You are quite wrong on this point. VGA cards and SCSI cards need an onboard BIOS to be able to boot from. The x86 cards will not work on a PPC platform. Period.
Really? That will come as a shock to Adaptec, who have been selling SCSI cards that support PCs and Macs for years now. (Admittedly I've never personally tried to boot from one, but the product detail page makes no mention of any such restriction.)
Video cards are in general stickier, but not entirely: several manufacturer's flavors of GeForce 2MX will work perfectly well in both Macs and PCs, and I believe the same goes for the Radeon 7500. Not entirely sure about later-generation cards.
That's funny because Apple was still using Nubus a decade ago. Their first PCI systems were introduced in 1995. If, as you allude, there was some stretch of time when Macs didn't support non-OF card and OF cards were more expensive, it certainly wasn't more than ten years ago.
Funny how I said "almost ten years", and yet somehow you saw "more than ten years."
You might want to consider seeing a doctor about this problem.
Mac OS X only helps "just getting work done" if you're functionally computer illiterate.
No. Linux is more productive than OSX for you, well congratulations for finding an efficient work environment. But frankly, from the sound of it, you've never actually spent any time in front of an OSX box.
6) Scriptability/rapid application development. Yes, the dreaded command line shell. Many of my most intense post-production tasks (i.e. laying out posters with their captions, borders, copyright notices, anti-aliasing, interpolating to proper sizes, etc.) are database driven and processed through command line tools like ImageMagick. This allows me to do things like "makeposter 20x16 img_2525.crw" and in a single pass have the image automatically fetched from archive, converted from Canon raw, edited, captioned, matted, etc. according to a list of edits and captions I've saved ahead of time for images in my database, then sent to post-production (i.e. output). Don't tell me that there is a "makeposter" command in Mac OS X that will automatically query my database of images and perform these tasks for me, or that Apple will be willing to write me one.
[Perhaps AppleScript is capable of this stuff, perhaps not... I don't know AppleScript. But I will happily refuse to buy arguements that as well as my system works for me, I should switch to Mac OS X simply because AppleScript just "gets it right" or is "just more elegant" as scripting languages go. You'll have to give me real benefits, not techno-spiritual ones.]
Would it have killed you to actually do a bit of research before spouting off here?
1. OSX is unix. Click terminal.app, you're looking at a tcsh shell. Bash is bundled. So is perl, python, tcl and, yes, AppleScript. There's even a full-fledged IDE for AppleScript.
2. ImageMagick compiles quite happily on OSX. You can get binary packages from Fink.
3. AppleScript is merely the most visible frontend to what Apple calls the "Open Scripting Architecture" or OSA. You know all that neat process-automation you can do with the GIMP because it has a scripting language built-in? You can do that in almost every MacOS Classic and OSX application ever written in the last decade via OSA, and you can do it in not only AppleScript, but any scripting language that supports the OSA interface. Which, at last check, is just about all of them.
From the sounds of it, you've got your workflow pretty well optimized for your needs, so I wouldn't suggest that there's any overwhelming need for you to change it. But by saying things like "OSX only helps the computer illiterate" when by the looks of things you haven't the faintest clue what OSX is, you only make yourself look like yet another troll.
The multitude of X86 cheap stuff doesnt work on these platforms. You probably pay 3-6 times what you'd normally pay for NICS and GFX cards. Apple does this all the time.
That's funny -- I just got back from CompUSA, where I paid all of $15 for a D-Link 100baseT NIC that will work with both Macs and PCs. The exact same trick works with most SCSI cards, several flavors of NVidia and ATI graphics cards, and Creative's Soundblaster line.
It's been many, many years since PCI cards for Macs cost substantially more than their PC counterparts. Like, almost a decade now.
And here's the thing: in many cases, those Mac cards will work unmodified in Linux-on-IBM/PPC servers and workstations. Also, occasionally, in Sun kit. Reason is, the "BIOS" in the PowerMacs, IBM's e-Servers and all of Sun's hardware is the same: OpenFirmware, AKA OpenBoot. Once you've set up your PCI card to support OpenBoot on one platform, it supports them all, and all the platform vendor has to do is write an OS-level driver for the card.
For the record, I have nothing against the concept of cross-platform development toolkits. They can be great, time-saving things.
But. Priorities. Opera developed a functional product that could be used by the vast majority of their paying customers first. Then they prototyped and shipped versions for secondary platforms. After they started seeing revenue (or the potential for revenue; I'm not privy to their books, merely aware that they're apparently still in business, unlike the Mozilla team), they then wrote the minimum amount of glue to allow them to ship their releases in lockstep. And they did it in what...a quarter of the time it took to build a functional XPFE browser? An eighth?
Second point: XUL was more than just a cross-platform widget set. If that had been all that it was, Moz 1.0 would have shipped in 1999, maybe even 1998. People write cross-platform toolsets all the damn time, and it rarely takes half a decade to do. No, XUL/XUI/XPFE were the logical result of Netscape drinking its own "it's not a web browser, it's an application platform!" kool-aid. It's an API, it's an application framework, it's a development toolkit, it's an XML parser, it's a widget set, it'll walk your dog and it gets your whites whiter!
Just search for comments from users with mozilla.org and netscape.com addresses on slashdot for the past few years: Mozilla wasn't just going to be a better web browser, it was going to be the foundation for an entire industry of "mozilla-based web applications" that someone, somewhere, was sure to write.
See, as far as I can tell, it's the not-so-secret desire of just about every developer who ever lived to write The One Universal Cross-Platform Middleware Library That Everyone Will Use Forever. Therefore, except in the exceedingly rare instances where doing that is the actual stated and understood project plan from the CEO on down (ie: win32, java,.net, openstep), the job of every project manager in the world is to stand behind that developer's back with a rattan cane, and smack them across the shoulders everytime they start to try it. Netscape's management completely failed in this critical task, and Microsoft's near-total control of a market that 5 years ago they were an also-ran in is the entirely predictable result.
Heh, well, I certainly won't dispute that Opera put the majority of their effort into the product that was earning them the highest return on their efforts, ie. the windows browser, But, well, that's just one more reason why they're still employed and the geniuses who brought us XUL are...not.
As has been pointed out elsewhere: all the Mozilla team had to do to ensure quality non-windows browser support was adequately document and freeze the Gecko API. Galeon and Camino were stable on Linux and OSX respectively months or even years before the XPFE Mozilla could be considered usable.
So, Mr. Know-It-All Anonymous Coward, pontificating from on high, here's a pop quiz. If you have to implement an entire widget set in your browser to have any hope of supporting styleable form controls etc. (as outlined in CSS2 and above), is it better to:
a) Write one user interface for all platforms using those same controls, and use that UI as another testbed for them b) Write five or more separate user interfaces, and have to keep them all up to date and in sync?
Guess what, hotshot? The answer to that question is: Whichever one will not take 4+ years to ship in a working form while the world's largest and most predatory corporation is working overtime to dig your grave.
Please notice that despite the nonstop handwaving from the Mozilla team about how maintaining seperate native interfaces for the assorted Gecko frontends was supposed to be some sort of impossible herculean task that no reasonable person could be expected to tackle, in the time that it took to produce ONE semi-functional version of Mozilla, Opera Software, a company with not even a tenth of AOLNSCP's resources, produced multiple versions of a fully functional web browser, for all of Mozilla's major target platforms. Not only did they produce, maintain and upgrade native Windows, MacOS and Linux versions of Opera, but they increased their market share, and made money doing it.
"We had no choice but to implement XUL/XPFE" is the Big Lie of the entire Netscape saga. The fact that mozilla team members are still stating it with cultish earnestness suggests not that you all came to a reasoned engineering decision, but that your project management was not merely incompetant, but downright pathological. If 1% market share and the firing of your entire development team isn't enough to convince you that somewhere, somehow, you made the wrong decision, you are simply delusional.
Hopefully, some of the core Mozilla developers and managers will use some of their newly acquired free time to read Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month." When Brooks talks about the Second-System Effect, he's talking about you.
Until now, there haven't been any PowerPC processors that have been capable of processing the full 64-bit width of data though.
Not quite true. I believe that IBM fabbed at least a few samples of the PPC620, which was to be the original 64bit PPC processor. For the usual assorted reasons (low yields, high costs, poor performance compared to Motorola's PPC750 design), the chip was never adopted by anyone.
...it was called the VisorPhone, and it sucked rocks.
The concept works great in theory, but breaks down badly in practice when it comes time to actually talk on the damn thing. Holding a PDA up to your face is awkward and stupid-looking. A wired earpiece gets tangled, broken and lost with clockwork regularity. A wireless earpiece is even easier to lose, and additionally will drain the hell out of the phone's batteries (usually already pushed to the max in order to support PDA functions on top of phone functions), and will require its own power source as well.
So far, the flip-phone form of the Treo and the Samsung palmos phones has really come closest to nailing the perfect design for one of these things in the real world. I'm a little dubious about the Treo 600, but I'm willing to try it out.
The SD slot in the Treo 600 is SDIO-compliant, which means you can put a bluetooth card, a wifi card, a GPS or whatever you want in there.
I agree that it's not as nice as having the bluetooth antenna built in, but the damn thing is already being priced out at $600, and you gotta keep the aftermarket companies happy somehow.
It's not a G5, it's a PPC970, completely different beasts.
Newsflash, kiddo: neither Motorola nor IBM sell a CPU called the "G4". "G4" was a "marchitechture" term coined by Apple in the spirit of Motorola's internal "G3" codename for the PPC750. The chip inside any "PowerMac G4" is some flavor of a Motorola PowerPC 7400, no matter what Apple calls it.
You can pretty much bet the farm that Apple will call every varient of the PPC970 they ship a "PowerPC G5".
1GHz bus? gimme a break. Intel hasn't yet reached this. Two points impossible.
Ahem. ("1ghz" is probably apple marketing-speak, but it's always been known that the PPC970 will have a stupidly fast FSB -- Intel isn't the only company that can innovate in this field, eh?)
Almost believable, but for the moment Apple are phasing out the use of NVIDIA cards in their machines.
Simply and 100% wrong. Apple has been doing pretty much exactly the same thing for the last three years on this front: providing whichever of the two offered them the best OEM pricing as the default configuration, and offering the other as a build-to-order option. They will continue to do this.
Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0
Here, you may be correct, but there are two issues that may force them to start shipping "USB 2.0" connectors: first, the USB consortium has recently declared that all USB ports are "USB 2.0" (yes, this is weird and stupid), and secondly it's actually getting a bit difficult to source USB controllers that only support the 1.0/1.1 specs.
Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible
FW400 and FW800 use different connectors, and there are not yet many FW800 products on the market. This is called "covering your bets" and "not pissing off your customers". BTW, 1x FW800 and 2x FW400 is also the configuration on the 17" AlBook, so they've already shipped one machine in exactly this "impossible" configuration.
optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry but this sounds like wishful thinking.
No, it sounds like you have no idea what you're talking about. Do you have any idea how many macs are used in audio production? Are you aware that Apple sells their own high-end audio composition program? The only surprise about a PowerMac with optical TOSlink is that they didn't do it years ago.
A few years back at Geekfest in Cambridge (MA), a co-worker of mine observed ESR telling a local newspaper reporter with a straight face that all geeks are libertarians. I don't think that the idea that every single last one of his fellow engineers might not subscribe to every last one of his pet political causes would ever occur to the man.
Raymond has always been an egomaniac blowhard with a self-opinion exceeding his actual worth by several orders of magnitude, and if you don't believe me, just ask any member of the linux kernel mailing list.
no customers == no money
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's very simple: there are no customers.
I've walked around a bunch of the old Exodus datacenters in New York City: even the "older" ones (ie the former GlobalCenter colo on 8th avenue, and the original NJ1 at Exchange Place)) were like ghost towns: row after row after row of empty racks.
The colocation "boom" of the 1990s was a pyramid scheme: VC-financed colo companies selling space at completely fictional rates to VC-financed startups. As soon as the venture money dried up, the small customer vanished...and then the big customers vanished...and then the behemoths themselves began to die off.
No matter how much you cut your costs, you can't make a profit if you have no customers.
My completely off-the-cuff guess is that even if C&W mothballed 90% of their colo facilities in the US, and all of their competitors (UUNet, AT&T, Globix, Level3) did likewise, there would still not be enough customers to keep them afloat. Colo is expensive, and there just aren't that many companies who actually need six-sigma uptimes. (Not that any of the colo providers ever came anywhere near their promised reliability numbers in practice, but that's a whole different rant.)
In theory, any PDA with an IR port can control stereo components.
In practice, the IR transmitter on most PDAs has an effective range of only a few feet: they were designed to allow wireless hotsyncing and PDA-to-PDA data exchange.
PDAs with remote-strength IR transceivers were, until recently, rarer, and the manufacturers are starting to make a big deal about it.
Lain is God. It was "supernatural" from the very beginning. In fact, you learn this in the first espisode. Again, you didn't get it.
I think what the original poster was trying to ask, in his ham-handed way, was: "Couldn't Serial Experiments Lain have wrapped up its plot without creating Yet Another Tentacle Monster at the very end?"
It's a reasonable question to ask. I loved Lain almost without reservation, but I really wish they hadn't felt the need to turn Eiri Masami into The Overfiend in the finale.
While this actually looks like an interesting product, this "review" appears to have been mostly cribbed from Sony's product info pages and press releases, and provides pretty much zero useful information other than the screenshots and the base product specs.
A few questions, off the top of my head, that I'd love to see answered:
What is the effective range of the remote-control functions?
How does using the remote control affect the battery life of the unit?
Is the remote limited to the control codes bundled by Sony, or can it learn?
Presumably there is a PalmOS application being used to manage the remote functions. Is it...any good? Can you program macros? Does it even have a name?
How does the battery life, weight and size of this unit compare to PDAs in a similar price range?
Can this product use the 256mb memory sticks? (The reviewer even asks this question, but apparently couldn't be bothered to call Sony and ask.
Does the foreshortened screen (compared to Sony's other clamshell Clies) make graffiti input difficult?
...nevermind that it verges on journalistic fraud to enthuse about how this thing can use 128MB Memory Stick cards without mentioning how insanely far behind CompactFlash and SD in both price and capacity this is.
Slashdot Mirror
You are quite wrong on this point. VGA cards and SCSI cards need an onboard BIOS to be able to boot from. The x86 cards will not work on a PPC platform. Period.
Really? That will come as a shock to Adaptec, who have been selling SCSI cards that support PCs and Macs for years now. (Admittedly I've never personally tried to boot from one, but the product detail page makes no mention of any such restriction.)
Video cards are in general stickier, but not entirely: several manufacturer's flavors of GeForce 2MX will work perfectly well in both Macs and PCs, and I believe the same goes for the Radeon 7500. Not entirely sure about later-generation cards.
That's funny because Apple was still using Nubus a decade ago. Their first PCI systems were introduced in 1995. If, as you allude, there was some stretch of time when Macs didn't support non-OF card and OF cards were more expensive, it certainly wasn't more than ten years ago.
Funny how I said "almost ten years", and yet somehow you saw "more than ten years."
You might want to consider seeing a doctor about this problem.
1. OSX is unix. Click terminal.app, you're looking at a tcsh shell. Bash is bundled. So is perl, python, tcl and, yes, AppleScript. There's even a full-fledged IDE for AppleScript.
2. ImageMagick compiles quite happily on OSX. You can get binary packages from Fink.
3. AppleScript is merely the most visible frontend to what Apple calls the "Open Scripting Architecture" or OSA. You know all that neat process-automation you can do with the GIMP because it has a scripting language built-in? You can do that in almost every MacOS Classic and OSX application ever written in the last decade via OSA, and you can do it in not only AppleScript, but any scripting language that supports the OSA interface. Which, at last check, is just about all of them.
From the sounds of it, you've got your workflow pretty well optimized for your needs, so I wouldn't suggest that there's any overwhelming need for you to change it. But by saying things like "OSX only helps the computer illiterate" when by the looks of things you haven't the faintest clue what OSX is, you only make yourself look like yet another troll.
The multitude of X86 cheap stuff doesnt work on these platforms. You probably pay 3-6 times what you'd normally pay for NICS and GFX cards. Apple does this all the time.
That's funny -- I just got back from CompUSA, where I paid all of $15 for a D-Link 100baseT NIC that will work with both Macs and PCs. The exact same trick works with most SCSI cards, several flavors of NVidia and ATI graphics cards, and Creative's Soundblaster line.
It's been many, many years since PCI cards for Macs cost substantially more than their PC counterparts. Like, almost a decade now.
And here's the thing: in many cases, those Mac cards will work unmodified in Linux-on-IBM/PPC servers and workstations. Also, occasionally, in Sun kit. Reason is, the "BIOS" in the PowerMacs, IBM's e-Servers and all of Sun's hardware is the same: OpenFirmware, AKA OpenBoot. Once you've set up your PCI card to support OpenBoot on one platform, it supports them all, and all the platform vendor has to do is write an OS-level driver for the card.
For the record, I have nothing against the concept of cross-platform development toolkits. They can be great, time-saving things.
.net, openstep), the job of every project manager in the world is to stand behind that developer's back with a rattan cane, and smack them across the shoulders everytime they start to try it. Netscape's management completely failed in this critical task, and Microsoft's near-total control of a market that 5 years ago they were an also-ran in is the entirely predictable result.
But. Priorities. Opera developed a functional product that could be used by the vast majority of their paying customers first. Then they prototyped and shipped versions for secondary platforms. After they started seeing revenue (or the potential for revenue; I'm not privy to their books, merely aware that they're apparently still in business, unlike the Mozilla team), they then wrote the minimum amount of glue to allow them to ship their releases in lockstep. And they did it in what...a quarter of the time it took to build a functional XPFE browser? An eighth?
Second point: XUL was more than just a cross-platform widget set. If that had been all that it was, Moz 1.0 would have shipped in 1999, maybe even 1998. People write cross-platform toolsets all the damn time, and it rarely takes half a decade to do. No, XUL/XUI/XPFE were the logical result of Netscape drinking its own "it's not a web browser, it's an application platform! " kool-aid. It's an API, it's an application framework, it's a development toolkit, it's an XML parser, it's a widget set, it'll walk your dog and it gets your whites whiter!
Just search for comments from users with mozilla.org and netscape.com addresses on slashdot for the past few years: Mozilla wasn't just going to be a better web browser, it was going to be the foundation for an entire industry of "mozilla-based web applications" that someone, somewhere, was sure to write.
See, as far as I can tell, it's the not-so-secret desire of just about every developer who ever lived to write The One Universal Cross-Platform Middleware Library That Everyone Will Use Forever. Therefore, except in the exceedingly rare instances where doing that is the actual stated and understood project plan from the CEO on down (ie: win32, java,
Heh, well, I certainly won't dispute that Opera put the majority of their effort into the product that was earning them the highest return on their efforts, ie. the windows browser, But, well, that's just one more reason why they're still employed and the geniuses who brought us XUL are...not.
As has been pointed out elsewhere: all the Mozilla team had to do to ensure quality non-windows browser support was adequately document and freeze the Gecko API. Galeon and Camino were stable on Linux and OSX respectively months or even years before the XPFE Mozilla could be considered usable.
That was, of course, supposed to say "World's largest and most predatory software corporation." MS is big, but it ain't GM or Exxon...yet.
Guess what, hotshot? The answer to that question is: Whichever one will not take 4+ years to ship in a working form while the world's largest and most predatory corporation is working overtime to dig your grave.
Please notice that despite the nonstop handwaving from the Mozilla team about how maintaining seperate native interfaces for the assorted Gecko frontends was supposed to be some sort of impossible herculean task that no reasonable person could be expected to tackle, in the time that it took to produce ONE semi-functional version of Mozilla, Opera Software, a company with not even a tenth of AOLNSCP's resources, produced multiple versions of a fully functional web browser, for all of Mozilla's major target platforms. Not only did they produce, maintain and upgrade native Windows, MacOS and Linux versions of Opera, but they increased their market share, and made money doing it.
"We had no choice but to implement XUL/XPFE" is the Big Lie of the entire Netscape saga. The fact that mozilla team members are still stating it with cultish earnestness suggests not that you all came to a reasoned engineering decision, but that your project management was not merely incompetant, but downright pathological. If 1% market share and the firing of your entire development team isn't enough to convince you that somewhere, somehow, you made the wrong decision, you are simply delusional.
Hopefully, some of the core Mozilla developers and managers will use some of their newly acquired free time to read Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month." When Brooks talks about the Second-System Effect, he's talking about you.
Until now, there haven't been any PowerPC processors that have been capable of processing the full 64-bit width of data though.
Not quite true. I believe that IBM fabbed at least a few samples of the PPC620, which was to be the original 64bit PPC processor. For the usual assorted reasons (low yields, high costs, poor performance compared to Motorola's PPC750 design), the chip was never adopted by anyone.
...when there's a handheld version for sale.
...it was called the VisorPhone, and it sucked rocks.
The concept works great in theory, but breaks down badly in practice when it comes time to actually talk on the damn thing. Holding a PDA up to your face is awkward and stupid-looking. A wired earpiece gets tangled, broken and lost with clockwork regularity. A wireless earpiece is even easier to lose, and additionally will drain the hell out of the phone's batteries (usually already pushed to the max in order to support PDA functions on top of phone functions), and will require its own power source as well.
So far, the flip-phone form of the Treo and the Samsung palmos phones has really come closest to nailing the perfect design for one of these things in the real world. I'm a little dubious about the Treo 600, but I'm willing to try it out.
The SD slot in the Treo 600 is SDIO-compliant, which means you can put a bluetooth card, a wifi card, a GPS or whatever you want in there.
I agree that it's not as nice as having the bluetooth antenna built in, but the damn thing is already being priced out at $600, and you gotta keep the aftermarket companies happy somehow.
Er, I've heard some dumb excuses from MIS managers for not allowing Macs on the corporate LAN before, but...viruses? VIRUSES?
I can only imagine what they meant was "That machine doesn't have enough viruses on it."
It's not a G5, it's a PPC970, completely different beasts.
Newsflash, kiddo: neither Motorola nor IBM sell a CPU called the "G4". "G4" was a "marchitechture" term coined by Apple in the spirit of Motorola's internal "G3" codename for the PPC750. The chip inside any "PowerMac G4" is some flavor of a Motorola PowerPC 7400, no matter what Apple calls it.
You can pretty much bet the farm that Apple will call every varient of the PPC970 they ship a "PowerPC G5".
1GHz bus? gimme a break. Intel hasn't yet reached this. Two points impossible.
Ahem. ("1ghz" is probably apple marketing-speak, but it's always been known that the PPC970 will have a stupidly fast FSB -- Intel isn't the only company that can innovate in this field, eh?)
Almost believable, but for the moment Apple are phasing out the use of NVIDIA cards in their machines.
Simply and 100% wrong. Apple has been doing pretty much exactly the same thing for the last three years on this front: providing whichever of the two offered them the best OEM pricing as the default configuration, and offering the other as a build-to-order option. They will continue to do this.
Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0
Here, you may be correct, but there are two issues that may force them to start shipping "USB 2.0" connectors: first, the USB consortium has recently declared that all USB ports are "USB 2.0" (yes, this is weird and stupid), and secondly it's actually getting a bit difficult to source USB controllers that only support the 1.0/1.1 specs.
Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible
FW400 and FW800 use different connectors, and there are not yet many FW800 products on the market. This is called "covering your bets" and "not pissing off your customers". BTW, 1x FW800 and 2x FW400 is also the configuration on the 17" AlBook, so they've already shipped one machine in exactly this "impossible" configuration.
optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry but this sounds like wishful thinking.
No, it sounds like you have no idea what you're talking about. Do you have any idea how many macs are used in audio production? Are you aware that Apple sells their own high-end audio composition program? The only surprise about a PowerMac with optical TOSlink is that they didn't do it years ago.
Apple has been a member of the HyperTransport consortium for over a year now. I believe the proper response to this "news" is "duh."
Only an Amiga fan could fail to see the contradiction between the second and third paragraphs there.
A few years back at Geekfest in Cambridge (MA), a co-worker of mine observed ESR telling a local newspaper reporter with a straight face that all geeks are libertarians. I don't think that the idea that every single last one of his fellow engineers might not subscribe to every last one of his pet political causes would ever occur to the man.
Raymond has always been an egomaniac blowhard with a self-opinion exceeding his actual worth by several orders of magnitude, and if you don't believe me, just ask any member of the linux kernel mailing list.
It's very simple: there are no customers.
I've walked around a bunch of the old Exodus datacenters in New York City: even the "older" ones (ie the former GlobalCenter colo on 8th avenue, and the original NJ1 at Exchange Place)) were like ghost towns: row after row after row of empty racks.
The colocation "boom" of the 1990s was a pyramid scheme: VC-financed colo companies selling space at completely fictional rates to VC-financed startups. As soon as the venture money dried up, the small customer vanished...and then the big customers vanished...and then the behemoths themselves began to die off.
No matter how much you cut your costs, you can't make a profit if you have no customers.
My completely off-the-cuff guess is that even if C&W mothballed 90% of their colo facilities in the US, and all of their competitors (UUNet, AT&T, Globix, Level3) did likewise, there would still not be enough customers to keep them afloat. Colo is expensive, and there just aren't that many companies who actually need six-sigma uptimes. (Not that any of the colo providers ever came anywhere near their promised reliability numbers in practice, but that's a whole different rant.)
Yeah, but that would require two things:
1. For the slashdot crowd to stop regarding "the slashdot effect" as some sort of penis substitute.
2. For Rob and Taco to actually spend 0.00001 seconds pondering the concepts of "ethics" and/or "professionalism."
Not gonna happen in a million years.
In theory, any PDA with an IR port can control stereo components.
In practice, the IR transmitter on most PDAs has an effective range of only a few feet: they were designed to allow wireless hotsyncing and PDA-to-PDA data exchange.
PDAs with remote-strength IR transceivers were, until recently, rarer, and the manufacturers are starting to make a big deal about it.
Lain is God. It was "supernatural" from the very beginning. In fact, you learn this in the first espisode. Again, you didn't get it.
I think what the original poster was trying to ask, in his ham-handed way, was: "Couldn't Serial Experiments Lain have wrapped up its plot without creating Yet Another Tentacle Monster at the very end?"
It's a reasonable question to ask. I loved Lain almost without reservation, but I really wish they hadn't felt the need to turn Eiri Masami into The Overfiend in the finale.
...perhaps because low-budget live-action anime adaptations do not have a reputation for quality?
A few questions, off the top of my head, that I'd love to see answered:
This isn't a review, this is a puff piece.
And once again, the great Wheel of Reincarnation comes full circle. Nice to have seen it happen twice in my lifetime.
Was I the only person who noticed that the implication of the Architect's speech is that Neo is not The One... ...he's Number Six?