And this is the same problem as the DC -- manifested in a different way. On the DC bad discs froze the system, on the PS2 bad code overwrote its bounds. This doesn't cover the overheat/freeze problems however. I suspect they need to further cool these puppies. DVD playback is still an issue.
My problem with this episode falls the same lines as yours. The big problem I had with this is that they weren't wearing full simstim suits, these were holograms, not of the calibre of a force hologram from Star Trek. That sorta bugged me. The references to Rise of the Triad was kinda funny with the baddies looking like the triad officers. The baddies and the level layout reminded me of RoTT terribly. *shudder*
I think he means the widget set looks a bit too rough and technical. Try driving a German vehicle sometime. all kinds of odd buttons, and lotsa squareness in those things. Like mercedes has all kinds of giant rocker switches on the dashboard, and the radio is very wide. It's just a different aesthetic, and something I'd expect from a French or Italian car as well. Different countries, different engineers.
I agree with the not good for quake part, and the not good for photoshop part.
I have a trackman marblefx for my mouse, and I also use a drawing tablet under photoshop. Drawing tablets aren't good for doing menu things, as they have a tendency to slide the cursor. The trackball is pretty accurate for selections though. You can do a straight across line, and clicking (or letting go of the button) does not move the cursor.
And what of the IV, the VI and the II. I don't recall a palm pilot 2. If you use their logic:
Palm Pilot (I)
Palm Pilot Pro (II?)
Palm III
Palm V
Palm VII
Palm IIIx
Palm IIIi
Palm IIIc
Palm IIIxe
A post above asked when the Palm VIIc comes out. They may have some power issues to work on with this one. I presume that they will need to work with a backlight on all the time with this one, and the battery life would be significantly reduced with the packetmodem.
also, on another note, did anybody else notice that this IIIc has a Li ion battery? This is odd, since the V seemed to be their "rechargable" line. Maybe they should rethink the numbering strategy.
btw: i have a iiix, and I don't think I could ever fill it up, so iiixe looks a little silly to me.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing for us overall? Linux was always a hacker's system. If you didn't know how to compile something, you weren't likely to get far. RedHat fixed that bug.
Now our desktop is too difficult to use? Which desktop? we have over 50 or so window managers, and 2 object models. I can see something based on gnome helping out, but what happens when JoeRandomNewbie loads up his pretty desktop and it proceeds to segfault? What if XDM drops him to a standard login prompt like when Windows can't load all of its dll's?
Suddenly, cold hard reality sets in. This isn't MacOS. For it to be close, they would have to somehow castrate the shell interface. You can't really do much in BeOS until you drop to a command line. MacOS is good for new users because they CAN'T go to that level. Everything is taken in graphically, just as our minds tend to work.
I once worked at Egghead. On the week following WIN95 going on sale, fielded many questions. One of the people there wondered if he had to use "DOS words" When I asked hem what he meant by that, he said "like name _period_ dat dat dat" and It dawned on me he was referring to filenames! This seems to be a common thought pattern among users out there.
Linux not getting new users is all about the CLI. New users are afraid of it. If a "newbie" distribution is made, it would be accepted quickly, but what happens if it fails out of the GUI? Or if a release goes out that has something broken in it? And the usual questions like "does it run Word" comes to mind. Heck, if it runs on Intel hardware, and so does Windows, why can't it run Windows applications? You will have a lot of Linux users on paper but not in life. They would be Eazel users.
While innovation is great, I think this project may do more harm than good. It will be good in the sense that a lot of UI work would be done. It would be great if it could be downloaded for free and used under any distro as a window manager. But how will Eazel make money if it is a company. There's the obvious support, but even RedHat sells a physical product.
If they put it up for sale it may not reach full adoption like standard libraries such as GTK or tcl/tk or X protocol. But they probably have a plan to take care of this. I could be wrong, but they could just be the first with an idea.
I know that the OS to most of us isn't the sum of its GUI and ease of use. It's the kernel and the applications. I hope the Eazel foks remember that. It's a different paradigm.
How does one draw the line between a "broad" and "non-broad" patent in a way that's not completely arbitrary?
I define broad patents as anything that falls outside the bounds of a perceptible concept or thing. One click shopping is broad because it (1)obviates its own need, and (2)covers any one-click shopping, as long as it's electronic.
As to your second statement, I agree except in the cases outlined in the original post. Mechanical devices should be patentable, as well as anything outside of behavior and natural law.
and on the last point, you already cannot patent something in nature, and most of mathematics is considered part of nature. makes you wonder where encryption stands. is it an algorithm or mathematics?
That's a tough line for me too. I happen to believe you can't patent DNA, but you should be able to patent the hardware to use it. Like the site that's linked in this article states, there is the issue of RSA's patent on their encryption. The algorithm is 200 years old, and they applied the principles and patented them. Like you said, it may be an original patent, but not really a novel one, due to a 200 year old work.
As far as nature is concerned, I consider only lower maths to be a part of nature. Most gemoetry is. Calculus to an extent is, since it describes nature. But when you are talking things like encryption, you tend to get into hypotheticals and are a bit outside the bounds of traditional mathematics and nature.
What sickens me about patents is the broad brush by which they are applied. to say "method of making greeting cards" and simply copy it as a derivative work by placing "electronically" or any other postfix is part of the problem. I'm not against patents, but rather against broad patents.
One example is a process patent. The way we do things to a certain extent is determined by the way we think. Patenting a process is like patenting a thought to an extent. As a matter of chemistry, culture and education 2 people just might come up with the same idea despite never having met, or seen each other's work. One isn't allowed to use his/her thoughts because he/she didn't patent it and the other did.
I am willing to give in on some points though. One such point is software that is truly unique. The truly non-obvious stuff should be patentable. Now what is obvious? I'd have to say that anything that makes at least a majority of the population say "well duuuuh." If you look at IBM's Patent Server you'll see quite a few duh's out there.
One click shopping springs to mind. While it has not real analogue to real life, it has to be common sense that the least steps anything can be done in is one. That goes for anybody out there who wishes to capatilze on one step processes of any sort. The number of steps in a process is not something on which to base a patent.
I'm personally ok with patents on algorithms. However, algorithms that are derivitive works shouldn't even get to be an issue. Modifying something existing does not make it yours. You also shouldn't be able to patent nature. Why patent leaf patterns?
I ramble as usual, boring slashdot to tears. Parting shot : Patents are good for physical things, dubios for processes, and OK for original software in my book. I don't mind flames:)
That's precisely what I want out of life. My statment that I work 70 hours to improve the quality of life was merely an intentionally ironic statment. It's mostly a part of my cynical view. I work one job to pay for my life, and the other to improve my future. But I in no way believe that one begets the other 100%. I wish my job made my life more fun. Perhaps one day it may sate my hunger for something important and fun to do with my life.
Its the PC world which is touting this "MHz" thing as a true benchmark.
And also, it's pretty obvious that it's the PC world that determines things that are the official, percieved and unofficial benchmarks. I agree that the only thing that matters is performance. However, the perception of 500mhz v. 800 mhz makes people think that newest dell or compaq is better than a Macintosh.
However, the processing bandwidth, you'll be sure to agree, is way higher on a G4 than on an intel chip. they have 500 mhz chip with up to 1 meg backside cache running at 250mhz. While the system bus is still 100 mhz and can only pump 800MB/s, it is still powerful. I do make the following off the wall prediction:
Apple will release a system with 200mhz bus, using the clock up/down method that athlon uses on the ev6 bus. This would make the system run at 1.6GB/s something els to put inder its belt.
Apple will work to get some of those nifty 200 (or more) dpi flatscreens in their line. Apple known for nifty.
They will one day cave and put an appropriately shaped mouse and keyboard on those things. (ok, so it's more of a nit)
Anyways, they still have a few chances to make announcements, so this may be their best year ever!
It's just my bad sense of humor (one that gets me marked down as troll from time to time) slipping through. I like what Jobs has done for the company, but it's all about his ego sometimes.:) Anyways, they are doing surprisingly well for a company in the dumper 3 years ago. kudos!
Well, since I'm working two jobs in the tech field, I just thought I'd give a breakdown.
Most of my weekdays involve me getting up at 6am and driving to work. I arrive at 7:30 and catch up on my email and Slashdot and the other 3 sites I visit regularly. This lasts until I find something useful to do, or until I go home. This is what you refer to as a "deadend" job. Nothing to do, can't do anything interesting in other departments (such as marketing) as you are "tied" to your structure. Feh I say.
The other part of my time I spend at my first job working for the new job in a media startup. Setting up server configs on paper, doing market-type research, sketching web designs and the like are common tasks. I don't feel bad about doing this, since the other job doesn't pay me yet, and I want to do something to avoid passing out from ennui.
I then drive 1.5 miles to my other, newer job. This one I hope will pan out. I spend about anywhere from 5-7 hours there and go home. Lately I've been there for at most 3-1/2 since I'm burning out fast.
In total, I usually spend from 7am to 9:30pm away from home. Sometimes I get home by 8:00 if I'm really tired. I can't be die-hard for a job I don't get paid for, but I kinda like it anyways.
My primary job rarely gets into my personal time, and my other job is almost a focused obsession. If I get paid regularly for the second job, I would quit the Old job in an instant. However, I have an apartment, a car, and other sundry payments to make. I miss going to my martial arts classes most of all. I feel week for it. However, they are early evening classes, and the distance from Cranberry Twp. to Pittsburgh is about 30 miles, making things all the more complicated.
Add it up, and I am either commuting or at work for approx 14 hours a day for a total of 70 hours per week. Aah, the things we do for quality of life.
I for one am glad to see these new releases, considering they don't co-incide with a major Apple conference. Anyways, on to the hardware:
The newer iBook:
I have to admit it is nice. It has a nice new graphite color and some internal improvements. I wonder if they have fixed that flimsy-feely keyboard. It made me think my hands weigh 10 pounds each. Very delicate hardware, and somewhat tiny keys. They doubled the ram and hdd which is of course a good thing.
It is interesting to note that it is one of the more expandable laptops I've seen recently, with a maximum 320 megs of ram. 366 is a decent speed for a portable device, especially when combined with RISC hardware. Unfortunately, you probably won't see much of an improvement until you run OSX client to take advantage of the chipset.
The G4:
I suppose Motorola caught up. Still upgrading the processor to 500mhz doesn't help much in a world full of 800 mhz PIIIs and Athlons. Should add a boost for professional video and photoshop folks out there.
The powerbook:
Late again. This was expected last month, but at least they put some polish on it. A 500mhz laptop is something to look at twice, regardless of the operating system it runs. Couple that with a max 512mb of RAM, and you have a nice little lapwarmer. I was fully expecting a G4 in this puppy, but I suppose I'll need to wait. 1 meg of backside cache is also a bonus. Oh yeah, it also has firewire ports. Nifty. One more thing: it only comes in one color. Thank the goddes for that one.
Looks like a nice bunch from Apple again. Hopefully they can deflate Steve's ego enough to get him out the door..
I've thought about things like that before- replacing the current DVD standards with open-source standards
Replacing these schemes would be great, but they are unfortunately plans already in motion. The focus would have to be on the next generation of DVD device, such as a DVD3 player or something along those lines.
The main problem is the ownership of the previous specs. If the CSS software is as closely held as it currently is in court, then you wouldn't be able to code by region without re-inventing the wheel there. MPEG and MJPEG are owned by expert groups, but specific decoding principals are covered by patent. You'd need to engineer that out. We all remember the problems with QT4 and Sorenson. Apple would love to spread the QuickTime love, but the primary codec is proprietary. And since OpenSource users like the code, they may not use something proprietary. This is a moral or political stand rather than a logical one.
If we promote hardware-based decoding instead of software based decoding, anybody can use the DVD drive, companies will feel safe in publishing, and compatiblity is assured to a common standard. However, companies will add to the standard, breaking things. There is always this risk, except in cases where a standard is dictated down. XML is completely extensible if you follow its rules. That is a definite standard.
The philosophy that a modem is a modem is what sets the Linux world apart from the Windows world. Our modems accept AT commands universally. Winmodems won't accept anything until you throw another layer in-between to translate the information. Even then they only work within windows, and not even through DOS.
To sum, companies want to put out a differentiated product, make it out of as few cheap parts as possible and maximize profit. If you want DVD under Linux, you have to get a more expensive hardware board. The companies are not beholden to a bunch of Linux activists.
I certainly can't agree with this. While the card can render triangles with textures, it hardly falls into the range of the cards out there that do T&L in hardware, accept a common API call that all operating systems can share, and do so with little interaction from the main processor.
Your Sound card *IS* a band in a box
While my sound card does wavetable synthesis, my computer must tell it which notes to play when, when to swap instruments and so on. While you have to tell a midi sequencer what to do, you can simply upload the relevant data and use it at will. My card, the SBAWE64, actually has 32 channels, and emulates 32 in software on top of that. I'd wager the 128 only has 64 hardware channels. It is still a Software solution.
but that's because of refinement, and has little to do with the capabilities of the chips themselves.
The Amiga demos used hardware tricks such as copper bars and sprite moves. It took some digging to get that out of a pc. I've seen it in text mode, and I was impressed. I've also seen some PC demos that had un-explainably good graphics that worked completely with standard vga graphics doing 3d. That was tight code.
My point is this: If you can do it in hardware, don't do it in software. Doing things in hardware raises costs in the short term, but adding one of these cards decreases system load while increasing the productivity of the core's time.
Does anybody ever use this much processor power? I mean, I can't wait to play quake 4 or perhaps Ultima Ascension on a 1ghz processor. That would be keen.
However, more and faster can't take the place of smart. What I'd like to see is more media processor chips. You know like Sid and Nancy, and Paula, and so on. Even the 68xxx chip series started out as a process controller.
I'd like to see the next GeForce256 based card as a rendering sub-system. I want my drive controller to do everything it can, and I want a sound card that acts like a band in a box.
Most of all, I'd like to see modern software not require the newest chip. If you come down to it, every new chip, every new hard drive and every new graphics technology gets abused eventually. That's unfortunate, especially when you go to computer shows and see 1024x768 3d card demos that look like the 640x480 vga based 3d demos from the earlier 90s.
I always wait until my processor is out-classed by 100-120% in speed increase before I consider an upgrade. I then buy the next one back. I currently have a PII450, and I will upgrade when we get to 1GHz shipped. At that point, I may buy a 900mhz. But running Linux, I can't see where that will take me except shorter compile times, and the ability to serve to 100+ thin clients in my house or something like that. Of course I could boot into windows and play games:)
It's a another case of "More and faster." God bless Moore's law.
..."More and faster, here we come, white and trashy and incredibly dumb." -KMFDM
My problem isn't with the flamers. It's mostly with the people who write such articles. They simply write them to get controversy and hence ad impressions. It's a bit obvious. Maybe not always obvious though; I constantly wonder what Bob Metcalfe has in his head. Very strange man, babbling on about how Transmeta should open source their chip since Linus works for them and developed the morph code. Linux==open, not Linus==open. People like these either need a gentle reminder, or in the sense of persistent cluelesness, need a slap upside their heads.
Flames do make us look bad. As this is Troll Tuesday apparently, that seems obvious. One article had 2(!) parents total that were on-topic. This was out of 1100 posts. Most of those were flames, not trolls. All were offtopic, and obviously the result of bored script kiddies. Let's hope it doesn't come to this in email. The last thing we need is a bunch of mailbombings of authors and businesses (see linuxone for an example) to prove "0ur sup3r10r17y t0 j00!"
There are some obvious reasons that Fnord did this, and not just for altruism alone.
The first is obvious: people in the offices can be required to take work home with them. Heck, they have a computer, why not?
The system can check to see if an employee is really at his (fith or 6th) granmother's funeral, or if he's on the web.
UUNET can spike their email to Fnord Motor Company as official communication. This is unlikely, but possible since they still OWN the computers.
The Fnord connected websites can easily coerce employees into doing extra work, like commenting on conditions on their own time. I see nothing wrong with this, but it raises the possibility.
I just can't personally see a company computer. It reminds me too much of the "company store"
whatddya get? another day over and you're deeper in debt.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that one's called "vger", in fact I'm sure of it ;P
And this is the same problem as the DC -- manifested in a different way. On the DC bad discs froze the system, on the PS2 bad code overwrote its bounds.
This doesn't cover the overheat/freeze problems however. I suspect they need to further cool these puppies. DVD playback is still an issue.
Glitches? those are feat' ah say features boy!
My problem with this episode falls the same lines as yours. The big problem I had with this is that they weren't wearing full simstim suits, these were holograms, not of the calibre of a force hologram from Star Trek. That sorta bugged me. The references to Rise of the Triad was kinda funny with the baddies looking like the triad officers. The baddies and the level layout reminded me of RoTT terribly. *shudder*
Yep, I caught that too. Man, I love it when they toss in those references in futurama. Good geek show.
I think he means the widget set looks a bit too rough and technical. Try driving a German vehicle sometime. all kinds of odd buttons, and lotsa squareness in those things. Like mercedes has all kinds of giant rocker switches on the dashboard, and the radio is very wide. It's just a different aesthetic, and something I'd expect from a French or Italian car as well. Different countries, different engineers.
Or if you are babylonian that would be:
2:46:40
I have a trackman marblefx for my mouse, and I also use a drawing tablet under photoshop. Drawing tablets aren't good for doing menu things, as they have a tendency to slide the cursor. The trackball is pretty accurate for selections though. You can do a straight across line, and clicking (or letting go of the button) does not move the cursor.
Palm Pilot (I)
Palm Pilot Pro (II?)
Palm III
Palm V
Palm VII
Palm IIIx
Palm IIIi
Palm IIIc
Palm IIIxe
A post above asked when the Palm VIIc comes out. They may have some power issues to work on with this one. I presume that they will need to work with a backlight on all the time with this one, and the battery life would be significantly reduced with the packetmodem.
also, on another note, did anybody else notice that this IIIc has a Li ion battery? This is odd, since the V seemed to be their "rechargable" line. Maybe they should rethink the numbering strategy.
btw: i have a iiix, and I don't think I could ever fill it up, so iiixe looks a little silly to me.
The word is flooder, not spammer. This is not email, and it was quite on topic. Not to mention funny.
So I guess it's a good thing English supports overloaded Macros.
Now our desktop is too difficult to use? Which desktop? we have over 50 or so window managers, and 2 object models. I can see something based on gnome helping out, but what happens when JoeRandomNewbie loads up his pretty desktop and it proceeds to segfault? What if XDM drops him to a standard login prompt like when Windows can't load all of its dll's?
Suddenly, cold hard reality sets in. This isn't MacOS. For it to be close, they would have to somehow castrate the shell interface. You can't really do much in BeOS until you drop to a command line. MacOS is good for new users because they CAN'T go to that level. Everything is taken in graphically, just as our minds tend to work.
I once worked at Egghead. On the week following WIN95 going on sale, fielded many questions. One of the people there wondered if he had to use "DOS words" When I asked hem what he meant by that, he said "like name _period_ dat dat dat" and It dawned on me he was referring to filenames! This seems to be a common thought pattern among users out there.
Linux not getting new users is all about the CLI. New users are afraid of it. If a "newbie" distribution is made, it would be accepted quickly, but what happens if it fails out of the GUI? Or if a release goes out that has something broken in it? And the usual questions like "does it run Word" comes to mind. Heck, if it runs on Intel hardware, and so does Windows, why can't it run Windows applications? You will have a lot of Linux users on paper but not in life. They would be Eazel users.
While innovation is great, I think this project may do more harm than good. It will be good in the sense that a lot of UI work would be done. It would be great if it could be downloaded for free and used under any distro as a window manager. But how will Eazel make money if it is a company. There's the obvious support, but even RedHat sells a physical product.
If they put it up for sale it may not reach full adoption like standard libraries such as GTK or tcl/tk or X protocol. But they probably have a plan to take care of this. I could be wrong, but they could just be the first with an idea.
I know that the OS to most of us isn't the sum of its GUI and ease of use. It's the kernel and the applications. I hope the Eazel foks remember that. It's a different paradigm.
I define broad patents as anything that falls outside the bounds of a perceptible concept or thing. One click shopping is broad because it (1)obviates its own need, and (2)covers any one-click shopping, as long as it's electronic.
As to your second statement, I agree except in the cases outlined in the original post. Mechanical devices should be patentable, as well as anything outside of behavior and natural law.
That's a tough line for me too. I happen to believe you can't patent DNA, but you should be able to patent the hardware to use it. Like the site that's linked in this article states, there is the issue of RSA's patent on their encryption. The algorithm is 200 years old, and they applied the principles and patented them. Like you said, it may be an original patent, but not really a novel one, due to a 200 year old work.
As far as nature is concerned, I consider only lower maths to be a part of nature. Most gemoetry is. Calculus to an extent is, since it describes nature. But when you are talking things like encryption, you tend to get into hypotheticals and are a bit outside the bounds of traditional mathematics and nature.
One example is a process patent. The way we do things to a certain extent is determined by the way we think. Patenting a process is like patenting a thought to an extent. As a matter of chemistry, culture and education 2 people just might come up with the same idea despite never having met, or seen each other's work. One isn't allowed to use his/her thoughts because he/she didn't patent it and the other did.
I am willing to give in on some points though. One such point is software that is truly unique. The truly non-obvious stuff should be patentable. Now what is obvious? I'd have to say that anything that makes at least a majority of the population say "well duuuuh." If you look at IBM's Patent Server you'll see quite a few duh's out there.
One click shopping springs to mind. While it has not real analogue to real life, it has to be common sense that the least steps anything can be done in is one. That goes for anybody out there who wishes to capatilze on one step processes of any sort. The number of steps in a process is not something on which to base a patent.
I'm personally ok with patents on algorithms. However, algorithms that are derivitive works shouldn't even get to be an issue. Modifying something existing does not make it yours. You also shouldn't be able to patent nature. Why patent leaf patterns?
I ramble as usual, boring slashdot to tears. Parting shot : Patents are good for physical things, dubios for processes, and OK for original software in my book. I don't mind flames :)
That's precisely what I want out of life. My statment that I work 70 hours to improve the quality of life was merely an intentionally ironic statment. It's mostly a part of my cynical view. I work one job to pay for my life, and the other to improve my future. But I in no way believe that one begets the other 100%. I wish my job made my life more fun. Perhaps one day it may sate my hunger for something important and fun to do with my life.
Unfortunately, work==boredom
And also, it's pretty obvious that it's the PC world that determines things that are the official, percieved and unofficial benchmarks. I agree that the only thing that matters is performance. However, the perception of 500mhz v. 800 mhz makes people think that newest dell or compaq is better than a Macintosh.
However, the processing bandwidth, you'll be sure to agree, is way higher on a G4 than on an intel chip. they have 500 mhz chip with up to 1 meg backside cache running at 250mhz. While the system bus is still 100 mhz and can only pump 800MB/s, it is still powerful. I do make the following off the wall prediction:
- Apple will release a system with 200mhz bus, using the clock up/down method that athlon uses on the ev6 bus. This would make the system run at 1.6GB/s something els to put inder its belt.
- Apple will work to get some of those nifty 200 (or more) dpi flatscreens in their line. Apple known for nifty.
- They will one day cave and put an appropriately shaped mouse and keyboard on those things. (ok, so it's more of a nit)
Anyways, they still have a few chances to make announcements, so this may be their best year ever!It's just my bad sense of humor (one that gets me marked down as troll from time to time) slipping through. I like what Jobs has done for the company, but it's all about his ego sometimes. :) Anyways, they are doing surprisingly well for a company in the dumper 3 years ago. kudos!
Most of my weekdays involve me getting up at 6am and driving to work. I arrive at 7:30 and catch up on my email and Slashdot and the other 3 sites I visit regularly. This lasts until I find something useful to do, or until I go home. This is what you refer to as a "deadend" job. Nothing to do, can't do anything interesting in other departments (such as marketing) as you are "tied" to your structure. Feh I say.
The other part of my time I spend at my first job working for the new job in a media startup. Setting up server configs on paper, doing market-type research, sketching web designs and the like are common tasks. I don't feel bad about doing this, since the other job doesn't pay me yet, and I want to do something to avoid passing out from ennui.
I then drive 1.5 miles to my other, newer job. This one I hope will pan out. I spend about anywhere from 5-7 hours there and go home. Lately I've been there for at most 3-1/2 since I'm burning out fast.
In total, I usually spend from 7am to 9:30pm away from home. Sometimes I get home by 8:00 if I'm really tired. I can't be die-hard for a job I don't get paid for, but I kinda like it anyways.
My primary job rarely gets into my personal time, and my other job is almost a focused obsession. If I get paid regularly for the second job, I would quit the Old job in an instant. However, I have an apartment, a car, and other sundry payments to make. I miss going to my martial arts classes most of all. I feel week for it. However, they are early evening classes, and the distance from Cranberry Twp. to Pittsburgh is about 30 miles, making things all the more complicated.
Add it up, and I am either commuting or at work for approx 14 hours a day for a total of 70 hours per week. Aah, the things we do for quality of life.
The newer iBook:
I have to admit it is nice. It has a nice new graphite color and some internal improvements. I wonder if they have fixed that flimsy-feely keyboard. It made me think my hands weigh 10 pounds each. Very delicate hardware, and somewhat tiny keys. They doubled the ram and hdd which is of course a good thing.
It is interesting to note that it is one of the more expandable laptops I've seen recently, with a maximum 320 megs of ram. 366 is a decent speed for a portable device, especially when combined with RISC hardware. Unfortunately, you probably won't see much of an improvement until you run OSX client to take advantage of the chipset.
The G4:
I suppose Motorola caught up. Still upgrading the processor to 500mhz doesn't help much in a world full of 800 mhz PIIIs and Athlons. Should add a boost for professional video and photoshop folks out there.
The powerbook:
Late again. This was expected last month, but at least they put some polish on it. A 500mhz laptop is something to look at twice, regardless of the operating system it runs. Couple that with a max 512mb of RAM, and you have a nice little lapwarmer. I was fully expecting a G4 in this puppy, but I suppose I'll need to wait. 1 meg of backside cache is also a bonus. Oh yeah, it also has firewire ports. Nifty. One more thing: it only comes in one color. Thank the goddes for that one.
Looks like a nice bunch from Apple again. Hopefully they can deflate Steve's ego enough to get him out the door..
Replacing these schemes would be great, but they are unfortunately plans already in motion. The focus would have to be on the next generation of DVD device, such as a DVD3 player or something along those lines.
The main problem is the ownership of the previous specs. If the CSS software is as closely held as it currently is in court, then you wouldn't be able to code by region without re-inventing the wheel there. MPEG and MJPEG are owned by expert groups, but specific decoding principals are covered by patent. You'd need to engineer that out. We all remember the problems with QT4 and Sorenson. Apple would love to spread the QuickTime love, but the primary codec is proprietary. And since OpenSource users like the code, they may not use something proprietary. This is a moral or political stand rather than a logical one.
If we promote hardware-based decoding instead of software based decoding, anybody can use the DVD drive, companies will feel safe in publishing, and compatiblity is assured to a common standard. However, companies will add to the standard, breaking things. There is always this risk, except in cases where a standard is dictated down. XML is completely extensible if you follow its rules. That is a definite standard.
The philosophy that a modem is a modem is what sets the Linux world apart from the Windows world. Our modems accept AT commands universally. Winmodems won't accept anything until you throw another layer in-between to translate the information. Even then they only work within windows, and not even through DOS.
To sum, companies want to put out a differentiated product, make it out of as few cheap parts as possible and maximize profit. If you want DVD under Linux, you have to get a more expensive hardware board. The companies are not beholden to a bunch of Linux activists.
I certainly can't agree with this. While the card can render triangles with textures, it hardly falls into the range of the cards out there that do T&L in hardware, accept a common API call that all operating systems can share, and do so with little interaction from the main processor.
Your Sound card *IS* a band in a box
While my sound card does wavetable synthesis, my computer must tell it which notes to play when, when to swap instruments and so on. While you have to tell a midi sequencer what to do, you can simply upload the relevant data and use it at will. My card, the SBAWE64, actually has 32 channels, and emulates 32 in software on top of that. I'd wager the 128 only has 64 hardware channels. It is still a Software solution.
but that's because of refinement, and has little to do with the capabilities of the chips themselves.
The Amiga demos used hardware tricks such as copper bars and sprite moves. It took some digging to get that out of a pc. I've seen it in text mode, and I was impressed. I've also seen some PC demos that had un-explainably good graphics that worked completely with standard vga graphics doing 3d. That was tight code.
My point is this: If you can do it in hardware, don't do it in software. Doing things in hardware raises costs in the short term, but adding one of these cards decreases system load while increasing the productivity of the core's time.
However, more and faster can't take the place of smart. What I'd like to see is more media processor chips. You know like Sid and Nancy, and Paula, and so on. Even the 68xxx chip series started out as a process controller.
I'd like to see the next GeForce256 based card as a rendering sub-system. I want my drive controller to do everything it can, and I want a sound card that acts like a band in a box.
Most of all, I'd like to see modern software not require the newest chip. If you come down to it, every new chip, every new hard drive and every new graphics technology gets abused eventually. That's unfortunate, especially when you go to computer shows and see 1024x768 3d card demos that look like the 640x480 vga based 3d demos from the earlier 90s.
I always wait until my processor is out-classed by 100-120% in speed increase before I consider an upgrade. I then buy the next one back. I currently have a PII450, and I will upgrade when we get to 1GHz shipped. At that point, I may buy a 900mhz. But running Linux, I can't see where that will take me except shorter compile times, and the ability to serve to 100+ thin clients in my house or something like that. Of course I could boot into windows and play games :)
It's a another case of "More and faster." God bless Moore's law.
Flames do make us look bad. As this is Troll Tuesday apparently, that seems obvious. One article had 2(!) parents total that were on-topic. This was out of 1100 posts. Most of those were flames, not trolls. All were offtopic, and obviously the result of bored script kiddies. Let's hope it doesn't come to this in email. The last thing we need is a bunch of mailbombings of authors and businesses (see linuxone for an example) to prove "0ur sup3r10r17y t0 j00!"
Flames are bad as a reflection of us.
There are some obvious reasons that Fnord did this, and not just for altruism alone.
The first is obvious: people in the offices can be required to take work home with them. Heck, they have a computer, why not?
The system can check to see if an employee is really at his (fith or 6th) granmother's funeral, or if he's on the web.
UUNET can spike their email to Fnord Motor Company as official communication. This is unlikely, but possible since they still OWN the computers.
The Fnord connected websites can easily coerce employees into doing extra work, like commenting on conditions on their own time. I see nothing wrong with this, but it raises the possibility.
I just can't personally see a company computer. It reminds me too much of the "company store"
whatddya get? another day over and you're deeper in debt.