Great site... you can just hear the author snickering at the truebelievers. I especially like the part where he talks about playing to his "audience's" fantasies.../Brian
Joy '97 is a good book, but it's a completely different book from the original. Ethan Becker, Irma Rombauer's grandson, is on the cover, but it was really a collaborative effort led by cookbook editor extraordinaire Maria Guarnaschelli. The end result is a must-have book in any serious cook's collection, but it ain't Joy, and only got to be that because Becker's name and expertise were attached.
I would recommend it unreservedly to anybody, but it would not be a bad idea to keep an older edition around as well for antiquarian interest./Brian
I too had a VIC-20 (though I rarely used it). The manual actually included a small recipe organizer program as an example, so perhaps it wasn't so subliminal./Brian
If you can read French, get Escoffier in French (and get an industrial-strength dictionary, pour l'amour de Dieu, you're gonna need it). The only readily available English translation is supposedly not very good, and Americanizes the measurements.
No, metric is not a bad thing; just turn the measuring cup around and quit whining...
Interestingly, as a challenge for myself, before I got my hard copy of the original French I decided to see whether I could handle Escoffier's French. It wasn't too hard for what I picked, though I did need AB's above-reviewed book for a technique or two...
And of course Julia, who I'm pretty certain is a minor deity in disguise. From spy (well, she did work for the OSS) to queen of the kitchen... that's one of those transitions that just blows the mind./Brian
Except it sounds like you think the movie was a total fiction. The codetalkers are a well-known part of WWII history; if it sounds ridiculous to you, well, take it up with the US Army, circa 1942.
I didn't see the movie myself, heard it was rather hokey, but it's Based On A True Story. For real./Brian
That's the thing about Alton Brown: while I personally like garlic presses (no quicker way to make spaghetti aglio e olio), I understand his hatred of gadgetitis. Me, I bought myself a Wusthof knife a month or so ago; it's the nicest piece of kitchen equipment I own. And I'm still looking for a sashimi knife and trying to convince myself none-too-successfully that there is no way in hell I will ever make enough sushi to justify buying a ceramic knife.
It is fun multitasking things that weren't meant for it, though; paella pans, for example. I've used mine as a roasting pan, omelette pan (big mistake), and a majorly oversized wok with varying degrees of success./Brian
Could you cite a source for said hardware? I know it's out there, but I wouldn't know where to find it.
I think Apple, should they get into the x86 hardware market (which I don't think would be a particularly good idea), might consider developing their own PC chipset, open to others to develop for, but meant specifically as a Darwin/X platform./Brian
A more likely rumor I've heard is Apple switching to a POWER4 variant rather than stay yoked to the broken Motorola core.
I think the only thing holding Apple up in the MHz race is their commitment to the G4; they're probably wishing they'd gone with the Philips TriMedia at this point. As I understand the situation, IBM can produce the parts Apple needs to keep up in MHz, but isn't allowed to because of contractual issues with Motorola regarding AltiVec. We could have 2GHz G3s at this point (NB the PPC 750/750CX is an IBM part, not Motorola), if Apple wanted them (and I'm sure they'd use them if they could get away with it, but marketing likes the illusion of Progress).
As for proprietary hardware: Apple couldn't get away with doing that. As pointed out, the core of the system is open source to begin with, and the modern Mac is a lot less proprietary than it looks anyway. They have some interest in doing this, true, but in the current climate I don't think they could justify spending the money on anything more elaborate than Yet Another PC Chipset.
(That said, I'd love to see an Apple BIOS in action...)/Brian
Fundamental problem: it's nothing like a Mac case
on
Mac-Case Clone for PCs
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· Score: 4, Informative
Here's the thing: I've seen a PC case that is built like a Mac case, and it's a clusterfuck.
Walk into any CompUSA and go looking for a case that bears a significant resemblance to a late-model HP Pavilion case. I don't even want to get into the quality of the case (execrable; it's meant for a full ATX board but has piss-poor ventilation; it also falls apart a bit too easily) or the looks of the case (copies HP's design while completely failing to capture its elegance). The big problem is that the ATX spec just doesn't work for this kind of design.
The case in question (I think it's OEM by Fujitsu, but this is more speculation than anything else) initially appealed to me because of its easy access design. Just like a Mac case, it's a drop-side design, and in theory could probably be opened up while running. The big problem is that it's just not practical with the current design; the ATX power connectors are usually towards the top of the board, which is a very inconvenient place for a power cable; not only is the cable in the power supply that comes with the case too short, there is no obvious way to get it out of the way of daughtercards, fans, etc.
I do think a case design like this is a really good idea. Unfortunately, it's just not practical with the ATX spec, and the case featured in the parent article (which is a very poor rendition of its inspiration to begin with) is just a plain old case. At least the Lian Li cases have easy-removal mobo trays and substantial sex appeal.../Brian
It wasn't a very good book -- one of Kevin Anderson's (says it all really), can't remember which one.
I do think the idea that the Kessel Run is a variable-distance route is an interesting one; Han is bragging, basically, that he knows shortcuts from Kessel to Coruscant (or wherever) that no one else does. It's a fairly clean save for a dialogue screwup...
I think there's actually a difference in practice depending on where you are in the world. I might have this backwards, but I think in France you don't, in Canada you do. That's one example.
That's a little depressing, if you think about it -- after you get past all the cruft and compromises that make the PC design, things like ACPI and ugly hacks to emulate ISA slots that don't exist eny more, you still have to rely on ancient firmware to get yourself running, and it's like using a gravel driveway as an onramp to a superhighway...
Mobo makers might be wise to make their specs public. Even just the simple improvement of a 32-bit BIOS would be a good idea (as in start as 16 and switch to 32 first thing on a particular setting).
As I understand, it's called Yamhill, and it's basically a hedge against the fact that no one paid attention to Itanic and there aren't a whole lot of people lined up to get their hands on McKinley either.
As others have pointed out, for the basics it's no big deal. RTF covers a multitude of sins in the document translation world.
Where I used to live, the local library's public systems were (afaik still are) run on Win98. They were hideously unstable (Netscape had a habit of locking out input and requiring restarts). Where I live now, the libraries run Win2k; it's still Windows, but at least it works.
I suggested to the librarians a couple of times that they could run Linux, but both of the tech librarians that I knew were unfriendly and bitchy types, and one of them I got into a heated argument with over a small issue of file translation. Pretty typical of the entire fscking town, if you ask me...
Hey, I think you're doing something pretty cool myself.
What I'd like to see myself is an open Northbridge chip -- memory controller, PCI controller, probably AGP on board -- just so we can get some cheap PowerPC boards out there. I know there's a PCI controller on Opencores.
Back when WORM drives were all the rage, some engineers at Atari actually implemented a worn: (Write Once, Read Never) device in Atari BASIC. I don't remember how it was done (it's buried in an old issue of Compute! that I probably threw out years ago) but I actually got to try it out on a computer at the school I was going to (back in the day when everyone had Apple ][s, this school was using Atari 800s).
It was just an Easter Egg; I suppose some Unix geek at Atari just decided it needed its own equivalent of/dev/null.
We do need more graphic artists, but I have to make a comment about #3:
YES! YES! YES!
See, here's the thing. The Mac could have been a great gaming platform; a lot of developer houses wanted to do Power Mac work in the beginning. As it is, we get good games, but not enough of them. The game world is still Windows-based, and probably will be for quite some time to come.
The situation is this: the Mac needs these games as badly as the Linux world does.
I also agree with #6 though I might point out that some of these games don't even reach that high... /Brian
Hey, we all have our mishegoss. I decided to start a cooking show because I like to cook.
That said, I can't really see doing this myself; it's far too much work. But the technical expertise involved makes this a very cool, if somewhat monomaniacal, toy. What's really interesting is the links; there are clearly plenty of people who like this idea. The only downside is that it's anything other than a weekend project (which is really about the limit of what it would be worth, construction-wise, for me to build one...) and that it's brutally expensive...
Read the Borderlands of Science by Michael Shermer -- Sagan may have been overbearing, but he was by all indications more of a scientist than most of us will ever be. At least he published like one...
(btw, I wouldn't recommend buying it, just flipping through it -- this is Shermer at his driest and most stat-bound...)
Is a resurrection of Timna (Celeron + Northbridge), with integrated nForce graphics. The thing is that they'd have to do it themselves, and they'd still be paying out the ass to nVidia, so even if they could get their own x86 chip fab up and running (which I wouldn't count on them being able to pull off in the next five years) they'd be screwed.
Well, okay. But it could still easily be construed as an elegy to the glories of the marriage bed and the sacredness of sexuality. Or both. The fact is that sex is central to the theme of the Song of Solomon, whether used as a metaphor or not, and the fact that it is as explicit as it is says something probably a lot of Christians aren't willing to admit about their Bible.
Slashdot Mirror
+1, Funny...
/Brian
That's inspired.
I could say something about this, but I'm not a cybernetic anthropologist. /Brian
Great site... you can just hear the author snickering at the truebelievers. I especially like the part where he talks about playing to his "audience's" fantasies... /Brian
Well that's rather a different story, then, isn't it? But that's not how you sounded initially... /Brian
Joy '97 is a good book, but it's a completely different book from the original. Ethan Becker, Irma Rombauer's grandson, is on the cover, but it was really a collaborative effort led by cookbook editor extraordinaire Maria Guarnaschelli. The end result is a must-have book in any serious cook's collection, but it ain't Joy, and only got to be that because Becker's name and expertise were attached.
/Brian
I would recommend it unreservedly to anybody, but it would not be a bad idea to keep an older edition around as well for antiquarian interest.
I too had a VIC-20 (though I rarely used it). The manual actually included a small recipe organizer program as an example, so perhaps it wasn't so subliminal. /Brian
If you can read French, get Escoffier in French (and get an industrial-strength dictionary, pour l'amour de Dieu, you're gonna need it). The only readily available English translation is supposedly not very good, and Americanizes the measurements.
/Brian
No, metric is not a bad thing; just turn the measuring cup around and quit whining...
Interestingly, as a challenge for myself, before I got my hard copy of the original French I decided to see whether I could handle Escoffier's French. It wasn't too hard for what I picked, though I did need AB's above-reviewed book for a technique or two...
And of course Julia, who I'm pretty certain is a minor deity in disguise. From spy (well, she did work for the OSS) to queen of the kitchen... that's one of those transitions that just blows the mind.
The CI show, America's Test Kitchen, is another great kitchen-geek show. I have one of the cookbooks from it, plan to get others. /brian
Except it sounds like you think the movie was a total fiction. The codetalkers are a well-known part of WWII history; if it sounds ridiculous to you, well, take it up with the US Army, circa 1942.
/Brian
I didn't see the movie myself, heard it was rather hokey, but it's Based On A True Story. For real.
That's the thing about Alton Brown: while I personally like garlic presses (no quicker way to make spaghetti aglio e olio), I understand his hatred of gadgetitis. Me, I bought myself a Wusthof knife a month or so ago; it's the nicest piece of kitchen equipment I own. And I'm still looking for a sashimi knife and trying to convince myself none-too-successfully that there is no way in hell I will ever make enough sushi to justify buying a ceramic knife.
/Brian
It is fun multitasking things that weren't meant for it, though; paella pans, for example. I've used mine as a roasting pan, omelette pan (big mistake), and a majorly oversized wok with varying degrees of success.
Could you cite a source for said hardware? I know it's out there, but I wouldn't know where to find it.
/Brian
I think Apple, should they get into the x86 hardware market (which I don't think would be a particularly good idea), might consider developing their own PC chipset, open to others to develop for, but meant specifically as a Darwin/X platform.
A more likely rumor I've heard is Apple switching to a POWER4 variant rather than stay yoked to the broken Motorola core.
/Brian
I think the only thing holding Apple up in the MHz race is their commitment to the G4; they're probably wishing they'd gone with the Philips TriMedia at this point. As I understand the situation, IBM can produce the parts Apple needs to keep up in MHz, but isn't allowed to because of contractual issues with Motorola regarding AltiVec. We could have 2GHz G3s at this point (NB the PPC 750/750CX is an IBM part, not Motorola), if Apple wanted them (and I'm sure they'd use them if they could get away with it, but marketing likes the illusion of Progress).
As for proprietary hardware: Apple couldn't get away with doing that. As pointed out, the core of the system is open source to begin with, and the modern Mac is a lot less proprietary than it looks anyway. They have some interest in doing this, true, but in the current climate I don't think they could justify spending the money on anything more elaborate than Yet Another PC Chipset.
(That said, I'd love to see an Apple BIOS in action...)
Here's the thing: I've seen a PC case that is built like a Mac case, and it's a clusterfuck.
/Brian
Walk into any CompUSA and go looking for a case that bears a significant resemblance to a late-model HP Pavilion case. I don't even want to get into the quality of the case (execrable; it's meant for a full ATX board but has piss-poor ventilation; it also falls apart a bit too easily) or the looks of the case (copies HP's design while completely failing to capture its elegance). The big problem is that the ATX spec just doesn't work for this kind of design.
The case in question (I think it's OEM by Fujitsu, but this is more speculation than anything else) initially appealed to me because of its easy access design. Just like a Mac case, it's a drop-side design, and in theory could probably be opened up while running. The big problem is that it's just not practical with the current design; the ATX power connectors are usually towards the top of the board, which is a very inconvenient place for a power cable; not only is the cable in the power supply that comes with the case too short, there is no obvious way to get it out of the way of daughtercards, fans, etc.
I do think a case design like this is a really good idea. Unfortunately, it's just not practical with the ATX spec, and the case featured in the parent article (which is a very poor rendition of its inspiration to begin with) is just a plain old case. At least the Lian Li cases have easy-removal mobo trays and substantial sex appeal...
It wasn't a very good book -- one of Kevin Anderson's (says it all really), can't remember which one.
I do think the idea that the Kessel Run is a variable-distance route is an interesting one; Han is bragging, basically, that he knows shortcuts from Kessel to Coruscant (or wherever) that no one else does. It's a fairly clean save for a dialogue screwup...
/Brian
I think there's actually a difference in practice depending on where you are in the world. I might have this backwards, but I think in France you don't, in Canada you do. That's one example.
/Brian
That's a little depressing, if you think about it -- after you get past all the cruft and compromises that make the PC design, things like ACPI and ugly hacks to emulate ISA slots that don't exist eny more, you still have to rely on ancient firmware to get yourself running, and it's like using a gravel driveway as an onramp to a superhighway...
Mobo makers might be wise to make their specs public. Even just the simple improvement of a 32-bit BIOS would be a good idea (as in start as 16 and switch to 32 first thing on a particular setting).
/Brian
As I understand, it's called Yamhill, and it's basically a hedge against the fact that no one paid attention to Itanic and there aren't a whole lot of people lined up to get their hands on McKinley either.
/Brian
As others have pointed out, for the basics it's no big deal. RTF covers a multitude of sins in the document translation world.
Where I used to live, the local library's public systems were (afaik still are) run on Win98. They were hideously unstable (Netscape had a habit of locking out input and requiring restarts). Where I live now, the libraries run Win2k; it's still Windows, but at least it works.
I suggested to the librarians a couple of times that they could run Linux, but both of the tech librarians that I knew were unfriendly and bitchy types, and one of them I got into a heated argument with over a small issue of file translation. Pretty typical of the entire fscking town, if you ask me...
/Brian
Hey, I think you're doing something pretty cool myself.
What I'd like to see myself is an open Northbridge chip -- memory controller, PCI controller, probably AGP on board -- just so we can get some cheap PowerPC boards out there. I know there's a PCI controller on Opencores.
/Brian
Back when WORM drives were all the rage, some engineers at Atari actually implemented a worn: (Write Once, Read Never) device in Atari BASIC. I don't remember how it was done (it's buried in an old issue of Compute! that I probably threw out years ago) but I actually got to try it out on a computer at the school I was going to (back in the day when everyone had Apple ][s, this school was using Atari 800s).
/dev/null.
It was just an Easter Egg; I suppose some Unix geek at Atari just decided it needed its own equivalent of
/Brian
We do need more graphic artists, but I have to make a comment about #3:
YES! YES! YES!
See, here's the thing. The Mac could have been a great gaming platform; a lot of developer houses wanted to do Power Mac work in the beginning. As it is, we get good games, but not enough of them. The game world is still Windows-based, and probably will be for quite some time to come.
The situation is this: the Mac needs these games as badly as the Linux world does.
I also agree with #6 though I might point out that some of these games don't even reach that high...
/Brian
Hey, we all have our mishegoss. I decided to start a cooking show because I like to cook.
That said, I can't really see doing this myself; it's far too much work. But the technical expertise involved makes this a very cool, if somewhat monomaniacal, toy. What's really interesting is the links; there are clearly plenty of people who like this idea. The only downside is that it's anything other than a weekend project (which is really about the limit of what it would be worth, construction-wise, for me to build one...) and that it's brutally expensive...
/Brian
Read the Borderlands of Science by Michael Shermer -- Sagan may have been overbearing, but he was by all indications more of a scientist than most of us will ever be. At least he published like one...
(btw, I wouldn't recommend buying it, just flipping through it -- this is Shermer at his driest and most stat-bound...)
/Brian
Is a resurrection of Timna (Celeron + Northbridge), with integrated nForce graphics. The thing is that they'd have to do it themselves, and they'd still be paying out the ass to nVidia, so even if they could get their own x86 chip fab up and running (which I wouldn't count on them being able to pull off in the next five years) they'd be screwed.
But it ain't gonna happen...
/Brian
Well, okay. But it could still easily be construed as an elegy to the glories of the marriage bed and the sacredness of sexuality. Or both. The fact is that sex is central to the theme of the Song of Solomon, whether used as a metaphor or not, and the fact that it is as explicit as it is says something probably a lot of Christians aren't willing to admit about their Bible.
/brian