While I like these ideas, projects like this make me think that we haven't even approached the limits of efficiency in fossil fuel engines. This thing might be a concept, but VW made it now, it runs on normal diesel fuel, and gets nearly 240 MPG. This is the kind of thing that we need to explore in the near-term. While I think that pie-in-the-sky exotics are sexy, I also think that they won't be ready for production or have a working support infrastructure for years - here is something we could do now to cut our fuel usage.
Also worth noting is that the article mentions that the US gov't has blocked sales of these machines because they believe that NEC is "dumping" them on the US market - eg selling them below cost. Has there been any WTO action on these restrictions? Wouldn't this be a perfect test case for getting US trade restrictions struck down?
With all of the supercomputer posts on/. recently, I've seen a lot of talk about the various ASCI projects in the works by IBM and others. No one even mentioned this before. I'm glad to see that someone is building supercomputers for reasons other than nuclear weapons research though.
I worked at the offices of a major cosmetics firm that had an all-black dress code. I started buying people iPaq desktops, which are black and silver, and they loved it. Personally, I got sick of having a monochromatic wardrobe, but there's no actual proof that being a fashionista means that you have actual TASTE. Consider some of the god-awful things coming out of the fashion world. Oh, and I bought a couple of tangerine iBooks too, for those who wanted to subvert the system.
The article touches on an interesting point, but in my mind here is the real question: how can a democracy function when the laws and contracts that control the lives of each and every citizen are intentionally written so that normal citizens cannot read them?
What we need in this country is comprehensive legal reform: laws need to be written in plain English, with NO USE OF LATIN TERMS; court decisions need to be composed in the vernacular and freely searchable by any citizen; contracts likewise need to be composed in plain English.
Legal cooperatives that are springing up around the country are one solution to this problem, but ultimately the real solution will be to write legal documents in such a way that a high-school educated person can read and understand them.
where a couple of years ago, my next door neighbor decided to throw away his entire old Mac setup, including the monitor, modem, keyboard, mouse, and all of the cables. Everything worked - I grabbed it when I got home. The local kids' response? To spraypaint black graffitti on the monitor. No one thought to take it and play with it, and I'm pretty sure that it this neighborhood computer ownership was pretty low.
Hah, I originally typed "10 year old" before I took off my socks to count on my toes and realized just how long I've had the damned thing. Believe it or not, I actually got a job once just because the interviewer was an old-school techie and got all misty-eyed when I mentioned RLL drive technology. Who said that knowledge is a waste of brain space!
They made the most absolute rock-solid hard drives as far as I'm concerned. I have a 14 year old ESDI drive that they made and it STILL works like a charm whenever I need to grab something off of it, but in the end it didn't save them. When things become commodities like ram and hard drives have, people simply won't pay extra for quality. Unfortunately for IBM, a rep for quality was the only thing that their hard drives had going for them before the whole Deskstar fiasco, and now there isn't even that. IBM cannot and SHOULD not compete in the commodity market, so this move makes perfect sense.
Well, it turns out that my senator, Dan Inouye, who up until now has been known mostly for legislation related to WWII veteran's issues, is a co-sponsor of this bill. I used his site's (http://www.senate.gov/~inouye/index.html) feedback feature to tell him exactly how I feel about this. It's great to see that Democrats and Republicans can finally agree on something, I only wish that their point of agreement was not their willingness to sell their constituencies for industry cash. Hawaii is a small state. I fully intend to let every registered voter I can think of know how well their elected officials are serving them. Everyone should do the same.
Now if we could only get rid of the dealtime.com links every time you search for anything computer-related, Google really would be perfect. (hint: try searching for "firewire video card")
Ok, so no character or plot developement to speak of. Silly makeup and some rather cheap CGI. Stilted dialogue (Just... do... it). These are all things that I expected, and I got them. Of COURSE this was a lousy movie, but it was also creepy and provided some good scares (my date was hiding under her jacket half the time). It looks like they're gearing up for a sequel considering how the movie ended, and maybe this time they will pay a starving screenwriter living in a one-room hovel in LA an extra $50 to write an actual script. We'll see.
By far the best part of the movie was the trailer for "XXX", starring the ever-expressive Vin Diesel. I mean, how can a movie with Static-X's "Bled for Days" in the soundtrack be bad?
Remember AmiPro? Now it's called WordPro, and it's a part of the IBM/Lotus office suite that comes with a lot of computers for free but never, ever gets installed or used. Ever. There was a time, however, when AmiPro was a serious, bona-fide competitor for MS Word. I used to use it on my 286 with Windows 3.0, and it was fantastic. It did everything, it gave me real WYSIWYG (something that I associated with seriously high-end apps like Ventura, but not Word), it was just great. IBM had been promising a native OS/2 version of AmiPro for ages, and this was it - the last hope, the last light for OS/2. This was still a viable product, people were still using it and paying actual MONEY for it, and this was the suite that could (maybe) save OS/2. The release was pushed back time and time again, and when AmiPro for OS/2 finally saw the light of day, everyone wanted to put it back in the ground. It was awful, buggy, evil stuff, didn't install properly, crashed non-stop, ate files, and just plain didn't work. That was when even the faithful started jumping ship. A working version of AmiPro could have made OS/2 an operating system that you could actually accomplish normal office tasks with, but instead gave MS-boosters yet another thing to point to when they dismissed it. Ahh well.
I've used floppy distros to rescue Windows boxes for more often than I've used them for rescuing linux. NT password crackers, disk utils, tiny editors, you name it - I used to carry a syslinux disk around with me at our all-NT shop just in case, and by the time I left I wasn't the only one using them.
The mission to Mars sounds even less appealing once you consider how much cancer / AIDS / environmental / fusion / fuel cell / quantum computing / immortality / (name your favorite project) research it would replace.
I saw something on PI a couple of days ago that made me think about this. I don't remember the guest's quote exactly, but it went something along the lines of, "If you really believe that government funds not spent on one project will necessarily be spent on something that you find more valuable, then you don't know much about how our government works." It's not that money spent on NASA is taken away from AIDS or other socially imperative research; rather, money is not spent on research because the public will to spend money in that way is lacking. More or less money for NASA doesn't change that fact - I guarantee that money not spent on NASA will be spent on exploding cow research or a more modest frock for the Statue of Liberty instead, and not on AIDS or breast cancer research.
That particular edit always amazed me. Kids might be dumb, but they're not THAT dumb - I think most kids can figure out that adults do not sit around in big groups at night drinking TEA that's been pored out of huge glass bottles into little cups until they pass out. Give the kids some credit. And anyway, since when did it become immoral to show adults legally consuming alcohol? Do the characters in Law & Order go to bars and drink milk?
If it's really impossible to give grown-ups some grown-up shows to watch, then we're all doing something wrong. These parents that are yelling and screaming about cartoon violence late at night should be making sure that their kids aren't up until 1am watching TV instead.
Unfortunately Symbian R6 (and now 7 I guess) did away with a lot of the features that made EPOC so attractive to geeks. File-based UI is gone. These devices feel a lot less like a full computer than a Psion 5mx did, even though they may have more processing power (though it appears that they don't have more memory, for reasons that escape me). The Nokia 9290 is a real dissappointment for me - I was seriously considering buying one until I saw that the old UI is gone, and there's no touchscreen. While this Sony phone is pretty, I'm hoping that someone out there can do better. What I want, essentially, is the Nokia 9290 with a reasonable keyboard (a Revo-style keyboard would even be better than what they're using now), a touchscreen/stylus, and a reasonable amount of RAM. I'm unlikely to be satisfied, though.
Obviously some setups will be more shoestring than others. One of the nice things about using tiny local install of *nix with something like KDE on the server end is that you can basically throw anything at all at it. I've used virtually-abandoned Indigos for this in labs, and it works great - the same thing would work for all of those forgotten 603e and 604 Macs that most universities have laying around. You'll want a fast network no matter what you do, but for reclaiming otherwise obsolete hardware, X+KDE+remote logins is great.
I spell my name "J-O-H-N" but I pronounce it "Olivia." Get USED to it, fatso!
Seriously, this ain't ancient Rome. If you want people to call your product "ten" then you had better either use the Arabic numerals or spell out the word "ten."
We're dealing with a basic question of what kind of governance we believe in. Are there cases where we accept entire populations being forcibly integrated into larger dictatorships "for their own good"? We finally got our act together 20 years too late in East Timor - we accept that people have the basic right to choose their own governments, even if it means that they'll be poorer/more ignorant/vitamin-C deficient, whatever. The Uigers may not have a good track record of handling their own affairs, but shouldn't it be up to them to choose how they handle them, rather than their self-appointed Big Brothers?
How many times have you read a movie review that described the film in question as a "magical romp" or "delightfully funny" when it is obvious even from the ads that no one, even people who liked "Glitter", could possibly enjoy such rubbish? Is there really any difference between reviewing something that you haven't seen and reviewing things with a complete disregard for their actual quality?
We all became convinced that things that people at "normal" jobs take for granted - eg working at the same office for more than a year - were irrelevant. Hell, why work hard or show up on time when the recruiters will swarm your phone as soon as you put your resume on Monster? Before 2001, I could literally find a job within a week of starting my search, and the quality of my references or the reasons for my newly-found state of unemployment were mostly irrelevant. Imagine my horror when that all changed in April 2001. Ahh well, at least I'll get all of those taxes back thanks to making less than $10k last year.
On another note: is it my imagination, or do most of the people in that article seem like the same marketing wonks who should be the first people to be 86'ed from a failing organization anyway?
As for OmniWeb, is is a little bit crashy. If you're using the 4.1 beta, as I am, then this is to be expected. However, I haven't had anywhere near the severe crashes that you report, and I use it as my primary web browser. The only real complaint I have about OmniWeb at this moment is that CSS support is still quite dodgy, and pages that use a lot of CSS rarely render correctly. Oh, and then there are websites that run a browser check on every damned page, but the Compatibility panel has helped iron out most of those.
I purchased a pair of SGIs for the store design department of my former company. The machines themselves were great, and I have no complaints about the prices considering what we were getting. The problem is SGI's resellers - they still use an extremely antiquated distribution technique, where you have to call a reseller, ask for a quote, they get back to you, etc. Or at least they did in 2000 - I hope that that's not the case anymore. There might be a lot more companies willing to buy these things if they could just click on them at warehouse.com and avoid having to deal with jackass salesmen.
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While I like these ideas, projects like this make me think that we haven't even approached the limits of efficiency in fossil fuel engines. This thing might be a concept, but VW made it now, it runs on normal diesel fuel, and gets nearly 240 MPG. This is the kind of thing that we need to explore in the near-term. While I think that pie-in-the-sky exotics are sexy, I also think that they won't be ready for production or have a working support infrastructure for years - here is something we could do now to cut our fuel usage.
Also worth noting is that the article mentions that the US gov't has blocked sales of these machines because they believe that NEC is "dumping" them on the US market - eg selling them below cost. Has there been any WTO action on these restrictions? Wouldn't this be a perfect test case for getting US trade restrictions struck down?
With all of the supercomputer posts on /. recently, I've seen a lot of talk about the various ASCI projects in the works by IBM and others. No one even mentioned this before. I'm glad to see that someone is building supercomputers for reasons other than nuclear weapons research though.
I worked at the offices of a major cosmetics firm that had an all-black dress code. I started buying people iPaq desktops, which are black and silver, and they loved it. Personally, I got sick of having a monochromatic wardrobe, but there's no actual proof that being a fashionista means that you have actual TASTE. Consider some of the god-awful things coming out of the fashion world.
Oh, and I bought a couple of tangerine iBooks too, for those who wanted to subvert the system.
What we need in this country is comprehensive legal reform: laws need to be written in plain English, with NO USE OF LATIN TERMS; court decisions need to be composed in the vernacular and freely searchable by any citizen; contracts likewise need to be composed in plain English.
Legal cooperatives that are springing up around the country are one solution to this problem, but ultimately the real solution will be to write legal documents in such a way that a high-school educated person can read and understand them.
where a couple of years ago, my next door neighbor decided to throw away his entire old Mac setup, including the monitor, modem, keyboard, mouse, and all of the cables. Everything worked - I grabbed it when I got home. The local kids' response? To spraypaint black graffitti on the monitor. No one thought to take it and play with it, and I'm pretty sure that it this neighborhood computer ownership was pretty low.
Hah, I originally typed "10 year old" before I took off my socks to count on my toes and realized just how long I've had the damned thing. Believe it or not, I actually got a job once just because the interviewer was an old-school techie and got all misty-eyed when I mentioned RLL drive technology. Who said that knowledge is a waste of brain space!
They made the most absolute rock-solid hard drives as far as I'm concerned. I have a 14 year old ESDI drive that they made and it STILL works like a charm whenever I need to grab something off of it, but in the end it didn't save them. When things become commodities like ram and hard drives have, people simply won't pay extra for quality. Unfortunately for IBM, a rep for quality was the only thing that their hard drives had going for them before the whole Deskstar fiasco, and now there isn't even that. IBM cannot and SHOULD not compete in the commodity market, so this move makes perfect sense.
Proof that an extremely high-paid fashion designer can still make something that's both expensive AND fugly. As if we needed more proof of that.
Well, it turns out that my senator, Dan Inouye, who up until now has been known mostly for legislation related to WWII veteran's issues, is a co-sponsor of this bill. I used his site's (http://www.senate.gov/~inouye/index.html) feedback feature to tell him exactly how I feel about this. It's great to see that Democrats and Republicans can finally agree on something, I only wish that their point of agreement was not their willingness to sell their constituencies for industry cash.
Hawaii is a small state. I fully intend to let every registered voter I can think of know how well their elected officials are serving them. Everyone should do the same.
Now if we could only get rid of the dealtime.com links every time you search for anything computer-related, Google really would be perfect.
(hint: try searching for "firewire video card")
Ok, so no character or plot developement to speak of. Silly makeup and some rather cheap CGI. Stilted dialogue (Just ... do ... it). These are all things that I expected, and I got them. Of COURSE this was a lousy movie, but it was also creepy and provided some good scares (my date was hiding under her jacket half the time). It looks like they're gearing up for a sequel considering how the movie ended, and maybe this time they will pay a starving screenwriter living in a one-room hovel in LA an extra $50 to write an actual script. We'll see.
By far the best part of the movie was the trailer for "XXX", starring the ever-expressive Vin Diesel. I mean, how can a movie with Static-X's "Bled for Days" in the soundtrack be bad?
Remember AmiPro? Now it's called WordPro, and it's a part of the IBM/Lotus office suite that comes with a lot of computers for free but never, ever gets installed or used. Ever. There was a time, however, when AmiPro was a serious, bona-fide competitor for MS Word. I used to use it on my 286 with Windows 3.0, and it was fantastic. It did everything, it gave me real WYSIWYG (something that I associated with seriously high-end apps like Ventura, but not Word), it was just great. IBM had been promising a native OS/2 version of AmiPro for ages, and this was it - the last hope, the last light for OS/2. This was still a viable product, people were still using it and paying actual MONEY for it, and this was the suite that could (maybe) save OS/2. The release was pushed back time and time again, and when AmiPro for OS/2 finally saw the light of day, everyone wanted to put it back in the ground. It was awful, buggy, evil stuff, didn't install properly, crashed non-stop, ate files, and just plain didn't work. That was when even the faithful started jumping ship. A working version of AmiPro could have made OS/2 an operating system that you could actually accomplish normal office tasks with, but instead gave MS-boosters yet another thing to point to when they dismissed it. Ahh well.
I've used floppy distros to rescue Windows boxes for more often than I've used them for rescuing linux. NT password crackers, disk utils, tiny editors, you name it - I used to carry a syslinux disk around with me at our all-NT shop just in case, and by the time I left I wasn't the only one using them.
The mission to Mars sounds even less appealing once you consider how much cancer / AIDS / environmental / fusion / fuel cell / quantum computing / immortality / (name your favorite project) research it would replace.
I saw something on PI a couple of days ago that made me think about this. I don't remember the guest's quote exactly, but it went something along the lines of, "If you really believe that government funds not spent on one project will necessarily be spent on something that you find more valuable, then you don't know much about how our government works." It's not that money spent on NASA is taken away from AIDS or other socially imperative research; rather, money is not spent on research because the public will to spend money in that way is lacking. More or less money for NASA doesn't change that fact - I guarantee that money not spent on NASA will be spent on exploding cow research or a more modest frock for the Statue of Liberty instead, and not on AIDS or breast cancer research.
That particular edit always amazed me. Kids might be dumb, but they're not THAT dumb - I think most kids can figure out that adults do not sit around in big groups at night drinking TEA that's been pored out of huge glass bottles into little cups until they pass out. Give the kids some credit. And anyway, since when did it become immoral to show adults legally consuming alcohol? Do the characters in Law & Order go to bars and drink milk?
If it's really impossible to give grown-ups some grown-up shows to watch, then we're all doing something wrong. These parents that are yelling and screaming about cartoon violence late at night should be making sure that their kids aren't up until 1am watching TV instead.
Unfortunately Symbian R6 (and now 7 I guess) did away with a lot of the features that made EPOC so attractive to geeks. File-based UI is gone. These devices feel a lot less like a full computer than a Psion 5mx did, even though they may have more processing power (though it appears that they don't have more memory, for reasons that escape me). The Nokia 9290 is a real dissappointment for me - I was seriously considering buying one until I saw that the old UI is gone, and there's no touchscreen. While this Sony phone is pretty, I'm hoping that someone out there can do better. What I want, essentially, is the Nokia 9290 with a reasonable keyboard (a Revo-style keyboard would even be better than what they're using now), a touchscreen/stylus, and a reasonable amount of RAM. I'm unlikely to be satisfied, though.
Will they wrap CUPS with Cocoa?
I think it's usually other way around. Put the cocoa in the cups, otherwise you'll make a mess and burn your hand.
Obviously some setups will be more shoestring than others. One of the nice things about using tiny local install of *nix with something like KDE on the server end is that you can basically throw anything at all at it. I've used virtually-abandoned Indigos for this in labs, and it works great - the same thing would work for all of those forgotten 603e and 604 Macs that most universities have laying around. You'll want a fast network no matter what you do, but for reclaiming otherwise obsolete hardware, X+KDE+remote logins is great.
I spell my name "J-O-H-N" but I pronounce it "Olivia." Get USED to it, fatso!
Seriously, this ain't ancient Rome. If you want people to call your product "ten" then you had better either use the Arabic numerals or spell out the word "ten."
We're dealing with a basic question of what kind of governance we believe in. Are there cases where we accept entire populations being forcibly integrated into larger dictatorships "for their own good"? We finally got our act together 20 years too late in East Timor - we accept that people have the basic right to choose their own governments, even if it means that they'll be poorer/more ignorant/vitamin-C deficient, whatever. The Uigers may not have a good track record of handling their own affairs, but shouldn't it be up to them to choose how they handle them, rather than their self-appointed Big Brothers?
How many times have you read a movie review that described the film in question as a "magical romp" or "delightfully funny" when it is obvious even from the ads that no one, even people who liked "Glitter", could possibly enjoy such rubbish? Is there really any difference between reviewing something that you haven't seen and reviewing things with a complete disregard for their actual quality?
We all became convinced that things that people at "normal" jobs take for granted - eg working at the same office for more than a year - were irrelevant. Hell, why work hard or show up on time when the recruiters will swarm your phone as soon as you put your resume on Monster? Before 2001, I could literally find a job within a week of starting my search, and the quality of my references or the reasons for my newly-found state of unemployment were mostly irrelevant. Imagine my horror when that all changed in April 2001. Ahh well, at least I'll get all of those taxes back thanks to making less than $10k last year.
On another note: is it my imagination, or do most of the people in that article seem like the same marketing wonks who should be the first people to be 86'ed from a failing organization anyway?
As for OmniWeb, is is a little bit crashy. If you're using the 4.1 beta, as I am, then this is to be expected. However, I haven't had anywhere near the severe crashes that you report, and I use it as my primary web browser. The only real complaint I have about OmniWeb at this moment is that CSS support is still quite dodgy, and pages that use a lot of CSS rarely render correctly. Oh, and then there are websites that run a browser check on every damned page, but the Compatibility panel has helped iron out most of those.
I purchased a pair of SGIs for the store design department of my former company. The machines themselves were great, and I have no complaints about the prices considering what we were getting. The problem is SGI's resellers - they still use an extremely antiquated distribution technique, where you have to call a reseller, ask for a quote, they get back to you, etc. Or at least they did in 2000 - I hope that that's not the case anymore. There might be a lot more companies willing to buy these things if they could just click on them at warehouse.com and avoid having to deal with jackass salesmen.