I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which made 80186 systems running a proprietary OS. This is the first time I've heard of an 80186 DOS system. I've often wondered why the industry basically skipped that processor.
You might change some conversational habits, but most of the time you'll just convince people that you're obsessed with something that most people just don't care about. If you're going to destroy your social life, you should at least do it in the cause of something that matters.
Performance is hardly an issue. Even an old Palm V, with its 15Mhz processor, should have no trouble emulating a 1 Mhz 6502.
As for endianness, what's the big deal? It's not that hard to make your code endian-agnostic. Juddging from the list of Frodo ports, it's just not an issue.
CmdrTaco's reaction was typical of what I heard from many geeks, on Slashdot and elsewhere. It didn't occur to them that reducing download time by a factor of 30 was a big step forward. Interesting oversight. I saw it right away, and I usually don't grok performance issues.
You think Phoenix is the only company in the world capable of writing an onboard ROM? Jeez, they didn't even invent the thing -- they just reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS. Their main accomplishment was to invent the clean room technique, which allowed them to do reverse-engineering without violating trade secrets or copyrights. Whoops, they didn't even do that -- Wikipedia says that Compaq did it first.
And if my mother had wings, she could fly. Any MB maker that ignores Windows compatibility does so at its peril. Let's say all the manufacturers banded together and refused to do TC. You can bet somebody would seize the market opportunity that this would present, and the anti TC consortium would sink faster than the Titanic.
Face it, Microsoft dictates what desktop hardware looks like. This is not a good thing, but it's not an easy thing to change.
Yeah, all the UI stuff that Google did right and Infoseek did wrong made a lot of difference in how people perceive them. The really ironic thing is that Infoseek (or rather Disney, which wanted to use the search engine to steer people to their other sites) did every little thing they could to squeeze revenue out of their visits. Not just banner ads, but heavy-handed attempts to grab users attentions. The result was a total disaster-- Disney spent billions turning Infoseek into the Go.com portal, and never saw any of it again. By contrast, Google stuck a few "sponsored links" off on the right and made huge bucks. And, as you point out, such a low key approach made them a lot more popular.
Still, I think page clutter had less to do with Infoseek's downfall than Disneys' total neglect of technology. I remember when I first heard about Google in '99. Then their only claim to fame was an innovative hit ranking system. I tried it, thought, "Cool, but they need to work on their spidering," and went back to Infoseek and Altavista. Well, they did work on their spidering. And their filtering. And their syntax. And a lot of other stuff. While the competition, which had all become media properties, neglected technology in favor of marketing. You know the results.
But as I said, Infoseek was doomed in any case. Low level stuff like a "near" operator is useful to the geek, but it's the sophisticated stuff you don't see that has turned "Google" into a verb.
Lots of Big Ideas in your post: "Economic proof", "authoritarian power", and of course the "anarchocapitalist" in your sig.
Now, there's a danger with Big Ideas -- they make it hard to deal with the practical reality. You can argue all you want that the patent system, and other IP concepts, have outlived their usefulness. You might even convince a lot of people that you're right. (I, for one, am half-convinced already, and I haven't even looked at your links.) But that's not very useful. Big Ideas do nothing to address the enormous economic and political power of IP enterprises. Which consist, incidentally, not just of rich corporate execs, but also thousands of ordinary schmos. Including a lot of Slashdotters -- high tech still relies mainly on copyrights and patents to protect its assets.
With so many people dependent on the current system, proposals to start from scratch are simply irrelevent. (Unless the whole system simply breaks down, in which case IP issues are the least of our problems.) If you want to make a difference, you need to think in terms of resisting the growing abuses of the IP system, and maybe pushing back a little. That kind of change comes from simple hard work, not Big Ideas.
Well, a Netscape true believe might disagree with you. I usually avoid the X is better than Y religious wars, but I have to admit there was a long period when Netscape was turning out a really crappy product, while MS continued to find ways to improve IE.
On the other hand, when IE first appeared it really was something of a joke. It was just a rebranded version of Spyglass Mosaic that Microsoft hurriedly licensed when they realized that they'd ignored the Internet for too long. Lots of silly bugs and poorly designed features.
But that's all beside the point. I wasn't talking about the browser war -- I never even mentioned browsers. IE played a part in destroying Netscape, but only a small part. Netscape's main source of revenue was supposed to be on the server side. This was true even before Microsoft destroyed the market for browsers by making IE a freebie. But once Microsoft became a competitor, Netscape had no hope of selling its server software or integration services.
I remember a news article, '97 or thereabouts, about Netscape and MS competing for a major integration contract. (Can't remember the name of the customer.) MS, being late to the party, didn't even jump in until Netscape almost had the whole thing wrapped up. All the specifics had been negotiated and agreed to, and only the final formalities were left. Then MS beseiged the customer with a massive sales pitch, a huge and expensive prototype, and of course a lowball bid. (When you have MS's revenue streams, you can afford to take a huge loss just to get a long-term customer.) Netscape never knew what hit them.
That sort of thing explains most of MS's dominance of the software market. But it doesn't work against somebody like Google, which essentially depends on millions of small customers who can't be easily turned.
Google's not an ad agency? Wrong. You may not think of Google's "sponsored links" as ads, but that's what they are. Actually, most people don't, which is why they're so effective. Which in turn explains why Google went into the black early on, and stayed there.
More correct to say that bogus placement cheats Google out fairly-earned ad revenue. Perhaps that's why they work so hard defeating this kind of spam. But I like to think that they're mainly motivated by the desire to have the best search results possible.
Easy to defeat a bayesian filter: use a sentence generator.
Easy for you. I doubt if Ms. Gifts Baskets knows what a Bayesian filter is. This is an arms race between the index spammers and Google computer scientists -- and Google has a lot of really good CS people. Perhaps somebody smart enough could start a business defeating Googles filters, and distribute the costs among spammer clients. But it'd be cheaper just to buy a Google sponsored link.
That's why I have to laugh whenever I read stories speculating that Microsoft might do to Google what they did to Netscape. It's one thing to steal a big consulting/integration contract by throwing lots of marketing and engineering resources at the customer. But to dominate the search engine world, you have to earn and maintain the trust of millions of users who pound on your engine every single minute. I used to think that Infoseek, Altavista, and the others died solely from corporate neglect. That's partially true, but they were doomed anyway, as soon as Google appeared. Because none of them ever understood what Brin and company seem to understand instinctively -- a public search engine requires hard work on a huge scale, and it never stops.
when was the last time you saw anything on mainstream media subtitled?
I think it was a Klingon conversation in one of the Star Trek movies. Definitely an exception that proves the rule...
You're quite right, American entertainment conglomerates are afraid to make their audiences do any work. Like read subtitles. Or follow complicated plots. Or deal with moral ambiguity....
Insisting on me using a booth is like upgrading your encryption when users are writing their passwords on stickies attached to their monitors.
Or like most banks' online transactions, which are encrypted by the maximum key length supported by non-export browsers, but makes no attempt to make its users use high-entropy passwords to access that encrypted data. My own bank just uses my ATM PIN, which only has 10,000 possible values!
Most security measures serve to make people feel more secure, not make them safer. As witness the Maginot Line and the NRA.
Though it does occur to me that a bank might have non-security reasons for insisting that safe-deposit boxes be accessed privately. Many boxes contain contraband, "dirty" money, and other stuff the bank works very hard at not knowing about. If they get in legal hot water, they can point at their see-no-evil policies as evidence of their non-complicity.
First of all, you're reading too much into what I said when you assume that I'm defending SGI's mistakes. Perhaps you don't know the literary reference behind "Alas"?
Second, your notions of how the movie biz works are pretty naive. Is your idea of an "Indie studio" a bunch of film geeks scraping together a few thou to make a bad horror movie? Real film making is expensive. Nowadays a "low budget" movie costs a minimum of $3 million to make. And the studios mentioned in the article spend more than that on catering!
Yeah, they can save some money buying open source applications instead of Maya. Probably not that much. I suspect that they probably buy whatever makes their animators most productive. The salaries they pay those guys dwarfs any sum they might spend on animation software.
Of course, open-source apps may have an edge if they need a feature they can't find in any closed-source app: they can just hire somebody to write the feature in. Of course, that makes the open-source app much more expensive! I don't know how often this happens, but I'm inclined to believe that most studios use a mixture of open and closed source applications.
Anyway, this isn't about applications, this is about the platform: Linux, running on commodity computers. This trend is happening not because Linux is a little cheaper than Irix. It's happening because commdity computers are a lot cheaper, crunch for crunch, then RISC computers. Commodity computers are less powerful, but with current clustering technology, you can just throw more processors at a problem and still spend less money.
I think your psychic powers are failing. I was working at SGI when they began the Linux drive. Which was never about replacing Irix with Linux. If it were, they'd be selling Linux for their MIPS-based system. But nobody would buy such a system: their existing MIPS users are all used to IRIX -- and MIPS systems continues to be their bread and butter.
What their Linux drive is about is selling systems based on Itanium processors. They simply decided it would be cheaper to join the Linux movement than to port Irix to the Itanium. They still sell both Irix/MIPS and Linux/Itanium systems. Neither of which Hollywood seems to have any interest in.
What your Linus story has to do with anything escapes me.
When you say "no contract" of course you mean "no written contract". You had a verbal contract. Depending on witnesses, circumstances etc., that kind of contract is just as binding as a written contract, though usually much harder to enforce. But they do get enforced, as Kim Basinger learned when she paid $7.4 million to get out of a verbal commitment to star in a bad movie.
But yeah, headhunters make huge commissions. Law of supply and demand. I once worked for a company that built a new building, moved its employees in, and only then realized that nobody had thought to order blinds for any of the windows. Not good: glare, security issues. So they called up a jobber, who was able to get the blinds installed quickly, but at a premium price. I heard that they tried to get in touch with her shortly later on an unrelated matter, and were told "Sorry, she just got this huge commission and is using it to take an extended vacation."
Moral being, if companies dig themselves into expensive holes (not buying blinds, not looking for that key employee until the last minute), you can't blame the people who earn big commissions for helping dig them out. Especially when they're honest enough to give you $6K that they might have avoided paying.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which made 80186 systems running a proprietary OS. This is the first time I've heard of an 80186 DOS system. I've often wondered why the industry basically skipped that processor.
You seem to have achieved geek nirvana. Inquiring minds want to know all about your hardware, OS, applications, etc.
Portability would seem to be a design goal. I'm downloading the Windows binary as we speak. There are also notes on running it on Mac (both 9 and X).
Yeah, I think somebody was mad at me. Not a big deal -- it was just a humorous post, not entirely ontopic.
You might change some conversational habits, but most of the time you'll just convince people that you're obsessed with something that most people just don't care about. If you're going to destroy your social life, you should at least do it in the cause of something that matters.
It's Greek for "Google is your friend".
As for endianness, what's the big deal? It's not that hard to make your code endian-agnostic. Juddging from the list of Frodo ports, it's just not an issue.
You talk as if the purpose of language is to communicate. How naive! The purpose of language is to avoid lawsuits!
Frodo is open source and seems to be easy to port. Shouldn't be hard to make it work on DragonBall Palms.
It's a lot more than 20 times, I think. But who's going to write good games for the platform? All the first-rate designers are targeting Gameboy.
"Palm Pilot" is the the name of a discontinued model. The platform is just "Palm". And please, we've heard all the masturbation jokes!
CmdrTaco's reaction was typical of what I heard from many geeks, on Slashdot and elsewhere. It didn't occur to them that reducing download time by a factor of 30 was a big step forward. Interesting oversight. I saw it right away, and I usually don't grok performance issues.
You think Phoenix is the only company in the world capable of writing an onboard ROM? Jeez, they didn't even invent the thing -- they just reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS. Their main accomplishment was to invent the clean room technique, which allowed them to do reverse-engineering without violating trade secrets or copyrights. Whoops, they didn't even do that -- Wikipedia says that Compaq did it first.
Face it, Microsoft dictates what desktop hardware looks like. This is not a good thing, but it's not an easy thing to change.
Still, I think page clutter had less to do with Infoseek's downfall than Disneys' total neglect of technology. I remember when I first heard about Google in '99. Then their only claim to fame was an innovative hit ranking system. I tried it, thought, "Cool, but they need to work on their spidering," and went back to Infoseek and Altavista. Well, they did work on their spidering. And their filtering. And their syntax. And a lot of other stuff. While the competition, which had all become media properties, neglected technology in favor of marketing. You know the results.
But as I said, Infoseek was doomed in any case. Low level stuff like a "near" operator is useful to the geek, but it's the sophisticated stuff you don't see that has turned "Google" into a verb.
Now, there's a danger with Big Ideas -- they make it hard to deal with the practical reality. You can argue all you want that the patent system, and other IP concepts, have outlived their usefulness. You might even convince a lot of people that you're right. (I, for one, am half-convinced already, and I haven't even looked at your links.) But that's not very useful. Big Ideas do nothing to address the enormous economic and political power of IP enterprises. Which consist, incidentally, not just of rich corporate execs, but also thousands of ordinary schmos. Including a lot of Slashdotters -- high tech still relies mainly on copyrights and patents to protect its assets.
With so many people dependent on the current system, proposals to start from scratch are simply irrelevent. (Unless the whole system simply breaks down, in which case IP issues are the least of our problems.) If you want to make a difference, you need to think in terms of resisting the growing abuses of the IP system, and maybe pushing back a little. That kind of change comes from simple hard work, not Big Ideas.
On the other hand, when IE first appeared it really was something of a joke. It was just a rebranded version of Spyglass Mosaic that Microsoft hurriedly licensed when they realized that they'd ignored the Internet for too long. Lots of silly bugs and poorly designed features.
But that's all beside the point. I wasn't talking about the browser war -- I never even mentioned browsers. IE played a part in destroying Netscape, but only a small part. Netscape's main source of revenue was supposed to be on the server side. This was true even before Microsoft destroyed the market for browsers by making IE a freebie. But once Microsoft became a competitor, Netscape had no hope of selling its server software or integration services.
I remember a news article, '97 or thereabouts, about Netscape and MS competing for a major integration contract. (Can't remember the name of the customer.) MS, being late to the party, didn't even jump in until Netscape almost had the whole thing wrapped up. All the specifics had been negotiated and agreed to, and only the final formalities were left. Then MS beseiged the customer with a massive sales pitch, a huge and expensive prototype, and of course a lowball bid. (When you have MS's revenue streams, you can afford to take a huge loss just to get a long-term customer.) Netscape never knew what hit them.
That sort of thing explains most of MS's dominance of the software market. But it doesn't work against somebody like Google, which essentially depends on millions of small customers who can't be easily turned.
You really should read a message all the way through before hitting that reply button.
More correct to say that bogus placement cheats Google out fairly-earned ad revenue. Perhaps that's why they work so hard defeating this kind of spam. But I like to think that they're mainly motivated by the desire to have the best search results possible.
That's why I have to laugh whenever I read stories speculating that Microsoft might do to Google what they did to Netscape. It's one thing to steal a big consulting/integration contract by throwing lots of marketing and engineering resources at the customer. But to dominate the search engine world, you have to earn and maintain the trust of millions of users who pound on your engine every single minute. I used to think that Infoseek, Altavista, and the others died solely from corporate neglect. That's partially true, but they were doomed anyway, as soon as Google appeared. Because none of them ever understood what Brin and company seem to understand instinctively -- a public search engine requires hard work on a huge scale, and it never stops.
You're quite right, American entertainment conglomerates are afraid to make their audiences do any work. Like read subtitles. Or follow complicated plots. Or deal with moral ambiguity....
Most security measures serve to make people feel more secure, not make them safer. As witness the Maginot Line and the NRA.
Though it does occur to me that a bank might have non-security reasons for insisting that safe-deposit boxes be accessed privately. Many boxes contain contraband, "dirty" money, and other stuff the bank works very hard at not knowing about. If they get in legal hot water, they can point at their see-no-evil policies as evidence of their non-complicity.
Second, your notions of how the movie biz works are pretty naive. Is your idea of an "Indie studio" a bunch of film geeks scraping together a few thou to make a bad horror movie? Real film making is expensive. Nowadays a "low budget" movie costs a minimum of $3 million to make. And the studios mentioned in the article spend more than that on catering!
Yeah, they can save some money buying open source applications instead of Maya. Probably not that much. I suspect that they probably buy whatever makes their animators most productive. The salaries they pay those guys dwarfs any sum they might spend on animation software.
Of course, open-source apps may have an edge if they need a feature they can't find in any closed-source app: they can just hire somebody to write the feature in. Of course, that makes the open-source app much more expensive! I don't know how often this happens, but I'm inclined to believe that most studios use a mixture of open and closed source applications.
Anyway, this isn't about applications, this is about the platform: Linux, running on commodity computers. This trend is happening not because Linux is a little cheaper than Irix. It's happening because commdity computers are a lot cheaper, crunch for crunch, then RISC computers. Commodity computers are less powerful, but with current clustering technology, you can just throw more processors at a problem and still spend less money.
What their Linux drive is about is selling systems based on Itanium processors. They simply decided it would be cheaper to join the Linux movement than to port Irix to the Itanium. They still sell both Irix/MIPS and Linux/Itanium systems. Neither of which Hollywood seems to have any interest in.
What your Linus story has to do with anything escapes me.
But yeah, headhunters make huge commissions. Law of supply and demand. I once worked for a company that built a new building, moved its employees in, and only then realized that nobody had thought to order blinds for any of the windows. Not good: glare, security issues. So they called up a jobber, who was able to get the blinds installed quickly, but at a premium price. I heard that they tried to get in touch with her shortly later on an unrelated matter, and were told "Sorry, she just got this huge commission and is using it to take an extended vacation."
Moral being, if companies dig themselves into expensive holes (not buying blinds, not looking for that key employee until the last minute), you can't blame the people who earn big commissions for helping dig them out. Especially when they're honest enough to give you $6K that they might have avoided paying.