We haver this already, it's called console gaming. The problem with the idea, even though it's a decent idea, is that it requires the video game companies to do massive amounts of extra work in order to release a game. This costs them money that could be better spent on writers and artists. It also reduces the appeal of said game. If I have to reboot my system to play a game and then boot back I'm not going to be a happy person.
For answers look to usenet, it has been around since before Rob and Jeff were wetting their diapers...well almost that long. Don't let Linux hype get to you either, the Windows/Intel "stranglehold" hasn't been entirely bad. Without Intel and AMD competing in their clock speed pissing contest we'd still be running around on 200mhz Pentium Pro boxes thinking we were l33t because we had 32 megs of RAM. A free developer-centric OS is probably not going to ever be a real desktop/home champion until someone stops releasing distrobutions of software and actually builds a whole environment around the kernel rather than repacking everyone else's software.
Ten million Linux users? Where does that number come from. According to most things I've seen it says Linux numbers about 1% of the home market nowadays. That is one percent of about one hundred million which is smaller than your estimate by a factor of ten.
On most newer games I've played I've rarely come across this problem but I agree that many older games suffered badly from this. Maybe I just don't play crappy games anymore. One of the biggest hassles was Quicktime 2.x. Everyone used it but they all used a slightly different version which had no idea you already had it installed.
Re:Anyone that downloads a vbs file on gnutella...
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Gnutella VBS Worm
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What makes you think you're so superior a computer user? Ohhh, wow you can type things on a command line. That is really excellent, you ought to be commended. Oh wait a second, The command line is an interface to give the system instructions, not to actually process data. Raw power in a few lines of code, you would be hard pressed to do anything worthwhile merely from a command line. Moving files and writing the output of ls to a text file isn't my idea of raw power. Under your logic cars ought not have power steering or ABS brakes because people ought to learn how to live without them. Everyone ought to spend their time at home in fromt of a glowing screen like you do so they too can understand computers. Doesn't it suck to be a 45 year old virgin though?
Reading the oodles of noodles of comments everyone here seems to think that an MS-free office absolutely needs to be Linux. Right now Linux is too immature for professional desktops for the most part. Theres too much interaction between the user and the system for it to be terribly productive. Low level interaction is great when you're running a server or are tinkering about on your home system but in a corporate environment you need things that save you time. You may remember back to the days of OS/2 which was designed by IBM to be a strictly business environment, you turned it on and got to work. An MS-free office means alot more than just open sourced apps. A good choice as of late is Apple, once again have good productivity suites and a usable OS. What Linux needs right now is someone to put together a good set of tools for use in offices. Word processing is pointless if you can't print out your work with whatever printer your office has available. Generally open source development is done because said programmer has hardware X and needs to make it work with their system. If businesses have to wait around for device drivers and software for barcode readers and printers Linux will never make any headway in the corporate environment. Besides the Linux centric attitude, everyone seems to be StarOffice centric. Are all Linux users this cheap? Unless your business gives away its source code for free and tries to profit off "support" you're going to make some money. With said money you can afford to pay for things. A good suite that hardly ever gets any attention is Applix. Not only is it supported on several operating systems (BSD, Solaris, Linux) it is also available for Alpha and PPC architectures. Another caveat of Applix is the Anyware Office suite. Anyware is a Java implimentation of the Applixware suite which can be run from any Java capable browser or Java-savy OS. Wow, that means you can set up an office on thin clients which is going to get you five thin clients for the price of a new workstation. Applix is a really nice suite of software. I suppose the qualm Linux fanatics have is you don't get to see the source code and actually have to pay for it. Thats just the client side stuff the users see, making an office MS-free on the backend gets even more difficult but it is possible, there WAS a time before MS Exchange and such things. Way back when documents were entirely ASCII typed on a terminal hooked up to a mainframe.
Uh dude? Most companies who want to make a profit on their software don't want to release their code to the public without licensing fees. Open Source is not nearly as profitable as closed source. Support and advertisments are pidly shit compared to licensing fees. And to help you out, Java is a good language for portability because there is no porting. If you want it to run quick on your processor you just compile the code for your system. C++ and C are portable but across platforms you need to make library changes and such things. Java needs none of that. And of course you can always compile a Java applet as just bytecode which will be run on a machine's JVM. If we could get some JVM modules in our kernels things would be awfly nice...
Your comment on multi-threading is very true. If you write a visual app with a thread doing the hard work and then a thread which handles the interface you're not doing yourself much good. One of the nice thing about the way Be sets up their libraries is everything is multi-threaded and they usually help you multi-thread things in an intelligent way as to actually speed up the code on multiple processors. Silly C programmers.
From the tinkering on it that I've done (thanks SuSE for putting it on CD) it looks pretty good. I just got a V3 for my Linux box so I may have to try to get that puppy working. Once it reaches a stable stage I think people will be all over it like lint on tape. Once Linux can play the games I want with reasonable speed I'll put it on all my boxes. And of course I want Photoshop, Gimp doesn't really stand up to PS in my opinion. Maybe the XFree people ought to get ahold of people like Adobe and such people in the graphics biz to get some colour certification on X. With good colour calibration on the free Unicies more professional apps that need said calibration will start porting. Apple got Adobe's support in a big way with their excellent colour management, maybe Linux can be next.
The hockey puck mouse is annoying until you get used to it. The hockey pucks were supposed to fit with the overall design of the iMac and later the bondi G3s. I think a mouse with a touch sensitive surface is a pretty cool idea because it lets you place buttons exactly where your fingers are most comfortable. Next I'd like to see a touchpad keyboard that had spring mechanism under the touchpad so it feels like real keys.
but this was sposed to be one of Irridium's neato factors. You could access data from anywhere on the planet including the ocean. Now Irridium is just crashing into the ocean. The only solution I can think of is get your mom a Tech or General license so she can bouce RTTY signals off AMSATs. Doing RTTY whilst on the road is a great thing if you can manage it. It might be a little slow but if mom is just getting text she might do ok. Has she though of just taking a train though?
To get that sort of resolution you would need enormous sats in orbit. Lots of sats. I don't think your voyeuristic tendancies are worth that much money.
I have a cell phone, like many of you. However I am not l33t and do not want to play Q3A:Pocket Edition on said cell phone. I also don't particularly care for surfing the net using crappy data protocols at slow speeds. Were I a developer I wouldn't appriciate Motorola and Nokia writing very different browsers for said cell phone which renders code for the competitor's product a garbled (waste of bandwidth == time == money == bankrupt) mess. Maybe I'm not with the "groove" as it were. I don't want several things added to my cell phone but I can think of several things I DO want added to it. I want an electric ink screen rather than buttons and an LCD. There's a funny thing about devices that don't continuously need electricity, they preserve battery life a great deal. Electric ink in its various forms holds the image you put on it until another charge is applied to it and besides which the charge is meager compared to the backlight of an LCD. Such a screen compined with touch sensors could be altered to display any language easily and different keypads. Another thing I do want on a cell phone is a decent data rate that makes downloading of fancy XML dataforms quick and relatively painless. If we're going to WAP cell phones do we really need companies like Nokia and Motorola defining how we WAP our data (pun intended)? How about we use old skool HTML before Netscape and M$ extended it to be modernized sandskrit. Wow maybe we can even listen to those W3C guys talking about something called "HTML standards". It seems to me XML is not the greatest of ideas in some cases for limited bandwidth toys like cell phones and handheld computers. The main problem I see is bandwidth, with XML the processing is done almost entirely by your client machine. While this is fine and dandy on a four exahertz home system with a DSL hook-up a mobile device is somewhat limited by the battery and bandwidth which are both costing you money. People wouldn't be jizzing all over the internet right now if you had to pay by the house/minute/Planck second for access. More to the point of this article why aren't we seeing more Java for these new and wonderful toys? According to McNealy a couple years ago by now we ought to be seeing Java everywhere. Networked phones seem like the perfect niche. JIT compiling and Applets let you write your WAP toy once and run it on any phone you get your hands on. Don't like Motorola's XML parser? Pop in a third party browser written in Java and you're good to go. Jini's marketing plans come back to me now, as do Bluetooth. I put my cell phone and laptop on a desk and turn both on and WAP! I have a wireless internet connection. Not only do I get to share my connection but I also get to upload a new program for the phone. Eh, oh well.
I don't care about the government tracking my cell phone very much considering its really expensive to use the equipment needed to triangulate a mobile phone. If I reall'y want to be sneaky I won't need some Unix-like OS on my phone I'll just pull out the battery. I know, I ought to be a spy. The only real problem with "open sourcing" a mobile phone is to figure out what is doing what on the inside of the phone. Anyone with some experience with microcircuitry and radio can do that with some effort and the right tools (the right tools being specification docs from Motorola). Then of course you need to port Linux to it which is a rather dumb idea. A monolithic kernel with protected memory? Sure. How about you bust out a teeny tiny RTOS like QNX for your dirty hax0r needs. Most phones have the capability of "checking on phone networks" back in the day this was called phreaking. Mobile phones aren't much different. It all seems like alot of effort when all I really want to do is call my and order pizza on the way home so the pizza dude shows up when I do so I don't need to wait for the pizza.
When I first saw that effect I thought I had found one of our 65k bugs. Then of course I realized it was a real feature. It is a rather neat effect, maybe one GNOME or KDE can impliment sometime.
Konami, Capcom, Bungie. Need I list anymore developers? Bungie have always been major Mac backers and in case you're a retard, Metal Gear is published by Konami.
I really think in practice the third-party DSL stuff is a really bad idea. In theory it simplifies the DSL process, you call one company to order your DSL and they find out about service in your area. Too bad it doesn't work that way. Here PacBell is offering their own DSL service but then Earthlink (my ISP) is also offering it through a partnership with PacBell. I figured I would go with Earthlink's service even though it was 10$ more because I wouldn't have to switch email addresses and all of those hassles. According to Earthlink my house is out of range of DSL. I called up PacBell to find out when it would be available here (of course Earthlink had no idea) and they told me it was available and asked if I wanted to sign up with them. This is happening to most of the people here. Does anyone find that disturbing? We're a bunch of geeks and technophiles, what about Ma and Pa Average who just want a speedier connection because they just found out about MP3s or are tired of waiting for paged to load on their 28.8 modem? Cable here is the same way, Charter provides the copper but Earthlink hooks Charter's office to the rest of the internet. It's a real hassle trying to get support for that kind of service. I needed Mac software because my cable line needs to use a dialup connection for upstream traffic and Macs don't like doing that with their default TCP drivers. Neither Charter nor Earthlink would provide the free software to do that, they wanted me to pay for SurfDoubler out of my own pocket. If you even mention Linux support they laugh at you or ask you why you don't use Windows. I used to think service companies existed to provide service for paying customers. I no longer have such a naieve view, service companies exist to take your money and make you waste time on the telephone.
OS X is the better mousetrap in that it is an old school OS base that is very proven and robust combined with a friendly and well tailored GUI and API set. This is probably one of the better things that has happened to Unix in the past 20 years. Sun and SGI have been putting out high end commercial Unicies for years but have never really marketed them towards the home user. NeXT would have faired well I think had they not run into certain troubles. Apple is tying things together with good hardware and good software to run on it. I think by better mousetrap you mean a 3D GUI or some such. Those are still a ways off mostly due to the fact that hardware is outpacing software by several generations. Go down to Fry's or Best Buy and check out the requirements on the newest games and compare said specs to those of a brand new higher end PC system. A super duper 3D GUI requires a good deal of thinking on the part of the programmer and computer and also needs a workable interface that thinks in as many dimensions as it projects. Linux as a home users Unix is kind of using a wretch to hammer a nail, it works decently enough but it isn't really the best tool for the job. As for clones, the reason no Apple clones exist is because Apple stopped licensing their OS to Power Computing and such companies. They were building boxes cheaper than Apple and undercutting Apple's price. Apple is a hardware company so the decline in hardware sales hurt them plenty. The hardware inside a G3 and G4 is documents damn well as a matter of fact. You can check out Apple for hardware specs and Motorola for specs on the PPC 750 and 7400 processors. What Apple won't give you is the specific toys in the boot ROMs on their boards. This however can be bypassed (ask the LinuxPPC or NetBSD guys about getting *nix on a Mac).
The massive thing we call the internet today is going to be changing a great deal in the next ten or so years. Right now we're trying to max out a system that wasn't really designed to handle the traffic it now handles. Sure Cisco and Lucent make googabit routers and fibre lines but on those lines are flowing vast streams of packet switched data. Packet switched data was great for redundancy that would be needed were there some kind of bad thing happening that day, like a war. The problem with it is that many of those packets get lost or float about a while when someone set their ttl too high. Besides that the routers and switches made by Cisco and Lucent make take a while to send off your particular packet of data. If you need a really high bandwidth HDTV stream or something you probably ought not try a packet switched network. Many people realize this. The network of the future will most likely be a hybrid of packet switching and circuit switching (soft switching mind you) with packet switching dying out until a need for it arises (hax0ring and IP spoofing don't count). The circuit switched network with give us a dedicated path between the server of our choice and us. The network will still have a web-like structure with variable connection pathways but when we talk over it we'll be speaking through a direct channel rather than scattering our packets to the wind with an address attached. As for content, more people and places are finding themselves with fat pipes with newer structures being installed all the time. Hopefully by 2010 we'll have a single optical fibre (or receiver dish depending on your area) that we'll stuff our media into and get hit by as it shoots out. The final question is "What will we be getting hit by flying out of said fat optical pipe?" Right now everyone and their mother, literally, are hopping on the net and trying to find an idea that hasn't been flogged to death to run with. America is in lone with their moving pictures and teenage musical pop princesses. This means we're going to have plenty of media sites that resemble the broadcast networks of the 20th century. You'll be able to hop over to MTV's site and watch Carson Daily reminice about his "career" as an MTV VJ or maybe even catch a glimpse of those zany kids all living in a Winnebego on the open road trying to survive. The question of downloadable movies and music will be a long settled argument since everyone will have the bandwidth to download HDTV quality video on demand. Besides just static watching, kneeling, and praying to the glowing screens we'll be streaming our applications and such things through said pipe. The idea of the Network Computer will finally be realized since the average shmuck has the bandwidth to work off a network rather than a local drive. Maybe we'll even see the rebirth of mainframes-frame style time sharing. Instead of the servers residing on a college campus they'll be sitting in Joe Geek's livingroom or garage and people will be logging in with 3D avatars rather than terminal emulators. For the most part I think the shit we have to put up now is just the birth pangs of a bigger bitchier beast. I enjoyed the way it was, before the dark times, before Amazon.
The problem with your plan is what happens when I've got a bunch of stores in a row all broadcasting their ads. Do I get the equivilent of spam on my cell or PDA with all their ads that I then have to sift through? People already drive like shit just dialing phone numbers on their cell phones. I wouldn't want to be on the road whilst they were scrolling through their cell spam reading the ad on their 3 or 4 line display.
Clarify when you say "controls hardware". Apple uses most if not all the same specs and stardards as anyone else. They just have a limited set of devices they ship inside their boxes. This is beneficial to them as developers because they know exactly what drivers are needed for a particular (unmodified) model of computer. This is why MS doesn't support OEM copies of Windows. The OEM is responsible for the hardware they stick onto the motherboard and it would be hideously expensive for MS to handle all service related issues on said hardware. Apple, SGI, and Sun all control their hardware and software manufacture so don't spend nearly as much as MS or Redhat would supporting an enormous variety of hardware configurations.
Project Builder is basically a GUI front for several compilers. AFAIK the only way you can get it is by using Aqua and I would assume PB will come with OS X.
Apple's already created the better mousetrap dude. If you've been taking notes you'll know that the whole Quartz GUI is what is known as a level 3 interface. Instead of just static primitives drawn onto the screen with no further heed of the GUI Quartz maintains a running count of said primitives. Instead of a static widget whose dimensions are just staic numbers the primitives in Quartz are geometric functions. The GUI has knowlege that the primitive on the screen is a circle or square. This lets you do things like animate them in real time but it also lets you say "resize all squares by 15%" and all the squares will resize. Windows 9x/NT/2000, X, and MacOS 10 are all level two interfaces where the widget's properties are only known at the time they are rastered. And like I and so many others have said, what is so proprietary about AGP, PCI 2.1, SCSI, IEEE 1394, USB, IEEE 802.2/3? What exactly is Apple keeping so proprietary?
If DirectX were made open source it would be an enormous boon to just about everyone. The folks over at XFree could incorporate it into XFree, PC game folks could much more easily port their games to multiple OSes and in doing so gain market share. Sigh, I can wish.
Play Q3 in Win98, pull up a console and type/r_smp 1 and see what happens. Ohhhh yeah, Win98 can't use multiple processors. Sheesh silly me. Tomshardware was restricted in its test because they needed to stick to a single processor. Linux, Be and MacOS all support SMP also and benefit from it.
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We haver this already, it's called console gaming. The problem with the idea, even though it's a decent idea, is that it requires the video game companies to do massive amounts of extra work in order to release a game. This costs them money that could be better spent on writers and artists. It also reduces the appeal of said game. If I have to reboot my system to play a game and then boot back I'm not going to be a happy person.
For answers look to usenet, it has been around since before Rob and Jeff were wetting their diapers...well almost that long. Don't let Linux hype get to you either, the Windows/Intel "stranglehold" hasn't been entirely bad. Without Intel and AMD competing in their clock speed pissing contest we'd still be running around on 200mhz Pentium Pro boxes thinking we were l33t because we had 32 megs of RAM. A free developer-centric OS is probably not going to ever be a real desktop/home champion until someone stops releasing distrobutions of software and actually builds a whole environment around the kernel rather than repacking everyone else's software.
Ten million Linux users? Where does that number come from. According to most things I've seen it says Linux numbers about 1% of the home market nowadays. That is one percent of about one hundred million which is smaller than your estimate by a factor of ten.
On most newer games I've played I've rarely come across this problem but I agree that many older games suffered badly from this. Maybe I just don't play crappy games anymore. One of the biggest hassles was Quicktime 2.x. Everyone used it but they all used a slightly different version which had no idea you already had it installed.
What makes you think you're so superior a computer user? Ohhh, wow you can type things on a command line. That is really excellent, you ought to be commended. Oh wait a second, The command line is an interface to give the system instructions, not to actually process data. Raw power in a few lines of code, you would be hard pressed to do anything worthwhile merely from a command line. Moving files and writing the output of ls to a text file isn't my idea of raw power. Under your logic cars ought not have power steering or ABS brakes because people ought to learn how to live without them. Everyone ought to spend their time at home in fromt of a glowing screen like you do so they too can understand computers. Doesn't it suck to be a 45 year old virgin though?
Reading the oodles of noodles of comments everyone here seems to think that an MS-free office absolutely needs to be Linux. Right now Linux is too immature for professional desktops for the most part. Theres too much interaction between the user and the system for it to be terribly productive. Low level interaction is great when you're running a server or are tinkering about on your home system but in a corporate environment you need things that save you time. You may remember back to the days of OS/2 which was designed by IBM to be a strictly business environment, you turned it on and got to work. An MS-free office means alot more than just open sourced apps. A good choice as of late is Apple, once again have good productivity suites and a usable OS. What Linux needs right now is someone to put together a good set of tools for use in offices. Word processing is pointless if you can't print out your work with whatever printer your office has available. Generally open source development is done because said programmer has hardware X and needs to make it work with their system. If businesses have to wait around for device drivers and software for barcode readers and printers Linux will never make any headway in the corporate environment.
Besides the Linux centric attitude, everyone seems to be StarOffice centric. Are all Linux users this cheap? Unless your business gives away its source code for free and tries to profit off "support" you're going to make some money. With said money you can afford to pay for things. A good suite that hardly ever gets any attention is Applix. Not only is it supported on several operating systems (BSD, Solaris, Linux) it is also available for Alpha and PPC architectures. Another caveat of Applix is the Anyware Office suite. Anyware is a Java implimentation of the Applixware suite which can be run from any Java capable browser or Java-savy OS. Wow, that means you can set up an office on thin clients which is going to get you five thin clients for the price of a new workstation. Applix is a really nice suite of software. I suppose the qualm Linux fanatics have is you don't get to see the source code and actually have to pay for it. Thats just the client side stuff the users see, making an office MS-free on the backend gets even more difficult but it is possible, there WAS a time before MS Exchange and such things. Way back when documents were entirely ASCII typed on a terminal hooked up to a mainframe.
Uh dude? Most companies who want to make a profit on their software don't want to release their code to the public without licensing fees. Open Source is not nearly as profitable as closed source. Support and advertisments are pidly shit compared to licensing fees. And to help you out, Java is a good language for portability because there is no porting. If you want it to run quick on your processor you just compile the code for your system. C++ and C are portable but across platforms you need to make library changes and such things. Java needs none of that. And of course you can always compile a Java applet as just bytecode which will be run on a machine's JVM. If we could get some JVM modules in our kernels things would be awfly nice...
Your comment on multi-threading is very true. If you write a visual app with a thread doing the hard work and then a thread which handles the interface you're not doing yourself much good. One of the nice thing about the way Be sets up their libraries is everything is multi-threaded and they usually help you multi-thread things in an intelligent way as to actually speed up the code on multiple processors. Silly C programmers.
From the tinkering on it that I've done (thanks SuSE for putting it on CD) it looks pretty good. I just got a V3 for my Linux box so I may have to try to get that puppy working. Once it reaches a stable stage I think people will be all over it like lint on tape. Once Linux can play the games I want with reasonable speed I'll put it on all my boxes. And of course I want Photoshop, Gimp doesn't really stand up to PS in my opinion. Maybe the XFree people ought to get ahold of people like Adobe and such people in the graphics biz to get some colour certification on X. With good colour calibration on the free Unicies more professional apps that need said calibration will start porting. Apple got Adobe's support in a big way with their excellent colour management, maybe Linux can be next.
The hockey puck mouse is annoying until you get used to it. The hockey pucks were supposed to fit with the overall design of the iMac and later the bondi G3s. I think a mouse with a touch sensitive surface is a pretty cool idea because it lets you place buttons exactly where your fingers are most comfortable. Next I'd like to see a touchpad keyboard that had spring mechanism under the touchpad so it feels like real keys.
but this was sposed to be one of Irridium's neato factors. You could access data from anywhere on the planet including the ocean. Now Irridium is just crashing into the ocean. The only solution I can think of is get your mom a Tech or General license so she can bouce RTTY signals off AMSATs. Doing RTTY whilst on the road is a great thing if you can manage it. It might be a little slow but if mom is just getting text she might do ok. Has she though of just taking a train though?
To get that sort of resolution you would need enormous sats in orbit. Lots of sats. I don't think your voyeuristic tendancies are worth that much money.
I have a cell phone, like many of you. However I am not l33t and do not want to play Q3A:Pocket Edition on said cell phone. I also don't particularly care for surfing the net using crappy data protocols at slow speeds. Were I a developer I wouldn't appriciate Motorola and Nokia writing very different browsers for said cell phone which renders code for the competitor's product a garbled (waste of bandwidth == time == money == bankrupt) mess. Maybe I'm not with the "groove" as it were.
I don't want several things added to my cell phone but I can think of several things I DO want added to it. I want an electric ink screen rather than buttons and an LCD. There's a funny thing about devices that don't continuously need electricity, they preserve battery life a great deal. Electric ink in its various forms holds the image you put on it until another charge is applied to it and besides which the charge is meager compared to the backlight of an LCD. Such a screen compined with touch sensors could be altered to display any language easily and different keypads. Another thing I do want on a cell phone is a decent data rate that makes downloading of fancy XML dataforms quick and relatively painless. If we're going to WAP cell phones do we really need companies like Nokia and Motorola defining how we WAP our data (pun intended)? How about we use old skool HTML before Netscape and M$ extended it to be modernized sandskrit. Wow maybe we can even listen to those W3C guys talking about something called "HTML standards". It seems to me XML is not the greatest of ideas in some cases for limited bandwidth toys like cell phones and handheld computers. The main problem I see is bandwidth, with XML the processing is done almost entirely by your client machine. While this is fine and dandy on a four exahertz home system with a DSL hook-up a mobile device is somewhat limited by the battery and bandwidth which are both costing you money. People wouldn't be jizzing all over the internet right now if you had to pay by the house/minute/Planck second for access.
More to the point of this article why aren't we seeing more Java for these new and wonderful toys? According to McNealy a couple years ago by now we ought to be seeing Java everywhere. Networked phones seem like the perfect niche. JIT compiling and Applets let you write your WAP toy once and run it on any phone you get your hands on. Don't like Motorola's XML parser? Pop in a third party browser written in Java and you're good to go. Jini's marketing plans come back to me now, as do Bluetooth. I put my cell phone and laptop on a desk and turn both on and WAP! I have a wireless internet connection. Not only do I get to share my connection but I also get to upload a new program for the phone. Eh, oh well.
I don't care about the government tracking my cell phone very much considering its really expensive to use the equipment needed to triangulate a mobile phone. If I reall'y want to be sneaky I won't need some Unix-like OS on my phone I'll just pull out the battery. I know, I ought to be a spy. The only real problem with "open sourcing" a mobile phone is to figure out what is doing what on the inside of the phone. Anyone with some experience with microcircuitry and radio can do that with some effort and the right tools (the right tools being specification docs from Motorola). Then of course you need to port Linux to it which is a rather dumb idea. A monolithic kernel with protected memory? Sure. How about you bust out a teeny tiny RTOS like QNX for your dirty hax0r needs. Most phones have the capability of "checking on phone networks" back in the day this was called phreaking. Mobile phones aren't much different. It all seems like alot of effort when all I really want to do is call my and order pizza on the way home so the pizza dude shows up when I do so I don't need to wait for the pizza.
When I first saw that effect I thought I had found one of our 65k bugs. Then of course I realized it was a real feature. It is a rather neat effect, maybe one GNOME or KDE can impliment sometime.
Konami, Capcom, Bungie. Need I list anymore developers? Bungie have always been major Mac backers and in case you're a retard, Metal Gear is published by Konami.
I really think in practice the third-party DSL stuff is a really bad idea. In theory it simplifies the DSL process, you call one company to order your DSL and they find out about service in your area. Too bad it doesn't work that way. Here PacBell is offering their own DSL service but then Earthlink (my ISP) is also offering it through a partnership with PacBell. I figured I would go with Earthlink's service even though it was 10$ more because I wouldn't have to switch email addresses and all of those hassles. According to Earthlink my house is out of range of DSL. I called up PacBell to find out when it would be available here (of course Earthlink had no idea) and they told me it was available and asked if I wanted to sign up with them. This is happening to most of the people here. Does anyone find that disturbing? We're a bunch of geeks and technophiles, what about Ma and Pa Average who just want a speedier connection because they just found out about MP3s or are tired of waiting for paged to load on their 28.8 modem? Cable here is the same way, Charter provides the copper but Earthlink hooks Charter's office to the rest of the internet. It's a real hassle trying to get support for that kind of service. I needed Mac software because my cable line needs to use a dialup connection for upstream traffic and Macs don't like doing that with their default TCP drivers. Neither Charter nor Earthlink would provide the free software to do that, they wanted me to pay for SurfDoubler out of my own pocket. If you even mention Linux support they laugh at you or ask you why you don't use Windows. I used to think service companies existed to provide service for paying customers. I no longer have such a naieve view, service companies exist to take your money and make you waste time on the telephone.
OS X is the better mousetrap in that it is an old school OS base that is very proven and robust combined with a friendly and well tailored GUI and API set. This is probably one of the better things that has happened to Unix in the past 20 years. Sun and SGI have been putting out high end commercial Unicies for years but have never really marketed them towards the home user. NeXT would have faired well I think had they not run into certain troubles. Apple is tying things together with good hardware and good software to run on it. I think by better mousetrap you mean a 3D GUI or some such. Those are still a ways off mostly due to the fact that hardware is outpacing software by several generations. Go down to Fry's or Best Buy and check out the requirements on the newest games and compare said specs to those of a brand new higher end PC system. A super duper 3D GUI requires a good deal of thinking on the part of the programmer and computer and also needs a workable interface that thinks in as many dimensions as it projects. Linux as a home users Unix is kind of using a wretch to hammer a nail, it works decently enough but it isn't really the best tool for the job. As for clones, the reason no Apple clones exist is because Apple stopped licensing their OS to Power Computing and such companies. They were building boxes cheaper than Apple and undercutting Apple's price. Apple is a hardware company so the decline in hardware sales hurt them plenty. The hardware inside a G3 and G4 is documents damn well as a matter of fact. You can check out Apple for hardware specs and Motorola for specs on the PPC 750 and 7400 processors. What Apple won't give you is the specific toys in the boot ROMs on their boards. This however can be bypassed (ask the LinuxPPC or NetBSD guys about getting *nix on a Mac).
The massive thing we call the internet today is going to be changing a great deal in the next ten or so years. Right now we're trying to max out a system that wasn't really designed to handle the traffic it now handles. Sure Cisco and Lucent make googabit routers and fibre lines but on those lines are flowing vast streams of packet switched data. Packet switched data was great for redundancy that would be needed were there some kind of bad thing happening that day, like a war. The problem with it is that many of those packets get lost or float about a while when someone set their ttl too high. Besides that the routers and switches made by Cisco and Lucent make take a while to send off your particular packet of data. If you need a really high bandwidth HDTV stream or something you probably ought not try a packet switched network. Many people realize this.
The network of the future will most likely be a hybrid of packet switching and circuit switching (soft switching mind you) with packet switching dying out until a need for it arises (hax0ring and IP spoofing don't count). The circuit switched network with give us a dedicated path between the server of our choice and us. The network will still have a web-like structure with variable connection pathways but when we talk over it we'll be speaking through a direct channel rather than scattering our packets to the wind with an address attached. As for content, more people and places are finding themselves with fat pipes with newer structures being installed all the time. Hopefully by 2010 we'll have a single optical fibre (or receiver dish depending on your area) that we'll stuff our media into and get hit by as it shoots out.
The final question is "What will we be getting hit by flying out of said fat optical pipe?" Right now everyone and their mother, literally, are hopping on the net and trying to find an idea that hasn't been flogged to death to run with. America is in lone with their moving pictures and teenage musical pop princesses. This means we're going to have plenty of media sites that resemble the broadcast networks of the 20th century. You'll be able to hop over to MTV's site and watch Carson Daily reminice about his "career" as an MTV VJ or maybe even catch a glimpse of those zany kids all living in a Winnebego on the open road trying to survive. The question of downloadable movies and music will be a long settled argument since everyone will have the bandwidth to download HDTV quality video on demand. Besides just static watching, kneeling, and praying to the glowing screens we'll be streaming our applications and such things through said pipe. The idea of the Network Computer will finally be realized since the average shmuck has the bandwidth to work off a network rather than a local drive. Maybe we'll even see the rebirth of mainframes-frame style time sharing. Instead of the servers residing on a college campus they'll be sitting in Joe Geek's livingroom or garage and people will be logging in with 3D avatars rather than terminal emulators. For the most part I think the shit we have to put up now is just the birth pangs of a bigger bitchier beast. I enjoyed the way it was, before the dark times, before Amazon.
The problem with your plan is what happens when I've got a bunch of stores in a row all broadcasting their ads. Do I get the equivilent of spam on my cell or PDA with all their ads that I then have to sift through? People already drive like shit just dialing phone numbers on their cell phones. I wouldn't want to be on the road whilst they were scrolling through their cell spam reading the ad on their 3 or 4 line display.
Clarify when you say "controls hardware". Apple uses most if not all the same specs and stardards as anyone else. They just have a limited set of devices they ship inside their boxes. This is beneficial to them as developers because they know exactly what drivers are needed for a particular (unmodified) model of computer. This is why MS doesn't support OEM copies of Windows. The OEM is responsible for the hardware they stick onto the motherboard and it would be hideously expensive for MS to handle all service related issues on said hardware. Apple, SGI, and Sun all control their hardware and software manufacture so don't spend nearly as much as MS or Redhat would supporting an enormous variety of hardware configurations.
Project Builder is basically a GUI front for several compilers. AFAIK the only way you can get it is by using Aqua and I would assume PB will come with OS X.
Apple's already created the better mousetrap dude. If you've been taking notes you'll know that the whole Quartz GUI is what is known as a level 3 interface. Instead of just static primitives drawn onto the screen with no further heed of the GUI Quartz maintains a running count of said primitives. Instead of a static widget whose dimensions are just staic numbers the primitives in Quartz are geometric functions. The GUI has knowlege that the primitive on the screen is a circle or square. This lets you do things like animate them in real time but it also lets you say "resize all squares by 15%" and all the squares will resize. Windows 9x/NT/2000, X, and MacOS 10 are all level two interfaces where the widget's properties are only known at the time they are rastered. And like I and so many others have said, what is so proprietary about AGP, PCI 2.1, SCSI, IEEE 1394, USB, IEEE 802.2/3? What exactly is Apple keeping so proprietary?
If DirectX were made open source it would be an enormous boon to just about everyone. The folks over at XFree could incorporate it into XFree, PC game folks could much more easily port their games to multiple OSes and in doing so gain market share. Sigh, I can wish.
Play Q3 in Win98, pull up a console and type /r_smp 1 and see what happens. Ohhhh yeah, Win98 can't use multiple processors. Sheesh silly me. Tomshardware was restricted in its test because they needed to stick to a single processor. Linux, Be and MacOS all support SMP also and benefit from it.