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  1. Re:My thoughts on Unix vs Windows.. on Apple's Response to Microsoft: Unix Ads? · · Score: 1

    Sun a small little company making low end Unix boxes for Berkly

    Stanford, actually. That's what the 'S" stands for. And the i386 was a dog compared to "real" Sun boxes. It could barely get out of it's own way.

  2. Re:My thoughts on NEC vs NCR.. on Apple's Response to Microsoft: Unix Ads? · · Score: 1

    NEC? I think you mean NCR.

    When I was at Bell Labs, I got to play with an
    amazing little box called "Alexander".
    It looked like a 3B2, shrunk to the size of a
    large book. It had a Unix that was compressed
    on a Nintendo-ish rom cart.
    When you turned it on, you got a login:
    instantly (from the serial port) while the
    rest of Unix uncompressed itself from
    the rom into memory. I don't think it
    had a hard drive. Seemingly 0 second
    boot time.

    Amazingly cool little box at the time.
    But like so many things at AT&T, it never saw the
    light of day.

    There's no limit to what the army of PHBs
    at AT&T could and continue to fsck up.
    (With or without Microsoft)

  3. It's all stale on Is Realism Destroying Video Games? · · Score: 1

    Just like the music and film industries, the game companies keep churning out the same thing:

    80% puppet manipulation
    10% vehicle manipulation

    Then again, that's a lot like real life.

  4. Re:Won't Buy from Apple Until Keyboard Problem Fix on Why I Ain't Buying A Mac · · Score: 1

    How many times are you going to paste
    this fsckin' rant here? This must be the
    sixth time I've seen it here.

    Yeah, we get the point.
    Take some time and work up a fresh thought.

  5. Decline in varied content on Web Surfing Losing Its Luster · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Back in the gold rush years, I think the majority of people were excited about the net because they could be heard.
    Everyone has their own individual interests and expertise and they wanted to share them with the world.

    The net made it easy. Sometimes it was just a "my home page" or "here's a picture of my girlfriend" (remember those?) or cars, or other hobbies like favorite band lyrics.
    But a lot of people are well versed in certain subjects and they could now share this knowledge with an affordable accessibility that print and the airwaves didn't provide.

    Then came the lawyers and the media and corporate IP money to back them up.
    The law firms could hire cheap help to comb AltaVista for their client's keywords.

    The law firm shows the giant list to the client, they get paid a bundle for easy work and out went the cease and desist letters.
    This killed 90% of the personal interest websites.

    These days, if you search for something, all you'll get back are offers to sell you what you probably already have.

    In the gold rush days, you would actually get back somebody's personal opinion, insight or opinion. It was great, and that also fostered the desire to give back your contribution to the collective. Heady times and the possibility to be heard, to matter, to exist.

    In about 8 years, greed has killed it all off almost completely. Now with Google, it's 2 billion channels with nothing on. That and spam.

    It's a shame too. I don't think we'll ever have that chance again.

  6. Re:Why I'll never buy a mac. on Apple Wants Your Input · · Score: 1

    Apple has never shipped 13W3 video as far as I know.
    (Sun, SGI and NeXT have but they were not targeting the consumer market.)
    For years, Apple's been DB15 VGA and recently, modern digital video connectors, providing a higher quality image than analog.
    Times have changed.

    The G4 is made for your needs, but I guess you're more of a Dell dude.
    The world needs ditch diggers too.

  7. First Unix/Xenix on Microsoft's Ancient History w/ Unix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In 1979 all that existed of Xenix was a silver brochure from Microsoft
    but there was no distribution. I wanted it to run it/sell it, seeing that
    you could do the timesharing thing just like back at college, except
    without a giant machine behind glass. I contacted the then tiny
    Microsoft, asked, begged, pleaded but they had nothing to sell.

    After multiple inquiries, they finally told me that they didn't have
    Xenix yet, but they expected it to arrive shortly. Arrive? From where?
    I was told, from Human Computing Resources (HCR) in Toronto.
    Ahh, interesting. So I called HCR somehow got them to commit
    to an early delivery. After a few weeks, and several dollars, the
    day came. MS wanted a PDP-11 and 68000 version and was
    only after the PDP-11 distro, I was 1 week ahead in the queue
    from Microsoft. So, as I was told from HCR, I had the first Xenix
    distribution in the US, ahead of Microsoft. I ran it on a LSI-11/23
    with insanely expensive 256Kb of memory and a giant 20Mb
    drive from Charles River Data Systems. It also had 2 eight inch
    floppies (errrtt, clunk, clunk, errrrttt), and 2 four port serial cards
    that each ran a VT100. The distro came on a 9-track tape (which
    I still have) and the take drive was this weird, front loading thing
    where you loaded the tape in the front like a big floppy and it
    auto threaded the tape (sometimes). As I remember, it seemed
    pretty fast, I'd start up stuff on all of the terminals, just to do it.
    Of course, it wasn't that fast but at the time....

    The Unix itself was a more or less pure Unix v7. The only thing,
    as I remember that made is Xenix, was the boot message and
    the captions on the man pages. There was no vi at that time,
    the editor of choice was "ed". It did have a nice /usr/games
    and I got a Zork for it from a friend.

    We ended up selling a few of the boxes. The company was
    called MSD. The only record of such is in a 1981 (Jan?) issue
    of Byte with our little ad in the back. And that's the story of the
    first commercial Unix sold in the US.

  8. Re:Linux does good on Dell machines on More on Dell Dropping Linux Support · · Score: 1
    except when we had to cut the power globally

    You work for Enron?

  9. Re:Why does style have to be masculine? on iMac LCD Impostors · · Score: 1

    fag-wagon huh?
    Have you ever waxed a New Beetle, preferably a red one? A delightfully sensual experience if there ever was one.

  10. Re:Apple Laptop ADB keyboards? on Penguin2Apple · · Score: 1

    ADB? What are you talking about?
    You mean like old Apple Desktop Bus Keyboards? You sure are HTML-enhanced-bitchy for an AC that's clueless. ADB!! ABD!!!! It's terrible!!
    What the keyboard does is a driver layer issue anyway. .. and I've learned to adapt to any keyboard I'm sitting at in a few minutes anyway.
    Go play with your Dell.

  11. Re:The Indigo was a nice machine... on Iris Indigo Case Mod · · Score: 1

    He should have restored it back to working order. At least then he could play tranquility on it.

  12. Won't mount on Alias|Wavefront Releases Free Version of Maya · · Score: 1

    When I click on MayaPLE351.img, DiskCopy says "Could not mount"

    Anyone else have that problem?

  13. Re:I wouldn't buy it because. . . . on Cringely: OS X on Intel · · Score: 1

    I've never seen a Linux desktop that ever could be considered anything but ugly...

  14. Re:Love the idea. But it won't happen on Cringely: OS X on Intel · · Score: 1

    again...
    M$ owns no part of Apple, influential or otherwise. $150 Mil worth of non-voting shares, long since sold.

  15. OS X for SPARC on Cringely: OS X on Intel · · Score: 1

    Putting OS X on wintel makes little marketing sense, it might
    please a few people that like to roll their own cheap boxes
    but they probably would run a pirated copy anyway.

    It would be far more interesting to put OS X on Sun boxes.
    There's no real overlap in market segment; Sun isn't going
    after the home or laptop market and Apple, at least right now,
    doesn't have anything in the big iron server market.

    Solaris is ok, but it's not got much of a desktop environment
    and some Sun customers might like to have unified access
    to Office, Photoshop, iApps etc. New iMacs would make spiffy front
    end terminals to big Sun boxes. And a partnership with Sun might bring
    some of Solaris robustness and torque into OS X.

    Plus, Apple's got a good appreciation for Java, at least better
    than M$. I've heard that wintel is banned at Sun, which makes
    the TiBook and iBook the laptop of choice there (hearsay, I
    don't know if that's true).

    I can't see any downside in having OS X/SPARC for Sun,
    Apple, or their customers.

  16. Macs are cool because they're better. on Cringely: OS X on Intel · · Score: 1

    I've used almost everything over 25 years and after all of this time, I'm now a Mac user and
    developer. I only spend maybe %5 doing system maint things and the rest of the time
    I can focus on the task at hand, not troubleshooting problems with my machines.
    And now with OS X and it's Unix services, the Mac meets every need I have with style, grace,
    and consistency.

    Sure for some, tweezing a kernel, wrangling DLL's, or editing config files might be fun but
    life's more enjoyable and productive when you get past getting your computer to work right.

    Moving OS X to peecee hardware would bring much of that grief back into the user experience,
    plus the overhead and hassle with fat binaries for developers and their customers.

    Sure, I still have wintel boxes, develop software on them. But they stay in my out-building.
    Only Macs are allowed in the house.

  17. Use C# and learn not to on Designing Multiplayer Game Engines? · · Score: 1

    You should write your game in C# (or Java or C++) so when it collapses under the weight of it's own sludge, you'll learn what it's like to toss away 6 months worth of work on a bad decision and never make that mistake again. Then you can write it again in ultra clean C and maybe actually ship something that runs halfway decently. With what you are planning, you'll need to get every bit of efficiency out of every critical loop. In a 3D game, especially in massive-multiplayer, you can't afford to trade ease of implementation with not knowing what's going on in your code.

  18. Re:What about MS purchase of OpenGL from SGI? on Mac OS X: Game Developer's Playground · · Score: 1

    didn't MS just buy a bunch of OpenGL stuff from SGI?

    No, they bamboozeled SGI by getting them to build NT boxes and during the romance, got SGI to disclose the OpenGL family jewels. Just like how the M$/Sega relationship begat Xbox while tanking Dreamcast, the M$/SGI relationship begat DirectX3D and a castrated SGI (and the M$ president's spot for R. Belluzo as a reward for a job well done).

    Microsoft...masters of the we-win, you-lose "relationship".

  19. Re:Hmmmm.... on Universal Music Prepares for Copy-Protection Complaints · · Score: 1

    No more Sting?
    Maybe this does have an upside. It's almost worth it.

  20. Re:SGI no longer owns it's own graphics patents. on SGI Sets Sights On Turnaround · · Score: 1

    Belluzzo was sent in specifically by Microsoft to rape SGI. Mission accomplished, he was rewarded with a top M$ exec job.
    Thus was born DirectX 3D.
    If Microsoft knocks on your door and you let them in, it's like taking a big hit of mil-grade anthrax.

  21. M$ collapses on 20 Factors That Will Change PCs In 2002 · · Score: 1

    The most significant change to computing in 2002 will be that Microsoft will do an Enron into oblivion. Xbox will prove to be a 3 month Xmas blip, XP sales will be a tenth of projections and a few key bank failures in March will induce panic in M$ investors.

  22. slow progress on Deep Space One Mission Comes To An End · · Score: 3, Funny

    At this rate it'll take forever to get to Deep Space Nine.

  23. /. != vision on This is IT? · · Score: 1
    Amazing close-mindedness here. No wonder you guys use POS PeeCees, load some pedestrian OS that's not much different than what you could get in the '80s (Coherent etc.), and think you're cutting edge. If this was 1970, you would be defending that slide rule hanging on your belt.

    On a more positive note, this is the US, it's a thing that moves, we're gonna race 'em. Speed, distance and endurance records will drive the technology forward.

    If Kamen can build one for ~$5K, think of what $100K worth of Ginger would do. Oh, that's right, you've got no vision.

  24. Re:Gates' Comment on Cringely On Gates' Free Software Connection · · Score: 1
    and, of all things, APL.

    ahhh....APL....

    That's a level of innovation we don't see today. Nobody would even dare.

  25. My favorite part: on SSSCA Hearing October 25th: Free Software Threatened · · Score: 1

    Nice security boys...

    [header] S:\WPSHR\LEGGNSL\XYWRITE\COMMS\COPYRITE.5A

    --