I've seen one of the Espresso models (under what name I can't remember). I don't remember too much about it except that it was pretty good at doing its job.
I don't know what I think about these systems, though. They're great vertical-market units -- presentations, control systems, that sort of thing -- but as a plain old desktop system... I don't know. I tend to be rather cluttered and I'd worry about my CPU getting lost in the mess. I think they are quite cool in and of themselves, mind you, but who's kidding who -- they're toys. (Unless of course you live in a studio apartment with no room for a desk.)
Hey, it could be worse. Those 'executive shelf sets' or whatever they call 'em are pretty annoying -- they all look like Bang & Olufsen or Nakamichi ripoffs, right down to the (usually) vertical CD player and all the blue lights. And most of them you can't even link up into a boom box.
(smack) Ballmer is deliberately blurring the lines, just like Craig Mundie did. He knows this; he's trying to convince the rest of the world that there is no difference.
I have to say, though. I find it a bit hard to believe anyone could be taking tactics like this seriously -- MS is starting to sound like a bunch of whiners. If he was talking about another company like this on the record, I strongly suspect Microsoft's stock would be in trouble.
Linux/PS1 is actually pretty useless except for things like the above, but it also has the advantage of (like Linux/Dreamcast, NetBSD/Dreamcast, etc) being a good way to make your own games. And the PlayStation in both forms is not going away soon, so this is really not a bad idea.
Think of it this way: the PSone is the last of the stand-alone game consoles; everything else is bleeding into PC territory.
Actually, here's a diversionary thought for you...
Are we witnessing a convergence in system design? I think so. The video game console sort of split off from the personal computer tree right at the beginning, while the dumb terminal was absorbing PC traits and eventually developing into things like the X terminal and then things like the iOpener and WebTV. Now we're seeing something that started with the Dreamcast where the video game console of old is merging with the descendants of the terminal. I don't actually know if this is a good thing, though -- seems to me there should be a point of principle about opening closed systems as quickly as humanly possible, as most of these are at least nominally closed systems...
How hard could this possibly be to explain, and yet the question comes up every time someone announces a port like this?
Because it can be done. Because you're talking about putting a general-purpose OS on a fairly powerful (okay, by '96 standards, but still...) $99 box. Because there's a great deal of satisfaction in cracking a closed system (though demosceners have been doing it for a while now). In two words: hack value.
Do you need any further explanation?
/Brian
Re:Uh... what's wrong with a distributed root, the
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 2
Even then all you have to do is divide up the space appropriately. A p2p registration system would simply make sure that the name being registered doesn't exist in any other primary nameserver. The easiest way is to have separate tlds, but that's not all that practical.
My interpretation is that he's gotten himself in a behind-the-scenes pissing contest with Theo, who as we all know is not the most reasonable man in the world himself. That said, though I'm inclined to believe that Darren is legally correct, I think he's way off base and will wind up seeing his code fade into irrelevance. I gotta take Theo's side on this one; Darren is being a very bad boy by flouting community standards like this.
Re:Uh... what's wrong with a distributed root, the
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 2
Insightful? +1 freakin' Hilarious is more like it, even if he couldn't spell my freakin' email address...
/Brian
Uh... what's wrong with a distributed root, then?
on
IETF vs. ICANN
·
· Score: 4
This has got to be ICANN fud. I haven't read the RFCs, but there's no reason you can't make the "root" system a p2p distributed database. This is not a power grid where economies of scale are proving to be a more efficient way of working than deregulated competition; it's more like a telephone grid.
I guess there's not too much else to say, except for acknowledging that politics will make a mess of things...
This is hardly a shock when you realize that BSD is dying, all your base are in fact belong to us (get over it already, you're not getting them back), a naked and petrified Natalie Portman is in fact pouring hot grits down some Harvard Square ice cream jockey's pants even as we speak, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't write Under the Bridge about your apartment.
And if you do it to 'hot grits' you get, uh... 'ipu hsjut'... oh, wait, stale meme...
I still wonder about what it will take to create true AI and if we'll wind up regretting it down the road. I have this sense that any AI will consider its creators gods in some sense or another.
And I do think a hostile AI won't necessarily be a physical threat unless given an actual body. I would think an AI program would be too high-level to control a computer system any way but the same way we do (indirectly). After all, the human brain can move a terabyte or so of information in a minute (or is it a second?) yet I still can't tell right from left sometimes...
Mozilla can be taken as one of two things: an open-source project of mediocre popularity but great utility, or a broken-but-still-barely-working car carcass waiting to be stripped for parts. Take from that what you will...
My thought on the matter: get a Sandpoint board or something similar, get Darwin running on it, then copy over all the rest of the system and see if it will work. Unless they are in fact making high-level components hardware-dependent, it should work. Maybe not flawlessly mind you (Apple System Profiler would probably choke), but unless Apple's pulling some kind of funny business like was suggested above it shouldn't really be a problem... That is, after all, what microkernels are for...
Interesting (cynical and a bit slanted, though not inaccurate) way of putting it.
So somebody is playing both ends against the middle in this scenario, but it's unclear who. I have to say, though, I don't think it's precisely a First Amendment issue (though it is partially that); it's more just a general affront to freedom.
I look at it this way: stickers and rating systems are a Good Thing, even if somewhat flawed (I think the TV rating system is probably the cleanest way of dealing with it -- general guideline plus specific warnings). But all they are is guidelines, and I don't think they should be treated as anything but. Gov. Rowland made the right decision. Some things you simply can't regulate like that.
I think Microsoft sort of wussed out on this one, though. All they had to do was create their own rebranded BSD (based on an NTFS filesystem perhaps?) and they could keep it in the family...
Apple's got themselves in an interesting situation here. The more low-level stuff they put out for all to play with, the harder they lock down the high-level stuff.
Seems to me that Apple's in kind of a strange situation -- Darwin makes Mac cloning possible, at least for small operators. Apple needs to do some fast thinking at this point -- going completely Open Source is a good idea because MS-style licensing enforcement at this point goes out the window. But that means they need to start moving boxes, and more importantly, motherboards.
No doubt this is an interesting place for Apple to be working. They are giving up control, hopefully looking ahead to a point where software licensing is meaningless. That's good. Giving away an extensible crypto architecture is even better (not to mention that it makes hash of what little is left of export controls on crypto).
Apple should stay the course. Their next trick, though, needs to be establishing a commodity PowerPC hardware market. I'd be interested to see how that can be pulled off...
I thought it was to allow children to be directly interposed into an execution context for performance reasons rather than putting them through normal procedure calls?
Motif is no more dead than Cobol, it would seem. The most we can expect is that eventually Motif will wind up being supported as a legacy system for quite a long time, but will wind up being deprecated for new toolkits (probably Gnome).
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen one of the Espresso models (under what name I can't remember). I don't remember too much about it except that it was pretty good at doing its job.
I don't know what I think about these systems, though. They're great vertical-market units -- presentations, control systems, that sort of thing -- but as a plain old desktop system... I don't know. I tend to be rather cluttered and I'd worry about my CPU getting lost in the mess. I think they are quite cool in and of themselves, mind you, but who's kidding who -- they're toys. (Unless of course you live in a studio apartment with no room for a desk.)
/Brian
Hey, it could be worse. Those 'executive shelf sets' or whatever they call 'em are pretty annoying -- they all look like Bang & Olufsen or Nakamichi ripoffs, right down to the (usually) vertical CD player and all the blue lights. And most of them you can't even link up into a boom box.
/Brian
(smack) Ballmer is deliberately blurring the lines, just like Craig Mundie did. He knows this; he's trying to convince the rest of the world that there is no difference.
I have to say, though. I find it a bit hard to believe anyone could be taking tactics like this seriously -- MS is starting to sound like a bunch of whiners. If he was talking about another company like this on the record, I strongly suspect Microsoft's stock would be in trouble.
/Brian
Linux/PS1 is actually pretty useless except for things like the above, but it also has the advantage of (like Linux/Dreamcast, NetBSD/Dreamcast, etc) being a good way to make your own games. And the PlayStation in both forms is not going away soon, so this is really not a bad idea.
Think of it this way: the PSone is the last of the stand-alone game consoles; everything else is bleeding into PC territory.
Actually, here's a diversionary thought for you...
Are we witnessing a convergence in system design? I think so. The video game console sort of split off from the personal computer tree right at the beginning, while the dumb terminal was absorbing PC traits and eventually developing into things like the X terminal and then things like the iOpener and WebTV. Now we're seeing something that started with the Dreamcast where the video game console of old is merging with the descendants of the terminal. I don't actually know if this is a good thing, though -- seems to me there should be a point of principle about opening closed systems as quickly as humanly possible, as most of these are at least nominally closed systems...
/Brian
How hard could this possibly be to explain, and yet the question comes up every time someone announces a port like this?
Because it can be done. Because you're talking about putting a general-purpose OS on a fairly powerful (okay, by '96 standards, but still...) $99 box. Because there's a great deal of satisfaction in cracking a closed system (though demosceners have been doing it for a while now). In two words: hack value.
Do you need any further explanation?
/Brian
Even then all you have to do is divide up the space appropriately. A p2p registration system would simply make sure that the name being registered doesn't exist in any other primary nameserver. The easiest way is to have separate tlds, but that's not all that practical.
/Brian
My interpretation is that he's gotten himself in a behind-the-scenes pissing contest with Theo, who as we all know is not the most reasonable man in the world himself. That said, though I'm inclined to believe that Darren is legally correct, I think he's way off base and will wind up seeing his code fade into irrelevance. I gotta take Theo's side on this one; Darren is being a very bad boy by flouting community standards like this.
/Brian
Silly me... I shifted the wrong way...
gns fqhsr
/Brian
Insightful? +1 freakin' Hilarious is more like it, even if he couldn't spell my freakin' email address...
/Brian
This has got to be ICANN fud. I haven't read the RFCs, but there's no reason you can't make the "root" system a p2p distributed database. This is not a power grid where economies of scale are proving to be a more efficient way of working than deregulated competition; it's more like a telephone grid.
I guess there's not too much else to say, except for acknowledging that politics will make a mess of things...
/Brian
This is hardly a shock when you realize that BSD is dying, all your base are in fact belong to us (get over it already, you're not getting them back), a naked and petrified Natalie Portman is in fact pouring hot grits down some Harvard Square ice cream jockey's pants even as we speak, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers didn't write Under the Bridge about your apartment.
/Brian
And if you do it to 'hot grits' you get, uh... 'ipu hsjut'... oh, wait, stale meme...
I still wonder about what it will take to create true AI and if we'll wind up regretting it down the road. I have this sense that any AI will consider its creators gods in some sense or another.
And I do think a hostile AI won't necessarily be a physical threat unless given an actual body. I would think an AI program would be too high-level to control a computer system any way but the same way we do (indirectly). After all, the human brain can move a terabyte or so of information in a minute (or is it a second?) yet I still can't tell right from left sometimes...
/Brian
All your major studies and BSDbots are belong to us...
Interface-picky? We're spoiled like that :-)
Mozilla can be taken as one of two things: an open-source project of mediocre popularity but great utility, or a broken-but-still-barely-working car carcass waiting to be stripped for parts. Take from that what you will...
/Brian
Which is why I figure that porting it should be possible...
Sony Digital Relay, you mean :-)
Why not, though? But that would be the high-end model...
/Brian
Why couldn't they create MacOS X/x86 easily?
My thought on the matter: get a Sandpoint board or something similar, get Darwin running on it, then copy over all the rest of the system and see if it will work. Unless they are in fact making high-level components hardware-dependent, it should work. Maybe not flawlessly mind you (Apple System Profiler would probably choke), but unless Apple's pulling some kind of funny business like was suggested above it shouldn't really be a problem... That is, after all, what microkernels are for...
/Brian
Interesting (cynical and a bit slanted, though not inaccurate) way of putting it.
So somebody is playing both ends against the middle in this scenario, but it's unclear who. I have to say, though, I don't think it's precisely a First Amendment issue (though it is partially that); it's more just a general affront to freedom.
I look at it this way: stickers and rating systems are a Good Thing, even if somewhat flawed (I think the TV rating system is probably the cleanest way of dealing with it -- general guideline plus specific warnings). But all they are is guidelines, and I don't think they should be treated as anything but. Gov. Rowland made the right decision. Some things you simply can't regulate like that.
/Brian
Ha, ha. People like you are a pain in my...
Anyway...
I think Microsoft sort of wussed out on this one, though. All they had to do was create their own rebranded BSD (based on an NTFS filesystem perhaps?) and they could keep it in the family...
(How hard would that be, anyway?)
/Brian
Apple's got themselves in an interesting situation here. The more low-level stuff they put out for all to play with, the harder they lock down the high-level stuff.
Seems to me that Apple's in kind of a strange situation -- Darwin makes Mac cloning possible, at least for small operators. Apple needs to do some fast thinking at this point -- going completely Open Source is a good idea because MS-style licensing enforcement at this point goes out the window. But that means they need to start moving boxes, and more importantly, motherboards.
No doubt this is an interesting place for Apple to be working. They are giving up control, hopefully looking ahead to a point where software licensing is meaningless. That's good. Giving away an extensible crypto architecture is even better (not to mention that it makes hash of what little is left of export controls on crypto).
Apple should stay the course. Their next trick, though, needs to be establishing a commodity PowerPC hardware market. I'd be interested to see how that can be pulled off...
/Brian
Uh... can you expect much out of a community whose favorite database is called MySQL :-)
/Brian
I thought it was to allow children to be directly interposed into an execution context for performance reasons rather than putting them through normal procedure calls?
/Brian
Well... at least this is shorter than the previous versions. What I want to know is what this has to do with something that isn't even Unix.
/Brian
They're trying to pretend the code they're using is LGPLed and putting the questionable stuff in DLLs to get around the letter of the license.
/Brian
Motif is no more dead than Cobol, it would seem. The most we can expect is that eventually Motif will wind up being supported as a legacy system for quite a long time, but will wind up being deprecated for new toolkits (probably Gnome).
/Brian