The problem is that unless you own a sexy DVcam, 1394 seems pretty useless.
But Sony's plan is to push "iLink" across their consumer line. When it's common for TVs, cable boxes, satellite boxes, amplifiers, DVD Players, and so on to have a 1394 port, most PC users will finally 'get' the application. --
USB is an Intel standard that Microsoft signed on to support. They didn't support it very well -- working USB drivers didn't ship on Windows until 2 years after Intel had been shipping motherboards with USB.
WinNT support will still be missing until tomorrow -- 4 years after Intel shipped USB. --
Back in the late 80s, a boring beige boxy Mac II series computer would set you back $5000 to $10,000. This is when PCs sold for $2500 at most.
Apple doesn't have the software tech advantage anymore that could demand a price two to four times greater than their competitiors. As they proved up to about 1996, they don't even have the software tech to demand a price $500 greater than their competitors (for much faster machines). If style didn't sell they'd probably be out of business.
Of course, when they were making the 75% margins, they invested a ton of money in to R+D projects that failed (QuickDrawGX, Taligent, Copeland, OpenDoc, etc.) So luck and good managment play into it too.
I would suggest both more moderation and a shorter range.
Also, get rid of any karma bonus -- karma stars like Bruce Perens or Effugus or Signal11 have no problem get moderated up when they have something to say. And misuse of karma bonus almost never gets 'kneecapped'.
Also, don't allow over moderation -- once a post hits maximum or minimum, extra moderation doesn't cost the moderator. This limits the simultaneous moderation points black hole.
Also, limit early positive moderation -- this will allow more conversations to start before everyone starts replying to the top scored posts.
Also, VA should just pay someone to be a permanent moderator. This person whould have the job of knocking down First Posts, outright rascist stuff, spam, and so on, so the community doesn't have to. (This person would not moderate down Petrified Hot Grits or other humor value trolls -- let the real moderators do that if the joke is getting old.) --
OK, but I still think that you are painting the world darker than it needs to be. Most individuals who cart home an iMac do actual get competent enough to get their AOL or surf the web.
(Now there's quite a bit of false advertising here -- The industry essentially says that iMac, etc. equals Internet+You, but they conveniently neglect to mention that iMac also equals you installing drivers, you upgrading your OS and memory, you troubleshooting cryptic errors and so on. Some people figure these next steps out -- quite a few others give up and the computer gathers dust. My solution was to get my mom a WebTV.)
Now the real problem is at the corporate level -- how many times have you seen an new application or even an entire OS (err, Win95) rolled out with no training budgeted towards it? Or assistants layed-off, with the logic being that computer-illiterate middle managers that have never even used an electric typewriter can type their own memos? These things happen all the time, and I really don't blame the poor users. Even the IT department, which should be savvy enough to believe differently, has bought the line that more and newer computers automatically brings more efficiency. --
Well, Intel sells CPUs and not memory chips, so what they are really saying is:
the new OS requires 250 more megahertz of chip power to get the equivalent user experience (if you only have 32MB of RAM)
On a "reasonable" NT machine with 128MB, the "user experience" is about the same between NT4+ActiveDesktop and NT5.
(And, yes, I know that Linux users will flame the 128MB number. Yawn. A memory upgrade is still cheaper than a CPU upgrade. And since corporations don't usually upgrade CPUs, that means a whole new computer if you were to follow Intel's instructions.)
It would be a simpler world if everyone in the computer industry shared your attitude and tried to reserve computing to competant operators.
But, that's not how 90% of the industry thinks. They sell consumer electronics. They want to put their product in front of as many people as possible. It's the industry trying to gain market penetration, not the lusers clammoring at the gates that are the problem.
(But to address your point about cars -- that's why they invented the automatic transmission, and put drivers education and licencing programs in place, and so on.)
So, while you can hide in some unixy corner of the world and feel relatively safe from the unwashed masses, everyone else in the industry is trying to let the unwashed masses in as fast as they can collect money. (Meanwhile, you benefit from commodity pricing, but I don't hear you bitch about that.) Live with it, or come up with a constructive solution. --
OS/2 actually did have an enormous amount of hype behind. Time travel back to 1989, and pretty much everyone 'in the know' thought that it was the operating system of the future.
Also (for what it's worth), I do have a fawning book called "The Sony Vision" (Nick Lyons, 1976) about Akio Morita and his drive to create Sony and to push the Betamax on to the world market. --
CD-ROMs were developed after CD Audio, but not much after, so they must have been aware of the computer applications through the design phase. Early multimedia specifications from Apple and others just played Red Book CD Audio through the analog jacks -- playing audio files from the CD was considered to complex or too slow.
(It's kinda like saying that writable DVD standards were developed after DVD-video -- technically true, but throughout the DVD development process everyone was fully aware of the computer applications. In fact, this standards war has in fact been brewing for years, and grew out of an earlier "Treaty of Versailles" that allowed a standard DVD format to ship in the first place.)
Anyway, thanks for the technical explanation. It just strikes me that the content/consumer electronic industry would be so stupid to produce something that looks like a computer drive, and acts like a computer drive, and then be amazed when the users want to use it like a computer drive. They should just stick to black boxes until they are ready to play the convergance game according to the existing rules. --
I just can't help but thinking that if they really implemented MSDE, they would have "Powered By SQL Server!" written all over the marketing materials. Still there's a beta sitting around, so I suppose I could install it and see. (Of course, I could also start burning myself with cigarettes just for fun -- I've been waiting around since the v4 beta cycle for Exchange to get even halfassed, and I've pretty much lost patience.) --
One of the reason moderation has failed, in my view, is that too many moderation posts get spent on too few posts.
You are assuming that once you get above +3 (or some other magic number), the cream has truely risen to the top. To the contrary, if you go back and read most complete articles, the posts that have moderated up to +4 or +5 are usually just long posts that were posted early, or dull party line statements, and there's plenty of good, well thought out posts amidst the noise down at +1 or +2, including some very informative or insightful stuff that just got posted late.
If anything, what's needed is *less* moderation categories, not more -- Instead of -1 through 5, it should be -1 through +1 (or at most +2). It's not like there's any objective quality difference between the average +3 and the average +5 post. Removing the incentive to push an agreeable or early statement up to +5 will spread things out and give you more of the 'moderated' discussion you are looking for. --
This is unlike current CD-ROMs which can give you direct access to all data on the CD, including CD audio.
Yes, but with early CD-ROM drives it was impossible to access the CD Audio data layer. I don't know if this was by design or not, but a DVD-ROM could be designed by our movie industry friends to hide the video bits from the IDE/SCSI bus.
Of course, I have digital audio outputs from my DVD player proper...
All of this stuff has the MPAA's copy protection schemes built right into the hardware. It's certainly not the computer industry philosophy of pushing digital bits where ever you want. --
Yes, but where's the progress? When the Jaz came out it was 1 Gig for about $600, and we all had 2 GB hard drives.
Now the Jaz is 2.5 gigs for about $350 and we all have 18GB disks. Removable media just seems to keep falling further behind the storage sizes people expect. --
If anything, the existing crop of DVD-ROM players show that the DVD consortium doesn't really understand computer peripherals and how to design them. Rather than choosing a 'closed' solution that would (in theory) be more difficult to crack, they cut corners and went for a software decryption/decoder approach, and then pushed the drives out into the market at very reasonable prices.
Software decoding has done wonders for DVD's installed base (mostly in computers right now), but at the same time it's left the more savvy users scratching their heads. Here is a stream of data coming across the IDE bus, bouncing around the hardware and the OS, and eventually displaying on the computer monitor. The one huge problem is that the users weren't supposed access that data, and if that isn't a giant scratchable itch, I don't know what is.
I can't stop wondering why they didn't just take the approach of CD-ROM players, which have normal audio-out leads right on the back of the drive. 99% of music CD listening is done through these leads and the sound card's analog mixer device. In fact, until a couple years ago, it was impossible to access the digital audio stream with most CD-ROMs, and people who ripped CDs generally did a analog-digital conversion with their SoundBlaster, resulting in a very noticeable quality loss.
Likewise, the same approach could have been taken with DVDs -- normal data access through IDE/SCSI, and just leave a S-Video connector on the back of the drive (along with a CD-ROM style audio hookup) for movie viewing. All the decryption and macrovision crap could be done completely in hardware. Of course, you would need a video 'mixer' device of some sort, but cheap TV cards have been available for some time, and are supported on all platforms. Any 'Rip' would require a D->A->D conversion.
Now, I'm not trying to give the studios advice on how to copy protect their movies, only trying to point out how short sighted they are. Any consumer writeable DVD format that come out will probably be designed just like DVD-Video was -- as much as possible will be done in software to reduce costs, and then a bunch of ill-thought out copy protection features will be kludged on at the end. Of course, you know the story from there on -- someone will want to scratch that itch and crack the whole thing open again, and then we are back to where we are now with DVD. --
Well, the main reason that CD-ROM, CD-R, and CD-RW beat other optical storage formats is that you really can't fight the economies of scale of the millions audio CD players produced every year, not to mention the media manufacturing and pressing equipment, and so on..
In theory, DVD-ROM has the same advantages. However, if they continue to mung up the R and R/W formats, this may never be the case. --
You know, any fraud perpetrated with these credit card numbers is going to get covered either by RealNames or some other middleman company in the credit card business.
So who is going to sue whom? Is Visa going to sue RealNames? Is Bank Of America going to sue RealNames? Will RealNames just have to eat any fraudulant purchases made with these cards, and then sue their contract network administrators?
Certainly the RealName customers aren't going to get harmed (other than the minor hassle of being issued a new card), so what grounds would they have for a lawsuit? --
Not on any of the (hundreds) of NT boxes I've had the pleasure to run. 99% of the BSODS are NTFS.SYS or the SCSI or NIC driver, or a memory parity error. Of course, ususally the box just goes to shit without BSODding and needs to be rebooted, but that's usually a background service problem with nothing to do with the GUI.
I have to think that you've swollowed a line by saying this -- Unix users think that GUI-in-the-kernel is bad (OK, maybe that's true). But then you jump to the "logical" conclusion that that is why NT is not-so-stable. Sorry, the evidence doesn't back you up.
{I've only seen NT Server crash once on the video driver -- and the box stayed up. It was NT3.51 with the user mode GUI, of course. } --
No -- Stimuli's got a point. Even though NT4 is single user only, all the Admin tools are multiuser and use RPC only.
It is also impossible to boot an NT machine with attempting to start all the "Automatic" services. I've had situations where the machine would boot, but you couldn't log in locally because winlogon.exe had died, and there was no other NT machine on the network with which to fix this problem. One cries for a unix-style "single user mode" in these situations. (And, no, the Win2K "Safe Mode" still sucks!)
I think regedit.exe (not regedt32.exe) runs directly against the local registry, that might be a solution. Of course, regedit.exe is not supported for editing on NT4. Catch-22. --
OK -- maybe the "moronized" generator is Slashdot itself. It liberally accepts extend ISO8850-1 characters as "Plain Old Text", and then liberally generates incorrect HTML containing those characters. --
MacOS is actually potentially more broken than Windows in this respect. It uses a different character set than ISO8859-1, or "ANSI".
This means that all MacOS Internet programs must translate Mac Extended ASCII to ISO8859-1. Historically, there's been some software that didn't do this translation at all, which means that extended characters wouldn't display correctly on any non-Mac platform.
What Netscape and other programs seem to do on MacOS is translate to MS's extended version of ISO8859-1. This handles things like smart quotes in single byte character streams. I guess since Unix is already using ISO8859-1/ANSI, Netscape doesn't feel the need to do any translation. --
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that unless you own a sexy DVcam, 1394 seems pretty useless.
But Sony's plan is to push "iLink" across their consumer line. When it's common for TVs, cable boxes, satellite boxes, amplifiers, DVD Players, and so on to have a 1394 port, most PC users will finally 'get' the application.
--
USB is an Intel standard that Microsoft signed on to support. They didn't support it very well -- working USB drivers didn't ship on Windows until 2 years after Intel had been shipping motherboards with USB.
WinNT support will still be missing until tomorrow -- 4 years after Intel shipped USB.
--
Back in the late 80s, a boring beige boxy Mac II series computer would set you back $5000 to $10,000. This is when PCs sold for $2500 at most.
Apple doesn't have the software tech advantage anymore that could demand a price two to four times greater than their competitiors. As they proved up to about 1996, they don't even have the software tech to demand a price $500 greater than their competitors (for much faster machines). If style didn't sell they'd probably be out of business.
Of course, when they were making the 75% margins, they invested a ton of money in to R+D projects that failed (QuickDrawGX, Taligent, Copeland, OpenDoc, etc.) So luck and good managment play into it too.
--
Tennon MachTen runs BSD Unix on top of MacOS.
In addition, MacOS X server does run a 'virtual machine' to boot the classic MacOS environment. A/UX did something similar.
--
I would suggest both more moderation and a shorter range.
Also, get rid of any karma bonus -- karma stars like Bruce Perens or Effugus or Signal11 have no problem get moderated up when they have something to say. And misuse of karma bonus almost never gets 'kneecapped'.
Also, don't allow over moderation -- once a post hits maximum or minimum, extra moderation doesn't cost the moderator. This limits the simultaneous moderation points black hole.
Also, limit early positive moderation -- this will allow more conversations to start before everyone starts replying to the top scored posts.
Also, VA should just pay someone to be a permanent moderator. This person whould have the job of knocking down First Posts, outright rascist stuff, spam, and so on, so the community doesn't have to. (This person would not moderate down Petrified Hot Grits or other humor value trolls -- let the real moderators do that if the joke is getting old.)
--
OK, but I still think that you are painting the world darker than it needs to be. Most individuals who cart home an iMac do actual get competent enough to get their AOL or surf the web.
(Now there's quite a bit of false advertising here -- The industry essentially says that iMac, etc. equals Internet+You, but they conveniently neglect to mention that iMac also equals you installing drivers, you upgrading your OS and memory, you troubleshooting cryptic errors and so on. Some people figure these next steps out -- quite a few others give up and the computer gathers dust. My solution was to get my mom a WebTV.)
Now the real problem is at the corporate level -- how many times have you seen an new application or even an entire OS (err, Win95) rolled out with no training budgeted towards it? Or assistants layed-off, with the logic being that computer-illiterate middle managers that have never even used an electric typewriter can type their own memos? These things happen all the time, and I really don't blame the poor users. Even the IT department, which should be savvy enough to believe differently, has bought the line that more and newer computers automatically brings more efficiency.
--
Well, Intel sells CPUs and not memory chips, so what they are really saying is:
the new OS requires 250 more megahertz of chip power to get the equivalent user experience (if you only have 32MB of RAM)
On a "reasonable" NT machine with 128MB, the "user experience" is about the same between NT4+ActiveDesktop and NT5.
(And, yes, I know that Linux users will flame the 128MB number. Yawn. A memory upgrade is still cheaper than a CPU upgrade. And since corporations don't usually upgrade CPUs, that means a whole new computer if you were to follow Intel's instructions.)
--
It would be a simpler world if everyone in the computer industry shared your attitude and tried to reserve computing to competant operators.
But, that's not how 90% of the industry thinks. They sell consumer electronics. They want to put their product in front of as many people as possible. It's the industry trying to gain market penetration, not the lusers clammoring at the gates that are the problem.
(But to address your point about cars -- that's why they invented the automatic transmission, and put drivers education and licencing programs in place, and so on.)
So, while you can hide in some unixy corner of the world and feel relatively safe from the unwashed masses, everyone else in the industry is trying to let the unwashed masses in as fast as they can collect money. (Meanwhile, you benefit from commodity pricing, but I don't hear you bitch about that.) Live with it, or come up with a constructive solution.
--
OS/2 actually did have an enormous amount of hype behind. Time travel back to 1989, and pretty much everyone 'in the know' thought that it was the operating system of the future.
Also (for what it's worth), I do have a fawning book called "The Sony Vision" (Nick Lyons, 1976) about Akio Morita and his drive to create Sony and to push the Betamax on to the world market.
--
CD-ROMs were developed after CD Audio, but not much after, so they must have been aware of the computer applications through the design phase. Early multimedia specifications from Apple and others just played Red Book CD Audio through the analog jacks -- playing audio files from the CD was considered to complex or too slow.
(It's kinda like saying that writable DVD standards were developed after DVD-video -- technically true, but throughout the DVD development process everyone was fully aware of the computer applications. In fact, this standards war has in fact been brewing for years, and grew out of an earlier "Treaty of Versailles" that allowed a standard DVD format to ship in the first place.)
Anyway, thanks for the technical explanation. It just strikes me that the content/consumer electronic industry would be so stupid to produce something that looks like a computer drive, and acts like a computer drive, and then be amazed when the users want to use it like a computer drive. They should just stick to black boxes until they are ready to play the convergance game according to the existing rules.
--
I just can't help but thinking that if they really implemented MSDE, they would have "Powered By SQL Server!" written all over the marketing materials. Still there's a beta sitting around, so I suppose I could install it and see. (Of course, I could also start burning myself with cigarettes just for fun -- I've been waiting around since the v4 beta cycle for Exchange to get even halfassed, and I've pretty much lost patience.)
--
One of the reason moderation has failed, in my view, is that too many moderation posts get spent on too few posts.
You are assuming that once you get above +3 (or some other magic number), the cream has truely risen to the top. To the contrary, if you go back and read most complete articles, the posts that have moderated up to +4 or +5 are usually just long posts that were posted early, or dull party line statements, and there's plenty of good, well thought out posts amidst the noise down at +1 or +2, including some very informative or insightful stuff that just got posted late.
If anything, what's needed is *less* moderation categories, not more -- Instead of -1 through 5, it should be -1 through +1 (or at most +2). It's not like there's any objective quality difference between the average +3 and the average +5 post. Removing the incentive to push an agreeable or early statement up to +5 will spread things out and give you more of the 'moderated' discussion you are looking for.
--
This is unlike current CD-ROMs which can give you direct access to all data on the CD, including CD audio.
...
Yes, but with early CD-ROM drives it was impossible to access the CD Audio data layer. I don't know if this was by design or not, but a DVD-ROM could be designed by our movie industry friends to hide the video bits from the IDE/SCSI bus.
Of course, I have digital audio outputs from my DVD player proper
All of this stuff has the MPAA's copy protection schemes built right into the hardware. It's certainly not the computer industry philosophy of pushing digital bits where ever you want.
--
Yes, but where's the progress? When the Jaz came out it was 1 Gig for about $600, and we all had 2 GB hard drives.
Now the Jaz is 2.5 gigs for about $350 and we all have 18GB disks. Removable media just seems to keep falling further behind the storage sizes people expect.
--
(This is sorta off topic.)
If anything, the existing crop of DVD-ROM players show that the DVD consortium doesn't really understand computer peripherals and how to design them. Rather than choosing a 'closed' solution that would (in theory) be more difficult to crack, they cut corners and went for a software decryption/decoder approach, and then pushed the drives out into the market at very reasonable prices.
Software decoding has done wonders for DVD's installed base (mostly in computers right now), but at the same time it's left the more savvy users scratching their heads. Here is a stream of data coming across the IDE bus, bouncing around the hardware and the OS, and eventually displaying on the computer monitor. The one huge problem is that the users weren't supposed access that data, and if that isn't a giant scratchable itch, I don't know what is.
I can't stop wondering why they didn't just take the approach of CD-ROM players, which have normal audio-out leads right on the back of the drive. 99% of music CD listening is done through these leads and the sound card's analog mixer device. In fact, until a couple years ago, it was impossible to access the digital audio stream with most CD-ROMs, and people who ripped CDs generally did a analog-digital conversion with their SoundBlaster, resulting in a very noticeable quality loss.
Likewise, the same approach could have been taken with DVDs -- normal data access through IDE/SCSI, and just leave a S-Video connector on the back of the drive (along with a CD-ROM style audio hookup) for movie viewing. All the decryption and macrovision crap could be done completely in hardware. Of course, you would need a video 'mixer' device of some sort, but cheap TV cards have been available for some time, and are supported on all platforms. Any 'Rip' would require a D->A->D conversion.
Now, I'm not trying to give the studios advice on how to copy protect their movies, only trying to point out how short sighted they are. Any consumer writeable DVD format that come out will probably be designed just like DVD-Video was -- as much as possible will be done in software to reduce costs, and then a bunch of ill-thought out copy protection features will be kludged on at the end. Of course, you know the story from there on -- someone will want to scratch that itch and crack the whole thing open again, and then we are back to where we are now with DVD.
--
Well, the main reason that CD-ROM, CD-R, and CD-RW beat other optical storage formats is that you really can't fight the economies of scale of the millions audio CD players produced every year, not to mention the media manufacturing and pressing equipment, and so on..
In theory, DVD-ROM has the same advantages. However, if they continue to mung up the R and R/W formats, this may never be the case.
--
You know, any fraud perpetrated with these credit card numbers is going to get covered either by RealNames or some other middleman company in the credit card business.
So who is going to sue whom? Is Visa going to sue RealNames? Is Bank Of America going to sue RealNames? Will RealNames just have to eat any fraudulant purchases made with these cards, and then sue their contract network administrators?
Certainly the RealName customers aren't going to get harmed (other than the minor hassle of being issued a new card), so what grounds would they have for a lawsuit?
--
This is the source of most crashes.
Not on any of the (hundreds) of NT boxes I've had the pleasure to run. 99% of the BSODS are NTFS.SYS or the SCSI or NIC driver, or a memory parity error. Of course, ususally the box just goes to shit without BSODding and needs to be rebooted, but that's usually a background service problem with nothing to do with the GUI.
I have to think that you've swollowed a line by saying this -- Unix users think that GUI-in-the-kernel is bad (OK, maybe that's true). But then you jump to the "logical" conclusion that that is why NT is not-so-stable. Sorry, the evidence doesn't back you up.
{I've only seen NT Server crash once on the video driver -- and the box stayed up. It was NT3.51 with the user mode GUI, of course. }
--
If the "old Pentium machine" was something like a Compaq Proliant 4500, it shouldn't be a problem.
When NT 4 shipped these were the 'premiere' machines to run it on, and IIRC, Microsoft still uses quite a few of them for web serving.
--
Reliability(Linux on x86) is greater than Reliability(Solaris x86) -- Driver support and hardware oddities make Solaris/Intel difficult to deal with.
(And I have proven this using a compaq machine that is right on Sun's HCL.)
--
No -- Stimuli's got a point. Even though NT4 is single user only, all the Admin tools are multiuser and use RPC only.
It is also impossible to boot an NT machine with attempting to start all the "Automatic" services. I've had situations where the machine would boot, but you couldn't log in locally because winlogon.exe had died, and there was no other NT machine on the network with which to fix this problem. One cries for a unix-style "single user mode" in these situations. (And, no, the Win2K "Safe Mode" still sucks!)
I think regedit.exe (not regedt32.exe) runs directly against the local registry, that might be a solution. Of course, regedit.exe is not supported for editing on NT4. Catch-22.
--
I don't have a link handy, but a month or two ago InfoWorld (print) published a pie chart showing the causes for NT failures incident.
The interesting thing was that "Internal NT problem" was just as likely to cause a failure as "Hardware/Drivers"
The *more* interesting thing is that the data was from Microsoft. (I really wish I had a link handy!)
--
OK -- maybe the "moronized" generator is Slashdot itself. It liberally accepts extend ISO8850-1 characters as "Plain Old Text", and then liberally generates incorrect HTML containing those characters.
--
Thanks for the correction -- I wasn't sure what to call it myself.
--
(Followup to myself on the MacOS issue.)
MacOS is actually potentially more broken than Windows in this respect. It uses a different character set than ISO8859-1, or "ANSI".
This means that all MacOS Internet programs must translate Mac Extended ASCII to ISO8859-1. Historically, there's been some software that didn't do this translation at all, which means that extended characters wouldn't display correctly on any non-Mac platform.
What Netscape and other programs seem to do on MacOS is translate to MS's extended version of ISO8859-1. This handles things like smart quotes in single byte character streams. I guess since Unix is already using ISO8859-1/ANSI, Netscape doesn't feel the need to do any translation.
--