Agnes, Denise, and Paula. One of the first integrated multimedia chipsets in the world, and if some of the features I've heard of are true (especially the part about multiple resolutions on the same screen, which may be a slightly garbled memory).
I wonder what that kind of technology would be like now...
You know, I'm typing this on an iMac, and I've just realized that my model didn't come with a cup holder. Should I sue;-)
Now that you mention it, though, it does seem a bit odd that the bitness thing has gone by the wayside; it might have made a fun marketing strategy, say, five years ago. It really comes down to the realization that if it's really a numbers game, it's not the big ones on the spec sheet that count. Yes, geeks have known this for years. But it would seem that people outside the geek world are starting to figure this out.
That said... well, yes, mister, that is where they keep all the gigabytes. See, they come out of here by this long ribbon when they're needed, feed around here into this circuit board, and see this big grey metal box where the power cord goes into? Once you have 1.21 gigabytes and the DVD is spinning at 88 mph...
I don't quite see your point, to be honest with you. You mention SONM (great book, btw; I think I own a first edition but I'm not sure), but I don't really see how it connects to your final point.
That said... your list is a lot less coherent than makes any sense. The Altair didn't last long, but it started an entire industry; one could make the same case about the Osborne-1 and portable systems. The Bernoulli still exists; the cartridges are smaller and we call it the Zip drive now, but the technology is the same. Data General was probably a history of missed opportunities more than anything else, though I don't know the whole story. Packard-Bell was a joke from the beginning. As for DEC... you mean to hold up a lineage (lineages really, but you're slamming them together) that got close to thirty years of lifespan overall as a failure (assuming that's your point)?
I don't really understand where you're coming from at all. The Xbox is in the situation it's in because of a failure to gain credibility in a vicious market. Indrema tried the same thing with very similar hardware and never even made it to the plate. The fact is that some consumer products will last a very long time. Some won't. (As for the Sony Walkman, what exactly you're getting at there escapes me completely -- imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that, and I'd say knockoffs or no the Walkman and its successors have been a success beyond anyone's wildest dreams...)
And what exactly is wrong with a BIOS? Open Firmware is nicer, yes, but at the end of the day you still need something to get up and running.
You're correct about the overglorified 386DX thing, though. That's why there are a large number of/.ers who would wet their pants if a cheap PowerPC mobo went on the market tomorrow.
What bothers me more is this: AMD appears to be on the verge of taking over the standards war from Intel. Fine. It's about time Intel got smacked down by the market instead of the courts. But they're doing it with a hand up from M$... that doesn't bode well for the future, I think.
That said, I won't turn down an Opteron box if I have the opportunity to build one (wouldn't take an Itanic if you paid me though), but I'm running Intel Inside because it cost me $200 when I bought it... moreover, I'm typing this on an iMac.
Opteron is a Light Pokemon. It evolves from a pretty much garden variety Eevee with the help of a Prism stone and it has a unique Laser Attack that is especially useful against Ground Pokemon that are safe from the attacks of other Eevee-derived forms.
It also tastes really good spitroasted after a day or two in a sushi vinegar and olive oil marinade.
I like that they're talking about "pirated server software"... One can only hope that this case goes nowhere, because the very idea that this is what's going on is a really frightening one.
So much for "reverse-engineering for interoperability"... control freaks. All I can say is this: Vivendi is Big Entertainment. They're giving bnetd the DeCSS treatment: intimidation and propaganda.
The key to fundamentalism is to suck up to the people you're trying to reach. Fundies take as their starting point that the Bible is to be read according to "simple, common-sense" thinking. From there follows the principle of Biblical literalism.
These people believe what they believe not necessarily because they've been brainwashed (though most of them have), but because their spiritual leaders have started by calling Scripture the ultimate authority and then bending interpretations to fit what their congregation already believes. Many (but probably not a majority) of these ministers know that they're lying; they're the ones who create Bible colleges and suchlike to keep the poor suckers whose prejudices they're feeding from realizing they're being decieved.
The two beliefs aren't mutually exclusive, really, as long as you try to understand the Bible from a literary standpoint (try A History of God by Karen Armstrong for a starter). The thing is that fundies don't see it that way, because the majority of them are conditioned in such a way as to not be able to see it without compelling outside influences making their way in (a powerful argument for why irrational singlemindedness is sometimes considered a virtue under the label of True Faith (tm) ). Some do find their way out.
I have personally given up on religion myself -- I was raised Catholic, but being exposed to many influences eroded my faith over the years to the point where I finally admitted to myself that there was no point to me going to church as I didn't really believe anything past the existence of some kind of god. It's caused massive strife with my parents, who claim I'm not being open-minded (after twenty-six years?!). But I have enough to deal with in life without religious guilt.
The process of fundamentalist Christianity (and a lot of organized religion in general) is to use fear to play off of people's prejudices. Them Northerners want you to get rid of your slaves? We all gonna start our own Southern church that sez you can keep your niggaz and beat 'em up when they get uppity. Them Jews and gubmint types takin money outa yer pocket? Get a gun and join our church for good Christian white folk who love our freedom. And so on. And once you've hooked them by validating their prejudices, you *really* start manipulating them.
I like how the popup includes a free pen for a $15 donation.
A free "stick pen".
A free, bought-in-bulk-for-a-dime-a-piece "stick pen".
Why don't they just throw in a scoop-neck baby T saying "Showing My Cleavage for Jesus" for their female contributors? Objective Ministries doesn't seem to have a problem with that particular type of clohting; I certainly don't:-)
I look at it this way: internal hard drives are now up to ATA/133. The fastest hard drives out there are hard pressed to saturate an ATA/33 pipe. The net result is that hardware manufacturers are building the Big Dig when all they need is Storrow Drive*.
The only bottlenecks that matter right now are memory and graphics speed; networking issues really lie outside the box, and even a bottom-of-the-line Celeron or Duron has more processing power than 99% of us are ever going to need. Someone tells me they're running a Clawhammer with prototype DDR400 memory, that's interesting. But it's hard for me to get excited once I realize that that SATA/150 hard drive that their prototype box includes can't saturate its own pipe to the motherboard, even with a huge cache.
/Brian
*a rather scenic 4-lane that runs along the south bank of the Charles River in Boston
Well, SunOS wasn't much more than vanilla BSD in those days:-)
Actually, I'd love to see someone do a working mockup of what a MacOS X based on Solaris would have looked like -- sort of a peculiar hybrid of CDE and Platinum, I suppose. Figure Motif and *Solaris-Carbon side by side...
I might also point out that there was a very real possibility of a MacOS X (or whatever it would have been called) built on Solaris instead of NeXT -- to those not conversant with Mac history, a failed merger with Sun was what led to the NeXT buyout and the return of Steve.
Would have been interesting, maybe not all that different from what we have now...
"CDs out of the 70s"? You mean slightly off-sized disks with voices of Japanese and Dutch engineers saying "testing one two three"?
It does look as though we've hit the wall when it comes to CD speeds, though. I can say I've never been particularly comfortable with drives that spin that fast; I've had some interesting experiences with mis-pressed CDs -- some work, some don't -- and I experienced one (a MacAddict CD, as it happens) that would have maytagged my drive if it wasn't internal.
The Big Question: as it's been pointed out, do we really need drives this fast to begin with?
That is a pretty frightening idea. I would like someone who is NNAL (not not a lawyer) to look this one up.
That said, it does seem pretty smoke-and-mirrors. The sad part is that an awful lot of schools are going to go along with this just out of fear or ignorance...
Slashdot Mirror
Agnes, Denise, and Paula. One of the first integrated multimedia chipsets in the world, and if some of the features I've heard of are true (especially the part about multiple resolutions on the same screen, which may be a slightly garbled memory).
I wonder what that kind of technology would be like now...
/Brian
The Nazis got more press. Otherwise your two other examples are equally appropriate. Lighten up.
/brian
Umm... silly pointless numbers troll? You're forgetting the hacked nForce chipset with the GeForce 3 inside...
It's not about the CPU anymore (insert threadbare rant about Brian's PII box).
/Brian
You know, I'm typing this on an iMac, and I've just realized that my model didn't come with a cup holder. Should I sue ;-)
Now that you mention it, though, it does seem a bit odd that the bitness thing has gone by the wayside; it might have made a fun marketing strategy, say, five years ago. It really comes down to the realization that if it's really a numbers game, it's not the big ones on the spec sheet that count. Yes, geeks have known this for years. But it would seem that people outside the geek world are starting to figure this out.
That said... well, yes, mister, that is where they keep all the gigabytes. See, they come out of here by this long ribbon when they're needed, feed around here into this circuit board, and see this big grey metal box where the power cord goes into? Once you have 1.21 gigabytes and the DVD is spinning at 88 mph...
/Brian
I don't quite see your point, to be honest with you. You mention SONM (great book, btw; I think I own a first edition but I'm not sure), but I don't really see how it connects to your final point.
That said... your list is a lot less coherent than makes any sense. The Altair didn't last long, but it started an entire industry; one could make the same case about the Osborne-1 and portable systems. The Bernoulli still exists; the cartridges are smaller and we call it the Zip drive now, but the technology is the same. Data General was probably a history of missed opportunities more than anything else, though I don't know the whole story. Packard-Bell was a joke from the beginning. As for DEC... you mean to hold up a lineage (lineages really, but you're slamming them together) that got close to thirty years of lifespan overall as a failure (assuming that's your point)?
I don't really understand where you're coming from at all. The Xbox is in the situation it's in because of a failure to gain credibility in a vicious market. Indrema tried the same thing with very similar hardware and never even made it to the plate. The fact is that some consumer products will last a very long time. Some won't. (As for the Sony Walkman, what exactly you're getting at there escapes me completely -- imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that, and I'd say knockoffs or no the Walkman and its successors have been a success beyond anyone's wildest dreams...)
/Brian
That's what a shim does, isn't it? Mapping functionality of one library to a similar but different one?
Though I wouldn't mind having a bag of CornNuts.
/Brian
Ah, yes. But Gecko can render HTML just as well (or better) than IE can. And CornNuts make lousy blood filters.
/brian
But of course you could still replace the IE stuff with a shim over Gecko, thus making IE->Mozilla a 1:1 swap. In theory.
/brian
And what exactly is wrong with a BIOS? Open Firmware is nicer, yes, but at the end of the day you still need something to get up and running.
/.ers who would wet their pants if a cheap PowerPC mobo went on the market tomorrow.
You're correct about the overglorified 386DX thing, though. That's why there are a large number of
What bothers me more is this: AMD appears to be on the verge of taking over the standards war from Intel. Fine. It's about time Intel got smacked down by the market instead of the courts. But they're doing it with a hand up from M$... that doesn't bode well for the future, I think.
That said, I won't turn down an Opteron box if I have the opportunity to build one (wouldn't take an Itanic if you paid me though), but I'm running Intel Inside because it cost me $200 when I bought it... moreover, I'm typing this on an iMac.
/Brian
Opteron is a Light Pokemon. It evolves from a pretty much garden variety Eevee with the help of a Prism stone and it has a unique Laser Attack that is especially useful against Ground Pokemon that are safe from the attacks of other Eevee-derived forms.
It also tastes really good spitroasted after a day or two in a sushi vinegar and olive oil marinade.
/Brian
I like that they're talking about "pirated server software"... One can only hope that this case goes nowhere, because the very idea that this is what's going on is a really frightening one.
So much for "reverse-engineering for interoperability"... control freaks. All I can say is this: Vivendi is Big Entertainment. They're giving bnetd the DeCSS treatment: intimidation and propaganda.
/Brian
The key to fundamentalism is to suck up to the people you're trying to reach. Fundies take as their starting point that the Bible is to be read according to "simple, common-sense" thinking. From there follows the principle of Biblical literalism.
These people believe what they believe not necessarily because they've been brainwashed (though most of them have), but because their spiritual leaders have started by calling Scripture the ultimate authority and then bending interpretations to fit what their congregation already believes. Many (but probably not a majority) of these ministers know that they're lying; they're the ones who create Bible colleges and suchlike to keep the poor suckers whose prejudices they're feeding from realizing they're being decieved.
The two beliefs aren't mutually exclusive, really, as long as you try to understand the Bible from a literary standpoint (try A History of God by Karen Armstrong for a starter). The thing is that fundies don't see it that way, because the majority of them are conditioned in such a way as to not be able to see it without compelling outside influences making their way in (a powerful argument for why irrational singlemindedness is sometimes considered a virtue under the label of True Faith (tm) ). Some do find their way out.
I have personally given up on religion myself -- I was raised Catholic, but being exposed to many influences eroded my faith over the years to the point where I finally admitted to myself that there was no point to me going to church as I didn't really believe anything past the existence of some kind of god. It's caused massive strife with my parents, who claim I'm not being open-minded (after twenty-six years?!). But I have enough to deal with in life without religious guilt.
The process of fundamentalist Christianity (and a lot of organized religion in general) is to use fear to play off of people's prejudices. Them Northerners want you to get rid of your slaves? We all gonna start our own Southern church that sez you can keep your niggaz and beat 'em up when they get uppity. Them Jews and gubmint types takin money outa yer pocket? Get a gun and join our church for good Christian white folk who love our freedom. And so on. And once you've hooked them by validating their prejudices, you *really* start manipulating them.
/Brian
I like how the popup includes a free pen for a $15 donation.
:-)
A free "stick pen".
A free, bought-in-bulk-for-a-dime-a-piece "stick pen".
Why don't they just throw in a scoop-neck baby T saying "Showing My Cleavage for Jesus" for their female contributors? Objective Ministries doesn't seem to have a problem with that particular type of clohting; I certainly don't
/Brian
I look at it this way: internal hard drives are now up to ATA/133. The fastest hard drives out there are hard pressed to saturate an ATA/33 pipe. The net result is that hardware manufacturers are building the Big Dig when all they need is Storrow Drive*.
The only bottlenecks that matter right now are memory and graphics speed; networking issues really lie outside the box, and even a bottom-of-the-line Celeron or Duron has more processing power than 99% of us are ever going to need. Someone tells me they're running a Clawhammer with prototype DDR400 memory, that's interesting. But it's hard for me to get excited once I realize that that SATA/150 hard drive that their prototype box includes can't saturate its own pipe to the motherboard, even with a huge cache.
/Brian
*a rather scenic 4-lane that runs along the south bank of the Charles River in Boston
Well, SunOS wasn't much more than vanilla BSD in those days :-)
Actually, I'd love to see someone do a working mockup of what a MacOS X based on Solaris would have looked like -- sort of a peculiar hybrid of CDE and Platinum, I suppose. Figure Motif and *Solaris-Carbon side by side...
/Brian
I might also point out that there was a very real possibility of a MacOS X (or whatever it would have been called) built on Solaris instead of NeXT -- to those not conversant with Mac history, a failed merger with Sun was what led to the NeXT buyout and the return of Steve.
Would have been interesting, maybe not all that different from what we have now...
/brian
"CDs out of the 70s"? You mean slightly off-sized disks with voices of Japanese and Dutch engineers saying "testing one two three"?
It does look as though we've hit the wall when it comes to CD speeds, though. I can say I've never been particularly comfortable with drives that spin that fast; I've had some interesting experiences with mis-pressed CDs -- some work, some don't -- and I experienced one (a MacAddict CD, as it happens) that would have maytagged my drive if it wasn't internal.
The Big Question: as it's been pointed out, do we really need drives this fast to begin with?
/Brian
Unfortunately it would be too much to ask of the American public...
.sig involves *dropping* it. Like I should really need to explain this to a slashdot reader?
Oh, and to the clueless: the
/Brian
According to Park at least, Technova (a subsidiary of Toyota) eventually gave up on cold fusion.
/Brian
More to the point, if it's proven to work it's not alternative anymore, thus disposing of the digitalis argument.
/brian
Uh, yeah. Y'know, mainstream medicine is a big part of that...
/brian
Er... if this guy's real name is Mel Thusian, it might be time for a little thinning of the ranks around here.
/Brian
That is a pretty frightening idea. I would like someone who is NNAL (not not a lawyer) to look this one up.
That said, it does seem pretty smoke-and-mirrors. The sad part is that an awful lot of schools are going to go along with this just out of fear or ignorance...
/brian
Point being that Marshall was a good justice. Thomas was a joke from the beginning.
/Brian
Neat trick -- I didn't know that was possible, nor that Thomas was even intelligent enough to make his own decisions.
But that's what you get when you replace a great man like Thurgood Marshall with a token n*****...
/Brian