Doom 3 was August 2004, XP was summer 2001. Windows 98 would have been 6 years old by then.
I agree that it's annoying when old software stops working and new software doesn't work, but it's impossible to maintain software and backwards compatibility for ever, and I think the balance we have is just about right.
I just ran it on my iPad and it does indeed work well. The Jailbreak guys (Comex et al) do an incredible job, and I'm really glad that they do it (because it reminds everyone that you DO own your own hardware), but I'm seeing less and less reason to Jailbreak these days.
It has been about 3 years since I last Jailbroke an iPhone. Back then, it was almost essential -- you got some serious additional functionality that wasn't in iOS. Coming back to it now, I'm not so sure. Cydia is pretty slick, but iOS is a completely different kettle of fish. I was quite surprised at how many apps cost actual money -- the spirit of hackers sharing for the sake of hacking has almost totally gone, and now you're expected to spend a few dollars on the best of the little tweaks. For example, an app that can record an AVI of your screen (useful for creating tutorials) costs $5. It's not a bad price, I admit, but it's not what I was expecting. If more of the best Cydia apps were free, I expect there would be far more jailbreaking.
Sadly, the two things I was most interested in -- terminal/bash and ruby -- appear to be poorly maintained and are in a pretty unusable state. Ruby 1.9.2p0 is in Cydia, but when I ran it I got a dyld error about a missing symbol. There's no way that's going to work. The MobileTerminal app crashed too, but I got around it by installing openssh and sshing in to the console through prompt. It was slow (I think OpenSSL is slow on the ARM chip -- or maybe it's just prompt) and pointless (without Ruby/git).
It has been nice to take a look at the state of the Jailbreak scene, but I don't think I'll bother keeping it. It did make me think about what I would like to do with my iPad, if I could (I would like the ability to install a console, a compiler, ruby, vim, sqlite and so on). I would quite like Linux on my iPad. Having XWindows isn't important, though some sort of graphics system would be nice (based on libsvga or whatever) so we can create our own touch UI. Bluetooth support (for mouse/keyboard), power management, sound and hardware-accelerated h264 would also be essential. Is there any reason we can't create a Linux distro that literally replaces iOS, using the same techniques as the Jailbreak to get it up and running? Can anyone comment on whether it is just too hard because of the totally undocumented hardware, or are the components standard enough to make it feasible?
It's a risky strategy -- on the one hand they annoy people and prevent the service from growing at a super-fast rate. On the other hand, they know that people who really want in will find a way, and those that do will feel in a sense that they belong to a 'special club', and that may cement their loyalty to the service. They probably want to build a really deep fan base before they unleash it on the fickle farm-ville playing masses.
I was an early adopter of gmail, back in the limited beta days, and I'm still a huge fan now.
Agreed. I occasionally get caught out by an odd margin where I've not set the position attribute, or certain attributes that don't like percentages or have sane defaults, but I write a lot of stuff that needs to be standards + IE compatible, and it's not that difficult. You just need to learn the tricks of the trade, and that means practice/experience.
Yet another reason that users might think twice before depending on Facebook for photo storage.
Whenever I upload a photo to Facebook I am amazed at just how far they compresses and scale down the image. I get that they need to do it because it saves a monstrous amount of storage and bandwidth, and people browsing my photos don't really care about seeing the photos in high resolution, but I'd never, ever use Facebook as a photo storage -- to lose that fidelity is just not an option.
So I guess I don't get these stories where people throw their hands up and start crying that you can't trust Facebook to store your photos. It's like going back in time and saying I don't trust a bulletin board to store reprints of my 35mm photos. Of course you don't -- that's not the storage mechanism. My photo album is. In the Facebook case, your computer (or Picassa, or MobileMe, or whatever) is your album. Facebook is just a bulletin board.
Or did I just miss a checkbox somewhere that tells Facebook to store high quality/full sized copies of my photos?
Those points are all valid, but we're talking about the mid-term future here, not looking at things as they are right now. It just seems likely that once we have gigabit internet, we'll probably be using entire walls to watch TV, and we'll be wanting suitably high-definition video.
As for your other points, if the internet connection is so fast that it can download the entire stream in 15 seconds, skipping foward/backwards won't be a problem, nor will downloading it again. Besides, you could just save the stream. I just can't see any benefit in downloading it all in 15 seconds versus a slower stream as you watch -- not that I'm against downloading in 15 seconds. It's just an odd thing to bring up as a visionary, because it doesn't really improve my life in any way at all -- regardless of whether it streams or downloads in one chunk, it's still going to take me 100 minutes to watch the average film...
But people will just want to stream 1080p and then 2K and then 4K video so any increase in bandwidth will just get eaten up, just the same as it always has. And can somebody explain to me why downloading a video in 1 gigantic burst is better than streaming it at a more steady rate? Surely the same amount of data gets transferred either way -- packet headers and things might account for a small overhead, but that's nothing compared to the actual video data. Like I say, I might be missing something.
According to Wikipedia a Phoenix can rise from the ashes again and again. The future will be the same as the past...
Yep, and Phoenix Technologies will once again force that phoenix to change its name, just like they did the first version of Firefox (which was originally called Phoenix).
My first exposure to Linux was Slackware on a PC Pro cover disk in 1995. The magazine just bundled all of these disk images and packages on the CD, and in the magazine contents had a tiny entry for it that simply said "Slackware Linux version x.y." Then, in capital letters: "We recommend you do not install this. You will probably break your PC!". Well, of course, what could I do? With a warning like that I had to install it!
I re-partitioned the drive (600MB Windows, 200MB Linux) and spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to not permanently kill my monitor with the settings in xf86config (another dire warning message) and getting my modem to dial out by editing the networking config files.
The annoying thing is, once I did get it all working, I had nothing to do with it. All the packaged software was academic -- no word processors or any of the stuff I liked doing on computers back then (drawing, music, etc). I played reversi I think, used pine or elm of whatever, compiled a really simple c programme, and went back to Windows. I could see it was awesome, but as a 16 year old with no Linux using friends I couldn'y really make use of it back then. Looking back, I wish I'd learned C at that time. Learning C on Windows was impossible for me because compilers were too expensive. Ah well.
It has been really interesting to watch Linux grow and evolve over the years. I use it today mostly for serving Rails and Python apps.
I read somewhere (I forget where now, maybe John Gruber posted it) that when Steve Jobs said that on stage, it was literally the first that most of the FaceTime engineers knew about it, so they literally were 'starting' the day after. I hope they open it up, including the directory (so third party systems can call the Apple registered users), but I don't suppose they'll go that far
Could well be running on OS X -- I believe iTunes and the Apple store is running on WebObjects. They may well be running some custom version of Darwin/BSD based on the Mach kernel that they use underneath OS X. It's all guess work though.
The people who benefit significantly from taller screens are mostly people reading books—a task for which a portrait mode display (such as an iPad) would be more appropriate.
And programmers, which is why we often lament the passage of 4:3 here on Slashdot. I still have a 20" HP 4:3 monitor on my desk that runs at 1600x1200 (and is matte). I love it, but I realize that I really am not representative of the wider population and I can quite easily see why it was replaced by the wide screens. In terms of quality, it can't hold a candle to my iMac's glossy 20" display from 3 or 4 years ago, and I personally have no problem with glossy screens - especially because LED back-lights are more than bright enough to overcome any glare.
OK, maybe you just didn't understand the intent of my post, but my point is that Linux is far easier to admin than Windows because of things like SSH, and that is why it scales better. Look at rails; cap deploy. blam. You can't do that on Windows because you don't have scp. What about installing a one-off SQL server? Damn, looks like you'll be logging on to install that over remote desktop. What about proxying web requests over AJP or whatever with rules so it only applies to certain paths? I'd rather configure Apache to do that than IIS. What about installing software updates vs. yum/apt?
Look, I'm MCSE certified (from years ago before programming fully took over my life), so I know my way around Windows Server pretty well. I also work with Linux/Mac/BSD a lot too. In my experience, *nix is far easier to manage and that is why it is more scalable. That's why nearly every major site (that isn't Microsoft) runs on stuff that isn't Windows Server. There are obvious exceptions (like stackoverflow), just not all that many.
This is just my opinion, but I have more direct experience of both systems than a lot of people so I like to think I'm in a good place to at least offer an opinion.
And P.S., PowerShell does NOT offer the same features as SSH, they are totally different things. SSH is a secure tunnelling protocol, PowerShell is a shell. Obviously one of the things you do with SSH is access the shell, but to say Powershell provides the same features as SSH is plain wrong. Unless I'm missing something? Can I do the equivalent of scp over Powershell? What about public key authentication?
I'm a programmer who runs Windows and *nix servers, and I can tell you that Windows Server doesn't scale as well as *nix in reality, and that there are some major differences -- the main one being lack of SSH on Windows. SSH is just the most incredible thing - It opens up so many options for automation and security that I can't even begin to imagine running a serious size farm on Windows any more. Thanks to MS' pig-headed we'd-rather-die-than-use-an-existing-open-source-alternative, Windows Server is now lagging a long way behind Linux/BSD/Unix.
Cygwin isn't the answer, and neither is Powershell (another demonstration of MS' NIH syndrome), though powershell may eventually prove quite useful, right now it's just a verbose pain in the ass that makes setting up some stuff much harder than it used to be.
Sure, either system can perform well enough that they can run demanding sites and databases, but the supporting tools make all the difference, and Linux/*nix wins hands down there. Remote desktop is the very worst way to manage a server in this day and age.
I may be wrong here, but I think the optical stuff lives in the connector with lightpeak. That means you can plug an optical cable in to your existing thunderbolt ports and see the same benefits (i.e, it jumps to 10Gbps capable and runs over a good distance) -- once the cables and supporting hardware arrive. That's my understanding, though I haven't paid much attention.
No, not the basic run-time environment for desktops. I can't tell you exactly off the top of my head, but I'm sure it's no more than 100MB. The.NET 2.0 runtime redistributable was about 25MB. Same for the Java JRE, which expands to around 70MB.
I vaguely remember writing something at school in the 80's (on the school's single BBC Micro that got wheeled around between classrooms on a trolley) that may well have been intended for this project. Seeing this does ring a bell.
Anyway, anything I wrote as a child in the 1980's certainly wouldn't be worth reading today.
Slashdot Mirror
Doom 3 was August 2004, XP was summer 2001. Windows 98 would have been 6 years old by then.
I agree that it's annoying when old software stops working and new software doesn't work, but it's impossible to maintain software and backwards compatibility for ever, and I think the balance we have is just about right.
I just ran it on my iPad and it does indeed work well. The Jailbreak guys (Comex et al) do an incredible job, and I'm really glad that they do it (because it reminds everyone that you DO own your own hardware), but I'm seeing less and less reason to Jailbreak these days.
It has been about 3 years since I last Jailbroke an iPhone. Back then, it was almost essential -- you got some serious additional functionality that wasn't in iOS. Coming back to it now, I'm not so sure. Cydia is pretty slick, but iOS is a completely different kettle of fish. I was quite surprised at how many apps cost actual money -- the spirit of hackers sharing for the sake of hacking has almost totally gone, and now you're expected to spend a few dollars on the best of the little tweaks. For example, an app that can record an AVI of your screen (useful for creating tutorials) costs $5. It's not a bad price, I admit, but it's not what I was expecting. If more of the best Cydia apps were free, I expect there would be far more jailbreaking.
Sadly, the two things I was most interested in -- terminal/bash and ruby -- appear to be poorly maintained and are in a pretty unusable state. Ruby 1.9.2p0 is in Cydia, but when I ran it I got a dyld error about a missing symbol. There's no way that's going to work. The MobileTerminal app crashed too, but I got around it by installing openssh and sshing in to the console through prompt. It was slow (I think OpenSSL is slow on the ARM chip -- or maybe it's just prompt) and pointless (without Ruby/git).
It has been nice to take a look at the state of the Jailbreak scene, but I don't think I'll bother keeping it. It did make me think about what I would like to do with my iPad, if I could (I would like the ability to install a console, a compiler, ruby, vim, sqlite and so on). I would quite like Linux on my iPad. Having XWindows isn't important, though some sort of graphics system would be nice (based on libsvga or whatever) so we can create our own touch UI. Bluetooth support (for mouse/keyboard), power management, sound and hardware-accelerated h264 would also be essential. Is there any reason we can't create a Linux distro that literally replaces iOS, using the same techniques as the Jailbreak to get it up and running? Can anyone comment on whether it is just too hard because of the totally undocumented hardware, or are the components standard enough to make it feasible?
It's a risky strategy -- on the one hand they annoy people and prevent the service from growing at a super-fast rate. On the other hand, they know that people who really want in will find a way, and those that do will feel in a sense that they belong to a 'special club', and that may cement their loyalty to the service. They probably want to build a really deep fan base before they unleash it on the fickle farm-ville playing masses.
I was an early adopter of gmail, back in the limited beta days, and I'm still a huge fan now.
That's OK, we Brits have a solution for that problem too -- lots and lots of speed cameras and some really evil traffic wardens!
I'm British, so maybe I'm biased, but I'm pretty sure that roundabouts do not increase taxes. Seems like an odd claim to make.
FWIW, roundabouts aren't really that difficult to use. You just drive round them.
Agreed. I occasionally get caught out by an odd margin where I've not set the position attribute, or certain attributes that don't like percentages or have sane defaults, but I write a lot of stuff that needs to be standards + IE compatible, and it's not that difficult. You just need to learn the tricks of the trade, and that means practice/experience.
Yet another reason that users might think twice before depending on Facebook for photo storage.
Whenever I upload a photo to Facebook I am amazed at just how far they compresses and scale down the image. I get that they need to do it because it saves a monstrous amount of storage and bandwidth, and people browsing my photos don't really care about seeing the photos in high resolution, but I'd never, ever use Facebook as a photo storage -- to lose that fidelity is just not an option.
So I guess I don't get these stories where people throw their hands up and start crying that you can't trust Facebook to store your photos. It's like going back in time and saying I don't trust a bulletin board to store reprints of my 35mm photos. Of course you don't -- that's not the storage mechanism. My photo album is. In the Facebook case, your computer (or Picassa, or MobileMe, or whatever) is your album. Facebook is just a bulletin board.
Or did I just miss a checkbox somewhere that tells Facebook to store high quality/full sized copies of my photos?
Those points are all valid, but we're talking about the mid-term future here, not looking at things as they are right now. It just seems likely that once we have gigabit internet, we'll probably be using entire walls to watch TV, and we'll be wanting suitably high-definition video.
As for your other points, if the internet connection is so fast that it can download the entire stream in 15 seconds, skipping foward/backwards won't be a problem, nor will downloading it again. Besides, you could just save the stream. I just can't see any benefit in downloading it all in 15 seconds versus a slower stream as you watch -- not that I'm against downloading in 15 seconds. It's just an odd thing to bring up as a visionary, because it doesn't really improve my life in any way at all -- regardless of whether it streams or downloads in one chunk, it's still going to take me 100 minutes to watch the average film...
But people will just want to stream 1080p and then 2K and then 4K video so any increase in bandwidth will just get eaten up, just the same as it always has. And can somebody explain to me why downloading a video in 1 gigantic burst is better than streaming it at a more steady rate? Surely the same amount of data gets transferred either way -- packet headers and things might account for a small overhead, but that's nothing compared to the actual video data. Like I say, I might be missing something.
You spoke and they listened! Behold:
http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Home.aspx
Unfortunately, I binned my collection of INPUT magazines and I never could afford the Amiga SDK anyway...
It's a $50 add-on (also in the app store), according to Apple's website.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/
Seems fair, if an easy-to-use Unix server is what you're after.
According to Wikipedia a Phoenix can rise from the ashes again and again. The future will be the same as the past...
Yep, and Phoenix Technologies will once again force that phoenix to change its name, just like they did the first version of Firefox (which was originally called Phoenix).
And it's exactly the reason I did try Linux!
My first exposure to Linux was Slackware on a PC Pro cover disk in 1995. The magazine just bundled all of these disk images and packages on the CD, and in the magazine contents had a tiny entry for it that simply said "Slackware Linux version x.y." Then, in capital letters: "We recommend you do not install this. You will probably break your PC!". Well, of course, what could I do? With a warning like that I had to install it!
I re-partitioned the drive (600MB Windows, 200MB Linux) and spent a huge amount of time trying to figure out how to not permanently kill my monitor with the settings in xf86config (another dire warning message) and getting my modem to dial out by editing the networking config files.
The annoying thing is, once I did get it all working, I had nothing to do with it. All the packaged software was academic -- no word processors or any of the stuff I liked doing on computers back then (drawing, music, etc). I played reversi I think, used pine or elm of whatever, compiled a really simple c programme, and went back to Windows. I could see it was awesome, but as a 16 year old with no Linux using friends I couldn'y really make use of it back then. Looking back, I wish I'd learned C at that time. Learning C on Windows was impossible for me because compilers were too expensive. Ah well.
It has been really interesting to watch Linux grow and evolve over the years. I use it today mostly for serving Rails and Python apps.
I read somewhere (I forget where now, maybe John Gruber posted it) that when Steve Jobs said that on stage, it was literally the first that most of the FaceTime engineers knew about it, so they literally were 'starting' the day after. I hope they open it up, including the directory (so third party systems can call the Apple registered users), but I don't suppose they'll go that far
Could well be running on OS X -- I believe iTunes and the Apple store is running on WebObjects. They may well be running some custom version of Darwin/BSD based on the Mach kernel that they use underneath OS X. It's all guess work though.
Maybe he's the guy that got arrested.
The people who benefit significantly from taller screens are mostly people reading books—a task for which a portrait mode display (such as an iPad) would be more appropriate.
And programmers, which is why we often lament the passage of 4:3 here on Slashdot. I still have a 20" HP 4:3 monitor on my desk that runs at 1600x1200 (and is matte). I love it, but I realize that I really am not representative of the wider population and I can quite easily see why it was replaced by the wide screens. In terms of quality, it can't hold a candle to my iMac's glossy 20" display from 3 or 4 years ago, and I personally have no problem with glossy screens - especially because LED back-lights are more than bright enough to overcome any glare.
OK, maybe you just didn't understand the intent of my post, but my point is that Linux is far easier to admin than Windows because of things like SSH, and that is why it scales better. Look at rails; cap deploy. blam. You can't do that on Windows because you don't have scp. What about installing a one-off SQL server? Damn, looks like you'll be logging on to install that over remote desktop. What about proxying web requests over AJP or whatever with rules so it only applies to certain paths? I'd rather configure Apache to do that than IIS. What about installing software updates vs. yum/apt?
Look, I'm MCSE certified (from years ago before programming fully took over my life), so I know my way around Windows Server pretty well. I also work with Linux/Mac/BSD a lot too. In my experience, *nix is far easier to manage and that is why it is more scalable. That's why nearly every major site (that isn't Microsoft) runs on stuff that isn't Windows Server. There are obvious exceptions (like stackoverflow), just not all that many.
This is just my opinion, but I have more direct experience of both systems than a lot of people so I like to think I'm in a good place to at least offer an opinion.
And P.S., PowerShell does NOT offer the same features as SSH, they are totally different things. SSH is a secure tunnelling protocol, PowerShell is a shell. Obviously one of the things you do with SSH is access the shell, but to say Powershell provides the same features as SSH is plain wrong. Unless I'm missing something? Can I do the equivalent of scp over Powershell? What about public key authentication?
I'm a programmer who runs Windows and *nix servers, and I can tell you that Windows Server doesn't scale as well as *nix in reality, and that there are some major differences -- the main one being lack of SSH on Windows. SSH is just the most incredible thing - It opens up so many options for automation and security that I can't even begin to imagine running a serious size farm on Windows any more. Thanks to MS' pig-headed we'd-rather-die-than-use-an-existing-open-source-alternative, Windows Server is now lagging a long way behind Linux/BSD/Unix.
Cygwin isn't the answer, and neither is Powershell (another demonstration of MS' NIH syndrome), though powershell may eventually prove quite useful, right now it's just a verbose pain in the ass that makes setting up some stuff much harder than it used to be.
Sure, either system can perform well enough that they can run demanding sites and databases, but the supporting tools make all the difference, and Linux/*nix wins hands down there. Remote desktop is the very worst way to manage a server in this day and age.
I may be wrong here, but I think the optical stuff lives in the connector with lightpeak. That means you can plug an optical cable in to your existing thunderbolt ports and see the same benefits (i.e, it jumps to 10Gbps capable and runs over a good distance) -- once the cables and supporting hardware arrive. That's my understanding, though I haven't paid much attention.
Cyberduck for Mac. Flow is nice too, but doesn't support certificates.
No, not the basic run-time environment for desktops. I can't tell you exactly off the top of my head, but I'm sure it's no more than 100MB. The .NET 2.0 runtime redistributable was about 25MB. Same for the Java JRE, which expands to around 70MB.
And whether it cures or causes cancer.
They probably are Amazon Prime members now. You'll see the $79 fee appear on your next CC bill*
* assuming you own a PS3
I vaguely remember writing something at school in the 80's (on the school's single BBC Micro that got wheeled around between classrooms on a trolley) that may well have been intended for this project. Seeing this does ring a bell.
Anyway, anything I wrote as a child in the 1980's certainly wouldn't be worth reading today.