People want standard stereo-sized MP3 components. I agree. What I don't get is why none of the few that I've seen are like this:
-Built-in CD-ROM (so it can replace your CD player if you feel like it)
-razor-thin (like 4cm) form factor. You don't need much for this thing.
-Option of front-panel and TV control.
-Built-in ripping capability and a USB port to add a burner.
Apart from the form factor, you could just as easily do this with a pizza-box-case PC with a TV-out card, but it would probably be more expensive than would be practical.
Come to think of it, that would be a great way to build your own Ultimate Jukebox as well -- all you need is a coinbox and a touchscreen.../Brian
clipboard behavior -- it's broken. It's nonintuitive. When I select something, all I'm doing is indicating, not actually copying. Broken metaphor. It's gotta go.
Mac community != Apple. I personally regard Apple with a 50/50 mix of reverent awe and fear+loathing, and I imagine there's a huge number of other Mac users who agree. The fact is that as minority platforms, we are all in the same boat of trying to build/preserve a beachhead against a common (foe? opposition? majority platform?). With the introduction of MacOS X, it has basically become Win32 vs. Unix, with virtually everything else fading into the background to some degree or another. Fact is, Mac fanatics and Linux fanatics are cut from the same cloth (which is probably why such an alliance doesn't exist in the first place), yet both sides have a great deal to learn from each other.
But if we can't unify five different strains of open source BSD, can we really have some kind of broad consensus across platforms?
A componentized GUI is a good idea on the Mac. Apple has been absolutely ridiculous about the Aqua matter anyway.
As for the office suite problem, you're perhaps taking me a bit less hyperbolically than I intended, though I stand by the basic sentiment. We've got good toolkits, true, but if everyone's working on the foundation when does the house get built? In any case, I'm not saying *copy* other desktops necessarily, but keeping in mind how successful MacOS and Windows have been, we really should be doing most of what they do.
Choice is not a bad thing, mind you. The problem is not choice (of which there is plenty) but consistency (of which there is very little). Separation of policy from mechanism is nice from a developer standpoint, but it can be very messy to a user. Look at X -- to a geek, X is a masterpiece of configurability. To Joe the User, X is a tangled mess not too distinguishable from, say, a network closet. What Unix has been trying to do for the last fifteen years that Apple all but nailed out of the gate and that Microsoft has just barely managed to do is to strike a happy medium between visible plumbing and clean surface design.
Apple has a better thing going with MacOS Classic than most people realize, you know. AppleScript is as clean a workaround for a lack of a component-based architecture as I can imagine; I'd venture to say that this particular model is actually more elegant than most Unix scripting languages in some ways (though it has to be in a world of monolithic apps). But Unix has always had the glue thing down perfectly on the plumbing level; it's just that Unix developers have a habit of leaving the pipes in plain view.
The coming-from-above thing -- what I'm saying is that it's not being done everywhere it needs to be. I guess I'm saying that we need more things like FHS and Linux Standards Base that deal with how to design Linux software instead of how to implement it.
Cloning MS Office -- What I want is minimal basic functionality with lots of hooks and a white-glove-clean interface. I want a word processor that will pop up with just a ruler, formatting tools, and text styles, NOTHING ELSE. If I want a spellchecker, the word processor can call some kind of ispell-like engine and feed it the text stream. Spreadsheet? Xvisicalc would be the prototype. Database? Every Linux distribution has MySQL and PostgreSQL. Just write a Rolodex-like front end for one of them, and there's your file program.
Apple had the right idea with OpenDoc, but they failed miserably to push it where it needed to go.
Am I a developer? Yes, though mostly command-line stuff (but now that I have a better PC...). I've done VB design and I've been a Mac user for many years.
Okay. Start with this: why the hell does kwrite automatically copy selections into the clipboard whether I want it to or not? (Did that on RH6.0, anyway; I haven't really paid attention to whether it's been fixed since).
I agree with those who say the Linux community is too insular. We sit here and bitch and whine that the world isn't taking us quite as seriously as we'd like, but who's out there hacking OpenOffice to help make a workable MSOffice replacement? Why are we letting politics dominate our desktop decisions? And why the hell isn't the Linux community trying to forge alliances with the Mac community?
I'll start with the last point first and get the flamebaiting out of the way. When the Mac came out, Apple put out the Mac Human Interface guidelines. Microsoft has its own rules for Windows. We have no such thing for either of the significant Linux desktops. Believe it or not, this is a bad thing.
For this to work we need some interface guidelines, preferably written by someone using both MacOS and Linux (since Mac users as a general rule are more sensitive to clumsy interface design) (ducking flames, please hold). Specs like this are not amenable to committee design, so they should be handed down from on high by the toolkit developers for public comment rather than designed by committee. That's one.
The politics have got to go. Yeah, you've got your favorite features; I personally rather enjoy the look (though not the feel) of Athena widgets. Stuff 'em; you can add them later if you need them, but you need something to fit them in with. We have two desktops, which is one too many, and they will probably never be merged. Fine. Let's go with what we have and relegate the rest to the special-purpose bins where they belong; Motif is dying anyway, and it's the only other toolset that really counts. And if we must keep them, let's have XawGTK and QtLesstif around so we don't get confused and have to look at fruit-salad apps.
As for the matter of open source desktop apps, we only have ourselves to blame. Browser? Okay, Galeon's halfway there, but you still need Mozilla. That's ridiculous; AOLTW/Netscape changed the licensing, so there's no reason for separate downloads. Desktop? Sorry, I have no sympathy when OpenOffice goes wanting for developers. You've got a rather useful package there -- huge, but it's got everything you need and an open file format to boot. If you have nothing at all to contribute to OpenOffice or any of its competitors, you have no right whatsoever to bitch about articles like this.
The Linux world needs to swallow its pride and accept that some decisions do need to be made from above, or at least proposed from above and accepted by a critical mass. You fork, you're out. You've just created a new community, and the burden is on you to get it accepted, not to whine about why it isn't.
There is another component to this. Our desktop flagship programs are huge. Mozilla is about a 20MB source tarball IIRC, and I believe OpenOffice is well over 300MB. This is IMHO unacceptable in a Unix-based community; monolithic office suites are a Bad Thing to begin with, and given that there hasn't been a really core-type feature invented since the multidimensional spreadsheet I have to wonder where all this bloat is coming from (since I don't use it I could be off-base). Same with wasting space on skinnable browsers when performance should be the big issue.
We need more than developers in the Open Source community, you see. What's missing from the Open Source equation is support personnel like tech writers and creative people. We need more books like Coriolis Press' Lions-style source commentaries. We need interface designers willing to make stuff look pretty (something I'd love to help with, if anyone wants a Mac user's view, btw). We need Open Source RAD tools like VB or MacOS X Interface builder. It is very much time we reached out to the rest of the world to see what there is to be offered.
Yes, there's the marketing problem as well. Don't expect Linux desktops everywhere next year. But how many people who know only the hype are aware that Linux is coming up on its tenth anniversary?
Hey, I can put OpenBSD on my SE/30 too. Admittedly I can't find an Enet card for it either, but they do exist. (If all else fails, there's always a PPP connection...)
533 mHz dual G4. Upgradable on build-to-order. Darwin is SMP-capable, and thus OS X is as well.
GeForce 3 is, I believe, the current standard video card for high-end G4s (or at least it's available).
You could get NuBus breakout boxes back in the day; might still be able to get them used, but there's a very good reason Apple went to PCI. Besides, I don't think any performance-conscious Mac user wants to be saddled with an 8mHz bus.
I reiterate: you're either horribly misinformed or you're a troll. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
You're talking something you could put in your living room and watch DVDs on -- mofo is *huge*.
Apple's probably going along the right lines dropping the CRTs anyway -- every current CRT-based Apple monitor I've seen is just flat out ugly. They're a lot deeper than they really need to be, and they're a funny cone shape. I sincerely think they've lost their edge when it comes to designing monitors...
I like how they slipped Samba in, too. I would love to know how they plan to actually enforce the "ten-client license" package, though -- I thought the whole point of flat-fee licensing was that you couldn't regulate licenses on an open-source product? (And don't tell me a reasonably motivated Darwin hacker couldn't get around the licensing restrictions easily...)
I'd mod this as a troll if I had the points. Either that or you haven't used a Mac since at least 1995. But I will clarify anyway, because I can afford the karma hit.
-The current crop of G4s are five-slot systems. It'd be nice to have six or seven, true, but given that you've already got Ethernet, USB, FireWire, and sound on the motherboard you have all those yummy extra slots for things like a GeForce 3 card and other fun stuff.
-Western Digital 20 gig (Ultra ATA/66, though I don't think it takes full advantage) in my 6500. Aftermarket. No problems whatsoever.
-RS-422 serial ports disappeared with the B&W G3s. But you know that as well as I do. Go back under your bridge.
-Mobo swaps? Try box replacement. I grant you it's ugly, but it's the same for Compaq, HP, and a number of other PC makers. (Obviously if you're on/. you'd prefer to be a build-your-own kinda bridgedweller, but of course not everyone can.) And in any case it's starting to become the case overall; I blame Intel for patenting Slot 1, and then we have Slot A, and FC-PGA, and Socket A, and DDR SDRAM... (Brian fades off into a long babbling list of hardware-level features that change so quickly that motherboard swaps are inevitable when making major upgrades)
You've *got* to be a troll. Nobody, and I mean, nobody, who posts here can act this clueless and actually mean it. I admit that it is kind of tough to find ethernet for an SE, but... aw, fsck it. I shoulda flamed you instead.
As others have pointed out, it's still a navigation hazard. And you do have to worry about birds falling out of the sky and all.
I remember reading about this idea in futurist books as a kid, and by the time I stopped being interested in this sort of literature (just don't pick much of it up anymore) the idea was already being dismissed. Okay, it diffuses. But that's not much help.
Over-the-air power transmission on any scale larger than what's needed to power a bug (I believe the Russians did this) is too much of a risk. It's an interesting idea that I think someone floated without really giving a lot of thought to it. You could probably do a ground-based version with a massive solar array and a waveguide to pipe the energy where it needs to go, but that would sort of miss the point of the technology, wouldn't it? Putting it out in the middle of nowhere isn't really going the help when you still run the risk of frying anything that flies through the beam (last I checked I didn't think it was common practice for airplanes to reroute around deserts...)
For the record, "split infinitives" are not actually a grammatical error. It's a style point that gets played up by misinformed pedants repeating a bit of Latin grammar that was inappropriately mapped on to English a couple of centuries ago by someone who didn't really know what he was talking about.
Diagram that!
/Brian
(ps William Shatner, food... uh... Well, I was in a bar last night that was invaded by three costumed folks passing out stickers promoting the Iron Chef special and they hadn't heard the William Shatner thing. I will say this, though -- if you need overdramatic (which I get the sense Iron Chef is; AT&T won't get off their butts and give us TV Food Network already) he's your man.)
(pps This message is boobytrapped. The pedants I mentioned above will know why but won't realize it.)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is economic fascism (as much as that actually means anything). To those laissez-faire capitalists still left out there, you should be chilled to the bone at things like this. (Funny you should mention Nazis -- a question to this effect of mine on/. a couple of weeks ago confirmed my suspicion that this sort of corporate co-opting was Just Doing Business in Nazi Germany...)
But anyway...
The industry has it even worse than that. Economy of scarcity aside (which it is, by now), there has been a general trend, driven originally by youth culture and especially the warez community of the early PC era, towards the total monetary devaluing of IP as we know it. I don't think anyone is going to argue that this trend won't continue now that Napster and Gnutella have blown the whole thing wide open (and Fraunhofer had best kiss its patents goodbye -- if there's any better way to screw up a revenue stream than the nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more distribution method Apple is using for iTunes, I'd love to see it).
The big question is how long it will take this whole mess to come crashing down. It's not far from that now...
...that anyone takes this idea seriously. It's such an incredibly dangerous idea too -- you don't even need a terrorist attack, just a telemetry malfunction, to fry a city with one of those things.
Precisely; it's a liability problem. Now that Dennis Tito has gone and come back, space tourism is inevitable (though it will be a long time until it's cheap). The Russians want to sell rides, let them. They need the money, and thrill seekers will get their thrills if they want them.
One can only hope the Russians do something useful with it, though...
IMHO MacOS X is the best of both worlds -- bulletproof and powerful underpinnings covered with a cutesy interface. That way it can be as simple or as powerful as you need it.
(And anyone who ridicules MacOS classic as hopelessly dumbed down should look into AppleScript -- scriptable applications are pretty common, and you can control them like marionettes. The only reason that Unix doesn't have that kind of fine-grained control is that Unix shell commands are (or were) pretty fine-grained themselves, but that's why we have sockets and SysV IPC...)
Actually, I don't believe Sherlock does regexps (though it's not half bad as a search engine), but a lot of editing programs on the Mac (especially BBEdit) do. It's not quite the same, but hey...
And as for burning CDs... You might want to look into, say, Toast (3d party, but...) or iTunes 1.1, because I have a Yamaha CRW8824 that might take issue with that...
They're very good at making enemies, that's for sure.
In all this silliness, one thing is missing: a definition of the concept of "dead-agenting". A dead agent, according to Sun-Tzu in The Art of War, is one of either a double agent (hence winds up dead when caught) or a source of misinformation ("dead" information?). This is part of the whole Fair Game thing -- make the target look as unpleasant as possible with innuendo and dirt-digging so nobody will take them seriously.
And I am a registered user and you're an AC -- who's handwaving?
On the Mac, you don't have to jump through hoops to take over the processor, you just do it. That makes it rather tricky at times to deal with when writing end user code, but it's no problem at all if you need to run the system headless. You run your code with no interference whatsoever from the OS. (That's how much like you get a non-MacOS operating system run on a pre-PCI system, btw. You simply write a "bootloader" that takes over and says "everybody out of the pool", then install your own code over the (unprotected) memory space you just cleaned out.)
You know, calling someone an idiot in a technical dispute isn't really becoming. Why don't you step out from behind the LoserHandle and explain yourself?
First off, there was a good reason to hype the optical mouse: everyone was laughing about the hockey puck and Apple wanted to show the world they'd not only fixed the problem, but they'd found a more elegant way to do it. And frankly, I hate the Intellimouse anyway -- a mouse does not need to be that big. (And fwiw I think Sun and/or Mouse Systems was doing optical a long time ago -- they just needed special mouse pads at the time.)
Built-in Ethernet first showed up on the Blackbird (5xx) series in 1993 or so. It disappeared from the 5300s and was brought back in the 1400s and has been standard equipment in every Powerbook since. I don't know if they invented it, but they were doing it a long time ago.
The rest of your statement is too silly for a response.
Slashdot Mirror
People want standard stereo-sized MP3 components. I agree. What I don't get is why none of the few that I've seen are like this: -Built-in CD-ROM (so it can replace your CD player if you feel like it) -razor-thin (like 4cm) form factor. You don't need much for this thing. -Option of front-panel and TV control. -Built-in ripping capability and a USB port to add a burner. Apart from the form factor, you could just as easily do this with a pizza-box-case PC with a TV-out card, but it would probably be more expensive than would be practical. Come to think of it, that would be a great way to build your own Ultimate Jukebox as well -- all you need is a coinbox and a touchscreen... /Brian
This is a half-assed and noncompliant solution. It's sufficient to purposes if your code is LGPL, but not GPL.
/Brian
Why not? The Dreamcast is cheap and very well documented. It's a de facto open system.
/Brian
clipboard behavior -- it's broken. It's nonintuitive. When I select something, all I'm doing is indicating, not actually copying. Broken metaphor. It's gotta go.
Mac community != Apple. I personally regard Apple with a 50/50 mix of reverent awe and fear+loathing, and I imagine there's a huge number of other Mac users who agree. The fact is that as minority platforms, we are all in the same boat of trying to build/preserve a beachhead against a common (foe? opposition? majority platform?). With the introduction of MacOS X, it has basically become Win32 vs. Unix, with virtually everything else fading into the background to some degree or another. Fact is, Mac fanatics and Linux fanatics are cut from the same cloth (which is probably why such an alliance doesn't exist in the first place), yet both sides have a great deal to learn from each other.
But if we can't unify five different strains of open source BSD, can we really have some kind of broad consensus across platforms?
A componentized GUI is a good idea on the Mac. Apple has been absolutely ridiculous about the Aqua matter anyway.
As for the office suite problem, you're perhaps taking me a bit less hyperbolically than I intended, though I stand by the basic sentiment. We've got good toolkits, true, but if everyone's working on the foundation when does the house get built? In any case, I'm not saying *copy* other desktops necessarily, but keeping in mind how successful MacOS and Windows have been, we really should be doing most of what they do.
Choice is not a bad thing, mind you. The problem is not choice (of which there is plenty) but consistency (of which there is very little). Separation of policy from mechanism is nice from a developer standpoint, but it can be very messy to a user. Look at X -- to a geek, X is a masterpiece of configurability. To Joe the User, X is a tangled mess not too distinguishable from, say, a network closet. What Unix has been trying to do for the last fifteen years that Apple all but nailed out of the gate and that Microsoft has just barely managed to do is to strike a happy medium between visible plumbing and clean surface design.
Apple has a better thing going with MacOS Classic than most people realize, you know. AppleScript is as clean a workaround for a lack of a component-based architecture as I can imagine; I'd venture to say that this particular model is actually more elegant than most Unix scripting languages in some ways (though it has to be in a world of monolithic apps). But Unix has always had the glue thing down perfectly on the plumbing level; it's just that Unix developers have a habit of leaving the pipes in plain view.
The coming-from-above thing -- what I'm saying is that it's not being done everywhere it needs to be. I guess I'm saying that we need more things like FHS and Linux Standards Base that deal with how to design Linux software instead of how to implement it.
Cloning MS Office -- What I want is minimal basic functionality with lots of hooks and a white-glove-clean interface. I want a word processor that will pop up with just a ruler, formatting tools, and text styles, NOTHING ELSE. If I want a spellchecker, the word processor can call some kind of ispell-like engine and feed it the text stream. Spreadsheet? Xvisicalc would be the prototype. Database? Every Linux distribution has MySQL and PostgreSQL. Just write a Rolodex-like front end for one of them, and there's your file program.
Apple had the right idea with OpenDoc, but they failed miserably to push it where it needed to go.
Am I a developer? Yes, though mostly command-line stuff (but now that I have a better PC...). I've done VB design and I've been a Mac user for many years.
/Brian
Just my thoughts, but...
Okay. Start with this: why the hell does kwrite automatically copy selections into the clipboard whether I want it to or not? (Did that on RH6.0, anyway; I haven't really paid attention to whether it's been fixed since).
I agree with those who say the Linux community is too insular. We sit here and bitch and whine that the world isn't taking us quite as seriously as we'd like, but who's out there hacking OpenOffice to help make a workable MSOffice replacement? Why are we letting politics dominate our desktop decisions? And why the hell isn't the Linux community trying to forge alliances with the Mac community?
I'll start with the last point first and get the flamebaiting out of the way. When the Mac came out, Apple put out the Mac Human Interface guidelines. Microsoft has its own rules for Windows. We have no such thing for either of the significant Linux desktops. Believe it or not, this is a bad thing.
For this to work we need some interface guidelines, preferably written by someone using both MacOS and Linux (since Mac users as a general rule are more sensitive to clumsy interface design) (ducking flames, please hold). Specs like this are not amenable to committee design, so they should be handed down from on high by the toolkit developers for public comment rather than designed by committee. That's one.
The politics have got to go. Yeah, you've got your favorite features; I personally rather enjoy the look (though not the feel) of Athena widgets. Stuff 'em; you can add them later if you need them, but you need something to fit them in with. We have two desktops, which is one too many, and they will probably never be merged. Fine. Let's go with what we have and relegate the rest to the special-purpose bins where they belong; Motif is dying anyway, and it's the only other toolset that really counts. And if we must keep them, let's have XawGTK and QtLesstif around so we don't get confused and have to look at fruit-salad apps.
As for the matter of open source desktop apps, we only have ourselves to blame. Browser? Okay, Galeon's halfway there, but you still need Mozilla. That's ridiculous; AOLTW/Netscape changed the licensing, so there's no reason for separate downloads. Desktop? Sorry, I have no sympathy when OpenOffice goes wanting for developers. You've got a rather useful package there -- huge, but it's got everything you need and an open file format to boot. If you have nothing at all to contribute to OpenOffice or any of its competitors, you have no right whatsoever to bitch about articles like this.
The Linux world needs to swallow its pride and accept that some decisions do need to be made from above, or at least proposed from above and accepted by a critical mass. You fork, you're out. You've just created a new community, and the burden is on you to get it accepted, not to whine about why it isn't.
There is another component to this. Our desktop flagship programs are huge. Mozilla is about a 20MB source tarball IIRC, and I believe OpenOffice is well over 300MB. This is IMHO unacceptable in a Unix-based community; monolithic office suites are a Bad Thing to begin with, and given that there hasn't been a really core-type feature invented since the multidimensional spreadsheet I have to wonder where all this bloat is coming from (since I don't use it I could be off-base). Same with wasting space on skinnable browsers when performance should be the big issue.
We need more than developers in the Open Source community, you see. What's missing from the Open Source equation is support personnel like tech writers and creative people. We need more books like Coriolis Press' Lions-style source commentaries. We need interface designers willing to make stuff look pretty (something I'd love to help with, if anyone wants a Mac user's view, btw). We need Open Source RAD tools like VB or MacOS X Interface builder. It is very much time we reached out to the rest of the world to see what there is to be offered.
Yes, there's the marketing problem as well. Don't expect Linux desktops everywhere next year. But how many people who know only the hype are aware that Linux is coming up on its tenth anniversary?
/Brian
Not total users allowable on the system? (And that's still a silly limitation -- can't you just hack around it with netatalk or something similar?)
/Brian
Hey, I can put OpenBSD on my SE/30 too. Admittedly I can't find an Enet card for it either, but they do exist. (If all else fails, there's always a PPP connection...)
/Brian
533 mHz dual G4. Upgradable on build-to-order. Darwin is SMP-capable, and thus OS X is as well.
GeForce 3 is, I believe, the current standard video card for high-end G4s (or at least it's available).
You could get NuBus breakout boxes back in the day; might still be able to get them used, but there's a very good reason Apple went to PCI. Besides, I don't think any performance-conscious Mac user wants to be saddled with an 8mHz bus.
I reiterate: you're either horribly misinformed or you're a troll. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
/Brian
I would think so, at least wrt OS X (classic is a completely different story). The BSD layer should make the low-level parts trivial.
/Brian
You're talking something you could put in your living room and watch DVDs on -- mofo is *huge*.
Apple's probably going along the right lines dropping the CRTs anyway -- every current CRT-based Apple monitor I've seen is just flat out ugly. They're a lot deeper than they really need to be, and they're a funny cone shape. I sincerely think they've lost their edge when it comes to designing monitors...
/Brian
I like how they slipped Samba in, too. I would love to know how they plan to actually enforce the "ten-client license" package, though -- I thought the whole point of flat-fee licensing was that you couldn't regulate licenses on an open-source product? (And don't tell me a reasonably motivated Darwin hacker couldn't get around the licensing restrictions easily...)
/Brian
I'd mod this as a troll if I had the points. Either that or you haven't used a Mac since at least 1995. But I will clarify anyway, because I can afford the karma hit.
/. you'd prefer to be a build-your-own kinda bridgedweller, but of course not everyone can.) And in any case it's starting to become the case overall; I blame Intel for patenting Slot 1, and then we have Slot A, and FC-PGA, and Socket A, and DDR SDRAM... (Brian fades off into a long babbling list of hardware-level features that change so quickly that motherboard swaps are inevitable when making major upgrades)
-The current crop of G4s are five-slot systems. It'd be nice to have six or seven, true, but given that you've already got Ethernet, USB, FireWire, and sound on the motherboard you have all those yummy extra slots for things like a GeForce 3 card and other fun stuff.
-Western Digital 20 gig (Ultra ATA/66, though I don't think it takes full advantage) in my 6500. Aftermarket. No problems whatsoever.
-RS-422 serial ports disappeared with the B&W G3s. But you know that as well as I do. Go back under your bridge.
-Mobo swaps? Try box replacement. I grant you it's ugly, but it's the same for Compaq, HP, and a number of other PC makers. (Obviously if you're on
You've *got* to be a troll. Nobody, and I mean, nobody, who posts here can act this clueless and actually mean it. I admit that it is kind of tough to find ethernet for an SE, but... aw, fsck it. I shoulda flamed you instead.
/Brian
You didn't read the last line of my post, nyah nyah...
/Brian
As others have pointed out, it's still a navigation hazard. And you do have to worry about birds falling out of the sky and all.
I remember reading about this idea in futurist books as a kid, and by the time I stopped being interested in this sort of literature (just don't pick much of it up anymore) the idea was already being dismissed. Okay, it diffuses. But that's not much help.
Over-the-air power transmission on any scale larger than what's needed to power a bug (I believe the Russians did this) is too much of a risk. It's an interesting idea that I think someone floated without really giving a lot of thought to it. You could probably do a ground-based version with a massive solar array and a waveguide to pipe the energy where it needs to go, but that would sort of miss the point of the technology, wouldn't it? Putting it out in the middle of nowhere isn't really going the help when you still run the risk of frying anything that flies through the beam (last I checked I didn't think it was common practice for airplanes to reroute around deserts...)
/Brian
For the record, "split infinitives" are not actually a grammatical error. It's a style point that gets played up by misinformed pedants repeating a bit of Latin grammar that was inappropriately mapped on to English a couple of centuries ago by someone who didn't really know what he was talking about.
Diagram that!
/Brian
(ps William Shatner, food... uh... Well, I was in a bar last night that was invaded by three costumed folks passing out stickers promoting the Iron Chef special and they hadn't heard the William Shatner thing. I will say this, though -- if you need overdramatic (which I get the sense Iron Chef is; AT&T won't get off their butts and give us TV Food Network already) he's your man.)
(pps This message is boobytrapped. The pedants I mentioned above will know why but won't realize it.)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is economic fascism (as much as that actually means anything). To those laissez-faire capitalists still left out there, you should be chilled to the bone at things like this. (Funny you should mention Nazis -- a question to this effect of mine on /. a couple of weeks ago confirmed my suspicion that this sort of corporate co-opting was Just Doing Business in Nazi Germany...)
But anyway...
The industry has it even worse than that. Economy of scarcity aside (which it is, by now), there has been a general trend, driven originally by youth culture and especially the warez community of the early PC era, towards the total monetary devaluing of IP as we know it. I don't think anyone is going to argue that this trend won't continue now that Napster and Gnutella have blown the whole thing wide open (and Fraunhofer had best kiss its patents goodbye -- if there's any better way to screw up a revenue stream than the nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more distribution method Apple is using for iTunes, I'd love to see it).
The big question is how long it will take this whole mess to come crashing down. It's not far from that now...
/Brian
I tend to buy used or cut-rate CDs myself...
/Brian
...that anyone takes this idea seriously. It's such an incredibly dangerous idea too -- you don't even need a terrorist attack, just a telemetry malfunction, to fry a city with one of those things.
/Brian
Precisely; it's a liability problem. Now that Dennis Tito has gone and come back, space tourism is inevitable (though it will be a long time until it's cheap). The Russians want to sell rides, let them. They need the money, and thrill seekers will get their thrills if they want them.
One can only hope the Russians do something useful with it, though...
/Brian
IMHO MacOS X is the best of both worlds -- bulletproof and powerful underpinnings covered with a cutesy interface. That way it can be as simple or as powerful as you need it.
(And anyone who ridicules MacOS classic as hopelessly dumbed down should look into AppleScript -- scriptable applications are pretty common, and you can control them like marionettes. The only reason that Unix doesn't have that kind of fine-grained control is that Unix shell commands are (or were) pretty fine-grained themselves, but that's why we have sockets and SysV IPC...)
/Brian
And 'they' can even do that on OS X, of course...
Actually, I don't believe Sherlock does regexps (though it's not half bad as a search engine), but a lot of editing programs on the Mac (especially BBEdit) do. It's not quite the same, but hey...
And as for burning CDs... You might want to look into, say, Toast (3d party, but...) or iTunes 1.1, because I have a Yamaha CRW8824 that might take issue with that...
/Brian
I have a 6500 minitower myself. I think it's pretty slick for beige and I keep it on my desk...
/Brian
(*anonymous clam)
They're very good at making enemies, that's for sure.
In all this silliness, one thing is missing: a definition of the concept of "dead-agenting". A dead agent, according to Sun-Tzu in The Art of War, is one of either a double agent (hence winds up dead when caught) or a source of misinformation ("dead" information?). This is part of the whole Fair Game thing -- make the target look as unpleasant as possible with innuendo and dirt-digging so nobody will take them seriously.
/Brian
And I am a registered user and you're an AC -- who's handwaving?
On the Mac, you don't have to jump through hoops to take over the processor, you just do it. That makes it rather tricky at times to deal with when writing end user code, but it's no problem at all if you need to run the system headless. You run your code with no interference whatsoever from the OS. (That's how much like you get a non-MacOS operating system run on a pre-PCI system, btw. You simply write a "bootloader" that takes over and says "everybody out of the pool", then install your own code over the (unprotected) memory space you just cleaned out.)
You know, calling someone an idiot in a technical dispute isn't really becoming. Why don't you step out from behind the LoserHandle and explain yourself?
/Brian
Geez, give somebody a bridge to live under...
First off, there was a good reason to hype the optical mouse: everyone was laughing about the hockey puck and Apple wanted to show the world they'd not only fixed the problem, but they'd found a more elegant way to do it. And frankly, I hate the Intellimouse anyway -- a mouse does not need to be that big. (And fwiw I think Sun and/or Mouse Systems was doing optical a long time ago -- they just needed special mouse pads at the time.)
Built-in Ethernet first showed up on the Blackbird (5xx) series in 1993 or so. It disappeared from the 5300s and was brought back in the 1400s and has been standard equipment in every Powerbook since. I don't know if they invented it, but they were doing it a long time ago.
The rest of your statement is too silly for a response.
/Brian