Now I just have to give Nintendo credit on the Metroid thing. Granted you had to beat the game (or at the very least be introduced to Justin Bailey:-) ) to see Samus in all her glory, but having a female lead character in a kick-ass action game all the way back in '85 or so was definitely a Good Thing -- beat Lara Croft to the punch by a good 5 years or so.
The big question: did I hear correctly that a Metroid sequel is out there, and if so, did they make sure to make Samus a cutie?
/Brian
A Linux fan, but not an Agenda fan...
on
Agenda VR3 Review
·
· Score: 2
Realistically, the Agenda is a toy. This should just be common sense. If they'd put half the effort into coming up with a decent Elks or Minix based OS, they'd probably be ahead of the game. Yes, they lose name recognition, but they'd have a competitive gadget.
I am a Linux fan, okay? I want to get that out of the way right now, because I'm about to perpetuate an egregious act of anti-Karma whoring. The Agenda was a bad idea. Linux is a great server system. It could be a great desktop system. But Agenda's way of doing things has flagrantly ignored the lesson Microsoft should have learned: you can't scale a desktop OS to a palmtop. IT JUST DOESN'T WORK.
Linux is not an embedded OS. It's too damn big to do the job effectively without cutting out massive sections of the code -- and would you still have Linux when you were done cutting? We have Elks -- close enough to Linux for the purpose. We have Minix. Both are fairly small and royalty-free.
Agenda blew it on other counts; nobody will disagree with that. The interface is choppy, the marketing nonexistent, and the implementation is a mess. But I still believe that running Linux on a PDA for anything other than sheer hack value is almost certainly a ticket to disaster.
Calm down, buddy. Supply-side is bullshit -- the explosion of the national debt that came out of the Reagan/Bush era is enough to prove that.
Besides, you seem rather trollish anyway -- Theonomist, huh? The Blavatsky school of tax reform, no doubt -- you never know when California will fall into the sea and we all have to move back to Atlantis.
At least you're making no pretensions about who and what you are -- you're either a delusional supply sider/Ayn Rander or a troll with a Mocha Java IV drip.
... is the SE/30. I own one -- got it for $10 at a flea market. (Fafnir/Green Jade, according to the article... I didn't know that...) It's not much today -- OpenBSD is a painful install, but if you've got a big enough hard drive it works beautifully. (Apple would have a market for these if they brought them out again with a cheap G3-based motherboard, I think -- they make excellent thin clients for mail stations and the like...) The greatest of all toasters is the SE/30.
Actually, this codename thing is probably one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Mac world -- it's the only way to tell a fellow Mac user which PowerBook G3 model you have (even if Pismo and Lombard are virtually indistinguishable apart from SCSI vs. Firewire). Then system releases -- may I show off?
7.5 -- Mozart
8.0 -- Tempo (not Copland)
8.1 -- Bride of Buster
8.5 -- Allegro
9.0 -- Sonata (not Gershwin)
X Server -- Rhapsody
Sherlock -- V-Twin
(Now if someone could fill in the blanks -- I used to know 7.6, for example, but I can't remember...)
What I found most enlightening about the article was the fact that my Power Mac 6500 was a Gazelle -- I did not know that. I was, however, under the impression that the codename for the 6400 was Hacksaw...
Same reason people ported Linux to the Dreamcast or the iPaq -- because they can. Ain't nothing wrong with that, and it's a good education in embedded systems design.
Hey, I didn't say he was being 100% straight either:-)
Besides, that line rings hollow anyway, with MSware getting ripped off right and left and yet still somehow they manage to make money anyway. But I don't need to say that to this crowd.
If he truly believes the party line, than at least I give him credit for not sounding totally like a MicroDroid.
He's made some interesting points; screening for the MicroSerf factor, even though I disagree with a lot of it, he's not stupid and he's not spending 100% of his interview time talking down to us.
Who is this shithead who keeps posting BSD-is-dead anyway? It's become rather pointless and tiresome.
ObKarmaWhoring: I did my own history based on a slashdot post I made some time ago. It's at http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/bsd.html. I fancy it's a bit more technical than this version (which I've added a link to), and perhaps a bit less dispassionate (it was a/. post, after all). Wouldn't mind updates, though.
Can't somebody put a freakin' filter to block this idiot out?! This damn thing pops up every time BSD gets mentioned...
/Brian
Re:It's definitely NOT MacOS.
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
It's what we're used to. The one-size-fits-all concept of the dock is a bit of a mess, and to someone who's been using a Mac for any great length of time it feels broken.
I wouldn't consider the Apple Menu an interface hack anyway -- since 7.5 it's been a much more flexible way of doing the same thing Microsoft did with their ripped-off Start menu, and it's been able to hold anything at all since 7.0. It's been one of the Mac's most visible interface component, in fact, and the OS X version is the most obvious interface botch in the design.
/Brian
Re:Most of you are missing the point.
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
The Mac is actually rather interesting from a geek point of view, and I'm talking about Classic here. While it is in fact designed to be easily grasped by idiots (and/or people who don't want to waste their time learning the ins and outs, they just want to get the job done), it's plenty powerful for the hacked-over blob that it is.
Okay, multitasking support is and always has been impressively half-assed, and memory protection seems to be more theory than practice (though it's gotten much better, it's still ugly). But how many other operating systems have such a flexible scripting architecture built in? AppleScript is pretty nice for scripting -- if an application supports it properly, you can control everything from the MacOS equivalent of a shell script with a lot finer-grained control than most traditional environments. (Yes, VBA, but I think AppleScript may have been first...)
/Brian
Re:It's definitely NOT MacOS.
on
OS X
·
· Score: 3
Okay...
I'll give you this much -- the interface of the shipping version of OS X is an inexcusable kluge. Apple painted themselves into a corner with the Public Beta interface and wound up having to go back and return the Apple menu to where it belonged, but they screwed up by not really making it the Apple menu we all know and love.
I'm inclined to believe there's some NextStep interface baggage involved there. So be it. But make a working Apple Menu -- the old way -- as soon as possible. Put an Apple Menu Items folder in my home directory so it's as easy to manage as the original. That can't be so hard.
The interface isn't *awful*, mind you; it's just not very Mac-like and will take way too long to get used to. The finder isn't bad at all. The dock... well, I could take or leave that, but the use of the dock as a control strip replacement doesn't quite wash with me.
BTW, a quick history, for those of you not quite Mac-savvy enough to know about the nifty little gadget we've come to know and love: the Control Strip started out as a way for PowerBook users to control various system functions. It was intended solely for PowerBook users and was rigged to run only on those systems, but enough people found it useful that it was hacked to ignore the machine type. Apple got the hint and made it general system software in the next release, for both desktop and mobile. Its function was merged into the dock in X, which works, but it's a bit... oh, messy?
They're hardly shy -- most of the company brass (especially Steve and Avie "Mr. Mach" Tevanian) are NeXTies. It's just that they've subsumed it so completely that to all intents and purposes old-line cubers have been grandfathered as Mac folks (I guess, anyway).
What does bug me is that Apple doesn't push the fact that "their" tech (i.e. NextStep) was the base of the very first implementation of the World Wide Web. They should have been pushing that to a near-ridiculous degree when Rhapsody first shipped; after all, what better way to plug your server OS than to emphasize that it ran the first web server?
(And, yes, it's fair to say that. Scratch X, find OpenStep; there was even an issue of MacAddict a while back that showed how to activate the old Next look on Cocoa apps.)
This is not necessarily good or bad, just expeditious...
Think about it. OS X comes with a full suite of developer tools and they're said to be pretty damn good; they essentially serve the same purpose as Hypercard in a much less idiosyncratic manner.
Also, why would Apple want to devote resources to a program maintained in hand-hacked 680x0 assembler, translated to PPC by a mechanical cross-assembler called PortAsm, and maintained and extended solely by extension modules (especially when they have an OS that already fits part of that particularly gnarly description:-) )? The best they could possibly do is rewrite the whole bloody mess from scratch, and they most likely have better things to do with their time.
The best solution IMHO would be an open-source Hypercard sandbox. Start with someone willing to write a HyperTalk interpreter and go from there?
Because it breaks DNS as is. The filtering trick is the best retrofit because nobody back in the day thought being 16-bit clean would be particularly important...
Wait a minute, it's the Y2K bug all over again! Run for your lives! Stockpile food! Imminent death of the Internet predicted! Get this freakin' straitjacket outta my *mmmfmwf*!
I don't know... if you want to strike a happy medium, how about just making the whole mess *8-bit* clean and base everything off of ISO Latin-1? Okay, this particular proposal is a bit more complicated than that, but it might work and wouldn't require *major* retrofitting...
Essentially all domain names are archived in romanized forms using a standard transliteration form. Domain names are issued with reference to the ISO Latin-1 standard, i.e. they could be using any character set but are treated as if they're Latin-1. (Granted this would look a little strange for, say, websites with Russian domain names, and the whole thing isn't too well thought out, but it's just a quickie sketch of an idea, not an RFC draft...)
The actual domain name transliteration would most likely be done client-side or using an intermediate server that complements the existing DNS system.
Tell me Sega and/or the game developer and/or anyone who uses the Katana devsystem for a shipping product doesn't wind up paying a royalty to MS no matter what. (BillyBoy probably gets a per-unit just to silkscreen the logo on the front anyway...)
The coke tap is an odd idea, not really workable the way it's being presented, but it's interesting. The only stipulation I'd have is that you get to buy the tap so you can do whatever you want with it. Somehow I don't seek Coca-Cola being that nice about it, but in theory at least it's not a bad idea, especially if you have an in-house wet bar or something of the sort.
Now as to how Coke would expect it to be used, I have a *huge* problem with that...
The SGI fridge is just perfect... the question is, can you keep a Macquarium on top of it or does it get too hot in the back?
The Coke tap... hmm. First off, I'd buy one as long as I could have my choice of syrups (or perhaps make my own?). Second, carbonated water through pipes is a freakin' silly idea. That's why they have CO2 canisters.
Hmmm... I'm not the only one out there who thought the original Sonic seemed like a bit of an unfinished symphony. I've been playing it obsessively (until I fried my controller with a static burst a couple of days ago:-( ) since I got my Dreamcast.
I bought my Dreamcast after it dropped through the floor myself, primarily for hack value (even though I haven't tried to hack it yet). I would never have bought a DC when it first came out because of the WinCE factor, though -- it wouldn't surprise me in the least if this was a major cause of its weak sales.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I just have to give Nintendo credit on the Metroid thing. Granted you had to beat the game (or at the very least be introduced to Justin Bailey :-) ) to see Samus in all her glory, but having a female lead character in a kick-ass action game all the way back in '85 or so was definitely a Good Thing -- beat Lara Croft to the punch by a good 5 years or so.
The big question: did I hear correctly that a Metroid sequel is out there, and if so, did they make sure to make Samus a cutie?
/Brian
Realistically, the Agenda is a toy. This should just be common sense. If they'd put half the effort into coming up with a decent Elks or Minix based OS, they'd probably be ahead of the game. Yes, they lose name recognition, but they'd have a competitive gadget.
I am a Linux fan, okay? I want to get that out of the way right now, because I'm about to perpetuate an egregious act of anti-Karma whoring. The Agenda was a bad idea. Linux is a great server system. It could be a great desktop system. But Agenda's way of doing things has flagrantly ignored the lesson Microsoft should have learned: you can't scale a desktop OS to a palmtop. IT JUST DOESN'T WORK.
Linux is not an embedded OS. It's too damn big to do the job effectively without cutting out massive sections of the code -- and would you still have Linux when you were done cutting? We have Elks -- close enough to Linux for the purpose. We have Minix. Both are fairly small and royalty-free.
Agenda blew it on other counts; nobody will disagree with that. The interface is choppy, the marketing nonexistent, and the implementation is a mess. But I still believe that running Linux on a PDA for anything other than sheer hack value is almost certainly a ticket to disaster.
/brian
Calm down, buddy. Supply-side is bullshit -- the explosion of the national debt that came out of the Reagan/Bush era is enough to prove that.
Besides, you seem rather trollish anyway -- Theonomist, huh? The Blavatsky school of tax reform, no doubt -- you never know when California will fall into the sea and we all have to move back to Atlantis.
At least you're making no pretensions about who and what you are -- you're either a delusional supply sider/Ayn Rander or a troll with a Mocha Java IV drip.
/Brian
... is the SE/30. I own one -- got it for $10 at a flea market. (Fafnir/Green Jade, according to the article... I didn't know that...) It's not much today -- OpenBSD is a painful install, but if you've got a big enough hard drive it works beautifully. (Apple would have a market for these if they brought them out again with a cheap G3-based motherboard, I think -- they make excellent thin clients for mail stations and the like...) The greatest of all toasters is the SE/30.
/Brian
Actually, this codename thing is probably one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Mac world -- it's the only way to tell a fellow Mac user which PowerBook G3 model you have (even if Pismo and Lombard are virtually indistinguishable apart from SCSI vs. Firewire). Then system releases -- may I show off?
7.5 -- Mozart
8.0 -- Tempo (not Copland)
8.1 -- Bride of Buster
8.5 -- Allegro
9.0 -- Sonata (not Gershwin)
X Server -- Rhapsody
Sherlock -- V-Twin
(Now if someone could fill in the blanks -- I used to know 7.6, for example, but I can't remember...)
What I found most enlightening about the article was the fact that my Power Mac 6500 was a Gazelle -- I did not know that. I was, however, under the impression that the codename for the 6400 was Hacksaw...
/Brian
Same reason people ported Linux to the Dreamcast or the iPaq -- because they can. Ain't nothing wrong with that, and it's a good education in embedded systems design.
/Brian
One word: OpenDirectX.
/Brian
Hey, I didn't say he was being 100% straight either :-)
Besides, that line rings hollow anyway, with MSware getting ripped off right and left and yet still somehow they manage to make money anyway. But I don't need to say that to this crowd.
/Brian
If he truly believes the party line, than at least I give him credit for not sounding totally like a MicroDroid.
He's made some interesting points; screening for the MicroSerf factor, even though I disagree with a lot of it, he's not stupid and he's not spending 100% of his interview time talking down to us.
/Brian
Who is this shithead who keeps posting BSD-is-dead anyway? It's become rather pointless and tiresome.
ObKarmaWhoring: I did my own history based on a slashdot post I made some time ago. It's at http://www.geocities.com/connorbd/bsd.html. I fancy it's a bit more technical than this version (which I've added a link to), and perhaps a bit less dispassionate (it was a
/Brian
Can't somebody put a freakin' filter to block this idiot out?! This damn thing pops up every time BSD gets mentioned...
/Brian
It's what we're used to. The one-size-fits-all concept of the dock is a bit of a mess, and to someone who's been using a Mac for any great length of time it feels broken.
I wouldn't consider the Apple Menu an interface hack anyway -- since 7.5 it's been a much more flexible way of doing the same thing Microsoft did with their ripped-off Start menu, and it's been able to hold anything at all since 7.0. It's been one of the Mac's most visible interface component, in fact, and the OS X version is the most obvious interface botch in the design.
/Brian
The Mac is actually rather interesting from a geek point of view, and I'm talking about Classic here. While it is in fact designed to be easily grasped by idiots (and/or people who don't want to waste their time learning the ins and outs, they just want to get the job done), it's plenty powerful for the hacked-over blob that it is.
Okay, multitasking support is and always has been impressively half-assed, and memory protection seems to be more theory than practice (though it's gotten much better, it's still ugly). But how many other operating systems have such a flexible scripting architecture built in? AppleScript is pretty nice for scripting -- if an application supports it properly, you can control everything from the MacOS equivalent of a shell script with a lot finer-grained control than most traditional environments. (Yes, VBA, but I think AppleScript may have been first...)
/Brian
Okay...
I'll give you this much -- the interface of the shipping version of OS X is an inexcusable kluge. Apple painted themselves into a corner with the Public Beta interface and wound up having to go back and return the Apple menu to where it belonged, but they screwed up by not really making it the Apple menu we all know and love.
I'm inclined to believe there's some NextStep interface baggage involved there. So be it. But make a working Apple Menu -- the old way -- as soon as possible. Put an Apple Menu Items folder in my home directory so it's as easy to manage as the original. That can't be so hard.
The interface isn't *awful*, mind you; it's just not very Mac-like and will take way too long to get used to. The finder isn't bad at all. The dock... well, I could take or leave that, but the use of the dock as a control strip replacement doesn't quite wash with me.
BTW, a quick history, for those of you not quite Mac-savvy enough to know about the nifty little gadget we've come to know and love: the Control Strip started out as a way for PowerBook users to control various system functions. It was intended solely for PowerBook users and was rigged to run only on those systems, but enough people found it useful that it was hacked to ignore the machine type. Apple got the hint and made it general system software in the next release, for both desktop and mobile. Its function was merged into the dock in X, which works, but it's a bit... oh, messy?
/Brian
They're hardly shy -- most of the company brass (especially Steve and Avie "Mr. Mach" Tevanian) are NeXTies. It's just that they've subsumed it so completely that to all intents and purposes old-line cubers have been grandfathered as Mac folks (I guess, anyway).
What does bug me is that Apple doesn't push the fact that "their" tech (i.e. NextStep) was the base of the very first implementation of the World Wide Web. They should have been pushing that to a near-ridiculous degree when Rhapsody first shipped; after all, what better way to plug your server OS than to emphasize that it ran the first web server?
(And, yes, it's fair to say that. Scratch X, find OpenStep; there was even an issue of MacAddict a while back that showed how to activate the old Next look on Cocoa apps.)
/Brian
There is another primary color, but there's only this one old woman who can actually see it. Serious.
/Brian
(4/2)
Uh... /.'s slash-and-burn response?
In any case, I'd be more inclined to think of it in terms of parody...
/Brian
Can we get a new mod category for "-1: annoying BSD Bot"?
/Brian
This is not necessarily good or bad, just expeditious...
:-) )? The best they could possibly do is rewrite the whole bloody mess from scratch, and they most likely have better things to do with their time.
Think about it. OS X comes with a full suite of developer tools and they're said to be pretty damn good; they essentially serve the same purpose as Hypercard in a much less idiosyncratic manner.
Also, why would Apple want to devote resources to a program maintained in hand-hacked 680x0 assembler, translated to PPC by a mechanical cross-assembler called PortAsm, and maintained and extended solely by extension modules (especially when they have an OS that already fits part of that particularly gnarly description
The best solution IMHO would be an open-source Hypercard sandbox. Start with someone willing to write a HyperTalk interpreter and go from there?
/Brian
Because it breaks DNS as is. The filtering trick is the best retrofit because nobody back in the day thought being 16-bit clean would be particularly important...
Wait a minute, it's the Y2K bug all over again! Run for your lives! Stockpile food! Imminent death of the Internet predicted! Get this freakin' straitjacket outta my *mmmfmwf*!
I don't know... if you want to strike a happy medium, how about just making the whole mess *8-bit* clean and base everything off of ISO Latin-1? Okay, this particular proposal is a bit more complicated than that, but it might work and wouldn't require *major* retrofitting...
Essentially all domain names are archived in romanized forms using a standard transliteration form. Domain names are issued with reference to the ISO Latin-1 standard, i.e. they could be using any character set but are treated as if they're Latin-1. (Granted this would look a little strange for, say, websites with Russian domain names, and the whole thing isn't too well thought out, but it's just a quickie sketch of an idea, not an RFC draft...)
The actual domain name transliteration would most likely be done client-side or using an intermediate server that complements the existing DNS system.
/Brian
Tell me Sega and/or the game developer and/or anyone who uses the Katana devsystem for a shipping product doesn't wind up paying a royalty to MS no matter what. (BillyBoy probably gets a per-unit just to silkscreen the logo on the front anyway...)
/Brian
The coke tap is an odd idea, not really workable the way it's being presented, but it's interesting. The only stipulation I'd have is that you get to buy the tap so you can do whatever you want with it. Somehow I don't seek Coca-Cola being that nice about it, but in theory at least it's not a bad idea, especially if you have an in-house wet bar or something of the sort.
Now as to how Coke would expect it to be used, I have a *huge* problem with that...
/Brian
Uhhh... egg creams?
Milk, chocolate syrup, seltzer, and I believe ice. And I've never even been to Brooklyn...
/Brian
The SGI fridge is just perfect... the question is, can you keep a Macquarium on top of it or does it get too hot in the back?
The Coke tap... hmm. First off, I'd buy one as long as I could have my choice of syrups (or perhaps make my own?). Second, carbonated water through pipes is a freakin' silly idea. That's why they have CO2 canisters.
The rest I haven't looked at yet.
Hmmm... I'm not the only one out there who thought the original Sonic seemed like a bit of an unfinished symphony. I've been playing it obsessively (until I fried my controller with a static burst a couple of days ago :-( ) since I got my Dreamcast.
I bought my Dreamcast after it dropped through the floor myself, primarily for hack value (even though I haven't tried to hack it yet). I would never have bought a DC when it first came out because of the WinCE factor, though -- it wouldn't surprise me in the least if this was a major cause of its weak sales.
/Brian