I think everyone(*) is anxious for Apple to jump ahead in the GHz game. Considering how fast the Intel/AMD folks are cranking up the chips, it feels like we're being left behind.
We can talk until the cows come home about how CISC/Hybrid MHz are not RISC MHz, but the fact is we all want our machines to be faster. Even if they're already really, really fast.
But I can't see Apple making a transition to a platform that's not binary-compatible with PPC. It was painful enough when they went from 68xxx to PPC, and then to force everyone to buy all their applications again with the transition from OS 8/9 to OS X.
To do it again, within a year or two of the last major transition, would be disastrous. While I'm sure the software companies wouldn't much mind forcing everyone to buy a new version of all of their applications, how many users would put up with this? How long would people wait for Photoshop 8?
(* at least all the Apple users, and maybe a fair number of Unix/BSD users)
Oh, I dunno. My current ringtone for the girlfriend is a sample of Mr Burns saying "Excellleeent!"
Even in the anti-cell-phone coffee houses I frequent, people bust a gut when she calls.
Re:I'm glad I was too young to use that
on
Implementing VisiCalc
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Who's with me
ME!
I've been having fun doing that very thing.
Of course, my phone (Kyocera 6035) has four times more pixels than my first computer, 2048 times more memory than my first computer, and a CPU that's 11 times faster than my first computer.
But even now, Palm programming's more like programming for a Mac in 1985.
In a lot of ways, the job that was once called "secretary" has changed. Not to say that the change has been complete, or that this is true in all levels of the organization, but there has been a push of traditionally "secretary" tasks back to the secretary's employer (aka The Boss).
Secretaries did a lot of filing, which now often takes place on Boss' computers.
Secretaries wrote a lot of correspondence, which often now is replaced by the Boss' email.
Secretaries used to copy a lot of documents; now the Boss often just prints ten copies to the local laser printer.
*Real* men edit movies, software, and everything else by carefully waving magnets over the appropriate inodes on the hard-drive platters.
Using something as complicated and newfangled as sending signals over, say, an IDE interface, is for the wimps who can't stomach doing things the traditional way.
They represent a fallen glass and steel building as a good deflector for flowing lava.
And they didn't even get the geography of LA right.
Whoever did the science research and fact-checking for that film had an undergraduate degree in medieval poetry or something, but certainly not geology.
Might as well watch Star Trek to learn about quantum theory.
They think that perpetual motion is impossible, but I'm almost there!
There's just one small problem with friction in the defrobnication rotor. All I need is some funding to fabricate a new one out of frictionless unobtainium, and then we'll see who's laughing!
I'd be happy to demo the system to anyone willing to make a nominal million dollar investment. Second Law, make your time!
As for 5.25" floppies, I still have several 5.25" floppy drives, and I can still plug a them into the floppy controller of a modern PC motherboard and read the disks, assuming the data is still readable.
Well, you probably can read quad-density soft-sector floppies, but I haven't found anyone who can read my data off of my old 40 track, double density hard-sectored floppies. And turntables are actually more available today than five years ago due to their re-emergence in the DJ scene.
However, I agree that the larger market penetration of CDRs and DVDs will help by delaying the problem.
Even ignoring the questionable grammar of this assertion, the concepts behind it are dubious at best.
Timeless Format? Ain't no such thing. I have a bunch of "modern" 5.25 floppies, less than 25 years old, and there's no way to get my data from them, for love or money. Try finding someone who can read your 40 MB Syquest cartridges from 1990. Wait five or ten years, and try to read data off of those 3.5 inch floppies.
Oh sure, we say, we'll burn it on a CD or DVD, and we'll *always* be able to read those.
Well, my friends, let me tell you a sad little story. I worked at a company in the early 90s that wanted a data format that would last, and which decided to go with the aforementioned Syquests. The assumption was, of course, that hardware may come and go, but we could always plug the drive into whatever new and fancy machines, and read the old data. Going with an industry standard interface like SCSI would even buffer from unforseen changes like the evolution from ISA to PCI. Yeah, well, except for a few things... Support in the OS? Well, that seemed to have fallen by the wayside. So, sure, stay with MSDOS on the machine. No problem. Oh, but damn! The heads crashed on one of the drives. Hey, no problem, we had a redundant set, for just that purpose, so we could use one of the drives, while we got another repaired. We did, however, neglect the fact that nobody repairs the damn things. Oh, and media wearing out? Part of the plan was to transfer the data from old catridges to newer ones when the error rate got too high (beware this when you look for long-term CDR storage!). We stockpiled a lot of cartidges, but the failure rate was about 50% higher than estimated back in '90, so we burned through that stack faster than expected.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, even a reasonably well thought out data strategy didn't even last ten years.
Obviously, the installed base for CDRs and DVDs will be much larger than the Syquest market ever was. That buys you some time. Just don't count on them being the 100 year medium. And you probably should worry about data format, as well. Not many players will show.FLI or.FLC animations anymore... How long will MPEG4 be supported?
(end of rant)
Re:My experience with upgrading from VPC5 to VPC6
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
·
· Score: 1
Excellent! That's exectly what I'd hoped to hear!
Which version of VPC are you running? What speed iBook?
Thanks!
Re:I'll just Froogle Google Hacks
on
Google Hacks
·
· Score: 1
I'm sure if I had the book it would tell me how to hack Froogle into getting a lower price for the book. But then I'd already have the book..
No, what you want is haggle.google.com, where it will get different web sites to bargain for you.
There's also gaggle.google.com, which will unleash geese on the creator of a web site.
Also, don't neglect biggles.google.com, which searches for web pages about certain flying aces, giggle.google.com, which is a joke index, niggle.google.com, which points out small imperfections in web sites, goggle.google.com, which filters out web sites requiring eye-protection (zapping blink tags, and the like), toggle.google.com, which finds equal and opposite web pages, bugle.google.com, which plays taps when it finds dead sites, or jiggle.google.com, which is a pr0n search engine for het males.
Re:My experience with upgrading from VPC5 to VPC6
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
·
· Score: 1
This is interesting.
I'm considering getting VPC to do Palm OS development with Codewarrior 9. Metrowerks has stopped supporting the Mac as a platform for developing Palm stuff. (yeah, yeah. I know I should just switch over to the PRC-tool chain, but the Metrowerks debugger is has saved me great grief in the past.)
So this offers me some encouragement that this approach will be at least *possible*, if horrible and twisted.
The goal is to make the cost of breaking the encryption more than the value of the information.
Governments have a great deal of money to throw at a problem. But they're not going to throw that much money at cracking your PGP-encrypted email unless they think they're going to find something worth while. They couldn't care less about your personal life (excepting the case where you somehow have become, through your own fault or not, a "Person of Interest").
I live a ways away now, so I haven't been for a long time. But back when we were assembling computers by hand (S100 type stuff, and tricking out our TRS-80s), you could get great stuff there. Then in college, when I needed stepper motors, they were there for me.
You generally don't hoist a petard. A petard is a small mine.
To be "hoisted by your own petard" is to step on your own mine, and thereby be flung skywards.
Microsoft would only hoist a petard in order to drop it upon unsuspecting OSS advocates who walked beneath it. They would then be squashed, not hoisted.
(Still, the origin of the word petard is from the French, and basically means "small breaking of wind." Not only does this make the phrase "hoisted on your own petard" much funnier, but also gives us insight into the idea of Microsoft hoisting a Copyright petard, i.e., raising a Copyright Stink.)...
Oh, yeah, the Xerox machines. They were later replaced by the Photocopiers, which, I guess, have been replaced by "the copier."
I know people who will "stat" or "photostat" a copy.
I can still remember when we'd "mimeo," back in the not-so-long-distant days of mimeographs.
Heh. In elementary school, I recall making the discovery that an un-used mimeo master sheet would make a fantastic mess if gotten wet (e.g., dropped in a sink). Ah yes, those were the days. Gosh, were we easily amused. Today it requires far more destruction than mere ink. Well, of course, toner cartridges *do* have their amusing qualities when exploded, but... ah, nevermind.
Ohboy, that's going to look really harsh when you read it after Slashdot removed my fake HTML tags reading "RANT" and "OLD MAN VOICE" around some of the content.
Good God, man, haven't you ever heard of polygon reduction? Bump mapping? Image mapping?
It's hard to believe you *really* need all of that RAM. Then again, I haven't done 3D in years.
When I was a CG guy, we dreamt of bus speeds above 66MHz. We couldn't even imagine having more than 32M RAM. And we thought it was reasonable to wait two days for a 2k image to render...
How should you deal with all those people who tell you that the next few years are the best years of your life?
Don't.
Pity these people. Their lives peaked at age 17. They may end up having another sixty meaningless years in their lives.
Make each year better than the last. Be a better person each year than the last. It's hard now. But when those other people are bogged down in despair over their lost youth, you'll be doing things you like and enjoying life.
Funny story about German friends of mine who wanted to use a name that was not considered "appropriate."
They're up in Prussia, and convinced the bureaucrat that the name (which they'd made up) was a very common Schwabisch name. The bureaucrat didn't want to look stupid by not knowing this, and approved it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think everyone(*) is anxious for Apple to jump ahead in the GHz game. Considering how fast the Intel/AMD folks are cranking up the chips, it feels like we're being left behind.
We can talk until the cows come home about how CISC/Hybrid MHz are not RISC MHz, but the fact is we all want our machines to be faster. Even if they're already really, really fast.
But I can't see Apple making a transition to a platform that's not binary-compatible with PPC. It was painful enough when they went from 68xxx to PPC, and then to force everyone to buy all their applications again with the transition from OS 8/9 to OS X.
To do it again, within a year or two of the last major transition, would be disastrous. While I'm sure the software companies wouldn't much mind forcing everyone to buy a new version of all of their applications, how many users would put up with this? How long would people wait for Photoshop 8?
(* at least all the Apple users, and maybe a fair number of Unix/BSD users)
Same reason you only see beautiful people on TV.
... and there are a hell of a lot of beautiful people in Los Angeles, etc).
Manifestations of Wishful Thinking.
(Still... NeXT ran on multiple hardware platforms
Nope. Happens all the time in the seas of SE Asia, and to a lesser extent in the Carribbean.
I know of one case that was less than two day's sailing from San Diego.
Oh, I dunno. My current ringtone for the girlfriend is a sample of Mr Burns saying "Excellleeent!"
Even in the anti-cell-phone coffee houses I frequent, people bust a gut when she calls.
ME!
I've been having fun doing that very thing.
Of course, my phone (Kyocera 6035) has four times more pixels than my first computer, 2048 times more memory than my first computer, and a CPU that's 11 times faster than my first computer.
But even now, Palm programming's more like programming for a Mac in 1985.
In a lot of ways, the job that was once called "secretary" has changed. Not to say that the change has been complete, or that this is true in all levels of the organization, but there has been a push of traditionally "secretary" tasks back to the secretary's employer (aka The Boss).
Secretaries did a lot of filing, which now often takes place on Boss' computers.
Secretaries wrote a lot of correspondence, which often now is replaced by the Boss' email.
Secretaries used to copy a lot of documents; now the Boss often just prints ten copies to the local laser printer.
Etc.
Yahoo isn't a slang term.
It's a literary reference to Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels."
*Real* men edit movies, software, and everything else by carefully waving magnets over the appropriate inodes on the hard-drive platters.
Using something as complicated and newfangled as sending signals over, say, an IDE interface, is for the wimps who can't stomach doing things the traditional way.
Yeah. Good insight.
Uh-huh.
They confuse a tar pit with volcanic activity.
They represent a fallen glass and steel building as a good deflector for flowing lava.
And they didn't even get the geography of LA right.
Whoever did the science research and fact-checking for that film had an undergraduate degree in medieval poetry or something, but certainly not geology.
Might as well watch Star Trek to learn about quantum theory.
They think that perpetual motion is impossible, but I'm almost there!
There's just one small problem with friction in the defrobnication rotor. All I need is some funding to fabricate a new one out of frictionless unobtainium, and then we'll see who's laughing!
I'd be happy to demo the system to anyone willing to make a nominal million dollar investment. Second Law, make your time!
Well, you probably can read quad-density soft-sector floppies, but I haven't found anyone who can read my data off of my old 40 track, double density hard-sectored floppies. And turntables are actually more available today than five years ago due to their re-emergence in the DJ scene.
However, I agree that the larger market penetration of CDRs and DVDs will help by delaying the problem.
Even ignoring the questionable grammar of this assertion, the concepts behind it are dubious at best.
.FLI or .FLC animations anymore... How long will MPEG4 be supported?
Timeless Format? Ain't no such thing. I have a bunch of "modern" 5.25 floppies, less than 25 years old, and there's no way to get my data from them, for love or money. Try finding someone who can read your 40 MB Syquest cartridges from 1990. Wait five or ten years, and try to read data off of those 3.5 inch floppies.
Oh sure, we say, we'll burn it on a CD or DVD, and we'll *always* be able to read those.
Well, my friends, let me tell you a sad little story. I worked at a company in the early 90s that wanted a data format that would last, and which decided to go with the aforementioned Syquests. The assumption was, of course, that hardware may come and go, but we could always plug the drive into whatever new and fancy machines, and read the old data. Going with an industry standard interface like SCSI would even buffer from unforseen changes like the evolution from ISA to PCI.
Yeah, well, except for a few things... Support in the OS? Well, that seemed to have fallen by the wayside. So, sure, stay with MSDOS on the machine. No problem. Oh, but damn! The heads crashed on one of the drives. Hey, no problem, we had a redundant set, for just that purpose, so we could use one of the drives, while we got another repaired. We did, however, neglect the fact that nobody repairs the damn things. Oh, and media wearing out? Part of the plan was to transfer the data from old catridges to newer ones when the error rate got too high (beware this when you look for long-term CDR storage!). We stockpiled a lot of cartidges, but the failure rate was about 50% higher than estimated back in '90, so we burned through that stack faster than expected.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, even a reasonably well thought out data strategy didn't even last ten years.
Obviously, the installed base for CDRs and DVDs will be much larger than the Syquest market ever was. That buys you some time. Just don't count on them being the 100 year medium. And you probably should worry about data format, as well. Not many players will show
(end of rant)
Excellent! That's exectly what I'd hoped to hear!
Which version of VPC are you running? What speed iBook?
Thanks!
No, what you want is haggle.google.com, where it will get different web sites to bargain for you.
There's also gaggle.google.com, which will unleash geese on the creator of a web site.
Also, don't neglect biggles.google.com, which searches for web pages about certain flying aces, giggle.google.com, which is a joke index, niggle.google.com, which points out small imperfections in web sites, goggle.google.com, which filters out web sites requiring eye-protection (zapping blink tags, and the like), toggle.google.com, which finds equal and opposite web pages, bugle.google.com, which plays taps when it finds dead sites, or jiggle.google.com, which is a pr0n search engine for het males.
This is interesting.
I'm considering getting VPC to do Palm OS development with Codewarrior 9. Metrowerks has stopped supporting the Mac as a platform for developing Palm stuff. (yeah, yeah. I know I should just switch over to the PRC-tool chain, but the Metrowerks debugger is has saved me great grief in the past.)
So this offers me some encouragement that this approach will be at least *possible*, if horrible and twisted.
I like Bruce Schneier's analogy.
Unbreakable encryption is not achievable.
The goal is to make the cost of breaking the encryption more than the value of the information.
Governments have a great deal of money to throw at a problem. But they're not going to throw that much money at cracking your PGP-encrypted email unless they think they're going to find something worth while. They couldn't care less about your personal life (excepting the case where you somehow have become, through your own fault or not, a "Person of Interest").
When I was growing up, this was The Place.
They're still around -- http://aaaim.com/CandH/
I live a ways away now, so I haven't been for a long time. But back when we were assembling computers by hand (S100 type stuff, and tricking out our TRS-80s), you could get great stuff there. Then in college, when I needed stepper motors, they were there for me.
You generally don't hoist a petard. A petard is a small mine.
...
To be "hoisted by your own petard" is to step on your own mine, and thereby be flung skywards.
Microsoft would only hoist a petard in order to drop it upon unsuspecting OSS advocates who walked beneath it. They would then be squashed, not hoisted.
(Still, the origin of the word petard is from the French, and basically means "small breaking of wind." Not only does this make the phrase "hoisted on your own petard" much funnier, but also gives us insight into the idea of Microsoft hoisting a Copyright petard, i.e., raising a Copyright Stink.)
Hm.
... ah, nevermind.
Oh, yeah, the Xerox machines. They were later replaced by the Photocopiers, which, I guess, have been replaced by "the copier."
I know people who will "stat" or "photostat" a copy.
I can still remember when we'd "mimeo," back in the not-so-long-distant days of mimeographs.
Heh. In elementary school, I recall making the discovery that an un-used mimeo master sheet would make a fantastic mess if gotten wet (e.g., dropped in a sink). Ah yes, those were the days. Gosh, were we easily amused. Today it requires far more destruction than mere ink. Well, of course, toner cartridges *do* have their amusing qualities when exploded, but
Ohboy, that's going to look really harsh when you read it after Slashdot removed my fake HTML tags reading "RANT" and "OLD MAN VOICE" around some of the content.
preview, preview, preview...
Good God, man, haven't you ever heard of polygon reduction? Bump mapping? Image mapping?
It's hard to believe you *really* need all of that RAM. Then again, I haven't done 3D in years.
When I was a CG guy, we dreamt of bus speeds above 66MHz. We couldn't even imagine having more than 32M RAM. And we thought it was reasonable to wait two days for a 2k image to render...
How should you deal with all those people who tell you that the next few years are the best years of your life?
Don't.
Pity these people. Their lives peaked at age 17. They may end up having another sixty meaningless years in their lives.
Make each year better than the last. Be a better person each year than the last. It's hard now. But when those other people are bogged down in despair over their lost youth, you'll be doing things you like and enjoying life.
I don't plan to reproduce, but if I ever end up doing so, the kid's gonna have a lot of middle names:
Authorized Employees Staff Private Restricted No Permission
There will be no door that my kid couldn't go through...
Funny story about German friends of mine who wanted to use a name that was not considered "appropriate."
They're up in Prussia, and convinced the bureaucrat that the name (which they'd made up) was a very common Schwabisch name. The bureaucrat didn't want to look stupid by not knowing this, and approved it.
"Aaahhhh! The Sun! It burns, it burns!"
</Moe Voice>
<Gollum Voice>
I will stay here, and the Yellow Face won't see me.
</Gollum Voice>