Apple has already ported Mac OS X to Intel. And I don't just mean the Darwin open source foundation. The entire operating system including Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz and Aqua runs and runs well on Intel CPUs. At one point there was also an Alpha port but that was discontinued well before Mac OS X went beta.
Apple won't release a general Intel port of OS X. It makes no sense for them to do so. Apple makes the vast majority of its revenue through hardware sales, somewhere around 90-95%. If they released Mac OS X for Intel their hardware sales would fall dramatically. Because the unit cost of an operating system is much less than the cost of a hardware box (say $100 compared with $2000) Apple's revenues would fall precipitously.
No company can gp to Wall Street and say: I'm going to chop my annual revenues down from $8 billion to $500 million. Can you imagine what would happen to the Apple stock price if they announced this? It simply can't be done.
So why do Apple keep the Intel port of OS X alive? After all it costs real money to keep all that software running cross-platform.
There are two reasons. First as a hedge against Motorola or IBM screwing Apple on the PowerPC processor. In the last few years the clock rate (and other key performance measures) of the PowerPC line has fallen a long way behind Intel. If IBM/Moto can't get competitive again, then Apple wants the option of putting Intel CPUs into Macs. This would not mean you could buy an off-the-shelf Gateway/Dell/whatever and run OS X on it. You can bet Apple would make sure it only ran on a "real" Mac to preserve their hardware revenues.
The second reason they keep the port up is because it helps them produce better code. Having to write code that runs on more than one CPU family is a good engineering discipline. The different architectures stress different parts of the code and you will often see bugs on one platform that are hidden on the other.
So Apple already have OS X on Intel, but don't expect to see it in the marketplace anytime soon.
Well, you might or might not have to rewrite the GUI code to get it working under Linux. MS Office for OSX is a Carbon-based app, and Carbon is a wrapper around the Cocoa system that emulates the OS9 GUI API. So all you would actually need to do (in that area) would be to write a wrapper around GNUStep that provides the same interface, and in theory it would work.
Sorry no, Carbon is not a wrapper around Cocoa. Carbon is a peer API layer to Cocoa. You could (in theory) remove Cocoa entirely from a Mac OS X machine and still run Carbon apps. Carbon is an entire operating system (Mac OS 9) written on top of Darwin. Essentially it uses Darwin as an advanced Hardware Abstraction Layer.
Carbon is a very complex piece of software. It is several million lines of mainly C code that took several hundred person-years of write. Reproducing that work would be highly non-trivial, especially as you don't have the full specs.
I'm glad that Memento got nominated for the best screenplay and film editing awards. It was the most thought-provoking film I saw last year. Brilliantly written and executed with a stunning performance from Guy Pearse, it was perhaps also the best film of the year, Lord of the Rings notwithstanding. It certainly has major geek appeal, dealing with identity, memory and personality and the role of time. Its also one of the truly great "puzzle" films. It takes most people several viewing to work out what is really happening. Take a look at this Salon article (with major spoilers, you have been warned) for some insight into the complexity of this film.
I predict Memento will get the Screenplay award and that Lord of the Rings will take best picture.
Re: You paint WAY too rosey a picture rent....
on
The Laid-off Techie
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· Score: 2
You make it sound like rental pricing is actually bearable in the Bay Area. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead of being on the outer rim of the Seventh Layer of Hell, rents have fallen back to the the middle of the rim of the Seventh Layer of Hell.
I was merely pointing out the direction of the trend, not its magnitude. I agree the Bay Area and particularly San Francisco are still amongst the most expensive places on earth to live. Its just not quite as extreme as it was. Prices are noticeably down.
And I'm not sure if I would want to actually see the location of a place you could rent in the city for under a thousand per month.
Agreed, you'd have to look around the Mission or (shudder) out west in the Sunset, land of eternal fog. Friends of mine just rented a large 2 bedroom house with parking a couple of blocks from the ocean and just off the N Judah for under $1400 a month. One bedroom apartments can be had for under a grand in safe, decent but unexciting neighborhoods.
And housing for under $350,000? Again, where? Seriously, I want to know.
SOMA. Really. All those "live/work" lofts that were fetching way above half a million last year are now sitting empty. I'm seeing a lot of them advertised around the $350,000 mark. Look on Potrero Hill, particularly the east side - a lot of new development there that just can't be sold, so is going at (relatively for SF) firesale prices. Look out on the west side of the City, the Richmond, the Sunset, there are bargains to be had. Even neighborhoods like Glen Park are getting cheaper.
Of course you won't find a luxurious 3 bedroom apartment with views on Telegraph Hill, but if you are prepared to compromise you'll find good housing in decent places for much less than I paid for my house 18 months ago (sob:-)
Since you have a VisorPhone attachment can you use both your VisorPhone and your regular cell phone? I'm sure you cannot use the services concurrently, but can you say turn off your cell phone and then use your VisorPhone or vice versa? I'm interested in using the VisorPhone on occasion, but I'm in no rush to replace my cell phone since its form factor is much smaller. Thanks for any help.
I don't have a cell phone, I just have my VisorPhone. I would guess that you can't do what you are describing since most cellular services are tied to the SMID card in your cell phone. As you phone and VisorPhone have separate SMID cards the network would see them as different devices and require you to have two accounts. The only way around this is that the VisorPhone does use an SMID card, so you could swap the card between the devices. This would be a monumental pain in the butt, though.
The Time.com article quotes the need for daily recharging.
I'd say this is about right. My VisorPhone requires recharging once a day if I'm using it to make calls, it will last nearly 3 days on a full charge on standby. I'd guess the power drain of the Treo is similar to a Handspring+VisorPhone.
I've been using a Handspring Visor and VisorPhone attachment for a little over a year now. For those who don't know, the VisorPhone is a plug-in Springboard module that adds a cell phone to your Visor. Its sort of the prototype for the Treo.
I really like the VisorPhone, although its not without drawbacks. Its a little large; well actually the combined unit is a little large. It defintely looks a little geeky, and I think the Treo will be worse - Captain Kirk anyone? I'm using the Cingular service here in San Francisco and the reception is not great. I sometimes find I am struggling to get a signal when other cell phone users aren't.
All that being said I like the VisorPhone lots and will probably upgrade to a Treo Real Soon Now. The main advantages are having only one unit to carry around (I'd have a Palm device anyway); having everything always synched up (again I'd be synching my Palm anyway, this way my phone book gets updated as well); good software integration into the standard PalmOS apps; and I can play DopeWars on my phone.
Just don't drop it. I've had to replace the screen 3 times. One of the biggest features of the Treo for me is that flip up screen cover...
Here in San Francisco - the epicenter of the dot-com boom and bust - the market is grim. Finding work, even if you are highly qualified and experienced is a slow, brusing experience. If all you have is a reasonable degree and a couple of years experience at some failed dot-com, then its essentially impossible to find work in the high-tech sector and damn hard to find it elsewhere.
Over the summer of 2001 the City was flooded with laid off tech workers. For several months you literally could not hire a moving truck from any Bay Area rental company. Every one was hired and heading back east as yet another dot-commer left the City.
Its not all bad news, however. Housing costs in San Francisco are falling back from the ludicrous heights they reached a year or two back. Its now possible to rent in the City for less than $1000 a month. You can now buy a decent home for less than $350,000. Neither was possible two years ago. The City is also becoming more civilized again as the white heat of the boom years cools down a little.
Its also possible to detect a very slight improvement in the job market. This is partly because so many people have left the local market: noticeably fewer people are competing for the few jobs that come up. Its also true that as the economy slowly, slowly begins to come alive again, a few companies are starting to hire again.
But it will be a long time before we truly recover. Anyone remember the mid 80's?
Re:The hardware is the software
on
Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 4, Insightful
One thing that's always bothered me about the AI debate is that the thinking for a long time has centered around how to model intelligence on silicon.
Actually this is not true, for example an early AI system was constructed to play tic-tac-toe on a computer using matchboxes and marbles. No silicon at all.
One of the fundmental results of computing (discovered by Alan Turing, the first researcher in the field of AI) is that there is a basic set of computable functions. It doesn't matter what hardware you use, the set of things you can compute is ultimately the same. An interesting question is whether human-like intelligence is a combination of functions from the computable set or not. People like Roger Penrose argue that there is something more than computable functions going on in the human brain (he calls it the "divine spark"). In my opinion that's nonsense.
If an AI system can be built using computable functions it doesn't matter what hardware you execute it on (apart from perfromance issues). The results will be the same.
To me the true marvel of the mind is the holographic quality of intelligence and the way in which the physical form of the brain influences, and is shaped by, the quality and nature of one's thoughts.
You should look into neural net research. This uses massively parallel networks of artificial neurons to simulate the real structure of the brain. Its an important branch of AI research. Of course neural networks can be completely simulated on traditional computer hardware. Again, the hardware is not the key, its totally down to the software you run.
By the way, what do you mean "holographic" nature of intelligence. I don't understand what you are trying to imply with this term.
It will be exciting to see what part the new polymers can play in this research.
In my opinion, none, except perhaps to give us faster computers. They can do nothing to change the fundamental computations that are taking place.
What's really sad is that DVD is a terrible random access format. Each time I hit "skip", or "menu", or some other button, I get a ten-second intro animation that the DVD producer thought was clever...
And that's the point - this sort of poor interface design is not the fault of the DVD format. Its the fault of bad designers. Don't blame the paintbrush because the artist paints a bad picture, and don't blame the DVD format for the poor design of the producers.
For some people, the 50 hours/tape feature may be exciting. That's about 70 hours of TV if you cut out the commericals.
As we know from the non-consumer electronics world (i.e. computers) tape is a great archive mechanism but is lousy for random access. The problem with putting 70 hours of TV onto a digital tape is that I rarely want to watch 70 hours of back-to-back TV shows. More likely I'll want to find that kicking episode of Buffy that's somewhere on the tape. I don't want to have to play through 35 hours of other things to find it.
So although 70 hours of TV on a single tape sounds appealing, in practice I suspect that this format is going to lose out to recordable DVD technologies.
The Filewalker is definately interesting, but the text input method seems like it would be a pain. The biggest drawbacks are:
text entry will be slow because it is essentially a serial-access device not a random-access one like a keyboard
you have to be looking at the screen as you type, because you need to see which column of letters is in view.
An interesting alternative would be a device like this that used a chording keyboard. These were pioneered by a British company called Microwriter who built a device called the Agenda back in the early '80s. This had a text entry system that uses five keys - different combinations ("chords") of keys generate different letters. It takes a while to learn the chords, but once you know them you can type one-handed, relatively rapidly and without having to look at the screen. Chording keyboards may also be less liable to cause RSI.
For more information about chording keyboards, see this FAQ
(IANAL, of course). This is the silver lining to the disappointing outcome to the government's anti-trust case. While I would have preferred the anti-trust case to have resulted in a breakup of Microsoft or other strong measures against the company, it did at least hold that Microsoft was a monopoly.
This allows other companies large and small to launch their own suits against Microsoft and have a good shot at winning. This could end up costing Microsoft a huge amount of money and effectively curtailing their worst business practices.
While appreciating the humor, actually I convert all my CDs into digital form and store them on my computer because:
Its something reliable that gets backed up with my hard drive, not fragile like an easily scratched/broken/chipped CD.
I can control the quality of the sound, and trade off quality and storage space to my needs.
And, what the heck, its not physical so I can easily find the music I want and I don't have hundreds of annoying metallic discs cluttering up my living space.
Uh huh, we better not "disenfranchise" the market principle that has given us such wonderful companies like Microsoft, and organizations like the MPAA.
I just knew someone would make this argument. Its the equivalent of the person who tries to end every political argument with "yeah well Hitler believed what you do, so you must be wrong". Its surprising how effective and widely applicable that can be; try it sometime;-).
Seriously though, there are thousands of good, well-written, valuable software packages out there. Some of them are written by Microsoft (Office on the Mac for example) most of them are not. Some of them are free, some of them are commercial. I don't mind paying for good quality product, especially if it means I know I can keep using that software in the future because its developers will be around to maintain and upgrade it. One of the things that makes me nervous about free software is what happens if a project's developers go away (sometimes because they can no longer pay the bills) - not all free software projects continue to be maintained.
I'm not against free software per se, its just that the software developers do need to be rewarded for their skills and abilities. Software development is hard and valuable and needs to be valued. It seems to me that paying for good software isn't such a bad idea.
Side note - my Windows 2000 machine stays up pretty well. I've only had it crash once in the last year, and that's my development box. Windows used to be awful, its got a lot better. One of the key traits of Microsoft is they do improve their products, they do fix their bugs, they do add new features. Why? Because people pay for these improvements. Is the market perfect? Far from it. Has it "failed miserably"? Not in my book.
Of course it costs money to develop and distribute software. Its good to see an Slashdot article highlighting this.
But more intriguing is the suggested solution. So there are various funds I can contribute to that will renumerate some or all of the people working on free software. That's interesting but surely it has a fatal flaw.
By pooling donations to be split amongst projects you are diminishing a lot of the power of your money. When I pay for a software package I am saying that I want this software package, not one of the many alternatives I could have bought. The one I chose may have features I want, it may have a better UI for me, it may be more reliable, it may be more compatible.
I vote with my money and that gives me a small but significant voice in which software gets the resources to continue to grow.
I don't want to give up this power. Software should conform to my needs as the end user. The market mechanism is an extremely good way for me to express my needs in a way that the software developers will take seriously.
This is a Good Thing [tm].
Why circumvent the market principle? Why disenfranchise users in this way?
Yes, I am advocating selling software to cover its cost of development, distribution and continued production. You know, like we've always done for software and pretty much all other goods and services. Yay for selling good software for a fair price.
Of course you are right, but you're missing the point somewhat. Of course no useful system can be totally secure. However just because the system isn't perfectly secure doesn't mean we shouldn't have any security measures in place. The fewer points of vulnerability, the easier it is to control and monitor those parts of the system that you can't secure technically.
What Bush wants is not "poison-free food" but to make sure that the more egregious security problems of the Internet are solved. To extend your metaphor: if the ovens are unlocked, the food is never tested and the staff can't be trusted you're pretty much guaranteed a less-than-poison-free Thanksgiving feast.
A couple of years ago, I upgraded my PowerBook, and had the old machine spare. It's a PowerBook 5300c - a decent CPU and TFT display, but rather low-end for development...
So I took it out of its case, placed the motherboard on the back of the LCD, bought a cheap ($10) picture frame with a custom-cut border and put them together.
At the time my house had Ethernet in the walls, so I punched a hole in the wall, and put the machine on my network. Power and net were hidden, and the machine worked great. I wrote a quick app that displayed images from my collection. A wonderful way to show digital photographs you've taken.
Total cost was about $30 - I had no other use for the 5300. You could pick up a cheap laptop on eBay for $100-$200 if you don't have a spare. Bear in mind that displaying JPEGs is a very low-end task. All you really need is a decent TFT display and a network connection. Local hard disc is nice but not required.
Great fun to do, too.
I still have this working in my new house, but it now has an Airport card so I only need to wire in the power supply. This makes it easier to move it around and means I don't have to run Ethernet everywhere.
I think you're right, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. I predict we're within 50 years of cheap, programmable fabric displays. Imagine large-scale flexible material that can be programmed to display any image, still or moving. You want a TV on that wall? Just hang a sheet of fabric up and away you go. In fact every wall would be covered in this instead of in wallpaper - just walk up to a wall, press it and up comes a menu. Select TiVO, outline the area you want to view on and you're watching any show you want.
Imagine clothes made of this - they can look like anything you want. Any choice of color, texture or image. Forget those cheesy heat-sensitive tees that were popular for about a nanosecond ten years ago. Everyone could be a walking art show.
Suddenly every environment is infintely mutable. You don't like the wallpaper? Change it. Have clouds floating across your walls. Play Quake N in true surround-vision in your den. Every surface is now a monitor.
The combination of ever faster graphics processors, advanced in material science and a growing trend towards self-expression will get us there.
All true, but, surely there is a way to start a company without VC money.
Absolutely there are, and I was trying to mention some at the end of my comment. A good way is to borrow enough money to start your company. Good if you have great credit or rich parents or friends. There are also government and bank small business loans you can apply for. Or you can simply try to live off any savings you have while you try to bootstrap your business. Or any combination of these and other methods.
It seems to me that the CEOs are just as culpable as the VCs. Both are looking to get rich quick. If the original posters CEO was willing to start small and build gradually, they might have survived.
Certainly some CEOs are guilty of this. Many others are genuinely trying to build a business but don't realise just what pressure they will come under from the VCs. And this isn't just about greed and trying to "get rich quick". Most of the CEOs and VCs I've met and worked with are genuinely interested in building strong, successful, viable businesses. But you have to understand the economics of this.
VCs are usually funded by limited partners - typically large institutional investors like pension funds and banks. These limited partners want at least a 100% return on their money, otherwise why not invest in stocks or bonds which have much less risk attached? If VCs invest $10 million in each company, then the 1 company in 10 that succeeds has to make the VCs at least $200 million when it is sold before the VCs get any money back at all. Not many companies command a $300 - $400 million valuation required to generate that return within a few years of being founded.
Only companies that have a real shot at growing that fast that quickly should go the VC funding route. Otherwise, find another way to get your business started.
One of the problems that a lot of the 'dot-bombs' have seen is that their product is just fine, but occupies a niche that just isn't a large market. I worked for a company that had a half-way decent product, and the revenue of this product could have supported a dozen people, or even twenty or so. But our CEO (who couldn't add 13 and 7 correctly) was hyped, and thought we needed a 100+ employee company, and millions of dollars in investment, and that we could make billions of dollars. NO. Not every product is a revolution. Not every product needs to have a "225-person workforce"
Advice to executives: Don't hire unless you need some work done that your current employees can't handle.
This is right on the money, but remember why the phenomenon has come about. Many, if not most, of the dot bombs were funded by venture capitalists. VCs gamble large sums of money on young comapnies, knowing that only 1 in 10 of them will ever make it to a "liquidity event" (i.e. an IPO or sellout to Microsoft). So those 10% of comapnies that make it have to be worth enough to cover the investments in the other 90% of companies, plus make a big return on the total investment. That, like it or not, is how VCs work.
The upshot is that VCs are not interested in, and won't invest in, companies that aren't going to rapidly (within 5 years) grow to a large size (at least $250 million a year in revenues). The only way to get VC money is to pitch your company as that kind of opportunity. If you go to a VC with a plan to build a small but profitable company, they will politely show you the door.
This is a major cause of ridiculous business plans that have no basis in reality.
If you want to build a small, niche business you can, just don't expect to get VC money to do it - you have to find your seed capital elsewhere; rich friends or parents, huge credit card bills or another mortgage on your house.
Meccano isn't really the same as Erector. Take a look at this site which details the history of Meccano in the United States and its relationship to Erector. Meccano was the toy that budding civil engineers played with, I think most software engineers played with Lego. At least when I was growing up in the UK.
Re:Palm is just not exciting anymore
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Pocket PC 2002
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· Score: 2
Why on earth would you take a ~$300 piece of electronics to a BAR with you? Only bad things could happen. I'm assuming if you are geeky enough to have a pda then you have a cel phone that can store a bazillion numbers anyway. Just bring that, it's actually useful.
Hey, I live in San Francisco. Everyone in the bars has their PDAs on them. Great way to swap numbers, games, URLs etc. Gotta love that IR beam. Besides which my PDA is by cell phone - gotta love that VisorPhone.
Re:Palm is just not exciting anymore
on
Pocket PC 2002
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· Score: 2
Unfortunately, Palms do their jobs too well. They just work. I have no need to upgrade my HS Visor Deluxe anytime soon. It's a PDA that synchs between all my boxen, keeps my calendar, and keeps notes for me.
While there is a lot of truth in this - PDAs are not just small general-purpose desktop computers - I find I still need to replace mine every 12 months or so. Why? Because they break. Palms are somewhat rugged, but I carry mine on my belt, it gets exposed to the rough-and-tumble of my daily commute and the screens get scratched up over time. Not to mention taking it to my local bar.
I think there will be a reasonable turnover of PDAs because of this, even if they meet all your functional goals.
Bush constantly describes the terrorist attacks as being "attacks on freedom". Apparently, what he envisions as a free state is a 1984-esque totalitarian society, except that one can vote between two candidates who barely waver on the issues, and carry a gun. Is this really the only freedom we should be fighting for, and should we be prepared to give up all our other freedoms to try to kill bin Laden?
Have you ever read 1984? The restrictions on freedom that have been proposed don't come close to that. "Totalitarian" is completely the wrong word to use here, America isn't about to become anything like a totalitarian state.
Overstating the case like this does a huge dis-service to those who are making a serious effort to limit any loss of freedom. People out there aren't stupid - they know that the changes that are being proposed aren't leading to a totalitarian state. If you make these kind of obviously false and hysterical statements then it is easy for people to dismiss everything you say as nonsense.
If you want to have a serious voice and to influence the argument, then tone down the rhetoric and focus on the specifics of the proposals. Fight against those that are unneccessary and over-restrictive. Support a few, well-targeted changes to the law that will actually help fight against terrorism (if there are any). Make sure that any changes made have a suitably short time limit built into them, to guarantee that any loss of freedom is a temporary setback not a permanent change to America. That way you will have a real impact.
Flailing madly at windmills is only going make people dismiss all of your views, even the legitimate ones...
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Apple has already ported Mac OS X to Intel. And I don't just mean the Darwin open source foundation. The entire operating system including Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz and Aqua runs and runs well on Intel CPUs. At one point there was also an Alpha port but that was discontinued well before Mac OS X went beta.
Apple won't release a general Intel port of OS X. It makes no sense for them to do so. Apple makes the vast majority of its revenue through hardware sales, somewhere around 90-95%. If they released Mac OS X for Intel their hardware sales would fall dramatically. Because the unit cost of an operating system is much less than the cost of a hardware box (say $100 compared with $2000) Apple's revenues would fall precipitously.
No company can gp to Wall Street and say: I'm going to chop my annual revenues down from $8 billion to $500 million. Can you imagine what would happen to the Apple stock price if they announced this? It simply can't be done.
So why do Apple keep the Intel port of OS X alive? After all it costs real money to keep all that software running cross-platform.
There are two reasons. First as a hedge against Motorola or IBM screwing Apple on the PowerPC processor. In the last few years the clock rate (and other key performance measures) of the PowerPC line has fallen a long way behind Intel. If IBM/Moto can't get competitive again, then Apple wants the option of putting Intel CPUs into Macs. This would not mean you could buy an off-the-shelf Gateway/Dell/whatever and run OS X on it. You can bet Apple would make sure it only ran on a "real" Mac to preserve their hardware revenues.
The second reason they keep the port up is because it helps them produce better code. Having to write code that runs on more than one CPU family is a good engineering discipline. The different architectures stress different parts of the code and you will often see bugs on one platform that are hidden on the other.
So Apple already have OS X on Intel, but don't expect to see it in the marketplace anytime soon.
Well, you might or might not have to rewrite the GUI code to get it working under Linux. MS Office for OSX is a Carbon-based app, and Carbon is a wrapper around the Cocoa system that emulates the OS9 GUI API. So all you would actually need to do (in that area) would be to write a wrapper around GNUStep that provides the same interface, and in theory it would work.
Sorry no, Carbon is not a wrapper around Cocoa. Carbon is a peer API layer to Cocoa. You could (in theory) remove Cocoa entirely from a Mac OS X machine and still run Carbon apps. Carbon is an entire operating system (Mac OS 9) written on top of Darwin. Essentially it uses Darwin as an advanced Hardware Abstraction Layer.
Carbon is a very complex piece of software. It is several million lines of mainly C code that took several hundred person-years of write. Reproducing that work would be highly non-trivial, especially as you don't have the full specs.
I'm glad that Memento got nominated for the best screenplay and film editing awards. It was the most thought-provoking film I saw last year. Brilliantly written and executed with a stunning performance from Guy Pearse, it was perhaps also the best film of the year, Lord of the Rings notwithstanding. It certainly has major geek appeal, dealing with identity, memory and personality and the role of time. Its also one of the truly great "puzzle" films. It takes most people several viewing to work out what is really happening. Take a look at this Salon article (with major spoilers, you have been warned) for some insight into the complexity of this film.
I predict Memento will get the Screenplay award and that Lord of the Rings will take best picture.
You make it sound like rental pricing is actually bearable in the Bay Area. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead of being on the outer rim of the Seventh Layer of Hell, rents have fallen back to the the middle of the rim of the Seventh Layer of Hell.
I was merely pointing out the direction of the trend, not its magnitude. I agree the Bay Area and particularly San Francisco are still amongst the most expensive places on earth to live. Its just not quite as extreme as it was. Prices are noticeably down.
And I'm not sure if I would want to actually see the location of a place you could rent in the city for under a thousand per month.
Agreed, you'd have to look around the Mission or (shudder) out west in the Sunset, land of eternal fog. Friends of mine just rented a large 2 bedroom house with parking a couple of blocks from the ocean and just off the N Judah for under $1400 a month. One bedroom apartments can be had for under a grand in safe, decent but unexciting neighborhoods.
And housing for under $350,000? Again, where? Seriously, I want to know.
SOMA. Really. All those "live/work" lofts that were fetching way above half a million last year are now sitting empty. I'm seeing a lot of them advertised around the $350,000 mark. Look on Potrero Hill, particularly the east side - a lot of new development there that just can't be sold, so is going at (relatively for SF) firesale prices. Look out on the west side of the City, the Richmond, the Sunset, there are bargains to be had. Even neighborhoods like Glen Park are getting cheaper.Of course you won't find a luxurious 3 bedroom apartment with views on Telegraph Hill, but if you are prepared to compromise you'll find good housing in decent places for much less than I paid for my house 18 months ago (sob :-)
Since you have a VisorPhone attachment can you use both your VisorPhone and your regular cell phone? I'm sure you cannot use the services concurrently, but can you say turn off your cell phone and then use your VisorPhone or vice versa? I'm interested in using the VisorPhone on occasion, but I'm in no rush to replace my cell phone since its form factor is much smaller. Thanks for any help.
I don't have a cell phone, I just have my VisorPhone. I would guess that you can't do what you are describing since most cellular services are tied to the SMID card in your cell phone. As you phone and VisorPhone have separate SMID cards the network would see them as different devices and require you to have two accounts. The only way around this is that the VisorPhone does use an SMID card, so you could swap the card between the devices. This would be a monumental pain in the butt, though.
The Time.com article quotes the need for daily recharging.
I'd say this is about right. My VisorPhone requires recharging once a day if I'm using it to make calls, it will last nearly 3 days on a full charge on standby. I'd guess the power drain of the Treo is similar to a Handspring+VisorPhone.
I've been using a Handspring Visor and VisorPhone attachment for a little over a year now. For those who don't know, the VisorPhone is a plug-in Springboard module that adds a cell phone to your Visor. Its sort of the prototype for the Treo.
I really like the VisorPhone, although its not without drawbacks. Its a little large; well actually the combined unit is a little large. It defintely looks a little geeky, and I think the Treo will be worse - Captain Kirk anyone? I'm using the Cingular service here in San Francisco and the reception is not great. I sometimes find I am struggling to get a signal when other cell phone users aren't.
All that being said I like the VisorPhone lots and will probably upgrade to a Treo Real Soon Now. The main advantages are having only one unit to carry around (I'd have a Palm device anyway); having everything always synched up (again I'd be synching my Palm anyway, this way my phone book gets updated as well); good software integration into the standard PalmOS apps; and I can play DopeWars on my phone.
Just don't drop it. I've had to replace the screen 3 times. One of the biggest features of the Treo for me is that flip up screen cover...
Here in San Francisco - the epicenter of the dot-com boom and bust - the market is grim. Finding work, even if you are highly qualified and experienced is a slow, brusing experience. If all you have is a reasonable degree and a couple of years experience at some failed dot-com, then its essentially impossible to find work in the high-tech sector and damn hard to find it elsewhere.
Over the summer of 2001 the City was flooded with laid off tech workers. For several months you literally could not hire a moving truck from any Bay Area rental company. Every one was hired and heading back east as yet another dot-commer left the City.
Its not all bad news, however. Housing costs in San Francisco are falling back from the ludicrous heights they reached a year or two back. Its now possible to rent in the City for less than $1000 a month. You can now buy a decent home for less than $350,000. Neither was possible two years ago. The City is also becoming more civilized again as the white heat of the boom years cools down a little.
Its also possible to detect a very slight improvement in the job market. This is partly because so many people have left the local market: noticeably fewer people are competing for the few jobs that come up. Its also true that as the economy slowly, slowly begins to come alive again, a few companies are starting to hire again.
But it will be a long time before we truly recover. Anyone remember the mid 80's?
One thing that's always bothered me about the AI debate is that the thinking for a long time has centered around how to model intelligence on silicon.
Actually this is not true, for example an early AI system was constructed to play tic-tac-toe on a computer using matchboxes and marbles. No silicon at all.
One of the fundmental results of computing (discovered by Alan Turing, the first researcher in the field of AI) is that there is a basic set of computable functions. It doesn't matter what hardware you use, the set of things you can compute is ultimately the same. An interesting question is whether human-like intelligence is a combination of functions from the computable set or not. People like Roger Penrose argue that there is something more than computable functions going on in the human brain (he calls it the "divine spark"). In my opinion that's nonsense.
If an AI system can be built using computable functions it doesn't matter what hardware you execute it on (apart from perfromance issues). The results will be the same.
To me the true marvel of the mind is the holographic quality of intelligence and the way in which the physical form of the brain influences, and is shaped by, the quality and nature of one's thoughts.
You should look into neural net research. This uses massively parallel networks of artificial neurons to simulate the real structure of the brain. Its an important branch of AI research. Of course neural networks can be completely simulated on traditional computer hardware. Again, the hardware is not the key, its totally down to the software you run.
By the way, what do you mean "holographic" nature of intelligence. I don't understand what you are trying to imply with this term.
It will be exciting to see what part the new polymers can play in this research.
In my opinion, none, except perhaps to give us faster computers. They can do nothing to change the fundamental computations that are taking place.
What's really sad is that DVD is a terrible random access format. Each time I hit "skip", or "menu", or some other button, I get a ten-second intro animation that the DVD producer thought was clever...
And that's the point - this sort of poor interface design is not the fault of the DVD format. Its the fault of bad designers. Don't blame the paintbrush because the artist paints a bad picture, and don't blame the DVD format for the poor design of the producers.
For some people, the 50 hours/tape feature may be exciting. That's about 70 hours of TV if you cut out the commericals.
As we know from the non-consumer electronics world (i.e. computers) tape is a great archive mechanism but is lousy for random access. The problem with putting 70 hours of TV onto a digital tape is that I rarely want to watch 70 hours of back-to-back TV shows. More likely I'll want to find that kicking episode of Buffy that's somewhere on the tape. I don't want to have to play through 35 hours of other things to find it.
So although 70 hours of TV on a single tape sounds appealing, in practice I suspect that this format is going to lose out to recordable DVD technologies.
The Filewalker is definately interesting, but the text input method seems like it would be a pain. The biggest drawbacks are:
An interesting alternative would be a device like this that used a chording keyboard. These were pioneered by a British company called Microwriter who built a device called the Agenda back in the early '80s. This had a text entry system that uses five keys - different combinations ("chords") of keys generate different letters. It takes a while to learn the chords, but once you know them you can type one-handed, relatively rapidly and without having to look at the screen. Chording keyboards may also be less liable to cause RSI.
For more information about chording keyboards, see this FAQ
(IANAL, of course). This is the silver lining to the disappointing outcome to the government's anti-trust case. While I would have preferred the anti-trust case to have resulted in a breakup of Microsoft or other strong measures against the company, it did at least hold that Microsoft was a monopoly.
This allows other companies large and small to launch their own suits against Microsoft and have a good shot at winning. This could end up costing Microsoft a huge amount of money and effectively curtailing their worst business practices.
Hey, I can dream, can't I?
While appreciating the humor, actually I convert all my CDs into digital form and store them on my computer because:
Uh huh, we better not "disenfranchise" the market principle that has given us such wonderful companies like Microsoft, and organizations like the MPAA.
I just knew someone would make this argument. Its the equivalent of the person who tries to end every political argument with "yeah well Hitler believed what you do, so you must be wrong". Its surprising how effective and widely applicable that can be; try it sometime ;-).
Seriously though, there are thousands of good, well-written, valuable software packages out there. Some of them are written by Microsoft (Office on the Mac for example) most of them are not. Some of them are free, some of them are commercial. I don't mind paying for good quality product, especially if it means I know I can keep using that software in the future because its developers will be around to maintain and upgrade it. One of the things that makes me nervous about free software is what happens if a project's developers go away (sometimes because they can no longer pay the bills) - not all free software projects continue to be maintained.
I'm not against free software per se, its just that the software developers do need to be rewarded for their skills and abilities. Software development is hard and valuable and needs to be valued. It seems to me that paying for good software isn't such a bad idea.
Side note - my Windows 2000 machine stays up pretty well. I've only had it crash once in the last year, and that's my development box. Windows used to be awful, its got a lot better. One of the key traits of Microsoft is they do improve their products, they do fix their bugs, they do add new features. Why? Because people pay for these improvements. Is the market perfect? Far from it. Has it "failed miserably"? Not in my book.
Of course it costs money to develop and distribute software. Its good to see an Slashdot article highlighting this.
But more intriguing is the suggested solution. So there are various funds I can contribute to that will renumerate some or all of the people working on free software. That's interesting but surely it has a fatal flaw.
By pooling donations to be split amongst projects you are diminishing a lot of the power of your money. When I pay for a software package I am saying that I want this software package, not one of the many alternatives I could have bought. The one I chose may have features I want, it may have a better UI for me, it may be more reliable, it may be more compatible.
I vote with my money and that gives me a small but significant voice in which software gets the resources to continue to grow.
I don't want to give up this power. Software should conform to my needs as the end user. The market mechanism is an extremely good way for me to express my needs in a way that the software developers will take seriously.
This is a Good Thing [tm].
Why circumvent the market principle? Why disenfranchise users in this way?
Yes, I am advocating selling software to cover its cost of development, distribution and continued production. You know, like we've always done for software and pretty much all other goods and services. Yay for selling good software for a fair price.
Of course you are right, but you're missing the point somewhat. Of course no useful system can be totally secure. However just because the system isn't perfectly secure doesn't mean we shouldn't have any security measures in place. The fewer points of vulnerability, the easier it is to control and monitor those parts of the system that you can't secure technically.
What Bush wants is not "poison-free food" but to make sure that the more egregious security problems of the Internet are solved. To extend your metaphor: if the ovens are unlocked, the food is never tested and the staff can't be trusted you're pretty much guaranteed a less-than-poison-free Thanksgiving feast.
A couple of years ago, I upgraded my PowerBook, and had the old machine spare. It's a PowerBook 5300c - a decent CPU and TFT display, but rather low-end for development...
So I took it out of its case, placed the motherboard on the back of the LCD, bought a cheap ($10) picture frame with a custom-cut border and put them together.
At the time my house had Ethernet in the walls, so I punched a hole in the wall, and put the machine on my network. Power and net were hidden, and the machine worked great. I wrote a quick app that displayed images from my collection. A wonderful way to show digital photographs you've taken.
Total cost was about $30 - I had no other use for the 5300. You could pick up a cheap laptop on eBay for $100-$200 if you don't have a spare. Bear in mind that displaying JPEGs is a very low-end task. All you really need is a decent TFT display and a network connection. Local hard disc is nice but not required.
Great fun to do, too.
I still have this working in my new house, but it now has an Airport card so I only need to wire in the power supply. This makes it easier to move it around and means I don't have to run Ethernet everywhere.
I think you're right, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. I predict we're within 50 years of cheap, programmable fabric displays. Imagine large-scale flexible material that can be programmed to display any image, still or moving. You want a TV on that wall? Just hang a sheet of fabric up and away you go. In fact every wall would be covered in this instead of in wallpaper - just walk up to a wall, press it and up comes a menu. Select TiVO, outline the area you want to view on and you're watching any show you want.
Imagine clothes made of this - they can look like anything you want. Any choice of color, texture or image. Forget those cheesy heat-sensitive tees that were popular for about a nanosecond ten years ago. Everyone could be a walking art show.
Suddenly every environment is infintely mutable. You don't like the wallpaper? Change it. Have clouds floating across your walls. Play Quake N in true surround-vision in your den. Every surface is now a monitor.
The combination of ever faster graphics processors, advanced in material science and a growing trend towards self-expression will get us there.
All true, but, surely there is a way to start a company without VC money.
Absolutely there are, and I was trying to mention some at the end of my comment. A good way is to borrow enough money to start your company. Good if you have great credit or rich parents or friends. There are also government and bank small business loans you can apply for. Or you can simply try to live off any savings you have while you try to bootstrap your business. Or any combination of these and other methods.
It seems to me that the CEOs are just as culpable as the VCs. Both are looking to get rich quick. If the original posters CEO was willing to start small and build gradually, they might have survived.
Certainly some CEOs are guilty of this. Many others are genuinely trying to build a business but don't realise just what pressure they will come under from the VCs. And this isn't just about greed and trying to "get rich quick". Most of the CEOs and VCs I've met and worked with are genuinely interested in building strong, successful, viable businesses. But you have to understand the economics of this.
VCs are usually funded by limited partners - typically large institutional investors like pension funds and banks. These limited partners want at least a 100% return on their money, otherwise why not invest in stocks or bonds which have much less risk attached? If VCs invest $10 million in each company, then the 1 company in 10 that succeeds has to make the VCs at least $200 million when it is sold before the VCs get any money back at all. Not many companies command a $300 - $400 million valuation required to generate that return within a few years of being founded.
Only companies that have a real shot at growing that fast that quickly should go the VC funding route. Otherwise, find another way to get your business started.
One of the problems that a lot of the 'dot-bombs' have seen is that their product is just fine, but occupies a niche that just isn't a large market. I worked for a company that had a half-way decent product, and the revenue of this product could have supported a dozen people, or even twenty or so. But our CEO (who couldn't add 13 and 7 correctly) was hyped, and thought we needed a 100+ employee company, and millions of dollars in investment, and that we could make billions of dollars. NO. Not every product is a revolution. Not every product needs to have a "225-person workforce" Advice to executives: Don't hire unless you need some work done that your current employees can't handle.
This is right on the money, but remember why the phenomenon has come about. Many, if not most, of the dot bombs were funded by venture capitalists. VCs gamble large sums of money on young comapnies, knowing that only 1 in 10 of them will ever make it to a "liquidity event" (i.e. an IPO or sellout to Microsoft). So those 10% of comapnies that make it have to be worth enough to cover the investments in the other 90% of companies, plus make a big return on the total investment. That, like it or not, is how VCs work.
The upshot is that VCs are not interested in, and won't invest in, companies that aren't going to rapidly (within 5 years) grow to a large size (at least $250 million a year in revenues). The only way to get VC money is to pitch your company as that kind of opportunity. If you go to a VC with a plan to build a small but profitable company, they will politely show you the door.
This is a major cause of ridiculous business plans that have no basis in reality.
If you want to build a small, niche business you can, just don't expect to get VC money to do it - you have to find your seed capital elsewhere; rich friends or parents, huge credit card bills or another mortgage on your house.
Meccano isn't really the same as Erector. Take a look at this site which details the history of Meccano in the United States and its relationship to Erector. Meccano was the toy that budding civil engineers played with, I think most software engineers played with Lego. At least when I was growing up in the UK.
Why on earth would you take a ~$300 piece of electronics to a BAR with you? Only bad things could happen. I'm assuming if you are geeky enough to have a pda then you have a cel phone that can store a bazillion numbers anyway. Just bring that, it's actually useful.
Hey, I live in San Francisco. Everyone in the bars has their PDAs on them. Great way to swap numbers, games, URLs etc. Gotta love that IR beam. Besides which my PDA is by cell phone - gotta love that VisorPhone.
Unfortunately, Palms do their jobs too well. They just work. I have no need to upgrade my HS Visor Deluxe anytime soon. It's a PDA that synchs between all my boxen, keeps my calendar, and keeps notes for me.
While there is a lot of truth in this - PDAs are not just small general-purpose desktop computers - I find I still need to replace mine every 12 months or so. Why? Because they break. Palms are somewhat rugged, but I carry mine on my belt, it gets exposed to the rough-and-tumble of my daily commute and the screens get scratched up over time. Not to mention taking it to my local bar.
I think there will be a reasonable turnover of PDAs because of this, even if they meet all your functional goals.
Bush constantly describes the terrorist attacks as being "attacks on freedom". Apparently, what he envisions as a free state is a 1984-esque totalitarian society, except that one can vote between two candidates who barely waver on the issues, and carry a gun. Is this really the only freedom we should be fighting for, and should we be prepared to give up all our other freedoms to try to kill bin Laden?
Have you ever read 1984? The restrictions on freedom that have been proposed don't come close to that. "Totalitarian" is completely the wrong word to use here, America isn't about to become anything like a totalitarian state.
Overstating the case like this does a huge dis-service to those who are making a serious effort to limit any loss of freedom. People out there aren't stupid - they know that the changes that are being proposed aren't leading to a totalitarian state. If you make these kind of obviously false and hysterical statements then it is easy for people to dismiss everything you say as nonsense.
If you want to have a serious voice and to influence the argument, then tone down the rhetoric and focus on the specifics of the proposals. Fight against those that are unneccessary and over-restrictive. Support a few, well-targeted changes to the law that will actually help fight against terrorism (if there are any). Make sure that any changes made have a suitably short time limit built into them, to guarantee that any loss of freedom is a temporary setback not a permanent change to America. That way you will have a real impact.
Flailing madly at windmills is only going make people dismiss all of your views, even the legitimate ones...