But let's not call iPhone a success yet. It had an exciting demo that got a lot of buzz. It hasn't sold a single unit yet. Expectations are sky high already, so if this one doesn't do as well for some reason -- or even if it just has a slow start for whatever reason -- the perception could be that it's a disappointment, under-performer, or outright failure. It's hard to imagine it being a complete failure, but at the price tag that they're commanding, it's not like you can guarantee its success.
From what I've heard, Turbo Memory won't be supported by Windows XP, only Vista. Like a lot of sane people, and even most government agencies, I won't even think about running Vista until sometime next year, when they release a Service Pack or two that unfucks a lot of Vista's inherent shittiness.
Is there/will there be support for it in OS X or Linux? It'd be nice...
Don't get me wrong, I think a $100 markup for 2-button would be ridiculous, but that's how badly I want one... at this point, I'd be willing to actually blow a Benjamin just to have that feature. If you compare it to the markup premium on a BlackBook, it's about as reasonable to pay extra for a Black notebook as it is to pay for a 2-button notebook... but people are willing to do it.
Sure, that'd be possible, but it really should be necessary to perform hardware mods on something you spend $3000 for. If it's going to cost me that much, it'd better come the way I want it. I don't mind hacking hardware, but for the cost and the fact that it'd almost certainly void the warranty, I'd have to pass on that as a feasible, but not realistic option.
It wouldn't take a whole lot for apple to make it a purchasable option, though. Even with a $100 markup for the extra button, I'd do it.
So when can I get a 2-button trackpad? Come on, Apple, that's just one mouse button per core. I want a real button, not a clever software simulation of two buttons. Just humor me, I'm dying to buy one of these babies.
You also didn't have any sort of protetected memory back in 1986. The damn things would lock up on you and you'd have to reboot, often dozens of times per day. Crashing an application took down the whole system. It was often trivially easy to induce software crashes. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing at all could result in an app crashing. Memory leaks were quite common. When you did crash, anything you were working on was lost to the last time you saved, assuming it wasn't corrupted. Working around this often felt like that joke that starts out, "Doctor, it hurts whenever I do this!"
We made "working copies" of files in order to prevent this from causing the loss of important files that represented weeks or years of effort. Things like multiple Undo, Auto-save, and data recovery hadn't been invented or perfected yet.
You had to micromanage system resources, manually allocating how much RAM each application took, and when an app launched, it grabbed its full allocation at launch time whether it actually needed that much RAM or not. When it hit the limit you set for it, it couldn't go back to the system and get more; you'd have to Quit and manually bump up the allocation and hope that it was enough.
Font management on these systems was terrible. Font suitcase files disobeyed the normal rules for files, making it quite difficult to simply move them from one location to another. The font files often got corrupted from simple use, meaning you had to keep offline backups of all your fonts. If a critical system font went corrupt on you, good luck fixing the problem.
The hard drive was so tiny, you'd have to come up with really ingenious ways of compressing each and every last file to keep enough free space to do everything. This was back when CPU resources were so scarse that the cost of compressing and decompressing files was palpable (especially on single-tasking systems). You could spend an entire afternoon or day just screwing around with this stuff. Data compression could result in corruption, so if you were smart you kept offline backup copies of all your compressed data on floppies.
Speaking of hard drive problems, filesystem corruption was common, could render your system unbootable, and you needed to purchase a 3rd-party tool like Norton Disk Doctor just to do routine maintenance tasks like defragging and error checking/correction. On the plus side, these tools usually did work (although when they didn't they could cause you to lose data -- particularly defraggers). You always wanted to make backups of important files before you did anything involving the filesystem... which meant having stacks and stacks of floppy disks... which were really slow and required you to work with spanned compressed files. Fortunately floppy disks were made better back then.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is there's no way in hell I'd ever think about going back to using systems from that era. It's so painful to think about. Today's computers do so much more, so much better, it's not even funny. Speed and responsiveness isn't the only thing to think about when comparing between eras. Sure there's stuff now that's bloated beyond reason, features I never asked for or use, but I'd gladly live with that than have to go back to manually managing my OS's extensions load order (by carefully renaming the files so that they'd boot in correct alphabetical order, no less!) in order to produce a semblance of stability.
Yeah, but what happens when Valve decide to drop Steam services, or go out of business? I can still install HL1 on a computer today and play it. I don't think I've played the original H-L since I upgraded to Windows 2000, so possibly I might have to keep a Win98 box around or something, at some point in order to do that, but at least I don't have to build a replicated Steam service (which I know of no legal way how to do) on my home LAN in order to be able to play H-L2 indefinitely.
If Valve wants to ever drop the Steam service, they're going to need to provide some sort of unlock to the community of users so that they can keep playing long after they turn out the lights for the last time at Valve HQ. If they do this, then my opinion of them is considerably changed.
The happiness of society is the end of government. -- John Adams
I wonder if John Adams is using the word "end" in a way that is synonymous with "goal", rather than to suggest that he's some sort of radical anarchist. Do you have the context for the quote?
Content producers will wonder why they can't get you to pay for the bits WITH commercials, just like how there's commercials on cable TV. Eventually it'll happen.
Content producers will want you to stream the bits so that you'll have to pay-per-view, won't be able to copy for personal use, excerpt for purposes of commentary, criticism, or parody, or share with friends, or rewind for instant replay.
People will wonder why they have to pay their cable ISP for internet access AND Cable TV content that they can stream and PVR, and then have to pay yet again to download or stream lower-quality video from the internet. If they can even comprehend that there's a difference.
Pirates and other outlaws will keep on proving that maxim from Serenity, "You can't stop the signal."
far as im concerned they should require someone to/actually drive/ the damn car through an/actual city/ and average the results to get the fuel rating.
How can you do this in a way that will result in reproducible results? If I want to contest the findings, I'd need to be able to verify them independently by performing a controlled experiment. Real driving does not offer any controls to the experiment -- you'll get too many variables and won't have a clear picture of what you're actually observing.
To see intuitively how that happens, you just need to note that the rising third party will draw its support from the ranks of the major party that is most similar to it, thus effectively strengthening the major party that is most different from it.
But the Republican and Democrat parties are most similar to each other, and the most different party would be an improvement over either of them, whether that be Libertarian, Green, Communist, etc.
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But let's not call iPhone a success yet. It had an exciting demo that got a lot of buzz. It hasn't sold a single unit yet. Expectations are sky high already, so if this one doesn't do as well for some reason -- or even if it just has a slow start for whatever reason -- the perception could be that it's a disappointment, under-performer, or outright failure. It's hard to imagine it being a complete failure, but at the price tag that they're commanding, it's not like you can guarantee its success.
From what I've heard, Turbo Memory won't be supported by Windows XP, only Vista. Like a lot of sane people, and even most government agencies, I won't even think about running Vista until sometime next year, when they release a Service Pack or two that unfucks a lot of Vista's inherent shittiness.
Is there/will there be support for it in OS X or Linux? It'd be nice...
Yeah, if all I'm doing is running OS X. How well does Windows run with the single-button mouse if you dual boot?
If I dual-boot into Windows, will the 2-finger input work? Or will I be stuck with a 1-button dumbpad in Windows?
Don't get me wrong, I think a $100 markup for 2-button would be ridiculous, but that's how badly I want one... at this point, I'd be willing to actually blow a Benjamin just to have that feature. If you compare it to the markup premium on a BlackBook, it's about as reasonable to pay extra for a Black notebook as it is to pay for a 2-button notebook... but people are willing to do it.
Sure, that'd be possible, but it really should be necessary to perform hardware mods on something you spend $3000 for. If it's going to cost me that much, it'd better come the way I want it. I don't mind hacking hardware, but for the cost and the fact that it'd almost certainly void the warranty, I'd have to pass on that as a feasible, but not realistic option.
It wouldn't take a whole lot for apple to make it a purchasable option, though. Even with a $100 markup for the extra button, I'd do it.
So when can I get a 2-button trackpad? Come on, Apple, that's just one mouse button per core. I want a real button, not a clever software simulation of two buttons. Just humor me, I'm dying to buy one of these babies.
Wow, I never knew that. Most people just said they monkeyed around...
You also didn't have any sort of protetected memory back in 1986. The damn things would lock up on you and you'd have to reboot, often dozens of times per day. Crashing an application took down the whole system. It was often trivially easy to induce software crashes. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing at all could result in an app crashing. Memory leaks were quite common. When you did crash, anything you were working on was lost to the last time you saved, assuming it wasn't corrupted. Working around this often felt like that joke that starts out, "Doctor, it hurts whenever I do this!"
We made "working copies" of files in order to prevent this from causing the loss of important files that represented weeks or years of effort. Things like multiple Undo, Auto-save, and data recovery hadn't been invented or perfected yet.
You had to micromanage system resources, manually allocating how much RAM each application took, and when an app launched, it grabbed its full allocation at launch time whether it actually needed that much RAM or not. When it hit the limit you set for it, it couldn't go back to the system and get more; you'd have to Quit and manually bump up the allocation and hope that it was enough.
Font management on these systems was terrible. Font suitcase files disobeyed the normal rules for files, making it quite difficult to simply move them from one location to another. The font files often got corrupted from simple use, meaning you had to keep offline backups of all your fonts. If a critical system font went corrupt on you, good luck fixing the problem.
The hard drive was so tiny, you'd have to come up with really ingenious ways of compressing each and every last file to keep enough free space to do everything. This was back when CPU resources were so scarse that the cost of compressing and decompressing files was palpable (especially on single-tasking systems). You could spend an entire afternoon or day just screwing around with this stuff. Data compression could result in corruption, so if you were smart you kept offline backup copies of all your compressed data on floppies.
Speaking of hard drive problems, filesystem corruption was common, could render your system unbootable, and you needed to purchase a 3rd-party tool like Norton Disk Doctor just to do routine maintenance tasks like defragging and error checking/correction. On the plus side, these tools usually did work (although when they didn't they could cause you to lose data -- particularly defraggers). You always wanted to make backups of important files before you did anything involving the filesystem... which meant having stacks and stacks of floppy disks... which were really slow and required you to work with spanned compressed files. Fortunately floppy disks were made better back then.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is there's no way in hell I'd ever think about going back to using systems from that era. It's so painful to think about. Today's computers do so much more, so much better, it's not even funny. Speed and responsiveness isn't the only thing to think about when comparing between eras. Sure there's stuff now that's bloated beyond reason, features I never asked for or use, but I'd gladly live with that than have to go back to manually managing my OS's extensions load order (by carefully renaming the files so that they'd boot in correct alphabetical order, no less!) in order to produce a semblance of stability.
And it takes about as long for GNU to release a new version as it takes Microsoft to release Vista.
But who shed more features before going gold?
How about a beowulf cluster of them! Oh, and they have 128GB instead of 32GB! Or even 512GB! Or a petabyte!!!!!
Man, my imagination is on fire today.
Now, the next time I go to the world's deepest sinkhole, I won't have to worry about getting lost. Is it on Google Maps yet?
How else will the Microsoft-TimeWarner-AOL-Google-TacoBell lunar penal colony, a division of Citigroup-Glaxo-Monsanto-GM (TM) be populated in 2107?
Yeah, but what happens when Valve decide to drop Steam services, or go out of business? I can still install HL1 on a computer today and play it. I don't think I've played the original H-L since I upgraded to Windows 2000, so possibly I might have to keep a Win98 box around or something, at some point in order to do that, but at least I don't have to build a replicated Steam service (which I know of no legal way how to do) on my home LAN in order to be able to play H-L2 indefinitely.
If Valve wants to ever drop the Steam service, they're going to need to provide some sort of unlock to the community of users so that they can keep playing long after they turn out the lights for the last time at Valve HQ. If they do this, then my opinion of them is considerably changed.
I don't agree with that; it's entirely possible to have goals that are ongoing.
The happiness of society is the end of government. -- John Adams
I wonder if John Adams is using the word "end" in a way that is synonymous with "goal", rather than to suggest that he's some sort of radical anarchist. Do you have the context for the quote?
I'm hard-pressed to think of a popular game that played like SMB before SMB was introduced.
Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros added scrolling and power-ups. The platform jumping action was there from Donkey Kong on.
Netcraft will confirm this within the week.
Content producers will wonder why they can't get you to pay for the bits WITH commercials, just like how there's commercials on cable TV. Eventually it'll happen.
Content producers will want you to stream the bits so that you'll have to pay-per-view, won't be able to copy for personal use, excerpt for purposes of commentary, criticism, or parody, or share with friends, or rewind for instant replay.
People will wonder why they have to pay their cable ISP for internet access AND Cable TV content that they can stream and PVR, and then have to pay yet again to download or stream lower-quality video from the internet. If they can even comprehend that there's a difference.
Pirates and other outlaws will keep on proving that maxim from Serenity, "You can't stop the signal."
far as im concerned they should require someone to /actually drive/ the damn car through an /actual city/ and average the results to get the fuel rating.
How can you do this in a way that will result in reproducible results? If I want to contest the findings, I'd need to be able to verify them independently by performing a controlled experiment. Real driving does not offer any controls to the experiment -- you'll get too many variables and won't have a clear picture of what you're actually observing.
Yeah, so how long will it take to roll out these new, intelligent roads? And how much will it cost to maintain them?
Ghyslain, just get over it already.
My first car was a Bentley, you insensitive clod!!
Let's not forget the "voluntary" censorship.
Sweet! 25 foot tall Jessica Alba!