Wow, only $500?
That *is* informative. But I'm not so sure about buying hardware online. I had a couple incidents in the past month. Plus I'd have to buy a good USB mouse if I really want 3 button functionality on X
Maybe a slashcode poll or something. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the idea, macdaddy. I think it would be the best use of the/. poll we've had in a while. I can see it now:
Best features in SlashCode 2.0:
1) Remove Karma Cap
2) Nuke this troll account! [Mod option]
3) < goatsex > tag so we don't have to type the HREF and HTTP:// 4) COWBOYNEAL
I'm considering buying a used Mac so as to be able to run OSX, or Linux PPC though.
I think it's going to be difficult for you to test OS 10. I know that macs are a bit on the expensive side (~$1200,) and that the OS, unlike Linux, is expensive too: $129 the last time I looked. So with all the overhead and compounding it with having to find stuff that *run* on both or compile it yourself, it's hard for even seasoned Unix / Linux users running a cheap box to get a secondary box just to look at what Apple is doing with Darwin nowadays.
I bought a computer in the fall of 1998 that can't run 10 without some serious upgrades. I already have 64Mb ram but must double my ram again if I really want any flavor of *X in it. So I don't want Unix or OS 10, and will be well off reading about it. At least until I am forced to buy a new computer. So if you're planning to buy a used Macintosh, be sure it's no more than 1 year old. You'll be pleased.
I work on a college campus that has to deal with both PCs and Macs, and throughout the versions of Office that claim some or pretty good compatibility with earlier ones or even just across platforms, it seems like it's just specs. Nothing substantial accomplished in the real world because all the features offered to make users upgrade are implemented differently by the different developing teams that Microsoft has for their supported platforms. And I thought [internal] code-sharing was supposed to be Microsoft's key to success. But check out programs like Explorer 5 for macs and see what's been left out.
Back to the topic, students still come up to me at the helpdesk to print their papers when the PC side of the lab gets filled, even though the iMacs are unused and have a *newer* version of Office (98). Reason? "My fonts look different" or "It won't fit in the 5 page limit if you convert it" or "Hmm... but won't the mac version mess up my footnotes?"
Apparently, people aren't willing to even sit down to learn what *should* be the same program even if it means waiting on a queue while a compatible version is available. Will this same thing happen with XP and the upcoming version for the MacOS / OS X? Gee, didn't they just release office 2001? I think When an office suite is updated every year you have little chance to make good ports.
It am starting to fall behind in the # of versions we support (some people never upgrade and the college can't force them to or put Office on a server since the software isn't free).
Sorry about the incoherence you may find. It's almost 6 AM and I haven't slept because WHquestion is dying in 6 hours:'(
Scheme is actually seeen as a screening class since everyone who thinks of taking CS has to do it as 101. I dont know but I think that teaching them something as hard as scheme gets them discouraged and they end up taking Econ or Math.
I admire Lisp for its advances as a symbolic manipulation of concepts while encapsulating all the object typing. I, however, have to say that many computer science majors have renounced CS in my small liberal arts college because they didn't find lisp useful or easy to grasp.
I hope not to sound off topic since Zach's post can branch into what I wanna say.
The intro level Lisp doesn't seem as encouraging in terms of opening people's minds to functions. I have recommended the CS department to teach C++ as intro and *then* Lisp. I find that higher level languages are better for learning CS than languages *based* on recursion and non-obvious return types in higher level functions --which students don't see in their highschool. All they know is how to match parenthesis for math, but they never see 8 parenthesis in a row, I bet:)
A function that takes another function seems to me like a disastrous thing to teach a 101 student who has *never* taken CS till the college level but has some hopes as a prospective major. In C++ class, higher level functions make more sense, and does the whole paradigm of programming to the intro student. List should be a powerful language used once you have a grasp of basic data structure concepts and program design.
Damn, the 3 computers I set up for my relatives on Christmas break had Dellnet. It's going to be hard changing the Outlook settings, let alone explaining all that to my older aunt and younger cousins. I'm not looking forward to the end of this semester then.
I switched from AOL to MSN in a rebate deal buying a computer almost 2 years ago. The MSN service has been decent, and quite frankly, it has its benefits.
You're not tied to a Proprietary software connection as intrusive as AOL's software (read all the "if you have AOL or WEBTV, click here for your page") and you can finally use Internet Explorer's most recent edition to browse, plus something AOL won't offer: POP3 mail. The automation brought by outlook or your own choice of mail client is noticeable, though getting a virus through Outlook is easier than through AOL's HTML implementation of email.
The connections are stable but I was outraged to find only 2 lines for all of us 7 million users in New York City. They added about 5 more in December but I'm still a little worried about people from small towns getting local lines.
Like AOL, MSN uses a proprietary dialer, so my windows scripting functionality is a little struck. I don't know why you can't just use the system dialer but must monitor the user's every move and send in ads and things through proprietary and unbreakable programs. But almost every company big enough for me to have heard of it in the NorthEast has more and more of the qualities of MSN and AOL. So the choices aren't any better. I'd just wish MSN didn't charge the same rate as AOL since I get a few more busy lines with them.
PS: For the love of God, don't use the new MSN explorer! There's a reason why MSN version number jumped from v2.6 to v6.0 in the blink of an eye, and some of the features MSN used to have are killed. Grab your old MSN 2 CD and install that to use my features. You probably won't know anyone on your block with MSN anyway, so you don't need MSN's IM program or other time killers that [young] people have grown used to.
I hope this is helpful. If you don't currently have a large ISP, then a lot of what I said about MSN you might already be enjoying.
I both senses of the word! Suppose that it doesn't have an OS and hardware can control the craft with 29 year uptime... there's still the problem of collisions with objects going at 20K mph or the risk of falling into an unknown planet.
I still get the feeling that nasa shouldn't be that far ahead of us in technology to have planed such a clean launch and trajectory when chaos theory says a dust spec could drastically modify the path in the long run.
Dust, gravity and heat could affect Pioneer's path. Compound that trajectory deviation 29 years and it should land millions of miles away from its destination ( Unless space is mostly void and gravity less) Granted, the craft has no specific destination but I'd think something would have crossed its path by now.
Pretty clever, I haven't seen enough of OOG's posts to notice that he knows HTML. Does that qualify him as a l33t hax0r? Come on, what else would you be able to do with pedal CPU?:)
That was hilarious. This is a little offtopic, but do our mice and screens allow us to see that far *before* you zoom in? I might end up in the wrong orifice if I clicked too soon!
:)
Hmmm, B&W fix! B&W Creatures forum (There was an AI discussion on yesterday's archives)
Has a very interesting phenomenon going on: Some of the clubs that are in it are supposedly going to be shut down because of their content, not for child pornography, but the legal kind of pr0n. The interesting part is that the Sex and Romance section has deleted the links to their picture exchange sites, and the club search tool seems to be under heavy renovation while Yahoo seems to be preparing their servers for (??). Actually, you can't search for clubs at all unless you use the indexed links, so deleting those links has presumably kept new users from entering p0rn clubs because they can't *find* them.
Looks like the guys at Yahoo were thinking of slashing back the *free* Yahoo pr0n to promote their for-pay material.
This may seem a rant, but it's just sad that I have to deal with some things as a student and as a worker because of upgrade sprees.
There's actually lots of new hardware, but it's based on the same old compatibility with our old ports. If you think about it, whenever you buy your hardware there are disks that promise to do the install. The windows OS, although it claims to recognize Plug-and-Play, needs those installation disks.
The problem comes when your new hardware would need new ports, not SCSI, not USB, not parallel or ADB. Say, a PC's handling of Firewire. Then you would need an OS to provide the new system calls and hardware address resolutions and all the BIOS related things that your new hardware's drivers would rather not deal with.
That would be a reason to upgrade.
The sad thing is that even though the harware market doesn't get something like Firewire out every 12 months, our Operating Systems makers *must* change it every 12 months. The OS should actually have the bugs for the current hardware and software hammered out until enough new hardware did come.
So I personally don't find the need for my college campus's helpdesk job to have to support 3 flavors of windows that came out with pretty much the same hardware realm in mind. Windows 98 should be fine, but I realize that after windows 98 came out, MS has got its act together: They ship a new version of Windows every year, and now we are struggling to keep up. We will have to support windows 2000, windows ME and *gasp* windows XP.
I should mention my campus is an oficially a Macintosh campus. So we will have to support OS 10 as well... And all its little problems to be bloated enough and yet fail to support any optical CD technology. Thanks for all the eye candy, Apple, thanks for the likely to be bloated eye candy, XP! All I need is DVD support and actually Firewire compatibility, which they won't provide (for now)
Have you ever looked at how much RAM you needed to run System 7? It was about 2MB. I remember a laptop made around '92 or '94 where a RAM disk could be made big enough to dump your system folder and word processor, so you could work on a document for 7 hours of diskswap-less glory. That feature of the MacOs, will be missed, though:
Then came OS 8, and the amounts of RAM have raised... 10 MB, 15MB, OS 9: 24MB... Just for the system! Try running something like Unreal Tournament on OS X, and you'll need nearly 256MB --128 for the OS and a little more for the game.
God, I don't know where the mainstream OS industry is heading. The article mentioned that Win2000 should run on nearly 200Mhz, but my college campus has it on DELLs with 500Mhz pentiums that are as irresponsive as a Nintendo 64 emulator running without a 3D card.
Somehow I refuse believe the recommended specs. Windows won't willingly say how much RAM programs take, -- START \ RUN \ mem always says all my RAM belongs to the system. Ok, I know sysmonitor may tell you about RAM, but I don't trust its figures either: Try and start windows 98, which should run fine on 16MBs of RAM, with virtual memory off. I've had to troubleshoot computers that won't load any DLLs because the kernel takes the whole RAM and as soon as the desktop starts, you get errors for every DLL and VXD possible because 32MB != enough once people turn off VM.
In fact, here's something to think about:
Since when have we been able to run a system WITHOUT disk swapping? I told a friend taking an OS class the other day that OSs are guilty for our wait problems because they have made Hard Drives a requirement for an ideally optional feature. Old literature for Dos used to say: "First, insert your system floppy into the drive bay. Now, push the ON button." There were no hard drives and therefore, no disk swapping. And now you have swapping, 100% necessary DLLs instead of the dos system EXEs, and god knows how many unnecessary things get loaded at every startup.
A friend of mine said: Well, "what if a computer scientist like you built a system based on AI [so that] programs were 10k? [of plain-text human speech] The system would be huge, right?"
(It would need billions of library commands and much "knowledge", and it would need to compile the 10k on demand.)
I think AI will be the next killer app. If it were only true that we are closer to figuring it out, though... At least Clippy will be an unsupported feature in the next version of Windows.
This made me wonder what could happen if somehow the micros~1 breakup and new trends in the market or some massive tragedy brings Microsoft to its knees. I believe that it should not be that difficult to bring software back from the dead if the company 1) is not as small as a normal startup 2) is not as large as MS or AOL
The issue is that, assuming that they have an ungodly long list of software, like MS does nowadays (just look up their support services / bug report webpage) Then it would be hell to determine how many people were working on a specific project, what was their main project and the side projects (game development, windows code and maybe a small part of an application here and there) Where would the source for things like game animations, clipart, wizards, DLLs... be stored and what is MS's policy for keeping things organized? Actually, since it is such a closed source company, it would be even harder to know how to put the millions of lines of code together for the bulk of its multiple OS's.
I can't see the world without Windows or DOS, specially 3rd world countries that contribute close to 0 in software bulk... let alone whole operating systems. (Heck, when was the last time we saw something that was known to have started outside the US besides those pesky email viruses?) If MS fell apart, like is reasonable with anything powered by programmers, then the application software bulk would continue to grow at a slower pace while a few companies slowly switched to the alternative operating systems to garantee their own stay in the Apps / System support Utilities market. Then a new empire would eventually emerge from the prevalent OS and perhaps bring new twists to the annoying historical facts we're bound to repeat in a future without MS.
</Thinking cap >
Sigh. I believe we deserve a brighter future than this. Can any OS garantee that our processors will have fresh code to run forever, or do we have to start hardwiring OS's to make sure those won't expire as well?
A couple months ago, I would just have said "hmph, he's bluffing!"
After DeCSS, I realize that if 7 obscure lines of code can stand for all the random looking strings and C++ string handling routines, then Perl is the way to go for text[/signal?] processing.
I wonder if learning Perl could help my language theory professor to implement a revolutionary Natural Language Processing compiler in her lifetime.
where you visit someone with a mac and wait till they leave the room.
Then, grab a copy of the Shutdown program and drop it inside their Startup folder.
In our local case: If it's legally hard for people to enter the US to become a citizen, having to wait 5 - 10 years after you are claimed by a relative who's a citizen... then becoming a citizen or resident for someone without any credentials would be controversial to those who have some.
Elsewhere: If an alien gets a passport to travel around the world because he's just a new species and could bring new insight to our own worldview, then people will think of a new racism and complain that their contries don't give them passports that easily.
Imagine the issues of allowing an extraterrestial to work in a company or college where normal earthlings need a lifetime of experience to even consider the job. Then, again, SCI FI has shown how easily and comfortably humans live among aliens. Take Star Trek, Earth: Final Conflict (umm, maybe not...), Outer limits and many of those space fictions.
Let's hope the earth won't give them too many "unfair" priviledges that might spark a controversy on views on discrimination and 'racism.'
I think that this is the only way to go. Nothing electronic ever changed as much as the internet has. Look at telephones, tv boxes, radio, car tecnology. It's time to give the internet a rest and optimize the whole www so that it will load faster:)
Remember when *someone* said 640K was more than enough RAM? Then modern GUI's came out and butchered that limit. In terms of processing power, we've seen that you need a pretty fast processor to run Win2000 or OS X.
Just imagine.
If we introduce true Artificial Intelligence after a major discovery worthy of the 21st century, then our "noticeable" processing increments will be crappy because there will be tons of things for our modern Turing Machine design to take care of.
So the more power we get, the more we'll spend. A 10Ghz processors might perform like our old 33Mhz did when we ran had, say, Windows 3 back in the dark ages. I hope that won't be the case and that computers catch up to the human brain's power some day.
Is there any research on how much all-nighters and cramming affect your for life after repeating them for 4 years in college? I must admit it is pretty crazy and you will never mistreat your body like that, unless, of course, your do computer science.
No one's ever heard of senior citizens who are hackers or programmers, right?
You point on the Gundam Wing dub is well taken: I loved the vivid clarity with which pilots, scientists, and high-ranking directors communicate. You never get lost in the technical mumbo-jumbo because it is painstakingly translated into english. Just watch one of the scientists describing gundam parts and compare to the Pioneer dub of Tenchi. When Washu explains her gadgets, you won't like how technical terms are dumbed down to really really simple terms. I mean, Tenchi is on right after Gundam W., so the audience should be able to understand the complexity needed to make, um, nerds look cool. I think dubbing vocabulary should look more like Gundam Wing's.
DBZ made me ache too...
Gosh, you should see this site:
to see the edits and pictures showing what, how and why it was edited out. The dialog is completely butchered in a some of the episodes: It took Funimation till the middle of the Frieza saga to use the concept of "death" clearly. Before that, this was a common line: "I'll blast you... TO ANOTHER DIMENSION!" . They changed HELL to HFIL on some character's t-shirts who managed hell. Funimation also avoids any kind of reference to the word "revive" other than "he's back!" [from the dead!] I wonder whether the future sagas will continue to be edited less and less as time progresses. It costs a lot to edit something because of the amount of frames and work required to be discrete removing blod, tears. They even painting towels over some 200 frames (a few seconds) of Goku's butt once.
DBZ uncensored seems very complete up to almost the end of the frieza saga. It pains me to see that some things SHOULD stay censored, according to the logic I see from Cartoon Network: It is watched by a lot of kids, and it's their parents who pay for cable, so parents are the ones who will demand the editing/censoring. There's a whole lot of interest from Funimation into getting the more mature audience to buy the DVDs to quench the itch get the "uncensored" version. I guess TV can't give you all. But I wish there was an optional anime channel in my area.
Actually, I watched Candy Candy in the Caribbean. Does anyone have any web link or info on this show? I watched the spanish dub when I was young and I thought it never made it to the US.
Sorry if I deviate a little from this thread, but
I believe that there are a lot more companies out there dubbing anime to English audiences than the Mexican and Venezuelan dubbing companies. If you grew up outside the US, you'll know the entire set of voices for 80's american cartoons, american movies and anime right away. In the US, there are lots of companies in charge of English dubs, and you only need to dub japanese animation nowadays.
The guy dubbing Goku's voice for the spanish version of DBZ from Intertrack was the same one who did McGiver's. I loved the coincidence. But for some reason the female voice dubs tend to be slightly upsetting.
Just my two bits to show that Latin America too feels the japanese animation highs and lows. Please don't moderate this. I don't intend to complain... I miss the 80's too!
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, only $500?
:)
That *is* informative. But I'm not so sure about buying hardware online. I had a couple incidents in the past month. Plus I'd have to buy a good USB mouse if I really want 3 button functionality on X
But I'll check eBay just in case...
Thanks for the idea, macdaddy. I think it would be the best use of the
It reminds me of some AC who was trolling with the ASCII version of goatsex.
Ugh. *Shivers*
But what if this tag EMBEDS a picture to the post?
I'm considering buying a used Mac so as to be able to run OSX, or Linux PPC though.
I think it's going to be difficult for you to test OS 10. I know that macs are a bit on the expensive side (~$1200,) and that the OS, unlike Linux, is expensive too: $129 the last time I looked. So with all the overhead and compounding it with having to find stuff that *run* on both or compile it yourself, it's hard for even seasoned Unix / Linux users running a cheap box to get a secondary box just to look at what Apple is doing with Darwin nowadays.
I bought a computer in the fall of 1998 that can't run 10 without some serious upgrades. I already have 64Mb ram but must double my ram again if I really want any flavor of *X in it. So I don't want Unix or OS 10, and will be well off reading about it. At least until I am forced to buy a new computer. So if you're planning to buy a used Macintosh, be sure it's no more than 1 year old. You'll be pleased.
My $.02
I work on a college campus that has to deal with both PCs and Macs, and throughout the versions of Office that claim some or pretty good compatibility with earlier ones or even just across platforms, it seems like it's just specs. Nothing substantial accomplished in the real world because all the features offered to make users upgrade are implemented differently by the different developing teams that Microsoft has for their supported platforms. And I thought [internal] code-sharing was supposed to be Microsoft's key to success. But check out programs like Explorer 5 for macs and see what's been left out.
... but won't the mac version mess up my footnotes?"
:'(
Back to the topic, students still come up to me at the helpdesk to print their papers when the PC side of the lab gets filled, even though the iMacs are unused and have a *newer* version of Office (98). Reason? "My fonts look different" or "It won't fit in the 5 page limit if you convert it" or "Hmm
Apparently, people aren't willing to even sit down to learn what *should* be the same program even if it means waiting on a queue while a compatible version is available. Will this same thing happen with XP and the upcoming version for the MacOS / OS X? Gee, didn't they just release office 2001? I think When an office suite is updated every year you have little chance to make good ports.
It am starting to fall behind in the # of versions we support (some people never upgrade and the college can't force them to or put Office on a server since the software isn't free).
Sorry about the incoherence you may find. It's almost 6 AM and I haven't slept because WHquestion is dying in 6 hours
Scheme is actually seeen as a screening class since everyone who thinks of taking CS has to do it as 101. I dont know but I think that teaching them something as hard as scheme gets them discouraged and they end up taking Econ or Math.
Fractal
I admire Lisp for its advances as a symbolic manipulation of concepts while encapsulating all the object typing. I, however, have to say that many computer science majors have renounced CS in my small liberal arts college because they didn't find lisp useful or easy to grasp.
I hope not to sound off topic since Zach's post can branch into what I wanna say.
The intro level Lisp doesn't seem as encouraging in terms of opening people's minds to functions. I have recommended the CS department to teach C++ as intro and *then* Lisp. I find that higher level languages are better for learning CS than languages *based* on recursion and non-obvious return types in higher level functions --which students don't see in their highschool. All they know is how to match parenthesis for math, but they never see 8 parenthesis in a row, I bet
A function that takes another function seems to me like a disastrous thing to teach a 101 student who has *never* taken CS till the college level but has some hopes as a prospective major. In C++ class, higher level functions make more sense, and does the whole paradigm of programming to the intro student. List should be a powerful language used once you have a grasp of basic data structure concepts and program design.
Damn, the 3 computers I set up for my relatives on Christmas break had Dellnet. It's going to be hard changing the Outlook settings, let alone explaining all that to my older aunt and younger cousins. I'm not looking forward to the end of this semester then.
I switched from AOL to MSN in a rebate deal buying a computer almost 2 years ago. The MSN service has been decent, and quite frankly, it has its benefits.
You're not tied to a Proprietary software connection as intrusive as AOL's software (read all the "if you have AOL or WEBTV, click here for your page") and you can finally use Internet Explorer's most recent edition to browse, plus something AOL won't offer: POP3 mail. The automation brought by outlook or your own choice of mail client is noticeable, though getting a virus through Outlook is easier than through AOL's HTML implementation of email.
The connections are stable but I was outraged to find only 2 lines for all of us 7 million users in New York City. They added about 5 more in December but I'm still a little worried about people from small towns getting local lines.
Like AOL, MSN uses a proprietary dialer, so my windows scripting functionality is a little struck. I don't know why you can't just use the system dialer but must monitor the user's every move and send in ads and things through proprietary and unbreakable programs. But almost every company big enough for me to have heard of it in the NorthEast has more and more of the qualities of MSN and AOL. So the choices aren't any better. I'd just wish MSN didn't charge the same rate as AOL since I get a few more busy lines with them.
PS: For the love of God, don't use the new MSN explorer! There's a reason why MSN version number jumped from v2.6 to v6.0 in the blink of an eye, and some of the features MSN used to have are killed. Grab your old MSN 2 CD and install that to use my features. You probably won't know anyone on your block with MSN anyway, so you don't need MSN's IM program or other time killers that [young] people have grown used to.
I hope this is helpful. If you don't currently have a large ISP, then a lot of what I said about MSN you might already be enjoying.
I both senses of the word! Suppose that it doesn't have an OS and hardware can control the craft with 29 year uptime ... there's still the problem of collisions with objects going at 20K mph or the risk of falling into an unknown planet.
I still get the feeling that nasa shouldn't be that far ahead of us in technology to have planed such a clean launch and trajectory when chaos theory says a dust spec could drastically modify the path in the long run.
Dust, gravity and heat could affect Pioneer's path. Compound that trajectory deviation 29 years and it should land millions of miles away from its destination ( Unless space is mostly void and gravity less) Granted, the craft has no specific destination but I'd think something would have crossed its path by now.
Pretty clever, I haven't seen enough of OOG's posts to notice that he knows HTML. Does that qualify him as a l33t hax0r? Come on, what else would you be able to do with pedal CPU? :)
That was hilarious. This is a little offtopic, but do our mice and screens allow us to see that far *before* you zoom in? I might end up in the wrong orifice if I clicked too soon!
:)
Hmmm, B&W fix!
B&W Creatures forum (There was an AI discussion on yesterday's archives)
http://clubs.yahoo.com
Has a very interesting phenomenon going on: Some of the clubs that are in it are supposedly going to be shut down because of their content, not for child pornography, but the legal kind of pr0n. The interesting part is that the Sex and Romance section has deleted the links to their picture exchange sites, and the club search tool seems to be under heavy renovation while Yahoo seems to be preparing their servers for (??). Actually, you can't search for clubs at all unless you use the indexed links, so deleting those links has presumably kept new users from entering p0rn clubs because they can't *find* them.
Looks like the guys at Yahoo were thinking of slashing back the *free* Yahoo pr0n to promote their for-pay material.
This may seem a rant, but it's just sad that I have to deal with some things as a student and as a worker because of upgrade sprees.
There's actually lots of new hardware, but it's based on the same old compatibility with our old ports. If you think about it, whenever you buy your hardware there are disks that promise to do the install. The windows OS, although it claims to recognize Plug-and-Play, needs those installation disks.
The problem comes when your new hardware would need new ports, not SCSI, not USB, not parallel or ADB. Say, a PC's handling of Firewire. Then you would need an OS to provide the new system calls and hardware address resolutions and all the BIOS related things that your new hardware's drivers would rather not deal with.
That would be a reason to upgrade.
The sad thing is that even though the harware market doesn't get something like Firewire out every 12 months, our Operating Systems makers *must* change it every 12 months. The OS should actually have the bugs for the current hardware and software hammered out until enough new hardware did come.
So I personally don't find the need for my college campus's helpdesk job to have to support 3 flavors of windows that came out with pretty much the same hardware realm in mind. Windows 98 should be fine, but I realize that after windows 98 came out, MS has got its act together: They ship a new version of Windows every year, and now we are struggling to keep up. We will have to support windows 2000, windows ME and *gasp* windows XP.
I should mention my campus is an oficially a Macintosh campus. So we will have to support OS 10 as well... And all its little problems to be bloated enough and yet fail to support any optical CD technology. Thanks for all the eye candy, Apple, thanks for the likely to be bloated eye candy, XP! All I need is DVD support and actually Firewire compatibility, which they won't provide (for now)
Have you ever looked at how much RAM you needed to run System 7? It was about 2MB. I remember a laptop made around '92 or '94 where a RAM disk could be made big enough to dump your system folder and word processor, so you could work on a document for 7 hours of diskswap-less glory. That feature of the MacOs, will be missed, though:
Then came OS 8, and the amounts of RAM have raised... 10 MB, 15MB, OS 9: 24MB... Just for the system! Try running something like Unreal Tournament on OS X, and you'll need nearly 256MB --128 for the OS and a little more for the game.
God, I don't know where the mainstream OS industry is heading. The article mentioned that Win2000 should run on nearly 200Mhz, but my college campus has it on DELLs with 500Mhz pentiums that are as irresponsive as a Nintendo 64 emulator running without a 3D card.
Somehow I refuse believe the recommended specs. Windows won't willingly say how much RAM programs take, -- START \ RUN \ mem always says all my RAM belongs to the system. Ok, I know sysmonitor may tell you about RAM, but I don't trust its figures either: Try and start windows 98, which should run fine on 16MBs of RAM, with virtual memory off. I've had to troubleshoot computers that won't load any DLLs because the kernel takes the whole RAM and as soon as the desktop starts, you get errors for every DLL and VXD possible because 32MB != enough once people turn off VM.
In fact, here's something to think about:
Since when have we been able to run a system WITHOUT disk swapping? I told a friend taking an OS class the other day that OSs are guilty for our wait problems because they have made Hard Drives a requirement for an ideally optional feature. Old literature for Dos used to say: "First, insert your system floppy into the drive bay. Now, push the ON button." There were no hard drives and therefore, no disk swapping. And now you have swapping, 100% necessary DLLs instead of the dos system EXEs, and god knows how many unnecessary things get loaded at every startup.
A friend of mine said: Well, "what if a computer scientist like you built a system based on AI [so that] programs were 10k? [of plain-text human speech] The system would be huge, right?"
(It would need billions of library commands and much "knowledge", and it would need to compile the 10k on demand.)
I think AI will be the next killer app. If it were only true that we are closer to figuring it out, though... At least Clippy will be an unsupported feature in the next version of Windows.
The issue is that, assuming that they have an ungodly long list of software, like MS does nowadays (just look up their support services / bug report webpage) Then it would be hell to determine how many people were working on a specific project, what was their main project and the side projects (game development, windows code and maybe a small part of an application here and there) Where would the source for things like game animations, clipart, wizards, DLLs... be stored and what is MS's policy for keeping things organized? Actually, since it is such a closed source company, it would be even harder to know how to put the millions of lines of code together for the bulk of its multiple OS's.
I can't see the world without Windows or DOS, specially 3rd world countries that contribute close to 0 in software bulk... let alone whole operating systems. (Heck, when was the last time we saw something that was known to have started outside the US besides those pesky email viruses?) If MS fell apart, like is reasonable with anything powered by programmers, then the application software bulk would continue to grow at a slower pace while a few companies slowly switched to the alternative operating systems to garantee their own stay in the Apps / System support Utilities market. Then a new empire would eventually emerge from the prevalent OS and perhaps bring new twists to the annoying historical facts we're bound to repeat in a future without MS.
</Thinking cap >
Sigh. I believe we deserve a brighter future than this. Can any OS garantee that our processors will have fresh code to run forever, or do we have to start hardwiring OS's to make sure those won't expire as well?
A couple months ago, I would just have said "hmph, he's bluffing!"
After DeCSS, I realize that if 7 obscure lines of code can stand for all the random looking strings and C++ string handling routines, then Perl is the way to go for text[/signal?] processing.
I wonder if learning Perl could help my language theory professor to implement a revolutionary Natural Language Processing compiler in her lifetime.
where you visit someone with a mac and wait till they leave the room. Then, grab a copy of the Shutdown program and drop it inside their Startup folder.
Like
Assimilating a human for lunch behind closed doors
vs. Humans eating in public?
Religion? Sexual practices? Speech vs. Telepathy, etc.
What others can you think of?
Elsewhere: If an alien gets a passport to travel around the world because he's just a new species and could bring new insight to our own worldview, then people will think of a new racism and complain that their contries don't give them passports that easily.
Imagine the issues of allowing an extraterrestial to work in a company or college where normal earthlings need a lifetime of experience to even consider the job. Then, again, SCI FI has shown how easily and comfortably humans live among aliens. Take Star Trek, Earth: Final Conflict (umm, maybe not...), Outer limits and many of those space fictions.
Let's hope the earth won't give them too many "unfair" priviledges that might spark a controversy on views on discrimination and 'racism.'
I think that this is the only way to go. Nothing electronic ever changed as much as the internet has. Look at telephones, tv boxes, radio, car tecnology. It's time to give the internet a rest and optimize the whole www so that it will load faster :)
Just imagine. If we introduce true Artificial Intelligence after a major discovery worthy of the 21st century, then our "noticeable" processing increments will be crappy because there will be tons of things for our modern Turing Machine design to take care of.
So the more power we get, the more we'll spend. A 10Ghz processors might perform like our old 33Mhz did when we ran had, say, Windows 3 back in the dark ages. I hope that won't be the case and that computers catch up to the human brain's power some day.
No one's ever heard of senior citizens who are hackers or programmers, right?
You point on the Gundam Wing dub is well taken: I loved the vivid clarity with which pilots, scientists, and high-ranking directors communicate. You never get lost in the technical mumbo-jumbo because it is painstakingly translated into english. Just watch one of the scientists describing gundam parts and compare to the Pioneer dub of Tenchi. When Washu explains her gadgets, you won't like how technical terms are dumbed down to really really simple terms. I mean, Tenchi is on right after Gundam W., so the audience should be able to understand the complexity needed to make, um, nerds look cool. I think dubbing vocabulary should look more like Gundam Wing's.
DBZ made me ache too...
Gosh, you should see this site:
http://dbzuncensored.terrashare.com/
or have a quick jump to
http://dbzuncensored.terrashare.com/series/gallery .html
to see the edits and pictures showing what, how and why it was edited out. The dialog is completely butchered in a some of the episodes: It took Funimation till the middle of the Frieza saga to use the concept of "death" clearly. Before that, this was a common line: "I'll blast you ... TO ANOTHER DIMENSION!" . They changed HELL to HFIL on some character's t-shirts who managed hell. Funimation also avoids any kind of reference to the word "revive" other than "he's back!" [from the dead!] I wonder whether the future sagas will continue to be edited less and less as time progresses. It costs a lot to edit something because of the amount of frames and work required to be discrete removing blod, tears. They even painting towels over some 200 frames (a few seconds) of Goku's butt once.
DBZ uncensored seems very complete up to almost the end of the frieza saga. It pains me to see that some things SHOULD stay censored, according to the logic I see from Cartoon Network: It is watched by a lot of kids, and it's their parents who pay for cable, so parents are the ones who will demand the editing/censoring. There's a whole lot of interest from Funimation into getting the more mature audience to buy the DVDs to quench the itch get the "uncensored" version. I guess TV can't give you all. But I wish there was an optional anime channel in my area.
Actually, I watched Candy Candy in the Caribbean. Does anyone have any web link or info on this show? I watched the spanish dub when I was young and I thought it never made it to the US. Sorry if I deviate a little from this thread, but I believe that there are a lot more companies out there dubbing anime to English audiences than the Mexican and Venezuelan dubbing companies. If you grew up outside the US, you'll know the entire set of voices for 80's american cartoons, american movies and anime right away. In the US, there are lots of companies in charge of English dubs, and you only need to dub japanese animation nowadays. The guy dubbing Goku's voice for the spanish version of DBZ from Intertrack was the same one who did McGiver's. I loved the coincidence. But for some reason the female voice dubs tend to be slightly upsetting. Just my two bits to show that Latin America too feels the japanese animation highs and lows. Please don't moderate this. I don't intend to complain... I miss the 80's too!