By the time period discussed, Apple had gone far away from the "computer for the rest of us" idea, and was selling high-end graphic machines that cost $8000+.
Apple wanted to see themselves bought out by a huge conglomerate during their difficult periods back in the 90s -- and came very close with IBM and Sun. That's the source of all those rumors.
Adding more of the same level of engineeering expertise doesn't necessarily get you anywhere
It has nothing to do with engineering expertise -- it's FAB investment. None of the RISC companies could afford to keep up with Intel in process technology, and the enormous cost of designing and producing your own chip basically sunk DEC and SGI.
I agree that it was probably politically infesible, but the RISC crowd invested far too much money into niche CPUs and it killed all of them (except IBM).
> There was still a lot of DOS use but the PC world was hardly as you describe (slow 286's and 386's).
Turgid is right about this one. In 1991, there were still AT and even XT machines on the market, and 1MB would have been the stock RAM. The early 486 machines cost well over $5000 and it took a couple years for the chip to filter down to regular machines.
x86 processors finally caught up with RISC workstations when the AMD Althon came out.
Actually, the original 200mhz Pentium Pro had higher SPEC scores than any RISC chip available at the time (although there was a revised Alpha a couple months later). The PPro pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of ACE/ARC/PREP and all the other RISC PC efforts, and the beginning of the end of the RISC Workstation. By the time Athlon came out, everyone had already pretty much given up except Sun.
Wasn't the "Star Trek" Intel port done at about the same time? I also have heard stories that DEC Alpha was considered. So it does sound like they looked at everything.
"Great" was used sarcastically there, BTW. I was trying to argue why M2 is largely useless at 'moderating' the discussion.
I will agree that, while it pretty fails totally on the micro-level, Moderation was a genius idea on the macro-level. If you only want to read 50 or 100 posts and get the gist of what's going on, the option is there. It lets everyone get into their petty arguments, but it also lets the readership 'scale' above that. At least on a good day.
Probably the only thing I would really change would be the ability to mark a post off-topic without changing the karma-level.
I'm not sure when desktop email became ubitiqutious, but about 10 years I worked at a place where some people flashed their old-timer cred by having a real 3270 tube on their desk for PROFS. (And if you were really cool, you had one with a light pen.) The rest of us just used MSMail.
Metamoderation used to have a great feature where if you disagreed with more than 2 moderations, it subtracted karma from the meta-moderator. And then Taco would brag about positive M2 stats as proof that the moderation system was working. I would be curious if any biased moderator was ever removed because M2 -- it probably catches the GNAA guys and that's it.
I think any illusion that Slashdot Moderation is designed to provoke a balanced discussion is absolutely wrong. In fact the opposite is the case -- it's designed to promote extremism and silence 'moderate' views. It's the nature of the place, so you pretty much have to lower your thresholds and roll with it. The real battles take place in the comments, not the moderation.
I always thought it to be ironic that NeXTMail was considered "neato", but when Microsoft started spamming the world with RTF parts, everyone was outraged.
Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico.
I guess that explains why old versions of Pine understand RTF but have no clue what to do with HTML.
The issue with going right to the RFCs is that E-Mail was widely deployed before Internet access was. Corporations and government used inhouse systems such as IBM PROFS, Lotus ccMail, and even MS Mail. There were large non-RFC mail networks, including MCI, AT&T, and Worldcom's Lotus Notes network (that had something like a million users when the Internet was far smaller).
When Internet mail started to catch on in the early 90s, the Internet Mail capabilties were rather obviously kludged into these systems, usually with a funky addressing scheme such as "joeblow@example.com @ INTERNET", difficulty with file attachments, etc. Microsoft even introduced a X400 based product in 1994 where it was clear that SMTP was an after-thought. It was only around 2000 when SMTP was integrated into Exchange and Notes as a core protocol, rather than a gateway.
Many of the features that people from the Internet Mail tradition find distasteful, such as Top-Reply and Rich (html) Text come directly from the capabilities of corporate systems. Any sort of comprehensive history of email has to include these systems, rather than just the Unix boxes with their sendmail.
Finally, let me just complain that the RFCs for Internet Mail took a very simple spec and turned it into a complete fricken mess, with all sorts of ridiclous, overly-complex encoding crap for back-compatibility with 7-bit systems. It would be nice if someday someone flushed all this MIME crap and started over with a nice clean protocol like HTTP.
I appreciate your effort, but the M2 system has a nice fat loophole called "overrated". Furthermore, the system operates largely out of context, so what could just be an over the top statement with wry wit could easily seem like "flamebait" (another fav Apple mod).
I will give the Apple moderators some credit, they are very willing to dig through four day old discussions to moderate down opinions that nobody will ever read again.
I'm not denying the atmosphere was great. Just tired of reading college sophomores wanking about the storyline, which in fact was non-existent. (The game never actually says who the combine are or why they took over, or what any of this has to do with Half-Life 1. Yeah, you can draw inferences.)
Another good example is how early versions of Safari would automatically download files and execute them with no user intevention.
The interesting thing about that one is that nobody exploited it -- even though it would have only required basic HTML and script language skills. Meanwhile, in the Windows world, "zero day" stuff like the WMF hole gets millions of machines.
I think it says a lot about the hacker culture on the Mac being totally Pro-Mac. A lot of Windows programmers hate Bill Gates, and a lot of Unix programmer hate Linux. But that malicous instinct is just missing on the Mac, even though some could make a name for themselves.
Plus, it's clear that the for-pay spammers and mobsters just don't see Macs as an economic software development platform. But that's true of other software like CAD also.
60% is relevant because it represents the approximate marketshare of Intel chipsets that Apple now uses. In short, there's probably not going to be serious driver issues if the DRM is hacked.
Except IBM was already extracting small ISA royalties from most PC companies. I always though the issue was that they wanted OEMs to buy expensive MCA licenses for ISA PCs that they had already sold.
Also, that Wikipedia article is rather incoherent in tone, so I wouldn't take anything in there as factual proof of anything.
Uh, I wouldn't call EFI a big difference, it will be likely worked around pretty quickly. The Intel chipset support is all in there, even for P4 systems. A bigger issue is the TPM.
Judging by the developer builds, a very large percentage -- around 50% -- of new PCs are capable of running OS X (with maybe minor problems like the sound chip). The days of PC hardware being really diverse are long gone.
Microsoft's OEM program basically requires that all of the hardware drivers are certified by them. Something along those lines, except Apple could afford to be more strict. I don't think they'll do it for years though.
They couldn't use their disk-duplication machines legally -- without an agreement with Apple. I suppose they could install it by hand on each PC they ship.
Actually, I think Half-Life's major innovation was putting a girl in the game that didn't have blatantly polygonal boobies. The storyline itself was almost entirely missing -- "Gordon. Good to see you. Now go somewhere else... but take the back way!" in front of a standard post-apocolyptic backdrop.
Slashdot Mirror
By the time period discussed, Apple had gone far away from the "computer for the rest of us" idea, and was selling high-end graphic machines that cost $8000+.
Apple wanted to see themselves bought out by a huge conglomerate during their difficult periods back in the 90s -- and came very close with IBM and Sun. That's the source of all those rumors.
> It was neat technology, but it didn't solve a problem people thought they had.
I always had the impression that Star Trek was dry run of their 68K emulator technology, which was a problem that needed to be solved.
And I suppose you could argue that if they were going to switch to Intel eventually, they should have done it sooner rather than later.
Adding more of the same level of engineeering expertise doesn't necessarily get you anywhere
It has nothing to do with engineering expertise -- it's FAB investment. None of the RISC companies could afford to keep up with Intel in process technology, and the enormous cost of designing and producing your own chip basically sunk DEC and SGI.
I agree that it was probably politically infesible, but the RISC crowd invested far too much money into niche CPUs and it killed all of them (except IBM).
> There was still a lot of DOS use but the PC world was hardly as you describe (slow 286's and 386's).
Turgid is right about this one. In 1991, there were still AT and even XT machines on the market, and 1MB would have been the stock RAM. The early 486 machines cost well over $5000 and it took a couple years for the chip to filter down to regular machines.
Exactly - mod up. PowerPC was designed to be cheap moreso than it was to be fast.
The rumors are that Apple sells $2500 PowerBooks with a $30 G4 CPU. Ai.
x86 processors finally caught up with RISC workstations when the AMD Althon came out.
Actually, the original 200mhz Pentium Pro had higher SPEC scores than any RISC chip available at the time (although there was a revised Alpha a couple months later). The PPro pretty much put the final nail in the coffin of ACE/ARC/PREP and all the other RISC PC efforts, and the beginning of the end of the RISC Workstation. By the time Athlon came out, everyone had already pretty much given up except Sun.
Wasn't the "Star Trek" Intel port done at about the same time? I also have heard stories that DEC Alpha was considered. So it does sound like they looked at everything.
Things have changed. You can easily write javascript that is 99% cross-browser, at least for browsers released this century.
"Great" was used sarcastically there, BTW. I was trying to argue why M2 is largely useless at 'moderating' the discussion.
I will agree that, while it pretty fails totally on the micro-level, Moderation was a genius idea on the macro-level. If you only want to read 50 or 100 posts and get the gist of what's going on, the option is there. It lets everyone get into their petty arguments, but it also lets the readership 'scale' above that. At least on a good day.
Probably the only thing I would really change would be the ability to mark a post off-topic without changing the karma-level.
You're right --- PROFS was a timesharing system.
I'm not sure when desktop email became ubitiqutious, but about 10 years I worked at a place where some people flashed their old-timer cred by having a real 3270 tube on their desk for PROFS. (And if you were really cool, you had one with a light pen.) The rest of us just used MSMail.
Metamoderation used to have a great feature where if you disagreed with more than 2 moderations, it subtracted karma from the meta-moderator. And then Taco would brag about positive M2 stats as proof that the moderation system was working. I would be curious if any biased moderator was ever removed because M2 -- it probably catches the GNAA guys and that's it.
I think any illusion that Slashdot Moderation is designed to provoke a balanced discussion is absolutely wrong. In fact the opposite is the case -- it's designed to promote extremism and silence 'moderate' views. It's the nature of the place, so you pretty much have to lower your thresholds and roll with it. The real battles take place in the comments, not the moderation.
I always thought it to be ironic that NeXTMail was considered "neato", but when Microsoft started spamming the world with RTF parts, everyone was outraged.
Mark began working on a related project: MIME. This was done at U Washington, which developed MIME in conjunction with pine and pico.
I guess that explains why old versions of Pine understand RTF but have no clue what to do with HTML.
The issue with going right to the RFCs is that E-Mail was widely deployed before Internet access was. Corporations and government used inhouse systems such as IBM PROFS, Lotus ccMail, and even MS Mail. There were large non-RFC mail networks, including MCI, AT&T, and Worldcom's Lotus Notes network (that had something like a million users when the Internet was far smaller).
When Internet mail started to catch on in the early 90s, the Internet Mail capabilties were rather obviously kludged into these systems, usually with a funky addressing scheme such as "joeblow@example.com @ INTERNET", difficulty with file attachments, etc. Microsoft even introduced a X400 based product in 1994 where it was clear that SMTP was an after-thought. It was only around 2000 when SMTP was integrated into Exchange and Notes as a core protocol, rather than a gateway.
Many of the features that people from the Internet Mail tradition find distasteful, such as Top-Reply and Rich (html) Text come directly from the capabilities of corporate systems. Any sort of comprehensive history of email has to include these systems, rather than just the Unix boxes with their sendmail.
Finally, let me just complain that the RFCs for Internet Mail took a very simple spec and turned it into a complete fricken mess, with all sorts of ridiclous, overly-complex encoding crap for back-compatibility with 7-bit systems. It would be nice if someday someone flushed all this MIME crap and started over with a nice clean protocol like HTTP.
> I metamod twice a day, every day.
I appreciate your effort, but the M2 system has a nice fat loophole called "overrated". Furthermore, the system operates largely out of context, so what could just be an over the top statement with wry wit could easily seem like "flamebait" (another fav Apple mod).
I will give the Apple moderators some credit, they are very willing to dig through four day old discussions to moderate down opinions that nobody will ever read again.
I did. They were slugs who came from a hole in the sky. TO BE CONTINUED ....
I'm not denying the atmosphere was great. Just tired of reading college sophomores wanking about the storyline, which in fact was non-existent. (The game never actually says who the combine are or why they took over, or what any of this has to do with Half-Life 1. Yeah, you can draw inferences.)
Another good example is how early versions of Safari would automatically download files and execute them with no user intevention.
The interesting thing about that one is that nobody exploited it -- even though it would have only required basic HTML and script language skills. Meanwhile, in the Windows world, "zero day" stuff like the WMF hole gets millions of machines.
I think it says a lot about the hacker culture on the Mac being totally Pro-Mac. A lot of Windows programmers hate Bill Gates, and a lot of Unix programmer hate Linux. But that malicous instinct is just missing on the Mac, even though some could make a name for themselves.
Plus, it's clear that the for-pay spammers and mobsters just don't see Macs as an economic software development platform. But that's true of other software like CAD also.
60% is relevant because it represents the approximate marketshare of Intel chipsets that Apple now uses. In short, there's probably not going to be serious driver issues if the DRM is hacked.
Random usenet post on the topic: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.os2.misc/br owse_thread/thread/633e4924d742f30c/53092a6a33e797 ff?lnk=st콤a6a33e797ff
Except IBM was already extracting small ISA royalties from most PC companies. I always though the issue was that they wanted OEMs to buy expensive MCA licenses for ISA PCs that they had already sold.
Also, that Wikipedia article is rather incoherent in tone, so I wouldn't take anything in there as factual proof of anything.
Uh, I wouldn't call EFI a big difference, it will be likely worked around pretty quickly. The Intel chipset support is all in there, even for P4 systems. A bigger issue is the TPM.
Judging by the developer builds, a very large percentage -- around 50% -- of new PCs are capable of running OS X (with maybe minor problems like the sound chip). The days of PC hardware being really diverse are long gone.
Microsoft's OEM program basically requires that all of the hardware drivers are certified by them. Something along those lines, except Apple could afford to be more strict. I don't think they'll do it for years though.
They couldn't use their disk-duplication machines legally -- without an agreement with Apple. I suppose they could install it by hand on each PC they ship.
Actually, I think Half-Life's major innovation was putting a girl in the game that didn't have blatantly polygonal boobies. The storyline itself was almost entirely missing -- "Gordon. Good to see you. Now go somewhere else ... but take the back way!" in front of a standard post-apocolyptic backdrop.