First, the suffering that's out there has nothing whatsoever with the merits, or lack of same, of South Park.
I personally don't care for South Park, because tasteless humour is a big turn-off for me. I didn't like the Simpsons, I didn't like Beavis and friend, etc, etc.
And you are right, the nice fellow who writes these reviews has a perfect right to do so, and I must say I found his mode of analysis fascinating.
But - and here comes the hard part - if you read his site with the care it deserves, you will notice the occasional mention of concepts that I feel should be pretty alarming. It would appear that the writer of the site believes that movies that do not make 100 points on his scale should not be made. I would not be surprised if he believes it should in fact be illegal to make such movies.
The only movie that made 100 on his scale was Mary Poppins. Even other G-rated movies contain what he considers to be "inappropriate" scenes of sex, violence, bad language and worse. He mentions all over the site that these scenes really should not be seen by children. In at least one place, he slips up and says that adults should not be allowed to view material unsuitable for children, because it might corrupt them beyond salvation.
Can you imagine a world in which you could not view any movie but Mary Poppins, over and over and over and over again? Titanic consists of scenes of wanton violence and destruction - the sinking of the ship. So, clearly, we should never, under any circumstances, have movies that show sinking ships. Saving Private Ryan, while a powerful masterpiece, contains disgusting images of wanton violence; clearly, we can't have that. Clearly, then, we cannot have war movies, even if the anti-violence lesson might be important.
Yes, Mary Poppins. Over and over and over and over again. This is the world of Thomas A. Carder. A world without sex, without profanity, a world without ships sinking or buildings exploding. It's not that I like war or ships sinking, but they are part and parcel of human life.
Now, in a sense, I like this guy. I think he's done a nice job on his site. And he's certainly been far, far more patient than I would have been in meticulously taking down the details of "sinful" things in these movies. But, much as I appreciate his efforts, I don't want to live in his world. And need I say that he's lobbying to have his world the law of the land?
He's not going to make it, of course, because the general public hates G-rated movies. (Why do you think there are so few? Nobody wants to watch the darn things!) But he's going to try, and try hard. And that, surely, makes him well worthy of opposition.
Isn't the whole argument here that graphics in kernel space means drivers in kernel space, and that means a bad driver can bring down the whole OS?
And in that case, whether Linux or NT, it seems like this could be a mistake. The main difference, of course, is that with open source Linux driver bugs are bound to be more efficiently fixed.
High-end digital video cameras use 3CCDs with a similar beam-splitting system to what's described in the article. As far as I know, no mid-end digital still cameras (i.e. ones selling for less than $ 15k) do this, and I wonder why. This current practice would appear to invalidate their patent unless it's using a more sophisticated variant of the process.
Interestingly enough, my Canon XL1 MiniDV camcorder has the moire pattern problem despite the use of separate red, green and blue sensors. This is because it performs a process similar to that described in the article so that it can use larger CCDs to improve light sensitivity. It happens that the NTSC video standard, on which the XL1 is based, disguises such effects by providing a relatively high-resolution monochrome image and then overlaying low-resolution colour over it. This is why you often see reds distorted and blurred when you watch a video (especially one that's been through a few generations).
The biggest tradeoff between this lower effective resolution and competing cameras is significantly higher low-light performance and more vivid colours. The Sony VX-1000 has a more conservative design and would probably be the right camera to use for a direct comparison between the old and new technologies. (I have a review of the XL1 and the VX-1000 at the link above).
I find the XL1 to be the ideal digital camera for the web, since you can take video and pick the best individual frames from it. That way, you always get the picture. You can see some examples at my portfolio of XL1 pictures.
That being said, I wish they had shown a picture and given pricing for the new camera. Cool as the technology is, it seems like it would be even more difficult to carry around than my six point XL1. ----
It seems to me the issue here is that developers are willing to do the work implementing the standard, but it can't be done without permission from Sorenson/Apple.
If I understand this correctly, this is worse than even the Microsoft Word format. With Word, it's legal to reverse engineer it and attempt to read it, although it's difficult to underestimate the difficulty of such efforts. The Sorenson/Apple codec is protected by a patent, so we can't legally reverse engineer it.
It sounds to me like the developer of xanim would be happy to put the reverse-engineering effort in if it were legal to do so. Since it isn't, he's reduced to begging for access to the spec.
I certainly wouldn't put down xanim's developers for this.
To tell the truth, I feel really ambivalent about it - I love owning it and really don't want to sell. What i say on my web page is that if you want to offer an "absurd" amount of money for it, I'll consider it. But I'm not terribly eager to face the question.
In all honesty, I think most people trying to buy domain names are pretty much bottom feeding - unless it's something desperately needed like altavista.com (which was Digital's mistake in the first place for building up the brand without selling the name), people aren't buying.
Back in 1994, when domain names were free of charge and the InterNIC supposedly went over every application by hand and approved it, I registered amazing.com.
I have contradictory feelings about it. On the one hand, I want to keep it because a lot of my life is in it. On the other hand, I'm sure it's worth a lot of money to the right company.
I've gotten occasional offers for it - the last one was for $ 10k. I'd say it would cost about $10k worth of effort to move all my sites off the domain and try and reset all the links to it. Also, I think the absolute right buyer would pay more.
Any thoughts on how much such a common and distinctive word is worth? I looked on eBay and came to the conclusion that it's just not a good place to sell a name.
In fact, it is NSI's policy to let you keep the domain under those circumstances - a prior trademark application is required. So it's exceedingly doubtful that any such case would go to court.
He gave HP and AOLServer a ringing endorsement in his first book, and they paid him back by supplying him with his spiffy new hardware. They also bought a bunch of copies of his book to distribute to their employees.
All of this is described in an entirely above-board way in his books.
Now, I will admit to being a little puzzled at his hardware - by that donation, he upgraded his system from a desktop system that I think was about a SPARC 5 class straight to a four-processor, 4GB RAM, 200GB hard drive space monster You could run a good-sized corporation with that thing. I'm not sure how much it has accomplished - his pages were among the fastest on the net when he was running the old HP server, and - no big shock here - they remain some of the fastest pages on the net now.
Still, I'm sure it's nice to have. I just wonder how HP justified the magnitude of the donation when a much smaller machine would have done everything he'd ever need to do.
Finally, hefty hardware or no, I'd defend Phillip Greenspun to the death - he's a fantastic writer and you certainly can't accuse him of mamby-pamby corpspeak. We need more like him.
If I'm an artist, and I set up a web site on which customers can download mp3 (or higher quality successor) files of my latest CD for $10, will I lose by piracy compared to if I continued on my same deal with the record company?
Probably not. After all, I understand that artists make about $ 1 per CD. So each download would have to be transmitted to at least ten people who would otherwise have bought before I'm losing money compared to the old system.
Many people want to support artists, in the same way that people who buy an "official" Red Hat or SuSE CD want to support Red Hat or SuSE. I cheerfully pay SuSE $ 50 for their Linux distribution for the convenience of getting an "official" copy and to support their work; the same will happen with music.
This, in my view, is why artists aren't afraid of MP3. They know that they'll gain substantially while record companies lose.
It's going to be a long time, though, before direct reproduction becomes a feasible marketing strategy. Vanessa Daou, a favourite artist of mine, tried an "internet only" marketing approach for her circa one year old CD Plutonium Glow. She subsequently released a conventionally-distributed version, so I have to assume the direct marketing was not as successful as she would have hoped.
I first used it because web servers were free, while the Gopher folks wanted to charge $ 500 for "commercial use".
I thought about this and realized I was more or less a commercial entity. So I got a web server instead.
I started to quickly enjoy the idea of hypertext. But it took me a long time to see the value of images. I always browsed with Lynx and hated the slowness of images. Now, of course, a page without images is thought of as pretty quaint.
I remember the original Silicon Surf as being a major influence in my personal love affair with SGI machines.
That was one heartbreaking page, since it seems to presage the beginning of the end, the recasting of SGI as just another box manufacturer.
I remember when they changed to a white background a few years back (which I assume this is referring to), I wondered what the heck was going on - it was just boring.
I apologise for my "run well on any hardware" statement. What I meant was that it would run well on a wide range of system speeds and capabilities, which is true. What's not true, of course, is that it will run with any motherboard chipset or video card. I agree that this should be improved, but we should have some sympathy for Be as a small company that can't do everything at once.
But I will note that BeOS supports my AMD K6/300 on my IBM Aptiva just fine. This is a more or less random "open box" system I bought at Best Buy for $ 559.
The main reason co-existing is so important is that someone will say "Okay, I'm interested in doing cool media stuff, but at the end of the day I need to use Microsoft Office." Instead of antagonizing that guy by saying that you have to give up Office, JLG says that you can keep Office, but if you want to do cool digital media, we have the right way forward.
I think BeOS appeals to the more pragmatic side of us: Want to run cool software that doesn't crash and burn all the time? Check out Be.
D ----
Running Linux applications under Be
on
Be Inc. IPO-bound
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· Score: 1
I don't know about graphical applications - I think there is an X-server available, but I haven't tried it.
But for text-mode applications, as far as I know the port isn't hard. I believe there is now mySQL for BeOS, for instance.
It still has extremely high-quality articles you can't find anywhere else, so I wouldn't put it down too heavily.
I remember when it was stunning - printed on gorgeous thick paper, with a graphic design adventure on every page. The only problem is that many of those beautiful pages were virtually impossible to read. I emailed Andrew Anker of the magazine to ask "I think there are some great articles in Wired, but I can't read them. Could you tone down the design a bit?"
I still remember his reply. "Read the online version, then".
That kind of arrogance was what killed Wired (or LR's control of it, anyway), but in an odd sense it was also what made it so appealing.
I never took to HotWired, probably because I found the site hard to read and confusing to navigate. Oh, and I was always forgetting my password.
I don't think the magazine has changed as much as Jon does, but that's probably because I haven't seen it from the inside. I'm relieved that I can finally read the articles, but I will admit that with readable articles some of the creative spirit of the magazine died. Odd, that.
But Wired News is still one of the best news sources on the web, even though the lower number of articles makes it a shadow of its former glory.
So what happened to Louis Rissoto (or however you spell his last name)? Did he make a nice pile by selling out to Lycos? If he does, I have a feeling we'll see some bizarre new venture coming up the pike, but I wouldn't be surprised if he overspends and goes broke again. Pity.:-(
I certainly understand the skepticism of other readers when confronted with the bare facts behind the Be IPO. And certainly I wouldn't make a short-term investment in it; the IPO itself is as likely to sink as to rise.
But for the long term, I think there are some interesting factors at work here.
Applications. Yes, there is no Microsoft Office for BeOS. But that has let interesting little companies such as GoBe and BeatWare produce genuinely innovative products at very low prices. There are at least two companies producing professional-level video editing systems for the BeOS. With Be's ability to produce astonishing multi-media performance compared to NT or MacOS, I think this is an exceptional opportunity for the hapless consumer, burdened with poor-quality Windows products in the video editing space, to use a worthwhile and cost-effective solution.
Loyalty. Those who use BeOS love it with similar fervor to OS/2, Amiga, Linux and Mac users. The main thing that sets BeOS apart is that it's designed to co-exist with Windows, so you don't have to give up your Windows to use BeOS. It's a lot like Microsoft's oh-so-successful transition between DOS and Windows - you could ignore Windows, but when you wanted to use it, it was there. At $ 69.99, BeOS is an impulse purchase, just like Red Hat Linux without the complex installation. No hefty investment in additional hardware needed, which I think is key to its success.
Quality. Like Linux, BeOS is rock solid. It stays up. Unlike Linux, it has a coherent GUI that's slick, easy to learn and consistent. It was designed from the ground up to run well on any hardware, but to take advantage of multi-processing when available. Also unlike Linux, downloading and installing commercial applications is very slick and smooth.
Installation ease. If your hardware is supported - and it's looking pretty good for new PCs - BeOS is trivial to install. Put the CD in the drive, boot, answer a question about partition size (well explained in the manual), and you're off.
I think BeOS is a compelling solution for the type of person who just wants to do things with their computers. They can dabble in graphics with the arty programs available, try out sleek and smooth video editing systems, and even write documents and spreadsheets with GoBe. The weakest point is the web browser, which cannot access web sites relying on JavaScript. But that will change once Bezilla and Opera appear on the scene.
I see BeOS sneaking through the back door of computing, and I'm betting this is exactly what Jean-Louis Gassee wants. If I had a balanced stock portfolio of $ 50k or more, I'd throw $ 500 his way and let him run with the ball. I think it will be one heck of a ride.
Actually, my current apartment rent is $ 595 a month, for an incredibly boring place in a really boring (but safe) part of the Valley.
To be in the Westside where all the action is, you can pay $ 900 a month and live in a decaying slum-like apartment. I know, because I checked.
Fortunately, lower interest rates make houses not that far away. My mid to high five figure income can probably qualify me to buy a low to mid-end house. The cheapest single family house in a dismal area of the Valley is $ 100,000. Houses start getting dull but civilized around $ 200,000. For $ 400,000, you can live in eastern Malibu in a small but pleasant place with a partial ocean view. For $750,000 you can get a magnificent view of the ocean in Malibu with no land but what your house is sitting on. For $ 650,000 you can get a shack-like home on the beach. For $ 1,000,000 you can get a little land plus your spectacular view. For $ 3,995,000 you can get something pretty impressive. The most expensive home in Malibu is around $ 20 million.
I'm contemplating the purchase of a house, partially as an investment, partially for tax reasons, but mainly because a nice apartment costs about the same a month as a decent house.
I understand that these prices are bargain city compared to Silicon Valley's.
Right now, I spend $ 1,500 a month to rent office space including a shared 10mbps line, with my share being roughly a T1.
Unfortunately, the company leasing me the space is likely to go out of business within the next 6 months or so, so I'm trying to figure out my alternatives. The best one is probably to pipe a T1 into my home, but I'd like to save a few bucks doing it.
I've been doing computer consultancy/software development for over fourteen years, so you might want to compare apples to apples income-wise. It's also a matter of priorities - I really, really want high-speed Internet access to the home.
I want to get a T1 connection to my residence in the San Fernando Valley area of Southern California.
How good would a wireless T1 be, and how much would it cost? I'm considering a wired T1, but it's a bit pricey for an individual.
I'd also like to hear any feedback on cheaper wired T1 providers. I'm considering SoftAware - I know they're good, but $ 1,500 a month (all inclusive) is a little much.
"The software industry will give us a conclusion in the next 10 years."
Interesting way of thinking - that there will be a conclusion, and that it will take ten years to get there.
I don't think there is ever anything as definite as a conclusion in this biz. And any process that takes ten years will get to its destination way, way too late.
There have been some problems with Slashdot, but not many since they added their fancy new VA Research dual-processor system. Before then, they were running on pretty overloaded hardware paid for out of their own pockets, and it's hard to blame them for problems in that context.
Linux is successful because it consists of a lot of discrete parts, and once a relatively small amount of it was done, people could chime in and do their own parts. A good example is Donald Becker and the networking code - since it's mostly drivers that are easily integrated into the existing system design, minimal coordination with other parts of the code are needed.
But yes, Linus is definitely a factor - you only need to look at the relative success of FreeBSD versus Linux to recognize that. FreeBSD was much better established, and many people who know both think it's better technically, probably because it was created by a small, cohesive team. But it's Linux that's done best, and I think that's because of the personality and legend of Linus Torvalds.
It was the combination of Linus and open source that got Linux where it is today. Both were needed.
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably right - the promotion turned me off so much I didn't think it was necessary to watch the series to get a sense for what it was about.
I don't think that undermines my basic point, though.
I wonder how my message got scored as a troll? I think it's one of the better ones I've written. Ah well.
D
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Actually, it's a lot worse than that.
He appears to believe Mary Poppins should be the only legal movie.
D
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First, the suffering that's out there has nothing whatsoever with the merits, or lack of same, of South Park.
I personally don't care for South Park, because tasteless humour is a big turn-off for me. I didn't like the Simpsons, I didn't like Beavis and friend, etc, etc.
And you are right, the nice fellow who writes these reviews has a perfect right to do so, and I must say I found his mode of analysis fascinating.
But - and here comes the hard part - if you read his site with the care it deserves, you will notice the occasional mention of concepts that I feel should be pretty alarming. It would appear that the writer of the site believes that movies that do not make 100 points on his scale should not be made. I would not be surprised if he believes it should in fact be illegal to make such movies.
The only movie that made 100 on his scale was Mary Poppins. Even other G-rated movies contain what he considers to be "inappropriate" scenes of sex, violence, bad language and worse. He mentions all over the site that these scenes really should not be seen by children. In at least one place, he slips up and says that adults should not be allowed to view material unsuitable for children, because it might corrupt them beyond salvation.
Can you imagine a world in which you could not view any movie but Mary Poppins, over and over and over and over again? Titanic consists of scenes of wanton violence and destruction - the sinking of the ship. So, clearly, we should never, under any circumstances, have movies that show sinking ships. Saving Private Ryan, while a powerful masterpiece, contains disgusting images of wanton violence; clearly, we can't have that. Clearly, then, we cannot have war movies, even if the anti-violence lesson might be important.
Yes, Mary Poppins. Over and over and over and over again. This is the world of Thomas A. Carder. A world without sex, without profanity, a world without ships sinking or buildings exploding. It's not that I like war or ships sinking, but they are part and parcel of human life.
Now, in a sense, I like this guy. I think he's done a nice job on his site. And he's certainly been far, far more patient than I would have been in meticulously taking down the details of "sinful" things in these movies. But, much as I appreciate his efforts, I don't want to live in his world. And need I say that he's lobbying to have his world the law of the land?
He's not going to make it, of course, because the general public hates G-rated movies. (Why do you think there are so few? Nobody wants to watch the darn things!) But he's going to try, and try hard. And that, surely, makes him well worthy of opposition.
D
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Isn't the whole argument here that graphics in kernel space means drivers in kernel space, and that means a bad driver can bring down the whole OS?
And in that case, whether Linux or NT, it seems like this could be a mistake. The main difference, of course, is that with open source Linux driver bugs are bound to be more efficiently fixed.
D
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High-end digital video cameras use 3CCDs with a similar beam-splitting system to what's described in the article. As far as I know, no mid-end digital still cameras (i.e. ones selling for less than $ 15k) do this, and I wonder why. This current practice would appear to invalidate their patent unless it's using a more sophisticated variant of the process.
Interestingly enough, my Canon XL1 MiniDV camcorder has the moire pattern problem despite the use of separate red, green and blue sensors. This is because it performs a process similar to that described in the article so that it can use larger CCDs to improve light sensitivity. It happens that the NTSC video standard, on which the XL1 is based, disguises such effects by providing a relatively high-resolution monochrome image and then overlaying low-resolution colour over it. This is why you often see reds distorted and blurred when you watch a video (especially one that's been through a few generations).
The biggest tradeoff between this lower effective resolution and competing cameras is significantly higher low-light performance and more vivid colours. The Sony VX-1000 has a more conservative design and would probably be the right camera to use for a direct comparison between the old and new technologies. (I have a review of the XL1 and the VX-1000 at the link above).
I find the XL1 to be the ideal digital camera for the web, since you can take video and pick the best individual frames from it. That way, you always get the picture. You can see some examples at my portfolio of XL1 pictures.
That being said, I wish they had shown a picture and given pricing for the new camera. Cool as the technology is, it seems like it would be even more difficult to carry around than my six point XL1.
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It seems to me the issue here is that developers are willing to do the work implementing the standard, but it can't be done without permission from Sorenson/Apple.
If I understand this correctly, this is worse than even the Microsoft Word format. With Word, it's legal to reverse engineer it and attempt to read it, although it's difficult to underestimate the difficulty of such efforts. The Sorenson/Apple codec is protected by a patent, so we can't legally reverse engineer it.
It sounds to me like the developer of xanim would be happy to put the reverse-engineering effort in if it were legal to do so. Since it isn't, he's reduced to begging for access to the spec.
I certainly wouldn't put down xanim's developers for this.
D
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To tell the truth, I feel really ambivalent about it - I love owning it and really don't want to sell. What i say on my web page is that if you want to offer an "absurd" amount of money for it, I'll consider it. But I'm not terribly eager to face the question.
In all honesty, I think most people trying to buy domain names are pretty much bottom feeding - unless it's something desperately needed like altavista.com (which was Digital's mistake in the first place for building up the brand without selling the name), people aren't buying.
D
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Back in 1994, when domain names were free of charge and the InterNIC supposedly went over every application by hand and approved it, I registered amazing.com .
I have contradictory feelings about it. On the one hand, I want to keep it because a lot of my life is in it. On the other hand, I'm sure it's worth a lot of money to the right company.
I've gotten occasional offers for it - the last one was for $ 10k. I'd say it would cost about $10k worth of effort to move all my sites off the domain and try and reset all the links to it. Also, I think the absolute right buyer would pay more.
Any thoughts on how much such a common and distinctive word is worth? I looked on eBay and came to the conclusion that it's just not a good place to sell a name.
D
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In fact, it is NSI's policy to let you keep the domain under those circumstances - a prior trademark application is required. So it's exceedingly doubtful that any such case would go to court.
D
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He gave HP and AOLServer a ringing endorsement in his first book, and they paid him back by supplying him with his spiffy new hardware. They also bought a bunch of copies of his book to distribute to their employees.
All of this is described in an entirely above-board way in his books.
Now, I will admit to being a little puzzled at his hardware - by that donation, he upgraded his system from a desktop system that I think was about a SPARC 5 class straight to a four-processor, 4GB RAM, 200GB hard drive space monster You could run a good-sized corporation with that thing. I'm not sure how much it has accomplished - his pages were among the fastest on the net when he was running the old HP server, and - no big shock here - they remain some of the fastest pages on the net now.
Still, I'm sure it's nice to have. I just wonder how HP justified the magnitude of the donation when a much smaller machine would have done everything he'd ever need to do.
Finally, hefty hardware or no, I'd defend Phillip Greenspun to the death - he's a fantastic writer and you certainly can't accuse him of mamby-pamby corpspeak. We need more like him.
D
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If I'm an artist, and I set up a web site on which customers can download mp3 (or higher quality successor) files of my latest CD for $10, will I lose by piracy compared to if I continued on my same deal with the record company?
Probably not. After all, I understand that artists make about $ 1 per CD. So each download would have to be transmitted to at least ten people who would otherwise have bought before I'm losing money compared to the old system.
Many people want to support artists, in the same way that people who buy an "official" Red Hat or SuSE CD want to support Red Hat or SuSE. I cheerfully pay SuSE $ 50 for their Linux distribution for the convenience of getting an "official" copy and to support their work; the same will happen with music.
This, in my view, is why artists aren't afraid of MP3. They know that they'll gain substantially while record companies lose.
It's going to be a long time, though, before direct reproduction becomes a feasible marketing strategy. Vanessa Daou, a favourite artist of mine, tried an "internet only" marketing approach for her circa one year old CD Plutonium Glow. She subsequently released a conventionally-distributed version, so I have to assume the direct marketing was not as successful as she would have hoped.
D
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So, with all the money poured into it and all the throngs of advertisers eager to support it, why wasn't Wired more of a financial success?
D
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If you can disregard the Open Source requirement, NetPositive on the BeOS is exactly what you want - small, fast, works great.
Unfortunately, there are many sites that just won't load properly without JavaScript. Sad but true.
D
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I first used it because web servers were free, while the Gopher folks wanted to charge $ 500 for "commercial use".
I thought about this and realized I was more or less a commercial entity. So I got a web server instead.
I started to quickly enjoy the idea of hypertext. But it took me a long time to see the value of images. I always browsed with Lynx and hated the slowness of images. Now, of course, a page without images is thought of as pretty quaint.
D
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I remember the original Silicon Surf as being a major influence in my personal love affair with SGI machines.
That was one heartbreaking page, since it seems to presage the beginning of the end, the recasting of SGI as just another box manufacturer.
I remember when they changed to a white background a few years back (which I assume this is referring to), I wondered what the heck was going on - it was just boring.
D
(Proud owner of a used Indigo2).
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I apologise for my "run well on any hardware" statement. What I meant was that it would run well on a wide range of system speeds and capabilities, which is true. What's not true, of course, is that it will run with any motherboard chipset or video card. I agree that this should be improved, but we should have some sympathy for Be as a small company that can't do everything at once.
But I will note that BeOS supports my AMD K6/300 on my IBM Aptiva just fine. This is a more or less random "open box" system I bought at Best Buy for $ 559.
The main reason co-existing is so important is that someone will say "Okay, I'm interested in doing cool media stuff, but at the end of the day I need to use Microsoft Office." Instead of antagonizing that guy by saying that you have to give up Office, JLG says that you can keep Office, but if you want to do cool digital media, we have the right way forward.
I think BeOS appeals to the more pragmatic side of us: Want to run cool software that doesn't crash and burn all the time? Check out Be.
D
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I don't know about graphical applications - I think there is an X-server available, but I haven't tried it.
But for text-mode applications, as far as I know the port isn't hard. I believe there is now mySQL for BeOS, for instance.
D
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It still has extremely high-quality articles you can't find anywhere else, so I wouldn't put it down too heavily.
:-(
I remember when it was stunning - printed on gorgeous thick paper, with a graphic design adventure on every page. The only problem is that many of those beautiful pages were virtually impossible to read. I emailed Andrew Anker of the magazine to ask "I think there are some great articles in Wired, but I can't read them. Could you tone down the design a bit?"
I still remember his reply. "Read the online version, then".
That kind of arrogance was what killed Wired (or LR's control of it, anyway), but in an odd sense it was also what made it so appealing.
I never took to HotWired, probably because I found the site hard to read and confusing to navigate. Oh, and I was always forgetting my password.
I don't think the magazine has changed as much as Jon does, but that's probably because I haven't seen it from the inside. I'm relieved that I can finally read the articles, but I will admit that with readable articles some of the creative spirit of the magazine died. Odd, that.
But Wired News is still one of the best news sources on the web, even though the lower number of articles makes it a shadow of its former glory.
So what happened to Louis Rissoto (or however you spell his last name)? Did he make a nice pile by selling out to Lycos? If he does, I have a feeling we'll see some bizarre new venture coming up the pike, but I wouldn't be surprised if he overspends and goes broke again. Pity.
D
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But for the long term, I think there are some interesting factors at work here.
I think BeOS is a compelling solution for the type of person who just wants to do things with their computers. They can dabble in graphics with the arty programs available, try out sleek and smooth video editing systems, and even write documents and spreadsheets with GoBe. The weakest point is the web browser, which cannot access web sites relying on JavaScript. But that will change once Bezilla and Opera appear on the scene.
I see BeOS sneaking through the back door of computing, and I'm betting this is exactly what Jean-Louis Gassee wants. If I had a balanced stock portfolio of $ 50k or more, I'd throw $ 500 his way and let him run with the ball. I think it will be one heck of a ride.
D
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Actually, my current apartment rent is $ 595 a month, for an incredibly boring place in a really boring (but safe) part of the Valley.
To be in the Westside where all the action is, you can pay $ 900 a month and live in a decaying slum-like apartment. I know, because I checked.
Fortunately, lower interest rates make houses not that far away. My mid to high five figure income can probably qualify me to buy a low to mid-end house. The cheapest single family house in a dismal area of the Valley is $ 100,000. Houses start getting dull but civilized around $ 200,000. For $ 400,000, you can live in eastern Malibu in a small but pleasant place with a partial ocean view. For $750,000 you can get a magnificent view of the ocean in Malibu with no land but what your house is sitting on. For $ 650,000 you can get a shack-like home on the beach. For $ 1,000,000 you can get a little land plus your spectacular view. For $ 3,995,000 you can get something pretty impressive. The most expensive home in Malibu is around $ 20 million.
I'm contemplating the purchase of a house, partially as an investment, partially for tax reasons, but mainly because a nice apartment costs about the same a month as a decent house.
I understand that these prices are bargain city compared to Silicon Valley's.
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Right now, I spend $ 1,500 a month to rent office space including a shared 10mbps line, with my share being roughly a T1.
Unfortunately, the company leasing me the space is likely to go out of business within the next 6 months or so, so I'm trying to figure out my alternatives. The best one is probably to pipe a T1 into my home, but I'd like to save a few bucks doing it.
I've been doing computer consultancy/software development for over fourteen years, so you might want to compare apples to apples income-wise. It's also a matter of priorities - I really, really want high-speed Internet access to the home.
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I want to get a T1 connection to my residence in the San Fernando Valley area of Southern California.
How good would a wireless T1 be, and how much would it cost? I'm considering a wired T1, but it's a bit pricey for an individual.
I'd also like to hear any feedback on cheaper wired T1 providers. I'm considering SoftAware - I know they're good, but $ 1,500 a month (all inclusive) is a little much.
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"The software industry will give us a conclusion in the next 10 years."
Interesting way of thinking - that there will be a conclusion, and that it will take ten years to get there.
I don't think there is ever anything as definite as a conclusion in this biz. And any process that takes ten years will get to its destination way, way too late.
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There have been some problems with Slashdot, but not many since they added their fancy new VA Research dual-processor system. Before then, they were running on pretty overloaded hardware paid for out of their own pockets, and it's hard to blame them for problems in that context.
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Linux is successful because it consists of a lot of discrete parts, and once a relatively small amount of it was done, people could chime in and do their own parts. A good example is Donald Becker and the networking code - since it's mostly drivers that are easily integrated into the existing system design, minimal coordination with other parts of the code are needed.
But yes, Linus is definitely a factor - you only need to look at the relative success of FreeBSD versus Linux to recognize that. FreeBSD was much better established, and many people who know both think it's better technically, probably because it was created by a small, cohesive team. But it's Linux that's done best, and I think that's because of the personality and legend of Linus Torvalds.
It was the combination of Linus and open source that got Linux where it is today. Both were needed.
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