In the style of 2600 (okay, not the best
example ATM) we could just mirror them all over
the net until their FedEx budget dries up.
I wonder how this all works? How do they make money on the product--they're giving them away at the Rat Shack, right? If we understood this, perhaps we would understand their reluctance.
The company site claims that students will be
reqired to purchase a license no matter if they
want to or not; it will be included in their
tuition.
I don't have to buy a textbook; I
can borrow a copy from a friend. Even if they
don't roll the license into the tuition, you
still can't borrow a copy....
I am a fan of the Athlon, and have been more pro-AMD since the overhyped and under-performing Pentium II was released.
So I shed no tears about this recall. Intel's position as a 2000lb gorilla needs to be shaken; they have dealt with issues like the 486DX50, and Pentium FPU bug in a less-than-graceful way.
This product was a crude attempt to FUD AMD
out of the market with what looks like an
overclocked part. But AMD has been guilty of
faulty components as
well.
An earlier poster mentioned some bad
K5 CPU samples.
I would go so far as to claim the entire K5
line with its "PR" rating was a joke. The
performance was poor and the failure rate high.
At that time AMD was willing to do anything to stay
afloat...this continued into the earky K-6 (less than 300Mhz) era. But since then AMD has been
producing an enterprise-level CPU, even if some
of the motherboards for the Athlon were not up
to snuff.
My point is that both Intel and AMD have at
times traded reliability for release dates. We
should not let them forget it, but nor should
we rule out one manufacturer's product on the
basis of rumor or a recalled product.
Ignoring the obvious moral issues, what does
this do to future access of a work?
Witness abandonware. Software publishers drop a
product or go out of business and it is impossible
to purchase a title and illegal to copy it; the title becomes "lost".
Imagine that with books. A publisher stops
"support" for a book or goes out of business. With the "unlock code" unavailable, the book
can never be seen by future scholars.
Imagine the world today if all the classical
titles had been digital. The library at Toledo
would have contained few books, as the
decryption codes had been lost with the fall of
the Greek and Roman civilizations. The Odyssey and the works of Plato would be
unknown. As Europe tried to recover from the dark ages and the plague of 1348 ended, there would be
no ancient scienfitic knowledge to rebuild
western Europe.
The Book of Kells and Beowulf would be nothing more than mysterious discs
in a display case. We would wonder about the
Egyptians, as Budge could not read The Book
of the Dead.
Stamping general knowledge "Authorized, monied
persons only" will mark the beginning of the
decline of the information age.
That's a pretty dated joke. I bet few people
around here get that one. As for me, I was a
student-worker responsible for taping that show
for the district when I was in high school.
If this is the case, we should send our appreciation to the good work of men in engineering, whereever they may be now.
I wonder if they could restart the reactors? If the oxygen generation system and heaters had
survived, could they have lived for a while
in engineering, as the reactor could provide
heat, water and air?
Finally, it is my understanding that subs
are now dampened to prevent noise from
escaping. Would that not prevent the noise
from tapping escaping the ship?
"Black" humor is nothing new, in particular to
Americans. Morbid humor is part of the culture.
That being said, I feel for those poor kids
and their families. When Wednesday hit without a rescue, tears came to my eyes while listening to NPR; imagining all those people killed in such an awful way.
I don't feel bad for the ten old-guard navy
officers who were killed. They are pushing
the old arms race again, trying to preserve their jobs at the cost of another cold war.
This *should* be a position at every University.
on
Computer Historian?
·
· Score: 5
IMO, students should be required to take detailed courses in computer history. Why? Not
for the trivia, but to understand why decisions
were made, and what has been tried before.
Too many students come out of school thinking
they know it all, but understanding only a tiny
bit of computers beyond the present generation
for which they learned to program. Understanding
the computers of the past would be useful.
Alas, I have found no such position, or I would apply for it tomorrow.
I know well what I am talking about. Yes, Jack made Commodore. He also destoyed it. The C-64
was not the model T, nor was my beloved Atari. The Apple was the Model T. Sorry.
Jack did NOTHING to help with mutltmedia; the Amiga was designed outside Commodore by Jay Miner who had left Atari to form
his own company. Atari had a share in the company, and was to license the "Lorraine" (as the
Amiga was then called) chipset for their new
computer.
But when Jack Tramiel took over Atari, he
decided to refuse Amiga Systems any more funding,
knowing that they would go out of business and
the computer would default to Atari, as majority
stockholder; he would just steal it.
But Amiga sold the computer to Tramiel's old
company, Commodore. In the lawsuit that
followed, Tramiel got rights to some of the
technology, but nothing to do with the
Amiga was designed during his reign at either
company; it was designed at Atari during the
Warner days, then at Amiga Systems, then sold
to Commodore after Jack bought Atari. Commodore
did not steal it, Amiga sold it to them rather
than face bankruptcy. They were ex-Atari guys; they wanted to sell it to Atari. But they did not want to sell it for Jack's price,.10 on the dollar.
Was Atari going down under the reign of Ray Kassar and Warner? You bet it was. But Jack's
solution was to kill everything. He did not care about beauty or quality, just price.
In the late 1980s, Atari employees asked permission to hold a Christmas party--an Atari
tradition since 1972. Jack responded that he would not help pay for it, and if
they wanted one they would have to pay for it
themselves. The employees passed the hat around,
and finally threw their own party.
Jack and his sons came. They ate the employees food, drank their wines, and gave a speech about
how important the employees were at Atari. The
next day they fired most of them.
If you want to really know Jack Tramiel,
spend a few days with his ex-employees. Then
you may feel different.
So, let's see: "Model T"...well the Commodore
was just a cheap copy of the Atari, which was
alreay four years old by the time the C-64
came out. The Atari was a 6502-based design
like the Apple, but with a bunch of value-added
features. Sorry, the Apple II wins the price for
the "Model T" computer. The Atari was the
luxury machine, "the Duseldorf", and the Commodore
was just a knockoff. Since Jack had nothing to
do with the development of the Amiga, and Atari's
refusal (under Jack) to provide the final third-level funding for the Amiga so he could
get it cheap instead of paying what was owed destroyed the company and probably contributed
to Jay Miners early death. So he gets an "F" on
the Multimedia claim. The Jaguar was designed
in England by Flair, and while Jack had people working on it he fired the Falcon development
staff to do it, so that is not too much credit
for him.....
Buy you are right on the MIDI ports. Jack did do that. But he destroyed Atari to
do it.
The lynx was not American. It was made in Japan and Taiwan. The Jaguar was US-made.
I was there at CES90 when the Lynx was
introduced and I have one of the prototypes. It
is a neat box. Full-color, stereo sound, beats
the pants off of even the new Gameboy.
But is was destroyed by Jack Tramiel. Some
of the other Tramiels were okay, but Jack was
out to "beat Commodore" at any price during
those days, even if he had to destroy Atari
to prove it. After all, he had already nearly
ruined his own company...what's one more?
The Lynx should have been sold for a
lower price, but with few titles at the time
of release it would have been two hard to make up
the sales price with game sales...most people
bought it for California Games, the
included title. Atari was not making a lot
of money on the Lynx; they could not even afford a real booth at CES.
Jack Tramiel's Buy American advertising
campaign for the Jaguar was pretty ironic. Suddenly he was pushing US-made and quality, while
when he was at Commodore he had lead the charge
for the cheaply-built foreign-assembled home
PC that lead Warner to destroy the Atari 800
series. When he took over Atari, he did the
same thing...his goal was to make 'em cheaper,
who cares about anything else.
"If it looks good,
steal the best bits and make an inferior version...cheaper at all costs." Beating
on price is what the Commodore 64 did, and
what he tried to do with the Atari 130XE in
1985. Making a still-cheaper version of the
Atari 800XL, with some extra RAM thrown in
to sell to existing owners.
Actually, he did pretty well with them considering the chipset was already seven years
old...heck, it was four years old when his old
company copied the Atari 800 for the
Commodore 64 back in 1982! The only "advantage"
the Commodore had over the Atari was a better
cassette interface and the ability to produce better pure tones (Commodore's generic sound chip
was also much easier to program than Atari's
custom POKEY chip that was used in Tempest
and Missile Command as well as the Atari 800).
In all other ways the Commodore was inferior. But Jack cut the sales and (most important) production
prices down until he took over the market...at
the cost of nearly ruining the company. But he
sold it for less!
I was hoping with the Lynx he would not try
the same tact; the Atari 2600 was actually sold
for more on purpose to suggest its higher
quality than the (mostly) cruddy game systems on the market in 1977.
But Jack did not use any of that money for
marketing, and it died, as usual.
When Atari sold one of their VAXes after
they were bought out by Jack save-a-dollar-kill-a-product Tramiel, they lost
the original design details for many of their
custom ICs.
A fairly recent software package (DECrad, now IDXrad) was written in the mid-90s and is a
patient tracking system for Radiology departments,
all in VMS. It was solid and reliable in a
situation with 200+ terminals and no room for error.
Nice note. I wanted to make a similar comment but
you did a better job than I could.
Todays new grads laugh about VAX/VMS without
really knowing what it is. Yes it is CISC, but with the limitations of the day CISC looked like
a good idea. As a person who has spent many
all-nighters coding away in ASM without
a macro-assembler, CISC does not look too bad. I suspect that many (most?) people who laugh at
the VAX have never written assembly outside of
a homework assignment or two.
It is sad to see the end of the VAX. I use
Unix 'cause I can understand it; VMS documentation
takes two bookcases. But I have seen VMS wizards
(here is one, in the glasses) at
work and you have to respect a VAX in the hands
of a master.
The loss of the VAX represents a loss of
knowledge, and it is sad.
But that has been months. SC3K unlimited has
been available from Maxis for a considerable
amount of time, and Loki made their announcement
of the addition on May 18th; the core game was in beta in mid-April.
A posting on 20 May claimed the additions would
delay the game "by a couple of weeks"...
Don't get me wrong, I love Loki. But they seem
to be having a hard time shipping on schedule or
keeping their priorities straight.
Case in point: they have been taking pre-orders
for SimCity 3000 since June or earlier, when they
announced it was "almost ready". In the meantime, they suddenly announce and ship several new
products; apparently dropping work on the old
projects in favor of hot new titles.
I hate to be cynical, but if Loki falls into
the pit of endless vaporware releases they are
going to lose their customers. A local computer
store that is listed as a Loki distributor tells
me they don't actually stock the products as
"they don't really exist". The store is
in the wrong, but when a potential customer
hears this and orders the product from the
company website, only to find two months later it
is still "in prerelease", it can be
discouraging.
I think Loki should avoid taking on new projects (like BSD ports) until it can manage
to finish up a few of the ones it has.
Glad to hear you are willing to support the
customer even when they don't use a 100% packaged
VA system. I thought the argument "don't support
the hardware if the customer changes the software"
was rather weak.
I have thought of buying VA Linux boxes for
an upcoming project (I think they are pretty sexy), but I am a Slackware person ('cause I've been running Linux since '93, that's why) and if I had to run Red Hat to count on VA
support for my HW I would have just built my
own equipment.
Several companies produce fast wireless LAN
solutions that--depending on distance--can provide
higher performance at a lower-cost than running
four cell phones concurrently.
Enterasys (part of the former cabletron) offers the DEC
wireless network technology. I noticed they
have a press release about the use of such
a system in Australia on today's press
release. Pacific Wireless rolls out Wireless IP
Slashdot Mirror
In the style of 2600 (okay, not the best example ATM) we could just mirror them all over the net until their FedEx budget dries up.
I wonder how this all works? How do they make money on the product--they're giving them away at the Rat Shack, right? If we understood this, perhaps we would understand their reluctance.
The way I read it, there is a difference.
The company site claims that students will be reqired to purchase a license no matter if they want to or not; it will be included in their tuition.
I don't have to buy a textbook; I can borrow a copy from a friend. Even if they don't roll the license into the tuition, you still can't borrow a copy....
I am a fan of the Athlon, and have been more pro-AMD since the overhyped and under-performing Pentium II was released.
So I shed no tears about this recall. Intel's position as a 2000lb gorilla needs to be shaken; they have dealt with issues like the 486DX50, and Pentium FPU bug in a less-than-graceful way.
This product was a crude attempt to FUD AMD out of the market with what looks like an overclocked part. But AMD has been guilty of faulty components as well.
An earlier poster mentioned some bad K5 CPU samples. I would go so far as to claim the entire K5 line with its "PR" rating was a joke. The performance was poor and the failure rate high.
At that time AMD was willing to do anything to stay afloat...this continued into the earky K-6 (less than 300Mhz) era. But since then AMD has been producing an enterprise-level CPU, even if some of the motherboards for the Athlon were not up to snuff.
My point is that both Intel and AMD have at times traded reliability for release dates. We should not let them forget it, but nor should we rule out one manufacturer's product on the basis of rumor or a recalled product.
In the text, it says that all students are _required_ to purchase this copy of the book...
Ignoring the obvious moral issues, what does this do to future access of a work?
Witness abandonware. Software publishers drop a product or go out of business and it is impossible to purchase a title and illegal to copy it; the title becomes "lost".
Imagine that with books. A publisher stops "support" for a book or goes out of business. With the "unlock code" unavailable, the book can never be seen by future scholars.
Imagine the world today if all the classical titles had been digital. The library at Toledo would have contained few books, as the decryption codes had been lost with the fall of the Greek and Roman civilizations. The Odyssey and the works of Plato would be unknown. As Europe tried to recover from the dark ages and the plague of 1348 ended, there would be no ancient scienfitic knowledge to rebuild western Europe.
The Book of Kells and Beowulf would be nothing more than mysterious discs in a display case. We would wonder about the Egyptians, as Budge could not read The Book of the Dead.
Stamping general knowledge "Authorized, monied persons only" will mark the beginning of the decline of the information age.
I thought IBM had scrapped that line and was taking the plant down?
There is no way M$ could produce the silicon in-house; this will be farmed out to an ASIC producer or something.
They could wire a 1Mhz square wave into the HALT line to make it run just like Windows. Heck, just tie it low...
Hahaha!!
That's a pretty dated joke. I bet few people around here get that one. As for me, I was a student-worker responsible for taping that show for the district when I was in high school.
If this is the case, we should send our appreciation to the good work of men in engineering, whereever they may be now.
I wonder if they could restart the reactors? If the oxygen generation system and heaters had survived, could they have lived for a while in engineering, as the reactor could provide heat, water and air?
Finally, it is my understanding that subs are now dampened to prevent noise from escaping. Would that not prevent the noise from tapping escaping the ship?
"Black" humor is nothing new, in particular to Americans. Morbid humor is part of the culture.
That being said, I feel for those poor kids and their families. When Wednesday hit without a rescue, tears came to my eyes while listening to NPR; imagining all those people killed in such an awful way.
I don't feel bad for the ten old-guard navy officers who were killed. They are pushing the old arms race again, trying to preserve their jobs at the cost of another cold war.
IMO, students should be required to take detailed courses in computer history. Why? Not for the trivia, but to understand why decisions were made, and what has been tried before.
Too many students come out of school thinking they know it all, but understanding only a tiny bit of computers beyond the present generation for which they learned to program. Understanding the computers of the past would be useful.
Alas, I have found no such position, or I would apply for it tomorrow.
I know well what I am talking about. Yes, Jack made Commodore. He also destoyed it. The C-64 was not the model T, nor was my beloved Atari. The Apple was the Model T. Sorry.
Jack did NOTHING to help with mutltmedia; the Amiga was designed outside Commodore by Jay Miner who had left Atari to form his own company. Atari had a share in the company, and was to license the "Lorraine" (as the Amiga was then called) chipset for their new computer.
But when Jack Tramiel took over Atari, he decided to refuse Amiga Systems any more funding, knowing that they would go out of business and the computer would default to Atari, as majority stockholder; he would just steal it.
But Amiga sold the computer to Tramiel's old company, Commodore. In the lawsuit that followed, Tramiel got rights to some of the technology, but nothing to do with the Amiga was designed during his reign at either company; it was designed at Atari during the Warner days, then at Amiga Systems, then sold to Commodore after Jack bought Atari. Commodore did not steal it, Amiga sold it to them rather than face bankruptcy. They were ex-Atari guys; they wanted to sell it to Atari. But they did not want to sell it for Jack's price, .10 on the dollar.
Was Atari going down under the reign of Ray Kassar and Warner? You bet it was. But Jack's solution was to kill everything. He did not care about beauty or quality, just price.
In the late 1980s, Atari employees asked permission to hold a Christmas party--an Atari tradition since 1972. Jack responded that he would not help pay for it, and if they wanted one they would have to pay for it themselves. The employees passed the hat around, and finally threw their own party.
Jack and his sons came. They ate the employees food, drank their wines, and gave a speech about how important the employees were at Atari. The next day they fired most of them.
If you want to really know Jack Tramiel, spend a few days with his ex-employees. Then you may feel different.
So, let's see: "Model T"...well the Commodore was just a cheap copy of the Atari, which was alreay four years old by the time the C-64 came out. The Atari was a 6502-based design like the Apple, but with a bunch of value-added features. Sorry, the Apple II wins the price for the "Model T" computer. The Atari was the luxury machine, "the Duseldorf", and the Commodore was just a knockoff. Since Jack had nothing to do with the development of the Amiga, and Atari's refusal (under Jack) to provide the final third-level funding for the Amiga so he could get it cheap instead of paying what was owed destroyed the company and probably contributed to Jay Miners early death. So he gets an "F" on the Multimedia claim. The Jaguar was designed in England by Flair, and while Jack had people working on it he fired the Falcon development staff to do it, so that is not too much credit for him.....
Buy you are right on the MIDI ports. Jack did do that. But he destroyed Atari to do it.
The lynx was not American. It was made in Japan and Taiwan. The Jaguar was US-made.
I was there at CES90 when the Lynx was introduced and I have one of the prototypes. It is a neat box. Full-color, stereo sound, beats the pants off of even the new Gameboy.
But is was destroyed by Jack Tramiel. Some of the other Tramiels were okay, but Jack was out to "beat Commodore" at any price during those days, even if he had to destroy Atari to prove it. After all, he had already nearly ruined his own company...what's one more?
The Lynx should have been sold for a lower price, but with few titles at the time of release it would have been two hard to make up the sales price with game sales...most people bought it for California Games, the included title. Atari was not making a lot of money on the Lynx; they could not even afford a real booth at CES.
Jack Tramiel's Buy American advertising campaign for the Jaguar was pretty ironic. Suddenly he was pushing US-made and quality, while when he was at Commodore he had lead the charge for the cheaply-built foreign-assembled home PC that lead Warner to destroy the Atari 800 series. When he took over Atari, he did the same thing...his goal was to make 'em cheaper, who cares about anything else.
"If it looks good, steal the best bits and make an inferior version...cheaper at all costs." Beating on price is what the Commodore 64 did, and what he tried to do with the Atari 130XE in 1985. Making a still-cheaper version of the Atari 800XL, with some extra RAM thrown in to sell to existing owners.
Actually, he did pretty well with them considering the chipset was already seven years old...heck, it was four years old when his old company copied the Atari 800 for the Commodore 64 back in 1982! The only "advantage" the Commodore had over the Atari was a better cassette interface and the ability to produce better pure tones (Commodore's generic sound chip was also much easier to program than Atari's custom POKEY chip that was used in Tempest and Missile Command as well as the Atari 800). In all other ways the Commodore was inferior. But Jack cut the sales and (most important) production prices down until he took over the market...at the cost of nearly ruining the company. But he sold it for less!
I was hoping with the Lynx he would not try the same tact; the Atari 2600 was actually sold for more on purpose to suggest its higher quality than the (mostly) cruddy game systems on the market in 1977.
But Jack did not use any of that money for marketing, and it died, as usual.
When Atari sold one of their VAXes after they were bought out by Jack save-a-dollar-kill-a-product Tramiel, they lost the original design details for many of their custom ICs.
I can only hope that it is on a TK50 somewhere...
I like the name, as long as nobody confuses it with the Pink Shirt Book.
Yeah, Atari had some PC. Designed by a guy called Jay Miner. Ever hear of him?
Another company made a cheap clone of it without all the custom ASICs four years later and sold it with the worst disk drive ever made.
They are discussing a cartoon strip, in which one of the characters ported Outlook to Linux in order to destroy Linux with VBS-based worms.
We are an Outlook shop here, but I have no problem reading mail with Netscape on my Linux box.
A fairly recent software package (DECrad, now IDXrad) was written in the mid-90s and is a patient tracking system for Radiology departments, all in VMS. It was solid and reliable in a situation with 200+ terminals and no room for error.
Too bad. VAX hardware was really neat.
Have you ever used a VAX? Do you really know what one is or how it works?
Nice note. I wanted to make a similar comment but you did a better job than I could.
Todays new grads laugh about VAX/VMS without really knowing what it is. Yes it is CISC, but with the limitations of the day CISC looked like a good idea. As a person who has spent many all-nighters coding away in ASM without a macro-assembler, CISC does not look too bad. I suspect that many (most?) people who laugh at the VAX have never written assembly outside of a homework assignment or two.
It is sad to see the end of the VAX. I use Unix 'cause I can understand it; VMS documentation takes two bookcases. But I have seen VMS wizards (here is one, in the glasses) at work and you have to respect a VAX in the hands of a master.
The loss of the VAX represents a loss of knowledge, and it is sad.
But that has been months. SC3K unlimited has been available from Maxis for a considerable amount of time, and Loki made their announcement of the addition on May 18th; the core game was in beta in mid-April.
A posting on 20 May claimed the additions would delay the game "by a couple of weeks"...
Don't get me wrong, I love Loki. But they seem to be having a hard time shipping on schedule or keeping their priorities straight.
Case in point: they have been taking pre-orders for SimCity 3000 since June or earlier, when they announced it was "almost ready". In the meantime, they suddenly announce and ship several new products; apparently dropping work on the old projects in favor of hot new titles.
I hate to be cynical, but if Loki falls into the pit of endless vaporware releases they are going to lose their customers. A local computer store that is listed as a Loki distributor tells me they don't actually stock the products as "they don't really exist". The store is in the wrong, but when a potential customer hears this and orders the product from the company website, only to find two months later it is still "in prerelease", it can be discouraging.
I think Loki should avoid taking on new projects (like BSD ports) until it can manage to finish up a few of the ones it has.
Glad to hear you are willing to support the customer even when they don't use a 100% packaged VA system. I thought the argument "don't support the hardware if the customer changes the software" was rather weak.
I have thought of buying VA Linux boxes for an upcoming project (I think they are pretty sexy), but I am a Slackware person ('cause I've been running Linux since '93, that's why) and if I had to run Red Hat to count on VA support for my HW I would have just built my own equipment.
Several companies produce fast wireless LAN solutions that--depending on distance--can provide higher performance at a lower-cost than running four cell phones concurrently.
Enterasys (part of the former cabletron) offers the DEC wireless network technology. I noticed they have a press release about the use of such a system in Australia on today's press release. Pacific Wireless rolls out Wireless IP