With the multilink adapter, the SGI 1600SW works fine with the VGA output of any PowerMac.
Unfortunately, you need the multilink adapter.
My 1600SW was retired at my old place because it didn't do well when there was a lot of glare around, but I may bring it back as a second monitor to my 23" Apple Cinema Display. Unfortunately I have mislaid the power supply for the multilink adapter. If anyone has a spare, please email me. (I figure 1600SW users might be watching this).
When using timeline-based motion graphics programs like After Effects and Flash, it's very useful to be able to put the timeline on the big monitor and the display of your work and pallettes on the other. I've found this is true no matter how large your display is.
My reaction to the DoubleSight idea is why not just create a frame that's the size of two LCD panels and squeeze together the two panels into what looks like a single monitor? At first, I thought that's what this was.
That's why there are third parties that also replace the battery, for far less. As long as Apple, which has high overhead, is not trying to suppress these companies or the knowledge that they exist, I see nothing wrong with this.
It's just like Apple RAM. You can buy RAM for your Apple computer at purchase for exorbitant prices, in part because they're greedy, and in part because their labor costs to install stuff is very high. So when I bought my G5, I bought it with the standard RAM and upgraded it with third-party RAM. All is well and I saved a bundle.
Apple fans are Apple fans because Steve Jobs personally sweats over the location of every pixel on our screens, making an honest effort to produce as beautiful and wonderful an environment as can be made. Sometimes he fails; sometimes he succeeds, but you know he's there determined and always doing his best to improve things.(*)
Nobody else has this obsessive determination. Not Bill Gates, not the developers of Gnome or KDE. Steve does. Apple users realize that because of this, things are always going to be a bit more expensive than they are in the Windows or Linux world, but there's going to be a chance of true designer greatness, something no other operating system even tries to measure up to.
So if you want to know why we're happy bowing to the Great Steve, that's it. He works for us, really hard, to try and make wonderful things. Everyone else wants to make purely money. Sure, Steve wants to make money, and he does. But he REALLY want to make wonderful things.
And he does.
If you want wonderful things and you understand this difference, well, Apple has no competition.
D
(*) Yes, I know he doesn't do the actual work. I picture him as having enormous horrible meetings with everyone having anything to do with MacOS X, and every position of stuff on the screen being discussed to the pixel. Those meetings are no fun for the participants, but amazing stuff comes out of them.
There are about a billion ways you can replace the battery for about $50, so I'm not sure what the big deal is here. Even Apple will do it for $99.
Since a new iPod with similar functionality is $250-$299 (depending on how important extra storage space is to you), I'd say battery replacement is normally going to be worthwhile.
Unless you have an iPod broken for some other reason, I think the recycling is a bum deal.
You know, that was pretty clever, but a hint as to how this burst happened would be helpful.
Especially since Google really does have a great idea here. I know Slashdotters on the whole love Google, and I know there's a bit of a backlash, but for the sake of the integrity of the argument, let's have that backlash be for some legitimate reason, not just because Google's too popular because, well, it really is great.
Under those circumstances, though, fewer people might buy your camera. Consider the kerfluffle over Nikon closing their colour correction information to non-Nikon software. A lot of people, including myself, are really turned off by that kind of gesture. This is especially important since by most accounts Nikon's software isn't very good.
There may be nothing morally wrong about it - they are Nikon's cameras, after all - but it might still be commercially wrong if it makes people prefer Canon.
Some of the subtle things about how capitalism works are quite remarkable. That's why we both agree that it's a greate system:-).
Would you really want a single toner cartridge with all colors?
That would be awfully expensive to replace, since you'd have to replace the whole thing when just one of your colours was low. Inkjet owners have exactly the same problem, and I hear about them complaining all the time.
I have a HP Color LaserJet 3500, and aside from the weight it's a fabulous printer. Great quality (albiet slightly under a first-class photo inkjet), high speed and rock solid.
I don't have that much to say in a response, but I wanted to thank you for a most interesting post.
And you are right that logically, a single instance cannot prove whether something works or something doesn't.
On the other hand, if I have this post on Slashdot for, say, 24 hours or so, and nobody comes up with a story of an antidepressant actually working well for them, I would say it's likely to be pretty rare that antidepressants do work.
I lived with someone who was profoundly depressed for six months.
She had the whole Physician's Desk Reference memorized and could talk with amazing knowledge and erudition about every antidepressant that ever existed.
She had a psychiatrist she loved, and she would go to him and discuss prescriptions with him on a PhD level.
None of this -- I repeat, NONE of this -- ever helped her with her depression.
When there was a problem with her supply of drugs, she would get frantic but it felt almost like she was LESS depressed when she didn't have them, because there was some kind of cause with which to frame her life, namely her lack of drugs.
My conclusion from this is that antidepressants do virtually nothing real.
Anyone have stories where they actually pulled someone out of a tailspin? In the end, her situation got so bad that I eventually had to send my friend back to her native Canada, with her hopes that the Canadian healthcare system would help her. Alas, from the messages I've received from her since, I don't think it did.
She struck me as someone who really cares about teaching and her students, and she certainly didn't name names.
I don't think it's bad for students to know what teachers really think of them. It might even create some empathy in the minds of the students.
I now work for a Chemistry professor at a major university, and I know that I would have felt differently about my college experience if I knew about the hard work, long nights and love that goes into teaching a class.
Well, my calculator is bc, so let's see here: [David-H-Denniss-Computer:~] david% bc bc 1.06 Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. For details type `warranty'. (1/3*3)-1 -1 scale=4 (1/3*3)-1 -. 0001
Interesting, looks like it's just a little nuts no matter how you do it. However, we wanted to see how Rexx's decimal arithmatic compared, so I downloaded Rexx and here's what I get:
[David-H-Denniss-Computer:~] david% rexx say (1/3)*3-1 -1E-9 [David-H-Denniss-Computer:~] david%
So it looks like neither approach has won over the other, and as you say, binary arithmatic is a lot faster.
So I guess I have to eat my words on this one. Thanks for an interesting journey.
I don't think Rexx had a lot to do with the failure of the Amiga or OS/2 in the marketplace. Curiously enough, both of them had their deeply loyal adherents, and perhaps REXX was one of the reasons.
I have to admit that as a general rule I perfer languages that don't force me to declare variables, especially for simple projects. Or perhaps I just get tired of hearing stilted, bureaucratic language like "best practices".
That being said, what's wrong with decimal arithmatic? It has the major advantage of eliminating the tiresome rounding errors that make doing financial calculations in (say) Perl so annoying.
I thought the examples showed a very interesting way of thinking. I probably won't learn or convert to REXX but I can see that it's a very forgiving environment, and I think that makes life more pleasant overall, especially for beginneers. I can see why it's popular in cultures where C and Perl didn't start with overwhelming advantages.
I could have sworn I read something about Avalon not making it into Longhorn.
Now we know.net isn't going to be a primary component of Longhorn, despite products being named after.net for eons. Does this mean that we never have had.net, or that the meaning of it has changed?
If Avalon might or might not be in Longhorn, and Longhorn isn't.net added to Windows, and Longhorn isn't WINFS, well... exactly what IS Longhorn, anyway?
I guess what I'd like to see, instead of a vague initial paragraph and pages of formal specifications, is a concrete example of how you would code this, and then how it would be used.
I have never been fond of articles like this. Slashdot points us to something new (at least to me), and links to horribly long-winded and incomprehensible explanations of what it is. Sure, I could understand them... if I had an extra hour or two.
Since it's obvious that you do understand, would it be possible for you to come up with a 1-2 paragraph explanation of what the Semantic Web is and does?
I've spent some time on the linked to web site, and read Clay Shirky's essay, and I'm still not sure what it is and how it works.
The biggest advantage of MacOS X is not that it's idiot proof. As others have said in this thread, Linux is very similar all around.
However, MacOS X runs mainstream commercial software with some very nice twists. You can get Microsoft Office, and it will read Office files from Windows without the backbreaking problems I've seen with OpenOffice. The applications are slick and better designed. And of course it has very cool media tools for when you're using digital cameras and the like.
I'm not going to say it's foolproof, but at least it's fool-friendly, with a lot of delicious eye candy to help the medicine go down.
Heck, I prefer it to Linux and I'm a Unix geek who writes HTML by hand and does lots of server-side Unix programming.
It wrote random junk to random sectors of the drive until the machine died.
So essentially, yes.
It was a really nasty character. In fact, I don't know if there have ever been nastier ones. Most of the worms feel more like social engineering proofs of concept than anything else. This one was actually intentionally destructive, which is pretty rare.
I think that to be on one of these lists, you have to use your name as a conspicuous part of the blog. You'd have to read Groklaw for a while to know it's Pamela Jones. Likewise, you'd have to read OpinionJournal's Best of the Web for quite a while to know it's James Taranto's beat.
Neither of those people were listed, despite their high level of popularity.
I can only conclude that individual ego and a desire for personal fame are required to get on the list.
I get spam emails addressed to "David Dennis" all the time.
It would not be difficult for someone to emulate real PayPal emails much better than is currently being done, and as the law of diminishing returns impacts this kind of attack, I'm sure it will happen.
It used to be that you could reliably identify these attacks just because of their abysmal English, but that's become less true in the past few months.
What's foolproof is this: Anything asking for you to type in your ID and password is bogus, unless you go directly to that site to type it in, or unless it's the end of an eBay auction and you're being asked for payment that you already know you owe.
This is not actually true. Corporations have the advantage of having enough money to defend themselves against lawsuits, but if the case was as cut and dried as scanning books and putting them on the web, sufficient lawyers would be found and the legal cases pursued.
One place where corporations are actually worse off than individuals when facing lawsuits is that generally they have the ability to pay.
Let's say you shared 1 million songs with your 100,000 best friends on Kazaa. On paper, you would be liable for $150k per infringement or some such silly number, meaning that you would theoretically have to pay a mind-boggling sum.
In practice, of course, the suit would be settled for far less than that because everyone knows you simply don't have that kind of money. But a corporation does (or at least a lot more than you have). You could lose that lawsuit and wipe away most of the judgement in bankruptcy. A corporation might actually have to pay it.
I've been reading all the replies to this, which quite rightly defend Microsoft by noting that they have already had the basic elements of this before.
It made me wonder why it still felt like your comment was valid on an emotional level. Other web sites have, in fact, integrated maps and satellite images - just not nearly as effectively as Google. The effective integration is why we love Google maps.
Well, I realized what the reason was and thought I would share it. Microsoft should do things to catch up with Google; that's capitalism at work. But they go out and brag about them as though they're the first people in the world to do it. If you read Bill Gates' interview in isolation, you'd think he invented these ideas. Google's already implemented them; MS is playing catch-up, but having the nerve to claim that they're innovating by creating something individiual.
I think that creates a perception in the mind of the guy on the street that Microsoft is more innovative than it really is.
It seems especially interesting in comparsion to how Google does product introductions. They slip stuff on their site in the dead of night and rely on people to discover them and spread the word. This works because most people admire Google and are curious.
I don't think that many people are looking at all the cool new things on MSN, so Bill has to talk them up.
Slashdot Mirror
With the multilink adapter, the SGI 1600SW works fine with the VGA output of any PowerMac.
Unfortunately, you need the multilink adapter.
My 1600SW was retired at my old place because it didn't do well when there was a lot of glare around, but I may bring it back as a second monitor to my 23" Apple Cinema Display. Unfortunately I have mislaid the power supply for the multilink adapter. If anyone has a spare, please email me. (I figure 1600SW users might be watching this).
When using timeline-based motion graphics programs like After Effects and Flash, it's very useful to be able to put the timeline on the big monitor and the display of your work and pallettes on the other. I've found this is true no matter how large your display is.
My reaction to the DoubleSight idea is why not just create a frame that's the size of two LCD panels and squeeze together the two panels into what looks like a single monitor? At first, I thought that's what this was.
D
That's why there are third parties that also replace the battery, for far less. As long as Apple, which has high overhead, is not trying to suppress these companies or the knowledge that they exist, I see nothing wrong with this.
It's just like Apple RAM. You can buy RAM for your Apple computer at purchase for exorbitant prices, in part because they're greedy, and in part because their labor costs to install stuff is very high. So when I bought my G5, I bought it with the standard RAM and upgraded it with third-party RAM. All is well and I saved a bundle.
Apple fans are Apple fans because Steve Jobs personally sweats over the location of every pixel on our screens, making an honest effort to produce as beautiful and wonderful an environment as can be made. Sometimes he fails; sometimes he succeeds, but you know he's there determined and always doing his best to improve things.(*)
Nobody else has this obsessive determination. Not Bill Gates, not the developers of Gnome or KDE. Steve does. Apple users realize that because of this, things are always going to be a bit more expensive than they are in the Windows or Linux world, but there's going to be a chance of true designer greatness, something no other operating system even tries to measure up to.
So if you want to know why we're happy bowing to the Great Steve, that's it. He works for us, really hard, to try and make wonderful things. Everyone else wants to make purely money. Sure, Steve wants to make money, and he does. But he REALLY want to make wonderful things.
And he does.
If you want wonderful things and you understand this difference, well, Apple has no competition.
D
(*) Yes, I know he doesn't do the actual work. I picture him as having enormous horrible meetings with everyone having anything to do with MacOS X, and every position of stuff on the screen being discussed to the pixel. Those meetings are no fun for the participants, but amazing stuff comes out of them.
There are about a billion ways you can replace the battery for about $50, so I'm not sure what the big deal is here. Even Apple will do it for $99.
Since a new iPod with similar functionality is $250-$299 (depending on how important extra storage space is to you), I'd say battery replacement is normally going to be worthwhile.
Unless you have an iPod broken for some other reason, I think the recycling is a bum deal.
D
From what I understand, Google ignores links placed on Slashdot comment pages for exactly this reason :-(.
Sorry.
D
You know, that was pretty clever, but a hint as to how this burst happened would be helpful.
Especially since Google really does have a great idea here. I know Slashdotters on the whole love Google, and I know there's a bit of a backlash, but for the sake of the integrity of the argument, let's have that backlash be for some legitimate reason, not just because Google's too popular because, well, it really is great.
D
Under those circumstances, though, fewer people might buy your camera. Consider the kerfluffle over Nikon closing their colour correction information to non-Nikon software. A lot of people, including myself, are really turned off by that kind of gesture. This is especially important since by most accounts Nikon's software isn't very good.
:-).
There may be nothing morally wrong about it - they are Nikon's cameras, after all - but it might still be commercially wrong if it makes people prefer Canon.
Some of the subtle things about how capitalism works are quite remarkable. That's why we both agree that it's a greate system
D
Would you really want a single toner cartridge with all colors?
That would be awfully expensive to replace, since you'd have to replace the whole thing when just one of your colours was low. Inkjet owners have exactly the same problem, and I hear about them complaining all the time.
I have a HP Color LaserJet 3500, and aside from the weight it's a fabulous printer. Great quality (albiet slightly under a first-class photo inkjet), high speed and rock solid.
D
I don't have that much to say in a response, but I wanted to thank you for a most interesting post.
And you are right that logically, a single instance cannot prove whether something works or something doesn't.
On the other hand, if I have this post on Slashdot for, say, 24 hours or so, and nobody comes up with a story of an antidepressant actually working well for them, I would say it's likely to be pretty rare that antidepressants do work.
So we'll see. I'm trying to keep an open mind.
D
I lived with someone who was profoundly depressed for six months.
She had the whole Physician's Desk Reference memorized and could talk with amazing knowledge and erudition about every antidepressant that ever existed.
She had a psychiatrist she loved, and she would go to him and discuss prescriptions with him on a PhD level.
None of this -- I repeat, NONE of this -- ever helped her with her depression.
When there was a problem with her supply of drugs, she would get frantic but it felt almost like she was LESS depressed when she didn't have them, because there was some kind of cause with which to frame her life, namely her lack of drugs.
My conclusion from this is that antidepressants do virtually nothing real.
Anyone have stories where they actually pulled someone out of a tailspin? In the end, her situation got so bad that I eventually had to send my friend back to her native Canada, with her hopes that the Canadian healthcare system would help her. Alas, from the messages I've received from her since, I don't think it did.
D
I, too, read part of the blog.
She struck me as someone who really cares about teaching and her students, and she certainly didn't name names.
I don't think it's bad for students to know what teachers really think of them. It might even create some empathy in the minds of the students.
I now work for a Chemistry professor at a major university, and I know that I would have felt differently about my college experience if I knew about the hard work, long nights and love that goes into teaching a class.
D
I assume you mean (1/3*3) - 1?
. 0001
Well, my calculator is bc, so let's see here:
[David-H-Denniss-Computer:~] david% bc
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
(1/3*3)-1
-1
scale=4
(1/3*3)-1
-
Interesting, looks like it's just a little nuts no matter how you do it. However, we wanted to see how Rexx's decimal arithmatic compared, so I downloaded Rexx and here's what I get:
[David-H-Denniss-Computer:~] david% rexx
say (1/3)*3-1
-1E-9
[David-H-Denniss-Computer:~] david%
So it looks like neither approach has won over the other, and as you say, binary arithmatic is a lot faster.
So I guess I have to eat my words on this one. Thanks for an interesting journey.
D
I don't think Rexx had a lot to do with the failure of the Amiga or OS/2 in the marketplace. Curiously enough, both of them had their deeply loyal adherents, and perhaps REXX was one of the reasons.
I have to admit that as a general rule I perfer languages that don't force me to declare variables, especially for simple projects. Or perhaps I just get tired of hearing stilted, bureaucratic language like "best practices".
That being said, what's wrong with decimal arithmatic? It has the major advantage of eliminating the tiresome rounding errors that make doing financial calculations in (say) Perl so annoying.
I thought the examples showed a very interesting way of thinking. I probably won't learn or convert to REXX but I can see that it's a very forgiving environment, and I think that makes life more pleasant overall, especially for beginneers. I can see why it's popular in cultures where C and Perl didn't start with overwhelming advantages.
D
I could have sworn I read something about Avalon not making it into Longhorn.
.net isn't going to be a primary component of Longhorn, despite products being named after .net for eons. Does this mean that we never have had .net, or that the meaning of it has changed?
.net added to Windows, and Longhorn isn't WINFS, well ... exactly what IS Longhorn, anyway?
Now we know
If Avalon might or might not be in Longhorn, and Longhorn isn't
D
I guess what I'd like to see, instead of a vague initial paragraph and pages of formal specifications, is a concrete example of how you would code this, and then how it would be used.
Many thanks.
D
I have never been fond of articles like this. Slashdot points us to something new (at least to me), and links to horribly long-winded and incomprehensible explanations of what it is. Sure, I could understand them ... if I had an extra hour or two.
Since it's obvious that you do understand, would it be possible for you to come up with a 1-2 paragraph explanation of what the Semantic Web is and does?
I've spent some time on the linked to web site, and read Clay Shirky's essay, and I'm still not sure what it is and how it works.
Many thanks.
D
The biggest advantage of MacOS X is not that it's idiot proof. As others have said in this thread, Linux is very similar all around.
However, MacOS X runs mainstream commercial software with some very nice twists. You can get Microsoft Office, and it will read Office files from Windows without the backbreaking problems I've seen with OpenOffice. The applications are slick and better designed. And of course it has very cool media tools for when you're using digital cameras and the like.
I'm not going to say it's foolproof, but at least it's fool-friendly, with a lot of delicious eye candy to help the medicine go down.
Heck, I prefer it to Linux and I'm a Unix geek who writes HTML by hand and does lots of server-side Unix programming.
D
Those blogs are either under someone's name or not on the list, so I think my point is reasonable.
The overwhelming majority of blogs on the list are shown as individual's names.
D
I agree with Peter (someone who also responded to your message). Really serious consequences are the destruction of data on your system.
Anything else is relatively easy to recover from. Loss of data lasts a lifetime.
Being annoyed is very different from having your life's work potentially lost. And how many people have really good backups?
How do you back up a 1tb disk, anyway?
D
It wrote random junk to random sectors of the drive until the machine died.
So essentially, yes.
It was a really nasty character. In fact, I don't know if there have ever been nastier ones. Most of the worms feel more like social engineering proofs of concept than anything else. This one was actually intentionally destructive, which is pretty rare.
D
I think that to be on one of these lists, you have to use your name as a conspicuous part of the blog. You'd have to read Groklaw for a while to know it's Pamela Jones. Likewise, you'd have to read OpinionJournal's Best of the Web for quite a while to know it's James Taranto's beat.
Neither of those people were listed, despite their high level of popularity.
I can only conclude that individual ego and a desire for personal fame are required to get on the list.
D
Don't rely on this.
I get spam emails addressed to "David Dennis" all the time.
It would not be difficult for someone to emulate real PayPal emails much better than is currently being done, and as the law of diminishing returns impacts this kind of attack, I'm sure it will happen.
It used to be that you could reliably identify these attacks just because of their abysmal English, but that's become less true in the past few months.
What's foolproof is this: Anything asking for you to type in your ID and password is bogus, unless you go directly to that site to type it in, or unless it's the end of an eBay auction and you're being asked for payment that you already know you owe.
D
This is not actually true. Corporations have the advantage of having enough money to defend themselves against lawsuits, but if the case was as cut and dried as scanning books and putting them on the web, sufficient lawyers would be found and the legal cases pursued.
One place where corporations are actually worse off than individuals when facing lawsuits is that generally they have the ability to pay.
Let's say you shared 1 million songs with your 100,000 best friends on Kazaa. On paper, you would be liable for $150k per infringement or some such silly number, meaning that you would theoretically have to pay a mind-boggling sum.
In practice, of course, the suit would be settled for far less than that because everyone knows you simply don't have that kind of money. But a corporation does (or at least a lot more than you have). You could lose that lawsuit and wipe away most of the judgement in bankruptcy. A corporation might actually have to pay it.
D
Why is it that Google is scanning copyright-protected works?
I thought that was flagrantly illegal, and the fines for willful copyright infringement are steep, even for a company with Google's money.
What's going on?
D
I've been reading all the replies to this, which quite rightly defend Microsoft by noting that they have already had the basic elements of this before.
It made me wonder why it still felt like your comment was valid on an emotional level. Other web sites have, in fact, integrated maps and satellite images - just not nearly as effectively as Google. The effective integration is why we love Google maps.
Well, I realized what the reason was and thought I would share it. Microsoft should do things to catch up with Google; that's capitalism at work. But they go out and brag about them as though they're the first people in the world to do it. If you read Bill Gates' interview in isolation, you'd think he invented these ideas. Google's already implemented them; MS is playing catch-up, but having the nerve to claim that they're innovating by creating something individiual.
I think that creates a perception in the mind of the guy on the street that Microsoft is more innovative than it really is.
It seems especially interesting in comparsion to how Google does product introductions. They slip stuff on their site in the dead of night and rely on people to discover them and spread the word. This works because most people admire Google and are curious.
I don't think that many people are looking at all the cool new things on MSN, so Bill has to talk them up.
D
I certainly like Google Maps better than any existing mapping service I've seen.
Which ones do you consider better, and why?
D