It does. It keeps quite a lot of bad drivers off the road. It just doesn't stop all of them.
If anyone, with no prior knowledge, was allowed on public roads and highways... don't you think things would be much worse than they are now with licenses?
That was my thought. Given the "experts" that groups like the RIAA use, having a license on someone that could be pulled to prevent them from continuing to work in that field seems like a good thing.
Maybe it should be a separate license. Maybe it should be a special add on class (PI + C for Private Investigator + Computer Specialty). But it's good it's SOMETHING. Someone who doesn't know what they are doing can not only cause big problems (enrage a spouse leading to anything from unnecessary worry to violence), but they could easily destroy evidence for someone who does know what they are doing making it useless in court.
Part of it is how ingrained in free software you are. I don't use much outside of Mail and Safari, where I spend 90+% of my time. I don't mind paying for a few little things. If you are really heavy into using 20+ different programs, your experience may vary. I spent time using Macs for a few years before I moved to the PC during the Windows 3.1 days, so many Macisms were familiar to me already.
Now onto some other things. To kill an app you can go to terminal, but that's not Mac like. You can choose "Force Quit" from the apple menu, click-and-hold/right-click on the dock icon and chose "Force Quit", or press Command-Option-Escape to bring up the Force Quit dialog. Unfortunately those of us who spent time in OS 7 and it's friends have that one memorized.
Moving and copying files isn't bad for the most part. I can rename them easily (when select, hit enter to edit the file name). In 10.5, when you rename a file by default it selects the entire file name except the extension and period before it. This is very handy, I don't know why someone else didn't think of it before. I can easily change things, but if I don't want to (like most of the time when I just want to change "DSC1023.jpg" into "Macro shot of flowers.jpg") it's very nice.
I understand your point of view. While going through my switch I still had to make use of Office. I use Quicken to manage my finances and didn't want to switch that too.
OS X isn't for everyone, but a large number of people who's only option would have been Linux or BSD a few years ago has a new option that they may consider superior (as it seems to be for my style of use).
I liked Linux and was slowly switching until I got to see how nice OS X was and became (as it was released/updated). There is a very good chance I spent most of my time on Linux at this point if it wasn't for OS X. My brother is probably the same was, as are many others in small IT department I work at. OS X provides us the unixy goodness we love (command line and such), with a great GUI that's easy to use and commercial software and things "just working". I've been on a Mac for a few years now, yet I still discover nice little things (like my Mac keeps separate mute statuses for when I have headphones plugged in and not plugged in, so it adjusts automatically as soon as I plug my headphones in.)
If you are not a hardcore FOSS person who wants the source to everything they run... OS X provides a fantastic environment for a great many people.
I figured it was a movie reference (after all, it said Mel Gibson), but I'll admit I didn't get it. But I responded with some other books that would be more worrying... and Yertle the Turtle. I took a chance.
I could do the same thing if I used a Comcast box, but they're crud and I don't want one. But having one of those means you get a selection of what they want. I want a selection of what Netflix has now. I want it integrated with my queue, so I don't lose all the time and planning that went into that. I want it to use the Netflix model so I can watch 12 things in a weekend if I can turn 'em over fast enough, or watch 1 a month, all for the same monthly fee. I don't want to mess with the "this content is free, this is $2" stuff. I don't want to re-create my queue somewhere else. I wan exactly what I have with DVDs, but without the physical media.
Just please let me do this on my TiVo, my Series 3. I don't want to watch movies on my laptop (especially if you make me use Windows to do it, I'm a Mac guy). I don't want to watch them on my iPod (mine can't play movies, but if I want to watch a movie on the go I'll stick a DVD in my MacBook Pro). I don't care about DRM that only lets me have 3 DVD at a time (ala the current subscription model I use on Netflix). It's OK if I can't transfer it between TiVos, or copy it do my computer. I really don't care.
Just let me download and watch movies and TV shows to my TiVo. Like Amazon Unbox, but tied to my Netflix queue and subscription model. Unbox looks nice enough, but I already pay Netflix, so I haven't really used it (my parents like it though).
It doesn't have to be HD. HD would be fantastic, but as long as it's 480p I'll be happy (since that fits with the DVDs I use now). Note that this doesn't mean 480p letter boxed that my TV can zoom, so I lose 150 lines to black bars, the wide screen content should be 480p tall.
Do that, I'll gladly sign up. I'll pay a tiny bit extra, say $1-2 per month on my Netflix account for the privilege. I would find this tremendously useful.
Netflix says they don't want a "Netflix Box", they want 100 of them. Good! Make the TiVo Series 3 one of them. I don't want another box either. I don't want to buy a new TV to get the functionality. I love my TiVo's UI, and I love Netflix's content. Please put them together. Make me a happy consumer.
The Silverlight part of the interface is almost wholly unnecessary. It's really nice to use, it's smooth, it's easy, and it's beautiful - but it's nothing that requires a RIA in the first place. Microsoft could have easily implemented the same user experience (give or take) with HTML + JavaScript/AJAX; with a lot less effort and greater compatibility.
That bit, the third numbered bullet, is what matters. They aren't doing something special, they are just forcing their technology on others because they can. Now I'm kind of interested in seeing what happens, because frankly I think MS's current site is a mess (I can never find what I'm looking for). But if they are going to push something like this they should go all out and demonstrate what it can do, not just use it in place of JavaScript (which they tried to replace with VBScript and failed) and AJAX (which they invented, to a degree).
He's coming back, and I can't wait, but I think Stewart's version of straight news would be too depressing.
What I find so ironic is that this strike knocked my two main sources of news off TV, thus reducing the amount of coverage I've heard about it to what NPR did (which has died down now that the strike has been on for so long). A few weeks ago I realized I didn't even know if the strike was over or not and I had to go look it up.
For the most part I agree. Kurt Cobain had a decent following and was becoming very popular and influential (from what I understand). It really wasn't covered at all. You can make an argument for that (like you did, and I largely agree that celebrities shouldn't be covered). But ABC did decided to cover him... not through a real piece, or a little 1 hour documentary, but through insulting him as a joke for Andy Roony.
I get my news from John Steward, Steven Colbert, NPR, and the 'net. The first two are funny and cover a good mix of stuff. NPR does a pretty good job on the whole, with much better coverage of world events and more interesting in depth stories than I'd get from my other sources. The 'net supplements everything with tons of detailed coverage of the things that I care quite a bit about (like technology) that would include topics too esoteric for more mainstream coverage.
But many evenings I'll watch 15 minutes or so of news while I'm cooking or eating dinner. I watch NBC, ABC, or CBS. Local or national, whichever is on. It never ceases to amaze me just how BAD it is. The reporting on local events doesn't cover much, except to say there was a fire here or a robbery here. The national news tends to cover celebrity junk, or the war (which they cover very poorly, no matter which side you're on). The best thing I've seen in a long time was CBS's recent series on where our tax dollars went, and just how many earmarks and pork there was last year. But this was one little 5 minute segment on the evening news. It wasn't longer. They didn't call for action. Just a quick "congress is wasting your tax dollars, oh well."
I remember once, a few years ago, Charlie Gibson did some little piece that was probably supposed to be fluff for Good Morning America. And in the middle of the piece he just asked this really insightful hardball question to the person. It made the Daily Show because it was such a perfect "gotcha" moment. And it just makes you wonder... Charlie seems like a nice guy but if he can do that kind of reporting, why is he just doing fluff on the morning show... competing with the likes of Regis and Kelly (who don't pretend to be news).
Every now and then, I'll hear a fantastic report on NPR. It will tell me more than I ever knew about some event that I'd already heard about earlier from other outlets; and I'll gain a real understanding. It may be just some little human interest type story, but something that's actually interesting about a little town or business and what's going on there. The "Grandma Smith's cat traveled 80 miles to come back home" type stories get, at most, a 5 second mention to fill time in a group of little tidbits.
And then, once in a long time, one of the reporters on Morning Edition will say something funny. Something I didn't expect, and hilarious. Not some bad joke anyone could have written. Not some forced line. Something that's actually funny. Like a few months ago when there was some story about Moree Eels, and they broke out into a version of "That's Amore" (which got posted in the comments here on/.) that made me just break out laughing. They're willing to take a few risks now and then that no TV network will.
To say nothing about their other programming. Where is network TV's version of All Things Considered, Science Friday, Talk of the Nation, or any of NPR's other news-type programs.
At this point, watching the main networks is just kind of depressing, making me pitty how bad they have become. You'll see people like Rather talk about trying to be Cronkite, and you just wonder how little Cronkite or some of those other older authoritative voices would think of how bad things are now.
I agree. I read most of his rant. It's a lot of him being full of himself, holier than thou, and general bitching. Even seen through the filter of someone who is so mad that they want to strangle someone, it's ranty.
That said, there were two things in the article that grabbed me. One was when the other guy who was arguing with him deleted the autoconf file. I'll agree with him that's just pathetic.
The second was what you quoted.
We're a little shop. One of our main boxes has been up for most of a year. The others have been up for 9 months, and that is because we got the boxes 9 months ago. Our main applications don't need restarting... ever. The only real restart we do is because after 10-20 updates Java runs out of permgen space (where it stores class information, roughly). We restart the JVM and it's good for quite a while longer. If we didn't make updates for customers, would should be able to keep our software up nearly perpetually. We've fixed every leak we could find (and some that should never happen).
We're a little company (compared to everyone from Microsoft and IBM to smaller 200 man outfits). I'm important, because I'm one of only a few IT personnel. Where IBM wouldn't be hit hard if it had to fire one person, that's not as true in smaller companies like mine. If I put something on the server that required us to reboot the application once a day and I thought that was OK, I'd probably be fired (or at least deserved it). I can't even imagine having an average uptime for my app of 4 minutes. Forget production applications, I can't imagine having some little crazy one-off project I made handle that poorly. I've made some bad code for personal projects, but not to that degree.
Some of our people have looked into Ruby and Rails. They liked it, and it was nice. But the last time they looked it had serious problems scaling to the levels that we would need (I think there is a global interpreter, like Python, right?). It's neat, and we may use it for some smaller projects, but it just wasn't there for large stuff (not that we'd rewrite out main apps in Ruby just for the fun of it).
But reading that section really made my head spin. 4 MINUTES???
The Nano has a chip that accelerates (or, more probably, completely does) decoding of H.264. I don't know if the Wii has a chip to do that or not. If the Wii has the requisite chip, then as long as you stay within the chip's specs it would have no problem. If it doesn't or your video doesn't fit the specs (bitrate too high, for example) it's be on the CPU. My guess is that the CPU couldn't play full screen video (My PowerBook G4 1.67 had trouble playing back anything above 640x480 H.264, so I wouldn't think the Wii would be able to well). Now you could play lower resolution stuff and stretch it up to size with the graphics chip, but that wouldn't be the same thing.
The CPU in a Nano (or most any iPod) would fall flat on it's face trying to decode most any video format (except perhaps RLE) at it's native resolution.
I've fiddled with the GBA and I'm looking into the DS. I haven't done any of the home consoles. I've done stuff on my Mac and on PCs for years and years and years, from native to Java. I've even fiddled with TI calculators.
It's just a different experience. There is no challenge in making a Mario style game on the PC. On a system that is more constrained (like a handheld) there is challenge. There are other attributes as well. I can take a game I make for the DS with me easily, where my Mac is a little heavier. The DS has a great touchscreen, which my computer doesn't. I have a tablet, but it's not the same.
Then there is just the style. On a PC you either write the frame buffer, use a library, or use OpenGL type stuff to display sprites. The DS and GBA (and others) have this in hardware. You put the X co-ord in one memory address, the Y in another, a few other little things and it displays it for you. You want a tile background? Just put tile numbers in this magic area of memory, your tiles here, and it will take care of that for you, scrolling too.
It is a very different challenge
I'd like to make hardware too, but I don't know enough. Even if I did, I know there is no way I can make something as advanced as a GBA or a DS any time in the next decade.
I love the way they did, it shows good ingenuity. If you watch the video, they explain that they can get into GameCube compatibility mode (what is used for GC style home brew) but that the ATI chip acts as a gateway to the extended RAM and other new neat stuff (SD card slot, BlueTooth, etc.).
By physically tying address lines on the memory chips, they could circumvent the address lock and read areas of memory they shouldn't be able to. Through this, they dumped the RAM though the controller ports (using them as serial ports) and were able to pick through it and start decoding it to find things like the signature that let them break out.
Very neat. I love reading about this kind of stuff.
It will be very interesting to see what people do with this. I never really heard about any interesting XBox homebrew, just running Linux and XBMC type stuff. Ditto with the 'cube. But the Wii should prove interesting.
Ditto. I got a 360 in mid December or so. XBox Live has been flakey since the day I got it. Sometimes you couldn't log in, sometimes you couldn't get to the marketplace. Just problems and more problems. I was worried that I would be missing something not paying for Live Gold, now I'm glad I didn't. The Christmas set only made things worse.
My last experience with XBL was in '04-'05 after Halo 2 came out. That was the last time I used the service and it worked fantastically then. This kind of thing didn't happen then.
I can't say all this surprises me too much. I've ran into more than a few questionable design choices on the 360.
I hope they get things working better. All they did was reassure me in my decision not to pay them for their "service".
What I meant is that it's not Ubuntu with green wallpaper, they changed the desktop environment so it doesn't work as well. It wasn't stock. You're right it's Ubuntu based, that I didn't remember. But it doesn't sound like the setup improved Ubuntu by any stretch, it went the other way.
That's what he said. For the amount of hassles, it might be worth it if you can afford it. I agree that doubling the price is high. He should have pointed out a $300 box from somewhere, that would have been more fair.
So many people are jumping all over this as if PC Mac is just knocking something because it's not Windows. I'm not a big fan, I do think they are biased (read their Mac reviews, they say nice things then seem to try to find reasons to knock the score down). But based on what he encountered, the score seems fair.
A major selling point of this is that it is cheap and his first recommendation is buying something more than twice as expensive.
Because the thing that he is reviewing doesn't work well. He is suggesting spending a little more for something better. The Vista bit is because there isn't much that has Linux pre-installed, and because Vista software is available at your local store, unlike Linux stuff.
The thing uses less energy than most other systems, he says so himself, so he complains that this fact is not certified.
Their "look at us we're green" thing strikes me a shady, and I think that's what he was getting at. It's like something that they noticed it technically qualified as so they started trumpeting it as a design decision to appeal to morons who only want to buy "green" stuff.
So now you are better off buying an underpowered Vista machine at twice the price or taking Linux off this box and replacing it with a buggy windows product.
The Vista machine will have software at your local store, and be supportable by many people. That's not going to be true with this box. Vista sounds much more thought-out than this (sad), there are books on how use Vista, but not gOS. The one thing I'll give you on this is I think he should have mentioned something along the line of "If you buy this and replace the OS with Ubuntu, it would be a 3."
He had to change the monitor resolution. That's rough. He had to install Flash and had choices that confused him
Yes, because grandma will love everything looking funny and stretchy. The fact that the change wouldn't even stick over reboots is problematic. Flash is just about required to use the 'net these days for basic things many users want (YouTube, MySpace, many companies sites) and the trouble he had installing it is what your non-computer savvy buyer will have tons of trouble with.
Wow - that's almost like investigative reporting. It's a web-based PC?
That's an important point. Many people aren't going to know that they can't buy this thing then walk down to Office Max and buy a copy of program X and expect to have it work. Most people have the "a computer is a computer" attitude, except for Macs (which they seem to have learned can't talk to PCs at all, ignoring the errors there). "If it's not a Mac, it should work with everything out there" seems to be the theory that novice computer users will have, and that attitude will cause them problems with this computer.
I got the feeling that he would have given it a much higher rating if the OS didn't have so many problems. I don't think he's ragging on the computer as much as the poorly thought out OS setup.
Go actually read the review. It's perfectly worthwhile. The machine is not going to be fast (Via CPUs can't compete clock for clock), and it doesn't run Ubuntu, it runs gOS, which is some little custom distro that sounds full of "fun" quirks.
I thought this was a pretty good review. While some of it may not matter, I think their points about installing Flash and the inconsistencies in the OS (like the Google search on the desktop) are very insightful, and the kind of thing that would drive Grandma mad. Same think with the broadband/modem bit (where the modem doesn't even work).
It sounds like a weak piece of hardware (mostly the CPU, a used P3 or P4 would do you better, probably) with a sad OS. If you bought the thing and then immediately put Ubuntu or Debian on, it sounds like it might make 2.5 or 3 stars. Their point of saving up an extra $100 to get a much better box seems like quite sound advice to me.
I would think that there would be multiple types on the larger models (like the MacBook Pros). At least SD and CF (which I think would be the two most common). On a smaller model the like MacBook, they could put just SD (which seems to be the most common on small cameras today) or xD (which is becoming more popular).
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I would have thought he would have had a much lower UID.
Or did you lose your password a few times Bill?
I've got a PSP "Phat", and I couldn't care less.
That said. Let's look at the evidence.
It's the return of... sidetalkin'!
It does. It keeps quite a lot of bad drivers off the road. It just doesn't stop all of them.
If anyone, with no prior knowledge, was allowed on public roads and highways... don't you think things would be much worse than they are now with licenses?
That was my thought. Given the "experts" that groups like the RIAA use, having a license on someone that could be pulled to prevent them from continuing to work in that field seems like a good thing.
Maybe it should be a separate license. Maybe it should be a special add on class (PI + C for Private Investigator + Computer Specialty). But it's good it's SOMETHING. Someone who doesn't know what they are doing can not only cause big problems (enrage a spouse leading to anything from unnecessary worry to violence), but they could easily destroy evidence for someone who does know what they are doing making it useless in court.
Part of it is how ingrained in free software you are. I don't use much outside of Mail and Safari, where I spend 90+% of my time. I don't mind paying for a few little things. If you are really heavy into using 20+ different programs, your experience may vary. I spent time using Macs for a few years before I moved to the PC during the Windows 3.1 days, so many Macisms were familiar to me already.
Now onto some other things. To kill an app you can go to terminal, but that's not Mac like. You can choose "Force Quit" from the apple menu, click-and-hold/right-click on the dock icon and chose "Force Quit", or press Command-Option-Escape to bring up the Force Quit dialog. Unfortunately those of us who spent time in OS 7 and it's friends have that one memorized.
Moving and copying files isn't bad for the most part. I can rename them easily (when select, hit enter to edit the file name). In 10.5, when you rename a file by default it selects the entire file name except the extension and period before it. This is very handy, I don't know why someone else didn't think of it before. I can easily change things, but if I don't want to (like most of the time when I just want to change "DSC1023.jpg" into "Macro shot of flowers.jpg") it's very nice.
I understand your point of view. While going through my switch I still had to make use of Office. I use Quicken to manage my finances and didn't want to switch that too.
OS X isn't for everyone, but a large number of people who's only option would have been Linux or BSD a few years ago has a new option that they may consider superior (as it seems to be for my style of use).
I liked Linux and was slowly switching until I got to see how nice OS X was and became (as it was released/updated). There is a very good chance I spent most of my time on Linux at this point if it wasn't for OS X. My brother is probably the same was, as are many others in small IT department I work at. OS X provides us the unixy goodness we love (command line and such), with a great GUI that's easy to use and commercial software and things "just working". I've been on a Mac for a few years now, yet I still discover nice little things (like my Mac keeps separate mute statuses for when I have headphones plugged in and not plugged in, so it adjusts automatically as soon as I plug my headphones in.)
If you are not a hardcore FOSS person who wants the source to everything they run... OS X provides a fantastic environment for a great many people.
I figured it was a movie reference (after all, it said Mel Gibson), but I'll admit I didn't get it. But I responded with some other books that would be more worrying... and Yertle the Turtle. I took a chance.
I'd be much more worried about buying the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, The Anarchist's Cookbook, or Yertle the Turtle than Cather in the Rye.
I could do the same thing if I used a Comcast box, but they're crud and I don't want one. But having one of those means you get a selection of what they want. I want a selection of what Netflix has now. I want it integrated with my queue, so I don't lose all the time and planning that went into that. I want it to use the Netflix model so I can watch 12 things in a weekend if I can turn 'em over fast enough, or watch 1 a month, all for the same monthly fee. I don't want to mess with the "this content is free, this is $2" stuff. I don't want to re-create my queue somewhere else. I wan exactly what I have with DVDs, but without the physical media.
Just please let me do this on my TiVo, my Series 3. I don't want to watch movies on my laptop (especially if you make me use Windows to do it, I'm a Mac guy). I don't want to watch them on my iPod (mine can't play movies, but if I want to watch a movie on the go I'll stick a DVD in my MacBook Pro). I don't care about DRM that only lets me have 3 DVD at a time (ala the current subscription model I use on Netflix). It's OK if I can't transfer it between TiVos, or copy it do my computer. I really don't care.
Just let me download and watch movies and TV shows to my TiVo. Like Amazon Unbox, but tied to my Netflix queue and subscription model. Unbox looks nice enough, but I already pay Netflix, so I haven't really used it (my parents like it though).
It doesn't have to be HD. HD would be fantastic, but as long as it's 480p I'll be happy (since that fits with the DVDs I use now). Note that this doesn't mean 480p letter boxed that my TV can zoom, so I lose 150 lines to black bars, the wide screen content should be 480p tall.
Do that, I'll gladly sign up. I'll pay a tiny bit extra, say $1-2 per month on my Netflix account for the privilege. I would find this tremendously useful.
Netflix says they don't want a "Netflix Box", they want 100 of them. Good! Make the TiVo Series 3 one of them. I don't want another box either. I don't want to buy a new TV to get the functionality. I love my TiVo's UI, and I love Netflix's content. Please put them together. Make me a happy consumer.
That bit, the third numbered bullet, is what matters. They aren't doing something special, they are just forcing their technology on others because they can. Now I'm kind of interested in seeing what happens, because frankly I think MS's current site is a mess (I can never find what I'm looking for). But if they are going to push something like this they should go all out and demonstrate what it can do, not just use it in place of JavaScript (which they tried to replace with VBScript and failed) and AJAX (which they invented, to a degree).
He's coming back, and I can't wait, but I think Stewart's version of straight news would be too depressing.
What I find so ironic is that this strike knocked my two main sources of news off TV, thus reducing the amount of coverage I've heard about it to what NPR did (which has died down now that the strike has been on for so long). A few weeks ago I realized I didn't even know if the strike was over or not and I had to go look it up.
For the most part I agree. Kurt Cobain had a decent following and was becoming very popular and influential (from what I understand). It really wasn't covered at all. You can make an argument for that (like you did, and I largely agree that celebrities shouldn't be covered). But ABC did decided to cover him... not through a real piece, or a little 1 hour documentary, but through insulting him as a joke for Andy Roony.
I get my news from John Steward, Steven Colbert, NPR, and the 'net. The first two are funny and cover a good mix of stuff. NPR does a pretty good job on the whole, with much better coverage of world events and more interesting in depth stories than I'd get from my other sources. The 'net supplements everything with tons of detailed coverage of the things that I care quite a bit about (like technology) that would include topics too esoteric for more mainstream coverage.
But many evenings I'll watch 15 minutes or so of news while I'm cooking or eating dinner. I watch NBC, ABC, or CBS. Local or national, whichever is on. It never ceases to amaze me just how BAD it is. The reporting on local events doesn't cover much, except to say there was a fire here or a robbery here. The national news tends to cover celebrity junk, or the war (which they cover very poorly, no matter which side you're on). The best thing I've seen in a long time was CBS's recent series on where our tax dollars went, and just how many earmarks and pork there was last year. But this was one little 5 minute segment on the evening news. It wasn't longer. They didn't call for action. Just a quick "congress is wasting your tax dollars, oh well."
I remember once, a few years ago, Charlie Gibson did some little piece that was probably supposed to be fluff for Good Morning America. And in the middle of the piece he just asked this really insightful hardball question to the person. It made the Daily Show because it was such a perfect "gotcha" moment. And it just makes you wonder... Charlie seems like a nice guy but if he can do that kind of reporting, why is he just doing fluff on the morning show... competing with the likes of Regis and Kelly (who don't pretend to be news).
Every now and then, I'll hear a fantastic report on NPR. It will tell me more than I ever knew about some event that I'd already heard about earlier from other outlets; and I'll gain a real understanding. It may be just some little human interest type story, but something that's actually interesting about a little town or business and what's going on there. The "Grandma Smith's cat traveled 80 miles to come back home" type stories get, at most, a 5 second mention to fill time in a group of little tidbits.
And then, once in a long time, one of the reporters on Morning Edition will say something funny. Something I didn't expect, and hilarious. Not some bad joke anyone could have written. Not some forced line. Something that's actually funny. Like a few months ago when there was some story about Moree Eels, and they broke out into a version of "That's Amore" (which got posted in the comments here on /.) that made me just break out laughing. They're willing to take a few risks now and then that no TV network will.
To say nothing about their other programming. Where is network TV's version of All Things Considered, Science Friday, Talk of the Nation, or any of NPR's other news-type programs.
At this point, watching the main networks is just kind of depressing, making me pitty how bad they have become. You'll see people like Rather talk about trying to be Cronkite, and you just wonder how little Cronkite or some of those other older authoritative voices would think of how bad things are now.
I agree. I read most of his rant. It's a lot of him being full of himself, holier than thou, and general bitching. Even seen through the filter of someone who is so mad that they want to strangle someone, it's ranty.
That said, there were two things in the article that grabbed me. One was when the other guy who was arguing with him deleted the autoconf file. I'll agree with him that's just pathetic.
The second was what you quoted.
We're a little shop. One of our main boxes has been up for most of a year. The others have been up for 9 months, and that is because we got the boxes 9 months ago. Our main applications don't need restarting... ever. The only real restart we do is because after 10-20 updates Java runs out of permgen space (where it stores class information, roughly). We restart the JVM and it's good for quite a while longer. If we didn't make updates for customers, would should be able to keep our software up nearly perpetually. We've fixed every leak we could find (and some that should never happen).
We're a little company (compared to everyone from Microsoft and IBM to smaller 200 man outfits). I'm important, because I'm one of only a few IT personnel. Where IBM wouldn't be hit hard if it had to fire one person, that's not as true in smaller companies like mine. If I put something on the server that required us to reboot the application once a day and I thought that was OK, I'd probably be fired (or at least deserved it). I can't even imagine having an average uptime for my app of 4 minutes. Forget production applications, I can't imagine having some little crazy one-off project I made handle that poorly. I've made some bad code for personal projects, but not to that degree.
Some of our people have looked into Ruby and Rails. They liked it, and it was nice. But the last time they looked it had serious problems scaling to the levels that we would need (I think there is a global interpreter, like Python, right?). It's neat, and we may use it for some smaller projects, but it just wasn't there for large stuff (not that we'd rewrite out main apps in Ruby just for the fun of it).
But reading that section really made my head spin. 4 MINUTES???
There WAS a liquid sodium reactor in the US. The seals in the cooling system seals started to fail leading to severe consequences. See Wikipeida.
The Nano has a chip that accelerates (or, more probably, completely does) decoding of H.264. I don't know if the Wii has a chip to do that or not. If the Wii has the requisite chip, then as long as you stay within the chip's specs it would have no problem. If it doesn't or your video doesn't fit the specs (bitrate too high, for example) it's be on the CPU. My guess is that the CPU couldn't play full screen video (My PowerBook G4 1.67 had trouble playing back anything above 640x480 H.264, so I wouldn't think the Wii would be able to well). Now you could play lower resolution stuff and stretch it up to size with the graphics chip, but that wouldn't be the same thing.
The CPU in a Nano (or most any iPod) would fall flat on it's face trying to decode most any video format (except perhaps RLE) at it's native resolution.
I've fiddled with the GBA and I'm looking into the DS. I haven't done any of the home consoles. I've done stuff on my Mac and on PCs for years and years and years, from native to Java. I've even fiddled with TI calculators.
It's just a different experience. There is no challenge in making a Mario style game on the PC. On a system that is more constrained (like a handheld) there is challenge. There are other attributes as well. I can take a game I make for the DS with me easily, where my Mac is a little heavier. The DS has a great touchscreen, which my computer doesn't. I have a tablet, but it's not the same.
Then there is just the style. On a PC you either write the frame buffer, use a library, or use OpenGL type stuff to display sprites. The DS and GBA (and others) have this in hardware. You put the X co-ord in one memory address, the Y in another, a few other little things and it displays it for you. You want a tile background? Just put tile numbers in this magic area of memory, your tiles here, and it will take care of that for you, scrolling too.
It is a very different challenge
I'd like to make hardware too, but I don't know enough. Even if I did, I know there is no way I can make something as advanced as a GBA or a DS any time in the next decade.
I love the way they did, it shows good ingenuity. If you watch the video, they explain that they can get into GameCube compatibility mode (what is used for GC style home brew) but that the ATI chip acts as a gateway to the extended RAM and other new neat stuff (SD card slot, BlueTooth, etc.).
By physically tying address lines on the memory chips, they could circumvent the address lock and read areas of memory they shouldn't be able to. Through this, they dumped the RAM though the controller ports (using them as serial ports) and were able to pick through it and start decoding it to find things like the signature that let them break out.
Very neat. I love reading about this kind of stuff.
It will be very interesting to see what people do with this. I never really heard about any interesting XBox homebrew, just running Linux and XBMC type stuff. Ditto with the 'cube. But the Wii should prove interesting.
Ditto. I got a 360 in mid December or so. XBox Live has been flakey since the day I got it. Sometimes you couldn't log in, sometimes you couldn't get to the marketplace. Just problems and more problems. I was worried that I would be missing something not paying for Live Gold, now I'm glad I didn't. The Christmas set only made things worse.
My last experience with XBL was in '04-'05 after Halo 2 came out. That was the last time I used the service and it worked fantastically then. This kind of thing didn't happen then.
I can't say all this surprises me too much. I've ran into more than a few questionable design choices on the 360.
I hope they get things working better. All they did was reassure me in my decision not to pay them for their "service".
What I meant is that it's not Ubuntu with green wallpaper, they changed the desktop environment so it doesn't work as well. It wasn't stock. You're right it's Ubuntu based, that I didn't remember. But it doesn't sound like the setup improved Ubuntu by any stretch, it went the other way.
That's what he said. For the amount of hassles, it might be worth it if you can afford it. I agree that doubling the price is high. He should have pointed out a $300 box from somewhere, that would have been more fair.
So many people are jumping all over this as if PC Mac is just knocking something because it's not Windows. I'm not a big fan, I do think they are biased (read their Mac reviews, they say nice things then seem to try to find reasons to knock the score down). But based on what he encountered, the score seems fair.
Because the thing that he is reviewing doesn't work well. He is suggesting spending a little more for something better. The Vista bit is because there isn't much that has Linux pre-installed, and because Vista software is available at your local store, unlike Linux stuff.
Their "look at us we're green" thing strikes me a shady, and I think that's what he was getting at. It's like something that they noticed it technically qualified as so they started trumpeting it as a design decision to appeal to morons who only want to buy "green" stuff.
The Vista machine will have software at your local store, and be supportable by many people. That's not going to be true with this box. Vista sounds much more thought-out than this (sad), there are books on how use Vista, but not gOS. The one thing I'll give you on this is I think he should have mentioned something along the line of "If you buy this and replace the OS with Ubuntu, it would be a 3."
Yes, because grandma will love everything looking funny and stretchy. The fact that the change wouldn't even stick over reboots is problematic. Flash is just about required to use the 'net these days for basic things many users want (YouTube, MySpace, many companies sites) and the trouble he had installing it is what your non-computer savvy buyer will have tons of trouble with.
That's an important point. Many people aren't going to know that they can't buy this thing then walk down to Office Max and buy a copy of program X and expect to have it work. Most people have the "a computer is a computer" attitude, except for Macs (which they seem to have learned can't talk to PCs at all, ignoring the errors there). "If it's not a Mac, it should work with everything out there" seems to be the theory that novice computer users will have, and that attitude will cause them problems with this computer.
I got the feeling that he would have given it a much higher rating if the OS didn't have so many problems. I don't think he's ragging on the computer as much as the poorly thought out OS setup.
Go actually read the review. It's perfectly worthwhile. The machine is not going to be fast (Via CPUs can't compete clock for clock), and it doesn't run Ubuntu, it runs gOS, which is some little custom distro that sounds full of "fun" quirks.
I thought this was a pretty good review. While some of it may not matter, I think their points about installing Flash and the inconsistencies in the OS (like the Google search on the desktop) are very insightful, and the kind of thing that would drive Grandma mad. Same think with the broadband/modem bit (where the modem doesn't even work).
It sounds like a weak piece of hardware (mostly the CPU, a used P3 or P4 would do you better, probably) with a sad OS. If you bought the thing and then immediately put Ubuntu or Debian on, it sounds like it might make 2.5 or 3 stars. Their point of saving up an extra $100 to get a much better box seems like quite sound advice to me.
I would think that there would be multiple types on the larger models (like the MacBook Pros). At least SD and CF (which I think would be the two most common). On a smaller model the like MacBook, they could put just SD (which seems to be the most common on small cameras today) or xD (which is becoming more popular).