Several years back when I had the chance to try out the various versions of BeOS on the hardware available at that time, it wasn't significantly better than its contemproraries. The file system was interesting, but having applications depend on features of the file system is a great way to create a software ghetto, like the Mac was before OS X: metadata about the file belongs in the file system. Metadata about the contents of the file belongs in files. The object oriented API might have been interesting, but it was too heavily based on an oddball OO language that was particularly hard to work with: C++. The kernel was intended to be part of a "Media OS", but it didn't make any attempt to provide real-time support.
There were some nice features in the shell (Tracker), but they could have been implemented on a conventional OS.
Performance was poor. The only OS it outperformed on the same hardware was the classic Mac OS... Windows, Windows NT, OpenStep, and open source UNIX were all faster. Of course the contemporary Mac OS was near its nadir of performance.
When the rumors of Apple picking it up, I was somewhat hopeful... it was definitely better than what they had.
When Palm picked it up I was horrified. Palm's existing OS was far better suited for the PDA, and it was looking like Palm was going to end up with some really nice and cheap handhelds... if yo could get a Palm to retail for under $50 (a target they could have easily met and suprassed by now) everyone would be using them in high school instead of calculators, and they'd have no competition. But instead of doing what they did best, they decided to go after Microsoft on Microsoft's turf... and went from an easily-maintained 80% of the handheld market to "who's going to buy them"?
BeOS? It's a poison pill. The Amiga of the '90s, without the virtue of EVER having had a hope in hell.
The Linux community hasn't been telling the MPAA and RIAA that they can prevent copyright violations by implementing technical measures like protected mode.
Microsoft wants people to believe that this mechanism can be used to create a secure environment for DRM applications to present protected content without their output being hijacked by the computer's owner (who of course has Administrator access). They have justified many appalling design decisions in Vista by saying they are required to provide this protection... and if it can be bypassed this easily then DRM has become Microsoft's WMDs.
With appropriate CSS... OK. That can move the meta-information required to produce typeset quality documents into the CSS defined for that purpose, as well as good online documentation with a suitable CSS file...
I'm against any law designed to force out any specific competitor from any market...
I guess you don't realise that not only is there no reason Microsoft couldn't produce ODF documents, but the open source community is already stepping up to the plate with free ODF plugins for Microsoft products?
Cellphones don't need unique addresses
on
IPv6 Tested in Space
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Remembering there are about 250 million usable addresses, what if you want to IP enable 80 million cell phone customers for web, video, IM, e-mail and other services?
Since every phone has a unique address (PSTN address, AKA phone number) within the cell network, you don't even need to touch 10.0.0.0. You can give every phone the address 192.168.0.2, router 192.168.0.1, and NAT them all by PSTN at your border router.
I would *prefer* to have my cellphone be something like $CARRIER:PREFIX::$PSTN:IN:OCTETS but you don't actually need this capability.
On the other hand it's got a real GPU with real VRAM, not the apalling GMA950 integrated video that eats 64M of RAM, so it's more like the equivalent of a 320MB Intel mini. So long as you don't fire up Rosetta it's going to beat the original PPC minis, and those are still eBaying for more than the AppleTV costs.
I'd say it's a safe bet that neither one of us has any personal professional recollection of the "software technology and operating systems" of the '60s or more importantly, the business aspects of the computer industry of that era.
You'd lose that bet, friend, so I won't let you put any money on it.
if "best tech products of all time" is going to be spoken of, then the article should incorporate aircraft, gps, lightbulb, wheel and more.
Friend, I already said pretty much the same thing.
prior to [the late '80s] hi-tech stuff was limited to businesses
Maybe in Turkey, but by the late '80s every single 8-bit computer I've mentioned had already been superceded and most of them had been completely discontinued. And apart from the Apple II none of them were business machines.
My point is that "it's no more dangerous than browsing the web" is too dangerous already if you're using Internet Explorer, and the reason is that the "should I do something stupid" dialog box doesn't actually provide much protection.
If your point was that browsing the web with a Microsoft browser is already too dangerous, of course I agree, but if so you didn't exress yourself terribly well.
That's pretty amazing. If a 60 MHz FPGA (4 pipelines, 350 Mbit/s bandwidth) could do realtime raytracing with almost 300,000 polys in 2005, then when will nVidia or ATI be releasing a 450 MHz 16 pipeline 10 Gbit/s dedicated raytracer?
For example Nokia let you hold Nokia hardware, with TI chipsets, in your hands. They do not want you breaking out of the sandbox that they've set up.
Right, like I said, only people who believe they can keep someone from breaking into their own computer think that you can win even when the other guy has physical access. Cellphone manufacturers are a perfect example.
What keeps people from chipping their own cellphones isn't the technical difficulty of breaking in and unlocking it, it's that the risk of losing support or screwing up is higher than the benefit: the biggest cost of owning a cellphone isn't paying for the phone, it's paying for the service... the carriers front the cost of the phones. So Nokia's real customers... the carriers... are more interested in detecting fraud statistically than about a small fraction of their users taking their phones with them instead of taking the "free" phone when they switch to another service.
, here's the figures for March and Feb in CSV.
OS,March,Feb Windows XP,83.57%,84.33% Windows 2000,4.71%,4.75% Mac OS,3.94%,4.29% Mac Intel,2.14%,2.09% Windows Vista,2.04%,0.93% Windows 98,1.36%,1.50% Windows NT,0.80%,0.71% Windows ME,0.70%,0.76% Linux,0.57%,0.42% Nintendo Wii,-,0.05% Windows CE,0.03%,0.04% Windows 95,0.03%,0.03% PSP,0.02%,0.02% Hiptop,0.02%,0.02% WebTV,0.02%,0.02% Series 60,0.01%,- All Wintel,93.21%,93.01% All Windows only went up 0.2%, so Windows other than Vista went down 0.91% and most of the bites Vista is taking are coming from other versions of Windows... mostly XP, Linux went up 0.15% (Computerworld didn't mention that), and all Mac went down by 0.3%. And look, the Nintendo Wii went from 0.05% to nothing. I wonder what the story is there... maybe Vista is responsible?
Or maybe... well... other surveys referenced by Wikipedia and elsewhere show considerable variation, with figures as much as 25% lower for Windows... so changes less than a percent are probably not worth getting worried about.
Something you can actually put a full sized drive and regular DIMMs into, at least one decent PCI-E slot, room for 4GB RAM, a professional video card with real VRAM (none of this Intel GMA crap) and (for crying out loud) enough juice that you don't have to dangle a powered hub off it to charge your iPod!
The iMac won't cut it without some slots and bays... and a built-in KVM or at least video passthrough so you could use it with your existing KVM.
Particularly since people who bought Mac minis when they first came out didn't get the free upgrade to Tiger that came only a few months later.
Mac mini announced January 11 2005. Available January 22 2005. Mac OS X 10.4 at that time was rumored to be coming out at WWDC 2005, June 6, 2005. Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" released April 29, 2005. Cut-off date for free upgrades to Tiger: April 12, 2005.
Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" to be released "Spring, 2007". Mac OS X 10.5 rumored to be coming out at WWDC 2007, June 11 - June 15, 2007.
There hasn't been anything new at the low end (where this would matter... if you can afford an 8-core Mac Pro you're not going to blink at buying the OS again in a couple of months) in a while. It's a slow time for Mac sales.
Maintaining internal interoperability doesn't preclude the use of interfaces and protocols that lock out the competition.
In theory, you're right. In practice, with the software technology and operating systems of the '60s, it didn't happen. Whether it might have happened if IBM had tried enough to make it happen might be something worth debating over a beer in the Usenix dead dog party some time, but it didn't happen and I'm not drunk enough to care right now.
it seems way more productive (although, clearly, harder) to try and get plant cells to do this for us: harness the ion gradients in their chloroplasts, parasitize their electric potential. Most of the machinery is already there. We just need to get the voltage potential outside the cell.
Time to recycle that old joke: "Why did the $MINORITY bury batteries in his garden? He was trying to grow a power plant!"
I don't see how subscription-based business models can survive with DRM-free music.
Rhapsody isn't purely subscription... you can buy tracks and burn them to a CD, for example. If the DRM-free music meme catches on, they *will* respond to it with some way of saving your "favorites" free and clear. And whatever format they use for that WILL be compatible with the iPod, I guarantee it.:)
As an aside, my first reaction was to ask, rhetorically, how the subscription model can survive at all... but as I think about it it seems that as long as it's annoying enough to break, it's easier for their customers to go along with the subscription on the "honor system".
About the only part of the software industry that doesn't assume that you've already won if you've got physical access to the box (and getting into a JTAG port kind of implies that) are the folks who still have a dog in the DRM fight... and there's fewer of them every year.
But this means that maybe another factor of four in performance will allow for simple scenes to be fully raytraced using general purpose processors. But raytracing is an "embarassingly parallelizable" problem, so a dedicated ray processing unit (RPU, by analogy to CPU, GPU, and PPU) could probably provide that factor of four performance improvement today, per ray pipeline, and fit many more ray pipelines than generally programmable cells on the same silicon...
So does this mean we're on the edge of having raytraced rendering in specialised video cards? Will nVidia's rayForce 9Z800 show up running 40 FPS raytraced Warcraft in a few years?
i am approaching it just like a kid who has grown up in the era and which stuff had what impact in his life.
Yes, I understand that. You have exactly the same problem as the original authors... they believed time started in the early '80s, you believe time started in the mid-late '80s. If the article had been titled "50 Best Tech Products of the past quarter century", or "50 best technical products available in Turkey in the past two decades", you'd have a point.
But when you're claiming you have the "50 Best Tech Products of All Time", or arguing that something should be included in a list of the "50 Best Tech Products of All Time", then you can't cut out 90% of the world or 90% of the information revolution.
the fact that IBM's monopoly was spread out over multiple operating systems, doesn't make them any less of a monopolist.
There's nothing illegal about being a monopoly. The problem comes when a monopolist attempts to use its monopoly to leverage its position in other markets. IBM allegedly did that, BUT without a single unified API IBM had to maintain interoperability internally and so couldn't use closed interfaces and protocols to effectively lock out competition the way Microsoft can and has.
Slashdot Mirror
Several years back when I had the chance to try out the various versions of BeOS on the hardware available at that time, it wasn't significantly better than its contemproraries. The file system was interesting, but having applications depend on features of the file system is a great way to create a software ghetto, like the Mac was before OS X: metadata about the file belongs in the file system. Metadata about the contents of the file belongs in files. The object oriented API might have been interesting, but it was too heavily based on an oddball OO language that was particularly hard to work with: C++. The kernel was intended to be part of a "Media OS", but it didn't make any attempt to provide real-time support.
There were some nice features in the shell (Tracker), but they could have been implemented on a conventional OS.
Performance was poor. The only OS it outperformed on the same hardware was the classic Mac OS... Windows, Windows NT, OpenStep, and open source UNIX were all faster. Of course the contemporary Mac OS was near its nadir of performance.
When the rumors of Apple picking it up, I was somewhat hopeful... it was definitely better than what they had.
When Palm picked it up I was horrified. Palm's existing OS was far better suited for the PDA, and it was looking like Palm was going to end up with some really nice and cheap handhelds... if yo could get a Palm to retail for under $50 (a target they could have easily met and suprassed by now) everyone would be using them in high school instead of calculators, and they'd have no competition. But instead of doing what they did best, they decided to go after Microsoft on Microsoft's turf... and went from an easily-maintained 80% of the handheld market to "who's going to buy them"?
BeOS? It's a poison pill. The Amiga of the '90s, without the virtue of EVER having had a hope in hell.
The Linux community hasn't been telling the MPAA and RIAA that they can prevent copyright violations by implementing technical measures like protected mode.
Microsoft wants people to believe that this mechanism can be used to create a secure environment for DRM applications to present protected content without their output being hijacked by the computer's owner (who of course has Administrator access). They have justified many appalling design decisions in Vista by saying they are required to provide this protection... and if it can be bypassed this easily then DRM has become Microsoft's WMDs.
"Basically, we want criminals to feel comfortable that who they're dealing with is probably some other criminal and let us in on what's going on,"
When RIAA says "criminals" they mean "just about anybody".
Translating this:
"Basically, we want people to feel comfortable that who they're dealing with is probably some other actual human and let us in on what's going on,"
It's ridiculous to suggest that the typing of office workers should be stored as anything other than HTML.
//--></script><table><tr><td><P> ...
If by HTML you mean something like:
<DIV id="section" name="environment">
<DIV id="section-title">Environmental considerations</DIV>
<DIV id="section-head">...</DIV>
<DIV id="paragraph">...</DIV>
[...]
</DIV>
With appropriate CSS... OK. That can move the meta-information required to produce typeset quality documents into the CSS defined for that purpose, as well as good online documentation with a suitable CSS file...
If you mean something like:
<DIV style="..." onClick="..." onBlur="..."><IMG SRC="inline:6sta52" ALT="Environmental Considerations"></DIV>
<script type=javascript>//<!--
[...]
</td></tr></table><p>...<p>...
Then, no...
I'm against any law designed to force out any specific competitor from any market...
I guess you don't realise that not only is there no reason Microsoft couldn't produce ODF documents, but the open source community is already stepping up to the plate with free ODF plugins for Microsoft products?
Remembering there are about 250 million usable addresses, what if you want to IP enable 80 million cell phone customers for web, video, IM, e-mail and other services?
Since every phone has a unique address (PSTN address, AKA phone number) within the cell network, you don't even need to touch 10.0.0.0. You can give every phone the address 192.168.0.2, router 192.168.0.1, and NAT them all by PSTN at your border router.
I would *prefer* to have my cellphone be something like $CARRIER:PREFIX::$PSTN:IN:OCTETS but you don't actually need this capability.
By the late '80s there were several under-$1000 PC-compatibles, and the second generation Atari ST and Amiga were half that price.
WHERE there were lower-middle classes being able to buy pcs and similar level computers in late 80s ?
United States.
Australia.
England.
Canada.
Japan.
Basically, the first world.
On the other hand it's got a real GPU with real VRAM, not the apalling GMA950 integrated video that eats 64M of RAM, so it's more like the equivalent of a 320MB Intel mini. So long as you don't fire up Rosetta it's going to beat the original PPC minis, and those are still eBaying for more than the AppleTV costs.
Phenomenal graphics power... itty bitty memory space.
You can easily find as capable and reliable MP3 players for less than half the price of an equivalent iPod.
You exaggerate, I think... the Apple Tax is more like 40% than 100%.
I'd say it's a safe bet that neither one of us has any personal professional recollection of the "software technology and operating systems" of the '60s or more importantly, the business aspects of the computer industry of that era.
You'd lose that bet, friend, so I won't let you put any money on it.
if "best tech products of all time" is going to be spoken of, then the article should incorporate aircraft, gps, lightbulb, wheel and more.
Friend, I already said pretty much the same thing.
prior to [the late '80s] hi-tech stuff was limited to businesses
Maybe in Turkey, but by the late '80s every single 8-bit computer I've mentioned had already been superceded and most of them had been completely discontinued. And apart from the Apple II none of them were business machines.
I'm still missing your point.
My point is that "it's no more dangerous than browsing the web" is too dangerous already if you're using Internet Explorer, and the reason is that the "should I do something stupid" dialog box doesn't actually provide much protection.
If your point was that browsing the web with a Microsoft browser is already too dangerous, of course I agree, but if so you didn't exress yourself terribly well.
That's pretty amazing. If a 60 MHz FPGA (4 pipelines, 350 Mbit/s bandwidth) could do realtime raytracing with almost 300,000 polys in 2005, then when will nVidia or ATI be releasing a 450 MHz 16 pipeline 10 Gbit/s dedicated raytracer?
For example Nokia let you hold Nokia hardware, with TI chipsets, in your hands. They do not want you breaking out of the sandbox that they've set up.
Right, like I said, only people who believe they can keep someone from breaking into their own computer think that you can win even when the other guy has physical access. Cellphone manufacturers are a perfect example.
What keeps people from chipping their own cellphones isn't the technical difficulty of breaking in and unlocking it, it's that the risk of losing support or screwing up is higher than the benefit: the biggest cost of owning a cellphone isn't paying for the phone, it's paying for the service... the carriers front the cost of the phones. So Nokia's real customers... the carriers... are more interested in detecting fraud statistically than about a small fraction of their users taking their phones with them instead of taking the "free" phone when they switch to another service.
Something you can actually put a full sized drive and regular DIMMs into, at least one decent PCI-E slot, room for 4GB RAM, a professional video card with real VRAM (none of this Intel GMA crap) and (for crying out loud) enough juice that you don't have to dangle a powered hub off it to charge your iPod!
... and a built-in KVM or at least video passthrough so you could use it with your existing KVM.
The iMac won't cut it without some slots and bays
Particularly since people who bought Mac minis when they first came out didn't get the free upgrade to Tiger that came only a few months later.
Mac mini announced January 11 2005.
Available January 22 2005.
Mac OS X 10.4 at that time was rumored to be coming out at WWDC 2005, June 6, 2005.
Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" released April 29, 2005.
Cut-off date for free upgrades to Tiger: April 12, 2005.
Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" to be released "Spring, 2007".
Mac OS X 10.5 rumored to be coming out at WWDC 2007, June 11 - June 15, 2007.
There hasn't been anything new at the low end (where this would matter... if you can afford an 8-core Mac Pro you're not going to blink at buying the OS again in a couple of months) in a while. It's a slow time for Mac sales.
Maintaining internal interoperability doesn't preclude the use of interfaces and protocols that lock out the competition.
In theory, you're right. In practice, with the software technology and operating systems of the '60s, it didn't happen. Whether it might have happened if IBM had tried enough to make it happen might be something worth debating over a beer in the Usenix dead dog party some time, but it didn't happen and I'm not drunk enough to care right now.
it seems way more productive (although, clearly, harder) to try and get plant cells to do this for us: harness the ion gradients in their chloroplasts, parasitize their electric potential. Most of the machinery is already there. We just need to get the voltage potential outside the cell.
Time to recycle that old joke: "Why did the $MINORITY bury batteries in his garden? He was trying to grow a power plant!"
I don't see how subscription-based business models can survive with DRM-free music.
:)
Rhapsody isn't purely subscription... you can buy tracks and burn them to a CD, for example. If the DRM-free music meme catches on, they *will* respond to it with some way of saving your "favorites" free and clear. And whatever format they use for that WILL be compatible with the iPod, I guarantee it.
As an aside, my first reaction was to ask, rhetorically, how the subscription model can survive at all... but as I think about it it seems that as long as it's annoying enough to break, it's easier for their customers to go along with the subscription on the "honor system".
About the only part of the software industry that doesn't assume that you've already won if you've got physical access to the box (and getting into a JTAG port kind of implies that) are the folks who still have a dog in the DRM fight... and there's fewer of them every year.
But this means that maybe another factor of four in performance will allow for simple scenes to be fully raytraced using general purpose processors. But raytracing is an "embarassingly parallelizable" problem, so a dedicated ray processing unit (RPU, by analogy to CPU, GPU, and PPU) could probably provide that factor of four performance improvement today, per ray pipeline, and fit many more ray pipelines than generally programmable cells on the same silicon...
So does this mean we're on the edge of having raytraced rendering in specialised video cards? Will nVidia's rayForce 9Z800 show up running 40 FPS raytraced Warcraft in a few years?
i am approaching it just like a kid who has grown up in the era and which stuff had what impact in his life.
Yes, I understand that. You have exactly the same problem as the original authors... they believed time started in the early '80s, you believe time started in the mid-late '80s. If the article had been titled "50 Best Tech Products of the past quarter century", or "50 best technical products available in Turkey in the past two decades", you'd have a point.
But when you're claiming you have the "50 Best Tech Products of All Time", or arguing that something should be included in a list of the "50 Best Tech Products of All Time", then you can't cut out 90% of the world or 90% of the information revolution.
the fact that IBM's monopoly was spread out over multiple operating systems, doesn't make them any less of a monopolist.
There's nothing illegal about being a monopoly. The problem comes when a monopolist attempts to use its monopoly to leverage its position in other markets. IBM allegedly did that, BUT without a single unified API IBM had to maintain interoperability internally and so couldn't use closed interfaces and protocols to effectively lock out competition the way Microsoft can and has.