Lapping is what happens when one racer is one full lap ahead of another on a circuit. I don't know how many laps there are in the race of personal computer OS usage, but I'm pretty sure that simply managing to catch up to Apple's 5% market share or their somewhat higher share in the installed base doesn't qualify.
Since this isn't a linear race to a finish line, but a nonlinear race to achieve 100% control, I think it's reasonable to describe a lap as doubling the adoption of a competitor. By this figure of merit, MacOS and Linux are about even, WinNT is around one lap ahead, Win95 and Win98 are on the order of three laps ahead, and everyone else is just struggling off the starting line. If the race ever ends, it will probably be when one product is more than 6 laps (64x adoption) ahead of its closest competitor.
MS doesn't want what little there is of a Linux desktop market share.
Why not? I would guess the Linux/BSD installed base is pretty close to the size of the MacOS installed base by now, and MS owns the Mac office SW market. If there's good money to be had, they'll go after it. A hundred million bucks is a hundred million bucks. Regardless of your other sources of income, that's a lot of jelly beans.
Amen, brother! Remember the mid-80s? Full-GUI multitasking micros with 1 MB of RAM that could boot in (I am not making this up) under 2 seconds. My home computer now has over 300 times the RAM, 50 times the MHz, and 9,000 times the disk storage. Yet, amazingly, it takes 100 times as long to boot, and (apart from games) delivers very little in the way of application functionality that my system of 13 years ago did not. My OS alone requires what would have been 40 hard drives and 256 times the maximum possible RAM of the computer on which Unix was invented, and cannot support two users. This is progress?
With all due respect (and I'm sure that's a lot), I fail to see that my use of the vernacular was any more grievous an offense than your failure to capitalize. If you're going to insist on splitting grammatical hairs, at least have the courtesy to exert yourself to reach that little finger over to the shift key at appropriate times.
If you have an old Mac, as I do, load it up with dual Ethernets, Open Transport 1.1.1 or better, and IPNetRouter. It does all the port mapping and filtering you need, and comes with excellent instructions.
The same reason Macs were chosen by the U.S Army will make your old Mac a great firewall: Macs don't hardly have any open TCP/IP ports! Other than the ones you explicitly enable, of course.
I loaded up IPNetRouter on my 6-yr-old Mac and used it both as a firewall for my house and as my primary workstation for over 9 months before I upgraded. It has been extremely reliable (uptimes on the order of weeks ain't bad considering all I do to it) and easy to maintain.
Which is more than I can say for the Linux rig I used for my firewall previously.
It's also truly sad to me to see a "geek" say, "Tech is fine and dandy, but where's my royalty check?"
That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is, don't abuse my good faith by enriching yourself on the strength of money put up by me. Works paid for by the public should be free for everyone to enjoy equally. That's what public means, isn't it?
It's not about "give me the money." It's about "don't you go thinking this is yours and yours alone just because you did the work. We all paid to support you doing it, so you have to share." Monopolizing private profit from publicly funded research is stealing. The fact that "everybody does it" does not make it right, it makes it more wrong.
I'm all for Universities and corporations taking patents on the novel inventions they create. Go ahead, collect the royalties and get rich... and don't forget to give me my share!
As a taxpayer, I demand to be compensated for my contribution to this research! Whether it be university, corporate, or military technology, the fruits of the research must belong to those who paid for it -- which is very often the federal government, i.e., you and me. There is a reason why works created by government employees are not copyrightable. I don't see that works for hire undertaken by private parties at public expense should be any different.
I think it's great that defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies and universities and dot-coms are making $billions selling inventions that I paid for but due to patents am not allowed to use! Yes, Gullible Sucker is my middle name, why do you ask?
If Mac Freaks(tm) didn't buy the latest'n'greatest from Apple pretty much every time there was a new release, Apple would have been bankrupt years ago.
I think what you meant to say was, "If Mac users would only upgrade as often as PC users, Apple wouldn't have come so close to bankruptcy so often in the past few years."
Numerous studies (the Gartner Group used to do one every year or two) have shown that Macs remain in service, on average, twice as long as PCs.
This has doubly damaging effects. First, it means half of the revenue for "that other" platform is essentially due to the inferiority of its product! Second, it gives Apple about half the market share that its portion of the installed base represents. This is called focusing on the wrong metric, a.k.a. lying with statistics.
This nasty double standard has been used to slam Apple since the mid-80's. Back then, the universal PC (and PC press) party line was, "18% market share isn't enough for software makers to justify the effort of supporting Apple," when, due to the greater longevity of the machines, the real fact was that Mac was the platform of about 35% of software buyers. They repeated this fallacy so long, it nearly destroyed Apple. If that had happened, I'm sure all the naysayers would have felt vindicated, but even that wouldn't have made their logic correct.
I don't know why the press continues to focus only on market share. It's a silly, wrongheaded, ignorant practice, like comparing CPUs only by MHz; or cars only by HP; or bicycles only by their number of gears; or stock market performance only by points. Other factors, equally important, are being ignored.
This lemming-like tendancy of all journalists to stampede en masse down the treacherous decline of credibility into statistical oblivion is on of the biggest reasons I have no respect for the mainstream press. We have laws against conspiring to fix prices. Where are the laws against the press conspiring to commit identically flawed interpretation of facts?
Attention all journalists: The one metric you choose to emphasize is not always the right one in every analysis!
In closing, I encourage you non-Mac fans to do your own thinking independently before you resort to your favorite taunt, and not believe everything you hear from your friends.
I beg your pardon, I am not too busy drooling over that luscious little cube to install Linux on my Mac and enjoy the best of both worlds. And I hate Aqua, so there.
Since I already mostly live the life you describe, I feel qualified to address this issue.:-) For the most part, I don't watch television (although I did watch The Simpsons once last week). I see no more than a couple dozen movies a year, and half of those are not from Hollywood. I don't read news periodicals, and I don't watch TV news or late-night talk shows. Music CDs I mostly buy directly from the artists who record them.
Overwhelmingly, most of my entertainment and information comes from the Internet. I have fun by chatting with friends spread across three continents, and I get the skinny on what's happening from people who know first-hand by reading news-discussion sites like Slashdot.
What's it like? I wouldn't have it any other way! My quality of life would take a sharp turn for the worse if I had to rely on the mass media or use it regularly.
Since it's a teensy bit out of my league, perhaps you can tell me in what way COM is different from the embedded software object technology NeXT used circa 1988.
Innovative computer companies: Apple; IBM; HP; DEC; Cray Research; NeXT. Notice how many of these are defunct.:-P
I'll give a better answer when I have more time. I have plenty of opinions on who is and who ain't, I just can't get into it now.
Re:My $0.02 from my talks with pals who work at MS
on
The Myth Of The Borg
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure what the average age of a Slashdot reader is
Low 20's
They used to be innovative, but they lost the ability to be innovative after huge growth but had the money to buy other companies so adapted.
I'm sorry, but I can't let that one go. Microsoft has never had a single innovation in the whole history of the company. I defy you to name even so much as ONE innovative idea, product or technology first created by Microsoft. I've been trying for years to find anyone who can answer this question for me, and it hasn't happened yet.
You are wrong. You know how a motorcycle really does ride better when you give it an extra-loud aftermarket exhaust system? It's the noise that makes high performance, not the heat.
As a long-time PowerBook owner, I can attest that computing in silence is bliss. However, it's silent only as long as the hard drive is not spinning. The hard drive makes about half of the noise even on desktop Macs (as compared with PCs, where fan noise effectively drowns out the HD).
"...will the open-source community allow the integration of this technology into our society be spearheaded by closed-source vendors?"
This is a moot point. Speech-recognition has been in mainstream use in society for over a decade already. You just don't realize it when it's happening because the computer isn't in front of you.
The closed-source proprietary companies have already spearheaded the integration of speech recognition. As usual, it is the role of free software to play catch-up as the technology trickles down to the level where hobbyists and academics can implement the algorithms and run them on commodity hardware.
What's it like to work for a top technology company that is a clear market leader in several different (but related) fields? How about:
40-hour work weeks, as long as schedules are met Managers who *understand* software development and developers Managers who have lives and understand that employees do too Flexible work hours and casual dress (what's a tie?) Diverse engineering section with many women and minorities Interesting work on leading-edge technologies and products Good pay and benefits Medium-sized city with a low cost of living
There has been shockingly little innovation in the core fundamentals of computing. It has been accurately, if simplistically, stated that the entire history of personal computers has been one of reinventing what happened on mainframes 30 years prior.
Nearly all of the important innovations in the GUI took place prior to 1970. Ditto CPU design, the OS kernel, programming languages, storage, networking, etc. All that we have done since 1970 is improve the implementation.
What have we invented since 1980?
Umm... hyperlinked multimedia (combining some of the better ideas from the 1940s through 60s). The microkernel and multithreading (minor refinements of 1969 kernel technology). Oh, wait, here's one: Distributed component software. And, of course, the blind user license agreement. Yuck.
The Mac market is a strange bird. The way it's been treated, it's no surprise.
Here are some of my thoughts on the matter, in no particular order.
Like other posters have pointed out, Mac programming has a high barrier to entry: the Toolbox. It's powerful as anything, with upwards of 5,000 subroutines in it. When was the last time you thought, "I feel like cranking out a program. I'll just refresh my memory on the 5,000 most common system calls and hit the keys!" Compare it to the difficulty of becoming a Perl master, times 10. "Hello world" is about a 15-line program unless you use a special STDIO runtime library.
Source code has never been an issue. I've played with Macs for over 10 years and never had any trouble getting working source code to learn from. Documentation, on the other hand, wasn't always as easy as it is today.
One important social issue to remember is that the Free Software Foundation snubbed Mac users pretty hard. How long did that silly boycott last? That always seemed awfully hypocritical to me, since FSF programs have always been supported on other platforms that are just as closed and proprietary as Mac: HPUX, SunOS, DOS, etc.
It's really amazing how the attitude toward the Mac has been poisoned in the PC and Unix communities. I think it all derives from one simple premise: DOS and Unix users between 1984 and 1995 were perpetually sick with envy and too stubborn to admit it. It's all sour grapes.
I honestly can't imagine anyone giving the Mac a fair, open-minded try for a couple of months and not concluding that it is, in many ways, still years ahead of everything else (even though the kernel lags). Some of its features are amazingly slick. Aliases, for example, are much smarter than Shortcuts or symbolic links.
Also like other posters have mentioned, a lot of the grassroots Mac development took place in Hypercard, not something likely to catch the attention of the rest of the world. I prefer to do my Mac hacking in MacPerl nowadays; AppleScript I mostly ignore.
Finally, I'd like to try (once again, in vain) to put to rest the twin myths of software drought and overpriced hardware.
In over 10 years of using the Mac, I don't think I've ever been forced to do something on a PC or Unix because there was no software to do it on the Mac. I may have done it if I couldn't find appropriate free software, but there was always something. The Mac shareware and freeware communities have produced a steady stream of high-quality apps. Some are so good I have used them daily for over 6 years. On the commercial side, there are over 25,000 shipping applications. This is not exactly what I think of as a platform bereft of runnable code. Maybe you're thinking of Minix.;-)
Finally, I have yet to be convinced that Macs below the top-of-the-line have been significantly overpriced in the past 5+ years. I keep pretty close tabs on current Mac and PC prices, and low- and mid-range Macs don't cost much more equivalent PCs -- in fact, they often cost LESS than an equivalent PC from a first-class maker like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, HP, or IBM. It doesn't bother me that Apple charges an extra $1000 for that last 50 MHz; the top-of-the-line should be the high-profit-margin gravy. I want the guys with all the bucks to subsidize my mid-level machine!
While it is true that x86 *chips* continue to get faster and faster, the *architecture* does not. A variety of popular benchmarks consistently show that the efficiency (defined as performance/MHz) of the x86 has not improved *at all* since the introduction of the Pentium. In fact, it's gotten worse. Even the mighty Athlon is (depending on the benchmark) only a few % more efficient than Intel.
Compare that to PowerPC, Alpha, and some of the other RISC ISA families. Unlike x86, they actually *do* improve their efficiency as the family matures.
Case closed. The x86 ISA is stagnant. The *only* factor driving its continued performance improvement is increasing clock speed.
"Congratulations, you have found secret message #2. We knew somebody reads this stuff."
The software manual that contains this message belongs to a product identified in a post hidden within this thread. Be the first to identify it and I'll send you my extra copy.:-)
It's clear Delta Tao loves easter eggs. They even mention some in their manuals; I guess they got tired of users reporting them as bugs.
For instance:
Spaceward Ho! uses a cute Santa icon... um, you can guess why. Ho! also features planets named after DT employees. And there are special ship graphics that you get only when your stats line up just right.
Eric's Ultimate Solitaire changes card backs to mark special occasions. I don't remember what they were, but something special was shown on Mother's Day.
I don't know if it counts as an easter egg, but in their new game, Clan Lord, interesting things tend to happen on holidays. It also has some mini-quests that reward people who complete them with some cute, otherwise-useless prize. Some items in the game give funny messages if you use them in the right way.
This does beg the question: Is it an easter egg if it's in a game, where the primary purpose of the software is to entertain the user? On the one hand, it gives a little warm fuzzy to the people who discover it. On the other hand, the game is supposed to do that!
So, I would guess that you can count on easter eggs or like amusements in the future from Delta Tao. It seems to be part of their culture.
Is it obvious that DT is my favorite game maker?:-)
Forget the langage. You can teach kids good programming technique in any language, and kids don't get hung up on the stupider elements of programming systems the way we dinosaurs do. Programming skills aquired in one system can be applied to any other.
What you need is strong motivation. If your kids are anything like I was, that motivation is games. Do you have any games that support scripts or macros? Use 'em! Another poster suggested Lego Mindstorms. Great! I happen to enjoy MUDs, some of which allow extensive player programming. Even for the ones that don't, a specialized MUD client will.
My point is, exploit your kids' desire to excel in their game, or make their own. They'll learn. Faster than you'll believe. It worked for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Lapping is what happens when one racer is one full lap ahead of another on a circuit. I don't know how many laps there are in the race of personal computer OS usage, but I'm pretty sure that simply managing to catch up to Apple's 5% market share or their somewhat higher share in the installed base doesn't qualify.
Since this isn't a linear race to a finish line, but a nonlinear race to achieve 100% control, I think it's reasonable to describe a lap as doubling the adoption of a competitor. By this figure of merit, MacOS and Linux are about even, WinNT is around one lap ahead, Win95 and Win98 are on the order of three laps ahead, and everyone else is just struggling off the starting line. If the race ever ends, it will probably be when one product is more than 6 laps (64x adoption) ahead of its closest competitor.
MS doesn't want what little there is of a Linux desktop market share.
Why not? I would guess the Linux/BSD installed base is pretty close to the size of the MacOS installed base by now, and MS owns the Mac office SW market. If there's good money to be had, they'll go after it. A hundred million bucks is a hundred million bucks. Regardless of your other sources of income, that's a lot of jelly beans.
Amen, brother! Remember the mid-80s? Full-GUI multitasking micros with 1 MB of RAM that could boot in (I am not making this up) under 2 seconds. My home computer now has over 300 times the RAM, 50 times the MHz, and 9,000 times the disk storage. Yet, amazingly, it takes 100 times as long to boot, and (apart from games) delivers very little in the way of application functionality that my system of 13 years ago did not. My OS alone requires what would have been 40 hard drives and 256 times the maximum possible RAM of the computer on which Unix was invented, and cannot support two users. This is progress?
With all due respect (and I'm sure that's a lot), I fail to see that my use of the vernacular was any more grievous an offense than your failure to capitalize. If you're going to insist on splitting grammatical hairs, at least have the courtesy to exert yourself to reach that little finger over to the shift key at appropriate times.
If you have an old Mac, as I do, load it up with dual Ethernets, Open Transport 1.1.1 or better, and IPNetRouter. It does all the port mapping and filtering you need, and comes with excellent instructions.
The same reason Macs were chosen by the U.S Army will make your old Mac a great firewall: Macs don't hardly have any open TCP/IP ports! Other than the ones you explicitly enable, of course.
I loaded up IPNetRouter on my 6-yr-old Mac and used it both as a firewall for my house and as my primary workstation for over 9 months before I upgraded. It has been extremely reliable (uptimes on the order of weeks ain't bad considering all I do to it) and easy to maintain.
Which is more than I can say for the Linux rig I used for my firewall previously.
It's also truly sad to me to see a "geek" say, "Tech is fine and dandy, but where's my royalty check?"
That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is, don't abuse my good faith by enriching yourself on the strength of money put up by me. Works paid for by the public should be free for everyone to enjoy equally. That's what public means, isn't it?
It's not about "give me the money." It's about "don't you go thinking this is yours and yours alone just because you did the work. We all paid to support you doing it, so you have to share." Monopolizing private profit from publicly funded research is stealing. The fact that "everybody does it" does not make it right, it makes it more wrong.
I'm all for Universities and corporations taking patents on the novel inventions they create. Go ahead, collect the royalties and get rich... and don't forget to give me my share!
As a taxpayer, I demand to be compensated for my contribution to this research! Whether it be university, corporate, or military technology, the fruits of the research must belong to those who paid for it -- which is very often the federal government, i.e., you and me. There is a reason why works created by government employees are not copyrightable. I don't see that works for hire undertaken by private parties at public expense should be any different.
I think it's great that defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies and universities and dot-coms are making $billions selling inventions that I paid for but due to patents am not allowed to use! Yes, Gullible Sucker is my middle name, why do you ask?
If Mac Freaks(tm) didn't buy the latest'n'greatest from Apple pretty much every time there was a new release, Apple would have been bankrupt years ago.
I think what you meant to say was, "If Mac users would only upgrade as often as PC users, Apple wouldn't have come so close to bankruptcy so often in the past few years."
Numerous studies (the Gartner Group used to do one every year or two) have shown that Macs remain in service, on average, twice as long as PCs.
This has doubly damaging effects. First, it means half of the revenue for "that other" platform is essentially due to the inferiority of its product! Second, it gives Apple about half the market share that its portion of the installed base represents. This is called focusing on the wrong metric, a.k.a. lying with statistics.
This nasty double standard has been used to slam Apple since the mid-80's. Back then, the universal PC (and PC press) party line was, "18% market share isn't enough for software makers to justify the effort of supporting Apple," when, due to the greater longevity of the machines, the real fact was that Mac was the platform of about 35% of software buyers. They repeated this fallacy so long, it nearly destroyed Apple. If that had happened, I'm sure all the naysayers would have felt vindicated, but even that wouldn't have made their logic correct.
I don't know why the press continues to focus only on market share. It's a silly, wrongheaded, ignorant practice, like comparing CPUs only by MHz; or cars only by HP; or bicycles only by their number of gears; or stock market performance only by points. Other factors, equally important, are being ignored.
This lemming-like tendancy of all journalists to stampede en masse down the treacherous decline of credibility into statistical oblivion is on of the biggest reasons I have no respect for the mainstream press. We have laws against conspiring to fix prices. Where are the laws against the press conspiring to commit identically flawed interpretation of facts?
Attention all journalists: The one metric you choose to emphasize is not always the right one in every analysis!
In closing, I encourage you non-Mac fans to do your own thinking independently before you resort to your favorite taunt, and not believe everything you hear from your friends.
I beg your pardon, I am not too busy drooling over that luscious little cube to install Linux on my Mac and enjoy the best of both worlds. And I hate Aqua, so there.
Since I already mostly live the life you describe, I feel qualified to address this issue. :-) For the most part, I don't watch television (although I did watch The Simpsons once last week). I see no more than a couple dozen movies a year, and half of those are not from Hollywood. I don't read news periodicals, and I don't watch TV news or late-night talk shows. Music CDs I mostly buy directly from the artists who record them.
Overwhelmingly, most of my entertainment and information comes from the Internet. I have fun by chatting with friends spread across three continents, and I get the skinny on what's happening from people who know first-hand by reading news-discussion sites like Slashdot.
What's it like? I wouldn't have it any other way! My quality of life would take a sharp turn for the worse if I had to rely on the mass media or use it regularly.
Good reply!
:-P
Since it's a teensy bit out of my league, perhaps you can tell me in what way COM is different from the embedded software object technology NeXT used circa 1988.
Innovative computer companies: Apple; IBM; HP; DEC; Cray Research; NeXT. Notice how many of these are defunct.
I'll give a better answer when I have more time. I have plenty of opinions on who is and who ain't, I just can't get into it now.
I'm not sure what the average age of a Slashdot reader is
Low 20's
They used to be innovative, but they lost the ability to be innovative after huge growth but had the money to buy other companies so adapted.
I'm sorry, but I can't let that one go. Microsoft has never had a single innovation in the whole history of the company. I defy you to name even so much as ONE innovative idea, product or technology first created by Microsoft. I've been trying for years to find anyone who can answer this question for me, and it hasn't happened yet.
High performance creates heat
You are wrong. You know how a motorcycle really does ride better when you give it an extra-loud aftermarket exhaust system? It's the noise that makes high performance, not the heat.
As a long-time PowerBook owner, I can attest that computing in silence is bliss. However, it's silent only as long as the hard drive is not spinning. The hard drive makes about half of the noise even on desktop Macs (as compared with PCs, where fan noise effectively drowns out the HD).
"...will the open-source community allow the integration of this technology into our society be spearheaded by closed-source vendors?"
This is a moot point. Speech-recognition has been in mainstream use in society for over a decade already. You just don't realize it when it's happening because the computer isn't in front of you.
The closed-source proprietary companies have already spearheaded the integration of speech recognition. As usual, it is the role of free software to play catch-up as the technology trickles down to the level where hobbyists and academics can implement the algorithms and run them on commodity hardware.
What's it like to work for a top technology company that is a clear market leader in several different (but related) fields? How about:
40-hour work weeks, as long as schedules are met
Managers who *understand* software development and developers
Managers who have lives and understand that employees do too
Flexible work hours and casual dress (what's a tie?)
Diverse engineering section with many women and minorities
Interesting work on leading-edge technologies and products
Good pay and benefits
Medium-sized city with a low cost of living
Yes, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Three comments:
1. MacOS has had command line shells that you can add to it since forever. The fact that most people have not chosen to do it is beside the point.
2. The latest skinny is that you will be able to get a shell tool in OS X, it just won't be the #1 window you open like it is in most X desktops.
3. Some of us love MacOS for its stability and robustness too. MacOS 8.1 virtually never crashes on me. MacOS 9, strangely, is not so solid.
There has been shockingly little innovation in the core fundamentals of computing. It has been accurately, if simplistically, stated that the entire history of personal computers has been one of reinventing what happened on mainframes 30 years prior.
Nearly all of the important innovations in the GUI took place prior to 1970. Ditto CPU design, the OS kernel, programming languages, storage, networking, etc. All that we have done since 1970 is improve the implementation.
What have we invented since 1980?
Umm... hyperlinked multimedia (combining some of the better ideas from the 1940s through 60s). The microkernel and multithreading (minor refinements of 1969 kernel technology). Oh, wait, here's one: Distributed component software. And, of course, the blind user license agreement. Yuck.
The Mac market is a strange bird. The way it's been treated, it's no surprise.
;-)
Here are some of my thoughts on the matter, in no particular order.
Like other posters have pointed out, Mac programming has a high barrier to entry: the Toolbox. It's powerful as anything, with upwards of 5,000 subroutines in it. When was the last time you thought, "I feel like cranking out a program. I'll just refresh my memory on the 5,000 most common system calls and hit the keys!" Compare it to the difficulty of becoming a Perl master, times 10. "Hello world" is about a 15-line program unless you use a special STDIO runtime library.
Source code has never been an issue. I've played with Macs for over 10 years and never had any trouble getting working source code to learn from. Documentation, on the other hand, wasn't always as easy as it is today.
One important social issue to remember is that the Free Software Foundation snubbed Mac users pretty hard. How long did that silly boycott last? That always seemed awfully hypocritical to me, since FSF programs have always been supported on other platforms that are just as closed and proprietary as Mac: HPUX, SunOS, DOS, etc.
It's really amazing how the attitude toward the Mac has been poisoned in the PC and Unix communities. I think it all derives from one simple premise: DOS and Unix users between 1984 and 1995 were perpetually sick with envy and too stubborn to admit it. It's all sour grapes.
I honestly can't imagine anyone giving the Mac a fair, open-minded try for a couple of months and not concluding that it is, in many ways, still years ahead of everything else (even though the kernel lags). Some of its features are amazingly slick. Aliases, for example, are much smarter than Shortcuts or symbolic links.
Also like other posters have mentioned, a lot of the grassroots Mac development took place in Hypercard, not something likely to catch the attention of the rest of the world. I prefer to do my Mac hacking in MacPerl nowadays; AppleScript I mostly ignore.
Finally, I'd like to try (once again, in vain) to put to rest the twin myths of software drought and overpriced hardware.
In over 10 years of using the Mac, I don't think I've ever been forced to do something on a PC or Unix because there was no software to do it on the Mac. I may have done it if I couldn't find appropriate free software, but there was always something. The Mac shareware and freeware communities have produced a steady stream of high-quality apps. Some are so good I have used them daily for over 6 years. On the commercial side, there are over 25,000 shipping applications. This is not exactly what I think of as a platform bereft of runnable code. Maybe you're thinking of Minix.
Finally, I have yet to be convinced that Macs below the top-of-the-line have been significantly overpriced in the past 5+ years. I keep pretty close tabs on current Mac and PC prices, and low- and mid-range Macs don't cost much more equivalent PCs -- in fact, they often cost LESS than an equivalent PC from a first-class maker like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, HP, or IBM. It doesn't bother me that Apple charges an extra $1000 for that last 50 MHz; the top-of-the-line should be the high-profit-margin gravy. I want the guys with all the bucks to subsidize my mid-level machine!
While it is true that x86 *chips* continue to get faster and faster, the *architecture* does not. A variety of popular benchmarks consistently show that the efficiency (defined as performance/MHz) of the x86 has not improved *at all* since the introduction of the Pentium. In fact, it's gotten worse. Even the mighty Athlon is (depending on the benchmark) only a few % more efficient than Intel.
Compare that to PowerPC, Alpha, and some of the other RISC ISA families. Unlike x86, they actually *do* improve their efficiency as the family matures.
Case closed. The x86 ISA is stagnant. The *only* factor driving its continued performance improvement is increasing clock speed.
Don't forget gomoku! :-)
"Congratulations, you have found secret message #2. We knew somebody reads this stuff."
:-)
The software manual that contains this message belongs to a product identified in a post hidden within this thread. Be the first to identify it and I'll send you my extra copy.
It's clear Delta Tao loves easter eggs. They even mention some in their manuals; I guess they got tired of users reporting them as bugs.
For instance:
Spaceward Ho! uses a cute Santa icon... um, you can guess why. Ho! also features planets named after DT employees. And there are special ship graphics that you get only when your stats line up just right.
Eric's Ultimate Solitaire changes card backs to mark special occasions. I don't remember what they were, but something special was shown on Mother's Day.
I don't know if it counts as an easter egg, but in their new game, Clan Lord, interesting things tend to happen on holidays. It also has some mini-quests that reward people who complete them with some cute, otherwise-useless prize. Some items in the game give funny messages if you use them in the right way.
This does beg the question: Is it an easter egg if it's in a game, where the primary purpose of the software is to entertain the user? On the one hand, it gives a little warm fuzzy to the people who discover it. On the other hand, the game is supposed to do that!
So, I would guess that you can count on easter eggs or like amusements in the future from Delta Tao. It seems to be part of their culture.
Is it obvious that DT is my favorite game maker? :-)
The idea drives the intelligentsia nuts, but it's becoming clearer all the time that culture isn't being destroyed online but re-invented here.
What are you trying to say here, Jon? I resent your churlish insinuation that we aren't the intelligentsia!
Forget the langage. You can teach kids good programming technique in any language, and kids don't get hung up on the stupider elements of programming systems the way we dinosaurs do. Programming skills aquired in one system can be applied to any other.
What you need is strong motivation. If your kids are anything like I was, that motivation is games. Do you have any games that support scripts or macros? Use 'em! Another poster suggested Lego Mindstorms. Great! I happen to enjoy MUDs, some of which allow extensive player programming. Even for the ones that don't, a specialized MUD client will.
My point is, exploit your kids' desire to excel in their game, or make their own. They'll learn. Faster than you'll believe. It worked for me.