Xerox did NOT invent the GUI. Apple did NOT steal Xerox technology. This has been hashed out I don't know how many times in the last 15 years, but GET OVER IT!!!!!!
All of the basic components of the GUI were invented before 1970 (PARC founded, IIRC, 1971) by a variety of individuals, including Bush, Englebart, Sutherland, Kay, and Raskin. Of the preceding, I believe only Kay worked at PARC.
Apple's first GUI may have copied a little to closely the icons from Xerox, but the way it *WORKED* was way more advanced.
Furthermore, for those of you who genuinely didn't know, Apple ***PAID XEROX*** (I believe it was something like $1M in stock options) for what they saw. They didn't steal *anything*.
For the last time: Check your facts before posting or SHUT UP!
This is disgusting and horrific.
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Live or Memorex?
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· Score: 2
That this technology came to be was inevitable. Chroma Key has been around for decades, making it possible to composite live analog video images. I believe the Princeton digital system has been used to create virtual billboards in baseball broadcast coverage for a couple of years now.
I hate it.
It should be illegal for anyone to altar in any way an image used to portray a real event. I don't even like having the TV weather reporter superimposed on the map -- I prefer a simple voice over. Even cropping photographs is skirting a fine line of propriety. The only exception I would make is for markups conspicuously added for illustation after the raw image is shown (e.g., during football game replays).
I hope it isn't too late to stuff this genie back in its bottle. As we have been shown ad nausemu, the maintstream press will pick a quick buck over the unvarnished truth every time. Because we cannot afford a tyranny of corporate thought police any more than we can a governmental one, we must not allow any altered images in news or event reporting.
And if it takes a ruling by the FCC or even the Supreme Court to force the media to give us the complete picture, then make it so!
P.S.
RE: the Netherlands, that includes showing billboards in news broadcasts. Those advertisers paid good money to have their ads put in plain sight. If that's what the scene looks like, that's what it looks like. Showing us the whole truth includes showing the ads that decorate the scene.
Actually, some embedded systems (I won't speculate on how many) do care about the date and store the year/month/day/hr/min/sec as binary-coded decimal, with one or two digits per byte. Well-known systems from reputable companies like Texas Instruments.
MacOS already has this. Unless it disappeared when I wasn't looking, Apple has shipped a screen magnification utility for vision impaired users as a standard part of MacOS for longer than I can remember; 10 years, at least.
Re:People actually care about power consumption
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G4 vs. Athlon Review
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· Score: 1
You're off by four orders of magnitude. An extra 50W of power consumption will cost you $20/year if you run 24/7. More if you live in an expensive electric market like I do. When you have multiple boxes (like I do), it adds up. You pay $20 MORE just for the privilege of having a single wasteful CPU.
You make some good points, but your one about labor being free is not one of them.:-) Aquiring knowledge takes time, and time is money. If you can amortize the cost of aquiring the knowledge by learning how to do it right once then flawlessly building a whole mess of PCs, great. But then you're not a customer, you're a builder.
I believe you know enough about PCs to pick up a catalog, order a bunch of parts that will work together, slap 'em in, install the OS and drivers, and have a working system in under 3 hours. HOW MUCH OF YOUR TIME WENT INTO AQUIRING THAT EXPERTISE? And if you do have it, why are you letting it go to waste? You should be out building and selling PCs!
My whole point, from the beginning, has been that the cost to me, as a customer who wants a working computer, is nearly as great with a PC as with an equivalent Mac, irrespective of the OS software you put on it. My Mac is a Linux machine, too. My original claim was that a PC costs within $200 of the price of an equivalent Macintosh. I later clarified that by requiring the PC to be a complete, working system out of the box (like a Mac) to be equivalent. I still stand by that claim.
Your point about iMacs and aesthetics is well taken. I'd say it's at least the second most important feature that sets it apart from all those boring, beige PC clones. (Incidentally, whose idea was it to make personal computers beige?)
I wouldn't say the iMac is exactly wicked fast, but it does deliver good value for the money. If you think it's only good for a word processor, you have some funny priorities. It runs all the same kinds of software as any other system, why only single out one kind? I know, your comment was only a troll, but really, you can do better than that. Everyone knows the only reason really to buy an iMac is to play Clan Lord.
Please explain to me how you obtain satisfaction from a broken PC without taking it back or buying a new one. Once it's out of warranty, there's nothing stopping an iMac owner from replacing only the busted parts him/herself, and if it's still under warranty, then you're a fool not to make the vendor do the repair. The only difference is, when you take the iMac in, you don't have a lonely, useless monitor sitting forlornly on your desk waiting for its CPU to come home.
As for physics experiments, it's not really an experiment if you already know the outcome before you start.
For the price of *BUYING* an iMac, I could *BUILD* a better Mac system, too. Discounting, of course, the value of my labor. This is my message: Unless you're comparing completely built and ready-to-run systems, YOU'RE NOT COMPARING THE SAME THING! A pile of parts is not a computer until you've put it all together. That takes (somebody's) time, and time is money.
I don't give a flying leap what you can pay to buy the components; that's not an acceptable response to my (implicit) challenge. Not unless it includes an accounting of your time, as previously described.
Incidentally, I notice that your "iMac", despite all its lowball components and *no cost of labor*, nearly comes within my stated $200 of the list price of an iMac in US$. As an experiment, I went to a site I trust and priced out a comparable PC from components and came up with a range of about US$690-$1200. Since I'm not a PC expert, I have no damn idea which exactly of these components is truly comparable.
For the high-end config, I came up with a range of US$1024-$2096 for what seems to be essentially the same system. I know for a fact that some of those minimum-priced components are not suitable for a high-end system, like for example the US$90 mobo or the US$30 case. But how the **** am I supposed to know which motherboard goes with which processor goes with max RAM of 1.5 GB? And what's the $ value of motherboard audio?
This is why, BTW, you have to include some accounting of the value of the time you put into knowing the answers to these questions.
I'll let your cheap shot about Linux go, since I use it too. However, I will add that my net router got "demoted" from Pentium/Linux to PowerMac/MacOS because the Linux system was too fragile. Couldn't handle power outages. There's something to be said for an OS that can survive powering down without flushing its disk caches.
I think you're lowballing some of the components. Noone in their right mind would live with a $5 keyboard or a $5 mouse. Nor do I believe the sound system you quote is equivalent in quality.
I'll come right out and say, no way on earth is ATA-66 nearly as good as UW-SCSI. And the Mac I cited has both UW-SCSI and ATA-33 on it.
I'm scratching my head at some of your prices, because they look pretty good to me, even in US$. Maybe I should move to Canada.
You're also not taking into account labor. Please estimate how much time you have spent researching, shopping, installing, troubleshooting, and generally maintaining expertise in PC parts. Either that, or quote a PC package out of the box.
Case in point: I have in the past 12 months sunk about three WEEKS into smacking my Linux system into shape. It's not fair to value it at what my company pays me, but it IS time taken away from things I would rather be doing. And that's NOT counting the time I spend just generally knowing what's going on.
So please, do let us know how much sweat equity went into those cheap custom-built PCs of yours.
I don't agree with your comment about crap components, but I'll let it go. But I don't for a minute accept your argument that you can fairly compare a PC built up one part at a time against a complete package machine. That's why I quoted a PC vendor's price, not an itemized list of parts culled out of Computer Shopper after 4 hours of searching through it.
Just out of curiosity, how many hours did you spend researching, shopping for, buying, installing, and troubleshooting your custom-built $500 PC? If you spend a significant amount of time just keeping your expertise current, that counts.
Is your $500 PC truly comparable to an iMac? For that you need about a Celeron/400 or K6-III/450, 64 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 6 GB IDE, CD-ROM, Rage 128 level video, surround sound, monitor, speakers, 56k modem, and 10/100-base-T ethernet, and OS software. And, like I said, it's really only fair if you get it all packaged together out of the box.
For the high end configuration, you need an Athlon/550 or Pentium III/600, 128 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 9 GB UW-SCSI drive and adaptor, CD-ROM, Rage 128 video, surround sound, and 10/100-base-T ethernet, and OS software.
The incessant sniping about how expensive Macs are gets REALLY OLD, kiddies. Trust me, we know all about it. I've been tracking the prices of Macs and PCs since many of you were in grade school, and let me tell you, it ain't true that Macs are a ripoff.
I've done several side-by-side comparisons over the years. Price out a Mac and an equally equipped PC of comparable performance*. Yes, the Mac still costs more. How much more? $100 to $200. That's right. I'll say it again to make sure it's not a mistake. $100 to $200 more to buy a Mac vs. a comparably equipped PC.
*By performance, I mean the computer's ability to compute, not the MHz its oscillator runs at.
This has been true at nearly every point in time for at least the past 5 years, maybe 10.
Now... is your time worth anything to you? If that PC costs you 1 work day of support more than the Mac over the lifetime of the machine... bye bye savings! And trust me, it will. Been there, done that, got the Tee-shirt, three times over.
I reboot Windows NT as often as I reboot MacOS. If Linux is your game... I've got a Linux partition on both my Mac and my PC, so there!:-)
Case in point #1: A budget AMD PC. Starts at $670. Sounds pretty cheap. Now add stuff until it equals a $999 iMac 350. Total price: $954. And the iMac is the faster machine, significantly. I'm not making this up, this is a real quote from iDot.com.
Case in point #2: A high-end G3/450. Price: $1800 from Outpost.com. Price of a comparable** 600 MHz Intel PC from iDot: $1774.
**Remember what I said about performance.
Doggone, Macs are a better deal than I thought! The Mac premium has fallen to under $50. I'd better run out and buy one before Apple comes to their senses.
Two steps forward, two steps back, heat dissipated
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Interface Zen
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Tom Christiansen is obviously a smart, thoughful guy. But this self-inconsistent essay is little more than a combination of "think about human factors" and "damn, weren't the '70s great!" I got news for you. The '70s were pretty good, but they weren't the end-all, be-all, particularly where computer input technology is concerned.
Now, let me get out all my biases right up front. I love Perl, but I HATE VI. And I hate moving my cursor with the ^@#$ hjkl keys. And I hate editing modes. And I hate trying to remember 200,000 non-mnemonic single-key commands.
What's so bad about the inverted-T cursor keys? I have a keyboard whose arrow keys are arranged in a straight line, and I hate it. How often do you want to cursor up-down-up-down? Nearly never, I'd wager. With hjkl, you get really funky finger-pairs on complementary keys, which I have never gotten used to. It also takes my hand off the home position, which bugs the hell out of me.
Now, if you really want awful keyboard usage, we can talk about Tom's cherished NetHack. Moving with hjklyubn? You get your index finger doing 62.5% of your moves, every single one away from its home position. THAT gives me Fitts.
Give me the numeric keypad any day of the week. Right hand for movement and a few most common commands, left hand for all complex commands. Distribute the burden of cursoring around across your three strongest three fingers.
NetHack is a poor example anyway, because there are so many occasions where you need to compose long phrases or expressions. Pick up $(]*=[%/, anyone? Sure, it may look like Zen, but it doesn't feel like it.
Tom doesn't like chording, either... so why does he point us to the Happy Hacking keyboard? You have to chord it just to reach the cursor or F-keys! He's the VI guru, he should positively love the way Windows software is operated by poking F-keys. I doubt he'd be happy if he had to reach down to that option key every time he wanted to take a step in his debugger. Oh, I forgot. We're supposed to enter an editing mode and do it all from the hjkl keys.
And what's wrong with the Caps-Lock key? I thought Tom didn't like chording. Doesn't he ever write programs with #defined macros or symbolic constants? Caps-Lock is golden for those. Oh, right. He's a Perl programmer. His symbols are all lower-case, and Caps-Lock doesn't even work for @#$%&.
Problem with editing modes is, you have to learn different command sets just to use the same program. VI is especially bad in this regard. It's bad enough when there's no consistency from one program to the next. (How many mutually incompatible ways are there to cut/copy/paste text in X?) It's criminal to have that degree of inconsistency in one app!
Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple Computer delivered to the world one of the most valuable innovations in all of computing: A user command vocabulary (keystrokes and mouse gestures) that is standard across all applications! This doesn't work if the same key (combination) doesn't do the same thing all the time.
I agree with Tom about frequently used keys being sent out to the penalty zone. But if this happens a lot... then you're probably using the wrong tool for the job. I think he also exaggerates both the cost and frequency of context-switching.
I have to context switch all the time. I use keyboards with differing layouts, mice and trackballs (left-hand and right-hand), different OS platforms... and once I get into the groove, I find that all combinations are ultimately efficacious. I can enter that "programmer's trance" on any of them. I do not feel that my productivity is impacted.
Think-time is sufficiently greater than UI time that minor things like key command chords (or even typed command words like M-x revert-buffer) make no consequential difference. When your input devices are appropriate to your command language, you can Zen. That includes the F keys, the arrow keys, the number pad, and yes, even the mouse.
So, back to my title. I think Tom's discussion has some good points and some bad points. No net gain, but I had fun making the journey.
I had the impression that P1's "consciousness" generally only ran on a single processing host at a time. Then again, the author may have been deliberately vague on that point.
If any remedy is implemented that results in multiple companies selling different implementations of Windows, one of two situations will result:
1) Windows will truly and forevermore be locked in as THE personal computer operating system. Your choices will go from (Windows, Linux, Mac) to (Windows A, Windows B, Windows C). If the "alternative" to Windows is also Windows, Linux loses most of its appeal. VERY, VERY BAD.
2) All the standardization that has been painfully established to date will be shattered by the creation of mutually incompatible versions of Windows, such that no single compiled app will run on more than 30% of PCs. WORSE.
I'm all for reining in MS, but let's not even think about splitting up their OS division into multiple competitive entities or licensing the source code. Much better to leave the OS company as one single entity so that Linux won't get squeezed out.
Re:How far should Universities go?
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Copyright!
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· Score: 1
My answer to this is very simple: All owners of LANs and other data networks should most appropriately (and in my educated opinion on right vs. wrong) be viewed as "common carriers", and should not be held responsible in any way for the items (i.e., data) their customers choose to transport via their services.
Will the "owners" of intellectual property choose to see it this way? NO ****ing WAY; it's much easier to bully a few network admins than thousands of 2-bit users. But that doesn't make them right, and that doesn't make the law right if it sides with them.
Similarly, an ISP should have no more liability for the contents of its customers' files than a storage company has for the contents of its customers' units, and a university should be no more responsible for its students' files than the contents of their dorm rooms.
Do I think the legal establishment agrees with me on this? No, actually, I don't. But I have sufficient confidence in my ethical compass to say I am right and they are wrong. If you have a problem with something I do, (metaphorically) tell it to my face, don't snitch to my mommy.
Zodiac: [Eco] There's a lot of good chemistry in this book. Oh, some bad chemistry too. Set circa 1990, most of what happens in this book is delightfully (or chillingly) fealible. Protagonist is about the same caliber as the one in Snow Crash. Lots of chasing around. Doesn't end abruptly.
By my definition, a killer app is one that is so indispensible, someone will buy a new or different computer just to have it, right away. In my pathetic little opinion, there have only been two killer apps in the history of PCs.
1. VisiCalc - The application that transformed personal computing from a hobby to an industry.
2. NCSA Mosaic - The application that made Internet access must-have. Parent application of both Netscape and Internet Explorer.
I cannot think of any other PC product that changed the world, overnight.
Products that I regard as influential but fail the killer app test include Macintosh (MacOS + MacPaint + MacWrite), LAN technologies, and Wolfenstein 3D.
If you want to see Linux become a/the dominant OS, you have to figure out what the next killer app will be and write it for Linux. Preferably in such a way that it won't run adequately on any other platform.:-)
Of course, it's the nature of killer apps that if anyone knew what it would be, we'd have it already. It stands to reason that the nature of the next killer app cannot be extrapolated from any product we have and use today.
I actually switch hit between Dvorak and Qwerty. I've been a Qwerty touch typist for about 18 years, and a Dvorak touch typist for about 1.5 years. Surprise, surprise, I'm actually faster with Qwerty!:-) BUT... I'm about 90%+ as fast with Dvorak, and either Dv or switching back and forth has resulted in greatly increased comfort in my hands and wrists.
I also switch mouse and trackball, left-hand and right-hand. (Sanity hint: Don't mess with the mapping of your mouse buttons, just use the default right-handed config.) I'm the most ambidextrous PC user I know!:-)
A popular informational.org website I am affiliated with had this happen to it. This site is not a major site, but gets perhaps 150,000 hits/year on its homepage. We were alerted by a reader that an Australian porn site had reproduced the homepage in its entirety at the bottom of theirs. It should without saying that our site has nothing whatsoever to do with "adult entertainment".
I believe the way we got the page pulled was by writing to abuse and webmaster @ the offending domain and demanding that they stop illegally using our trademark!
Now we face a different kind of web page piracy: An e-commerce site has registered the.com version of our domain, clearly in an attempt to capture the people who search for our.org site. I guess it's time to raise the trademark club again. It'll be interesting to see if NSI rolls over as readily for a penniless.org trademark holder as it does for a corporation. Stay tuned...
I have found that I have been fairly spam free. I think a major reason for this is that I configure no identity in my web browsers, and accept only cookies that return to the originating server.
On the other hand, if you want to get lots of spam, just post regularly to a Usenet newsgroup without munging your identity.:-P It always amuses me when I get "Dear fellow X" (X being something that has zero commonality with the relevant newsgroup) emails on accounts that I create for RPG characters. That'll teach me to post to News with a valid return address.
I have a new Yahoo email address that as yet has never been used for anything but private email. I wonder how long it'll take before I get spam to it...
On the otherhand using FreeBSD as your desktop is a bit of a waste of computing power since Unix was originally designed for very large computers...
If I recall my OS history correctly, Unix was designed to run on small computers, not big ones. Unix was hacked together as a minimal system to run on a cast-off PDP-8 (a mini-computer). The name itself is a parody of Multics, which was designed to run on bigger machines. The earliest versions of Unix had no VM, and couldn't access more than 64kB of memory.
So, as far as that goes, Unix actually has its roots in hardware roughly on a level with 6502 machines like the Apple II, Commodore 64, or Atari 800. Compared to those, Linus' early '386 was quite a deluxe machine indeed!
Zodiac appears to be set approximately in 1990. Unlike Snow Crash, there are no characters with superhuman powers. It's a very engaging and thoughtful speculation about biological eco-hazards. The main character is tind of a brilliant arrogant prick hero type -- I think he has a sort of Heinlein-esque feel to him. Zodiac is not the pulse-pounder that Snow Crash was, but I'd say it's more exciting than Diamond Age. I have liked all three enough that I'd buy Stephenson's books on the author's name alone.
Now I'm curious. Open Transport is a pretty strange beast. Is its TCP/IP stack a barely-warmed-over port of the standard Unix model, or is it truly something new?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know who did it first, but this has been around since the late '80s.
I had this feature (probably still do, come to think of it) in an Atari ST word processor I bought in 1987.
Standard in MacOS since System 6 or before.
Unicode was *invented by Apple*. Well, them and one other company (perhaps Xerox), IIRC.
Kudos to MS for supporting Unicode -- but ASCII is still alive and well in Windows.
Xerox did NOT invent the GUI. Apple did NOT steal Xerox technology. This has been hashed out I don't know how many times in the last 15 years, but GET OVER IT!!!!!!
All of the basic components of the GUI were invented before 1970 (PARC founded, IIRC, 1971) by a variety of individuals, including Bush, Englebart, Sutherland, Kay, and Raskin. Of the preceding, I believe only Kay worked at PARC.
Apple's first GUI may have copied a little to closely the icons from Xerox, but the way it *WORKED* was way more advanced.
Furthermore, for those of you who genuinely didn't know, Apple ***PAID XEROX*** (I believe it was something like $1M in stock options) for what they saw. They didn't steal *anything*.
For the last time: Check your facts before posting or SHUT UP!
That this technology came to be was inevitable. Chroma Key has been around for decades, making it possible to composite live analog video images. I believe the Princeton digital system has been used to create virtual billboards in baseball broadcast coverage for a couple of years now.
I hate it.
It should be illegal for anyone to altar in any way an image used to portray a real event. I don't even like having the TV weather reporter superimposed on the map -- I prefer a simple voice over. Even cropping photographs is skirting a fine line of propriety. The only exception I would make is for markups conspicuously added for illustation after the raw image is shown (e.g., during football game replays).
I hope it isn't too late to stuff this genie back in its bottle. As we have been shown ad nausemu, the maintstream press will pick a quick buck over the unvarnished truth every time. Because we cannot afford a tyranny of corporate thought police any more than we can a governmental one, we must not allow any altered images in news or event reporting.
And if it takes a ruling by the FCC or even the Supreme Court to force the media to give us the complete picture, then make it so!
P.S.
RE: the Netherlands, that includes showing billboards in news broadcasts. Those advertisers paid good money to have their ads put in plain sight. If that's what the scene looks like, that's what it looks like. Showing us the whole truth includes showing the ads that decorate the scene.
Actually, some embedded systems (I won't speculate on how many) do care about the date and store the year/month/day/hr/min/sec as binary-coded decimal, with one or two digits per byte. Well-known systems from reputable companies like Texas Instruments.
MacOS already has this. Unless it disappeared when I wasn't looking, Apple has shipped a screen magnification utility for vision impaired users as a standard part of MacOS for longer than I can remember; 10 years, at least.
You're off by four orders of magnitude. An extra 50W of power consumption will cost you $20/year if you run 24/7. More if you live in an expensive electric market like I do. When you have multiple boxes (like I do), it adds up. You pay $20 MORE just for the privilege of having a single wasteful CPU.
You make some good points, but your one about labor being free is not one of them. :-) Aquiring knowledge takes time, and time is money. If you can amortize the cost of aquiring the knowledge by learning how to do it right once then flawlessly building a whole mess of PCs, great. But then you're not a customer, you're a builder.
I believe you know enough about PCs to pick up a catalog, order a bunch of parts that will work together, slap 'em in, install the OS and drivers, and have a working system in under 3 hours. HOW MUCH OF YOUR TIME WENT INTO AQUIRING THAT EXPERTISE? And if you do have it, why are you letting it go to waste? You should be out building and selling PCs!
My whole point, from the beginning, has been that the cost to me, as a customer who wants a working computer, is nearly as great with a PC as with an equivalent Mac, irrespective of the OS software you put on it. My Mac is a Linux machine, too. My original claim was that a PC costs within $200 of the price of an equivalent Macintosh. I later clarified that by requiring the PC to be a complete, working system out of the box (like a Mac) to be equivalent. I still stand by that claim.
Your point about iMacs and aesthetics is well taken. I'd say it's at least the second most important feature that sets it apart from all those boring, beige PC clones. (Incidentally, whose idea was it to make personal computers beige?)
I wouldn't say the iMac is exactly wicked fast, but it does deliver good value for the money. If you think it's only good for a word processor, you have some funny priorities. It runs all the same kinds of software as any other system, why only single out one kind? I know, your comment was only a troll, but really, you can do better than that. Everyone knows the only reason really to buy an iMac is to play Clan Lord.
Please explain to me how you obtain satisfaction from a broken PC without taking it back or buying a new one. Once it's out of warranty, there's nothing stopping an iMac owner from replacing only the busted parts him/herself, and if it's still under warranty, then you're a fool not to make the vendor do the repair. The only difference is, when you take the iMac in, you don't have a lonely, useless monitor sitting forlornly on your desk waiting for its CPU to come home.
As for physics experiments, it's not really an experiment if you already know the outcome before you start.
For the price of *BUYING* an iMac, I could *BUILD* a better Mac system, too. Discounting, of course, the value of my labor. This is my message: Unless you're comparing completely built and ready-to-run systems, YOU'RE NOT COMPARING THE SAME THING! A pile of parts is not a computer until you've put it all together. That takes (somebody's) time, and time is money.
I don't give a flying leap what you can pay to buy the components; that's not an acceptable response to my (implicit) challenge. Not unless it includes an accounting of your time, as previously described.
Incidentally, I notice that your "iMac", despite all its lowball components and *no cost of labor*, nearly comes within my stated $200 of the list price of an iMac in US$. As an experiment, I went to a site I trust and priced out a comparable PC from components and came up with a range of about US$690-$1200. Since I'm not a PC expert, I have no damn idea which exactly of these components is truly comparable.
For the high-end config, I came up with a range of US$1024-$2096 for what seems to be essentially the same system. I know for a fact that some of those minimum-priced components are not suitable for a high-end system, like for example the US$90 mobo or the US$30 case. But how the **** am I supposed to know which motherboard goes with which processor goes with max RAM of 1.5 GB? And what's the $ value of motherboard audio?
This is why, BTW, you have to include some accounting of the value of the time you put into knowing the answers to these questions.
Nice work. I have only minor nitpicks.
I'll let your cheap shot about Linux go, since I use it too. However, I will add that my net router got "demoted" from Pentium/Linux to PowerMac/MacOS because the Linux system was too fragile. Couldn't handle power outages. There's something to be said for an OS that can survive powering down without flushing its disk caches.
I think you're lowballing some of the components. Noone in their right mind would live with a $5 keyboard or a $5 mouse. Nor do I believe the sound system you quote is equivalent in quality.
I'll come right out and say, no way on earth is ATA-66 nearly as good as UW-SCSI. And the Mac I cited has both UW-SCSI and ATA-33 on it.
I'm scratching my head at some of your prices, because they look pretty good to me, even in US$. Maybe I should move to Canada.
You're also not taking into account labor. Please estimate how much time you have spent researching, shopping, installing, troubleshooting, and generally maintaining expertise in PC parts. Either that, or quote a PC package out of the box.
Case in point: I have in the past 12 months sunk about three WEEKS into smacking my Linux system into shape. It's not fair to value it at what my company pays me, but it IS time taken away from things I would rather be doing. And that's NOT counting the time I spend just generally knowing what's going on.
So please, do let us know how much sweat equity went into those cheap custom-built PCs of yours.
I don't agree with your comment about crap components, but I'll let it go. But I don't for a minute accept your argument that you can fairly compare a PC built up one part at a time against a complete package machine. That's why I quoted a PC vendor's price, not an itemized list of parts culled out of Computer Shopper after 4 hours of searching through it.
Just out of curiosity, how many hours did you spend researching, shopping for, buying, installing, and troubleshooting your custom-built $500 PC? If you spend a significant amount of time just keeping your expertise current, that counts.
Is your $500 PC truly comparable to an iMac? For that you need about a Celeron/400 or K6-III/450, 64 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 6 GB IDE, CD-ROM, Rage 128 level video, surround sound, monitor, speakers, 56k modem, and 10/100-base-T ethernet, and OS software. And, like I said, it's really only fair if you get it all packaged together out of the box.
For the high end configuration, you need an Athlon/550 or Pentium III/600, 128 MB PC-100 SDRAM, 9 GB UW-SCSI drive and adaptor, CD-ROM, Rage 128 video, surround sound, and 10/100-base-T ethernet, and OS software.
The incessant sniping about how expensive Macs are gets REALLY OLD, kiddies. Trust me, we know all about it. I've been tracking the prices of Macs and PCs since many of you were in grade school, and let me tell you, it ain't true that Macs are a ripoff.
:-)
I've done several side-by-side comparisons over the years. Price out a Mac and an equally equipped PC of comparable performance*. Yes, the Mac still costs more. How much more? $100 to $200. That's right. I'll say it again to make sure it's not a mistake. $100 to $200 more to buy a Mac vs. a comparably equipped PC.
*By performance, I mean the computer's ability to compute, not the MHz its oscillator runs at.
This has been true at nearly every point in time for at least the past 5 years, maybe 10.
Now... is your time worth anything to you? If that PC costs you 1 work day of support more than the Mac over the lifetime of the machine... bye bye savings! And trust me, it will. Been there, done that, got the Tee-shirt, three times over.
I reboot Windows NT as often as I reboot MacOS. If Linux is your game... I've got a Linux partition on both my Mac and my PC, so there!
Case in point #1: A budget AMD PC. Starts at $670. Sounds pretty cheap. Now add stuff until it equals a $999 iMac 350. Total price: $954. And the iMac is the faster machine, significantly. I'm not making this up, this is a real quote from iDot.com.
Case in point #2: A high-end G3/450. Price: $1800 from Outpost.com. Price of a comparable** 600 MHz Intel PC from iDot: $1774.
**Remember what I said about performance.
Doggone, Macs are a better deal than I thought! The Mac premium has fallen to under $50. I'd better run out and buy one before Apple comes to their senses.
No, stay away. They smell funny.
Tom Christiansen is obviously a smart, thoughful guy. But this self-inconsistent essay is little more than a combination of "think about human factors" and "damn, weren't the '70s great!" I got news for you. The '70s were pretty good, but they weren't the end-all, be-all, particularly where computer input technology is concerned.
Now, let me get out all my biases right up front. I love Perl, but I HATE VI. And I hate moving my cursor with the ^@#$ hjkl keys. And I hate editing modes. And I hate trying to remember 200,000 non-mnemonic single-key commands.
What's so bad about the inverted-T cursor keys? I have a keyboard whose arrow keys are arranged in a straight line, and I hate it. How often do you want to cursor up-down-up-down? Nearly never, I'd wager. With hjkl, you get really funky finger-pairs on complementary keys, which I have never gotten used to. It also takes my hand off the home position, which bugs the hell out of me.
Now, if you really want awful keyboard usage, we can talk about Tom's cherished NetHack. Moving with hjklyubn? You get your index finger doing 62.5% of your moves, every single one away from its home position. THAT gives me Fitts.
Give me the numeric keypad any day of the week. Right hand for movement and a few most common commands, left hand for all complex commands. Distribute the burden of cursoring around across your three strongest three fingers.
NetHack is a poor example anyway, because there are so many occasions where you need to compose long phrases or expressions. Pick up $(]*=[%/, anyone? Sure, it may look like Zen, but it doesn't feel like it.
Tom doesn't like chording, either... so why does he point us to the Happy Hacking keyboard? You have to chord it just to reach the cursor or F-keys! He's the VI guru, he should positively love the way Windows software is operated by poking F-keys. I doubt he'd be happy if he had to reach down to that option key every time he wanted to take a step in his debugger. Oh, I forgot. We're supposed to enter an editing mode and do it all from the hjkl keys.
And what's wrong with the Caps-Lock key? I thought Tom didn't like chording. Doesn't he ever write programs with #defined macros or symbolic constants? Caps-Lock is golden for those. Oh, right. He's a Perl programmer. His symbols are all lower-case, and Caps-Lock doesn't even work for @#$%&.
Problem with editing modes is, you have to learn different command sets just to use the same program. VI is especially bad in this regard. It's bad enough when there's no consistency from one program to the next. (How many mutually incompatible ways are there to cut/copy/paste text in X?) It's criminal to have that degree of inconsistency in one app!
Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple Computer delivered to the world one of the most valuable innovations in all of computing: A user command vocabulary (keystrokes and mouse gestures) that is standard across all applications! This doesn't work if the same key (combination) doesn't do the same thing all the time.
I agree with Tom about frequently used keys being sent out to the penalty zone. But if this happens a lot... then you're probably using the wrong tool for the job. I think he also exaggerates both the cost and frequency of context-switching.
I have to context switch all the time. I use keyboards with differing layouts, mice and trackballs (left-hand and right-hand), different OS platforms... and once I get into the groove, I find that all combinations are ultimately efficacious. I can enter that "programmer's trance" on any of them. I do not feel that my productivity is impacted.
Think-time is sufficiently greater than UI time that minor things like key command chords (or even typed command words like M-x revert-buffer) make no consequential difference. When your input devices are appropriate to your command language, you can Zen. That includes the F keys, the arrow keys, the number pad, and yes, even the mouse.
So, back to my title. I think Tom's discussion has some good points and some bad points. No net gain, but I had fun making the journey.
I had the impression that P1's "consciousness" generally only ran on a single processing host at a time. Then again, the author may have been deliberately vague on that point.
If any remedy is implemented that results in multiple companies selling different implementations of Windows, one of two situations will result:
1) Windows will truly and forevermore be locked in as THE personal computer operating system. Your choices will go from (Windows, Linux, Mac) to (Windows A, Windows B, Windows C). If the "alternative" to Windows is also Windows, Linux loses most of its appeal. VERY, VERY BAD.
2) All the standardization that has been painfully established to date will be shattered by the
creation of mutually incompatible versions of Windows, such that no single compiled app will run on more than 30% of PCs. WORSE.
I'm all for reining in MS, but let's not even think about splitting up their OS division into multiple competitive entities or licensing the source code. Much better to leave the OS company as one single entity so that Linux won't get squeezed out.
My answer to this is very simple: All owners of LANs and other data networks should most appropriately (and in my educated opinion on right vs. wrong) be viewed as "common carriers", and should not be held responsible in any way for the items (i.e., data) their customers choose to transport via their services.
Will the "owners" of intellectual property choose to see it this way? NO ****ing WAY; it's much easier to bully a few network admins than thousands of 2-bit users. But that doesn't make them right, and that doesn't make the law right if it sides with them.
Similarly, an ISP should have no more liability for the contents of its customers' files than a storage company has for the contents of its customers' units, and a university should be no more responsible for its students' files than the contents of their dorm rooms.
Do I think the legal establishment agrees with me on this? No, actually, I don't. But I have sufficient confidence in my ethical compass to say I am right and they are wrong. If you have a problem with something I do, (metaphorically) tell it to my face, don't snitch to my mommy.
Zodiac: [Eco]
There's a lot of good chemistry in this book. Oh, some bad chemistry too. Set circa 1990, most of what happens in this book is delightfully (or chillingly) fealible. Protagonist is about the same caliber as the one in Snow Crash. Lots of chasing around. Doesn't end abruptly.
By my definition, a killer app is one that is so indispensible, someone will buy a new or different computer just to have it, right away. In my pathetic little opinion, there have only been two killer apps in the history of PCs.
:-)
1. VisiCalc - The application that transformed personal computing from a hobby to an industry.
2. NCSA Mosaic - The application that made Internet access must-have. Parent application of both Netscape and Internet Explorer.
I cannot think of any other PC product that changed the world, overnight.
Products that I regard as influential but fail the killer app test include Macintosh (MacOS + MacPaint + MacWrite), LAN technologies, and Wolfenstein 3D.
If you want to see Linux become a/the dominant OS, you have to figure out what the next killer app will be and write it for Linux. Preferably in such a way that it won't run adequately on any other platform.
Of course, it's the nature of killer apps that if anyone knew what it would be, we'd have it already. It stands to reason that the nature of the next killer app cannot be extrapolated from any product we have and use today.
I actually switch hit between Dvorak and Qwerty. I've been a Qwerty touch typist for about 18 years, and a Dvorak touch typist for about 1.5 years. Surprise, surprise, I'm actually faster with Qwerty! :-) BUT... I'm about 90%+ as fast with Dvorak, and either Dv or switching back and forth has resulted in greatly increased comfort in my hands and wrists.
:-)
I also switch mouse and trackball, left-hand and right-hand. (Sanity hint: Don't mess with the mapping of your mouse buttons, just use the default right-handed config.) I'm the most ambidextrous PC user I know!
I believe the way we got the page pulled was by writing to abuse and webmaster @ the offending domain and demanding that they stop illegally using our trademark!
Now we face a different kind of web page piracy: An e-commerce site has registered the
I have found that I have been fairly spam free. I think a major reason for this is that I configure no identity in my web browsers, and accept only cookies that return to the originating server.
:-P It always amuses me when I get "Dear fellow X" (X being something that has zero commonality with the relevant newsgroup) emails on accounts that I create for RPG characters. That'll teach me to post to News with a valid return address.
On the other hand, if you want to get lots of spam, just post regularly to a Usenet newsgroup without munging your identity.
I have a new Yahoo email address that as yet has never been used for anything but private email. I wonder how long it'll take before I get spam to it...
If I recall my OS history correctly, Unix was designed to run on small computers, not big ones. Unix was hacked together as a minimal system to run on a cast-off PDP-8 (a mini-computer). The name itself is a parody of Multics, which was designed to run on bigger machines. The earliest versions of Unix had no VM, and couldn't access more than 64kB of memory.
So, as far as that goes, Unix actually has its roots in hardware roughly on a level with 6502 machines like the Apple II, Commodore 64, or Atari 800. Compared to those, Linus' early '386 was quite a deluxe machine indeed!
Zodiac appears to be set approximately in 1990. Unlike Snow Crash, there are no characters with superhuman powers. It's a very engaging and thoughtful speculation about biological eco-hazards. The main character is tind of a brilliant arrogant prick hero type -- I think he has a sort of Heinlein-esque feel to him. Zodiac is not the pulse-pounder that Snow Crash was, but I'd say it's more exciting than Diamond Age. I have liked all three enough that I'd buy Stephenson's books on the author's name alone.
Now I'm curious. Open Transport is a pretty strange beast. Is its TCP/IP stack a barely-warmed-over port of the standard Unix model, or is it truly something new?