Linux, despite being as widely adored as it is, is just not cut out to compete as a desktop OS. It's more difficult to install than either Win95 or MacOS 9, it has fewer software options than either, and its OS and software are overall less intuitive. A desktop OS really needs to be "idiot-friendly"; Linux still isn't.
My point? That Linux's main competitor in Redmond is Windows NT/2000 (the server OS), while Mac's main competitor is Windows 95/98/ME (the consumer OS). Microsoft blends the compatibility of those two OSes, but make no mistake that they're targetted at two completely different audiences. This being the case, I don't think Linux can be said to be "overtaking" the MacOS in the vs-Microsoft wars at all -- they're not actually fighting the same enemy.
If I'm not mistaken, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (or more specifically, NCSA) did successfully market its Mosaic web browser; they spun it off to a company called Spyglass, which licensed the code to Netscape and Microsoft both, and made out with millions for the deal.
The line the University held to, and still holds to, is that NCSA's job is to research new technologies, not to market them as business products. Once Mosaic was deemed a success, they gave licensing rights over to a separate company (Spyglass) and got back to researching other technologies.
Yep, it *is* an iMac on steroids. More accurately, it's an iMac that lets you pick your own monitor. (Check out the QTVR of the insides being taken out -- where *could* you put a PCI card?)
The no-fan is a great feature, made possible only by the low-power G4 processor. But, as others have pointed out, the risk of stacking papers or dropping paper clips into the top of the thing is distressingly high.
I'm sure people who are buying used Macs at swap meets love it when they find out they can't hook it up to any monitor known to man except the VideoVision monitor,
Judging from the plethora of ports underneath the Cube, I'm willing to bet that it's still compatible with ordinary monitor cables -- this particular cable is merely designed to combine three into one when running from the computer to the monitor.
Re:Another Industrial Design Coup for Apple
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Apple Cube Confirmed
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Newton: A really powerful PDA
*snort*
Newton failed because it sucked batteries dry and the handwriting recognition was lousy. 3M took the idea, out-innovated Apple, and created the Palm. Apple took defeat smartly and stuck to desktops.
Macintouch has the same keynote coverage, in a pleasantly digested summary. MacCentral has point-by-point coverage, but for some reason it's writting in reverse order.
The movie's already 1:40 long. I personally think 2:25 is wayyyyy too long for a superhero movie.
You must've hated"The Matrix", then.:-) That was basically a superhero movie (super-cracker movie, anyways) with a defined story, and well-explained characters, which was so well-paced I still don't feel how long it is when I watch it.
On the other hand, if what Singer trimmed was mainly exposition and character speeches by folks whom the movie wasn't spending much time on anyways, then that's fine with me. The movie needed to focus on the core characters -- Magneto, Xavier, Rogue, and Wolverine -- or else it would've gotten totally lost in itself.
Re:This is why I dont take movie advice from anyon
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Slashdot Meets X-Men
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i didn't know about Cyclops' past, and just assumed his power worked the same as Rogue's, that is, uncontrollably.
Like I said, it doesn't really matter.:-)
The official comics lines are: Scott's powers are supposed to be controllable, but due to brain damage he can't turn them off. Rogue's powers are "always-on", and while there's speculation that this may be a psychological issue, the official line is that that's just how her powers work. Wolverine's fast-healing factor is automatic, just like your slow-healing factor is. And Mystique, unless she's using her powers to disguise herself, is always blue.
On the fringe, telepaths typically have to learn to block out stray thoughts, and people with powers like Storm's have to learn not to let heated emotions trigger their powers accidentally. But that can be controlled with practice.
The aspect that stuck out for me was that he had to fiddle with his visor to fire his beam.
One of Singer's cardinal rules for this movie was that if it wasn't realistic, it was thrown out. That includes Cyclops being able to open his visor without actually touching it. (According to a dated comic reference, he has a button embeded in the glove of his costume that opens and closes the visor, but that's contradicted so often you may as well accept that he controls it psychically.)
Re:This is why I dont take movie advice from anyon
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Slashdot Meets X-Men
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This just strikes me as dumb. By the same note, why didnt we learn why Magneto got magnetized? Or why Rogue can suck you drier than a mosquito?
Because that's their mutant powers, while Cyclops' inability to control his blasts (according to the comics) is due to brain damage he suffered as a pre-teen.
But the point you wanted to make is: why explain bit details of the characters when they don't impact the story at all? And there's no reason, and that's why I'm glad it was omitted. It was obvious from the movie that Scott can't control his blasts, and anyone else would've figured that was just the way his powers worked.
Seeing Toad pull a Darth Maul movie (alas, I was the only one in the theater that seemed to get it) was perfect.
Chalk another one up to the "only one who laughed at this scene" column. Most people who weren't following the pre-movie hype didn't know that Toad and Darth Maul were one and the same character (and visually, you can hardly blame them).
Singer succeeded in hitting a wide audience
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Slashdot Meets X-Men
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At least two women I know -- one with a passing familiarity with the X-Men comics, and one with no familiarity whatsoever -- reported that they were easily able to follow the characters and story points. Which means that Bryan Singer's goal of making the movie accessible to non-fans was a total success.
It is the fact that M$ is ignoring industry standards while adding proprietary "features"
Agreed. What developers are really asking for is uniform CSS support, HTML4/XHTML compatability, and a cross-browser DOM for scripting. I've never heard anyone asking for an HTML tag to generate calendars when an ASP tag will do the job better, and more universally.
Speaking as a professional developer, the only time these proprietary tags are useful is in intranet development, when everyone in a company is expected to the same browser. Doubtless this is the market segment Microsoft is targeting, but it would be nice if they didn't utterly forget the non-business users that also use their browser (c.f. Microsoft Office).
We didn't have cars 200 years ago, and people survived, I think we could probably figure out a way to do it again!
That's because they didn't have suburbs back then. Or explosive population density growth. To get along completely without cars in a major metropolis today, you'd have to replace every single highway with a mass-transit system just to keep sending people where they need/want to go.
Not every part of the world is like "L.A. Story"; some people use cars because there's really no other way to get to where they need to work.
One drawback: a caller to NPR's "Car Talk" some months back was doing exactly this; turned out the vegetable oils were gumming up the hoses and engine, which was designed exclusively with mineral-based oils in mind.
Not that this can't be dealt with, of course, and if veggie fuels were more common it probably wouldn't have been an issue. But it is a reason.
In the U.S., gas prices are often kept lower than in other countries because the demand is higher. It's part of the American lifestyle -- hitting the road, independent travel, driving cross-country on vacation -- and it may be unique to those countries that span entire continents.
By comparison to the U.S., the cost of gasoline in Hong Kong and Singapore is simply exploitive. Japan is pretty well up there, too -- which is why it shouldn't surprise anyone that the first companies to hit the U.S. market with practical electric cars are Honda and Toyota.
It'll be nice to see more electric-gas hybrid cars out there, but with the 3-gallons-per-mile SUV craze going on, I don't think it'll happen all that soon.
I think it'll happen sooner than you think. The advantage of the new hybrid car from Toyota is that it gets the electricity from spare kinetic energy that your car generates from going downhill or braking to a stop -- you don't need "electric fuel pumps" anywhere to make it happen.
...people keep buying gasoline cars for the same reason they keep buying WinTel computers: there's a hundred times more places to buy the stuff that goes inside.
[Young Netizens] don't seem to grasp that their lack of political acumen and organizing skills not only make such legislation possible but increasingly inevitable in encounters with a legal and political system dominated by those older and non-technologically-centered.
This is intriguing, especially since one of the most frequently-cited reasons Microsoft is in the antitrust quagmire it's in now is because they were very late in getting lobbyists into Congress, presumably due to a hubris that their power over software would be enough. Is it possible that the technology-centric members of society will increasingly allow "the laws of the Net" to be their law, regardless of what their governments say? Will society someday be divided into the law-abiding neo-Luddites and the self-regulating technologists? (And most importantly, will William Gibson or Neal Stephenson publish another novel based on this premise?)
Well, without an LCD screen to display the text, support for playlists (or ID3 tags) would be pretty much worthless. Wait for the next generation, I suppose.
If I were to buy one of these, or the in-dash models, I'd mainly want to put it on random play. Make a few CD-RW's with a common theme or band for each one, stick 'em in, listen to 'em for the entire three hour drive back home.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux, despite being as widely adored as it is, is just not cut out to compete as a desktop OS. It's more difficult to install than either Win95 or MacOS 9, it has fewer software options than either, and its OS and software are overall less intuitive. A desktop OS really needs to be "idiot-friendly"; Linux still isn't.
My point? That Linux's main competitor in Redmond is Windows NT/2000 (the server OS), while Mac's main competitor is Windows 95/98/ME (the consumer OS). Microsoft blends the compatibility of those two OSes, but make no mistake that they're targetted at two completely different audiences. This being the case, I don't think Linux can be said to be "overtaking" the MacOS in the vs-Microsoft wars at all -- they're not actually fighting the same enemy.
I wonder what it means, though, when I can't focus on a video game long enough to play it all the way through?
The line the University held to, and still holds to, is that NCSA's job is to research new technologies, not to market them as business products. Once Mosaic was deemed a success, they gave licensing rights over to a separate company (Spyglass) and got back to researching other technologies.
The no-fan is a great feature, made possible only by the low-power G4 processor. But, as others have pointed out, the risk of stacking papers or dropping paper clips into the top of the thing is distressingly high.
Judging from the plethora of ports underneath the Cube, I'm willing to bet that it's still compatible with ordinary monitor cables -- this particular cable is merely designed to combine three into one when running from the computer to the monitor.
*snort*
Newton failed because it sucked batteries dry and the handwriting recognition was lousy. 3M took the idea, out-innovated Apple, and created the Palm. Apple took defeat smartly and stuck to desktops.
Check out Apple's home page and the Apple Store for pics and data on the new hardware.
Macintouch has the same keynote coverage, in a pleasantly digested summary. MacCentral has point-by-point coverage, but for some reason it's writting in reverse order.
You must've hated "The Matrix", then. :-) That was basically a superhero movie (super-cracker movie, anyways) with a defined story, and well-explained characters, which was so well-paced I still don't feel how long it is when I watch it.
On the other hand, if what Singer trimmed was mainly exposition and character speeches by folks whom the movie wasn't spending much time on anyways, then that's fine with me. The movie needed to focus on the core characters -- Magneto, Xavier, Rogue, and Wolverine -- or else it would've gotten totally lost in itself.
Like I said, it doesn't really matter. :-)
The official comics lines are: Scott's powers are supposed to be controllable, but due to brain damage he can't turn them off. Rogue's powers are "always-on", and while there's speculation that this may be a psychological issue, the official line is that that's just how her powers work. Wolverine's fast-healing factor is automatic, just like your slow-healing factor is. And Mystique, unless she's using her powers to disguise herself, is always blue.
On the fringe, telepaths typically have to learn to block out stray thoughts, and people with powers like Storm's have to learn not to let heated emotions trigger their powers accidentally. But that can be controlled with practice.
Bryan Singer wanted the movie to be grounded in reality; that means no time travel in any sequel, as long as he's directing them.
Regular X-Fans on the internet are used to this. Along with Magneto's fellow member of the Brotherhood of Chromatic Mutants, Rouge. :-)
One of Singer's cardinal rules for this movie was that if it wasn't realistic, it was thrown out. That includes Cyclops being able to open his visor without actually touching it. (According to a dated comic reference, he has a button embeded in the glove of his costume that opens and closes the visor, but that's contradicted so often you may as well accept that he controls it psychically.)
Because that's their mutant powers, while Cyclops' inability to control his blasts (according to the comics) is due to brain damage he suffered as a pre-teen.
But the point you wanted to make is: why explain bit details of the characters when they don't impact the story at all? And there's no reason, and that's why I'm glad it was omitted. It was obvious from the movie that Scott can't control his blasts, and anyone else would've figured that was just the way his powers worked.
Chalk another one up to the "only one who laughed at this scene" column. Most people who weren't following the pre-movie hype didn't know that Toad and Darth Maul were one and the same character (and visually, you can hardly blame them).
At least two women I know -- one with a passing familiarity with the X-Men comics, and one with no familiarity whatsoever -- reported that they were easily able to follow the characters and story points. Which means that Bryan Singer's goal of making the movie accessible to non-fans was a total success.
Agreed. What developers are really asking for is uniform CSS support, HTML4/XHTML compatability, and a cross-browser DOM for scripting. I've never heard anyone asking for an HTML tag to generate calendars when an ASP tag will do the job better, and more universally.
Speaking as a professional developer, the only time these proprietary tags are useful is in intranet development, when everyone in a company is expected to the same browser. Doubtless this is the market segment Microsoft is targeting, but it would be nice if they didn't utterly forget the non-business users that also use their browser (c.f. Microsoft Office).
Um, read the website. It's a hybrid car. Uphill is the time when it switches to the gasoline power. :-)
That's because they didn't have suburbs back then. Or explosive population density growth. To get along completely without cars in a major metropolis today, you'd have to replace every single highway with a mass-transit system just to keep sending people where they need/want to go.
Not every part of the world is like "L.A. Story"; some people use cars because there's really no other way to get to where they need to work.
Not that this can't be dealt with, of course, and if veggie fuels were more common it probably wouldn't have been an issue. But it is a reason.
By comparison to the U.S., the cost of gasoline in Hong Kong and Singapore is simply exploitive. Japan is pretty well up there, too -- which is why it shouldn't surprise anyone that the first companies to hit the U.S. market with practical electric cars are Honda and Toyota.
I think it'll happen sooner than you think. The advantage of the new hybrid car from Toyota is that it gets the electricity from spare kinetic energy that your car generates from going downhill or braking to a stop -- you don't need "electric fuel pumps" anywhere to make it happen.
...people keep buying gasoline cars for the same reason they keep buying WinTel computers: there's a hundred times more places to buy the stuff that goes inside.
This is intriguing, especially since one of the most frequently-cited reasons Microsoft is in the antitrust quagmire it's in now is because they were very late in getting lobbyists into Congress, presumably due to a hubris that their power over software would be enough. Is it possible that the technology-centric members of society will increasingly allow "the laws of the Net" to be their law, regardless of what their governments say? Will society someday be divided into the law-abiding neo-Luddites and the self-regulating technologists? (And most importantly, will William Gibson or Neal Stephenson publish another novel based on this premise?)
If I were to buy one of these, or the in-dash models, I'd mainly want to put it on random play. Make a few CD-RW's with a common theme or band for each one, stick 'em in, listen to 'em for the entire three hour drive back home.