Yeah... I want a Clapton Strat someday, but the truth is those Fender Squiers are pretty good. (I have a Peavey cheapo Strat clone, but I hate it -- crappy electronics and nonstandard parts...)
And what does a developer get from getting in on.NET in the first place? Plenty of downsides in it -- Hailstorm, Passport, learning a new language (C#), you name it -- but why in the world do we *need*.NET? The closest MS has come to coming out with anything worthwhile is Xbox, and even that's being greeted with a yawn from gaming aficionadoes.
I work in a bookstore so I have some idea of what people are looking for information on. Office XP has been a bit of a flop with professional shops (most seem to be staying with Office2K or Office97, it would seem), and most all professional users are hanging onto Win98SE for dear life on the desktop. We don't get many questions from people looking for XP books; the books are there, but not many people seem to be looking for them.
For what it's worth, I think this might just price the Average Joe Developer out of the market, not that Microsoft probably cares. I would hope that would derail.NET's acceptance, but you never know...
/Brian
Re:large and feature-filled
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 2
As far as features per line of code, I find that to be a rather dubious statement. I'd say the same thing applies to Your Average Linux Distro as well, but the problem in this case is that the software (most egregiously SuSE and RedHat) becomes musclebound rather than bloated. Even Debian ships on 3 CDs now; there's something a bit wrong with that IMHO.
For this I blame GNU -- for whatever reason, GNU's version of embrace-and-extend hasn't created bloatware *exactly*, but a lot of their software has far too much core functionality (*cough*emacs*cough*) for efficiency. (One of these days I'm going to sit down and create that Linux Lite distro I've thought of making -- Minix sed instead of GNU, One True Awk instead of gawk, you know...)
Apple tried to do it with OpenDoc and nobody paid attention (though I think that might have had something to do with a) the development model and b) Novell, who dropped the ball on OpenDoc/Win32 while Apple and IBM were shipping live code).
I'm sorry, I simply don't buy what you're selling. The fact is that we're regularly seeing gigaflops on the desktop, and very few systems are running less than 32MB of RAM these days. Most modern systems can handle a small-tool-based system; it's just that bloatware is the order of the day and people seem to think they need that ability.
Worth noting: somehow I doubt your average early PostScript interpreter would put much of a strain on a modern PC's processing capabilities.
This is a rather interesting point; IMHO it should be fairly easy to create a full-featured office suite in Perl and Tk that will fit on a floppy and run on practically any Unix; while it could be pointed out that the support files (for things like Perl and ispell) are huge, the thing is that they're already there.
/Brian
Re:Apple reminds me more of Commodore every day
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 2
I don't necessarily agree. Don't forget, we live in the age of ATA/66 and ATA/100 where as long as you don't need the flexibility you're better off with IDE for cost reasons. The analogy with modern IDE and SCSI is more along the lines of AGP vs. PCI -- an AGP slot will transfer data faster, but you only get one of them. It's a tradeoff.
USB2 is a bag on the side of USB -- it's faster in theory, but lacks busmastering capability (which FireWire has had since the beginning).
/Brian
Re:Apple reminds me more of Commodore every day
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 2
USB... the Boston area MicroCenter has two tables full of old computers, mostly high-end Pentiums and Pentium Pros. Many -- maybe most -- have USB, but I doubt any of them ever had a USB device hooked up to them.
Apple *made* USB, probably single-handedly. Intel created it, MS pushed it as a standard, but it didn't become one until the first iMac hit the streets and a flood of cutesy translucent peripherals followed.
Firewire is in no such state of neglect; Sony's on board, and Firewire made it out in the PC world quite a bit earlier than it did the Mac world. It's a standard now in certain circles (just ask Hollywood), and iPod will only help its mainstream acceptance. (For the record, I don't see much future for USB2, but that's another issue entirely...)
Agreed. It's only lame because it's not the Monster Mac PDA the/. brass were hoping for. It's a bit underwhelming IMHO, but I think the huge hard drive and the Firewire make it for me.
One idea, though: not everyone can afford the iPod. How about a cheaper version with flash RAM instead of the hard drive but the same internals otherwise?
Actually, I thought of something similar but more generalized -- APS Tech used to (probably still does) sell a double SCSI case which I most vividly remember combining a Jaz drive with a CD burner. It was probably roughly the same style case as you're referring to.
See, I saw the headline and I was thinking some kind of half-pizza deal -- something small, slick, and preferably black. I like the concept, but the design doesn't work.
IIRC (and I might not) Zubrin might be considered a bit daft by some scientists (I know his name is in Voodoo Science by Bob Park somewhere, but I don't remember exactly where), but he's got to be right about this...
I can't believe anyone takes the idea of space-generated power seriously anymore. It *could* work, mind you -- but how many failsafes would you have to pack into the system to prevent it from cooking a bird, or part of a small town, or an airplane?
It does the job of being a small and workable system, and that's about it. It'd be a good cluster box, IMHO, but man... mofo is *ugly*.
Would I buy one? I don't know -- probably if they put it in a nicer case, but not like that. But I speak as someone who still lives at home and doesn't necessarily have space concerns that this box would address. (And I mean, really -- if space was truly an issue, why not just buy a Cappucino box and be done with it?)
What I want to see -- and I'm serious about this -- are a consumer-electronics-type case for a PC with an IR reciever and a graphical LED front panel (for media control) and a wooden case meant to match those "executive" mini-stereos from The Sharper Image...
That's the problem here, isn't it? The attitude of Ma Bill(tm) here is basically "stick your head in the sand and it'll go away", with a dose of "we'll protect you".
Clarify: can't justify spending upwards of $20 on a *bad* CD. Or haven't you heard that CD sales were through the roof during Napster's heyday?
Actually, I think the end result will be to a) create a protocol arms race (if all else fails, there's always encrypted FTP or something like that) and b) move the fileswaps to sneakernet. Or hasn't the RIAA ever heard the maxim "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of CDRs"?
You with the CueCat driver, and now this -- are you trying to be a shit magnet:-)
Hats off, though... and hats off to the person who did it in the first place...
/Brian
Re:Differences between PPC G4 and Power 4 ?
on
IBM Launches p690
·
· Score: 2
Actually, I think the problem with the 620 was that it was delayed so long that the 604 was beating it on performance tests. It was sort of a tradeoff; besides, at the time Apple was a long way away from having a 64-bit clean OS as they do now.
Apple could have been up to 500mHz a long time ago with the Exponential x704, as a matter of fact; the problem was that Exponential managed to get the clock speed, but fucked up the design so bad that the clocks didn't matter because the chip couldn't come close to what Motorola and IBM were capable of at the time, making it completely useless.
NT 4 will; NT 5+ (i.e. Win2K and WinXPirationDate) won't. Microsoft killed it because the market for Windows on anything except Intel/AMD and embedded processors (i.e. WinCE) simply wasn't there.
Yahoo is one possibility, but I think Apple has the bigger stake in the future of FreeBSD (after all, they do now employ Jordan Hubbard). I do think, however, that FreeBSD's future as a separate entity is hazy at best; there's more of a need for OpenBSD and NetBSD (security fortress and OS-of-last-resort, respectively), and except for licensing issues FreeBSD and Darwin would appear to potentially occupy roughly the same niche in the market.
One thing about ham radio -- you *can* run it on backup power....
Actually, I wonder... is there a subculture out there of people using hacked cellphones for legitimate, i.e. hobbyist, purposes? I don't mean cell phreakers or people using stolen service, I mean people doing precisely this p2p sort of thing, completely off the nets (or even using their own shadow nets). I can't think it would be that hard to do -- the only problems would be a) modifying the firmware and b) hooking your cell-frequency ham radio tower up to a PBX to connect to the rest of the phone net...
Jolene Blalock: Jeri Ryan without the acting talent. 'Nuff said.
I liked the rest, though; there were some weak spots (how is it that the human crew didn't mutiny on T'Pol when she pulled rank?), and it just didn't feel very Trek, but I did generally like it. The big-screen camera work is something new for Trek, and it works amazingly well. The Suliban are a little weird; I assume there will be much more.
To those who complained about plot weakness, lack of character development, etc: get over it. Get over it now. The Trek folks have broken the Roddenberry mold completely with this one and are starting from the very beginning with the idea of an ongoing story (remember, Gene didn't much like continuity; he wanted every original Trek story to be self-contained). Granted, that doesn't excuse the Infamous Greasedown Scene (unless there will be some romantic issues for those two characters, which I'd say is unlikely). But it's a good beginning, and I'd say that's all it was intended to be.
The Enterprise NX-01 is a nicely designed ship; I don't fault them for not making it a copy of Captain Pike's Enterprise for two reasons:
-The ship was clearly designed primarily with human expertise; we're going to make it look like what we're familiar with, and that's what the producers did. That means identifiable displays, not just random switches.
-Maybe the TOS thing was an aesthetic thing. It certainly looked as 60s as TNG did 80s.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, okay, you don't *have* to use C# (you could use Java >;-) (J# for the unclued-in)). But the rest still stands. And Hailstorm still scares me.
/Brian
Yeah... I want a Clapton Strat someday, but the truth is those Fender Squiers are pretty good. (I have a Peavey cheapo Strat clone, but I hate it -- crappy electronics and nonstandard parts...)
.NET in the first place? Plenty of downsides in it -- Hailstorm, Passport, learning a new language (C#), you name it -- but why in the world do we *need* .NET? The closest MS has come to coming out with anything worthwhile is Xbox, and even that's being greeted with a yawn from gaming aficionadoes.
.NET's acceptance, but you never know...
And what does a developer get from getting in on
I work in a bookstore so I have some idea of what people are looking for information on. Office XP has been a bit of a flop with professional shops (most seem to be staying with Office2K or Office97, it would seem), and most all professional users are hanging onto Win98SE for dear life on the desktop. We don't get many questions from people looking for XP books; the books are there, but not many people seem to be looking for them.
For what it's worth, I think this might just price the Average Joe Developer out of the market, not that Microsoft probably cares. I would hope that would derail
/Brian
As far as features per line of code, I find that to be a rather dubious statement. I'd say the same thing applies to Your Average Linux Distro as well, but the problem in this case is that the software (most egregiously SuSE and RedHat) becomes musclebound rather than bloated. Even Debian ships on 3 CDs now; there's something a bit wrong with that IMHO.
For this I blame GNU -- for whatever reason, GNU's version of embrace-and-extend hasn't created bloatware *exactly*, but a lot of their software has far too much core functionality (*cough*emacs*cough*) for efficiency. (One of these days I'm going to sit down and create that Linux Lite distro I've thought of making -- Minix sed instead of GNU, One True Awk instead of gawk, you know...)
/Brian
Apple tried to do it with OpenDoc and nobody paid attention (though I think that might have had something to do with a) the development model and b) Novell, who dropped the ball on OpenDoc/Win32 while Apple and IBM were shipping live code).
I'm sorry, I simply don't buy what you're selling. The fact is that we're regularly seeing gigaflops on the desktop, and very few systems are running less than 32MB of RAM these days. Most modern systems can handle a small-tool-based system; it's just that bloatware is the order of the day and people seem to think they need that ability.
Worth noting: somehow I doubt your average early PostScript interpreter would put much of a strain on a modern PC's processing capabilities.
/Brian
This is a rather interesting point; IMHO it should be fairly easy to create a full-featured office suite in Perl and Tk that will fit on a floppy and run on practically any Unix; while it could be pointed out that the support files (for things like Perl and ispell) are huge, the thing is that they're already there.
/Brian
I don't necessarily agree. Don't forget, we live in the age of ATA/66 and ATA/100 where as long as you don't need the flexibility you're better off with IDE for cost reasons. The analogy with modern IDE and SCSI is more along the lines of AGP vs. PCI -- an AGP slot will transfer data faster, but you only get one of them. It's a tradeoff.
USB2 is a bag on the side of USB -- it's faster in theory, but lacks busmastering capability (which FireWire has had since the beginning).
/Brian
USB... the Boston area MicroCenter has two tables full of old computers, mostly high-end Pentiums and Pentium Pros. Many -- maybe most -- have USB, but I doubt any of them ever had a USB device hooked up to them.
Apple *made* USB, probably single-handedly. Intel created it, MS pushed it as a standard, but it didn't become one until the first iMac hit the streets and a flood of cutesy translucent peripherals followed.
Firewire is in no such state of neglect; Sony's on board, and Firewire made it out in the PC world quite a bit earlier than it did the Mac world. It's a standard now in certain circles (just ask Hollywood), and iPod will only help its mainstream acceptance. (For the record, I don't see much future for USB2, but that's another issue entirely...)
/Brian
Agreed. It's only lame because it's not the Monster Mac PDA the /. brass were hoping for. It's a bit underwhelming IMHO, but I think the huge hard drive and the Firewire make it for me.
One idea, though: not everyone can afford the iPod. How about a cheaper version with flash RAM instead of the hard drive but the same internals otherwise?
/Brian
Uh, I dunno... Britney's starting to look like The Skank That Would Not Die...
/Brian
Actually, I thought of something similar but more generalized -- APS Tech used to (probably still does) sell a double SCSI case which I most vividly remember combining a Jaz drive with a CD burner. It was probably roughly the same style case as you're referring to.
See, I saw the headline and I was thinking some kind of half-pizza deal -- something small, slick, and preferably black. I like the concept, but the design doesn't work.
/Brian
IIRC (and I might not) Zubrin might be considered a bit daft by some scientists (I know his name is in Voodoo Science by Bob Park somewhere, but I don't remember exactly where), but he's got to be right about this...
I can't believe anyone takes the idea of space-generated power seriously anymore. It *could* work, mind you -- but how many failsafes would you have to pack into the system to prevent it from cooking a bird, or part of a small town, or an airplane?
/Brian
It does the job of being a small and workable system, and that's about it. It'd be a good cluster box, IMHO, but man... mofo is *ugly*.
Would I buy one? I don't know -- probably if they put it in a nicer case, but not like that. But I speak as someone who still lives at home and doesn't necessarily have space concerns that this box would address. (And I mean, really -- if space was truly an issue, why not just buy a Cappucino box and be done with it?)
What I want to see -- and I'm serious about this -- are a consumer-electronics-type case for a PC with an IR reciever and a graphical LED front panel (for media control) and a wooden case meant to match those "executive" mini-stereos from The Sharper Image...
/Brian
Yeah...
That's the problem here, isn't it? The attitude of Ma Bill(tm) here is basically "stick your head in the sand and it'll go away", with a dose of "we'll protect you".
/Brian
Clarify: can't justify spending upwards of $20 on a *bad* CD. Or haven't you heard that CD sales were through the roof during Napster's heyday?
Actually, I think the end result will be to a) create a protocol arms race (if all else fails, there's always encrypted FTP or something like that) and b) move the fileswaps to sneakernet. Or hasn't the RIAA ever heard the maxim "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of CDRs"?
/Brian
How is it reasonable for a private industry group to want carte blanche to blackice you in the name of protecting a copyright?
/Brian
ObShamelessPlug: that would certainly explain
http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq
You with the CueCat driver, and now this -- are you trying to be a shit magnet :-)
Hats off, though... and hats off to the person who did it in the first place...
/Brian
Actually, I think the problem with the 620 was that it was delayed so long that the 604 was beating it on performance tests. It was sort of a tradeoff; besides, at the time Apple was a long way away from having a 64-bit clean OS as they do now.
Apple could have been up to 500mHz a long time ago with the Exponential x704, as a matter of fact; the problem was that Exponential managed to get the clock speed, but fucked up the design so bad that the clocks didn't matter because the chip couldn't come close to what Motorola and IBM were capable of at the time, making it completely useless.
On another front... a Darwin port would be nice.
/Brian
Probably some POS Xenix box in somebody's closet (Lunix/C64 isn't enough like Unix to qualify in my book). Linux, no, but maybe ELKS on a good day...
/Brian
NT 4 will; NT 5+ (i.e. Win2K and WinXPirationDate) won't. Microsoft killed it because the market for Windows on anything except Intel/AMD and embedded processors (i.e. WinCE) simply wasn't there.
/Brian
Can you run MOL without a proper Mac ROM, though?
Also, how close is POWER4 to PowerPC, anyway? I know the PPC 601 will run POWER code just fine, but how divergent is the G4 series, for example?
/Brian
Yahoo is one possibility, but I think Apple has the bigger stake in the future of FreeBSD (after all, they do now employ Jordan Hubbard). I do think, however, that FreeBSD's future as a separate entity is hazy at best; there's more of a need for OpenBSD and NetBSD (security fortress and OS-of-last-resort, respectively), and except for licensing issues FreeBSD and Darwin would appear to potentially occupy roughly the same niche in the market.
I don't know...
/Brian
One thing about ham radio -- you *can* run it on backup power....
Actually, I wonder... is there a subculture out there of people using hacked cellphones for legitimate, i.e. hobbyist, purposes? I don't mean cell phreakers or people using stolen service, I mean people doing precisely this p2p sort of thing, completely off the nets (or even using their own shadow nets). I can't think it would be that hard to do -- the only problems would be a) modifying the firmware and b) hooking your cell-frequency ham radio tower up to a PBX to connect to the rest of the phone net...
/Brian
I don't know... seems to me that you'd wind up spending an awful lot on SMS charges just to render a picture of Natalie Portman...
/Brian
Er...
Jolene Blalock: Jeri Ryan without the acting talent. 'Nuff said.
I liked the rest, though; there were some weak spots (how is it that the human crew didn't mutiny on T'Pol when she pulled rank?), and it just didn't feel very Trek, but I did generally like it. The big-screen camera work is something new for Trek, and it works amazingly well. The Suliban are a little weird; I assume there will be much more.
To those who complained about plot weakness, lack of character development, etc: get over it. Get over it now. The Trek folks have broken the Roddenberry mold completely with this one and are starting from the very beginning with the idea of an ongoing story (remember, Gene didn't much like continuity; he wanted every original Trek story to be self-contained). Granted, that doesn't excuse the Infamous Greasedown Scene (unless there will be some romantic issues for those two characters, which I'd say is unlikely). But it's a good beginning, and I'd say that's all it was intended to be.
The Enterprise NX-01 is a nicely designed ship; I don't fault them for not making it a copy of Captain Pike's Enterprise for two reasons:
-The ship was clearly designed primarily with human expertise; we're going to make it look like what we're familiar with, and that's what the producers did. That means identifiable displays, not just random switches.
-Maybe the TOS thing was an aesthetic thing. It certainly looked as 60s as TNG did 80s.
/Brian
That said: