Better idea -- those PIIs you're dumping are pretty nice hardware by any reasonable standard, right? Well...
At some point in the near future I intend to hook up with an old PowerMac 5300. It's got an all-in-one case that would make a perfect jukebox. You could do that too -- maybe you'd have to build a cabinet, but it wouldn't be too hard. I suggest putting a monitor and a trackball in the top of the cabinet and a keyboard drawer and the box itself inside. (Don't know where you'd find a coinslot though...) My Mac jukebox will probably use MacOS 9 just so I can use iTunes (great program), but if I was building a PC jukebox I'd use Linux and LAME or Ogg Vorbis, or even write my own interface.
It's been done -- stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov has information on the Stone Soupercomputer, which was built entirely from donated parts. It's about 2/3 486 systems, with the rest Pentiums and a couple of Alphas. There was an article in SciAm a while back and it even made/.
But yeah -- if there's nothing else you can think of to do with your old computers, you can always start playing with clustering.
I dunno... might be the second step of a slippery slope leading to some kind of unification between Darwin and FreeBSD (Jordan Hubbard going to Apple being the first). I'm not saying it's in the works -- I've nothing but my own guesswork saying this -- but it seems very possible.
Cringely I don't know much about -- haven't read him for years. Dvorak, though, is pretty much widely considered not so much a whore (though given some of the stuff he used to write when he wrote for MacUser it's not unfair) as an idiot -- to Mac users in the mid-90s, the undercurrent of the average Dvorak Mac piece was "give up, go home, the party's over". Not so much preaching to the choir as trying to close the church. (No wonder he was exiled to Computer Shopper.)
Hiawatha Bray, who writes for the Boston Globe, used to fall into that category too. He still shows signs of whorishness, but ever since he bought that iMac a few years ago he's become much more balanced in his writing.
Spoken like someone who still thinks laissez-faire capitalism is the cure for everything.
These countries are doing what they're doing because they can't afford to do anything else. Brazil can no longer afford to blow massive amounts of money on an AIDS drug that they need desperately; seems to me that they've every right to make demands as we do, and a lot more need to do so. The fact is that drug companies go where the profits are. When you've got people dying, someone else's profits don't mean shit to you if there's something you can do about it.
I think the software thing is actually a separate issue -- alternatives do exist, and these countries are mandating their use because the way they were going was costing them too much in terms of money and potential security threats. What these countries are saying is that dependence on Microsoft presents a threat that should be removed; the cost thing is probably a factor as well, but... oh, read the freakin' article.
The issue here has everything to do with the security implementations of giving up control to a) a single company b) based in a foreign country c) with a well-documented history of blatantly corrupt behavior. I don't think it's unreasonable to point this out; the reason it "doesn't work" in this context is because these governments are placing far too much trust in a technology source they can neither afford nor rely on to hold their best interests at heart.
The thing is that Unix is Unix. How do *you* want to do it, and still keep the whole thing Unixy? MacOS X/NeXT packages are only a partial answer -- you still want to essentially keep the application files inviolate and centralized in some way or another, and you're still left with the problem of what to do with the config files. I submit that the MacOS Classic Preferences folder is not drastically different from/etc; it would be nice to have a ~/etc directory as well, but nobody seems to have thought of that yet (dot files are not a good thing IMHO -- invisible clutter is still clutter).
The other issue is that if you're dealing with a multiuser system you *have* to centralize applications and documentation or you wind up with the bizarre ad-hockery that is MacOS Classic's application permissions system. If you're a Mac user, selecting user permissions by individual application may not seem like a big deal, but to me it's a crappy bandaid over an overextended filesystem design and a horror more profound and bloodcurdling than SCSI voodoo (especially if, as on the average system install, something like fifty of the apps on your system are insignificant little AppleScripts and control panels).
"Look but don't touch" is critical to managing applications and the accompanying resources; the real issue is config files. I honestly don't think there is an elegant solution to what you're proposing, but then again I don't think this is really a problem.
What you're missing, though, is that Windows was designed as a single-user system, and Unix was designed as a multiuser system. However the distinction may have been blurred over the years, the methods are correct in their original context; whether that context holds today is probably the real question here. Don't forget -- you're dealing with thirty-odd years of history here -- Unix is what it is, and to drastically alter it would render it something distantly related but not identical along the lines of BeOS or MiNT.
In any case, the Unix filesystem certainly makes more sense to me than MacOS Classic (the folder arrangement in the System Folder has changed drastically with every major release since System 7, and sometimes even with point releases; don't even get me started on the silliness that is the font suitcase) or Windows 9x/Me (still based on freakin' DOS!). Unix has changed very little by comparison -- some accretions here and there (/sbin and/usr/sbin, created for the convenience of sysadmins, come to mind), but for the most part it's no big deal. It all depends on your personal opinion. (Though I will note the irony of a system that likes laying out everything for the user to be able to deal with by hand requiring something like dpkg or rpm to do installs and uninstalls...)
The NeXT/MacOS X solution is a pretty elegant one, but it does put somewhat of a conceptual strain on the system (Apple even ships a program called Package First Aid for when the system gets confused and converts a package into an ordinary folder).
To be honest with you, what we're dealing with is little more than a religious issue IMHO.
I think we have one. As a matter of fact, I think we have at least three (KOffice, OpenOffice, good old HTML; five if you count RTF and PDF, but not everyone would).
What I think about the matter is this: once upon a time we could assume everyone had access to RTF; I think this is still the case. The problem is that not everyone knows or cares about it; even some people in the high tech community (not techies, though; mostly recruiters and other administrative types) think there's nothing else out there but Word format.
Personally, I think all we need is a slight extension to HTML 4 to support pages (call it PLML -- Page Layout Markup Language -- make it HTML with a tag...). Of course it should be XML-based -- XML, buzzword though it may be, is cool. Might not even be all that difficult to extend Gecko and Konqueror to support it...
Not everyone likes MacOS. Seems as though everyone (around here anyway;-) ) likes Mac hardware, or the potential thereof. QED.
What we need is to get Linus using a G4 (yeah, right) and bury the hatchet with Paul Mackerras, and then convince someone, anyone, to start shipping commodity PPC mobos (doesn't have to be, probably shouldn't be, in fact, Apple).
Maybe, maybe not. But a quick glance through/. will tell you two things:
-/.ers love PPC hardware and would love to see more of it
-Not every Mac user is a six-colored-fire-breathing zealot. The ability to run something other than MacOS on Mac hardware is a selling point (a weak one, yes, but still a selling point).
On top of that, the PowerPC chips in theory are better than the Intel chips -- less power usage, more orthogonal instruction set, and a few other niceties. The only problem with them is Motorola.
BeOS was a half-assed (though excellently done, for the half an ass that was there) implementation of a great idea. What killed it in the end had a lot to do with Windows, but more I think to do with Jean-Louis Gassee's pigheadedness.
Be was a Mac fan's toy in the beginning -- the BeBox was a PowerPC-based system that was aimed at the geek world and happened to fit into the Mac world because of PowerPC loyalty. Be was doing okay until Apple killed Mac cloning and forced Be onto the much more hostile Intel playing field (a field they didn't have to be on, IMHO -- rewriting part of the Be microkernel using Mach/MkLinux code would have been workable (if a bit shady, since it's a little tough to tell what the licensing on Mach is) and would have kept Be alive on its native platform), but Gassee &c. chose not to.
I think Be could have made the whole thing work -- there was a Posix layer, after all, and the OS itself, though (as stated above) half-assed, was very elegant and well-implemented nevertheless. But as good a point as the bootloader issue is (and it's a damn good one -- day late and a dollar/euro/pound/yen short for bringing it up in 2001) it doesn't have much to do with Be's bright start fading slowly into obscurity.
I sort of see this coming from both sides. On the one hand, FireWire can be a big deal for video processing -- makes the editor's job a lot easier. On the other hand, Steve Jobs, CEO of Pixar, is an insider if I ever saw one...
I take the middle road on this one. FireWire is deserving, in a nuts'n'bolts sort of way, but I suspect that if it had been Intel that invented it and not long-time industry darling Apple (or, perhaps, equally-and-then-some-connected Sony) I don't know if it would have gotten the award.
FWIW, this story as far as anyone knows is not well known outside the US and was originally propagated by an American fundy who probably was not even there at the time. Darwin was known to be a lifelong agnostic and this particular story is thought to be out of character for him...
Well, see, the only people who are going to buy in because of the cute penguin on the box are us (who know what we're getting) and stupid VCs (who think, or thought, that Linux=$$$).
I don't know if I quite agree that "Linux can't technically be called a Unix" -- dmr considers it part of the family (Linux Magazine, a couple of months ago), and if he doesn't have final say on the matter who does?
Another point: your point is a good one, but it's more about perception than reality.
I do applaud the existence of a BSD book, finally, though -- I use Linux myself (I have OpenBSD running on a Mac SE/30, but it's wedged in rather painfully and I don't use it much) but I do think BSD gets rather short shrift these days. There are five different major Open Source BSDs out there these days, only one of which (Darwin) gets any significant amount of media play. But Yahoo has been running FreeBSD for a long time, and development continues on all the variants... it's about time.
/Brian
(how come we don't have a female mascot around here, anyway? What do Tux, Beastie, and Hexley go home to at night?)
Who cares about unnecessary extras? I'm thinking of having a roomful of clones of my computer: HP Vectra VL, P2 333, 128MB RAM, 6GB hard drive, Ethernet card. I think it's a safe bet that these computers a) provide a perfectly adequate platform for mass rendering and b) are available in mass quantity for dirt cheap. Face it: above 200mHz it's all a blur anyway (unless you're a gamer or a hardcore scientific computer).
Second, okay, you might be right about the shelves. I'm thinking cheap plastic workshop shelves from Home Depot, which would be big enough and certainly *look* sturdy enough (though you might want to bolt them to the wall).
Third, the networking hardware cost estimate was a wild guess and obviously a massive lowball. Point conceded; you're still bringing in a shitload of computing power for about the price of a top-of-the-line Lexus.
Finally, I feel forced to smack you upside the head for taking a perfectly good (and very silly) MasterCard commercial parody far too seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Better idea -- those PIIs you're dumping are pretty nice hardware by any reasonable standard, right? Well...
At some point in the near future I intend to hook up with an old PowerMac 5300. It's got an all-in-one case that would make a perfect jukebox. You could do that too -- maybe you'd have to build a cabinet, but it wouldn't be too hard. I suggest putting a monitor and a trackball in the top of the cabinet and a keyboard drawer and the box itself inside. (Don't know where you'd find a coinslot though...) My Mac jukebox will probably use MacOS 9 just so I can use iTunes (great program), but if I was building a PC jukebox I'd use Linux and LAME or Ogg Vorbis, or even write my own interface.
/Brian
It's been done -- stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov has information on the Stone Soupercomputer, which was built entirely from donated parts. It's about 2/3 486 systems, with the rest Pentiums and a couple of Alphas. There was an article in SciAm a while back and it even made /.
But yeah -- if there's nothing else you can think of to do with your old computers, you can always start playing with clustering.
/Brian
My high school computer class was a glorified typing class. On Apple IIs. In 1993.
On the one hand, I am the envy of almost anyone who watches me type. On the other hand, my computer education happened anywhere but in school.
/brian
I dunno... might be the second step of a slippery slope leading to some kind of unification between Darwin and FreeBSD (Jordan Hubbard going to Apple being the first). I'm not saying it's in the works -- I've nothing but my own guesswork saying this -- but it seems very possible.
/brian
Cringely I don't know much about -- haven't read him for years. Dvorak, though, is pretty much widely considered not so much a whore (though given some of the stuff he used to write when he wrote for MacUser it's not unfair) as an idiot -- to Mac users in the mid-90s, the undercurrent of the average Dvorak Mac piece was "give up, go home, the party's over". Not so much preaching to the choir as trying to close the church. (No wonder he was exiled to Computer Shopper.)
Hiawatha Bray, who writes for the Boston Globe, used to fall into that category too. He still shows signs of whorishness, but ever since he bought that iMac a few years ago he's become much more balanced in his writing.
/brian
Spoken like someone who still thinks laissez-faire capitalism is the cure for everything.
These countries are doing what they're doing because they can't afford to do anything else. Brazil can no longer afford to blow massive amounts of money on an AIDS drug that they need desperately; seems to me that they've every right to make demands as we do, and a lot more need to do so. The fact is that drug companies go where the profits are. When you've got people dying, someone else's profits don't mean shit to you if there's something you can do about it.
I think the software thing is actually a separate issue -- alternatives do exist, and these countries are mandating their use because the way they were going was costing them too much in terms of money and potential security threats. What these countries are saying is that dependence on Microsoft presents a threat that should be removed; the cost thing is probably a factor as well, but... oh, read the freakin' article.
/Brian
The issue here has everything to do with the security implementations of giving up control to a) a single company b) based in a foreign country c) with a well-documented history of blatantly corrupt behavior. I don't think it's unreasonable to point this out; the reason it "doesn't work" in this context is because these governments are placing far too much trust in a technology source they can neither afford nor rely on to hold their best interests at heart.
/Brian
The thing is that Unix is Unix. How do *you* want to do it, and still keep the whole thing Unixy? MacOS X/NeXT packages are only a partial answer -- you still want to essentially keep the application files inviolate and centralized in some way or another, and you're still left with the problem of what to do with the config files. I submit that the MacOS Classic Preferences folder is not drastically different from /etc; it would be nice to have a ~/etc directory as well, but nobody seems to have thought of that yet (dot files are not a good thing IMHO -- invisible clutter is still clutter).
The other issue is that if you're dealing with a multiuser system you *have* to centralize applications and documentation or you wind up with the bizarre ad-hockery that is MacOS Classic's application permissions system. If you're a Mac user, selecting user permissions by individual application may not seem like a big deal, but to me it's a crappy bandaid over an overextended filesystem design and a horror more profound and bloodcurdling than SCSI voodoo (especially if, as on the average system install, something like fifty of the apps on your system are insignificant little AppleScripts and control panels).
"Look but don't touch" is critical to managing applications and the accompanying resources; the real issue is config files. I honestly don't think there is an elegant solution to what you're proposing, but then again I don't think this is really a problem.
/Brian
What you're missing, though, is that Windows was designed as a single-user system, and Unix was designed as a multiuser system. However the distinction may have been blurred over the years, the methods are correct in their original context; whether that context holds today is probably the real question here. Don't forget -- you're dealing with thirty-odd years of history here -- Unix is what it is, and to drastically alter it would render it something distantly related but not identical along the lines of BeOS or MiNT.
/usr/sbin, created for the convenience of sysadmins, come to mind), but for the most part it's no big deal. It all depends on your personal opinion. (Though I will note the irony of a system that likes laying out everything for the user to be able to deal with by hand requiring something like dpkg or rpm to do installs and uninstalls...)
In any case, the Unix filesystem certainly makes more sense to me than MacOS Classic (the folder arrangement in the System Folder has changed drastically with every major release since System 7, and sometimes even with point releases; don't even get me started on the silliness that is the font suitcase) or Windows 9x/Me (still based on freakin' DOS!). Unix has changed very little by comparison -- some accretions here and there (/sbin and
The NeXT/MacOS X solution is a pretty elegant one, but it does put somewhat of a conceptual strain on the system (Apple even ships a program called Package First Aid for when the system gets confused and converts a package into an ordinary folder).
To be honest with you, what we're dealing with is little more than a religious issue IMHO.
/Brian
I think we have one. As a matter of fact, I think we have at least three (KOffice, OpenOffice, good old HTML; five if you count RTF and PDF, but not everyone would).
What I think about the matter is this: once upon a time we could assume everyone had access to RTF; I think this is still the case. The problem is that not everyone knows or cares about it; even some people in the high tech community (not techies, though; mostly recruiters and other administrative types) think there's nothing else out there but Word format.
Personally, I think all we need is a slight extension to HTML 4 to support pages (call it PLML -- Page Layout Markup Language -- make it HTML with a tag...). Of course it should be XML-based -- XML, buzzword though it may be, is cool. Might not even be all that difficult to extend Gecko and Konqueror to support it...
/Brian
Not everyone likes MacOS. Seems as though everyone (around here anyway ;-) ) likes Mac hardware, or the potential thereof. QED.
What we need is to get Linus using a G4 (yeah, right) and bury the hatchet with Paul Mackerras, and then convince someone, anyone, to start shipping commodity PPC mobos (doesn't have to be, probably shouldn't be, in fact, Apple).
/Brian
Maybe, maybe not. But a quick glance through /. will tell you two things:
-/.ers love PPC hardware and would love to see more of it
-Not every Mac user is a six-colored-fire-breathing zealot. The ability to run something other than MacOS on Mac hardware is a selling point (a weak one, yes, but still a selling point).
On top of that, the PowerPC chips in theory are better than the Intel chips -- less power usage, more orthogonal instruction set, and a few other niceties. The only problem with them is Motorola.
/Brian
Simply to point out that C++ had nothing much to do with it -- the early Be community certainly didn't mind.
/Brian
BeOS was a half-assed (though excellently done, for the half an ass that was there) implementation of a great idea. What killed it in the end had a lot to do with Windows, but more I think to do with Jean-Louis Gassee's pigheadedness.
Be was a Mac fan's toy in the beginning -- the BeBox was a PowerPC-based system that was aimed at the geek world and happened to fit into the Mac world because of PowerPC loyalty. Be was doing okay until Apple killed Mac cloning and forced Be onto the much more hostile Intel playing field (a field they didn't have to be on, IMHO -- rewriting part of the Be microkernel using Mach/MkLinux code would have been workable (if a bit shady, since it's a little tough to tell what the licensing on Mach is) and would have kept Be alive on its native platform), but Gassee &c. chose not to.
I think Be could have made the whole thing work -- there was a Posix layer, after all, and the OS itself, though (as stated above) half-assed, was very elegant and well-implemented nevertheless. But as good a point as the bootloader issue is (and it's a damn good one -- day late and a dollar/euro/pound/yen short for bringing it up in 2001) it doesn't have much to do with Be's bright start fading slowly into obscurity.
/Brian
I don't think there's any question at all of that. Even the appeals court thought so, even though they tossed the remedies.
/Brian
I sort of see this coming from both sides. On the one hand, FireWire can be a big deal for video processing -- makes the editor's job a lot easier. On the other hand, Steve Jobs, CEO of Pixar, is an insider if I ever saw one...
I take the middle road on this one. FireWire is deserving, in a nuts'n'bolts sort of way, but I suspect that if it had been Intel that invented it and not long-time industry darling Apple (or, perhaps, equally-and-then-some-connected Sony) I don't know if it would have gotten the award.
I say congratulations*.
/Brian
FWIW, this story as far as anyone knows is not well known outside the US and was originally propagated by an American fundy who probably was not even there at the time. Darwin was known to be a lifelong agnostic and this particular story is thought to be out of character for him...
/brian
Well, see, the only people who are going to buy in because of the cute penguin on the box are us (who know what we're getting) and stupid VCs (who think, or thought, that Linux=$$$).
/Brian
The OS X box will never show up -- I don't think anyone wants to relive the Pippin debacle...
/Brian
We do need more people doing work like this. I always thought that the cool thing about the Dreamcast was how much it had been hacked open...
/Brian
I don't know if I quite agree that "Linux can't technically be called a Unix" -- dmr considers it part of the family (Linux Magazine, a couple of months ago), and if he doesn't have final say on the matter who does?
Another point: your point is a good one, but it's more about perception than reality.
I do applaud the existence of a BSD book, finally, though -- I use Linux myself (I have OpenBSD running on a Mac SE/30, but it's wedged in rather painfully and I don't use it much) but I do think BSD gets rather short shrift these days. There are five different major Open Source BSDs out there these days, only one of which (Darwin) gets any significant amount of media play. But Yahoo has been running FreeBSD for a long time, and development continues on all the variants... it's about time.
/Brian
(how come we don't have a female mascot around here, anyway? What do Tux, Beastie, and Hexley go home to at night?)
And what hasn't been stellar, apart from Aqua's sluggishness and slightly sloppy design? OS X is a solid system.
Granted, Steve is still a loose cannon, but he always has been...
/Brian
As long as you have some organization, it will work, though. Er, Linux?
/Brian
First off...
Who cares about unnecessary extras? I'm thinking of having a roomful of clones of my computer: HP Vectra VL, P2 333, 128MB RAM, 6GB hard drive, Ethernet card. I think it's a safe bet that these computers a) provide a perfectly adequate platform for mass rendering and b) are available in mass quantity for dirt cheap. Face it: above 200mHz it's all a blur anyway (unless you're a gamer or a hardcore scientific computer).
Second, okay, you might be right about the shelves. I'm thinking cheap plastic workshop shelves from Home Depot, which would be big enough and certainly *look* sturdy enough (though you might want to bolt them to the wall).
Third, the networking hardware cost estimate was a wild guess and obviously a massive lowball. Point conceded; you're still bringing in a shitload of computing power for about the price of a top-of-the-line Lexus.
Finally, I feel forced to smack you upside the head for taking a perfectly good (and very silly) MasterCard commercial parody far too seriously.
Thank you for your time.
/Brian
Okay, I will grant you that, at least as maturity time goes.
After all, the Gimp still can't do color sep worth scheisse, so it won't be replacing Photoshop in the prepress world anytime soon...
/Brian