Well, reading the results I found them to be
pretty true...but it occured to me that they
seemed rather generic comments that could apply
to anyone.
So I took it again, but this time I chose the
colors in a random order. First by starting with
my least favorite color then clicking them at
random. Then clicking them in a pattern determined before the colors came up, so I would
not have any "unconcious influence" on the
pattern.
The data from those sessions seemed just as
accurate...
I hate most police officers. I think they are
just young guys who like to push people around.
But reading the link you posted, this protester-centric, anti-police, anti-GOP site is
not really a good source for unbiased news
reporting. I see it as even less
trustworthy than the official police site.
It sounds like the ear issue was an accident. And it was torn, not "ripped off", even according
to the link you posted. I suspect the protesters
were not all that peaceful. I've had run-ins
with "peaceful" animal rights protestors who
were quick to throw raw blood on me, despite
the fact that I have never worked with animals
(not much call for an Electrical Engineer to
do that), and that there had not been an animal
experiment in the building for 32 years. And
the researcher who had done the experiments
had died in 1974.
They did not care about accuracy, they just
wanted to protest...something....
I support many of 2600's causes, but a lot of the 2600 "staff" tends to stand on the edge of
legal at best.
Note that the CNN link from the 2600 page
says that the ACLU folks thought the prisoners
seemed to be treated okay. I'm certain the ACLU
would love to jump into this, and if they
say things look fair, I tend to believe them.
The fact that 2600 does not mention
the charge is significant.
Finally, I remember people arrested in the
WTO protest appeared on CNN whining about their
terrible treatment. Their specific complaints
were centered around issues of bologna-containing
sandwiches given to people who were "vegans", and
the fact that the fruit juice supplied by the
police was not 100% juice, but a 10% juice drink. Keep in mind that these people were detained for less than a day and never removed from the
site; the Seattle police were under no obligation to provide anything more than water to prevent
dehydration.
The protesters are a bunch of spoiled rich
kids, IMHO. It is "in" to be arrested, to protest, to "fight against the system" until Daddy
retires and you become an investment banker. I
won't put much stock in any of this until I hear
the whole story.
I realize that is a bit harsh, but I feel it
is the truth.
hehehehe...I've always wanted to publish a real paper with some humor, but every time I try my supervisor removes all sign of anything interesting. I like the p and q idea...
Did you go to the show? I did. There were two exhibitors there selling restored full-size video games. Bruce and Cathy Carso were there selling Atari hardware and software as they have for the last twenty years. The Intellivision developers were there selling a legal, licensed emulator with their games. So was Cosmi. Hasbro was giving away CDs with its PC versions of Atari games. Telegames was there with its games. There was a new developer with his classic Ultima-esque game and several tables with new 2600, Colecovision, and Lynx titles. Plus tables of used games everywhere.
Only one person was selling an emulator-style arcade cabinet that could run many games. But guess what? They were all legal, licensed versions.
There was nothing illegal at the show, with the exception of some mid-80s Atari pirate cartridges from overseas companies that are now prized as rare pirated cartridges by collectors who already own at least one of the legal versions.
Perhaps next time you should investigate a little before you start running off at the mouth; get some journalistic integrity. The website for the show is cgexpo.com.
That is not the point. Napster is making money off of somebody else's product without providing any sort of payment for the use of that product. If I ran a site where people could download scans of textbooks--for which I made a profit--don't you think the publishers would be annoyed?
The RIAA might be making money out of the whole deal with increased sales of records, but if you don't protect your property, you might lose it. Napster is also guilty of some double-standards (thatr have been discussed on slashdot), so I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Remember that lousy music group they sued for trademark infringement after the group started selling clothing with the Napster logo? Napster might get more visitors when people saw the illegal shirts, but Napster sent off their own cease-and-desist letter....
Napster is providing a way to access music that is sold my the RIAA without paying the fee that the RIAA asks for the music. It is not the same thing as making a copy of a music tape from a friend. It is like walking into a store, making a copy of a tape, and the store owner gets handed a dollar for allowing you to use his location.
RIAA is saying that that dollar should be theirs, since they own the rights to the music.
No. Napster is not just a search engine, its client program is a file server designed so hand all.MP3 files on a user's hard disk to anyone who asks, without regard to anything else.
Although I cannot stand the RIAA, the more I think about it something just seems wrong about Napster making a profit off of someone elses work.
If Napster was not doing this is for profit, then it would be an easier case for me. But with Napster doing this as a business, it seems fair that the record companies should get a cut; even if they don't really deserve any more money.
The MPAA case is a lot easier; they (the MPAA) are clearly in the wrong. But the RIAA have some valid points, and they are sounding more valid all the time.
Gnutella, on the other hand, is not a business and is therefore exempt, IMHO.
I disagreee. PCs are cheap both in price and quality. The best-quality components are much better, but they still fail enough that with 100, 10000, or 41000 you will have several with problems at any one time.
Even with the best server-grade components, the PCs will be far less reliable. And I would bet that 10000 server-grade PCs would cost as much as one of these mainframes. If you own the mainframe, the cost-per-minute charges don't apply (remember that IBM sells now-a-days), and while you need more-expensive operators, you need fewer of them as they are not swapping hard drives and smoking video cards every 20 minutes.
For a long time I advocated clusters of PCs for any application. Clusters have some great uses, but so does real hardware.
older CD players won't even play CDR's I have had real problems with the CDRs I have made. Certain types/colors work on certain players but not others. There is no universal standard that works on them all, but dark blue Verbatim seem the most compatible. I transfer out-of-print records to CD for a friend of mine.
MP3s suffer from the same problems as the other formats, however. It is not fast; reading and encoding the CD takes a while. Longer if you want error-checking. Second, the quality is pretty poor compared to CD...depending on the style of the music being encoded and the encoder. They are not "exact copies" at all!
Although tape pirating was a problem, I would argue that one of the reasons so few tapes were sold was the quality. Record companies sold (and often still sell) the worst quality tapes on the market (some companies, like American Gramaphone, were exceptions). And they were expensive! Often more money than the phonograph record, and you got a poor-quality tape with a lot of noise that would melt, stretch, wear out and break.
A solution? Buy the record and a top-quality blank. You tape it once, and the decent quality blank (which could be Cr02 or Metal if you had the right deck) would sound much, much better than a factory tape. Chances are it would last forever (a lot longer than the ones from the record companies), plus if it did wear out you just made a new one. Finally, the cost for a record and a blank was the same or just a bit more than the factory tapes.
When my phonograph died, I would buy factory tapes...but first-play I would copy them to a blank and keep the master in a safe place. Most of the factory tapes would degrade very quickly, and in the mid-80s ran $7-$14, which was quite a bit of money at the time.
True, it was easy to trade tapes. And unlike MP3s, the tapes lost quality with each transfer; not just the first one. But if the music industry wants to compete, they need to lower their prices (now way too high) or improve the quality. Give consumers a reason to buy the product, not just lawsuits.
I have little sympathy for companies who raise prices as sales increase...
To be fair, that is vaporware at the moment. It sounds impressive, but when I see one actually working on silicon then it will be newsworthy. But I wish them the best of luck.
I did not mean to suggest that Russia was somehow less-capable on some sort of intellectual basis; the nation has turned out many of the worlds best physicists and probably the majority of the mathematicians. The Russian people are also famous for their "kludge it with anything in a pinch" attitude that was once common among Americans, if not the their government. But fifty years of closed borders and minds in the government has put them rather behind the times. This is not all bad...programmers in Russia that learned in the 80s-90s are quite skilled as they had to learn how to work with the hardware they had instead of throwing new hardware at a software problem. I've been screaming about this in my country for the last 10 years and nobody takes any notice.
Until fairly recently, Russia did not have access to the tools to produce modern semiconductors; they could not have made them if they wanted to. I remember seeing photos of semiconductor production equipment in National Geographic that were seized while in the process of being smuggled to Russia. I'm sure some got in, and of course by now I imagine Russian companies are producing their own.
One "advantage" to using tube computers is that they are less sensitive to EMP, which is important if you are planning to be near a nuclear explosion. There are ways to shield semis from this problem, but that is fairly difficult.
Good point on the technology; I should have pointed out that I was speaking only about electronics. As I recall somebody else did notice and post a mention of the Adaptec logo on the board and the fact that the image was an obvious fake, yet people still droned on about how much they wanted one.
Should I have posted a "me too" about the Adaptec logo or chip? Perhaps. But it would not have done any good. People were screaming about it being a fake and people were still buying it!
BTW, the "1993" reference is just the oldest Adaptec card I own with that style of sticker. They still use the same style, and the one in the photo looks to be one of the newer ones. Finally, I covered the case of "what if you've never seen an Adaptec card" in the body of my message...
No, I was enjoying the action. When the article was first posted for just a moment I got really interested...then looked at the board and got confused. Then I laughed.
Monday Morning Quarterback? I assume this means judging an event after it has already happened? See my previous paragraph.
I was debating if I should point it out or sit back and watch when the first "this is a fake" post was made, at which point I wandered off 'cause I figured the gag was over. What amazed me when I came back is how many people kept talking about it and debating its use and possible features, when one glance should have told them it could not be real.
Of course a lot of people knew it was a fake! Not only did a lot of people post about it, but a lot of people probably just sat in their cubes and shook their heads like me.
My point was that it did should not need people looking up the DNS entry or the location of the city or anything else...from first glance the board should have been seen as a fake, which I'm sure many did. For those who did not, the whole Soviet-surplus concept should have set them straight. Nobody should ever have bought this for more than a few seconds.
I'm all for dreaming; it's not the "gee, this is neat" people I am teasing. There are many people on slashdot who spend a lot of time in serious psuedoscientific discussions making grand statements about subjects they don't begin to understand. This is one of the drawbacks of an open forum, but a decent tradeoff for the freedom. My point is that this should serve to remind the spouters and those who listen to them to think before they type.
So thanks for coming into the discussion so late and setting us all straight, but I think a lot of people already came to your conclusion, some time ago!
I did not post to "set anyone straight", but to add my comments to the other posters in this forum who still bought the idea and were complaining about the cruel hoax from these clever guys.
You raise a couple good points. Steve Jobs is no hero of mine. He needed to be controlled, but bringing in Sculley was not a solution. And that was Jobs own fault.
Regarding Atari, Bushnell would have run the company right into the ground given enough time. It was his poor management decisions that resulted in the sale to Warner and the arrival of Kassar in the first place. Atari had no marketing.
But after the arrival of Kassar, they had no engineering either.
I take your points, but still stand by my statement that management needs to understand the technology they handle. I should add, however, that innovators tend to make lousy managers. Neither Jobs nor Bushnell had any idea how to run a company. But they knew how to hire engineers and how to have an idea.
I have no sympathy for anyone who bought into the scam.
The board was such an obvious fake. First of all the "cpu" looks a lot like an Adaptec SCSI controller chip with an Adaptec part number sticker on it. In fact it looks exactly like one. I have boards dating back to 1993 that have stickers just like that...although only the newer ones have the bar codes.
Next, note the fact that the Adaptec logo appears on the PC board! I can't quite read the model number, but it is there. And a word that looks a lot like it says "adaptec" appears on the chips. And the board was angled in the photos so that you can't get a good look at it! Come on...
It was most amusing to watch so many people spout off about a product that was clearly a pasteup. The whole concept was laughable.
Russian millitary surplus?!? This is the same country that imported pinball machines into East Germany in the 1980s just to get their hands on the CPUs. The Russian millitary is still using vacuum tubes, folks. They don't have any high-performance vector processors. If they did, they would not be selling such a high-tech item on the surplus market.
Okay, say you really are an experienced user, but you (1) hate Adaptec, and have never even looked at their cards or logo (2) don't know about the state of Russian low-tech, (3) forgot to examine the photo to see if it was a fraud. Did it not strike any of the "victims" as a little strange that this Russian millitary component would be packaged in a gull-wing SMT plastic package? Don't you think it would be at least a rad-hardened component in a ceramic package? Did you never wonder about how Linux would be so easily ported to a radically different CPU yet still run standard binaries compiled for existing CPUs? Did you not think that since PPC Linux had different SETI binaries than Intel, that some ex-Soviet chip might just need SETI to be recompiled?
A lot has been said about these kids being "bad guys", but with a fake this obvious, I think the only people who should feel guilty are the self-described experts who were so quick to spout off about the "board" with no knowledge about the subject.
I disagree--this was an important lesson for many of the self-described "experts" who frequent/.
This was such an obvious hoax that I was laughing from the start. Come on, the board was obviously a paste-up fake! Based on Russian surplus technology?? The Russians are still using vacuum tubes; they're not going to trash some super vector processors. And in gull-wing SMT packages yet!
I'm not convinced IBM has turned around. Things are looking better, but I am taking a wait-and-see approach.
I don't know the story at Apple as well, but when Ray Kassar first took over Atari, he brought in marketing--something Atari never had--and people started to cheer him for "turning Atari around". But soon he started to fire engineers, and destroyed the creative startup environment that had made the company a success. He did not understand the value of innovation, and he and Nolan Bushnell quickly locked horns, just like Steve Jobs and the idiot-from-PepsiCo. Like Jobs at Apple, Bushnell was forced out of his own company and the new management destoyed the corporate culture. Unlike Apple, Atari did not pull its innovative culture back together....and it fell.
IBM has been unique as both an innovator and a dinosaur at the same time. I hope they survive and contiunue on their path toward greater use of open-source SW, but I am not holding my breath.
After 25 years, you can forgive him getting a bit confused., but AFAIK he has the story of the TRS-80 totally wrong. The TRS-80 Model I could be expanded and you could add a disk drive--even if it was a kludge. I'm also fairly certain that the development of the TRS-80 was about the same time as the Apple, not "much later" as portrayed by SW.
I had never read any of "The Woz"'s writing before, and it is nice that he does not have the "look at me, I am wonderful" problems of Steve Jobs. To listen to SJ, one would think that he--with some technical assistance from SW--created the microcomputer. SW is a lot more accurate.
Also nice was the mention of Mike Markkula, but like most stories of the founding of Apple no mention is made of the role of Nolan Bushnell.
I was very, very pleased to see mention of Atari engineeer Al Acorn in the article, however. If you know the full story on Atari--which SW does not cover--the complicated reasons for Bushnell's decision were what eventually brought the fall of Atari. Bad management from a ex-Burlington manager ran Atari into the ground, and a ex-Pepsi manager came inches from killing Apple. When will the technology industry realize that you can't have hi-tech industries run by people who don't understand them?
Woz has his head on a lot straighter than most of the people in SV.
If they will only release a binary of the driver, that is better than nothing. Linux users will gripe, but at least they will be supported.
But why not release it open source? Any decent hardware hacker can snag a logic analyzer and disassembler and pull the code apart. Besides, it can't be that big of a mystery; your compeditors probably have some engineers working on their own solution--the release of your source won't make a big difference.
I started using computers around 1980. It was my dream to become an engineer and move to SV; I even made what for me was almost a Haj to the valley in the mid-80s to visit some of the companies; in particular Broderbund and Atari.
Well, I am an engineer. But I don't even like to visit SV anymore, let alone live there. Gone are the days of friendly--if geeky--guys hanging out at the local computer swap meets where you could meet everyone from CEOs to pre-high school kids. Now it is about money and power. SV used to be ruled by the latest transistor design or MPU release. Now it is all stock options.
It has gotten totally out of hand.
Regarding the author's janitorial comments, while I admit he has a point about the disconnection, I strongly disagree that it is a race issue. Last time I was in SV, whites were a minority, as were Americans. Companies found it cheaper to bring in foreign grad students and pay them lower salaries. And while I am always friendly and greet the Spanish-speaking cleaning crew in my building (when I am here in the middle of the night), I cannot feel sorry for them because they don't speak English. They knew that the US was an English-speaking nation before they left home, and I don't think I am being cruel by not learning their language. The reason English-speaking people (of any ethnic background) have other jobs is their language skills.
I think the high-tech industry is a great equalizer. One company that is courting me has the following technical staff, as I see them: two "white" Americans, one hispanic American, one naturalized Asian-American female CEO, three additional Chinese (one female) and one Indian. That does not sound too race-oriented to me. The nice thing is that they decided not to relocate in SV.
When people base their success in life only on the $$$ they make, they have lost sight of the reasons for living.
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Well, reading the results I found them to be pretty true...but it occured to me that they seemed rather generic comments that could apply to anyone.
So I took it again, but this time I chose the colors in a random order. First by starting with my least favorite color then clicking them at random. Then clicking them in a pattern determined before the colors came up, so I would not have any "unconcious influence" on the pattern.
The data from those sessions seemed just as accurate...
So I'll have to give that quiz an "F"
Was this what he was charged with? Please cite where you found this out?
I hate most police officers. I think they are just young guys who like to push people around.
But reading the link you posted, this protester-centric, anti-police, anti-GOP site is not really a good source for unbiased news reporting. I see it as even less trustworthy than the official police site.
It sounds like the ear issue was an accident. And it was torn, not "ripped off", even according to the link you posted. I suspect the protesters were not all that peaceful. I've had run-ins with "peaceful" animal rights protestors who were quick to throw raw blood on me, despite the fact that I have never worked with animals (not much call for an Electrical Engineer to do that), and that there had not been an animal experiment in the building for 32 years. And the researcher who had done the experiments had died in 1974.
They did not care about accuracy, they just wanted to protest...something....
I support many of 2600's causes, but a lot of the 2600 "staff" tends to stand on the edge of legal at best.
Note that the CNN link from the 2600 page says that the ACLU folks thought the prisoners seemed to be treated okay. I'm certain the ACLU would love to jump into this, and if they say things look fair, I tend to believe them.
The fact that 2600 does not mention the charge is significant.
Finally, I remember people arrested in the WTO protest appeared on CNN whining about their terrible treatment. Their specific complaints were centered around issues of bologna-containing sandwiches given to people who were "vegans", and the fact that the fruit juice supplied by the police was not 100% juice, but a 10% juice drink. Keep in mind that these people were detained for less than a day and never removed from the site; the Seattle police were under no obligation to provide anything more than water to prevent dehydration.
The protesters are a bunch of spoiled rich kids, IMHO. It is "in" to be arrested, to protest, to "fight against the system" until Daddy retires and you become an investment banker. I won't put much stock in any of this until I hear the whole story.
I realize that is a bit harsh, but I feel it is the truth.
hehehehe...I've always wanted to publish a real paper with some humor, but every time I try my supervisor removes all sign of anything interesting. I like the p and q idea...
Clearly an Electronic Arts golden-era fan here!
I am with you though...MULE may be the best multiplayer game ever. Hell, it is the best, IM not-so HO.
Gnutella is not in the "right", but it is legal as it is a user-to-user transaction with out a profit being made by anyone in the deal.
How is this illegal???
Did you go to the show? I did. There were two exhibitors there selling restored full-size video games. Bruce and Cathy Carso were there selling Atari hardware and software as they have for the last twenty years. The Intellivision developers were there selling a legal, licensed emulator with their games. So was Cosmi. Hasbro was giving away CDs with its PC versions of Atari games. Telegames was there with its games. There was a new developer with his classic Ultima-esque game and several tables with new 2600, Colecovision, and Lynx titles. Plus tables of used games everywhere.
Only one person was selling an emulator-style arcade cabinet that could run many games. But guess what? They were all legal, licensed versions.
There was nothing illegal at the show, with the exception of some mid-80s Atari pirate cartridges from overseas companies that are now prized as rare pirated cartridges by collectors who already own at least one of the legal versions.
Perhaps next time you should investigate a little before you start running off at the mouth; get some journalistic integrity. The website for the show is cgexpo.com.
That is not the point. Napster is making money off of somebody else's product without providing any sort of payment for the use of that product. If I ran a site where people could download scans of textbooks--for which I made a profit--don't you think the publishers would be annoyed?
The RIAA might be making money out of the whole deal with increased sales of records, but if you don't protect your property, you might lose it. Napster is also guilty of some double-standards (thatr have been discussed on slashdot), so I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Remember that lousy music group they sued for trademark infringement after the group started selling clothing with the Napster logo? Napster might get more visitors when people saw the illegal shirts, but Napster sent off their own cease-and-desist letter....
That is not the same thing.
Napster is providing a way to access music that is sold my the RIAA without paying the fee that the RIAA asks for the music. It is not the same thing as making a copy of a music tape from a friend. It is like walking into a store, making a copy of a tape, and the store owner gets handed a dollar for allowing you to use his location.
RIAA is saying that that dollar should be theirs, since they own the rights to the music.
No. Napster is not just a search engine, its client program is a file server designed so hand all .MP3 files on a user's hard disk to anyone who asks, without regard to anything else.
Although I cannot stand the RIAA, the more I think about it something just seems wrong about Napster making a profit off of someone elses work.
If Napster was not doing this is for profit, then it would be an easier case for me. But with Napster doing this as a business, it seems fair that the record companies should get a cut; even if they don't really deserve any more money.
The MPAA case is a lot easier; they (the MPAA) are clearly in the wrong. But the RIAA have some valid points, and they are sounding more valid all the time.
Gnutella, on the other hand, is not a business and is therefore exempt, IMHO.
I disagreee. PCs are cheap both in price and quality. The best-quality components are much better, but they still fail enough that with 100, 10000, or 41000 you will have several with problems at any one time.
Even with the best server-grade components, the PCs will be far less reliable. And I would bet that 10000 server-grade PCs would cost as much as one of these mainframes. If you own the mainframe, the cost-per-minute charges don't apply (remember that IBM sells now-a-days), and while you need more-expensive operators, you need fewer of them as they are not swapping hard drives and smoking video cards every 20 minutes.
For a long time I advocated clusters of PCs for any application. Clusters have some great uses, but so does real hardware.
older CD players won't even play CDR's I have had real problems with the CDRs I have made. Certain types/colors work on certain players but not others. There is no universal standard that works on them all, but dark blue Verbatim seem the most compatible. I transfer out-of-print records to CD for a friend of mine.
MP3s suffer from the same problems as the other formats, however. It is not fast; reading and encoding the CD takes a while. Longer if you want error-checking. Second, the quality is pretty poor compared to CD...depending on the style of the music being encoded and the encoder. They are not "exact copies" at all!
Although tape pirating was a problem, I would argue that one of the reasons so few tapes were sold was the quality. Record companies sold (and often still sell) the worst quality tapes on the market (some companies, like American Gramaphone, were exceptions). And they were expensive! Often more money than the phonograph record, and you got a poor-quality tape with a lot of noise that would melt, stretch, wear out and break.
A solution? Buy the record and a top-quality blank. You tape it once, and the decent quality blank (which could be Cr02 or Metal if you had the right deck) would sound much, much better than a factory tape. Chances are it would last forever (a lot longer than the ones from the record companies), plus if it did wear out you just made a new one. Finally, the cost for a record and a blank was the same or just a bit more than the factory tapes.
When my phonograph died, I would buy factory tapes...but first-play I would copy them to a blank and keep the master in a safe place. Most of the factory tapes would degrade very quickly, and in the mid-80s ran $7-$14, which was quite a bit of money at the time.
True, it was easy to trade tapes. And unlike MP3s, the tapes lost quality with each transfer; not just the first one. But if the music industry wants to compete, they need to lower their prices (now way too high) or improve the quality. Give consumers a reason to buy the product, not just lawsuits.
I have little sympathy for companies who raise prices as sales increase...
To be fair, that is vaporware at the moment. It sounds impressive, but when I see one actually working on silicon then it will be newsworthy. But I wish them the best of luck.
I did not mean to suggest that Russia was somehow less-capable on some sort of intellectual basis; the nation has turned out many of the worlds best physicists and probably the majority of the mathematicians. The Russian people are also famous for their "kludge it with anything in a pinch" attitude that was once common among Americans, if not the their government. But fifty years of closed borders and minds in the government has put them rather behind the times. This is not all bad...programmers in Russia that learned in the 80s-90s are quite skilled as they had to learn how to work with the hardware they had instead of throwing new hardware at a software problem. I've been screaming about this in my country for the last 10 years and nobody takes any notice.
Until fairly recently, Russia did not have access to the tools to produce modern semiconductors; they could not have made them if they wanted to. I remember seeing photos of semiconductor production equipment in National Geographic that were seized while in the process of being smuggled to Russia. I'm sure some got in, and of course by now I imagine Russian companies are producing their own.
One "advantage" to using tube computers is that they are less sensitive to EMP, which is important if you are planning to be near a nuclear explosion. There are ways to shield semis from this problem, but that is fairly difficult.
Good point on the technology; I should have pointed out that I was speaking only about electronics. As I recall somebody else did notice and post a mention of the Adaptec logo on the board and the fact that the image was an obvious fake, yet people still droned on about how much they wanted one.
Should I have posted a "me too" about the Adaptec logo or chip? Perhaps. But it would not have done any good. People were screaming about it being a fake and people were still buying it!
BTW, the "1993" reference is just the oldest Adaptec card I own with that style of sticker. They still use the same style, and the one in the photo looks to be one of the newer ones. Finally, I covered the case of "what if you've never seen an Adaptec card" in the body of my message...
No, I was enjoying the action. When the article was first posted for just a moment I got really interested...then looked at the board and got confused. Then I laughed.
Monday Morning Quarterback? I assume this means judging an event after it has already happened? See my previous paragraph.
I was debating if I should point it out or sit back and watch when the first "this is a fake" post was made, at which point I wandered off 'cause I figured the gag was over. What amazed me when I came back is how many people kept talking about it and debating its use and possible features, when one glance should have told them it could not be real.
Of course a lot of people knew it was a fake! Not only did a lot of people post about it, but a lot of people probably just sat in their cubes and shook their heads like me.
My point was that it did should not need people looking up the DNS entry or the location of the city or anything else...from first glance the board should have been seen as a fake, which I'm sure many did. For those who did not, the whole Soviet-surplus concept should have set them straight. Nobody should ever have bought this for more than a few seconds.
I'm all for dreaming; it's not the "gee, this is neat" people I am teasing. There are many people on slashdot who spend a lot of time in serious psuedoscientific discussions making grand statements about subjects they don't begin to understand. This is one of the drawbacks of an open forum, but a decent tradeoff for the freedom. My point is that this should serve to remind the spouters and those who listen to them to think before they type.
So thanks for coming into the discussion so late and setting us all straight, but I think a lot of people already came to your conclusion, some time ago!I did not post to "set anyone straight", but to add my comments to the other posters in this forum who still bought the idea and were complaining about the cruel hoax from these clever guys.
You raise a couple good points. Steve Jobs is no hero of mine. He needed to be controlled, but bringing in Sculley was not a solution. And that was Jobs own fault.
Regarding Atari, Bushnell would have run the company right into the ground given enough time. It was his poor management decisions that resulted in the sale to Warner and the arrival of Kassar in the first place. Atari had no marketing.
But after the arrival of Kassar, they had no engineering either.
I take your points, but still stand by my statement that management needs to understand the technology they handle. I should add, however, that innovators tend to make lousy managers. Neither Jobs nor Bushnell had any idea how to run a company. But they knew how to hire engineers and how to have an idea.
I have no sympathy for anyone who bought into the scam.
The board was such an obvious fake. First of all the "cpu" looks a lot like an Adaptec SCSI controller chip with an Adaptec part number sticker on it. In fact it looks exactly like one. I have boards dating back to 1993 that have stickers just like that...although only the newer ones have the bar codes.
Next, note the fact that the Adaptec logo appears on the PC board! I can't quite read the model number, but it is there. And a word that looks a lot like it says "adaptec" appears on the chips. And the board was angled in the photos so that you can't get a good look at it! Come on...
It was most amusing to watch so many people spout off about a product that was clearly a pasteup. The whole concept was laughable.
Russian millitary surplus?!? This is the same country that imported pinball machines into East Germany in the 1980s just to get their hands on the CPUs. The Russian millitary is still using vacuum tubes, folks. They don't have any high-performance vector processors. If they did, they would not be selling such a high-tech item on the surplus market.
Okay, say you really are an experienced user, but you (1) hate Adaptec, and have never even looked at their cards or logo (2) don't know about the state of Russian low-tech, (3) forgot to examine the photo to see if it was a fraud. Did it not strike any of the "victims" as a little strange that this Russian millitary component would be packaged in a gull-wing SMT plastic package? Don't you think it would be at least a rad-hardened component in a ceramic package? Did you never wonder about how Linux would be so easily ported to a radically different CPU yet still run standard binaries compiled for existing CPUs? Did you not think that since PPC Linux had different SETI binaries than Intel, that some ex-Soviet chip might just need SETI to be recompiled?
A lot has been said about these kids being "bad guys", but with a fake this obvious, I think the only people who should feel guilty are the self-described experts who were so quick to spout off about the "board" with no knowledge about the subject.
I disagree--this was an important lesson for many of the self-described "experts" who frequent /.
This was such an obvious hoax that I was laughing from the start. Come on, the board was obviously a paste-up fake! Based on Russian surplus technology?? The Russians are still using vacuum tubes; they're not going to trash some super vector processors. And in gull-wing SMT packages yet!
Anyone who fell for this hoax deserved it!
I'm not convinced IBM has turned around. Things are looking better, but I am taking a wait-and-see approach.
I don't know the story at Apple as well, but when Ray Kassar first took over Atari, he brought in marketing--something Atari never had--and people started to cheer him for "turning Atari around". But soon he started to fire engineers, and destroyed the creative startup environment that had made the company a success. He did not understand the value of innovation, and he and Nolan Bushnell quickly locked horns, just like Steve Jobs and the idiot-from-PepsiCo. Like Jobs at Apple, Bushnell was forced out of his own company and the new management destoyed the corporate culture. Unlike Apple, Atari did not pull its innovative culture back together....and it fell.
IBM has been unique as both an innovator and a dinosaur at the same time. I hope they survive and contiunue on their path toward greater use of open-source SW, but I am not holding my breath.
After 25 years, you can forgive him getting a bit confused., but AFAIK he has the story of the TRS-80 totally wrong. The TRS-80 Model I could be expanded and you could add a disk drive--even if it was a kludge. I'm also fairly certain that the development of the TRS-80 was about the same time as the Apple, not "much later" as portrayed by SW.
I had never read any of "The Woz"'s writing before, and it is nice that he does not have the "look at me, I am wonderful" problems of Steve Jobs. To listen to SJ, one would think that he--with some technical assistance from SW--created the microcomputer. SW is a lot more accurate.
Also nice was the mention of Mike Markkula, but like most stories of the founding of Apple no mention is made of the role of Nolan Bushnell.
I was very, very pleased to see mention of Atari engineeer Al Acorn in the article, however. If you know the full story on Atari--which SW does not cover--the complicated reasons for Bushnell's decision were what eventually brought the fall of Atari. Bad management from a ex-Burlington manager ran Atari into the ground, and a ex-Pepsi manager came inches from killing Apple. When will the technology industry realize that you can't have hi-tech industries run by people who don't understand them?
Woz has his head on a lot straighter than most of the people in SV.
If they will only release a binary of the driver, that is better than nothing. Linux users will gripe, but at least they will be supported.
But why not release it open source? Any decent hardware hacker can snag a logic analyzer and disassembler and pull the code apart. Besides, it can't be that big of a mystery; your compeditors probably have some engineers working on their own solution--the release of your source won't make a big difference.
I started using computers around 1980. It was my dream to become an engineer and move to SV; I even made what for me was almost a Haj to the valley in the mid-80s to visit some of the companies; in particular Broderbund and Atari.
Well, I am an engineer. But I don't even like to visit SV anymore, let alone live there. Gone are the days of friendly--if geeky--guys hanging out at the local computer swap meets where you could meet everyone from CEOs to pre-high school kids. Now it is about money and power. SV used to be ruled by the latest transistor design or MPU release. Now it is all stock options.
It has gotten totally out of hand.
Regarding the author's janitorial comments, while I admit he has a point about the disconnection, I strongly disagree that it is a race issue. Last time I was in SV, whites were a minority, as were Americans. Companies found it cheaper to bring in foreign grad students and pay them lower salaries. And while I am always friendly and greet the Spanish-speaking cleaning crew in my building (when I am here in the middle of the night), I cannot feel sorry for them because they don't speak English. They knew that the US was an English-speaking nation before they left home, and I don't think I am being cruel by not learning their language. The reason English-speaking people (of any ethnic background) have other jobs is their language skills.
I think the high-tech industry is a great equalizer. One company that is courting me has the following technical staff, as I see them: two "white" Americans, one hispanic American, one naturalized Asian-American female CEO, three additional Chinese (one female) and one Indian. That does not sound too race-oriented to me. The nice thing is that they decided not to relocate in SV.
When people base their success in life only on the $$$ they make, they have lost sight of the reasons for living.