It's already been posted multiple times how releasing specs is not open source, so I won't repeat it. (I also won't go into open source software vs. hardware.)
Is this the fate of the open source movement? Thousands of notices of victory and congratulations whenever someone releases documentation? As if having ESR on board weren't bad enough for the movement...
This behavior reminds me of natives of the American southeast (also known as "hicks", "rednecks", or "inbreds"). With a dearth of native cultural artifacts, they claim anything even remotely related to the South as a direct result of their culture. (I believe it's currently up to claiming all Internet traffic through the Atlanta switches as having benefited from them.)
So, ESR aside: do we want to act like hicks? I say no!
Yes, blame it on "the suits". It's their fault software is buggy. The programmers who wrote the code, of course, did a perfect job, but the suits demanded that they go back through it and throw in some bugs.
First: whose fault is it that software is buggy? Management plays a role, yes. But, last I checked, management wasn't writing the code. If you touch it, you buy it, and if the programmers in the trenches are smart enough to predict a new business model, then certainly they're smart enough to not screw up pointer references.
Second: no matter what the primary product of IT businesses become, they'll still be responsible for writing and releasing code. (I doubt managers will persist in waiting for the open-source development cycle without throwing their own programmers on the job.) The same forces are still at work, and software will be released as before, just with more opportunity to see the code that causes the problems.
It's good to see MCA support. I had a few MCA machines I picked up around here for free; they were fairly nice for their vintage. MCA's a nice architecture; it's too bad that it's not in any more modern machines. (At least not Intel machines; though I don't think it's in any terribly recent IBM PPC machines, either...)
1) Bluetooth/wireless Ethernet, Ricochet/cell networking integrated, with automatic fallover 2) Voice recognition (ditch the annoying handwriting style) 3) More convenient form factors (eyeglass clipon, for example) 4) Automatic delegation of complex or computationally demanding tasks to servers over the aforementioned network
I'll get one when it integrates less obtrusively into life. Otherwise, there's not much benefit over my current system (computer and photographic memory)... or does it? Anyone have a good reason to get a Palm that counters anything here?
There seem to be a fair number of people suggesting DEC terminals (and I think someone mentioned NCD) -- I disagree. If you're planning on using these things for a while, you're better off getting something new and commodity. (Having said that, though, I'd suggest Sparc classics, which are pretty cheap and surprisingly powerful.)
If you're worried about maintainability, that sort of thing, I think you'd be better off going for easily clonable machines than Xterms or a centralized setup. Put an OS image on a server and create an install disk that basically dumps the image to the disk. There are fancier techniques, of course, but the basic idea is that you can make changes to the single OS image and spend ten minutes setting the machines to reload and reboot before leaving for the night. It'll save you a ton of effort and is probably the simplest way to propagate changes to machines.
You can get a fair bit of machine now for $350. Put $200 into the monitor -- say a new 17". (At least get a new monitor: they're going to be the most fragile part of the system.) Then for the system, look for early PII, maybe some cheap old Celerons floating around; you can usually get a decent setup there for $100. (And put the extra $50 into the server or 100bT networking...)
Take advantage of price points. For example, around here, new or near-new hard drives have a point of about $100 -- i.e. 4 GB cost ~$90, but 15 GB cost about $110. So for an extra $20, you have a whole new set of options.
Another option, which might not go over well depending on your setup, is to go out and get a bunch of those "free" computers. They're usually Celerons with a 15" monitor (which is more than adequate), and might possibly even come with onboard Ethernet. As for the ISP cost that comes with the machines: either hand the accounts out to students (possibly allowing you to use grant money from other sources, depending on how you present it) or consider it a low-interest loan (which could work well if inflation goes up).
Off topic...but your page of "real" slashdot IDs is hilarious.
If you're not intelligent to know that the real ESR wouldn't say "I'm going to trade in my truck for a Camry" or "No thanks, no more beer for me, I'm watching my figure"...:)
Clever twist of phrase. Pick it out yourself? Wonderful. My moment of mirth has marked me like a Paris fire hydrant, marked me for the warm, wet ire of Apple fans. Away with you, away...
Video? Bleech! I don't want to download for six hours (and that's on a cable modem:) to see some tech support person (or worse, Eric Raymond or one of the egocentric/. maintenance types) give me bad advice.
I'd much rather wait 10 seconds for a web page with inline screenshots. Same content, much faster, no looking at ESR. Better, no?
Something's rotten in the state of...where are they from again?
There are projected benchmarks, buzzwords galore (reminds me of a health food store; everything's copyrighted but doesn't actually mean anything), but nothing even remotely resembling evidence. At least put up a picture of one of these things doing *something* on a test rig...surely you have *some* kind of software, right?
The stronger the claim, the stronger the evidence needed to convince people you're not walking around in a tinfoil hat. Claims I see, evidence I don't.
(Of course, if someone reading this could point me at some reliable, 3rd-party information that lends credence to what they're saying...)
Of COURSE it would work out this way...
on
Sega Dreamcast: $0
·
· Score: 1
To summarize: It's good that corporations are realizing that things other than PCs should be online. It's bad that they're a year or two behind.
So, I make sure that any residence of mine has at least a cable modem. But if I want to buy something cool, I get accosted for a contract to an online service that I'll never use.
At least the X-box has *Ethernet* -- come on, Sega...
I haven't had a chance to look over the protocol and specs yet, so until then, has anyone analyzed this for scalability? I'd be curious to see how this would project up a few orders of magnitude...
Go ahead: finish your assignments, do what you're told, live a boring life. And smile when you get hired as a lowly programmer for a company started by an MIT hacker who enjoyed {him|her}self.:)
In general, this is a valid point, and MIT has shown itself to be time-sensitive (i.e. writing "SOX" on the Green Bldg. when the Red Sox were last in the Series -- and getting it hacked to "SUX" when they lost). This article, however, was on a back burner for a while and printed now because of an unrelated event.
A more careful reading will reveal that the lights used were specially added at the top of the building. One-dimensional Tetris was implemented (granted, not much, but you can say it was done).
The comments made about the difficulty of the two-dimensional hack are quite valid.
I would suggest some minor tweaks to the course outline in the parent post.
Most notably, I would deemphasize the more application-oriented aspects of the outline (spreadsheets, presentations, and to a more limited extent, databases and HTML.)
I would argue that kids are smart, and can figure out how to use commodity software on their own. A working knowledge of Office is a basic skill nowadays, but it is a skill easily imparted.
Without going into too much detail, put it this way: What is the value of "knowing Office?" Appreciable, but not great. Knowing HTML? Greater, but the skill is becoming a commodity. Knowing C? C++? Java? Perl? Significantly greater. Besides teaching kids that will let them get some real work done on their computers, you will be giving them an early introduction to the programming mindset -- which, given the poor introductions I have seen at most colleges, is of considerable utility.
Fine: Apple hasn't recovered. They've staved off the corporate Grim Reaper for a few more years, yes, but that's hardly a recovery. Apple's marketshare, etc. had nowhere to go but up. It's like calling Nevada the powerhouse of the American economy because it's growing at +50%/yr.
Apple junkies seem so desparate for vindication that even the slightest gurgle is seen as the Second Coming. News flash, people: ain't gonna happen, at least not for a while.
What did Apple do with the Altivec? Bundled it with a slow processor and sold it in overpriced systems. The iMac? Put Jeff Goldblum on the ads and priced it above an eMachine. And what will they do with the cool UNIX additions they'll wrap into OS X? Insist on their dated hardware hegemony and watch as they get copied.
Apple seems to have a knack for finding the exact balance between starvation and success. You can't kill them; but then again, you don't have to.
Ah, yes, the day trader's perspective. But why don't we take a look at market share, segment penetration, that sort of thing. Apple went from owning the market, to grasping onto a few niche markets, to getting a toehold in a few more. That's not recovery, it's simply avoiding death.
No, I'm sure you don't have your head in the sand. It's likely firmly implanted within the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (tm) apparently produced by Apple monitors...
Slashdot Mirror
It's already been posted multiple times how releasing specs is not open source, so I won't repeat it. (I also won't go into open source software vs. hardware.)
Is this the fate of the open source movement? Thousands of notices of victory and congratulations whenever someone releases documentation? As if having ESR on board weren't bad enough for the movement...
This behavior reminds me of natives of the American southeast (also known as "hicks", "rednecks", or "inbreds"). With a dearth of native cultural artifacts, they claim anything even remotely related to the South as a direct result of their culture. (I believe it's currently up to claiming all Internet traffic through the Atlanta switches as having benefited from them.)
So, ESR aside: do we want to act like hicks? I say no!
When AMD comes out with an IA-64 chip -- yes, faster than Itanium, but significantly later -- then I suppose you'll care? Go back to gaming, moron.
Yes, blame it on "the suits". It's their fault software is buggy. The programmers who wrote the code, of course, did a perfect job, but the suits demanded that they go back through it and throw in some bugs.
First: whose fault is it that software is buggy? Management plays a role, yes. But, last I checked, management wasn't writing the code. If you touch it, you buy it, and if the programmers in the trenches are smart enough to predict a new business model, then certainly they're smart enough to not screw up pointer references.
Second: no matter what the primary product of IT businesses become, they'll still be responsible for writing and releasing code. (I doubt managers will persist in waiting for the open-source development cycle without throwing their own programmers on the job.) The same forces are still at work, and software will be released as before, just with more opportunity to see the code that causes the problems.
Like I said...P133s with sufficient memory are workable, but not interesting enough to exploit some of the more interesting features of MCA.
:)
And OS/2 Warp? What are you thinking?
It's good to see MCA support. I had a few MCA machines I picked up around here for free; they were fairly nice for their vintage.
MCA's a nice architecture; it's too bad that it's not in any more modern machines. (At least not Intel machines; though I don't think it's in any terribly recent IBM PPC machines, either...)
Here's what I'm waiting for:
1) Bluetooth/wireless Ethernet, Ricochet/cell networking integrated, with automatic fallover
2) Voice recognition (ditch the annoying handwriting style)
3) More convenient form factors (eyeglass clipon, for example)
4) Automatic delegation of complex or computationally demanding tasks to servers over the aforementioned network
I'll get one when it integrates less obtrusively into life. Otherwise, there's not much benefit over my current system (computer and photographic memory)... or does it? Anyone have a good reason to get a Palm that counters anything here?
There seem to be a fair number of people suggesting DEC terminals (and I think someone mentioned NCD) -- I disagree. If you're planning on using these things for a while, you're better off getting something new and commodity. (Having said that, though, I'd suggest Sparc classics, which are pretty cheap and surprisingly powerful.)
If you're worried about maintainability, that sort of thing, I think you'd be better off going for easily clonable machines than Xterms or a centralized setup. Put an OS image on a server and create an install disk that basically dumps the image to the disk. There are fancier techniques, of course, but the basic idea is that you can make changes to the single OS image and spend ten minutes setting the machines to reload and reboot before leaving for the night. It'll save you a ton of effort and is probably the simplest way to propagate changes to machines.
You can get a fair bit of machine now for $350. Put $200 into the monitor -- say a new 17". (At least get a new monitor: they're going to be the most fragile part of the system.) Then for the system, look for early PII, maybe some cheap old Celerons floating around; you can usually get a decent setup there for $100. (And put the extra $50 into the server or 100bT networking...)
Take advantage of price points. For example, around here, new or near-new hard drives have a point of about $100 -- i.e. 4 GB cost ~$90, but 15 GB cost about $110. So for an extra $20, you have a whole new set of options.
Another option, which might not go over well depending on your setup, is to go out and get a bunch of those "free" computers. They're usually Celerons with a 15" monitor (which is more than adequate), and might possibly even come with onboard Ethernet. As for the ISP cost that comes with the machines: either hand the accounts out to students (possibly allowing you to use grant money from other sources, depending on how you present it) or consider it a low-interest loan (which could work well if inflation goes up).
Off topic...but your page of "real" slashdot IDs is hilarious.
:)
If you're not intelligent to know that the real ESR wouldn't say "I'm going to trade in my truck for a Camry" or "No thanks, no more beer for me, I'm watching my figure"...
Clever twist of phrase. Pick it out yourself?
Wonderful. My moment of mirth has marked me like a Paris fire hydrant, marked me for the warm, wet ire of Apple fans.
Away with you, away...
Yawn. Give me Quake anyday. But to discover "what it is truly all about", I usually turn off the monitor and go outside.
Solaris on Sun, actually. But if knee-jerk reactions make you happy, go right ahead...
Someone playing archaic video games. Loser.
Video? Bleech! I don't want to download for six hours (and that's on a cable modem :) to see some tech support person (or worse, Eric Raymond or one of the egocentric /. maintenance types) give me bad advice.
I'd much rather wait 10 seconds for a web page with inline screenshots. Same content, much faster, no looking at ESR. Better, no?
Something's rotten in the state of...where are they from again?
There are projected benchmarks, buzzwords galore (reminds me of a health food store; everything's copyrighted but doesn't actually mean anything), but nothing even remotely resembling evidence. At least put up a picture of one of these things doing *something* on a test rig...surely you have *some* kind of software, right?
The stronger the claim, the stronger the evidence needed to convince people you're not walking around in a tinfoil hat. Claims I see, evidence I don't.
(Of course, if someone reading this could point me at some reliable, 3rd-party information that lends credence to what they're saying...)
To summarize:
It's good that corporations are realizing that things other than PCs should be online.
It's bad that they're a year or two behind.
So, I make sure that any residence of mine has at least a cable modem. But if I want to buy something cool, I get accosted for a contract to an online service that I'll never use.
At least the X-box has *Ethernet* -- come on, Sega...
I haven't had a chance to look over the protocol and specs yet, so until then, has anyone analyzed this for scalability? I'd be curious to see how this would project up a few orders of magnitude...
Go ahead: finish your assignments, do what you're told, live a boring life. And smile when you get hired as a lowly programmer for a company started by an MIT hacker who enjoyed {him|her}self. :)
In general, this is a valid point, and MIT has shown itself to be time-sensitive (i.e. writing "SOX" on the Green Bldg. when the Red Sox were last in the Series -- and getting it hacked to "SUX" when they lost). This article, however, was on a back burner for a while and printed now because of an unrelated event.
Given that next year's is the most selective class yet, congrats!
:)
But don't plan on hacking every building: focus on the under-construction "William H. Gates Center for Software Engineering"
A more careful reading will reveal that the lights used were specially added at the top of the building. One-dimensional Tetris was implemented (granted, not much, but you can say it was done).
The comments made about the difficulty of the two-dimensional hack are quite valid.
Wow. Painting the water tower. How original.
You Canadians do know how to have a good time, don't you?
I would suggest some minor tweaks to the course outline in the parent post.
Most notably, I would deemphasize the more application-oriented aspects of the outline (spreadsheets, presentations, and to a more limited extent, databases and HTML.)
I would argue that kids are smart, and can figure out how to use commodity software on their own. A working knowledge of Office is a basic skill nowadays, but it is a skill easily imparted.
Without going into too much detail, put it this way: What is the value of "knowing Office?" Appreciable, but not great. Knowing HTML? Greater, but the skill is becoming a commodity. Knowing C? C++? Java? Perl? Significantly greater. Besides teaching kids that will let them get some real work done on their computers, you will be giving them an early introduction to the programming mindset -- which, given the poor introductions I have seen at most colleges, is of considerable utility.
Fine: Apple hasn't recovered. They've staved off the corporate Grim Reaper for a few more years, yes, but that's hardly a recovery. Apple's marketshare, etc. had nowhere to go but up. It's like calling Nevada the powerhouse of the American economy because it's growing at +50%/yr.
Apple junkies seem so desparate for vindication that even the slightest gurgle is seen as the Second Coming. News flash, people: ain't gonna happen, at least not for a while.
What did Apple do with the Altivec? Bundled it with a slow processor and sold it in overpriced systems. The iMac? Put Jeff Goldblum on the ads and priced it above an eMachine. And what will they do with the cool UNIX additions they'll wrap into OS X? Insist on their dated hardware hegemony and watch as they get copied.
Apple seems to have a knack for finding the exact balance between starvation and success. You can't kill them; but then again, you don't have to.
Ah, yes, the day trader's perspective. But why don't we take a look at market share, segment penetration, that sort of thing. Apple went from owning the market, to grasping onto a few niche markets, to getting a toehold in a few more. That's not recovery, it's simply avoiding death.
No, I'm sure you don't have your head in the sand. It's likely firmly implanted within the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field (tm) apparently produced by Apple monitors...
"Second downfall" implies that Apple recovered from the first one...