place.
D
As others have done, I went instantly to the section labelled "Browser", figuring it would contain, well, the browser, and ran into a whole collection of JavaScript files used for skinning and the like.
I have subsequently been straightened out by people who replied to my message earlier. It would appear that plenty of people who have seen the structure found it as baffling as I did, so I don't feel too bad.
D
Thanks for the tip! I find it interesting that another person who actually worked on it doesn't remember where it was, which makes me feel a bit better. Obviously I'm not alone.
So I glanced through a bit of it and I don't see it as that confusing, but it seems to be all wrappers around wrappers and I'll bet finding a section of it that actually does anything, and tracing through all the layers would be a titanic migraine despite the slick HTML cross-referencing scheme.
On the whole, then, I don't know if I'd call it bad, since I'm sure there are reasons why it would be written that way but difficult to work with seems like a given.
D
In my experience, any large software system is very, very difficult to get your hands around if you didn't create it yourself. If the source code looks bad to you, the odds are one reason is that you didn't write it yourself and so you don't understand the techniques used.
For example, I like dumping things in one directory instead of having anal directory structures that take time to navigate. Others prefer having things all in their place. Neither style is particularly right or wrong. My style probably doesn't scale well to projects done by more than one developer. Their style makes it more time-consuming to get to know the code.
But in any event, I can't pass judgement on this source code, since I can't find it. I looked through the source he linked to and I couldn't find a single C file. In fact, I couldn't find anything that seemed to deal with the browser's core funtionality, such as rendering pages or putting up menus or toolbars.
I didn't find anything about what I saw in the JavaScript that seemed too bad. It seemed reasonably straightforward to understand, but of course the numerous options made it more complex than I'd like. That's inevitable in this kind of project, so it's not really a fault.
Is there any kind of guide to the source code, that would explain where the heart of it is?
D
It seems very strange to see such high prices for the software on the street when it must be far cheaper for computer makers.
...
For instance, Dell, last time I looked, sold a $299 PC. Are they paying $199 for Windows XP Home, like we do in stores?
Obviously not. I've heard it's more like $25, and that sounds about right.
I'd love to get a $99 version of Windows Vista so I could take my eventually-to-be-purchased MacBook Pro and use Windows on it. That's still a huge markup over what the PC maker pays.
But to pay $299, the cost of a new PC, just to run it on my MacBook? That seems a bit off, doesn't it?
Now, I would think that if I bought my Macbook Pro, and paid $299 for Vista, Microsoft would be making about ten times what it does from the PC maker.
Is Apple soon to be a Windows OEM?
I guess they can't be technically, because the licenses require no alternative operating systems on the computers
I would think Microsoft would be pretty happy to see these Mac customers and their full-margin purchases. Frankly, I feel like a sucker. I'd probably just buy a new PC for testing if it wasn't for the fact that I like to go out into the park and the coffee shop with my computer, and Parallels will let me keep doing that.
D
If your story was all there was to the iPod, tens of millions of them wouldn't have been sold. There are not that many rabid Apple fans in the world.
Creating a music player isn't the hard part. Creating a music player the public wants is. Before the iPod, few people even knew what a portable MP3 player was. Apple came up with the right combination of ideas to produce a major success. This took enormous discipline and attention to detail, that was way beyond anything previous MP3 player makers had done.
Your message doesn't make it clear that you even disagree with anything I said about the Zune. What are you actually trying to say?
Attacking me for being an Apple fan isn't going to make the Zune good.
D
I'd be curious to hear what you have against Apple. They do make polished, beautifully engineered products. Sometimes they are flawed, but generally those that use them really enjoy them.
You can protest the DRM scheme within the iTunes music store, but you can use iTunes and the iPod with non-DRM music, so I think of it as Apple giving us a choice but still leaving us with freedom to choose. You are probably aware that in earlier versions of PlaysForSure, Microsoft encoded everything into their DRM format before copying it to the player. Not Apple.
That doesn't seem like behaviour that deserves the "Spanish Inquisition" comment, so I'm curious to hear where that comes from.
I obviously agree with you entirely about Microsoft and PlaysForSure.
D
I found Lomborg extremely convincing.
I'd like to read a good anti-Lomborg argument, but all the ones I've seen are arguing more against the man than the science.
If you have one link that summarizes the case against his work, instead of sending me off on an hours-long search adventure that I simply do not have time for, I'll read it.
D
Actually, what really amused me were Engadget's account and pictures of the install process. The install screens started by looking like a Hugo Chavez rally, and then a bunch of random drunks.
And then when the install program crashed, the legendary picture of the cute oriental girl screaming like crazy. Some people said it looked like an orgasm, others said scream. I'm on the scream side personally.
I checked out the device at Wal*Mart and my view is that it looks cheap, especially compared to the iPod, and the advantages suggested in the promotional material were not significant. I'm surprised it's selling at all, but I guess some people just don't like Apple.
Finally, they seem to be awfully hard on their most loyal customers.
I find it inexplicable that they would not support existing music purchased through PlaysForSure stores. Sure, almost nobody bought it, but I would expect those people to have by far the greatest interest in a new Microsoft based music player. Rule one in customer service is not to make fools out of your best customers, who are precisely the people who bought into PlaysForSure.
And what's with not supporting Windows Vista? Who runs Windows Vista now but the few fans Microsoft has? Who would buy the Zune, and try to popularize it, other than the few people who have decided to put the Vista beta on their machines?
I know that if I were a Windows fan, I'd be running Vista today, and I'd be royally angry that my new Zune didn't work with it. Both those decisions are just plain hideous, and to the very users Microsoft should be pampering, not kicking in the teeth.
It's stuff like this that makes me very glad I'm a Mac user. I don't think Apple would ever make simple, elementary mistakes like this.
D