from Orwell: "By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time."
"All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but, since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popu lar education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated."
The problems fixed by 10.2 are things which shouldn't have been problems in an OS you spent $129 USD for. You're right. Microsoft would charge at least $200.
OS X 10.1.x is very raw? Compared to what other OS? Any Linux distro? Windows xx/xx? OS X is the best raw OS I've every used.
As for being an unfinished product, I think that no OS is "finished" until it's discontinued. It's about as dynamic of an environment as you can get.
M$Phone nice? Please. It had all of the typical problems of M$ products. Promising feature set, shitty implementation. Sometimes it would ring and you couldn't pick up. Sometimes it would ring and 95 would exception fault. Sometimes it wouldn't ring at all. Sometimes it would un-sync itself with the base station and you had to do that strange mating dance with the phone and the base. Sometimes it would keep recording a message and wouldn't drop the line until it would fill up your disk and then crash. They never updated the software from v1.0 When 98 came out, it stopped working and you couldn't install new on 98. I wanted to write my own handler for it to get around the bugs but despite of all of the hype about a telephony API, it didn't use it and M$ never published specs or an API or ActiveX control for it. It set a new standard in M$ suck-ness. I was glad to retire it. Piece of shit.
If the execs didn't didn't snarf every dollar as soon as it came in, and instead took $.99 of each buck and paid guys like us to actually do the work, then they would have a viable business, we'd be swimming in Negroponte-style bandwidth and eventually, management would still be making a considerable pile of cash.
But no. They had to immediatly run off with all of the working capital and even that wasn't enough. Once they got a taste of $10Mil a year, they wanted to see what $100Mil felt like. Life begins at half a billion. Filtered down from the top, the exec VP's want a proportional cut, the junior VP's, and so on.
Now there's no money to run and grow the network. Engineers, wire pullers, suppliers, all the way down the line, are out of a job so there's nobody with enough cash to buy services. Thus the perception of over-capacity.
Oh well, instead of making a living wage, we C programmers and network engineers can be grounds keepers and security for the elite for eight bucks an hour. The elite, including our government, think that things worked out quite well.
Thanks dubya, good job. There is hope however. Many of us will be able to enlist in the national guard so we can police the homeless tent cities that will be springing up next year when the banks start failing. Good work if you can get past the brutality you'll be showing to your fellow "citizens".
...It's about time, I was starting to think that we'd never blow stuff up with light...
It's not "we", it's them. And in another year, it'll be pointed at protesters in the streets. After that, your house.
It's neat alright. More billion dollar war toys. Pfffftt!
In my game tranquility, reducing brain activity was the overriding design goal.
I avoided any features that used short term memory, there's no paths to remember or pattern matching skills used. I even tried to remove all of the text during game play so you could turn off that part of the brain too. I made the mouse movement sensitive to minimal movement so you could basically sit like a blob in a chair and play. If you start moving the mouse in an aggressive way, the viscosity of the environment is increased which makes game play more difficult. The music is also quiet and trance-like. When the game progresses and the graphics get more dense, the music in turn gets sparse so it's a sliding balance between two kinds of sensory stimulation. It's a big feedback loop that attempts to reward moving towards a vegetative state.
What's cool about this is that we get lots of players that tell us that they essentially get stoned playing the game. (Something that Quake just can't do.) Not just a mild effect either, but quite profound according to some of our players. It's more of a reefer or opiate high as opposed to a buzz. The effect also seems to persist for an hour or so after playing. I don't know of, or have had any reports of, long term effects (your honor..).
In light of the slick ps2linux kit (which for me, works great) where's the huge market in Xbox Linux?
There's a lot more ps2's out there and I don't see Sony going after what would have to be a $5mil market to make paying $200K worth it. With the Sony kit, you drop 200 bucks and Akio's your uncle. And it's even without the obvious market delays that the M$ lawyers would bring. But it's not exactly a hot item for Sony. Very, very niche sales numbers.
Maybe back a few years ago when money didn't care where it went, $200k was no big thing, but today? Why the fuss? Because it's a x86?
They spend all of that time being clever and screwed up the design. The display is on the fridge side door. It should be on the freezer side. You can't inventory the fridge (the only really useful function) without closing the door. (open door, got eggs?, close door, check, open door, got milk, close door, check....)
Granted, the freezer then inherits the problem but the fridge side is certainly used more often.
Should have been integrated with the ice/water dispenser. Perhaps a slide-down sreeen or move the ice dispenser down a bit with the screen above. Why didn't they ask me about this before building it?
It's like making a traditional laptop with the LCD on the bottom of the case..
Yeah, get the Dell. You'll have a nice P.O.S. on your desk that you know was made with the absolute cheapest parts available, not to mention the state of the art Windows XP experience. Enjoy. Now go away.
Reading this thread (but not the book), this is one of the first times I've seen others touching on my approach to software development. OOP is interesting, a good IDE is impressive if it's pulled off, write once and deploy everywhere is a noble goal. But... nothing beats pure clean C written using vi and a CLI make. The stuff runs fast without surprises, the editing process is almost subconscious and if the coder is good, maintaining the code is economical and bugs are nearly nonexistent. Same thing goes for debugging, there's nothing like printfs to get to the heart of a problem. The real secret of programming is to have the ability to "be the computer", to load and run the code in your head. It's an old school attitude, but I think all that other stuff is a crutch. Sure I'll use those extra layers of cruft, sometimes options are limited or the platform or client demands it. But the overhead both at runtime and during development outweigh the benefits. -- K&R are dead, long live K&R.
is that MS is coming out with the second-generation XBOX in September.. The system of coming out with twice as good generation every 9 months or whatever...
If they do, that strategy will work for just one cycle. If in 9 months, a 2nd gen comes out, along with new games to exploit it, and 1st gen buyers are out in the cold, they won't be fooled again.
Yes. A handfull of executives. The focus of business/government these days is to make a few execs very rich in a short time. The product is the company itself.
Being a millionaire these days ain't much. Life starts at 100 mil. It's impossible to earn that kind of money by creating something, especially when you need to raise that kind of cash for a dozen or so people in a hurry.
So the teams of suits come in. Rape and run. What do they care about the wake of destruction behind them?
They leave flush with cash and besides, those laid off engineers can be employed as caretakers of the estate.
I hope they'll be first up against the wall.
Re:And you people said Apple was overpriced...
on
Apple's Quarterly Results
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny.
Move towards the light, Pepper....
"By comparison with that existing
today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and
inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some
extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends
everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested
in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church
of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of
the reason for this was that in the past no government had the
power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The
invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate
public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process
further. With the development of television, and the technical
advance which made it possible to receive and transmit
simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an
end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough
to be worth watching, could be kept for twentyfour hours a day
under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official
propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.
The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the
will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all
subjects, now existed for the first time."
"All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental
attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to
sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature
of present-day society from being perceived. Physical
rebellion, or any preliminary move towards rebellion, is at
present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be
feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation
to generation and from century to century, working, breeding,
and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without
the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial
technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but,
since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important,
the level of popu lar education is actually declining. What
opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a
matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual
liberty because they have no intellect. In a Party member, on
the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on
the most unimportant subject can be tolerated."
The problems fixed by 10.2 are things which shouldn't have been problems in an OS you spent $129 USD for.
You're right. Microsoft would charge at least $200.
OS X 10.1.x is very raw? Compared to what other OS?
Any Linux distro? Windows xx/xx? OS X is the best raw OS I've every used.
As for being an unfinished product, I think that no OS is "finished" until it's discontinued.
It's about as dynamic of an environment as you can get.
M$Phone nice? Please. It had all of the typical problems of
M$ products. Promising feature set, shitty implementation.
Sometimes it would ring and you couldn't pick up.
Sometimes it would ring and 95 would exception fault.
Sometimes it wouldn't ring at all.
Sometimes it would un-sync itself with the base station and you
had to do that strange mating dance with the phone and the base.
Sometimes it would keep recording a message and wouldn't
drop the line until it would fill up your disk and then crash.
They never updated the software from v1.0
When 98 came out, it stopped working and you couldn't
install new on 98. I wanted to write my own handler for it
to get around the bugs but despite of all of the hype about
a telephony API, it didn't use it and M$ never published
specs or an API or ActiveX control for it.
It set a new standard in M$ suck-ness. I was glad to retire it.
Piece of shit.
This is so stupid
and a complete waste of time.
Yet, we'll all do it.
Dump that Linux.
Hey, that's my name! I take great offense at that article.
I'd sue Salon but they probably don't have any money left anyway....
Bill Romanowski
TQworld, LLC
If the execs didn't didn't snarf every dollar as soon as it came in, and instead took $.99 of each buck and paid
guys like us to actually do the work, then they would have a viable business, we'd be swimming in Negroponte-style
bandwidth and eventually, management would still be making a considerable pile of cash.
But no. They had to immediatly run off with all of the working capital and even that wasn't enough.
Once they got a taste of $10Mil a year, they wanted to see what $100Mil felt like. Life begins at half a billion.
Filtered down from the top, the exec VP's want a proportional cut, the junior VP's, and so on.
Now there's no money to run and grow the network. Engineers, wire pullers, suppliers, all the way down the line,
are out of a job so there's nobody with enough cash to buy services. Thus the perception of over-capacity.
Oh well, instead of making a living wage, we C programmers and network engineers can be grounds keepers
and security for the elite for eight bucks an hour. The elite, including our government, think that things worked out quite well.
Thanks dubya, good job. There is hope however. Many of us will be able to enlist in the national guard so we can
police the homeless tent cities that will be springing up next year when the banks start failing. Good work if you can
get past the brutality you'll be showing to your fellow "citizens".
Add a cheap haircut and you've got Bill Gates.
Real electronica isn't pop music.
www.mp3.com/rollingbeetles
It's not "we", it's them. And in another year, it'll be pointed at protesters in the streets. After that, your house.
It's neat alright. More billion dollar war toys. Pfffftt!
In my game tranquility, reducing brain activity was the overriding design goal.
I avoided any features that used short term memory, there's no paths to remember or pattern matching skills used. I even tried to remove all of
the text during game play so you could turn off that part of the brain too. I made the mouse movement sensitive to minimal movement so
you could basically sit like a blob in a chair and play. If you start moving the mouse in an aggressive way, the viscosity of the environment is
increased which makes game play more difficult. The music is also quiet and trance-like. When the game progresses and the graphics get
more dense, the music in turn gets sparse so it's a sliding balance between two kinds of sensory stimulation. It's a big feedback loop that
attempts to reward moving towards a vegetative state.
What's cool about this is that we get lots of players that tell us that they essentially get stoned playing the game. (Something that Quake just can't do.)
Not just a mild effect either, but quite profound according to some of our players. It's more of a reefer or opiate high as opposed to a buzz.
The effect also seems to persist for an hour or so after playing. I don't know of, or have had any reports of, long term effects (your honor..).
Damn! I bid $1.45 billion and ebay sniped me in the last 20 seconds.
(though i do find it amusing, per the poster's subject line, that
The first day I found Slashdot, many years ago,
I thought that Anonymous Coward was a guy with a cool nick that really posted a lot....
In light of the slick ps2linux kit (which for me, works great) where's the huge market in Xbox Linux?
There's a lot more ps2's out there and I don't see Sony going after what would have to be a $5mil market to make paying $200K worth it.
With the Sony kit, you drop 200 bucks and Akio's your uncle. And it's even without the obvious market delays that the M$ lawyers would bring.
But it's not exactly a hot item for Sony. Very, very niche sales numbers.
Maybe back a few years ago when money didn't care where it went, $200k was no big thing, but today?
Why the fuss? Because it's a x86?
I smell a fish.
It's RFID.
This article is "a must read"? Yeah, whatever.
They spend all of that time being clever and screwed
up the design. The display is on the fridge side door.
It should be on the freezer side. You can't inventory
the fridge (the only really useful function) without
closing the door. (open door, got eggs?, close door,
check, open door, got milk, close door, check....)
Granted, the freezer then inherits the problem but
the fridge side is certainly used more often.
Should have been integrated with the ice/water
dispenser. Perhaps a slide-down sreeen or move
the ice dispenser down a bit with the screen above.
Why didn't they ask me about this before building it?
It's like making a traditional laptop with the LCD on the
bottom of the case..
Yeah, get the Dell.
You'll have a nice P.O.S. on your desk that you know was made with the absolute cheapest parts available, not to mention the state of the art Windows XP experience. Enjoy. Now go away.
It's almost so bad, it looks like something from WindowsXP.
Reading this thread (but not the book), this is one of the first times
I've seen others touching on my approach to software development.
OOP is interesting, a good IDE is impressive if it's pulled off, write once
and deploy everywhere is a noble goal. But... nothing beats pure clean
C written using vi and a CLI make. The stuff runs fast without surprises,
the editing process is almost subconscious and if the coder is good,
maintaining the code is economical and bugs are nearly nonexistent.
Same thing goes for debugging, there's nothing like printfs to get to the
heart of a problem. The real secret of programming is to have the ability
to "be the computer", to load and run the code in your head.
It's an old school attitude, but I think all that other stuff is a crutch.
Sure I'll use those extra layers of cruft, sometimes options are limited
or the platform or client demands it. But the overhead both at runtime and
during development outweigh the benefits. -- K&R are dead, long live K&R.
Bill Romanowski
www.tqworld.com
is that MS is coming out with the second-generation XBOX in September..
The system of coming out with twice as good generation every 9 months or whatever...
If they do, that strategy will work for just one cycle.
If in 9 months, a 2nd gen comes out, along with new games to exploit it, and 1st gen buyers are out in the cold, they won't be fooled again.
and besides, M$, and xbox, sucks. heh.
the $$$ companies such as GE & Westinghouse generate in replacements.
Westinghouse? They don't really exist anymore. The name's used by some corps but Westinghouse itself was diced and dispersed by, I believe, CBS.
There must be someone this is good for...
Yes. A handfull of executives.
The focus of business/government these days is to make a few execs very rich in a short time.
The product is the company itself.
Being a millionaire these days ain't much. Life starts at 100 mil.
It's impossible to earn that kind of money by creating something, especially when you need to raise that kind of cash for a dozen or so people in a hurry.
So the teams of suits come in. Rape and run.
What do they care about the wake of destruction behind them?
They leave flush with cash and besides, those laid off engineers can be employed as caretakers of the estate.
I hope they'll be first up against the wall.
...and sold it two years ago.