This surprises me since BeOS itself on x86 was amazingly fast, and I would think you could put a surplus Pentium III (being given away in cereal boxes nowadays) and it would fly. My guess is that they must have cheaped out on the amount of memory they put in, which is pretty stupid considering how cheap 512MB modules are nowadays.
I did like the idea of the nice and large vertical Trinitron screen, though. That's probably what contributes to the weight. Maybe they would have been better off making the monitor into a consumer product instead of the system.
An impressive collection, but surely not more so than Yahoo or even (gasp) Microsoft. Comparable, perhaps, to what Disney owns, but Disney's not even on this list.
So I stand by my theory that this absurdly high percentage is mainly AOL users.
Anyone know what percentage of the ISP market AOL holds? That might be a pretty good proxy - if AOL has 32% of the ISP market and they have 32% of the web, then it's virtually all due to AOL.
Does it use NetPositive (Be's original web browser) or Opera?
I really loved NetPositive because it was so fast and opening new browser windows was very smooth, even when other sites were loading. Only OmniWeb for MacOS X matches that kind of performance (but of course OW has much more functionality).
Unfortunately, NetPositive supported a fairly ungenerous subset of HTML+JavaScript - it did fine on most HTML-only pages, but had pretty much no JS support worth mentioning.
I think they were going to go to Opera for eVilla, and I'd be curious to hear whether they did and what happened.
I'm not as annoyed by those at most people; it's a lot better than the pop OVER ads I've seen. All I need to do is close the silly thing.
For what it's worth, I saw it at Fry's. Picture quality is beyond awful - you'd might as well be watching random video noise for all the good it does you.
Someone reviewed it and noted that they didn't like it but their 8-year old kid loved being able to watch fuzzy, out of focus, noisy images and would stare at it for hours. So perhaps it's not entirely useless, but I fear it's hardly competition for my Canon XL1.
Their home automation products are plasticky but do work, although sadly the built-in light dimming, which I had high hopes for, was not very effective. But for controlling hard to reach light fixtures, it's realistically hard to beat. From what I understand, the products that do it right (non-plasticky quality, nice dimming, etc) cost thousands of dollars.
Has anyone actually used this thing? I saw it at Fry's and it looked pretty slick. Seems to me that with modem-only internet access it simply wasn't flexible enough. I would have loved to try one just to check out BeIA, but that didn't seem worth blowing the money on.
I'm glad Palm bought Be before this happened. No doubt this explains the low price, since I'm sure Be knew what was going on.
Has anyone here actually used it? I'd be curious to hear more about it from an actual user.
Exactly my point. I'll bet the bulk of that AOL traffic is from AOL users, with sites like Netscape and CNN making maybe 5% of the web proper. That's not so bad.
What on earth does AOL/Time Warner do that's 32% of the Internet? I visit CNN occasionally, but as far as I know that's about it for me and AOL/TW.
I suppose AOL users spend quite a bit of time at AOL/TW sites, and since they represent such a large percentage of Internet users, that skews the figures. But that's hardly fair to the rest of the net, since AOL itself is dedicated to giving people an experience that sticks with their services.
If you consider the argument that AOL users are AOL users first and Internet users second, the picture starts looking a lot less bleak, with Microsoft at 7.5% and Yahoo at 7.2%. The fourth company must have such pathetic market share they don't even tell us who it is! But we can tell - the total is 50.4%, so subtracting out AOL, MS and Yahoo we get a titanic 3.4% for number four, whoever it is.
This hardly strikes me as a good case for massive concentration, and certainly it doesn't show how Slashdotters use the net. It is true that I explore new sites just for the fun of it a great deal less than I did before, and I concentrate on specific sites I already know. But every query I type into a search engine exposes me to new places, and Slashdot does the same, and some of those will wind up in my mental list of cool sites to visit.
So the situation is not so bleak. The fellow who wrote this, however well-intentioned, has blinders on. He starts with the idea that anything controlled by private business is bad, and inevitably comes up with the same conclusions writers on the left always do.
He forgets about millions of personal home pages, including my own, whose owners develop an expertise on various issues they are happy to share. He forgets about community sites such as Slashdot, where people speak freely about what matters to them, and help evolve an uncontrolled consensus. The soul of the net is still alive and well.
Any mass medium develops a large variety of users. Some of those users are passive, others are active, as many of us are here. In the end, though, that's a choice made by each of us individually. And the mindless drones are drawn to heavily advertised sites, but that surely doesn't mean the sky is falling; if they weren't here, they'd probably be watching TV, which makes viewing any web site look like an intellectual exercise.
If you put a large number of people on a 10mbps network, I would think performance with X would degrade pretty fast, though - isn't X a pretty heavy traffic system?
I have to say that I like this guy's idea, even if I would probably buy new equipment to implement it.
As it is, in my company I've basically put virtually all our operations in a browser-based application running under Linux, so it doesn't matter what OS people use. Sadly, our IT department sticks with Windows, but there's no reason why they need to.
Well, other than a decent web browser, but that's another story. In all honesty, that seems like the biggest weakness; every time I've used Mozilla, I've retreated from it pretty fast.
D
Re:Microsoft's response...
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 2
For more just like this, check out this priceless classic:
Microsoft has brought spin "to a high art in
the software industry," says Peter Deegan,
editor of Woody's Office Watch, an online
newsletter for Microsoft users. "The MSN
email debacle reminded me immediately of
the story of how the old U.S.S.R. is supposed to
have announced the Chernobyl nuclear
accident to the world media." Ah, Peter, if
only.
Continuing to respond to users' desire
for clean, inexpensive power, the Soviet Union
has accelerated an upgrade of its historic
Chernobyl plant . ..
Tools such as LS, TAR, GZIP, and so on are not glamourous, but they are needed to create a functional Unix-style system.
At the time Linux was developed, there were no tools of this sort under a free license other than GNU's; BSD was still under a restrictive license and there was a great deal of confusion surrounding what could and couldn't be done with it.
The upshot is that it's fair to say that without GNU, there would have been no freely-available Linux.
So, should we acknowledge RMS's great contributions to the field of free software? Of course. Do we need to put GNU/ before Linux or give him control over programs he is not actively developing? I think not.
Raskin still says that he would rather run a Mac than Windows, however abysmal both of them are. So perhaps he's not quite as hostile to Apple as one might think.
I'm unabashedly pro-Apple. I've bought two Macs in the last year, one in anticipation of OSX (a G4 450 dual processor) and one because I needed a portable (the G4 Titanium/400). Both have performed superbly so far. Yes, X is a work in progress, but it's still the coolest Unix around, and we shouldn't forget this when we review its many shortcomings.
The Sony CLIE is awfully nice, though. I saw the high-resolution screen on the colour version and immediately fell in lust. It actually makes the screen pleasant to read instead of blotchy as in the older IIIc.
Too bad it doesn't have built-in Mac connectivity, although there is a $29.95 kit for that.
"You're a trained monkey. You too can run a web server! Just blow $1,000 on our systems and you're all set."
THe person who believed Microsoft when they said that is partially to blame, surely, but in the beginning it's Microsoft that has to take the hit for overpromising and underdelivering. If you promise a secure product anyone can use, well, you're on the hook if you don't supply one.
D
Re:Microsoft should be sued
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 2
As you must know, their own license agreement says they cannot be sued for their software, and that all you have really bought is a funny-looking silver coaster and a piece of paper or two.
This industry as a whole is a castle of sand with the tide rapidly coming in, but nobody cares to admit it.
I got Rhythms service through UUNET when Covad was unable to get a connection working for more than 24 consecutive hours without some kind of failure.
Rhythms has provided me with excellent service - so good as to be entirely invisible. I have a call in to UUNET to see where they can put me next; I'm scared to go with Covad again.
I may have to try a cable modem, but I really like being able to run a server at home. Anyone got ideas?
About three weeks ago, I got one of those SGI Insider newsletters in my email, with an unbeatable offer for one of their 1600SW monitors. I really wanted an Apple Cinema Display, of course, but for $550 plus tax and shipping, it sure was tough to beat; they're still about $900 on eBay.
I placed my order straight away, and it still has not arrived. The reason? During this crisis period for the company, where everything is falling apart, they are apparently changing their sales systems to use the latest version of Oracle. During this transfer, their ordering system is entirely manual. They haven't lost my order (yet), but they did take many more orders than they had available machines for, and they claim to still be straightening out the mess.
I lost even more faith in SGI when I noticed their "configure your SGI system" web page was Windows-based. For shame, SGI!
Part of this is, of course, the kind of weird degradation that occurs at any big company. But I can't say I have any faith in the company that makes that kind of blunder. Changing your ordering systems to the extent that operations are severely impacted is just plain stupid; I've never managed a major business, but if I were, the minute I had problems of that severity, I'd go straight back to the old system and send developers of the new one back to the drawing board. Elementary, surely?
Oh, and even though I am surely a beneficiary of a great monitor deal because of this, they should have dumped all the monitors on eBay, ten or so at a time. They would have made, maybe $ 800 per monitor instead of $600. That's a pretty respectable chunk of change right there.
I don't think there's anyone in the Apple world who didn't know the new PowerMacs were coming at the expo; this is pretty much common knowledge, and most of us will plan our buying accordingly unless we really, really need a machine.
(I'm typing this on my new TiBook because I really, really needed a notebook over the next few weeks, even though I know that new TiBooks will almost certainly come in September. But I also have a friend who wants to buy this one when I replace it, so I've covered myself already. He won't buy anything unless it's A Deal, so he's easy prey for that kind of tactic).
The combination of an attractive GUI and the ability to run mainstream software with the internals of Unix have me convinced that the Mac's the only way to go nowadays.
As others have said, it's really not at all expensive compared to other laptops. Although he doesn't address the Titanium PowerBook, which I'm about to buy, I thought this was pretty interesting as a comparison between the Apple iBook and its rivals.
What would they be doing if they weren't weaving that rug?
Almost certainly something much worse.
You have to bear that in mind, too.
I'll bet you could make the same statements about Japan fifty-odd years ago when World War II was ending and there was little hope or demand for anything Japanese.
Now they make half our cars, and have a thriving, rich industrial society.
The point is that societies can climb out of the gutter, and the way to do it is generally through trade with richer nations. Yes, it's tough and painful. But it does work.
Sealing nations off from trade creates situations where the sealed-off drive a brand new car identical in every way to a 1950s Morris Minor. And, I might add, with all the environmental damage this implies; 1950s cars were notably devoid of decent fuel efficiency or emission controls.
I'm not saying a world with trade is perfect; heck, no world is. But I am saying it's a lot better than the alternatives.
The people who have access to the President and Congress have the most power in a Democracy. By a quite remarkable coincidence, those are the people with the most money.
There is a kernel of truth to what Berlusconi said. Democracy simply means that the people rule. By buying the products we want, from the countries we want them from, we are ruling; we are getting what we want. So I can have a German car. I can have a Taiwanese laptop computer. I can have American software. All these countries are the best at those things. I would not want an American car or Taiwanese software. Thanks to globalization, I can get the best of what's available from all countries, and I think that's just super.
The results of our Democracy in the traditional sense include a whole ton of badly run services. Many of these I don't want; many of them I will never use, but I'm still paying for them. And even if I never have kids and therefore don't use our schools, I am surely effected by their generally abysmal quality.
I've read a number of "Green" magazines, and they seem to imply a society where trade is heavily regulated and where we all regress to picking weeds and harvesting tomatoes to eke out a bare existance. No Apple PowerBook G4/500 for me; it's created out of materials harmful to the earth! No electricity, we can't stand smoky power plants! And, surely no car, I'd be considered evil to even suggest it!
I don't know about you, but I frankly don't want to live in that kind of world. If you agree, I think you should take a hard look at what you're supporting, because that's its logical end.
And if you claim this is not what you're after, then what is it you actually want? I've read a lot of this stuff, and I still don't have a clue as to what the positive goals of your movement are, unless they are to destroy technological society entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
This surprises me since BeOS itself on x86 was amazingly fast, and I would think you could put a surplus Pentium III (being given away in cereal boxes nowadays) and it would fly. My guess is that they must have cheaped out on the amount of memory they put in, which is pretty stupid considering how cheap 512MB modules are nowadays.
I did like the idea of the nice and large vertical Trinitron screen, though. That's probably what contributes to the weight. Maybe they would have been better off making the monitor into a consumer product instead of the system.
D
An impressive collection, but surely not more so than Yahoo or even (gasp) Microsoft. Comparable, perhaps, to what Disney owns, but Disney's not even on this list.
So I stand by my theory that this absurdly high percentage is mainly AOL users.
Anyone know what percentage of the ISP market AOL holds? That might be a pretty good proxy - if AOL has 32% of the ISP market and they have 32% of the web, then it's virtually all due to AOL.
D
Does it use NetPositive (Be's original web browser) or Opera?
I really loved NetPositive because it was so fast and opening new browser windows was very smooth, even when other sites were loading. Only OmniWeb for MacOS X matches that kind of performance (but of course OW has much more functionality).
Unfortunately, NetPositive supported a fairly ungenerous subset of HTML+JavaScript - it did fine on most HTML-only pages, but had pretty much no JS support worth mentioning.
I think they were going to go to Opera for eVilla, and I'd be curious to hear whether they did and what happened.
D
I'm not as annoyed by those at most people; it's a lot better than the pop OVER ads I've seen. All I need to do is close the silly thing.
For what it's worth, I saw it at Fry's. Picture quality is beyond awful - you'd might as well be watching random video noise for all the good it does you.
Someone reviewed it and noted that they didn't like it but their 8-year old kid loved being able to watch fuzzy, out of focus, noisy images and would stare at it for hours. So perhaps it's not entirely useless, but I fear it's hardly competition for my Canon XL1.
Their home automation products are plasticky but do work, although sadly the built-in light dimming, which I had high hopes for, was not very effective. But for controlling hard to reach light fixtures, it's realistically hard to beat. From what I understand, the products that do it right (non-plasticky quality, nice dimming, etc) cost thousands of dollars.
D
Has anyone actually used this thing? I saw it at Fry's and it looked pretty slick. Seems to me that with modem-only internet access it simply wasn't flexible enough. I would have loved to try one just to check out BeIA, but that didn't seem worth blowing the money on.
I'm glad Palm bought Be before this happened. No doubt this explains the low price, since I'm sure Be knew what was going on.
Has anyone here actually used it? I'd be curious to hear more about it from an actual user.
D
Exactly my point. I'll bet the bulk of that AOL traffic is from AOL users, with sites like Netscape and CNN making maybe 5% of the web proper. That's not so bad.
D
What on earth does AOL/Time Warner do that's 32% of the Internet? I visit CNN occasionally, but as far as I know that's about it for me and AOL/TW.
I suppose AOL users spend quite a bit of time at AOL/TW sites, and since they represent such a large percentage of Internet users, that skews the figures. But that's hardly fair to the rest of the net, since AOL itself is dedicated to giving people an experience that sticks with their services.
If you consider the argument that AOL users are AOL users first and Internet users second, the picture starts looking a lot less bleak, with Microsoft at 7.5% and Yahoo at 7.2%. The fourth company must have such pathetic market share they don't even tell us who it is! But we can tell - the total is 50.4%, so subtracting out AOL, MS and Yahoo we get a titanic 3.4% for number four, whoever it is.
This hardly strikes me as a good case for massive concentration, and certainly it doesn't show how Slashdotters use the net. It is true that I explore new sites just for the fun of it a great deal less than I did before, and I concentrate on specific sites I already know. But every query I type into a search engine exposes me to new places, and Slashdot does the same, and some of those will wind up in my mental list of cool sites to visit.
So the situation is not so bleak. The fellow who wrote this, however well-intentioned, has blinders on. He starts with the idea that anything controlled by private business is bad, and inevitably comes up with the same conclusions writers on the left always do.
He forgets about millions of personal home pages, including my own, whose owners develop an expertise on various issues they are happy to share. He forgets about community sites such as Slashdot, where people speak freely about what matters to them, and help evolve an uncontrolled consensus. The soul of the net is still alive and well.
Any mass medium develops a large variety of users. Some of those users are passive, others are active, as many of us are here. In the end, though, that's a choice made by each of us individually. And the mindless drones are drawn to heavily advertised sites, but that surely doesn't mean the sky is falling; if they weren't here, they'd probably be watching TV, which makes viewing any web site look like an intellectual exercise.
D
If you put a large number of people on a 10mbps network, I would think performance with X would degrade pretty fast, though - isn't X a pretty heavy traffic system?
I have to say that I like this guy's idea, even if I would probably buy new equipment to implement it.
As it is, in my company I've basically put virtually all our operations in a browser-based application running under Linux, so it doesn't matter what OS people use. Sadly, our IT department sticks with Windows, but there's no reason why they need to.
Well, other than a decent web browser, but that's another story. In all honesty, that seems like the biggest weakness; every time I've used Mozilla, I've retreated from it pretty fast.
D
A Bug by Any Other Name by James Gleick
My favourite part:
DSo I checked out Pacific Bell's website.
"DSL Not available in your area" it said.
I called them and it was available, and at a higher speed than I'd gotten from Rhythms (384k versus 144k iDSL from Rhythms).
So "don't give up until you at least call" is sound advice in the real world.
Hope that helps.
D
Tools such as LS, TAR, GZIP, and so on are not glamourous, but they are needed to create a functional Unix-style system.
At the time Linux was developed, there were no tools of this sort under a free license other than GNU's; BSD was still under a restrictive license and there was a great deal of confusion surrounding what could and couldn't be done with it.
The upshot is that it's fair to say that without GNU, there would have been no freely-available Linux.
So, should we acknowledge RMS's great contributions to the field of free software? Of course. Do we need to put GNU/ before Linux or give him control over programs he is not actively developing? I think not.
Hope that helps.
D
Raskin still says that he would rather run a Mac than Windows, however abysmal both of them are. So perhaps he's not quite as hostile to Apple as one might think.
I'm unabashedly pro-Apple. I've bought two Macs in the last year, one in anticipation of OSX (a G4 450 dual processor) and one because I needed a portable (the G4 Titanium/400). Both have performed superbly so far. Yes, X is a work in progress, but it's still the coolest Unix around, and we shouldn't forget this when we review its many shortcomings.
D
Isn't Gassee still a shareholder? A decent portion of that money is most likely coming to him.
D
The Sony CLIE is awfully nice, though. I saw the high-resolution screen on the colour version and immediately fell in lust. It actually makes the screen pleasant to read instead of blotchy as in the older IIIc.
Too bad it doesn't have built-in Mac connectivity, although there is a $29.95 kit for that.
D
How did JLG do developers wrong?
D
Microsoft marketing says:
"You're a trained monkey. You too can run a web server! Just blow $1,000 on our systems and you're all set."
THe person who believed Microsoft when they said that is partially to blame, surely, but in the beginning it's Microsoft that has to take the hit for overpromising and underdelivering. If you promise a secure product anyone can use, well, you're on the hook if you don't supply one.
D
As you must know, their own license agreement says they cannot be sued for their software, and that all you have really bought is a funny-looking silver coaster and a piece of paper or two.
This industry as a whole is a castle of sand with the tide rapidly coming in, but nobody cares to admit it.
D
I got Rhythms service through UUNET when Covad was unable to get a connection working for more than 24 consecutive hours without some kind of failure.
Rhythms has provided me with excellent service - so good as to be entirely invisible. I have a call in to UUNET to see where they can put me next; I'm scared to go with Covad again.
I may have to try a cable modem, but I really like being able to run a server at home. Anyone got ideas?
D
About three weeks ago, I got one of those SGI Insider newsletters in my email, with an unbeatable offer for one of their 1600SW monitors. I really wanted an Apple Cinema Display, of course, but for $550 plus tax and shipping, it sure was tough to beat; they're still about $900 on eBay.
I placed my order straight away, and it still has not arrived. The reason? During this crisis period for the company, where everything is falling apart, they are apparently changing their sales systems to use the latest version of Oracle. During this transfer, their ordering system is entirely manual. They haven't lost my order (yet), but they did take many more orders than they had available machines for, and they claim to still be straightening out the mess.
I lost even more faith in SGI when I noticed their "configure your SGI system" web page was Windows-based. For shame, SGI!
Part of this is, of course, the kind of weird degradation that occurs at any big company. But I can't say I have any faith in the company that makes that kind of blunder. Changing your ordering systems to the extent that operations are severely impacted is just plain stupid; I've never managed a major business, but if I were, the minute I had problems of that severity, I'd go straight back to the old system and send developers of the new one back to the drawing board. Elementary, surely?
Oh, and even though I am surely a beneficiary of a great monitor deal because of this, they should have dumped all the monitors on eBay, ten or so at a time. They would have made, maybe $ 800 per monitor instead of $600. That's a pretty respectable chunk of change right there.
D
A new iMac did come, it just wasn't the revolution people were hoping for.
It was pretty clear that there would be no new iBook for a while, since it was just introduced and has been selling well.
I finally got my new Titanium G4, and I must say it's an awesome machine!
D
This is correct, but then they switched to Windows yet again, and apparently the new version has been working.
.NET in practice.
This one's a real black eye for them. The last couple of months don't look good for
D
I don't think there's anyone in the Apple world who didn't know the new PowerMacs were coming at the expo; this is pretty much common knowledge, and most of us will plan our buying accordingly unless we really, really need a machine.
(I'm typing this on my new TiBook because I really, really needed a notebook over the next few weeks, even though I know that new TiBooks will almost certainly come in September. But I also have a friend who wants to buy this one when I replace it, so I've covered myself already. He won't buy anything unless it's A Deal, so he's easy prey for that kind of tactic).
D
You don't have to be so defensive.
The combination of an attractive GUI and the ability to run mainstream software with the internals of Unix have me convinced that the Mac's the only way to go nowadays.
As others have said, it's really not at all expensive compared to other laptops. Although he doesn't address the Titanium PowerBook, which I'm about to buy, I thought this was pretty interesting as a comparison between the Apple iBook and its rivals.
D
What would they be doing if they weren't weaving that rug?
Almost certainly something much worse.
You have to bear that in mind, too.
I'll bet you could make the same statements about Japan fifty-odd years ago when World War II was ending and there was little hope or demand for anything Japanese.
Now they make half our cars, and have a thriving, rich industrial society.
The point is that societies can climb out of the gutter, and the way to do it is generally through trade with richer nations. Yes, it's tough and painful. But it does work.
Sealing nations off from trade creates situations where the sealed-off drive a brand new car identical in every way to a 1950s Morris Minor. And, I might add, with all the environmental damage this implies; 1950s cars were notably devoid of decent fuel efficiency or emission controls.
I'm not saying a world with trade is perfect; heck, no world is. But I am saying it's a lot better than the alternatives.
D
The people who have access to the President and Congress have the most power in a Democracy. By a quite remarkable coincidence, those are the people with the most money.
There is a kernel of truth to what Berlusconi said. Democracy simply means that the people rule. By buying the products we want, from the countries we want them from, we are ruling; we are getting what we want. So I can have a German car. I can have a Taiwanese laptop computer. I can have American software. All these countries are the best at those things. I would not want an American car or Taiwanese software. Thanks to globalization, I can get the best of what's available from all countries, and I think that's just super.
The results of our Democracy in the traditional sense include a whole ton of badly run services. Many of these I don't want; many of them I will never use, but I'm still paying for them. And even if I never have kids and therefore don't use our schools, I am surely effected by their generally abysmal quality.
I've read a number of "Green" magazines, and they seem to imply a society where trade is heavily regulated and where we all regress to picking weeds and harvesting tomatoes to eke out a bare existance. No Apple PowerBook G4/500 for me; it's created out of materials harmful to the earth! No electricity, we can't stand smoky power plants! And, surely no car, I'd be considered evil to even suggest it!
I don't know about you, but I frankly don't want to live in that kind of world. If you agree, I think you should take a hard look at what you're supporting, because that's its logical end.
And if you claim this is not what you're after, then what is it you actually want? I've read a lot of this stuff, and I still don't have a clue as to what the positive goals of your movement are, unless they are to destroy technological society entirely.
D