All the more reason to move to FBDIMMs. AMD would put one memory controller on their chips, and it would work with SD, DDR, DDR2, Rambus, XDR, or anything else someone wants to put on. Makes things easy. Becuase the physical interface is constant and buffered, you don't get the problems of needing a different socket for every kind of RAM out there.
Unfortunatly, no one seems to be pushing for this despite the headaches it would remove. All you'd have to do is make your memory controller able to recieve faster (like going from DDR333 to DDR400). Plus, with the memory not directly connected, memory makers would not only compete evenly (since the user wouldn't need to know the difference between DDR2 and XDR except speed and price), but they could add other things like an extra cache level in front of the memory just by replacing RAM. And it would mean that the computer you bought today would take the memory that was available 3 years from now. Right now SDRAM costs a FORTUNE. But if you had a computer that takes FBDIMMs, instead of paying $50 a stick for 256mb sticks, you could buy at the price of DDR today (say 512mb for $25 or whatever it is today).
Just think, you wouldn't need to buy new types of RAM for your PC every 2 years.
Ah, but you would have other problems blasting your nuclear waste. When it decays, it gives off radioactivity (hence the problem). But that is what lets it decay. If you could accelerate it, wouldn't you simply be causing a large burst of radioactive energy when you did it? Couldn't that be worse than buring it encased in lead in some anicent salt mines?
I mean, sure there are products (they probably showed them at the recent CES). But has anyone actually USED anything that has ZigBee in it? Is there some product that's "easy to find" (not horrifically obscure) that's available? Has anyone used ZigBee it's self or developed for it so they could give us impressions of it?
I mean it's interesting and all, but so was DataPlay (and we all know how many things with DataPlay we have in our houses).
Actually, you're both right and wrong. See my sibling post to yours for some more info.
There is some pain that is important to remember. It's VITAL to remember. This is stuff like knives are dangerous (learn this after a cut), a stove is hot (ouch!), it hurts having people piled on you (making it hard to breath), etc. All these things are important to remember for your survival. If you forgot that putting your hand on a stove hurt, how many times would you do that during your life? This is important stuff, so this comment's parrent is right.
At the same time there are things that are painfull that need to be forgotten. Some (like childbirth, mentioned in my other comment) could be a BIG problem if they were remembered. Others (highly traumatic events, abuse, serious car wrecks when you're bleeding on the pavement, etc) could prevent you from functioning if you remembered them. These things should, must, be forgotten to live a normal life. These things are fewer, and more likely to be emotional or abuse related.
As for "recovered memories", I agree completely. They are bogus, and very dangerous. There are some good books out there about the falacy's and dangers of recovered memories.
That's true, and I've heard it before. Many people remember traumatic events, and they remember that they WERE in pain, but they often don't remember the pain, or despite it's severity they don't "expiriance it" when they remember it.
This is very often true of pregnancy. I've been told (being a 21 year old guy, I'll never really know) that while childbirth is painful for humans (duh), women don't tend to remember it after childbirth. This is supposedly a genetic trait becuase otherwise women wouldn't be likely to have a second child, which could be bad for our species.
I had an operation when I was about 2 years old also. I remember (and will never forget) when I complained when my parrents bumped me when it hurt (which was the discover of the pain causing it). I remember being in the hospital bed. I also remember that they wouldn't let me leave either untill I could walk by myself (since I was mostly in the bed since the operation). I also (vaguely) remember being put to sleep before the operation.
I only remember one thing before that (my parrents painting the hallway), and a handfull after that but before I was 5 or so.
I have a TERRIBLE memory for many other things (especially names), but some things (even seemingly so insignificant) I remember. Very odd.
Of course memory it's self is odd. We don't remember things like we tend to think we do. It's not like a photograph or a movie. The brain remembers the things in the scene, and what they did, and recreates the pictures from that. Things we don't remember (like maybe exactly what someone was wearing) our brain makes up (maybe based on the thing the person wore most or clothes from another memory).
Start menu, - I'll give you that, although I wouldn't be suprised if there was prior evidence. Were people using the Apple menu on their Macs for launches back in '95 (I remember that being common later); because that would be about the same thing. I know I used the Apple menu just like a Start menu in '92.
mouse wheel - Page up and page down keys, placed on a mouse. That's what that was. Was it done before? I don't know, but I someone somewhere must have had a 5 button mouse and assigned 2 buttons to pageup and pagedown. They popularized it though.
control panel, - You're kidding right? MS didn't invent this. The Mac had this in '92 (for sure), and I'm pretty sure it had one back in '84 when it launched. In fact, there is a screenshot of the origional controll panel from the ORIGIONAL MacOS here.
MS didn't innovate many things, they just tooks things that looked good and used 'em. Just like KDE and Gnome. And how do you know the person who started a controll panel in KDE didn't do it because of the one in the Mac? You're an anti-MS troll. When Honda introduced the Odyssey, it had a fold down rear seat that would fold away. EVERYONE copied them because it was A GOOD IDEA. There is nothing wrong with copying GOOD IDEAS; or should every car compnay have to reinvent the wheel, the steering system, etc.
OK, time for a subthread of sorts. What's the last REAL innovative thing MS made.
I'll tell you. The last thing I can remember MS doing that I though was really great and hadn't seen before was the spellcheck as you type in Office 95 (the little squiggly red line). That was a fantastic feature. What have they done since then? Sure they have added features and such, but none of them (in ANY product) seems that innovative to me. Just "following the course". In reality, Office 95 would suit 95% of users (conservative guess). In fact, Office 95 was OVERKILL for 95% of users.
And "home" computers were $10,000 once. If I pay $10,000 for a computer, $500 seems reasonable for software. If a computer costs $1000, $50 seems reasonable for software. See a trend? They BOTH cost 10% of what they did.
BTW. Wordstar was $295, Word is $217. The 10% rule would put it at $30 (which would be reasonable), tripleing that would put it at $90 (Word is powerfull). Microsoft prices it at $217.
A computer that is THOUSANDS of times more powerful costs 1/20th what it did then. The leading wordprocessor costs 2/3rds. Yeah, software prices have declined.
PS: I know, buy Office and things are cheaper than buying individually, but the point is MS did not push down prices quite like you think.
This is true. Because MS moved in and grabbed market share, other companies that tried to stay in dropped their price. Horrah!
BUT... price isn't everything. Instead of having 3, 4, 5, or more products all competing against themselves and one-upping eachother for $60 each, you now have 2 products, at $50 each. Which is better?
Now certanly $50 is easier on your wallet. But what about the OTHER effects? MS products tend to rapidly get better untill they are better than everyone else and therefor "good enough". Then then stagnate. They stagnate like time stopped. So you have one product that's good enough, and another that will try to get better. But once that other product gets better, it will reach a point where it's better than MS's. Then what? Well since by now they probably have a much smaller market share, MS can sit by comfortably. Thus the second company doesn't have to work too hard because their product is already the superior. They can keep trying to make it MORE superior, but it probably won't change things. Firefox changed IE (a little), but that took HOW LONG? Things stagnated since IE 4 or 5 (and IE still has serious problems). And other than adding a popup blocker (which does work) and more warning dialogs (which never work), IE is the same. Consumers lost. Hopefully Firefox will get accepted enough for the cycle to repeat.
What about other products. How 'bout financial software. You have Quicken and Money for the home. That's it. Money works but I find a large number of annoyances in it (it's what I use). Quicken works, but I don't like it's interface at all (Money's is nicer IMHO). So I'm stuck choosing between the two. There is no third party to force them to improve against eachother, they are are usually considdered about the same quality (from ratings I remember seeing). No one will enter this market because it already has 2 juggernauts and they'll never get in (open source excepted). This isn't very good for the consumer.
Unless you use a Mac. If you use a Mac, MS doesn't MAKE Money for Mac. So you can choose between Quicken and... Quicken. What a buffet of options. Fantastic. The situation on the Mac is even worse (from what I know, there may be some other piece of software out there, but from my perspective (a rather highly educated consumer when it comes to computers) there are two options). And the Mac is considdered a small market with a monopoly product (Quicken) so no one will enter that market and provide competition. You just have to hope improves from Windows move over. And even if someone DOES enter the market, MS can always walk in and sell Money if they see you doing good, and you're gone. Quicken can survive, you little product probably won't.
I'll take $10 to $20 more and a better selection and more improvements from healthy competition over the cheaper stagnate price.
If that's all it takes to make things "better" for the consumer, lets have the Government make everything and sell one brand and price it 5% less than the old commercial products were. There will never be improvements, and quality will probably suffer without competition, but IT COSTS LESS!
Prices are better, quality isn't. And I contend that prices are better only through last ditch efforts to stay alive. If they little guys go out of business after MS enters a market and MS is left the only game in town with over 5% market share, they are free to never cut prices again or even raise them. Do you think Windows would cost $200-$300 per PC if MS had competition?
Well, my best suggestion would be to sell the stuff (eBay or a local shop) and use the money towards what you want.
That said, if you want to do it yourself, there is one thing I think would work reasonably. Now the cost of doing this might not be low. I don't know. Here we go:
There are tons of PLCs and ASICs and stuff on the 'net with lots of free code for 'em. There is free code to interface with memory modules so your chip could talk to ram and use it in a project. There is ALSO free code to talk to a hard drive (make a IDE interface) for your MP3 player or whatever. Now it seems that with all that documentation, it shouldn't be too hard to make a simple little state machine that translates incomming IDE requests to specific RAM addresses (a simple mapping from C/H/S or LBA to address should do it), fetch (or write) that data, and return it over the IDE interface (which you would have to make "backwards" from most on the web because you want to BE the HD, not talk to it).
I would think you could get some good speed out of that, shouldn't be hard to make it faster than a simple hard drive. The biggest problem would be that it would need to be partitioned and formatted at startup, but that could be easily done in a script (and it's not like it would take long if you skip bad block scans and such).
Someone may have already done this if you look hard enough.
So that's my suggestion. Would be a cool little project, and it shouldn't be hard to put as much RAM in as you want, you just have to multiplex it. The biggest problem would be refreshing all that RAM if you multiplex it. But those are problems for you to solve. Now if you DO do this, PLEASE post results (or at least expiraments) to/., as I'd love to see what you come up with (even if you go with another solution all together).
First of all, a 26x speedup is GOOD. That said, if you are trying to use a cluster of 64 Itanium 2 processors to compile things, you're an idiot. IIRC, the long pipeline and VLIW, highly scheduled, architecture of the Itanium 2 make it bad at compiling. You could get that performance with cheapter Athlon 64s or Xeons. Not only that, but compiling one thing will ALWAYS be partly serial. Now if they were to compile multiple things (say 3 kernels, or the kernel, X, and KDE) at the same time, they should see closer to that 64x speedup. It's all about how much you can make parallel.
Which is something else. If you were to give that same thing a better application, it WOULD give you near 64x performance. If you used it to batch convert WAVs to MP3s, or RAW images to JPEGs, or MPEG4 to DiVx, or even just raytrace images (all things where no part is dependant on another part so they are highly parallizable), things will go great. In the article, they give the example of some bandwidth benchmark where the bandwidth scales almost perfectly with the number of processors they throw at it.
PS: Interesting fact I saw the other day. The human brain can only do about 200 operations per second, which is why computers are much faster at math. But the brain can do MILLIONS of things at once. So while it may only be able to process the image from our eyes at 200 "operations" per second, it do that for the millions of little bits of information all at once, which is why people are so good at visual things, pattern matching, chess, etc. Just FYI.
I'm with you. I LOVE my DirectTiVo and have turned on 2 other people in the last 6 months alone. The thing is a WONDER. As I've said (here and in person) I would gladly pay $20 a month for the little box. Really, there is nothing keeping me on DirecTV but the TiVo. My cable is horrid, but I could get dish. The moment my TiVo stops working because they pull the plug, that's the moment I find someone else. If Dish has a TiVo (GENUINE TiVo) then I'll switch to them in a hearbeat. If Comcrap offers a genuine TiVo that can do what I want (I love the dual tuners) and they fix their quality problems, I'll switch to them. If DirecTV takes away my TiVo, they lose a great customer and spokesperson.
This leads me to my next point. TiVo may die (as a company), but the interface will live on. Lets face it, if you take any other DVR on the market, give it half decent performance (which would be much better than some of the ones out there right now), give it the TiVo interface and you're golden. There is nothing special about the TiVo other than it's fantastic UI. I think that if they can't get things going, they should start licensing out the UI to everyone and their brother.
As to all those who say there is nothing special about TiVo, you haven't used one. No one who has used one for any ammount of time would say that. There is something special about them, VERY special. If computer interfaces worked as well, there would be no training classes or "Dummies" books.
Last of all, Comcast was their SECOND chance. I think they missed the boat with DirecTV. If they could have gotten DirecTV to give out DirecTiVos standard they would be set for life. Even if they only did it for 6 months (and offered 6 months free TiVo service to those customers) by the time those people got used to those TiVos, they wouldn't be able to go back and DirecTV would have a killer feature: a REAL TiVo. People would rave about them. More sales, more fans, more and more and more. That was a golden opportunity. The Comcast deal was their second chance.
I love my little TiVo. And when it ceases to function as intended because someone decided to cut guide data, I will be out there with all the other TiVo fanatics trying to make an opensource guide data server so my little TiVo can continue to live on. I can't go back. I WON'T go back. I NEED my TiVo. I... just... love it... so much... *sobs*
OK, other idea. The quality wouldn't be as good (due to it being on TV) but it's still an option. Does he need channel 3 or 4? You can buy those little devices (often at Radio Shack (blech)) that let you plug in recent electionics (the kind of S-Video or RCA jacks) into old cable ready TVs. So you take a little PC (or laptop, or Mini-ITX or somesuch) with video out, and plug it into that box. Then you put that box between the TV and his cable line. Then whenever he goes to channel 3 or 4 (I think you can buy kits on the web to do it on other channels) he gets the pictures. From this point it is exactly as I described in my picture frame idea. You could do the same things for controll (or rig up other stuff for the same purpose). That would allow it to be on TV, and it would be much cheaper than the picture frame idea (buy an old laptop off e-bay with a busted screen and hide it behind the TV. It doesn't need the screen, just the video out.)
I think a digital picture frame is your best bet. While the larget ones are expensive (ouch), you could build your own larger one out of an old laptop or something much cheaper. Then you just have it automatically dial in (or use high speed internet if that's an option) and download pictures off a FTP server (or some such) somewhere every night. When you want to give him a new picutre, just upload it to the server. Then the next day it will automatically be one of the ones in the slide show. No controlls, no nothing. Just a static object in the room that doesn't require any interaction that does exactly what you want easily.
Now if you wanted to give him some controll (forward, back, pause, etc) that could be much trickier. The best I can think of off the top of my head (and this wouldn't be too easy) would be to set it up with a microphone and teach it to listen for whistles or some such. One quick whistle is stop, two is forward, etc. Or you could use different pitches (A is stop, B is forward, etc). That would be easy to controll once he got the hang of it and would require no controll device, wouldn't have to be rigged into the ones currently provided, etc.
Of course that assumes he knows how to whisle. He does know how to whistle doesn't he? He just puts his lips together and... sorry, couldn't resist.
You missunderstand the idea. You would still have shared libraries. Here is the idea (explain through Mac OS):
You want to install a new piece of software. You insert the CD and it's window opens up in Finder (like Windows Explorer). You open up your hard drive and browse to where you want the program to go (in OS X I think it's "Applications"). You then drag the program from the CD to that folder. But you don't drag the program, plus it's data files, plus this, plus that, you drag just the program. One file.
You get tired of it? Want to uninstall it? OK. Go find the program in the Applications folder again. Take it, and drag it to the trash. It's uninstalled.
It's this kind of simplicity that the poster is (I assume) talking about. You'd install the libraries the same way. This avoids having the program in/usr/bin/coolApp, documentation in/usr/share/doc/coolApp, global config in/etc/coolApp.conf, and so on. It makes life much easier.
Moving is easy too. If you go rename the MS Office directory or move it to c:\Office from c:\Program Files\Office, what happens? All hell breaks loose. But with a Mac, you should be able to (haven't tried it in years because I'm forced to use PCs, but I think it still works) just move the file. Don't want it in Applications? Drag it somewhere else (~/Cool Apps/ maybe) and when you double click on it, it runs just like always. When you upgrade from 3.4 to 4.0, you don't get that LOVELY headache where many programs (on Windows) like to put themselves in "C:\Program Files\NeatProg 3.4" and leave the directory behind. You could either install OVER it (and have it in a badly named folder), or install along side it and then delete the old one. AOL is terrible for this. Nothing weird like that.
Now don't missunderstand. The app still has it's data files and such. They are all hidden inside the "executable".app file. I think there are tools to look inside. There are additions to this (like when a program is run it should put a COPY of it's config files in a directory (/system/preferences/whoknowswhat maybe?). Then the user can go find that file (if they want) and edit it. Next time you launch the program it would notice that and accept the changes. I'm not too sure beyond the basic idea, but I know it's there.
THIS is what we should all strive for. Installing can't get easier (makes sense too, you copy the program to your computer and it's installed). Uninstalling is simply as intuitive (how many computer "n00bs" have you seen delete an icon from the desktop or Start Menu and think the program is gone?). It is easy, and makes sense. When you delete something you don't have to go hunting all over the filesystem for all it's little bits. Sure package managers and uninstallers do that for you, but god help you if you've moved anything. And it seems like at least half the time they don't get rid of everything.
It is just soo much easier.
PS: I doubt if you had to copy libs on your PC (like everything was statically linked) you wouldn't see the size go up THAT much as long as a choice few (X, QT, etc) stayed in one place.
Blame ATI. Hauppage supports Linux. I don't know if they write the drivers, or if they just tell people what they need to know, but the drivers are there.
Your beef is with ATI. I have an All-In-Wonder 3D Pro AGP 8mb card. This is from when AGP was first introduced. Pentium II era. There is STILL no decent TV input support that I could even find under Linux. It was a ton of hacking and messing around with beta/cvs drivers the last time I looked (a few months ago). If ATI would make the drivers so you could use your card, things would be fine. They make bianary closed source drivers so you can use 3D, why can't they do it for TV input too? Ask 'em, I'd like to know the answer. They also refuse to tell people what they need to know to make the apropriate video capture drivers, let alone 3D and such.
The solution? Buy video capture stuff from Hauppage, or anyone else who supports Linux. Buy 3D stuff from nVidia (who at least gives great 3D support for all their cards) or someone else who supports their cards well under Linux (Matrox has good Linux drivers, don't they?).
In short: DON'T BUY ATI FOR LINUX USE. It's that simple.
Windows 2000 was released on Feb 17th, 2000.
Windows 2003 was released on Apr 24th, 2003.
A replacment to NT 4 was released, followed by a replacment to THAT, and NT 4 has still been getting support for a year+ after that. I'm a bit suprised that NT was still supported without needing those special contracts up untill now.
For reference, 2K will get "mainstream" support (cost-per-incidient, free hotfixes) untill Jun 30 of this year, and "extended" stupport (hourly cost, pay for hotfixes) untill Jun 30, 2010. Hotfixes are free for everyone untill '07. I can't find End-of-Life dates for Windows 2003.
Re:any reactions from the M$ booth to the...
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Microsoft At Macworld
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I agree. iWork looks nice, but it looks to be something between Wordpad (VERY basic word processor) and Publisher (not a wordprocessor, but does all sorts of flyers and brocures and such).
I doesn't look like it will replace Office for most people. You either need the power of Word for wordprocessing (in which case you get Word/Office), or you don't need much more than Wordpad (in which case, you probably won't buy Office, it's expensive for that).
I may be wrong, but that's my impressions. Besides, Office is aimed (to a large degree) at businesses. And businesses would also want Excel and Powerpoint and other such things that are in Office. I don't think it should worry MS too much.
The $500 Mac I would worry about more. It is an easy way to get your feet wet in the wonderful world of Macs. Sure, MS can sell Office to Mac users, but if so many people start to see how nice the Mac is (overall, no viruses/spyware, etc) then MS should get worried. People will demand Windows gets that much better (good for people, bad for MS), or they will switch to Mac (good for Macs, bad for MS). THAT is the thing to be worried about (as I see it).
I must say, very cool stuff. I'm not big on the iPod Shuffle, but for $99 it's not bad. But it doesn't matter since I've got a 4th gen iPod. I LOVE that new little Mac.
That said, where are the PBs? I'm not expecting a G5 or antyhing, but I thought they would bump the speed (say to 1.6667 from 1.5) and the HD (to 100gb and 5400rpm) and add bluetooth 2.0 and such. Thinksecret said it was confirmed. I've been waiting for this show to buy a new powerbook, where are they?
Suprise Suprise. The ability to watch TV shows on a PSP that are stored on another device by accessing them over the 'net.
That other devices wouldn't be the all in one PVR/Game machine/Blender/etc. that the PS3 (possibly only a "top end" PS3) is supposed to be would it? Use your PS3 as a PVR and watch TV on the go using your PSP?
I can see it. Will it work? Don't know, but I wouldn't be suprised if this was the reason for the technology.
As for those who say "My gamegear could do this 10+ years ago", this is NOT a TV tuner, it's the ability to watch shows off a PVR that are streamed through the 'net (so they aren't stored on the PSP). This has nothing to do with recieving broadcast TV with a TV tuner (although that would be cool on that nice little screen, especially HD content).
You'd be amazed how good a filter some pantyhose stretched over an opening can be. Dirt cheap too (especially if you are married, just get a "used" pair your wife was going to toss due to a run or some such).
I agree. Keeping the PC in a little airtight cabinate would help too, as long as it doesn't get too hot (keep the PC slow and you should be fine). As for the keyboard, any standard keyboard should do if you put one of those plastic covers on it that covers EVERYTHING and is designed to protect keyboards from coffee and such. I would think that would keep the keyboard clean enough.
Depending on what you want to do (this is a bit extreme), you could use watercooling to keep any PC cool in that environment. Just run the cables through the airtight cabinate and keep the thing on the desk. I'm thinking of a Zalman Rezerator (or something like that). It is just a tall metal finned tank with integrated pump, no fan. It will dissapate heat just fine, and all you've got to do is dust it once in a while to keep it at top efficency. Fill it with good antifreeze and you shouldn't have problems in winter (unless you are in a cold part of Alaska or something).
Without that, just two sides of the airtight cabenite idea could be a filter cloth of some sort to keep dust out but allow air to move around. Vacuum them off once in a while if dust builds up.
I agree with the parrent post that a mechanical mouse would be a nightmare. You could always go touchpad though.
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Unfortunatly, no one seems to be pushing for this despite the headaches it would remove. All you'd have to do is make your memory controller able to recieve faster (like going from DDR333 to DDR400). Plus, with the memory not directly connected, memory makers would not only compete evenly (since the user wouldn't need to know the difference between DDR2 and XDR except speed and price), but they could add other things like an extra cache level in front of the memory just by replacing RAM. And it would mean that the computer you bought today would take the memory that was available 3 years from now. Right now SDRAM costs a FORTUNE. But if you had a computer that takes FBDIMMs, instead of paying $50 a stick for 256mb sticks, you could buy at the price of DDR today (say 512mb for $25 or whatever it is today).
Just think, you wouldn't need to buy new types of RAM for your PC every 2 years.
Ah, but you would have other problems blasting your nuclear waste. When it decays, it gives off radioactivity (hence the problem). But that is what lets it decay. If you could accelerate it, wouldn't you simply be causing a large burst of radioactive energy when you did it? Couldn't that be worse than buring it encased in lead in some anicent salt mines?
I mean, sure there are products (they probably showed them at the recent CES). But has anyone actually USED anything that has ZigBee in it? Is there some product that's "easy to find" (not horrifically obscure) that's available? Has anyone used ZigBee it's self or developed for it so they could give us impressions of it?
I mean it's interesting and all, but so was DataPlay (and we all know how many things with DataPlay we have in our houses).
There is some pain that is important to remember. It's VITAL to remember. This is stuff like knives are dangerous (learn this after a cut), a stove is hot (ouch!), it hurts having people piled on you (making it hard to breath), etc. All these things are important to remember for your survival. If you forgot that putting your hand on a stove hurt, how many times would you do that during your life? This is important stuff, so this comment's parrent is right.
At the same time there are things that are painfull that need to be forgotten. Some (like childbirth, mentioned in my other comment) could be a BIG problem if they were remembered. Others (highly traumatic events, abuse, serious car wrecks when you're bleeding on the pavement, etc) could prevent you from functioning if you remembered them. These things should, must, be forgotten to live a normal life. These things are fewer, and more likely to be emotional or abuse related.
As for "recovered memories", I agree completely. They are bogus, and very dangerous. There are some good books out there about the falacy's and dangers of recovered memories.
This is very often true of pregnancy. I've been told (being a 21 year old guy, I'll never really know) that while childbirth is painful for humans (duh), women don't tend to remember it after childbirth. This is supposedly a genetic trait becuase otherwise women wouldn't be likely to have a second child, which could be bad for our species.
Memory is facinating.
I only remember one thing before that (my parrents painting the hallway), and a handfull after that but before I was 5 or so.
I have a TERRIBLE memory for many other things (especially names), but some things (even seemingly so insignificant) I remember. Very odd.
Of course memory it's self is odd. We don't remember things like we tend to think we do. It's not like a photograph or a movie. The brain remembers the things in the scene, and what they did, and recreates the pictures from that. Things we don't remember (like maybe exactly what someone was wearing) our brain makes up (maybe based on the thing the person wore most or clothes from another memory).
Figures MS didn't think of it though, thanks.
mouse wheel - Page up and page down keys, placed on a mouse. That's what that was. Was it done before? I don't know, but I someone somewhere must have had a 5 button mouse and assigned 2 buttons to pageup and pagedown. They popularized it though.
control panel, - You're kidding right? MS didn't invent this. The Mac had this in '92 (for sure), and I'm pretty sure it had one back in '84 when it launched. In fact, there is a screenshot of the origional controll panel from the ORIGIONAL MacOS here.
MS didn't innovate many things, they just tooks things that looked good and used 'em. Just like KDE and Gnome. And how do you know the person who started a controll panel in KDE didn't do it because of the one in the Mac? You're an anti-MS troll. When Honda introduced the Odyssey, it had a fold down rear seat that would fold away. EVERYONE copied them because it was A GOOD IDEA. There is nothing wrong with copying GOOD IDEAS; or should every car compnay have to reinvent the wheel, the steering system, etc.
I'll tell you. The last thing I can remember MS doing that I though was really great and hadn't seen before was the spellcheck as you type in Office 95 (the little squiggly red line). That was a fantastic feature. What have they done since then? Sure they have added features and such, but none of them (in ANY product) seems that innovative to me. Just "following the course". In reality, Office 95 would suit 95% of users (conservative guess). In fact, Office 95 was OVERKILL for 95% of users.
BTW. Wordstar was $295, Word is $217. The 10% rule would put it at $30 (which would be reasonable), tripleing that would put it at $90 (Word is powerfull). Microsoft prices it at $217.
A computer that is THOUSANDS of times more powerful costs 1/20th what it did then. The leading wordprocessor costs 2/3rds. Yeah, software prices have declined.
PS: I know, buy Office and things are cheaper than buying individually, but the point is MS did not push down prices quite like you think.
BUT... price isn't everything. Instead of having 3, 4, 5, or more products all competing against themselves and one-upping eachother for $60 each, you now have 2 products, at $50 each. Which is better?
Now certanly $50 is easier on your wallet. But what about the OTHER effects? MS products tend to rapidly get better untill they are better than everyone else and therefor "good enough". Then then stagnate. They stagnate like time stopped. So you have one product that's good enough, and another that will try to get better. But once that other product gets better, it will reach a point where it's better than MS's. Then what? Well since by now they probably have a much smaller market share, MS can sit by comfortably. Thus the second company doesn't have to work too hard because their product is already the superior. They can keep trying to make it MORE superior, but it probably won't change things. Firefox changed IE (a little), but that took HOW LONG? Things stagnated since IE 4 or 5 (and IE still has serious problems). And other than adding a popup blocker (which does work) and more warning dialogs (which never work), IE is the same. Consumers lost. Hopefully Firefox will get accepted enough for the cycle to repeat.
What about other products. How 'bout financial software. You have Quicken and Money for the home. That's it. Money works but I find a large number of annoyances in it (it's what I use). Quicken works, but I don't like it's interface at all (Money's is nicer IMHO). So I'm stuck choosing between the two. There is no third party to force them to improve against eachother, they are are usually considdered about the same quality (from ratings I remember seeing). No one will enter this market because it already has 2 juggernauts and they'll never get in (open source excepted). This isn't very good for the consumer.
Unless you use a Mac. If you use a Mac, MS doesn't MAKE Money for Mac. So you can choose between Quicken and... Quicken. What a buffet of options. Fantastic. The situation on the Mac is even worse (from what I know, there may be some other piece of software out there, but from my perspective (a rather highly educated consumer when it comes to computers) there are two options). And the Mac is considdered a small market with a monopoly product (Quicken) so no one will enter that market and provide competition. You just have to hope improves from Windows move over. And even if someone DOES enter the market, MS can always walk in and sell Money if they see you doing good, and you're gone. Quicken can survive, you little product probably won't.
I'll take $10 to $20 more and a better selection and more improvements from healthy competition over the cheaper stagnate price.
If that's all it takes to make things "better" for the consumer, lets have the Government make everything and sell one brand and price it 5% less than the old commercial products were. There will never be improvements, and quality will probably suffer without competition, but IT COSTS LESS!
Prices are better, quality isn't. And I contend that prices are better only through last ditch efforts to stay alive. If they little guys go out of business after MS enters a market and MS is left the only game in town with over 5% market share, they are free to never cut prices again or even raise them. Do you think Windows would cost $200-$300 per PC if MS had competition?
That said, if you want to do it yourself, there is one thing I think would work reasonably. Now the cost of doing this might not be low. I don't know. Here we go:
There are tons of PLCs and ASICs and stuff on the 'net with lots of free code for 'em. There is free code to interface with memory modules so your chip could talk to ram and use it in a project. There is ALSO free code to talk to a hard drive (make a IDE interface) for your MP3 player or whatever. Now it seems that with all that documentation, it shouldn't be too hard to make a simple little state machine that translates incomming IDE requests to specific RAM addresses (a simple mapping from C/H/S or LBA to address should do it), fetch (or write) that data, and return it over the IDE interface (which you would have to make "backwards" from most on the web because you want to BE the HD, not talk to it).
I would think you could get some good speed out of that, shouldn't be hard to make it faster than a simple hard drive. The biggest problem would be that it would need to be partitioned and formatted at startup, but that could be easily done in a script (and it's not like it would take long if you skip bad block scans and such).
Someone may have already done this if you look hard enough.
So that's my suggestion. Would be a cool little project, and it shouldn't be hard to put as much RAM in as you want, you just have to multiplex it. The biggest problem would be refreshing all that RAM if you multiplex it. But those are problems for you to solve. Now if you DO do this, PLEASE post results (or at least expiraments) to /., as I'd love to see what you come up with (even if you go with another solution all together).
First of all, a 26x speedup is GOOD. That said, if you are trying to use a cluster of 64 Itanium 2 processors to compile things, you're an idiot. IIRC, the long pipeline and VLIW, highly scheduled, architecture of the Itanium 2 make it bad at compiling. You could get that performance with cheapter Athlon 64s or Xeons. Not only that, but compiling one thing will ALWAYS be partly serial. Now if they were to compile multiple things (say 3 kernels, or the kernel, X, and KDE) at the same time, they should see closer to that 64x speedup. It's all about how much you can make parallel.
Which is something else. If you were to give that same thing a better application, it WOULD give you near 64x performance. If you used it to batch convert WAVs to MP3s, or RAW images to JPEGs, or MPEG4 to DiVx, or even just raytrace images (all things where no part is dependant on another part so they are highly parallizable), things will go great. In the article, they give the example of some bandwidth benchmark where the bandwidth scales almost perfectly with the number of processors they throw at it.
PS: Interesting fact I saw the other day. The human brain can only do about 200 operations per second, which is why computers are much faster at math. But the brain can do MILLIONS of things at once. So while it may only be able to process the image from our eyes at 200 "operations" per second, it do that for the millions of little bits of information all at once, which is why people are so good at visual things, pattern matching, chess, etc. Just FYI.
I'm with you. I LOVE my DirectTiVo and have turned on 2 other people in the last 6 months alone. The thing is a WONDER. As I've said (here and in person) I would gladly pay $20 a month for the little box. Really, there is nothing keeping me on DirecTV but the TiVo. My cable is horrid, but I could get dish. The moment my TiVo stops working because they pull the plug, that's the moment I find someone else. If Dish has a TiVo (GENUINE TiVo) then I'll switch to them in a hearbeat. If Comcrap offers a genuine TiVo that can do what I want (I love the dual tuners) and they fix their quality problems, I'll switch to them. If DirecTV takes away my TiVo, they lose a great customer and spokesperson.
This leads me to my next point. TiVo may die (as a company), but the interface will live on. Lets face it, if you take any other DVR on the market, give it half decent performance (which would be much better than some of the ones out there right now), give it the TiVo interface and you're golden. There is nothing special about the TiVo other than it's fantastic UI. I think that if they can't get things going, they should start licensing out the UI to everyone and their brother.
As to all those who say there is nothing special about TiVo, you haven't used one. No one who has used one for any ammount of time would say that. There is something special about them, VERY special. If computer interfaces worked as well, there would be no training classes or "Dummies" books.
Last of all, Comcast was their SECOND chance. I think they missed the boat with DirecTV. If they could have gotten DirecTV to give out DirecTiVos standard they would be set for life. Even if they only did it for 6 months (and offered 6 months free TiVo service to those customers) by the time those people got used to those TiVos, they wouldn't be able to go back and DirecTV would have a killer feature: a REAL TiVo. People would rave about them. More sales, more fans, more and more and more. That was a golden opportunity. The Comcast deal was their second chance.
I love my little TiVo. And when it ceases to function as intended because someone decided to cut guide data, I will be out there with all the other TiVo fanatics trying to make an opensource guide data server so my little TiVo can continue to live on. I can't go back. I WON'T go back. I NEED my TiVo. I... just... love it... so much... *sobs*
Good luck.
Now if you wanted to give him some controll (forward, back, pause, etc) that could be much trickier. The best I can think of off the top of my head (and this wouldn't be too easy) would be to set it up with a microphone and teach it to listen for whistles or some such. One quick whistle is stop, two is forward, etc. Or you could use different pitches (A is stop, B is forward, etc). That would be easy to controll once he got the hang of it and would require no controll device, wouldn't have to be rigged into the ones currently provided, etc.
Of course that assumes he knows how to whisle. He does know how to whistle doesn't he? He just puts his lips together and... sorry, couldn't resist.
You want to install a new piece of software. You insert the CD and it's window opens up in Finder (like Windows Explorer). You open up your hard drive and browse to where you want the program to go (in OS X I think it's "Applications"). You then drag the program from the CD to that folder. But you don't drag the program, plus it's data files, plus this, plus that, you drag just the program. One file.
You get tired of it? Want to uninstall it? OK. Go find the program in the Applications folder again. Take it, and drag it to the trash. It's uninstalled.
It's this kind of simplicity that the poster is (I assume) talking about. You'd install the libraries the same way. This avoids having the program in /usr/bin/coolApp, documentation in /usr/share/doc/coolApp, global config in /etc/coolApp.conf, and so on. It makes life much easier.
Moving is easy too. If you go rename the MS Office directory or move it to c:\Office from c:\Program Files\Office, what happens? All hell breaks loose. But with a Mac, you should be able to (haven't tried it in years because I'm forced to use PCs, but I think it still works) just move the file. Don't want it in Applications? Drag it somewhere else (~/Cool Apps/ maybe) and when you double click on it, it runs just like always. When you upgrade from 3.4 to 4.0, you don't get that LOVELY headache where many programs (on Windows) like to put themselves in "C:\Program Files\NeatProg 3.4" and leave the directory behind. You could either install OVER it (and have it in a badly named folder), or install along side it and then delete the old one. AOL is terrible for this. Nothing weird like that.
Now don't missunderstand. The app still has it's data files and such. They are all hidden inside the "executable" .app file. I think there are tools to look inside. There are additions to this (like when a program is run it should put a COPY of it's config files in a directory (/system/preferences/whoknowswhat maybe?). Then the user can go find that file (if they want) and edit it. Next time you launch the program it would notice that and accept the changes. I'm not too sure beyond the basic idea, but I know it's there.
THIS is what we should all strive for. Installing can't get easier (makes sense too, you copy the program to your computer and it's installed). Uninstalling is simply as intuitive (how many computer "n00bs" have you seen delete an icon from the desktop or Start Menu and think the program is gone?). It is easy, and makes sense. When you delete something you don't have to go hunting all over the filesystem for all it's little bits. Sure package managers and uninstallers do that for you, but god help you if you've moved anything. And it seems like at least half the time they don't get rid of everything.
It is just soo much easier.
PS: I doubt if you had to copy libs on your PC (like everything was statically linked) you wouldn't see the size go up THAT much as long as a choice few (X, QT, etc) stayed in one place.
Your beef is with ATI. I have an All-In-Wonder 3D Pro AGP 8mb card. This is from when AGP was first introduced. Pentium II era. There is STILL no decent TV input support that I could even find under Linux. It was a ton of hacking and messing around with beta/cvs drivers the last time I looked (a few months ago). If ATI would make the drivers so you could use your card, things would be fine. They make bianary closed source drivers so you can use 3D, why can't they do it for TV input too? Ask 'em, I'd like to know the answer. They also refuse to tell people what they need to know to make the apropriate video capture drivers, let alone 3D and such.
The solution? Buy video capture stuff from Hauppage, or anyone else who supports Linux. Buy 3D stuff from nVidia (who at least gives great 3D support for all their cards) or someone else who supports their cards well under Linux (Matrox has good Linux drivers, don't they?).
In short: DON'T BUY ATI FOR LINUX USE. It's that simple.
Windows 2003 was released on Apr 24th, 2003.
A replacment to NT 4 was released, followed by a replacment to THAT, and NT 4 has still been getting support for a year+ after that. I'm a bit suprised that NT was still supported without needing those special contracts up untill now.
For reference, 2K will get "mainstream" support (cost-per-incidient, free hotfixes) untill Jun 30 of this year, and "extended" stupport (hourly cost, pay for hotfixes) untill Jun 30, 2010. Hotfixes are free for everyone untill '07. I can't find End-of-Life dates for Windows 2003.
I doesn't look like it will replace Office for most people. You either need the power of Word for wordprocessing (in which case you get Word/Office), or you don't need much more than Wordpad (in which case, you probably won't buy Office, it's expensive for that).
I may be wrong, but that's my impressions. Besides, Office is aimed (to a large degree) at businesses. And businesses would also want Excel and Powerpoint and other such things that are in Office. I don't think it should worry MS too much.
The $500 Mac I would worry about more. It is an easy way to get your feet wet in the wonderful world of Macs. Sure, MS can sell Office to Mac users, but if so many people start to see how nice the Mac is (overall, no viruses/spyware, etc) then MS should get worried. People will demand Windows gets that much better (good for people, bad for MS), or they will switch to Mac (good for Macs, bad for MS). THAT is the thing to be worried about (as I see it).
That said, where are the PBs? I'm not expecting a G5 or antyhing, but I thought they would bump the speed (say to 1.6667 from 1.5) and the HD (to 100gb and 5400rpm) and add bluetooth 2.0 and such. Thinksecret said it was confirmed. I've been waiting for this show to buy a new powerbook, where are they?
Here PB, PB, PB...
That other devices wouldn't be the all in one PVR/Game machine/Blender/etc. that the PS3 (possibly only a "top end" PS3) is supposed to be would it? Use your PS3 as a PVR and watch TV on the go using your PSP?
I can see it. Will it work? Don't know, but I wouldn't be suprised if this was the reason for the technology.
As for those who say "My gamegear could do this 10+ years ago", this is NOT a TV tuner, it's the ability to watch shows off a PVR that are streamed through the 'net (so they aren't stored on the PSP). This has nothing to do with recieving broadcast TV with a TV tuner (although that would be cool on that nice little screen, especially HD content).
Didn't think so.
You'd be amazed how good a filter some pantyhose stretched over an opening can be. Dirt cheap too (especially if you are married, just get a "used" pair your wife was going to toss due to a run or some such).
Depending on what you want to do (this is a bit extreme), you could use watercooling to keep any PC cool in that environment. Just run the cables through the airtight cabinate and keep the thing on the desk. I'm thinking of a Zalman Rezerator (or something like that). It is just a tall metal finned tank with integrated pump, no fan. It will dissapate heat just fine, and all you've got to do is dust it once in a while to keep it at top efficency. Fill it with good antifreeze and you shouldn't have problems in winter (unless you are in a cold part of Alaska or something).
Without that, just two sides of the airtight cabenite idea could be a filter cloth of some sort to keep dust out but allow air to move around. Vacuum them off once in a while if dust builds up.
I agree with the parrent post that a mechanical mouse would be a nightmare. You could always go touchpad though.