Not at all. The device is so efficient, that if it replaces something that would usually run at one watt, it actually ends up running at -9W, generating power. Not only will this help with mobile phone battery use, but it also means we'll be able to power our homes, vehicles, and other necessary appliances using magical mobile phone technology rather than traditional, more dangerous, systems in the future.
I hope I'm not responding this too late for anyone to answer. I think I roughly understand the concept, but I may be missing something major because I'm not sure I understand the examples.
I'm guessing that what's happening goes something like this:
- User program calls (ultimately) read(), a kernel call.
- Kernel tells device driver to read X bytes into memory, where user has requested it.
- Kernel marks the page(s) involved as "Funky stuff going on here"
- Kernel immediately returns to user program, without waiting for device driver to do it's thing
- Sometime later, when device driver has returned data, kernel restores the page(s) involved so the user program can read them without causing page faults.
Ok, except this isn't copy on write, it's "break on read" or something, unless CoW is a term generically used all over the place.
Is the right example being used? The way I envisage the system working would be more like:
{....}
char buffer[MAX_BUFFER_SIZE];
for(i=0; i<datalength; i++) { sprintf(buffer,"%d: %s\n", i, something[i]); fwrite(buffer,1,strlen(buffer),fd); }
{....}
(Yeah, it's dummy code, pretend the sprintf is actually a more complex set of data formatting commands.)
Now, in this case, I'm seeing where someone might implement something called Copy on Write, and where it would be "useful" but fail in the way you're describing. I'm envisaging the writing part of the above looking something like this:
- user program calls (ultimately) write() call
- kernel tells device driver to write characters at location X
- kernel marks relevent pages as Copy on Write, so that if user program writes more data to them, and the device driver hasn't finished, the user program doesn't interfere with what the device driver's doing.
- kernel immediately returns to user program, before device driver has finished.
- some time later, when device driver has finished writing data, kernel marks the relevent pages as "safe" again.
Is this a more appropriate example, or am I missing something and it really does affect read()s in a way I'm not understanding?
Well, this kind of argument goes on forever, usually with silly references to OS/2, and I think it's worth giving some examples of operating systems that have had substantial subsystems designed to give compatability with other operating systems that, nonetheless, achieved great success, and for which the bulk of apps written were "native". Note, in the below, while often the "other" operating system has a similar name, it generally has an entirely different API, look, feel, and smell (well, ok, I don't know about the last one.)
Windows 3.0 - compatible with MSDOS (earlier versions had some compatability too but it wasn't as solid
Windows 95 - compatible with Windows 3.x and DOS
Windows XP - compatible with Windows 95, 3.x, and DOS
Mac OS X - compatible with Mac OS 9. Also able to run many X11/Unix apps with just a recompile
Other people can probably come up with other examples of operating systems that, in their time, were successful, and had substantial back-compatibility with platforms that you generally wanted to obsolete, not support.
Anyone thinking "Hey, Windows is Windows right?" should note that Windows 3.x and Windows 95 couldn't have had more different looks and feels, and their APIs were only superficially similar. Win32, 95's base API, was 32-bit, worked with flat, 32 bit, addressing, and provided access to something resembling a sane file system. "Win16", the pseudonym of the Windows 1/2/3.x APIs, by comparison required programs be written to use segmented memory. Filenames were UPPERCASE and had eight characters, a period, and three more after that. The GUIs were marginally similar in terms of widget layout, indeed a Win16 application was grating when you saw it up against native 32 bit applications.
The real question is: Is Apple prepared to get this operating system out to the mass market, should they consider including Red Box in Leopard? If they don't, then with a 3-5% marketshare, there's a serious risk that programmers will rely upon Red Box to get their critical, we're-the-only-people-who-do-this, applications to OS X users, and not care too much about complaints from Mac OS X users about the ugliness of the GUIs. Native Mac programs will still exist, especially if Apple re-releases an updated version of their OpenStep/WebObjects for Windows development tools, incorporating the software into Xcode. But they'll remain the minority, and the divide between Mac apps and Windows apps will, if anything intensify.
IBM dropped OS/2 for a very simple, well documented, reason. They were told by Microsoft that they could either receive virtually no support whatsoever for getting Windows 95 to run on IBM computers, paying through the nose for the copies they bought, essentially making IBM's Windows 95 the worst performing and least competitive machines on the market, or they could get rid of OS/2 and the Lotus office suite (I forget the name.)
IBM choose dropping OS/2. Sure, it could have gambled everything on Windows 95 being a flop in comparison, but they already knew that OS/2 would only achieve a certain level of success in the short term, and Windows would survive regardless. Other PC manufacturers, with a few exceptions, refused to license OS/2 because by doing so they'd be reliant on a major (and at the time, untrustworthy) competitor.
Their decision to drop OS/2 had nothing to do with developers "only developing Windows apps because OS/2 was compatible with Windows" as some claim, it had nothing to do with ugliness (OS/2 Warp 3 was ugly, I agree, but OS/2 Warp 4 looked as good as anything did at the time.) It wasn't unpopular or poorly marketed (remember the "Where's the hourglass" ads?) It wasn't worse than Windows 95 (it was arguably an equal. They were both single-user 32 bit operating systems with pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and multimedia. '95 and WfW 3.11 had the benefit of networking, which didn't become standard until Warp 4, but OTOH Warp 3 generally came with a Dial Up networking suite anyway.) It just came down to the war of business: Microsoft said "Drop it, or we'll kill you", IBM at that point knew the gamble of staying with OS/2 in the hope enough people would chose it over Windows 95 just wasn't worth it.
That these threats occurred and that IBM capitulated is documented in Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact, the one major part of the Microsoft Antitrust trial that was wholly upheld in the later appeals. It's a surprisingly good read for a legal document, and worth every geek's time.
1. Yellow Box shipped as a commercial product (not under that name) for a long time, initially as OpenStep for NT, and then as part of WebObjects. I don't believe you can get it any more (just as you can't get WebObjects for Windows) but it was a real, shipping, product. I suspect that it's still under active development, at least as part of Apple's attempts to create safety nets (like Mac OS X under Intel)
2. Part of the original design for Rhapsody, the "missing link" between OpenStep 4 and Mac OS X Server 1.0, was, supposedly, a subsystem called Red Box. Red Box was, indeed, a Win32 compatibility system for the Rhapsody system. People curious to know why Apple would have incorporated this into the design of an OS supposedly destined to run on Macs should know this: Rhapsody wasn't actually limited to Macs, it ran on ix86 PCs too. Actual Rhapsody previews were released to developers, and there's a wealth of webpages out there describing people's experiences with it, running both on Macs and on PCs.
If I understand Cringley correctly, he's talking about Red Box. Red Box was never officially announced, but it's always been common knowledge it existed and was, at one time, a part of the design (even if it wasn't implemented.) It's not hard to believe Apple have been working on it for the last eight years, much as they did keeping Mac OS X running on Intel.
Now, before getting excited by this, remember that Red Box was always unofficial. It came up enough at the time that people convinced themselves it existed, if only as a concept. Cringely is likely to have heard of the system, and may have drawn conclusions that are not warranted. He may even be counting upon the rest of us to say "Ah! You mean Red Box!", to lend credibility to an otherwise ridiculous rumour.
On the other hand, I've read Windows Vista developers who are convinced about "something" in Leopard that's going to seriously damage Microsoft. And quite honestly, this is the only thing I can think of.
No, the GP's right. Yes, the law may mandate such a technology being introduced (though har-fucking-har to the politicians who pass it - not being able to copy something is still sufficiently involving complicated technologies that politicians cannot be held to account over it, but your TV's controls freezing because a commercial comes on due to a legal mandate? I think people will NOTICE that), but you're talking, ultimately, about the end of TV if this ever takes off.
People put up with the amount of advertising on TV at the moment precisely because of the ability to avoid it. TiVo and its competitors are doing an enormous amount to make TV usable again and are almost certainly resulting in much better ratings for the better shows, not just because they make it easier to avoid missing them, but also because the viewing experience is 100x better. Every few years, TV should die (or at least start a serious southward trend), but ends up gasping another deep breath and remaining the top entertainment medium because some technology fixes it. Video saved it in the 1970s. Cable saved it in the eighties and nineties. TiVo and HD is saving it now.
Hard though it is to believe, make TV truly unwatchable, and people will stop buying TVs.
I sincerely doubt that's true. And if it is, then what of it? If one person thinks "You know, I can look for a specific number in a list of numbers by going through each item in the list until I find it", and then someone else has the same idea a year later, without knowing what the first person did, then why, exactly, should the first person be able to stop the second, or force them to pay royalties, or some other crap?
Just because you did it first doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen anyway, a million times over, all independently.
I've looked it up and I don't see anything linking Legend Group (not "Legend Systems) and Packard Bell, or Lenovo and Packard Bell. Packard Bell is nominally independent, though NEC and Groupe Bull own large stakes.
ARCNET has similar characteristics, it's a kind of "Token Ring lite", and is generally considered cheaper and easier to implement. As a result it tends to be implemented in the kinds of areas you're talking about.
That said, realistically, switched Ethernet is "good enough" for the kinds of issues you describe to not be issues in practice. Yes, determinism is a good thing, but when you weigh everything up, the fact that 99.9999(etc)% of the time your Ethernet packet will arrive well within the time frame you need it to arrive, it often just ends up being more practical.
This complexity will already exist. The NG DVD players will need to support:
- High definition DVD
- DVD
- Audio CD
(And, almost certainly) MP3 CD, CDs with JPEGs, VCDs, etc
This involves at least three different physical formats. Adding one extra, that's similar to an existing format (both HD-DVD and Bluray use similar lasers), isn't going to be as major as supporting the formats above.
DECnet is a set of network protocols. It runs over Ethernet (and other physical networks.) You'd expect a DEC MicroVAX to use DECnet in the same way as a Windows/DOS machine would support NetBEUI.
I turned down a job 3 years ago at a place that was still running TR - a mid-sized retail chain. They said they were starting to look in to ethernet, but were happy with their token rings. That was the deciding factor for me to keep looking...At this point, a company that isn't actively working to replace TR with something else has some serious management issues and I would wonder what else was lying inder the surface.
I would have formed the opposite conclusion. If it works, then management are being pragmatic by not replacing it.
Yes, I'm bitter - I've seen exactly the kind of "Throw out the working solution for the cutting edge" mentality too often, and it inevitably fucks things up when people do it. Managers who make such decisions rarely predict the pointless disruption and additional costs that result from such projects, and can rarely give a justification beyond theoretical spending improvements (that are rarely fully costed out) and/or the ability to hire "cheaper" technicians/programmers/etc (that, in practice, actually just translates to more incompetents.)
The BBC was a radio broadcaster, quasi-independent from government, in the nineteen thirties. I don't think they've ever been a telecom anything, let alone a monopoly.
I'm pretty sure the Post Office, which ran the telephone system back then, didn't ban Churchill from anything. As for the BBC, I can't find a reference to anything about Churchill not being allowed to speak upon it, so without further information, I'm going to chalk this down to typical pseudo-libertarian misleading given the term could mean "He was considered irrelevent to politics back then and thus never got airtime", or it could mean "Neville Chamberlain personally called up Reith, and told him if the BBC ever gave Churchill airtime, he'd personally revoke their charter."
I'm guessing the former explanation is more likely, knowing the historic spirit of independence of the BBC.
The one megapixel camera in my Motorola V635 takes pictures that are "good enough" - that is, it replaced my 3 megapixel Kodak, and while the image quality wasn't quite as good, it was barely noticable in the majority of cases. I went around New York for my honeymoon, taking pictures all over the place. My wife, who had a 3 megapixel Kodak of her own, also went around taking pictures with that. Frequently my pictures turned out better. Rarely were my pictures worse than what you'd get with a disposable. I screwed up more photos myself by including my finger at the bottom of many shots than the camera screwed up by creating a blurry, dark, or otherwise ugly image.
By all of this, I don't mean to diss Kodak. I took some pretty amazing pictures with the Kodak when I had it. It's consumer grade, but it's nice. The fact is though that the whole "Oh, camera phones are so inferior, they're just cheap webcams really, gosh-diddly, you just can't get decent optics in such a small space" rant is, today, absurdly over-stated. Yes, you can still get cameraphones with bad cameras. Yes, even the better cameraphones cannot compete with high-end professional equipment.
But the better cameraphones can compete with regular consumer digital cameras. The better ones do do an excellent job. The quality is superb. My V635 isn't even top of line, it's mid-range, and it does an excellent job. I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever buy a standalone digital camera again, save for the highly improbable situation that I end up being a professional photographer.
My advice to anyone considering getting a camera phone who wants a good camera that'll eliminate the need to carry a seperate consumer-grade camera around is ignore the wankers who insist such things are not possible. Go to the mobile phone forums and check the picture samples. If they look good to you, then chances are it's a good camera. And that's one less box you need to carry around with you when you're somewhere that needs a camera, and a useful gadget to have anyway.
It helps both. It lowers costs for the carrier (savings which will be passed on to both customers and shareholders in the long term), but also provides the carrier's customers with ways to get around in-home blackspots that a carrier will never, and can never, fix.
The carriers love this. It's a system called UMA, GSM routed via TCP/IP. The calls still get routed over their network, they just reach the network via the Internet rather than their radio frequency allocations. It's essentially more bandwidth, the customers pay for the bulk of it, and the customer is essentially fixing blackspots and making their own coverage a little more reliable without the carrier having to do anything.
Despite the use of the term VoIP in the headline, this has nothing to do with Vonage or Skype.
I think you misunderstand the technology, which isn't surprising given the article summary.
First, yes, the preference is for calls to be routed via Wifi.
However, no, you don't burn less minutes. The technology under discussion is called UMA. It's a way of tunnelling GSM over 802.11 or Bluetooth (or presumably other future home wireless standards.) The phone call still has to be routed to your carrier (only, over the Internet rather than via the carrier's towers) otherwise your call would get dropped the moment you get out of range of your wireless network.
This is not the same thing as those mobile phones that also support Skype (for example) over 802.11. It's essentially a way for GSM subscribers to make their own home have less coverage blackspots (and help the carrier gain a little more capacity.) Your call costs may go down (or rather, the amount of minutes you get for your dollar may increase), because by doing this you're increasing capacity for the network, but it's possible a carrier will give you "free airtime" when you're in range of your wireless network, generally that's not the way they operate.
There is one major downside BTW, which is that in order to use an access point, it has to be registered with the carrier, and generally you need to manually tell the phone about it (once, obviously, not every time you get in range.) So don't think people are just going to set up ad-hoc wireless networks in well known blackspots just to help Cingular and T-Mobile customers out.
That would work great if you got complementary photo CDs from Walgreens or CVS when you print digital photos from a memory card. Only you don't. CVS charges $2.99, IIRC, I'm not sure how much Walgreens charges. Pretty sure it's not free.
And, of course, you're assuming they want to print all their photos.
The lack of market share makes a big difference too. Ignoring the (generally true) presumption that most virus writers aren't going to target an OS whose users are by far in the minority, there's also this to consider (shamelessly plaguarised from some guy's journal I read. Wait, that was my journal. Just wait until I get my hands on myself.
Here's a question. Suppose you have a biological virus that can only live inside of hosts that are human, male, that have blue eyes and black hair, and that are over 6 feet tall. Oh, and that particular targetted group happens to be fairly keen on regular visits to the doctor. Oh, and if it touches anyone not in that group, it doesn't actually spread from that person (even to the aforementioned six footers) but it causes a minor symptom that makes it obvious the virus is around. How well will it survive?
I'm going to guess that that subset of the human population is probably greater than 3%, but I doubt that virus will work terribly well. Now, if you remove those conditions, and just, say, have it target anyone who's not in either that group or another group that also comprises about 3% of the population, then you have a great virus on your hands, even if this new group also regularly goes to the doctor and the virus shows up a benign, non-transmitting, symptom in the 6% of the population otherwise unaffected.
That's the thing. In order for a Mac virus to spread, there have to be a lot of Macs in constant communication with one another. There aren't a lot of Macs, and by and large they live in a PC world. Mac owners probably communicate with a disproportionately large number of fellow Mac users, but the majority of email addresses in their address books are almost certainly still Windows users.
If we go for the usual trick that PC virusses use to spread, and use the old standby of "I'll email myself to everyone in the victim's address book", then 97% of those receiving the virus will contact the victim and say "I got that email you sent me, but the attachment will not open. What's the deal with that?", and suddenly the game's up.
Ok, I was talking about Mac virusses. The principle still applies though.
I'm not arguing that either the Mac or GNU/Linux are less secure than Windows (though the latter is a gray concept. Less secure than which Windows? And what's the deal with the IE/ActiveX integration thing?); but there are a variety of reasons why they're proving to be more secure in practice, and a lack of market share is definitely one of them.
Which actually makes the virus under discussion a little scary. Not that it's particularly bad by itself (I think it'll fizzle), it's more that virus writers appear to be adapting. You certainly can get more infections if you target multiple platforms, as long as you do so correctly, and each instance is as likely to cause an infection on the target platform as the best virus would on a platform it was written solely for.
I'm not quite sure where you get that idea. Modems have been common since the 80's, especially once Compuserve took off. Those who weren't business users tended to use modems for accessing BBSes and public access computers. The Internet may not have caught on until around '94-'95, but there were a number of uses for modems before that. Leaving modems off their machines was a huge mistake.
I stand by my comment. Modems were largely the province of a small group of computer enthusiasts and the occasional business user. Until the Internet took off, relatively few people had them, especially in the home.
The only thing left over from the iMac is the name. Apple has moved to very different designs that focus on ease of use and only the necessary options. The iMac was the first step toward today's designs, but it's incredibly different than what Apple puts out now.
If you mean Apple's not selling CRT-based G3 based machines, I agree with you. If you mean Apple isn't selling AIO machines that generally use commodity standards, with the focus on good design and simplicity of installation, then... well, no, I disagree. The iMac marked a move from functionality to design aesthetic. It's a piece of brilliance that has to be admired, and for whom Apple's current range owes a very big debt to.
The iMac was developed after Jobs returned to Apple.
The Wikipedia quote doesn't back that up, it merely backs up announcement and release dates, and reasons why this particular project went into production. The iMac was announced barely a year after Jobs took over. What did he do? Immediately go to Ives and say "We need a new, AIO, computer. I want you to throw out everything we've ever done. Design new motherboards, implement this untested third party standard from Intel and use it for the keyboards and mice, make the keyboards and mice completely different too, and make it look radical yet consumer oriented?"
This may not be the car industry (five year turnaround for new vehicles), but it takes a fuck of a lot longer to develop something of that order of magnitude than that. If Jobs had had to "start from scratch" in 1997, with no project already in the works, the iMac would have been a prettified Beige G3 AIO.
In any case, including a modem in 1998 was hardly radical. In 1995 it would have been.
His point is that current Macs are easily identifiable by their hardware options. Instead of having massive matrices of complex features, Apple takes the stance of putting everything into the machine that belongs in a given price range. That means that you can look at an iBook, and unequivically say, "That's the 2 USB model running a G3 processor, and originally OS X 10.2." This makes several things a lot easier
My point is that that point is bogus: that is, there's nothing particularly new about the strategy, and the machines he's criticising were, for the time, much the same thing. Saying "Yeah, but they didn't have USB" is a nonsense because USB didn't exist back then. They all had ADB and SCSI though. Saying "Yeah, but there were various models of Apple modem they might have had" is bogus, because back then modems weren't considered standard equipment - we're looking at 1995-96, the precise point when manufacturers were suddenly taken by surprise about the popularity of the Internet.
Suppose that Internet via Bluetooth via 3G were to take off right now. The same issues would arise. Apple doesn't sell or approve of any particular phone. It sells Bluetooth adapters, and in some cases internal bluetooth functionality (recent Intel Macs) but most of Apple's range of machines do not come with BT as standard. How is that different from modems in 1995?
So, over a period of two or three years, Apple figures out it has to design a machine with a built in modem. This somehow means the person who was managing Apple at the start of those three years was a moron, and that the one who's managing it at the end is a visionary. Bollocks. It means Apple made incremental changes, consistant with market expectations, to what should be included in an All-In-One computer.
Apple has always sold AIO machines. They have, for the most part, had everything you'd expect in an AIO machine for that time period. At a time when Apple the Internet was still such a new concept that Mac OS's TCP/IP stack was a bolt-on, their AIO didn't ship with a modem. That clearly shows The Steve was better than Teh Spindler!!!1! Bollocks.
And as an aside, because people are idiots and read stuff into things I write that aren't there, I'm not saying Spindler was a good Apple boss. Looking at the bio, it looks like he had severe personality flaws and didn't keep a grasp on what Apple was doing. But people have a habit of blaming every single piddling thing, from Sony making exploding batteries, to a lack of a feature that, at the time, was considered an unnecessary bolt-on to support an upcoming fad, as standard equipment in a computer, on personalities that frequently have little reason to have been that closely involved in decision making. The GGP can't see through his dislike of the guy to fairly determine where Spindler actually fucked up, and where shit just happened.
Apple could have destroyed Microsoft and Windows 95 with a real, modern Mac operating system like what Copland promised. But delays after delays stalled the project until it was finally cancelled. It would be interesting to see what a modern, non-Unix (and non-Windows) GUI OS looks like, but Apple completely rested on their laurels here, and users were stuck with crashy and ancient OS 7, 8, and 9 until 2001
Well, hold on a moment. Yes, it'd be interesting to see what "a modern, non-Unix (and non-Windows) GUI OS looks like", but Copland wasn't, even in 1995, "a real, modern Mac operating system", not even in terms of what Copland promised.
Copland was actually cruder than OS/2 and Windows 95. While it had "pre-emptive multitasking" on the bullet list, applications that interacted with the user (that is to say, pretty much all of them) had to run in the same process, called the Blue Box, which happened to look to applications a lot like Mac OS 7. An application developer who cared could split out the GUI part of their app from the rest of it, putting only the GUI/interactive part in the "Blue Box", but beyond that, you couldn't isolate your application completely from the rest of the system. If Word's Blue Box part crashed in a zany way, just as with Mac OS 7, every application would, essentially, die (what's the point in an interactive application running if the front end's dead?) Developers wanting to develop cross platform code for both Copland and OS 7 would find it easiest to forget about splitting out the code like that, and only the most conscientious developer (or one with very special needs) wouldn't write their code for an interactive application to run entirely in the Blue Box anyway.
The OS was also single user. Far from being able to "destroy" Microsoft and Windows 95, they'd have come up with a system that looked like an equal on a feature list, and was less stable and secure in practice.
Copland was never the write operating system for Apple. Indeed, Apple themselves portrayed it as a stepping stone towards Gershwin, which was supposed to be more of a next generation OS. But Gershwin was never started, its spec was always up in the air, and so it's hard to conclude what it might have looked like.
USB didn't come out until the late nineties, it's hardly Spindler's fault earlier Macs didn't come with it. Your other complaint seems to be that the 622X might have any one of multiple third party peripherals added to it. While it may seem "odd" in 2006 for a computer not to have a built-in modem... ahhhhh... well perhaps not, but let's go with the pretence... modems were still relatively rare peripherals in the early nineties. An iMac, be it a Bondi Blue or an Intel, may have a variety of manufacturer's MP3 player or DV camera plugged into it.
Now, it's true, the Internet was just taking off around about the last year of Spindler and in the 95-96 timescale that this range of Performas was released, much to the surprise of virtually everyone. Most companies misstepped at that point, and more to the point were in the learning stage about what worked and what didn't. The iMac is the result of that learning process, it quite simply is not a machine anyone would have designed in 1995, whether they worked for Apple, Dell, IBM, or anyone else.
I don't know enough to comment on Spindler generally, but I think this criticism is unwarranted. Indeed, as criticisms go, it suggests Jobs is a little overrated - his entry as iCEO and then CEO co-incided with Apple being ready to use their experiences of the previous three or four years to design better products. This would seem to be backed up by the fact that the iMac, which clearly influenced everything Apple has done since, was designed and more or less ready before Jobs took over.
In other words, your ISP won't give paying sites "better" access. It will give non-paying sites *worse* access.
Not in the scenario I painted. As I said, if an ISP offers a service to third parties that allows the third party to bump up the user's bandwidth (ie my 1.5Mbps connection becomes a 5Mbps, with the extra 3.5Mbps being reserved for the third party), then nobody's service is being downgraded.
The NN rules are too broad and sweeping to allow such a scenario to happen. What's needed are minimum levels of service, not ridiculous NN rules that assume that all discrimination is bad. I don't want my minimum, paid-for, level of service impaired, yet NN proponents don't seem to give a crap about that, as long as the impairing isn't for some extremely narrow set of circumstances where a third party pays for its packets to have some kind of special service. And they're keen on banning stuff that wouldn't make any difference to my minimum level of service at all.
NN is an extremely narrow-minded, poorly thought out, scheme, based upon short sighted paranoia based upon a few idiot comments from the CEO of SBC/AT&T.
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Not at all. The device is so efficient, that if it replaces something that would usually run at one watt, it actually ends up running at -9W, generating power. Not only will this help with mobile phone battery use, but it also means we'll be able to power our homes, vehicles, and other necessary appliances using magical mobile phone technology rather than traditional, more dangerous, systems in the future.
I'm guessing that what's happening goes something like this:
- User program calls (ultimately) read(), a kernel call.
- Kernel tells device driver to read X bytes into memory, where user has requested it.
- Kernel marks the page(s) involved as "Funky stuff going on here"
- Kernel immediately returns to user program, without waiting for device driver to do it's thing
- Sometime later, when device driver has returned data, kernel restores the page(s) involved so the user program can read them without causing page faults.
Ok, except this isn't copy on write, it's "break on read" or something, unless CoW is a term generically used all over the place.
Is the right example being used? The way I envisage the system working would be more like:
(Yeah, it's dummy code, pretend the sprintf is actually a more complex set of data formatting commands.)Now, in this case, I'm seeing where someone might implement something called Copy on Write, and where it would be "useful" but fail in the way you're describing. I'm envisaging the writing part of the above looking something like this:
- user program calls (ultimately) write() call
- kernel tells device driver to write characters at location X
- kernel marks relevent pages as Copy on Write, so that if user program writes more data to them, and the device driver hasn't finished, the user program doesn't interfere with what the device driver's doing.
- kernel immediately returns to user program, before device driver has finished.
- some time later, when device driver has finished writing data, kernel marks the relevent pages as "safe" again.
Is this a more appropriate example, or am I missing something and it really does affect read()s in a way I'm not understanding?
- Windows 3.0 - compatible with MSDOS (earlier versions had some compatability too but it wasn't as solid
- Windows 95 - compatible with Windows 3.x and DOS
- Windows XP - compatible with Windows 95, 3.x, and DOS
- Mac OS X - compatible with Mac OS 9. Also able to run many X11/Unix apps with just a recompile
Other people can probably come up with other examples of operating systems that, in their time, were successful, and had substantial back-compatibility with platforms that you generally wanted to obsolete, not support.Anyone thinking "Hey, Windows is Windows right?" should note that Windows 3.x and Windows 95 couldn't have had more different looks and feels, and their APIs were only superficially similar. Win32, 95's base API, was 32-bit, worked with flat, 32 bit, addressing, and provided access to something resembling a sane file system. "Win16", the pseudonym of the Windows 1/2/3.x APIs, by comparison required programs be written to use segmented memory. Filenames were UPPERCASE and had eight characters, a period, and three more after that. The GUIs were marginally similar in terms of widget layout, indeed a Win16 application was grating when you saw it up against native 32 bit applications.
The real question is: Is Apple prepared to get this operating system out to the mass market, should they consider including Red Box in Leopard? If they don't, then with a 3-5% marketshare, there's a serious risk that programmers will rely upon Red Box to get their critical, we're-the-only-people-who-do-this, applications to OS X users, and not care too much about complaints from Mac OS X users about the ugliness of the GUIs. Native Mac programs will still exist, especially if Apple re-releases an updated version of their OpenStep/WebObjects for Windows development tools, incorporating the software into Xcode. But they'll remain the minority, and the divide between Mac apps and Windows apps will, if anything intensify.
IBM choose dropping OS/2. Sure, it could have gambled everything on Windows 95 being a flop in comparison, but they already knew that OS/2 would only achieve a certain level of success in the short term, and Windows would survive regardless. Other PC manufacturers, with a few exceptions, refused to license OS/2 because by doing so they'd be reliant on a major (and at the time, untrustworthy) competitor.
Their decision to drop OS/2 had nothing to do with developers "only developing Windows apps because OS/2 was compatible with Windows" as some claim, it had nothing to do with ugliness (OS/2 Warp 3 was ugly, I agree, but OS/2 Warp 4 looked as good as anything did at the time.) It wasn't unpopular or poorly marketed (remember the "Where's the hourglass" ads?) It wasn't worse than Windows 95 (it was arguably an equal. They were both single-user 32 bit operating systems with pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, and multimedia. '95 and WfW 3.11 had the benefit of networking, which didn't become standard until Warp 4, but OTOH Warp 3 generally came with a Dial Up networking suite anyway.) It just came down to the war of business: Microsoft said "Drop it, or we'll kill you", IBM at that point knew the gamble of staying with OS/2 in the hope enough people would chose it over Windows 95 just wasn't worth it.
That these threats occurred and that IBM capitulated is documented in Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact, the one major part of the Microsoft Antitrust trial that was wholly upheld in the later appeals. It's a surprisingly good read for a legal document, and worth every geek's time.
1. Yellow Box shipped as a commercial product (not under that name) for a long time, initially as OpenStep for NT, and then as part of WebObjects. I don't believe you can get it any more (just as you can't get WebObjects for Windows) but it was a real, shipping, product. I suspect that it's still under active development, at least as part of Apple's attempts to create safety nets (like Mac OS X under Intel)
2. Part of the original design for Rhapsody, the "missing link" between OpenStep 4 and Mac OS X Server 1.0, was, supposedly, a subsystem called Red Box. Red Box was, indeed, a Win32 compatibility system for the Rhapsody system. People curious to know why Apple would have incorporated this into the design of an OS supposedly destined to run on Macs should know this: Rhapsody wasn't actually limited to Macs, it ran on ix86 PCs too. Actual Rhapsody previews were released to developers, and there's a wealth of webpages out there describing people's experiences with it, running both on Macs and on PCs.
If I understand Cringley correctly, he's talking about Red Box. Red Box was never officially announced, but it's always been common knowledge it existed and was, at one time, a part of the design (even if it wasn't implemented.) It's not hard to believe Apple have been working on it for the last eight years, much as they did keeping Mac OS X running on Intel.
Now, before getting excited by this, remember that Red Box was always unofficial. It came up enough at the time that people convinced themselves it existed, if only as a concept. Cringely is likely to have heard of the system, and may have drawn conclusions that are not warranted. He may even be counting upon the rest of us to say "Ah! You mean Red Box!", to lend credibility to an otherwise ridiculous rumour.
On the other hand, I've read Windows Vista developers who are convinced about "something" in Leopard that's going to seriously damage Microsoft. And quite honestly, this is the only thing I can think of.
People put up with the amount of advertising on TV at the moment precisely because of the ability to avoid it. TiVo and its competitors are doing an enormous amount to make TV usable again and are almost certainly resulting in much better ratings for the better shows, not just because they make it easier to avoid missing them, but also because the viewing experience is 100x better. Every few years, TV should die (or at least start a serious southward trend), but ends up gasping another deep breath and remaining the top entertainment medium because some technology fixes it. Video saved it in the 1970s. Cable saved it in the eighties and nineties. TiVo and HD is saving it now.
Hard though it is to believe, make TV truly unwatchable, and people will stop buying TVs.
Just because you did it first doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen anyway, a million times over, all independently.
I've looked it up and I don't see anything linking Legend Group (not "Legend Systems) and Packard Bell, or Lenovo and Packard Bell. Packard Bell is nominally independent, though NEC and Groupe Bull own large stakes.
That said, realistically, switched Ethernet is "good enough" for the kinds of issues you describe to not be issues in practice. Yes, determinism is a good thing, but when you weigh everything up, the fact that 99.9999(etc)% of the time your Ethernet packet will arrive well within the time frame you need it to arrive, it often just ends up being more practical.
- High definition DVD
- DVD
- Audio CD
(And, almost certainly) MP3 CD, CDs with JPEGs, VCDs, etc
This involves at least three different physical formats. Adding one extra, that's similar to an existing format (both HD-DVD and Bluray use similar lasers), isn't going to be as major as supporting the formats above.
DECnet is a set of network protocols. It runs over Ethernet (and other physical networks.) You'd expect a DEC MicroVAX to use DECnet in the same way as a Windows/DOS machine would support NetBEUI.
Yes, I'm bitter - I've seen exactly the kind of "Throw out the working solution for the cutting edge" mentality too often, and it inevitably fucks things up when people do it. Managers who make such decisions rarely predict the pointless disruption and additional costs that result from such projects, and can rarely give a justification beyond theoretical spending improvements (that are rarely fully costed out) and/or the ability to hire "cheaper" technicians/programmers/etc (that, in practice, actually just translates to more incompetents.)
I'm pretty sure the Post Office, which ran the telephone system back then, didn't ban Churchill from anything. As for the BBC, I can't find a reference to anything about Churchill not being allowed to speak upon it, so without further information, I'm going to chalk this down to typical pseudo-libertarian misleading given the term could mean "He was considered irrelevent to politics back then and thus never got airtime", or it could mean "Neville Chamberlain personally called up Reith, and told him if the BBC ever gave Churchill airtime, he'd personally revoke their charter."
I'm guessing the former explanation is more likely, knowing the historic spirit of independence of the BBC.
By all of this, I don't mean to diss Kodak. I took some pretty amazing pictures with the Kodak when I had it. It's consumer grade, but it's nice. The fact is though that the whole "Oh, camera phones are so inferior, they're just cheap webcams really, gosh-diddly, you just can't get decent optics in such a small space" rant is, today, absurdly over-stated. Yes, you can still get cameraphones with bad cameras. Yes, even the better cameraphones cannot compete with high-end professional equipment.
But the better cameraphones can compete with regular consumer digital cameras. The better ones do do an excellent job. The quality is superb. My V635 isn't even top of line, it's mid-range, and it does an excellent job. I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to ever buy a standalone digital camera again, save for the highly improbable situation that I end up being a professional photographer.
My advice to anyone considering getting a camera phone who wants a good camera that'll eliminate the need to carry a seperate consumer-grade camera around is ignore the wankers who insist such things are not possible. Go to the mobile phone forums and check the picture samples. If they look good to you, then chances are it's a good camera. And that's one less box you need to carry around with you when you're somewhere that needs a camera, and a useful gadget to have anyway.
It helps both. It lowers costs for the carrier (savings which will be passed on to both customers and shareholders in the long term), but also provides the carrier's customers with ways to get around in-home blackspots that a carrier will never, and can never, fix.
Despite the use of the term VoIP in the headline, this has nothing to do with Vonage or Skype.
First, yes, the preference is for calls to be routed via Wifi.
However, no, you don't burn less minutes. The technology under discussion is called UMA. It's a way of tunnelling GSM over 802.11 or Bluetooth (or presumably other future home wireless standards.) The phone call still has to be routed to your carrier (only, over the Internet rather than via the carrier's towers) otherwise your call would get dropped the moment you get out of range of your wireless network.
This is not the same thing as those mobile phones that also support Skype (for example) over 802.11. It's essentially a way for GSM subscribers to make their own home have less coverage blackspots (and help the carrier gain a little more capacity.) Your call costs may go down (or rather, the amount of minutes you get for your dollar may increase), because by doing this you're increasing capacity for the network, but it's possible a carrier will give you "free airtime" when you're in range of your wireless network, generally that's not the way they operate.
There is one major downside BTW, which is that in order to use an access point, it has to be registered with the carrier, and generally you need to manually tell the phone about it (once, obviously, not every time you get in range.) So don't think people are just going to set up ad-hoc wireless networks in well known blackspots just to help Cingular and T-Mobile customers out.
And, of course, you're assuming they want to print all their photos.
I'm not arguing that either the Mac or GNU/Linux are less secure than Windows (though the latter is a gray concept. Less secure than which Windows? And what's the deal with the IE/ActiveX integration thing?); but there are a variety of reasons why they're proving to be more secure in practice, and a lack of market share is definitely one of them.
Which actually makes the virus under discussion a little scary. Not that it's particularly bad by itself (I think it'll fizzle), it's more that virus writers appear to be adapting. You certainly can get more infections if you target multiple platforms, as long as you do so correctly, and each instance is as likely to cause an infection on the target platform as the best virus would on a platform it was written solely for.
I'd love to live on your planet!
This may not be the car industry (five year turnaround for new vehicles), but it takes a fuck of a lot longer to develop something of that order of magnitude than that. If Jobs had had to "start from scratch" in 1997, with no project already in the works, the iMac would have been a prettified Beige G3 AIO.
In any case, including a modem in 1998 was hardly radical. In 1995 it would have been.
Suppose that Internet via Bluetooth via 3G were to take off right now. The same issues would arise. Apple doesn't sell or approve of any particular phone. It sells Bluetooth adapters, and in some cases internal bluetooth functionality (recent Intel Macs) but most of Apple's range of machines do not come with BT as standard. How is that different from modems in 1995?
So, over a period of two or three years, Apple figures out it has to design a machine with a built in modem. This somehow means the person who was managing Apple at the start of those three years was a moron, and that the one who's managing it at the end is a visionary. Bollocks. It means Apple made incremental changes, consistant with market expectations, to what should be included in an All-In-One computer.
Apple has always sold AIO machines. They have, for the most part, had everything you'd expect in an AIO machine for that time period. At a time when Apple the Internet was still such a new concept that Mac OS's TCP/IP stack was a bolt-on, their AIO didn't ship with a modem. That clearly shows The Steve was better than Teh Spindler!!!1! Bollocks.
And as an aside, because people are idiots and read stuff into things I write that aren't there, I'm not saying Spindler was a good Apple boss. Looking at the bio, it looks like he had severe personality flaws and didn't keep a grasp on what Apple was doing. But people have a habit of blaming every single piddling thing, from Sony making exploding batteries, to a lack of a feature that, at the time, was considered an unnecessary bolt-on to support an upcoming fad, as standard equipment in a computer, on personalities that frequently have little reason to have been that closely involved in decision making. The GGP can't see through his dislike of the guy to fairly determine where Spindler actually fucked up, and where shit just happened.
Copland was actually cruder than OS/2 and Windows 95. While it had "pre-emptive multitasking" on the bullet list, applications that interacted with the user (that is to say, pretty much all of them) had to run in the same process, called the Blue Box, which happened to look to applications a lot like Mac OS 7. An application developer who cared could split out the GUI part of their app from the rest of it, putting only the GUI/interactive part in the "Blue Box", but beyond that, you couldn't isolate your application completely from the rest of the system. If Word's Blue Box part crashed in a zany way, just as with Mac OS 7, every application would, essentially, die (what's the point in an interactive application running if the front end's dead?) Developers wanting to develop cross platform code for both Copland and OS 7 would find it easiest to forget about splitting out the code like that, and only the most conscientious developer (or one with very special needs) wouldn't write their code for an interactive application to run entirely in the Blue Box anyway.
The OS was also single user. Far from being able to "destroy" Microsoft and Windows 95, they'd have come up with a system that looked like an equal on a feature list, and was less stable and secure in practice.
Copland was never the write operating system for Apple. Indeed, Apple themselves portrayed it as a stepping stone towards Gershwin, which was supposed to be more of a next generation OS. But Gershwin was never started, its spec was always up in the air, and so it's hard to conclude what it might have looked like.
USB didn't come out until the late nineties, it's hardly Spindler's fault earlier Macs didn't come with it. Your other complaint seems to be that the 622X might have any one of multiple third party peripherals added to it. While it may seem "odd" in 2006 for a computer not to have a built-in modem... ahhhhh... well perhaps not, but let's go with the pretence... modems were still relatively rare peripherals in the early nineties. An iMac, be it a Bondi Blue or an Intel, may have a variety of manufacturer's MP3 player or DV camera plugged into it.
Now, it's true, the Internet was just taking off around about the last year of Spindler and in the 95-96 timescale that this range of Performas was released, much to the surprise of virtually everyone. Most companies misstepped at that point, and more to the point were in the learning stage about what worked and what didn't. The iMac is the result of that learning process, it quite simply is not a machine anyone would have designed in 1995, whether they worked for Apple, Dell, IBM, or anyone else.
I don't know enough to comment on Spindler generally, but I think this criticism is unwarranted. Indeed, as criticisms go, it suggests Jobs is a little overrated - his entry as iCEO and then CEO co-incided with Apple being ready to use their experiences of the previous three or four years to design better products. This would seem to be backed up by the fact that the iMac, which clearly influenced everything Apple has done since, was designed and more or less ready before Jobs took over.
The NN rules are too broad and sweeping to allow such a scenario to happen. What's needed are minimum levels of service, not ridiculous NN rules that assume that all discrimination is bad. I don't want my minimum, paid-for, level of service impaired, yet NN proponents don't seem to give a crap about that, as long as the impairing isn't for some extremely narrow set of circumstances where a third party pays for its packets to have some kind of special service. And they're keen on banning stuff that wouldn't make any difference to my minimum level of service at all.
NN is an extremely narrow-minded, poorly thought out, scheme, based upon short sighted paranoia based upon a few idiot comments from the CEO of SBC/AT&T.