It was a silly name, and still is, but think of the marketing droids who were stumbling because the only identifiable brand they had was the number 86. They had to pick something.
The biggest threat with cyber terrorism is not so much direct attacks, but as a tool to gather information on organisations for other purposes. If a cyberterrorist attacks an ISP succesfully they can gain access to many more networks belonging to the global customers, Manufacturing concerns, Government agencies, Lobbies, Financial institutions. The ISP is the passageway for all of its customers and a large reputable ISP can have direct access to all sorts of customer resources. Monitoring a central router an an ISP can be the ultimate wiretap. ISP's often have financial and personal data of customers warehoused for disaster recovery reasons, these resources are often stored on Internet connected machines.
Worse yet ISP's do not necessarily want to cooperate with officials. They do not want to be slammed with liabilities for their transmission of dangerous material. ISP's (last I checked) are not immune to this sort of legal attack like telcos are.
Well I read the article as someone posted it, it certainly is intriguing. Dont get me wrong about this being cool, it just seems (to me at least) that using the brain to out perform the brain is an odd assertion.
Of course computer control via voice would generally happen in a controlled environment and would probably not have to involve a huge vocabulary as long as the computer could be trained on basic phonics and cross reference against a good dictionary.
They dont WANT to compete with Linux. They could care less. Sun makes computers, not operating systems. They're not trying to do anything other than sell more computers. Does IBM have open source for AIX? How about HP and HPUX? Compaq and Tru64? These are the people sun are competing with. People who sell computers.
Sun could care less whether they are Open Software or Free Software or whatever. They sell computers, not operating systems. They could also care less if people contribute to solaris. This is not an open source project (the way I see it) it's just a service to customers. They release the source code so paying customers who bought machines from them have one more perk of running Solaris instead of AIX/HPUX/Tru64/Whatever. Sun are not idiots. They know that Linux has some big advantages because the source is available. There's a lot of people out there who are pushing for Linux because the source code is available, at the expense of Solaris. These people dont care if the source is open, free, whatever, it's there. Now for sun, it's there as well.
Peole wont stand for things that make their lives complicated unless their gadgetry is for the sake of gadgetry. We're part of a group of people that really likes electronic toys and blinking lights and other asssorted gizmos and devices, but for the most part, most people dont care too much. Out of all the people I work with, most of them have cell phones, but very few have pagers. Only one has an electronic organizer.
I worked in an office where everyone had all the gizmos and I found it was terribly unproductive. Each person basically rejected all but one of the forms of information, and then only accepted info from that medium, not the most ideal situation, but hardly a cyberclism.
If you want to talk about a Cyberclism talk about the proliferation of bad information on the net. That's goofing up general society more than a few little gadgets that some geeks carry around.
As someone who was both a smart kid and bored in school, I still don't think that intelligence is any excuse for acting out.
Well add constant and cruel ridicule for over a decade into there and maybe you'll see it our way. I'm not saying everyone should be jerks in school, but when you have no friends, and are bored beyond comprehension in school you're going to lash out. There was no place to send me or nothing to do with me until the schools bought computers and I had a tool that could seemingly never be exhausted.
I've only had a couple different kinds of teachers in my entire life. One type realized instantly that I was bored, and would make sure that there was enough resources to let me do my thing, and the other kind punished me consistently for my unruly behavior and falure to submit to a boring curriculum. Unfortunately there were too many of the second punishing kind, leaving me with very very few positive memories of my 13 years of education. By the time I made it to college the damage had been done. It was tough to adjust to having to actually pay attention in class. For 13 years I had been running on momentum built on my free time learning, in college I had to actually learn from the curriculum.
I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who were bored in school. But my boredom was driven by the fact I really wanted to learn but could not find anything to teach me. It wasn't "I hate this class, It's so boring" it was "I wish the instructor would talk about the end of the book instead of this stuff I already know."
This sort of thing really baffles me. In a day when they're building speakerphones into couches (My parents have one, it's quite nifty) do we really need the freedom cordless phones used to provide? Everyone I know who uses a cordless phone generally sits down beside it when they are talking, what's the benefit of this thing again?:-)
At least cell phones will work without land based power, and anywhere you choose to make the call.
I'm not a Microserf, but a friend of mine is. He was using Linux way before he started working at Microsoft, and in fact they were impressed that he knew Linux when he originally interviewed for an internship there (This is in like 1994). Microsoft is like any other software company in the world, they evaluate Linux on the same merits as any other OS or tool to get their job done. How do you think the company ran before Windows NT? They certainly had to have UNIX or Big Iron somewhere....
I can see where this sort of thing would be very useful for keyboards and synths, effects modules, mixers, and so on, but I'm not quite sure what it buys someone who is playing a guitar. Good guitar amps are made using tubes, and the response of a good tube amp is totally dependent on the electrical qualities of the guitar, so cleaning it up digitally is sort of a waste of effort since you're killing the whole point of having a tube amp. Any use of this interface in a guitar is going to need a an analog channel to carry the signal out the good old fashioned way as well. Although the prospect of some sort of traditional like interface ( a dial) on a guitar that is wired to digital effects on the amp/mixer/preamp is very interesting.
Corel said that components derived from open code as well as any other open code can be distributed as open code. Their code however, is not currently open code. They will make it open in the future, but right now, as beta software, it's closed. Why is this so complicated?
Wow you could have just left the UIUC part out and I still would have known what school you were talking about. Honestly I dont remember very much of 333, I stopped going after a while:-)
You're probably jaded because UIUC is such a pain in the ass place. They're REALLY concerned with churning out high-caliber academics, so they inundate you with the academic process, so that if you make it to grad school you have obviously demonstrated an aptitude for 1) taking shit, and 2) long and painful documentation. I have no doubt in my mind that the people with clue who make it to grad school after undergrad at UIUC are incredibly sharp cookies, and probably do great work. Wasn't for me though. What I think went on there is that the curriculums were deisgned for people with serious interest in grad school. The rest of us just coasted along on what we wanted to learn, ignoring the stuff that went on in class. Some people did well. I did not. That process stuff just seemed like a colossal waste of time.
Using a web chat or newsgroups or email lists to manage learning of advanced subject matter is not a very good idea. I've been on IRC/email/usenet for 7 years and if there is anything I have learned it's that online communication is very difficult.
Works that are published, in print or otherwise are always carefully planned, edited, and executed to make sure that a reader will get the as close to the original meaning as possible. In written form, this is done with editors and defined writing structure. Close attention is placed on the audiencee and for the most part it is nothing more than a "broadcast" style medium.
Communication on the net is much more real-time. It's much more personal in nature. It is easily possible to carry on a conversation over email. It's also easy to be misunderstodd in email. People approach email like they approach conversation, short bits of info, not generally well thought out, conveyed quickly to a peer. It's a very casual approach. The problem is that there are no non-visual cues in the world of email other than some rudimentary emoticons like:-) and:-(. This is a great source of confusion. Of course some people will be able to understand context, but for others it's like jumping into the middle of a conversation.
Worse yet online communication is not necessarily linear. We all understand threading and multitasking because of our computer background. Veterans to IRC can speak asynchronously often being in many converstations with the same person at the same time. Unfortuately this is extrordinarily difficult to decipher when there is no understood context between parties, and that is the kind of thing that happens often on the net. You know what you mean, your friends might know what you mean, but it's not clear that everyone reading your post will know what you mean, since your post may arrive out of context with the discussion because of the nature of an online discussion. Even assuming perfect delivery, simultaneous responses can fork an online discussion, and software reads it as a thread, not a tree. Throw non-native english speakers into the mix and it gets even more difficult, since they do not have the mastery of the conversational language that takes part in such a discussion, nor the visual or cultural cues to decipher the context.
I think it's possible to do this sort of thing with teaching, but I think it's more likely that distance learning like this will be more useful when streaming media is ubiquitous and high-quality enabling people to get the contextual clues they need for efficient communication.
-Rich
(And I'm not a student of communications or anything, I just wrote a paper on this my last year of college for speech class)
The thing is PageMaker and Photoshop are WELL beyond what your average joe wants to do with his pc. There's no doubt that those programs could never be appliances. But sit down and watch people use computers in a computer lab someday. When they are word processing they pretty much type, save, print. Anything beyond changing the fonts/tabs/margins and spacing is for advanced users. Add support for tables, diagrams and templates you'll cover most of the business users too. Moore's law tells me that appliances are getting more powerful just as fast as PC's are. sure they are significantly behind the curve, but when you talk about handheld devices that are as powerful as the last generation of computers it makes a great argument for simplfying all this crap down to something people will understand. I think that the needlessly complicated software out there actually makes people LESS productive as they spend time screwing around with things experts can do better and more efficiently.
IIRC, some of the old DALNet servers were Linux when it was just a feldgling offshoot that was considered a joke by the Undernet/EFNet crowd. It's been a real long time since I gave a care about IRC archetecture though, so I could be wrong.
The fact that IRC is such a ridiculous hog is becasue the IRC protocol was really never intended for tens of thousands of users and thousands of channels. AFAIK they still require every server to know about what every user is doing. That in itself is sort of ridiculous for a system that is supposed to provide global chat, but you'll find no crowd, ANYWHERE, more unruly than the IRC folks when it comes to change.
The problem with buying a computer as a general purpose tool is that sooner or later this stuff is all going to morph into a few appliances to make it easy for the masses to do things. Computers are complicated. People like you and me can use them just fine, but there's a lot of dough to be made in taking spreadhseets and wordprocessors and applying them to lo-tech solutions with simple consistent UIs.
The games on a PC argument could go forever. Honestly I do think i get my money's worth out of my $2000 PC (lots of upgrades, custom built by me), but not for gaming. I dont take gaming seriously enough to muck around with 3d cards and crap like that. Of course a machine that is 10 times the price of a game console is going to excel in the details. The thing is though, the most compelling electronic games are never successful becasue of their details, they are successful because the quality gameplay/story/longevity and many other non technical factors. Space Invaders did not become a famous game becasue of it's incredible graphics. The atari 2600 had positively DISMAL graphics, even for the time, but it still managed to roll over the competition with it's games and it's value. Often game systems with superior graphics are a joke compared with other systems that simply have better games.
I dont think consoles will ever replace PC's for high end gaming becasue a PC's general purpose nature will lend it to a task that current consoles just are not designed for. OTOH I dont think PC's will ever replace consoles because they're too hard to use. Consoels are for everybody, PC's are for geeks and hard core gamers.
If there was ever a company that had the potential to be as pompous and megalomaniacal as Microsoft, it's Sun
I sort of agree with this. Soctt McNealy is one of those guys in the Valley who is more motivated by defeating Microsoft than by making a superior product or enhancing his business plan. I dont quite know if he really has any other desire beyond control.
The good news is, it won't happen. People are in love with speed and convenience. Even the most powerful Intel machines don't run software as fast as people want, so a network connection certainly isn't going to fulfill the need. Maybe someday when we all have full-time gigabit connections directly to our desktops and never want for speed during even the most intensive operations, Sun's vision may become reality.
But the most powerful Intel machines are a terrible terrible waste of money for what the majority of people do. Sun's argument is that if you simplified the software and the client it will be better. This does hold water when you think about Microsoft's cultre of bloating up the wares for no real reason.
Where Linux fits in is the in between. People who need power and flexibility, but dont wnat commercial bloatware and dont want simplistic appliances. The fact that most of/. would fit into this group is probably why everyone here hates thin clients so much.
I bet a dreamcast would do a fine job with networked Quake. It's only $199 and it's built for controlling compelx characters in a 3d environment, unlike a PC. Some games lend themselves to computers, strategy games, role playing games, games that require exorbinant amounts of data for maps and enemies, but the gap is thinning. The 3D environment of my Legend Of Zelda cartrige is far beyond something like Quake II (IMHO). N64 is $99, my PC was about $2000.
Sun doesn't care about workstations anymore anyhow. They want java. they want servers. If you need to run a workstation they'll be happy to sell you one, but you might as well go with something like Linux which integrates naturally into their idea of the future, unlike NT.
Wow. This sounds like all the reasons I bought an N64 yesterday:-)
Sun wants everyone to use cheap disposable machines, just so long as they connect to solaris servers. For anyone who's not interested in thin, and still wants a computer, Sun would be thrilled to have them all using Linux, it's a great first step to Solaris.
I have to imagine that any drug they manufacture would have been created by a process and could represent an invention, right? I dont get how human genes are any different than anything else. DuPont may have the patent for teflon, but it's absurd to think they should have the patent for all non-stick surfaces. They dont have the patent to the substance in eggs which sticks to metal, they have the patent on the process/material they use to prevent it. I just dont get how drugs are different. Patenting genes seems to me to be akin to patenting raw materials.
Dont get me wrong. I think someday the AI labs of the world will create a respectable artificial intelligence that will probably be capable of some cool things.
What I dont get is why periodically someone predicts that computers will take over the world and we will be their minions. Has anyone bothered to look at these people and notice that the closer we get to the eluisive goal of AI, the more work we need to do?
Society is already at a point where lack of computer skills puts people at an extreme disadvantage in the job market. Why does everyone expect it to evolve more? Haven't they been paying attention to the fact the computers are being made to become EASIER to use? I imagine when the plow was invented there were just as many people standing around saying it would put them out of jobs as when robots started building cars in Detroit. The tools get more complex, but the conflict will perpetually remain the same.
And remember who is building these things, people. We are building them as tools. They exist to make our lives easier. Computers already trade our secrets and data without our knowledge. Computers already teach our children. They already control what we watch, what we see. Guess what? somewhere down there was still a meeting in a board room that decided what that computer would be built for and what it would provide. Humankind is still in control. Computers dont change their mind. They do what they are programmed for. It's very simple. Although complex AI will probably someday exist, it's foolish to think that it will somehow be able to outsmart us. We created it you know, so by definition, we are the more intelligent. If survival goes to the fittest, it's absurd to think that tools can become more fit than their creators, it just doesn't make sense.
I've been at linux since early 1993 (6.5 years?) and I rmemeber first hearing about it on the msgs board on one of the student boxes at UIUC. I ended up loading the first version of SLS onto about (it seemed like) 20 1.2M 5.25" floppies and loaded it on a spare partition on my Windows 3.1 box. By late 93 Windows was gone and I never looked back. That was on a 486dx/33/4/130. The case and ethernet card are still in use today. 'last' on my computer goes back to January 1994. (What can I say I'm a dork)
EGADS man. I thought I'd forgotten about minicom. Now you have to go an remind me again...
A little later (once there was hard disk support among other things:-) I was hi tech, and used to run ka9q with the hacked telnet and finger clients as a TCP/IP stack since I had SLIP access at school.
Oh yeah, over a 2400 baud modem no less. Now THOSE were the days.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a silly name, and still is, but think of the marketing droids who were stumbling because the only identifiable brand they had was the number 86. They had to pick something.
The biggest threat with cyber terrorism is not so much direct attacks, but as a tool to gather information on organisations for other purposes. If a cyberterrorist attacks an ISP succesfully they can gain access to many more networks belonging to the global customers, Manufacturing concerns, Government agencies, Lobbies, Financial institutions. The ISP is the passageway for all of its customers and a large reputable ISP can have direct access to all sorts of customer resources. Monitoring a central router an an ISP can be the ultimate wiretap. ISP's often have financial and personal data of customers warehoused for disaster recovery reasons, these resources are often stored on Internet connected machines.
Worse yet ISP's do not necessarily want to cooperate with officials. They do not want to be slammed with liabilities for their transmission of dangerous material. ISP's (last I checked) are not immune to this sort of legal attack like telcos are.
-Rich
Well I read the article as someone posted it, it certainly is intriguing. Dont get me wrong about this being cool, it just seems (to me at least) that using the brain to out perform the brain is an odd assertion.
Of course computer control via voice would generally happen in a controlled environment and would probably not have to involve a huge vocabulary as long as the computer could be trained on basic phonics and cross reference against a good dictionary.
-Rich
I cant seem to get there.
Sounds like some pretty dubious claims that some neurons can out do a human brain. Anyone here who can post a summary?
-Rich
They dont WANT to compete with Linux. They could care less. Sun makes computers, not operating systems. They're not trying to do anything other than sell more computers. Does IBM have open source for AIX? How about HP and HPUX? Compaq and Tru64? These are the people sun are competing with. People who sell computers.
-Rich
Sun could care less whether they are Open Software or Free Software or whatever. They sell computers, not operating systems. They could also care less if people contribute to solaris. This is not an open source project (the way I see it) it's just a service to customers. They release the source code so paying customers who bought machines from them have one more perk of running Solaris instead of AIX/HPUX/Tru64/Whatever. Sun are not idiots. They know that Linux has some big advantages because the source is available. There's a lot of people out there who are pushing for Linux because the source code is available, at the expense of Solaris. These people dont care if the source is open, free, whatever, it's there. Now for sun, it's there as well.
-Rich
Peole wont stand for things that make their lives complicated unless their gadgetry is for the sake of gadgetry. We're part of a group of people that really likes electronic toys and blinking lights and other asssorted gizmos and devices, but for the most part, most people dont care too much. Out of all the people I work with, most of them have cell phones, but very few have pagers. Only one has an electronic organizer.
I worked in an office where everyone had all the gizmos and I found it was terribly unproductive. Each person basically rejected all but one of the forms of information, and then only accepted info from that medium, not the most ideal situation, but hardly a cyberclism.
If you want to talk about a Cyberclism talk about the proliferation of bad information on the net. That's goofing up general society more than a few little gadgets that some geeks carry around.
-Rich
As someone who was both a smart kid and bored in school, I still don't think that intelligence is any excuse for acting out.
Well add constant and cruel ridicule for over a decade into there and maybe you'll see it our way. I'm not saying everyone should be jerks in school, but when you have no friends, and are bored beyond comprehension in school you're going to lash out. There was no place to send me or nothing to do with me until the schools bought computers and I had a tool that could seemingly never be exhausted.
I've only had a couple different kinds of teachers in my entire life. One type realized instantly that I was bored, and would make sure that there was enough resources to let me do my thing, and the other kind punished me consistently for my unruly behavior and falure to submit to a boring curriculum. Unfortunately there were too many of the second punishing kind, leaving me with very very few positive memories of my 13 years of education. By the time I made it to college the damage had been done. It was tough to adjust to having to actually pay attention in class. For 13 years I had been running on momentum built on my free time learning, in college I had to actually learn from the curriculum.
I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who were bored in school. But my boredom was driven by the fact I really wanted to learn but could not find anything to teach me. It wasn't "I hate this class, It's so boring" it was "I wish the instructor would talk about the end of the book instead of this stuff I already know."
-Rich
This sort of thing really baffles me. In a day when they're building speakerphones into couches (My parents have one, it's quite nifty) do we really need the freedom cordless phones used to provide? Everyone I know who uses a cordless phone generally sits down beside it when they are talking, what's the benefit of this thing again? :-)
At least cell phones will work without land based power, and anywhere you choose to make the call.
-Rich
I'm not a Microserf, but a friend of mine is. He was using Linux way before he started working at Microsoft, and in fact they were impressed that he knew Linux when he originally interviewed for an internship there (This is in like 1994). Microsoft is like any other software company in the world, they evaluate Linux on the same merits as any other OS or tool to get their job done. How do you think the company ran before Windows NT? They certainly had to have UNIX or Big Iron somewhere....
-Rich
I can see where this sort of thing would be very useful for keyboards and synths, effects modules, mixers, and so on, but I'm not quite sure what it buys someone who is playing a guitar. Good guitar amps are made using tubes, and the response of a good tube amp is totally dependent on the electrical qualities of the guitar, so cleaning it up digitally is sort of a waste of effort since you're killing the whole point of having a tube amp. Any use of this interface in a guitar is going to need a an analog channel to carry the signal out the good old fashioned way as well. Although the prospect of some sort of traditional like interface ( a dial) on a guitar that is wired to digital effects on the amp/mixer/preamp is very interesting.
-Rich
Did you read the article?
Corel said that components derived from open code as well as any other open code can be distributed as open code. Their code however, is not currently open code. They will make it open in the future, but right now, as beta software, it's closed. Why is this so complicated?
-Rich
Wow you could have just left the UIUC part out and I still would have known what school you were talking about. Honestly I dont remember very much of 333, I stopped going after a while :-)
You're probably jaded because UIUC is such a pain in the ass place. They're REALLY concerned with churning out high-caliber academics, so they inundate you with the academic process, so that if you make it to grad school you have obviously demonstrated an aptitude for 1) taking shit, and 2) long and painful documentation. I have no doubt in my mind that the people with clue who make it to grad school after undergrad at UIUC are incredibly sharp cookies, and probably do great work. Wasn't for me though. What I think went on there is that the curriculums were deisgned for people with serious interest in grad school. The rest of us just coasted along on what we wanted to learn, ignoring the stuff that went on in class. Some people did well. I did not. That process stuff just seemed like a colossal waste of time.
-Rich
Using a web chat or newsgroups or email lists to manage learning of advanced subject matter is not a very good idea. I've been on IRC/email/usenet for 7 years and if there is anything I have learned it's that online communication is very difficult.
:-) and :-(. This is a great source of confusion. Of course some people will be able to understand context, but for others it's like jumping into the middle of a conversation.
Works that are published, in print or otherwise are always carefully planned, edited, and executed to make sure that a reader will get the as close to the original meaning as possible. In written form, this is done with editors and defined writing structure. Close attention is placed on the audiencee and for the most part it is nothing more than a "broadcast" style medium.
Communication on the net is much more real-time. It's much more personal in nature. It is easily possible to carry on a conversation over email. It's also easy to be misunderstodd in email. People approach email like they approach conversation, short bits of info, not generally well thought out, conveyed quickly to a peer. It's a very casual approach. The problem is that there are no non-visual cues in the world of email other than some rudimentary emoticons like
Worse yet online communication is not necessarily linear. We all understand threading and multitasking because of our computer background. Veterans to IRC can speak asynchronously often being in many converstations with the same person at the same time. Unfortuately this is extrordinarily difficult to decipher when there is no understood context between parties, and that is the kind of thing that happens often on the net. You know what you mean, your friends might know what you mean, but it's not clear that everyone reading your post will know what you mean, since your post may arrive out of context with the discussion because of the nature of an online discussion. Even assuming perfect delivery, simultaneous responses can fork an online discussion, and software reads it as a thread, not a tree. Throw non-native english speakers into the mix and it gets even more difficult, since they do not have the mastery of the conversational language that takes part in such a discussion, nor the visual or cultural cues to decipher the context.
I think it's possible to do this sort of thing with teaching, but I think it's more likely that distance learning like this will be more useful when streaming media is ubiquitous and high-quality enabling people to get the contextual clues they need for efficient communication.
-Rich
(And I'm not a student of communications or anything, I just wrote a paper on this my last year of college for speech class)
The thing is PageMaker and Photoshop are WELL beyond what your average joe wants to do with his pc. There's no doubt that those programs could never be appliances. But sit down and watch people use computers in a computer lab someday. When they are word processing they pretty much type, save, print. Anything beyond changing the fonts/tabs/margins and spacing is for advanced users. Add support for tables, diagrams and templates you'll cover most of the business users too. Moore's law tells me that appliances are getting more powerful just as fast as PC's are. sure they are significantly behind the curve, but when you talk about handheld devices that are as powerful as the last generation of computers it makes a great argument for simplfying all this crap down to something people will understand. I think that the needlessly complicated software out there actually makes people LESS productive as they spend time screwing around with things experts can do better and more efficiently.
:-)
Of course this is all my opinion
-Rich
IIRC, some of the old DALNet servers were Linux when it was just a feldgling offshoot that was considered a joke by the Undernet/EFNet crowd. It's been a real long time since I gave a care about IRC archetecture though, so I could be wrong.
The fact that IRC is such a ridiculous hog is becasue the IRC protocol was really never intended for tens of thousands of users and thousands of channels. AFAIK they still require every server to know about what every user is doing. That in itself is sort of ridiculous for a system that is supposed to provide global chat, but you'll find no crowd, ANYWHERE, more unruly than the IRC folks when it comes to change.
-Rich
The problem with buying a computer as a general purpose tool is that sooner or later this stuff is all going to morph into a few appliances to make it easy for the masses to do things. Computers are complicated. People like you and me can use them just fine, but there's a lot of dough to be made in taking spreadhseets and wordprocessors and applying them to lo-tech solutions with simple consistent UIs.
The games on a PC argument could go forever. Honestly I do think i get my money's worth out of my $2000 PC (lots of upgrades, custom built by me), but not for gaming. I dont take gaming seriously enough to muck around with 3d cards and crap like that. Of course a machine that is 10 times the price of a game console is going to excel in the details. The thing is though, the most compelling electronic games are never successful becasue of their details, they are successful because the quality gameplay/story/longevity and many other non technical factors. Space Invaders did not become a famous game becasue of it's incredible graphics. The atari 2600 had positively DISMAL graphics, even for the time, but it still managed to roll over the competition with it's games and it's value. Often game systems with superior graphics are a joke compared with other systems that simply have better games.
I dont think consoles will ever replace PC's for high end gaming becasue a PC's general purpose nature will lend it to a task that current consoles just are not designed for. OTOH I dont think PC's will ever replace consoles because they're too hard to use. Consoels are for everybody, PC's are for geeks and hard core gamers.
-Rich
If there was ever a company that had the potential to be as pompous and megalomaniacal as Microsoft, it's Sun
/. would fit into this group is probably why everyone here hates thin clients so much.
I sort of agree with this. Soctt McNealy is one of those guys in the Valley who is more motivated by defeating Microsoft than by making a superior product or enhancing his business plan. I dont quite know if he really has any other desire beyond control.
The good news is, it won't happen. People are in love with speed and convenience. Even the most powerful Intel machines don't
run software as fast as people want, so a network connection certainly isn't going to fulfill the need. Maybe someday when we all
have full-time gigabit connections directly to our desktops and never want for speed during even the most intensive operations,
Sun's vision may become reality.
But the most powerful Intel machines are a terrible terrible waste of money for what the majority of people do. Sun's argument is that if you simplified the software and the client it will be better. This does hold water when you think about Microsoft's cultre of bloating up the wares for no real reason.
Where Linux fits in is the in between. People who need power and flexibility, but dont wnat commercial bloatware and dont want simplistic appliances. The fact that most of
-Rich
I bet a dreamcast would do a fine job with networked Quake. It's only $199 and it's built for controlling compelx characters in a 3d environment, unlike a PC. Some games lend themselves to computers, strategy games, role playing games, games that require exorbinant amounts of data for maps and enemies, but the gap is thinning. The 3D environment of my Legend Of Zelda cartrige is far beyond something like Quake II (IMHO). N64 is $99, my PC was about $2000.
-Rich
Sun doesn't care about workstations anymore anyhow. They want java. they want servers. If you need to run a workstation they'll be happy to sell you one, but you might as well go with something like Linux which integrates naturally into their idea of the future, unlike NT.
-Rich
Wow. This sounds like all the reasons I bought an N64 yesterday :-)
Sun wants everyone to use cheap disposable machines, just so long as they connect to solaris servers. For anyone who's not interested in thin, and still wants a computer, Sun would be thrilled to have them all using Linux, it's a great first step to Solaris.
-Rich
Why do they have to patent the gene?
I have to imagine that any drug they manufacture would have been created by a process and could represent an invention, right? I dont get how human genes are any different than anything else. DuPont may have the patent for teflon, but it's absurd to think they should have the patent for all non-stick surfaces. They dont have the patent to the substance in eggs which sticks to metal, they have the patent on the process/material they use to prevent it. I just dont get how drugs are different. Patenting genes seems to me to be akin to patenting raw materials.
-Rich
Dont get me wrong. I think someday the AI labs of the world will create a respectable artificial intelligence that will probably be capable of some cool things.
What I dont get is why periodically someone predicts that computers will take over the world and we will be their minions. Has anyone bothered to look at these people and notice that the closer we get to the eluisive goal of AI, the more work we need to do?
Society is already at a point where lack of computer skills puts people at an extreme disadvantage in the job market. Why does everyone expect it to evolve more? Haven't they been paying attention to the fact the computers are being made to become EASIER to use? I imagine when the plow was invented there were just as many people standing around saying it would put them out of jobs as when robots started building cars in Detroit. The tools get more complex, but the conflict will perpetually remain the same.
And remember who is building these things, people. We are building them as tools. They exist to make our lives easier. Computers already trade our secrets and data without our knowledge. Computers already teach our children. They already control what we watch, what we see. Guess what? somewhere down there was still a meeting in a board room that decided what that computer would be built for and what it would provide. Humankind is still in control. Computers dont change their mind. They do what they are programmed for. It's very simple.
Although complex AI will probably someday exist, it's foolish to think that it will somehow be able to outsmart us. We created it you know, so by definition, we are the more intelligent. If survival goes to the fittest, it's absurd to think that tools can become more fit than their creators, it just doesn't make sense.
-Rich
I've been at linux since early 1993 (6.5 years?) and I rmemeber first hearing about it on the msgs board on one of the student boxes at UIUC. I ended up loading the first version of SLS onto about (it seemed like) 20 1.2M 5.25" floppies and loaded it on a spare partition on my Windows 3.1 box. By late 93 Windows was gone and I never looked back. That was on a 486dx/33/4/130. The case and ethernet card are still in use today. 'last' on my computer goes back to January 1994. (What can I say I'm a dork)
-Rich
EGADS man. I thought I'd forgotten about minicom. Now you have to go an remind me again...
:-) I was hi tech, and used to run ka9q with the hacked telnet and finger clients as a TCP/IP stack since I had SLIP access at school.
A little later (once there was hard disk support among other things
Oh yeah, over a 2400 baud modem no less.
Now THOSE were the days.
-Rich