What is most impressive about this to me is that they did it using Linux over IRIX. Why? Because this has provent to be Linux's weakest point: scalability.
Maybe that was true Three years ago when SGI announced its Itanium/Linux strategy. But I imagine they've put a little effort into it since then.
This new system is news, but it's hardly groundbreaking news. Back in '99, SGI spun off MIPS and announced they would do commodity systems -- including supercomputers with commodity processors. At that they had a choice: port IRIX to the Itanium, or teach Linux to scale so they could use it on their supercomputers. It's been no secret that they chose the latter. Or why: it was less expensive, and catered to an established user community.
Note that Itanium/Linux systems are not meant to replace MIPS/Irix systems. Unless they've changed their strategy since I worked there, SGI plans to keep developing Irix systems for another 10 years, at least. Of course, that depends on maintaining loyalty to Irix solutions, and the buzz is that they're having trouble with that.
Well, yeah, you have a right to express any opinion on any subject whatsover. Even when you're opinions are totally ignorant. Doesn't make you less ignorant.
Hey, do write code? Do you enjoy doing it? Many people do, because it can be an esthetic experience -- good code is beautiful. Do you get pissed off when somebody who doesn't understand what you're doing criticizes your work? Bet you do.
Actually, that goes for anything you might do for a living -- putting up buildings, selling cars, whatever. If you enjoy your work, you probably take pleasure in doing it well. You might accept criticism, but you'd think that ignorant criticism is stupid. And you'd be right.
Or music. What kind do you like? Do you enjoy dancing to it? How do you feel when somebody with two left feet criticizes your favorite music as "noise"?
If you think this self-smashing computer is stupid and pointless, you're entitled to think so. I might even agree with you. (In this case I probably would!) But unless you make a serious study of what's going on, you're not entitled to make authoritative statements about it, and insult the people doing it.
Unless, of course, your name is Rush Limbaugh. But he's special!
Just because art doesn't speak to you...
on
Crushing Experience
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...doesn't mean it's not art. Most people get more out of Disney than Michaelangelo. Does that mean that Fantasia is greater art than the Pieta?
That being said, I have to admit that I don't "get" most "post-modern" art either, and suspect that most of it is pretensious crap. But I understand enough to know I'm too ignorant of the ideas involved to really have a useful opinion.
The original black hole for time! But does the world really need to have ADM3a key codes tatooed on its brain?
One thing I miss from Rogue/Nethack's time-sharing days: it's pretty hard to share data files. Nothing more fun than finding the corpse of one of your friends and getting to plunder all his stuff!
Correlation is not causation
on
Layoffs at WotC
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· Score: 3, Informative
Sure PB promotes Monopoly, because that's what big companies do with their products. But how much has that to do with the product's success? The damn thing's an institution. Did anybody here not have access to a Monopoly set when they were growing up? In fact, Monopoly attained its vaunted status back during the Depression -- when makreting wouldn't have done a lot of good.
Corporate marketing people will always concede that the ultimate promotion is word-of-mouth. They do their best to create this, but they'll readily admit that it's mostly beyond their control.
Another parallel with DnD: in both games, players tend to improvise rules not approved by the publishers. In Monopoly, most players make the fine revenue into a prize you get by pulling a card at the right moment. (This change makes the game too random for my taste, but most people seem to like it.) And of course, serious Dungeon Masters use the TSR books as departure point, not a bible. In both cases, game is sustained by a critical mass of enthusiasts, not by corporate marketing.
Don't need no stinkin' recruiters!
on
Layoffs at WotC
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· Score: 2
Well, if DnD needs recruiters to survive, it's in trouble with or without WoTC! When was the last time you saw a recuirter for Monopoly? How about checkers?
In Windows you can do everything except specific drawing tasks without having a mouse.
Well, in theory, that's true. But how well implemented is this in fact? Most apps I use just don't provide keyboard shortcuts for all their actions. Or else, like Frame, they're complicated, obscure, and don't follow Windows GUI guidelines.
And even when there is adequate hot key support, it can be a pain to use. Ever try to use a web browser without a mouse? In theory, it's quite simple -- a web browser doesn't have that many actions, and all the browsers I've seen provide hot keys for every possible action. But many are context-dependent. You can't, for example use arrow keys to scroll the text unless the doc subwindow has the focus. And be careful not to use Backspace unless you're editing text, or really want to go back to previous page!
Bottom line: you can have proper keyboard support on any platform provided your app designer (including web page designers) are willing to sit down and think the problem through. Unfortunately, most aren't.
The MDI tendency directly contradicts Mac OS X, in which windows are document-centric rather than application-centric. No parent application "main window" exists--the menubar and other interface elements, like palettes, are used to constantly indicate which application is active. Document windows are only constrained by the user's desktop size (which might span single screen or multiple monitors).
That's sort of incorrect. GUI windows are fundamentally document-oriented, and unless you're stuck in a DOS mind set, application-oriented windows don't make a lot of sense. Yeah I know, a lot of you prefer them. I'll bet you use the command line a lot also!
Anyway, MDI adds a second level of navigation that's a pain to deal with, even if the app has a clean doc-window navigator -- and most MDI apps don't. I've always hated it. I guess I'm not alone, because fewer and fewer apps use MDI. Even MS Word and Excel no longer use it by default.
I don't need no stinkin' Wizards!!!!
on
Layoffs at WotC
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Do you think it will spell an end to D&D ?
You mean, will somebody go out and burn all the DM guides and monster manuals? Doesn't seem likely.
Oh, you mean will D&D software survive. That has nothing to do WotC. They only control things that are called D&D. Example:
A long time ago a undergrad name Michael Toy used the D&D fighting system and monster stats to create a Curses game called Rogue, the predecessor to NetHack. (Ignore Glenn Wichmann -- he's a legend in his own mind.) TSR didn't care for this, of course, and sicced their lawyers on him. The only result was that all the names got changed to non-D&D things. Which was actually an improvement -- there's no place in the D&D universe for my own favorite player character, the Tourist
Bottom line -- you don't need the media monopolies to play games, any more than you need them to make music. Pity about Farscape though.
There is always hope. HBO has a rather good record of picking up shows of meritable creative content that do not get network/cable support from the cronies that run them.
Not an option. Apparently USA Interactive, SciFi's parent, wants to have it both ways. They don't want to pay for more eps, but they want to retain exclusive US rights to the series. More IP hoarding!
Sorry to sound pessimistic, but networks have already long since shown that they don't want anything that doesn't appeal to the lowest common denominator.
I don't disagree. The trick is to include just enough sex and violence to get the networks to carry your show. Then you slip in some actual thought-provoking content. Look at Law and Order (well, before they became a franchise, anyway). And ER.
And in fact the creator of Firefly is Joss Whedon, who's past master of this trick. It helps that he's actually good at the violence part -- he used to make a living writing fight scenes for other people's movies.
Two weeks from now, Fox will premiere Firefly. The promos leave one with the impression that it's "Gunsmoke meets Buffy and buys a spaceship" but that's way off the mark. What's really happening is a serious attempt to do real "hard" SF. More serious, in fact, than any previous TV show -- and I don't exclude Star Trek. There are no conspiracies, latex aliens, ray guns, FTL drives, or any of the other silly baggage of previous TV SF. What it does have is people struggling to survive on terraformed planets in a remote solar system 500 years from now. Fancy technology exists, so most people have horses instead of shuttlecraft, and six-shooters instead of laser guns.
There's a heavy western/civil war feel (supposedly it's all inspired by The Killer Angels and Stagecoach), but it's not just old adventure stories in SF drag (anyone notice the similarity between Balance of Terror and The Enemy Below?). It's something new and original, and I'm looking forward to it a lot more than I ever did a Farscape ep.
This fan site has more info than does the official site, including a lot of good stills.
It might seem strange, but this sudden reversal seems consistent with the situation at SciFi. It's a pretty weird situation -- SciFi and USA Interactive's other cable networks were supposed to be spun off into a joint USA-Vivendi operation. But that seems to have fallen through. Instead, USA seems to be moving towards becoming a subsidiary of Vivendi. Except that Vivendi itself is in trouble. So they're both looking for ways to cut costs.
Yeah it's dumb. You have to spend money to make money. But it's the way business works these days. Investors see everything in terms of the quarterly bottom line. This was true even when the economy was booming and is doubly true now. The company I work for has been profitable for 8 quarters straight, has a huge amount of cash, and no long-term debt. And yet we have to jump through hoops to justify even tiny expenditures -- even ones that would obviously save us money in the long term.
The cash issue explains a lot of stuff at SciFi that had me puzzled. Their unwillingness to show Farscape episodes that supposedly had already been paid for. Their sudden disappearance of other shows because of "poor ratings". (Ratings that are poorer than the "Tales From the Crypt" reruns they used as filler?) I'm afraid the bottom line is this: SciFi's strategy of becomming a first-run entertainment provider is dead, and it's back to reruns of other networks' shows.
I can see how these phrases might equate to "A nice Debian-derived distro" -- to a Debian user. To this non-Debian user, they implied some kind of software associated with Debian.
Of course I know you didn't directly state that I was a Mac Bigot. (Have we even met?) But you did say that Siracusa was a "Mac bigot" because of his belief in Classic MacOS Metadata. By inference, anybody who shares this belief is also a "Mac bigot". Go draw a Venn diagram if you can't figure that out.
Even if that's not what you meant to say, somebody had to shoot down your linkage of metadata technology with Mac true-believers. Look, every theory has its kneejerk, dittohead followers. Has nothing to do with whether the theory is right or wrong.
But in fact, I am not dismissing Siracusa's opinions out of hand with simplistic stereotypes; I've just gotten tired of re-writing an essay on why he's wrong every time I come across a group of Mac users who think he's the cat's meow and think that hes conclusions on metadata are authoritative. If you'd like to read some of them, look on MacSlash, or look at old articles here on Slashdot where Siracusa's "definitive" articles have been posted.
You said "Until Siracusa [figures out how dumb his opinions are] he's just one more Mac bigot". Only with a rude, contemptuous metaphor to express the concept in square brackets. Does anyone else here not see this as dismissal? Don't all raise your hands at once!
First you identify Siracusa with his less intelligent followers, then you say, "it's not him, it's his followers." I think we need another Venn diagram.
As for your trauma in being forced to converse with uncritical Siracusa true-believers -- well, that doesn't mean you're not a bigot. You're still rudely dismissing Siracusa, you're just using the actions of other people to justify doing so. In other words you're a self-justifying bigot. Most bigots are.
Looks to me like you have generalized from Windows' poor implementation that file extensions are bad; the same mistake I think Siracusa makes. Believe me, file extensions are imperfect, but right now Mac OS X has the best type system available in a high-volume operating system.
OK, now that's actually a technical argument. And it's even a valid point. I have to confess ignorance of exactly how extensions work in OS X. I gather there are extension-handling feature that are better than those in Windows. But as long as a user can mung the data type of a file just by changing its name, I don't see how you can complete (or even mostly) avoid the problems I describe.
First tell me what you're talking about.
on
Libranet 2.7 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Both the Slashdot story and the Libranet main web page lack any indication of WTF Libranet is!!!!! Had to dig around before I found out that it was a distro. Come on people! I realize that writing goodful is not anybody's priority -- but "animal, vegetable or mineral" is the first part of any description.
On MacSlash, until Siracusa sees the light shining out of my ass on the evils of HFS+ metadata, he's just one more Mac bigot.
OK, you've just called me a "Mac bigot" -- since I agree with Siracusa about metadata -- and that has me scratching my head. You see I've never owned a Mac, never used a Mac for any extended period. I just don't like file extensions.
Filename extensions where invented back in command line days. They made a certain amount of sense when you didn't have a lot of different file types, or a robust file system for keeping track of them. Now you have dozens and dozens of file types.
File extensions are just not adequate to record this level of information. Too many have multiple meanings. (My favorite example is.WMZ, which means "Compressed Skin" to a certain media player and "Compressed graphic metafile" to a certain office suite -- both from the same company!) And how are users supposed to deal with them? If you have to specify an extension every time you copy or rename a file, Captain Murphy will make sure you get it wrong at the worst possible time. (Even worse for non-techies, who often don't know/forget that extensions are important, or can't remember all the ones they need to know.) If you leave it up the system, you're at the mercy of applications that play with extension associations without telling you and that impose "descriptions" that are more advertisements than useful classifications.
If there are problems with the way Classic does metadata, that's an implementation issue, not a flaw in the concept. Anyway, is file-type fascism on the Mac any worse that extension stealing on Windows?
If I have an issue with Siracusa about metadata, it's that his arguments on the subject tend to wander into obscure abstractions and complicated psychophilosophical rants. Computer science has some arcane roots, but computer people are a pragmatic bunch -- you can only convince them with specifics.
I have to comment on your use of the word "bigot". My American Heritage Dictionary defines "bigot" as "One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ." Dismissing other people's opinions by with simplistic stereotypes and scatological insults would seem to fit that definition.
I do think that he began picking at nits somewhat (who cares if people call it Jag-Wire),
Or what kind of graphics are used for the box or startup screen!
Of all the system architecture pundits I've read, Siracusa is the most literate and intelligent. But he has a certain tendency to get bogged down in minor details and issues. Which keeps him from developing much influence outside the Mac user community. Which is a pity.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it makes a nice change from the "I'm stuck, somebody tell me what to do!" pieces.
This new system is news, but it's hardly groundbreaking news. Back in '99, SGI spun off MIPS and announced they would do commodity systems -- including supercomputers with commodity processors. At that they had a choice: port IRIX to the Itanium, or teach Linux to scale so they could use it on their supercomputers. It's been no secret that they chose the latter. Or why: it was less expensive, and catered to an established user community.
Note that Itanium/Linux systems are not meant to replace MIPS/Irix systems. Unless they've changed their strategy since I worked there, SGI plans to keep developing Irix systems for another 10 years, at least. Of course, that depends on maintaining loyalty to Irix solutions, and the buzz is that they're having trouble with that.
..is a good idea. Or a bad idea, in terms of my schedule...
Well, yeah, you have a right to express any opinion on any subject whatsover. Even when you're opinions are totally ignorant. Doesn't make you less ignorant.
Actually, that goes for anything you might do for a living -- putting up buildings, selling cars, whatever. If you enjoy your work, you probably take pleasure in doing it well. You might accept criticism, but you'd think that ignorant criticism is stupid. And you'd be right.
Or music. What kind do you like? Do you enjoy dancing to it? How do you feel when somebody with two left feet criticizes your favorite music as "noise"?
If you think this self-smashing computer is stupid and pointless, you're entitled to think so. I might even agree with you. (In this case I probably would!) But unless you make a serious study of what's going on, you're not entitled to make authoritative statements about it, and insult the people doing it.
Unless, of course, your name is Rush Limbaugh. But he's special!
That being said, I have to admit that I don't "get" most "post-modern" art either, and suspect that most of it is pretensious crap. But I understand enough to know I'm too ignorant of the ideas involved to really have a useful opinion.
One thing I miss from Rogue/Nethack's time-sharing days: it's pretty hard to share data files. Nothing more fun than finding the corpse of one of your friends and getting to plunder all his stuff!
Corporate marketing people will always concede that the ultimate promotion is word-of-mouth. They do their best to create this, but they'll readily admit that it's mostly beyond their control.
Another parallel with DnD: in both games, players tend to improvise rules not approved by the publishers. In Monopoly, most players make the fine revenue into a prize you get by pulling a card at the right moment. (This change makes the game too random for my taste, but most people seem to like it.) And of course, serious Dungeon Masters use the TSR books as departure point, not a bible. In both cases, game is sustained by a critical mass of enthusiasts, not by corporate marketing.
Well, if DnD needs recruiters to survive, it's in trouble with or without WoTC! When was the last time you saw a recuirter for Monopoly? How about checkers?
And even when there is adequate hot key support, it can be a pain to use. Ever try to use a web browser without a mouse? In theory, it's quite simple -- a web browser doesn't have that many actions, and all the browsers I've seen provide hot keys for every possible action. But many are context-dependent. You can't, for example use arrow keys to scroll the text unless the doc subwindow has the focus. And be careful not to use Backspace unless you're editing text, or really want to go back to previous page!
Bottom line: you can have proper keyboard support on any platform provided your app designer (including web page designers) are willing to sit down and think the problem through. Unfortunately, most aren't.
Anyway, MDI adds a second level of navigation that's a pain to deal with, even if the app has a clean doc-window navigator -- and most MDI apps don't. I've always hated it. I guess I'm not alone, because fewer and fewer apps use MDI. Even MS Word and Excel no longer use it by default.
Oh, you mean will D&D software survive. That has nothing to do WotC. They only control things that are called D&D. Example:
A long time ago a undergrad name Michael Toy used the D&D fighting system and monster stats to create a Curses game called Rogue, the predecessor to NetHack. (Ignore Glenn Wichmann -- he's a legend in his own mind.) TSR didn't care for this, of course, and sicced their lawyers on him. The only result was that all the names got changed to non-D&D things. Which was actually an improvement -- there's no place in the D&D universe for my own favorite player character, the Tourist
Bottom line -- you don't need the media monopolies to play games, any more than you need them to make music. Pity about Farscape though.
Oh wait, that must be it. Never mind!
And in fact the creator of Firefly is Joss Whedon, who's past master of this trick. It helps that he's actually good at the violence part -- he used to make a living writing fight scenes for other people's movies.
Meant to write "Fancy technology exists, but is expensive, so..."
There's a heavy western/civil war feel (supposedly it's all inspired by The Killer Angels and Stagecoach), but it's not just old adventure stories in SF drag (anyone notice the similarity between Balance of Terror and The Enemy Below?). It's something new and original, and I'm looking forward to it a lot more than I ever did a Farscape ep.
This fan site has more info than does the official site, including a lot of good stills.
I guess the only topic you really care about who, "Who's the biggest jerk." You'll excuse me if I go look for a more interesting topic...
Yeah it's dumb. You have to spend money to make money. But it's the way business works these days. Investors see everything in terms of the quarterly bottom line. This was true even when the economy was booming and is doubly true now. The company I work for has been profitable for 8 quarters straight, has a huge amount of cash, and no long-term debt. And yet we have to jump through hoops to justify even tiny expenditures -- even ones that would obviously save us money in the long term.
The cash issue explains a lot of stuff at SciFi that had me puzzled. Their unwillingness to show Farscape episodes that supposedly had already been paid for. Their sudden disappearance of other shows because of "poor ratings". (Ratings that are poorer than the "Tales From the Crypt" reruns they used as filler?) I'm afraid the bottom line is this: SciFi's strategy of becomming a first-run entertainment provider is dead, and it's back to reruns of other networks' shows.
I can see how these phrases might equate to "A nice Debian-derived distro" -- to a Debian user. To this non-Debian user, they implied some kind of software associated with Debian.
Even if that's not what you meant to say, somebody had to shoot down your linkage of metadata technology with Mac true-believers. Look, every theory has its kneejerk, dittohead followers. Has nothing to do with whether the theory is right or wrong.
You said "Until Siracusa [figures out how dumb his opinions are] he's just one more Mac bigot". Only with a rude, contemptuous metaphor to express the concept in square brackets. Does anyone else here not see this as dismissal? Don't all raise your hands at once!First you identify Siracusa with his less intelligent followers, then you say, "it's not him, it's his followers." I think we need another Venn diagram.
As for your trauma in being forced to converse with uncritical Siracusa true-believers -- well, that doesn't mean you're not a bigot. You're still rudely dismissing Siracusa, you're just using the actions of other people to justify doing so. In other words you're a self-justifying bigot. Most bigots are.
OK, now that's actually a technical argument. And it's even a valid point. I have to confess ignorance of exactly how extensions work in OS X. I gather there are extension-handling feature that are better than those in Windows. But as long as a user can mung the data type of a file just by changing its name, I don't see how you can complete (or even mostly) avoid the problems I describe.Both the Slashdot story and the Libranet main web page lack any indication of WTF Libranet is!!!!! Had to dig around before I found out that it was a distro. Come on people! I realize that writing goodful is not anybody's priority -- but "animal, vegetable or mineral" is the first part of any description.
Filename extensions where invented back in command line days. They made a certain amount of sense when you didn't have a lot of different file types, or a robust file system for keeping track of them. Now you have dozens and dozens of file types.
File extensions are just not adequate to record this level of information. Too many have multiple meanings. (My favorite example is .WMZ, which means "Compressed Skin" to a certain media player and "Compressed graphic metafile" to a certain office suite -- both from the same company!) And how are users supposed to deal with them? If you have to specify an extension every time you copy or rename a file, Captain Murphy will make sure you get it wrong at the worst possible time. (Even worse for non-techies, who often don't know/forget that extensions are important, or can't remember all the ones they need to know.) If you leave it up the system, you're at the mercy of applications that play with extension associations without telling you and that impose "descriptions" that are more advertisements than useful classifications.
If there are problems with the way Classic does metadata, that's an implementation issue, not a flaw in the concept. Anyway, is file-type fascism on the Mac any worse that extension stealing on Windows?
If I have an issue with Siracusa about metadata, it's that his arguments on the subject tend to wander into obscure abstractions and complicated psychophilosophical rants. Computer science has some arcane roots, but computer people are a pragmatic bunch -- you can only convince them with specifics.
I have to comment on your use of the word "bigot". My American Heritage Dictionary defines "bigot" as "One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ." Dismissing other people's opinions by with simplistic stereotypes and scatological insults would seem to fit that definition.
Of all the system architecture pundits I've read, Siracusa is the most literate and intelligent. But he has a certain tendency to get bogged down in minor details and issues. Which keeps him from developing much influence outside the Mac user community. Which is a pity.