Repeat after me: people still like dead trees. That's not going to change, at least not until we start moving to Mars. There's no reason for it to -- eInk will never be as cheap as paper, and the fact is that ebooks haven't been very popular with the non-geek set.
Hell, I don't even like 'em very much -- the only reason I would use an ebook is for my guitar tab files (which are over an inch thick in dead tree form) and even then it's a pain in the ass to be playing, playing, playing, then having to stop to scroll down on my laptop to get to the next verse.
Ebooks: delicate, ephemeral by nature, can be locked up by greedy publishers.
Physical books: durable, portable, and you don't have to worry about lighting or screen quality half as much.
What was even more fun were the pocket computers. I always wanted one of those, even though they were just glorified scientific calculators. I think most of them were Sharp OEM systems, sort of ancestral to the Wizard or Zaurus but with more open-ended functionality. And yes, they all had Basic.
The pocket computer of the early- to mid-80s is dead, though; the family tree continues, but it diverged. On the one hand you've got graphing calculators (note to HP users: TI rocks!), and on the other hand you've got things like the PalmPilot and PocketPC. Neither one has the kind of functionality that these pocket computers did out of the box, even though they're so much more powerful:-(
Personally I think the m10x models are junk -- I wouldn't take one if you paid me. I have a IIIx, love it, but my first PalmPilot, a IIIe, died horribly in a locker room accident. Not much for durability.
But the TRS-80 Model 100... if only they were still around in some form. That's a design, that one -- everything a portable computer of its age could possibly need to be. Take one of those things, slap a modem, ethernet, and USB on it and give it a modern processor (PPC embedded or some sort) and a few megs of memory... sounds good to me...
Agreed. It's one of the more interesting ways of dealing with the "we want free stuff" thing -- Okay, we'll give you the free stuff, but you gotta play nice with it.
Rather an honorable way of dealing with it, I think; isn't it basically what TrollTech did with Qt, at least at first?
The maze of twisty little passages, all alike, is at
http://bang.dhs.org/if/
This is the easiest way to get around the Interactive Fiction FTP archive.
And if you want to write your own, use Inform or TADS... though Inform is the package that they used for Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (the last Infocom game, part of Zork: Grand Inquisitor, I believe). Inform actually compiles to Z-machine code.
Ah. The forerunner to Leisure Suit Larry... But if you want a much better dirty IF game play I-0. Adam Cadre is a weird dude but he writes some pretty good stuff -- just enough kink.
That would be a great product, though -- rack-mounted Darwin server, anyone?
But why use NT as a Mac server? Linux will run on the same hardware for much cheaper, and Netatalk is not that hard to get (though I've noticed that RedHat no longer supports it for reasons unknown). (And trust me on this -- support issues for netatalk are nonexistent -- it's pretty much plug'n'go. Not like, say, Samba or Apache.)
Presumably, though, a company could ship a computer with their own installer hack package along with a shrinkwrapped copy of OS X. That would probably be legal -- it's just a question of whether Apple would fulfill the orders.
/Brian
Re:Complete the following sequence: Xbox, silly
on
Mono Unimplementable?
·
· Score: 2
Passport is not a bad idea in and of itself, but in its current form it's not suitable for anyone but casual net surfers. If MS wanted to license the code behind it (MS Passport Server?) for server use, it might be different, but any business that would put its authentication services in the hands of a company like Microsoft is just asking to see their name up on fuckedcompany.com.
Hailstorm is EVIL.
/Brian
Re:Complete the following sequence: Xbox, silly
on
Mono Unimplementable?
·
· Score: 2
I hate to break this to you guys, but Microsoft has the clout to shove.NET (and Hailstorm) (and Passport) down everyone's throat, and they will do everything they can get away with to make it so. It'll take them a while (the hit always comes on the third strike with Microsoft), but they will do their damndest.
I think the Xbox will tank, at least initially -- the early buzz is vague and not too promising for delivering a quality product on schedule..Net is entirely a different story.
No, you'll get modded down as a troll for saying that MS doesn't participate in standardization.
They do. But from the look of it they're trying to pull the same bullshit Rambus didn't get away with, and they're trying to do it on much shakier ground.
Or maybe an MS PR flack is just shooting his mouth off? Looks like FUD poisoning to me...
"anything you can do I can do better"... okay, with OSS I'll grant you that's true -- that's why I'm a believer -- but "can do" and "done are two different things.
PPC bootloaders suck because up until Open Firmware became the rule, you had to jump through hoops (i.e. kick out MacOS) in order to start something else. You can either hack the firmware (like Darwin/MacOS X does) or you can start up from a stub MacOS Classic partition, but you can't do anything like LILO because the architecture is too different.
Besides, I think pretty much everyone uses one form or another of BootX anyway, at least where they can't reach the firmware xor are too lazy to learn Forth.
Well, as a Mac fan, I see that AMD truly is the big kid on the block, but you have to admit that having benches like that on a 500mHz chip means that the PPC 74x0 chips really are some bad motherfuckers compared to Intel...
Now if only Motorola can ship some chips that are up to spec.
In other words they're stonewalling because they don't know any better, or at least don't understand the alternatives...
It's the same in politics, though. It's the story of Edward Teller's career -- come up with an idea, get allies, push the idea, and milk it until everyone realizes it won't work.
ObKarmaWhoring: For an early example, go to the Jargon File and look up B1FF!!!11!!!!1
The whole thing started quite a while ago and just got very weird from there. (Though I think h4x0r is becoming a verb in its own right with the advent of Net appliances; sort of a more stylish way of saying "pried open" when "crack" doesn't quite pass muster...)
"From a certain point of view..." If you look it in terms of a self-contained product, putting aside design issues (which should be irrelevant if specs are available), I guess it is defective, isn't it? (Looking at it like that, that means everyone who ever bought a winmodem got ripped off, but I digress...) I've had the same problem myself -- anyone got a Farallon PC card ethernet adapter they're willing to swap for a 3Com Etherlink, email me...
Anyway, CmdrTaco is right on on this. The fact is that any fringe movement overpopulated with zealots is going to stay fringe -- that's why rms has become a sideshow in the movement he created. The zealots among us must simmer down -- I used to be one of those myself (probably still am -- Radical Moderate and proud), so I know what I'm talking about.
Facts are these:
-Linux is a pretty good system. It's not the cleanest, most versatile, or most elegant thing on the block, but it does what it's needed to do wonderfully. But *it* *can't* *do* *everything*. Neither can Windows, or MacOS, or BSD, or whatever your personal flavor of the week is.
-Those that are quick to flame make the rest of us look bad. It's only a matter of time before someone gets fed up enough to fork Linux under the same acrimonious conditions as happened to BSD.
-Repeat after me: WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. Whether we like it or not, the Linux world has both absorbed and contributed to the world around it. Zealotry don't mean shit when you have to work with someone you hate -- and he's got the wrench you need.
We've got Stallmanites. We've got Raymondites (that's me). We've got people who use Linux just because they like it (probably not the same people who appreciate elegance in design, but those people are still programming in Algol >:-) ). We all bring different things to the party, and some of us deeply resent the stain of being associated with nutjobs who put the cause ahead of minor things like Getting The Job Done.
True. The juicy bits are inside the system anyway. I heard a quote once about technology theft from a Russian intelligence agent to the effect that during the Cold War the Russians were always a couple of years behind the US with a lot of technologies because so much of their effort went into reverse-engineering instead of innovation...
Oy, did I ever say a mouthful. But that's a conversation for a different day.
I don't agree that the IP "isn't worth much", but it really is irrelevant in the driver world. I think what's going on is that these peripheral vendors, for whatever reason, are trying to play the same lockin games that people like Microsoft and Apple play, probably trying to milk the developers for license fees. They're missing the point, though -- fact is, it's not too likely that NVidia is loss-leadering every GeForce 3 chip that goes out the door, and HP's scanners have no place in the developer-licensing equation at all.
Fact is, HP has gained a disgruntled customer. This is not a good thing, and it's time companies like this realized that they are in fact screwing people over.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you can -- just hook up your system to an e-meter and keep beating on it exactly as the HOWTO says until the needle doesn't read anymore...
(Obscure Scientology joke -- www.xenu.net should have explanations)
/Brian
FDL gives the documentation an automatic bullschildt filter.
(Look it up -- it's in the Jargon File.)
/Brian
Repeat after me: people still like dead trees. That's not going to change, at least not until we start moving to Mars. There's no reason for it to -- eInk will never be as cheap as paper, and the fact is that ebooks haven't been very popular with the non-geek set.
Hell, I don't even like 'em very much -- the only reason I would use an ebook is for my guitar tab files (which are over an inch thick in dead tree form) and even then it's a pain in the ass to be playing, playing, playing, then having to stop to scroll down on my laptop to get to the next verse.
Ebooks: delicate, ephemeral by nature, can be locked up by greedy publishers.
Physical books: durable, portable, and you don't have to worry about lighting or screen quality half as much.
/Brian
More like 8x40, I think.
:-(
What was even more fun were the pocket computers. I always wanted one of those, even though they were just glorified scientific calculators. I think most of them were Sharp OEM systems, sort of ancestral to the Wizard or Zaurus but with more open-ended functionality. And yes, they all had Basic.
The pocket computer of the early- to mid-80s is dead, though; the family tree continues, but it diverged. On the one hand you've got graphing calculators (note to HP users: TI rocks!), and on the other hand you've got things like the PalmPilot and PocketPC. Neither one has the kind of functionality that these pocket computers did out of the box, even though they're so much more powerful
/Brian
Personally I think the m10x models are junk -- I wouldn't take one if you paid me. I have a IIIx, love it, but my first PalmPilot, a IIIe, died horribly in a locker room accident. Not much for durability.
But the TRS-80 Model 100... if only they were still around in some form. That's a design, that one -- everything a portable computer of its age could possibly need to be. Take one of those things, slap a modem, ethernet, and USB on it and give it a modern processor (PPC embedded or some sort) and a few megs of memory... sounds good to me...
/Brian
Agreed. It's one of the more interesting ways of dealing with the "we want free stuff" thing -- Okay, we'll give you the free stuff, but you gotta play nice with it.
Rather an honorable way of dealing with it, I think; isn't it basically what TrollTech did with Qt, at least at first?
/Brian
The maze of twisty little passages, all alike, is at
http://bang.dhs.org/if/
This is the easiest way to get around the Interactive Fiction FTP archive.
And if you want to write your own, use Inform or TADS... though Inform is the package that they used for Zork: The Undiscovered Underground (the last Infocom game, part of Zork: Grand Inquisitor, I believe). Inform actually compiles to Z-machine code.
/Brian
Ah. The forerunner to Leisure Suit Larry... But if you want a much better dirty IF game play I-0. Adam Cadre is a weird dude but he writes some pretty good stuff -- just enough kink.
/Brian
What about Curses? The modern IF world wouldn't exist without that one.
There are some truly amazing games out there. I'm in the process of trying to write one myself (just started; don't ask if you can be a beta tester).
/Brian
That would be a great product, though -- rack-mounted Darwin server, anyone?
But why use NT as a Mac server? Linux will run on the same hardware for much cheaper, and Netatalk is not that hard to get (though I've noticed that RedHat no longer supports it for reasons unknown). (And trust me on this -- support issues for netatalk are nonexistent -- it's pretty much plug'n'go. Not like, say, Samba or Apache.)
/Brian
But the problem is finding ATX PPC mobos. This thingy is a step in the right direction, but it's not versatile enough for the price...
/Brian
Presumably, though, a company could ship a computer with their own installer hack package along with a shrinkwrapped copy of OS X. That would probably be legal -- it's just a question of whether Apple would fulfill the orders.
/Brian
Passport is not a bad idea in and of itself, but in its current form it's not suitable for anyone but casual net surfers. If MS wanted to license the code behind it (MS Passport Server?) for server use, it might be different, but any business that would put its authentication services in the hands of a company like Microsoft is just asking to see their name up on fuckedcompany.com.
Hailstorm is EVIL.
/Brian
I hate to break this to you guys, but Microsoft has the clout to shove .NET (and Hailstorm) (and Passport) down everyone's throat, and they will do everything they can get away with to make it so. It'll take them a while (the hit always comes on the third strike with Microsoft), but they will do their damndest.
.Net is entirely a different story.
I think the Xbox will tank, at least initially -- the early buzz is vague and not too promising for delivering a quality product on schedule.
/Brian
No, you'll get modded down as a troll for saying that MS doesn't participate in standardization.
They do. But from the look of it they're trying to pull the same bullshit Rambus didn't get away with, and they're trying to do it on much shakier ground.
Or maybe an MS PR flack is just shooting his mouth off? Looks like FUD poisoning to me...
/Brian
It's 106 miles to Mars. We have a full sail of sunlight, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses. HIT IT!
This ought to be interesting to watch... a solar sail that didn't come out of an SF book. I like. The romance of space is not dead.
/Brian
Ah. See, I have a 6500, which has OF, but it's broken...
But thanks for the clarification. That's roughly what I meant to say in the second paragraph but I never quite got to it.
/Brian
"anything you can do I can do better"... okay, with OSS I'll grant you that's true -- that's why I'm a believer -- but "can do" and "done are two different things.
/Brian
Which is why the Mac is a generation and a half behind the PC world, even though it utterly destroys a Pentium III at the same speed.
That's what I call bittersweet...
/brian
PPC bootloaders suck because up until Open Firmware became the rule, you had to jump through hoops (i.e. kick out MacOS) in order to start something else. You can either hack the firmware (like Darwin/MacOS X does) or you can start up from a stub MacOS Classic partition, but you can't do anything like LILO because the architecture is too different.
Besides, I think pretty much everyone uses one form or another of BootX anyway, at least where they can't reach the firmware xor are too lazy to learn Forth.
/Brian
Well, as a Mac fan, I see that AMD truly is the big kid on the block, but you have to admit that having benches like that on a 500mHz chip means that the PPC 74x0 chips really are some bad motherfuckers compared to Intel...
Now if only Motorola can ship some chips that are up to spec.
/Brian
In other words they're stonewalling because they don't know any better, or at least don't understand the alternatives...
It's the same in politics, though. It's the story of Edward Teller's career -- come up with an idea, get allies, push the idea, and milk it until everyone realizes it won't work.
/Brian
ObKarmaWhoring: For an early example, go to the Jargon File and look up B1FF!!!11!!!!1
The whole thing started quite a while ago and just got very weird from there. (Though I think h4x0r is becoming a verb in its own right with the advent of Net appliances; sort of a more stylish way of saying "pried open" when "crack" doesn't quite pass muster...)
/Brian
"From a certain point of view..." If you look it in terms of a self-contained product, putting aside design issues (which should be irrelevant if specs are available), I guess it is defective, isn't it? (Looking at it like that, that means everyone who ever bought a winmodem got ripped off, but I digress...) I've had the same problem myself -- anyone got a Farallon PC card ethernet adapter they're willing to swap for a 3Com Etherlink, email me...
Anyway, CmdrTaco is right on on this. The fact is that any fringe movement overpopulated with zealots is going to stay fringe -- that's why rms has become a sideshow in the movement he created. The zealots among us must simmer down -- I used to be one of those myself (probably still am -- Radical Moderate and proud), so I know what I'm talking about.
Facts are these:
-Linux is a pretty good system. It's not the cleanest, most versatile, or most elegant thing on the block, but it does what it's needed to do wonderfully. But *it* *can't* *do* *everything*. Neither can Windows, or MacOS, or BSD, or whatever your personal flavor of the week is.
-Those that are quick to flame make the rest of us look bad. It's only a matter of time before someone gets fed up enough to fork Linux under the same acrimonious conditions as happened to BSD.
-Repeat after me: WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. Whether we like it or not, the Linux world has both absorbed and contributed to the world around it. Zealotry don't mean shit when you have to work with someone you hate -- and he's got the wrench you need.
We've got Stallmanites. We've got Raymondites (that's me). We've got people who use Linux just because they like it (probably not the same people who appreciate elegance in design, but those people are still programming in Algol >:-) ). We all bring different things to the party, and some of us deeply resent the stain of being associated with nutjobs who put the cause ahead of minor things like Getting The Job Done.
/Brian
True. The juicy bits are inside the system anyway. I heard a quote once about technology theft from a Russian intelligence agent to the effect that during the Cold War the Russians were always a couple of years behind the US with a lot of technologies because so much of their effort went into reverse-engineering instead of innovation...
Oy, did I ever say a mouthful. But that's a conversation for a different day.
I don't agree that the IP "isn't worth much", but it really is irrelevant in the driver world. I think what's going on is that these peripheral vendors, for whatever reason, are trying to play the same lockin games that people like Microsoft and Apple play, probably trying to milk the developers for license fees. They're missing the point, though -- fact is, it's not too likely that NVidia is loss-leadering every GeForce 3 chip that goes out the door, and HP's scanners have no place in the developer-licensing equation at all.
Fact is, HP has gained a disgruntled customer. This is not a good thing, and it's time companies like this realized that they are in fact screwing people over.
/Brian