Re:OT: Religion is a process, Evolution is a relig
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 2
Hit the send button too quickly, I fear -- I had some other comments.
The ICR is not a reliable source for scientific information. They have a reputation for intellectual dishonesty and don't even have a terribly clear definition of "creation science". No scientist takes them seriously for those reasons. (Lying for God would be the term I'd use, though "calling God a liar" is probably more accurate...)
"Faith in evolution" strikes me as being something of a tautology anyway -- faith in it to do what, keep doing what it's doing? Go look up the bit about the moths in Northern England and how their color changed with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. That's evolution, not some "march of progress" that you and yours claim that we believe it is. That's *observed* evolution. Proof enough, unless you believe in Last Tuesdayism.
/Brian
Re:OT: Religion is a process, Evolution is a relig
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 2
I do not consider humanism per se to be a religion (though it has been interpreted as such); after all, "God helps those who help themselves" is as baldly humanistic a statement as you can find but it still comes from a religious background (though probably not the one you think; I believe it came from Aesop).
/Brian
Re:Public education has serious problems
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 2
Okay, I correct myself. Atheism, strictly speaking, is not religion but dogma; probably a bit sloppy of me to equate them. (Read How We Believe by Michael Shermer and find out why he considers himself agnostic and not atheist)
Evolution is not a religion by any stretch of the imagination; it doesn't make any sense to call it that because it is not a belief, it's a process.
Hey, stranger things have happened. I've heard tell of a man who was lucky enough to have a Cray for his personal system...
And in any case, if a company needs it and can't get it, they'd hire someone to write it anyway.
/Brian
Re:zero tolerance for zero tolerance... please
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 2
I didn't say that, did I:-)
Though the idea of increasing protectiveness does explain a lot -- what you're basically saying is the tighter you close your hand, the more star systems will slip through your fingers (ha ha).
Does make sense if you think about it -- the Internet has created a culture of radical uncensorability that is in the process of destroying traditional concepts of copyright. The children of today have now had fairly general access to the net for five or six years and have discovered their own personal identities far earlier than their parents ever have.
I think this actually bodes well -- it will mean intellectual chaos in the short run, but in the long run it would appear to create a much more mature world. Things will settle down eventually, of course, but a lot of interesting stuff will come out of the ride -- seems we're already seeing the beginnings of a second sexual revolution (with people thinking with their heads instead of just their genitals this time around); who knows what will be next?
/Brian
Re:Public education has serious problems
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 2
Troll feeder... hmmm... and that pond scum comment has a very familiar ring to it... Steve?
Anyway, first mistake you make is calling Evolution a religion. (Atheism is, no matter how atheists would like to spin it some other way, but that's irrelevant...) Evolution is not a religion, it's a process.
As for the rest of your comment, I sum it up with this: just because we're descended from apes doesn't make us one with them. That would be like saying that since dogs and bears share a common ancestor, they're the same animal.
Yes, but the set of skills required to get by in an agrarian community are drastically different from modern urban culture.
The advantage to the "assembly line" approach is that *if things are done right* we can be reasonably assured that kids will get the same chance to get on the same level. The trick is to make it so that the opportunities are there for everybody.
/Brian
Re:Public education has serious problems
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 4
I think that's actually the second biggest problem with homeschooling, the instilling-your-values thing. I have no problem with raising your kids with a specific set of values, but you're doing them a grave disservice by forcing the issue and not exposing them to other viewpoints.
There is a bigger problem with homeschooling, though: hubris. People tell me I'm a pretty smart guy, and over the years I've learned better ways to train people (my innate people skills are pretty grotesque). However, the problem that comes up is that the person who chooses to homeschool can't be guaranteed to be an effective teacher no matter how good the materials are. And if you're trying to maintain a specific set of values, that may seriously affect the value of the curriculum (creation vs. evolution comes to mind as being the most likely problem).
I simply don't believe that the majority of people are qualified to be effective home teachers. That's not to say there aren't major problems in the public schools -- I have almost as much contempt for the far left as I do for the far right because of issues like abuse of antidiscrimination statutes, and (as any Massachusetts teacher will tell you) standardized testing is a lousy substitute for comprehensive personal assessment of achievement. But the real answer is taking schools out of the hands of politicians and putting the responsibility on the teachers (at least those who aren't hopelessly jaded by years of poor funding, etc) to run them. That's what they're trained to do; maybe if we let them do their jobs as they see fit (or at least as they were trained) we'd see an improvement?
/Brian
zero tolerance for zero tolerance... please
on
Sean In The Middle
·
· Score: 3
I don't really understand the way discipline works in schools today...
You ask most teachers, and I say it all the time -- the kids in middle school and high school today are one of the hardest-working, focused, and caring generations in anyone's memory. And they manage to accomplish this under one of the most paranoid, demanding climates that anyone has had to face -- I've often said that I'd love to go back to college but I would never go to high school in 2001.
I understand security. But to expel someone from school for a joke or possession of aspirin with intent to relieve pain, or to have someone arrested for something found out third hand... that's ridiculous.
I sometimes wonder how teenagers these days will grow up. With all that they can do, they have the potential to change the world the way their Baby Boomer parents couldn't; we GenXers tried to do it, but as much as we tried the Boomers called us slackers and have so far not really taken us seriously. But with the atmosphere they're put in, I'm afraid they might just get beaten down and sucked into the system... just like their parents. And that would be a tragedy.
Look, to the idiot who modded me down: I'm one of you Open Source Zealots (tm). I simply have enough guts to admit when what I support isn't doing the job. And I still wouldn't be trying to run Linux on a single high-load server.
(I'm also a hardcore Mac junkie, and there's no way in hell I'd be running a database server off a pre-X MacOS either. LinuxPPC? Sure. X? Hell yeah. But there are things the Classic Mac simply doesn't do well (apart from network security).)
I don't know where people get the idea that we don't need payphones. Earth to Verizon/Qwest/BellSouth/whoeveryourlocalPhoneCo is -- some of us don't *want* cellphones. They're a waste of money to some of us who don't feel we need them and I don't plan on getting one myself.
Come to think of it, I don't quite get why emergency callboxes are going out of style either -- they're all over every college campus I've seen and nowhere else. The big problem here is that the telcos like wireless -- less maintenance on their part, at least once the infrastructure is in there. The profit margins are probably better for them too. Maybe seeing it that way makes me a bit of a Luddite? I don't know. I don't care. Fact is, not everyone is going to have a phone in their pocket when they need to call home.
Open Source being what it is, I'd say that "one day" is not just likely but inevitable. Someone out there is rich enough or crazy enough to be able to do the work necessary.
Whether it will happen anytime soon is anyone's guess, but if there's demand it will be done.
Okay, now that I got that out of the way (and I probably won't be when I actually get this posted...)
I think Oracle probably holds the same place in the database world as Sun does in the server world. Open Source is a great thing, but it hasn't quite evolved to the enterprise-level capability that's needed. If I was doing anything involving heavy processing, you'd better believe I'd be running a Linux (or BSD or Darwin) farm to do the work. But if I needed something that was going to handle anything and everything I could throw at it, Solaris would still be my first choice (and you can get source anyway, even if the licensing is ludicrous).
Oracle's future is in positioning themselves as the Solaris of databases; when MySQL and PostgreSQL finally do catch up, they should be preparing themselves to go down the same route as IBM, opening up to the Open Source community while providing a rock-solid support network for their users. If Larry Ellison wants to prove to the world that he's not quite as much of a nutjob as everyone thinks he is, this is the sort of idea that should be on his roadmap.
I remember back in the Dark Days of the Mac World (tm) when he was one of the better-known "Apple is dying" columnists. He was particularly distinguished by the fact that virtually everything he said turned out wrong, to the point that when he finally flipflopped sometime around Steve's Coup I found myself wondering whether him suddenly liking Apple's chances was going to be something of a jinx for a company on its way out of the sewer. Then MacUser faded into the sunset, and Dvorak eventually wound up exiled to the back reaches of the ZD lineup (Computer Shopper? Geez...)
He's like a pompous version of Dave Winer, IMHO...
The big problem is that code always seems to be written for the latest and greatest hardware. MacOS X, for example. I don't mind Aqua. But I could live without translucent dragging and some of the dock's behavior -- why not an Aqua light that looks just as pretty but doesn't eat up as much processor power?
What annoys me more than anything else is that there is absolutely no need for an operating system distribution or a basic office application to soak up massive amounts of system resources. I should still be able to get a copy of MSOffice that will at least run on a first-generation PowerMac (no reason on earth they can't dig up an old copy of CodeWarrior and keep it running on a 68K, for that matter). A simple *text editor* should not need that much space (sorry, Emacs junkies, but I'm a pico man myself).
Now we have gHz+ processors on the market... well, I have a quarter-gigahertz Power Mac 6500. Boot ROM issues aside, is a 250mHz 603e all that wimpy a processor? Damn straight it isn't. 32MB of RAM is a nontrivial amount of memory as well, yet MacOS 9.1's performance can be charitably described as flaky on my hardware. There is no excuse for this, not when I can run a medium-sized production webserver on a Pentium 100 or less using a stripped-down Linux or BSD system.
Okay, I personally do not need a spel czecher. A lot of people do; that's arguably a necessary feature. Mail merge, pretty useful as well. HTML filter, helpful (though I handcraft my HTML so I only rarely need it). But why do I need a fruit salad interface? Why do I need a word processor with anything more complicated than a ruler and justification controls across the top of the window? What purpose does a spreadsheet with more than four dimensions serve?
I like GUIs. That's me; I guess I'm in a minority around here saying that, and that's fine. But I don't need the flash of rippling scroll bars; believe it or not, I find Athena widgets to be rather elegant sometimes (although the scroll bars leave a lot to be desired). Skinning is not a terribly useful thing, though it's nice to have the option; I was a serious Kaleidoscope junkie for a couple of years. But what excuse is there for Mozilla? Oh, we have bigger computers now...
I HAVE NEWS FOR ALL OF YOU WRITING THE SOFTWARE.
Some of us can't afford new hardware. I am unacceptably behind in both Mac and Linux expertise because I can't afford hardware newer than a couple of years old (and therefore can't afford a G3 or an Athlon). People are still using Pentiums. People are still using PPC601s. People are still using 486s, fer cryin out loud. Pretty soon the software march will have to slow down because people don't want to be bothered with keeping up with the Moores.
What I have noticed is that either I seem to have some kind of beer goggle thing going -- I've seen plenty of very attractive girls that only get sixes and sevens, older women invariably get marked down no matter how attractive they actually are, and nudity is the great equalizer -- women who don't necessarily have much of a face shot but great cleavage get tens even when they don't quite deserve them...
The Genesis was actually a pretty good machine, IMHO.
My thought on the Xbox is that Microsoft is trying to squeeze into a new market about which they don't know quite as much as they think they do. Sony succeeded with the Playstation because they knew the consumer market; consumer electronics has been their business as far back as I can remember. Microsoft's position is such that they can firebomb the consumer with advertising but for the most part not even worry about the matter -- after all, they just do the software (and mice and joysticks). Their few-and-far-between attempts at consumer marketing have been hilarious failures (Bob, Microsoft Barney).
I think the Xbox will not make it out the door when it's supposed to. I don't think it will be a debacle on a par with Bob; that would have more to do with the game producers than Microsoft itself. But I am inclined to agree that MS will either slam it out the door or delay it long past when it's supposed to be available. Sony's hurting enough from doing this (solely because of supply problems, mind you, not necessarily their fault) with the PS2 -- if they had been in this situation with the original Playstation they'd have been blown out of the water.
Microsoft could be a danger to the market, but I don't think they can break in right now. They won't get it right with Xbox; maybe down the road a ways, but not right now.
IIRC he was technically bitching about Mach, not OS X specifically. I don't know if that applies to OS X transitively; sounds like Linus is *saying* that it doesn't.
No, oft-failed is correct. The dumb terminal's run is the closest anyone's ever come to a viable network computer, and these days it's easier (though maybe not necessarily cheaper?) to buy last year's PC to do the job. And then there was Minitel, but that never saw the light of day outside France.
Since then we've seen Videotex, X terminals, Diskless Workstations, Network Computers (aka thin clients), email stations, and Audrey, all failures. Not to mention dedicated word processors, which were useful for a while as portable typewriter replacements but now have zero visibility on the market. You take this all back to the beginning of the whole Videotex thing and you realize that it hasn't happened yet, and it ain't going to.
The thin client market has always thrived on necessity. You can't give everyone their own PDP-11? Get a shopping-cart-full of VT100s and put one on every desk in the office. You can't afford that new Compaq/Commodore SX-64/Osborne (or just can't fit it on your tray table)? We got these nifty dedicated word processors (but even then you had the Tandy 100, the first great laptop). When the PC became sufficiently cheap, the thin client market became rather meaningless for most people. (Note I say most -- while a dedicated word processor is probably more trouble than it's worth, there's something to be said for an email station in the kitchen, and of course let's not forget the ultimate thin client, the PDA.)
No doubt the computer industry wants to see the thin client model back -- if nothing else it's a way for IT departments to feel important and yet give them less crap to deal with (after all, since when does an Xterminal come with a cupholder:-) ). But the fact is that it simply doesn't seem to be worth most people's while today, and until a point comes where an absolutely essential service appears but happens to be financially bottlenecked, we won't see network computers succeed.
I don't consider computerized "RPGs" to be RPGs at all. The name stuck because they were based on pencil-and-paper RPGs like D&D, but the fact is there are no roles being played except by the player. They're turn-based dungeon crawl games, no more, no less. (RPG is catchier, but totally inaccurate.)
First off I'd like to congratulate the person who did this; this is a very Good Thing for those into old games like this. Zelda is IMHO the classic of its kind -- great music, great graphics, a lot of fun. I hope to see that "how to hack Zelda" doc soon -- that looks like a great deal of fun.
I have actually seen one very good Zelda clone, but you have to be a Mac user to play it. It's called Mantra; I can't quite seem to find a web page for it anymore but it's easy enough to find a download. The music in particular is incredible, even if the plot line becomes nonsensical pretty quickly. The big question: does source exist to such a game somewhere?/Brian
Slashdot Mirror
Hit the send button too quickly, I fear -- I had some other comments.
The ICR is not a reliable source for scientific information. They have a reputation for intellectual dishonesty and don't even have a terribly clear definition of "creation science". No scientist takes them seriously for those reasons. (Lying for God would be the term I'd use, though "calling God a liar" is probably more accurate...)
"Faith in evolution" strikes me as being something of a tautology anyway -- faith in it to do what, keep doing what it's doing? Go look up the bit about the moths in Northern England and how their color changed with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. That's evolution, not some "march of progress" that you and yours claim that we believe it is. That's *observed* evolution. Proof enough, unless you believe in Last Tuesdayism.
/Brian
I do not consider humanism per se to be a religion (though it has been interpreted as such); after all, "God helps those who help themselves" is as baldly humanistic a statement as you can find but it still comes from a religious background (though probably not the one you think; I believe it came from Aesop).
/Brian
Okay, I correct myself. Atheism, strictly speaking, is not religion but dogma; probably a bit sloppy of me to equate them. (Read How We Believe by Michael Shermer and find out why he considers himself agnostic and not atheist)
Evolution is not a religion by any stretch of the imagination; it doesn't make any sense to call it that because it is not a belief, it's a process.
/Brian
Hey, stranger things have happened. I've heard tell of a man who was lucky enough to have a Cray for his personal system...
And in any case, if a company needs it and can't get it, they'd hire someone to write it anyway.
/Brian
I didn't say that, did I :-)
Though the idea of increasing protectiveness does explain a lot -- what you're basically saying is the tighter you close your hand, the more star systems will slip through your fingers (ha ha).
Does make sense if you think about it -- the Internet has created a culture of radical uncensorability that is in the process of destroying traditional concepts of copyright. The children of today have now had fairly general access to the net for five or six years and have discovered their own personal identities far earlier than their parents ever have.
I think this actually bodes well -- it will mean intellectual chaos in the short run, but in the long run it would appear to create a much more mature world. Things will settle down eventually, of course, but a lot of interesting stuff will come out of the ride -- seems we're already seeing the beginnings of a second sexual revolution (with people thinking with their heads instead of just their genitals this time around); who knows what will be next?
/Brian
Troll feeder... hmmm... and that pond scum comment has a very familiar ring to it... Steve?
Anyway, first mistake you make is calling Evolution a religion. (Atheism is, no matter how atheists would like to spin it some other way, but that's irrelevant...) Evolution is not a religion, it's a process.
As for the rest of your comment, I sum it up with this: just because we're descended from apes doesn't make us one with them. That would be like saying that since dogs and bears share a common ancestor, they're the same animal.
QED, but you won't listen either way.
/Brian
Yes, but the set of skills required to get by in an agrarian community are drastically different from modern urban culture.
The advantage to the "assembly line" approach is that *if things are done right* we can be reasonably assured that kids will get the same chance to get on the same level. The trick is to make it so that the opportunities are there for everybody.
/Brian
I think that's actually the second biggest problem with homeschooling, the instilling-your-values thing. I have no problem with raising your kids with a specific set of values, but you're doing them a grave disservice by forcing the issue and not exposing them to other viewpoints.
There is a bigger problem with homeschooling, though: hubris. People tell me I'm a pretty smart guy, and over the years I've learned better ways to train people (my innate people skills are pretty grotesque). However, the problem that comes up is that the person who chooses to homeschool can't be guaranteed to be an effective teacher no matter how good the materials are. And if you're trying to maintain a specific set of values, that may seriously affect the value of the curriculum (creation vs. evolution comes to mind as being the most likely problem).
I simply don't believe that the majority of people are qualified to be effective home teachers. That's not to say there aren't major problems in the public schools -- I have almost as much contempt for the far left as I do for the far right because of issues like abuse of antidiscrimination statutes, and (as any Massachusetts teacher will tell you) standardized testing is a lousy substitute for comprehensive personal assessment of achievement. But the real answer is taking schools out of the hands of politicians and putting the responsibility on the teachers (at least those who aren't hopelessly jaded by years of poor funding, etc) to run them. That's what they're trained to do; maybe if we let them do their jobs as they see fit (or at least as they were trained) we'd see an improvement?
/Brian
I don't really understand the way discipline works in schools today...
You ask most teachers, and I say it all the time -- the kids in middle school and high school today are one of the hardest-working, focused, and caring generations in anyone's memory. And they manage to accomplish this under one of the most paranoid, demanding climates that anyone has had to face -- I've often said that I'd love to go back to college but I would never go to high school in 2001.
I understand security. But to expel someone from school for a joke or possession of aspirin with intent to relieve pain, or to have someone arrested for something found out third hand... that's ridiculous.
I sometimes wonder how teenagers these days will grow up. With all that they can do, they have the potential to change the world the way their Baby Boomer parents couldn't; we GenXers tried to do it, but as much as we tried the Boomers called us slackers and have so far not really taken us seriously. But with the atmosphere they're put in, I'm afraid they might just get beaten down and sucked into the system... just like their parents. And that would be a tragedy.
/Brian
Wow. Never been called a troll before.
Look, to the idiot who modded me down: I'm one of you Open Source Zealots (tm). I simply have enough guts to admit when what I support isn't doing the job. And I still wouldn't be trying to run Linux on a single high-load server.
(I'm also a hardcore Mac junkie, and there's no way in hell I'd be running a database server off a pre-X MacOS either. LinuxPPC? Sure. X? Hell yeah. But there are things the Classic Mac simply doesn't do well (apart from network security).)
/Brian
I don't know where people get the idea that we don't need payphones. Earth to Verizon/Qwest/BellSouth/whoeveryourlocalPhoneCo is -- some of us don't *want* cellphones. They're a waste of money to some of us who don't feel we need them and I don't plan on getting one myself.
Come to think of it, I don't quite get why emergency callboxes are going out of style either -- they're all over every college campus I've seen and nowhere else. The big problem here is that the telcos like wireless -- less maintenance on their part, at least once the infrastructure is in there. The profit margins are probably better for them too. Maybe seeing it that way makes me a bit of a Luddite? I don't know. I don't care. Fact is, not everyone is going to have a phone in their pocket when they need to call home.
/Brian
Open Source being what it is, I'd say that "one day" is not just likely but inevitable. Someone out there is rich enough or crazy enough to be able to do the work necessary.
Whether it will happen anytime soon is anyone's guess, but if there's demand it will be done.
/Brian
FIRST POST!!!1!!
Okay, now that I got that out of the way (and I probably won't be when I actually get this posted...)
I think Oracle probably holds the same place in the database world as Sun does in the server world. Open Source is a great thing, but it hasn't quite evolved to the enterprise-level capability that's needed. If I was doing anything involving heavy processing, you'd better believe I'd be running a Linux (or BSD or Darwin) farm to do the work. But if I needed something that was going to handle anything and everything I could throw at it, Solaris would still be my first choice (and you can get source anyway, even if the licensing is ludicrous).
Oracle's future is in positioning themselves as the Solaris of databases; when MySQL and PostgreSQL finally do catch up, they should be preparing themselves to go down the same route as IBM, opening up to the Open Source community while providing a rock-solid support network for their users. If Larry Ellison wants to prove to the world that he's not quite as much of a nutjob as everyone thinks he is, this is the sort of idea that should be on his roadmap.
/Brian
Perl OO isn't dreck per se, it's just... uh... very... uh... it likes to, uh, solicit more user input than most.
/Brian
More like C++ and Smalltalk, IMHO... borrows syntax from C++, but the object model is pure Dynabook.
/Brian
Dvorak is an idiot.
I remember back in the Dark Days of the Mac World (tm) when he was one of the better-known "Apple is dying" columnists. He was particularly distinguished by the fact that virtually everything he said turned out wrong, to the point that when he finally flipflopped sometime around Steve's Coup I found myself wondering whether him suddenly liking Apple's chances was going to be something of a jinx for a company on its way out of the sewer. Then MacUser faded into the sunset, and Dvorak eventually wound up exiled to the back reaches of the ZD lineup (Computer Shopper? Geez...)
He's like a pompous version of Dave Winer, IMHO...
/Brian
The big problem is that code always seems to be written for the latest and greatest hardware. MacOS X, for example. I don't mind Aqua. But I could live without translucent dragging and some of the dock's behavior -- why not an Aqua light that looks just as pretty but doesn't eat up as much processor power?
What annoys me more than anything else is that there is absolutely no need for an operating system distribution or a basic office application to soak up massive amounts of system resources. I should still be able to get a copy of MSOffice that will at least run on a first-generation PowerMac (no reason on earth they can't dig up an old copy of CodeWarrior and keep it running on a 68K, for that matter). A simple *text editor* should not need that much space (sorry, Emacs junkies, but I'm a pico man myself).
Now we have gHz+ processors on the market... well, I have a quarter-gigahertz Power Mac 6500. Boot ROM issues aside, is a 250mHz 603e all that wimpy a processor? Damn straight it isn't. 32MB of RAM is a nontrivial amount of memory as well, yet MacOS 9.1's performance can be charitably described as flaky on my hardware. There is no excuse for this, not when I can run a medium-sized production webserver on a Pentium 100 or less using a stripped-down Linux or BSD system.
Okay, I personally do not need a spel czecher. A lot of people do; that's arguably a necessary feature. Mail merge, pretty useful as well. HTML filter, helpful (though I handcraft my HTML so I only rarely need it). But why do I need a fruit salad interface? Why do I need a word processor with anything more complicated than a ruler and justification controls across the top of the window? What purpose does a spreadsheet with more than four dimensions serve?
I like GUIs. That's me; I guess I'm in a minority around here saying that, and that's fine. But I don't need the flash of rippling scroll bars; believe it or not, I find Athena widgets to be rather elegant sometimes (although the scroll bars leave a lot to be desired). Skinning is not a terribly useful thing, though it's nice to have the option; I was a serious Kaleidoscope junkie for a couple of years. But what excuse is there for Mozilla? Oh, we have bigger computers now...
I HAVE NEWS FOR ALL OF YOU WRITING THE SOFTWARE.
Some of us can't afford new hardware. I am unacceptably behind in both Mac and Linux expertise because I can't afford hardware newer than a couple of years old (and therefore can't afford a G3 or an Athlon). People are still using Pentiums. People are still using PPC601s. People are still using 486s, fer cryin out loud. Pretty soon the software march will have to slow down because people don't want to be bothered with keeping up with the Moores.
Okay, that's my rant. I feel better now.
More to the point, what people such as the original poster in this thread are not taking into account is that hotornot.com has pictures of guys too.
/Brian
What I have noticed is that either I seem to have some kind of beer goggle thing going -- I've seen plenty of very attractive girls that only get sixes and sevens, older women invariably get marked down no matter how attractive they actually are, and nudity is the great equalizer -- women who don't necessarily have much of a face shot but great cleavage get tens even when they don't quite deserve them...
/Brian
The Genesis was actually a pretty good machine, IMHO.
My thought on the Xbox is that Microsoft is trying to squeeze into a new market about which they don't know quite as much as they think they do. Sony succeeded with the Playstation because they knew the consumer market; consumer electronics has been their business as far back as I can remember. Microsoft's position is such that they can firebomb the consumer with advertising but for the most part not even worry about the matter -- after all, they just do the software (and mice and joysticks). Their few-and-far-between attempts at consumer marketing have been hilarious failures (Bob, Microsoft Barney).
I think the Xbox will not make it out the door when it's supposed to. I don't think it will be a debacle on a par with Bob; that would have more to do with the game producers than Microsoft itself. But I am inclined to agree that MS will either slam it out the door or delay it long past when it's supposed to be available. Sony's hurting enough from doing this (solely because of supply problems, mind you, not necessarily their fault) with the PS2 -- if they had been in this situation with the original Playstation they'd have been blown out of the water.
Microsoft could be a danger to the market, but I don't think they can break in right now. They won't get it right with Xbox; maybe down the road a ways, but not right now.
/Brian
You already did apologize. Her name is Shania.
/Brian
IIRC he was technically bitching about Mach, not OS X specifically. I don't know if that applies to OS X transitively; sounds like Linus is *saying* that it doesn't.
/Brian
No, oft-failed is correct. The dumb terminal's run is the closest anyone's ever come to a viable network computer, and these days it's easier (though maybe not necessarily cheaper?) to buy last year's PC to do the job. And then there was Minitel, but that never saw the light of day outside France.
:-) ). But the fact is that it simply doesn't seem to be worth most people's while today, and until a point comes where an absolutely essential service appears but happens to be financially bottlenecked, we won't see network computers succeed.
Since then we've seen Videotex, X terminals, Diskless Workstations, Network Computers (aka thin clients), email stations, and Audrey, all failures. Not to mention dedicated word processors, which were useful for a while as portable typewriter replacements but now have zero visibility on the market. You take this all back to the beginning of the whole Videotex thing and you realize that it hasn't happened yet, and it ain't going to.
The thin client market has always thrived on necessity. You can't give everyone their own PDP-11? Get a shopping-cart-full of VT100s and put one on every desk in the office. You can't afford that new Compaq/Commodore SX-64/Osborne (or just can't fit it on your tray table)? We got these nifty dedicated word processors (but even then you had the Tandy 100, the first great laptop). When the PC became sufficiently cheap, the thin client market became rather meaningless for most people. (Note I say most -- while a dedicated word processor is probably more trouble than it's worth, there's something to be said for an email station in the kitchen, and of course let's not forget the ultimate thin client, the PDA.)
No doubt the computer industry wants to see the thin client model back -- if nothing else it's a way for IT departments to feel important and yet give them less crap to deal with (after all, since when does an Xterminal come with a cupholder
/Brian
I don't consider computerized "RPGs" to be RPGs at all. The name stuck because they were based on pencil-and-paper RPGs like D&D, but the fact is there are no roles being played except by the player. They're turn-based dungeon crawl games, no more, no less. (RPG is catchier, but totally inaccurate.)
/Brian
First off I'd like to congratulate the person who did this; this is a very Good Thing for those into old games like this. Zelda is IMHO the classic of its kind -- great music, great graphics, a lot of fun. I hope to see that "how to hack Zelda" doc soon -- that looks like a great deal of fun. I have actually seen one very good Zelda clone, but you have to be a Mac user to play it. It's called Mantra; I can't quite seem to find a web page for it anymore but it's easy enough to find a download. The music in particular is incredible, even if the plot line becomes nonsensical pretty quickly. The big question: does source exist to such a game somewhere? /Brian