So you can kick back on your couch or in your lay-Z-boy or, even better, on the toilet and read slashdot. I'd love to have this thing, but I'm not about to shell out $400 for it.
Thank Eris SOMEONE could inject a little perspective into this gripe fest.
Apple is hardware, not OS
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
Reality check here...
Apple is a hardware company. SGI is a hardware company. Sun is a hardware company. Microsoft is an applications company. RedHat, SuSE, etc. are distributors (for the most part).
What's my point? There's not a single company out there making money developing and selling an OS. MSWindows? MS lives on it's applications revenue and subsidises it's OS with the money. Apple can afford to develop and support OSX only through the sales of hardware. Why would Apple shoot themselves in the foot (read wallet) by making OSX available on anything other than their hardware?
Sure, Jobs is a bit crazy, but I would like to think he's not completely looney.
Would you hire an architect to design a house for you without formal training?
Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of this century's most innovative and influential architects and he never had formal instruction.
My point is that a piece of paper says you can memorize facts and problem solving techniques long enough to pass a test or write a paper. No more, no less. A degree doesn't guarantee the apptitude of an applicant.
I can't wait to check out the miniseries, but I think the GLOWING blue eyes of the Fremen are going to drive me batty. I think actual "blue within blue" would be so much more disconcerting than a silly neon-eyeball special effect. In all but the best light levels, "blue within blue" eyes would turn the eyes into black pits....creepy. I can understand the movie makers wanting to make sure we get it, but man, turn the volume down.
I'm a little afraid that much of this series is going to suffer a similar problem of taking what are supposed to be subtleties, turning up the volume, and hammering them into us repeatedly.
May the God-Emporer save us from catering to those with short attention spans and little imagination.
I absolutely refuse to work more than 8hrs a day. Period. Hell, I'd even get time and a half if I did, but I don't. Work simply is NOT the most important thing to me. And taking it one step father, ANYTHING I do that's at all work related gets charged to the company. That includes commute. Amazingly, my manager agrees with me on this. Hell, with 60 mi a day just getting to work and back puts 21000 miles on my car in a year. Not to mention 350 hours/year of my time.
My point? Our employers don't give us anything for free, so don't give them anything either.
(Hmpf...suddenly I don't really feel like being at work.):)
Though I'm not yet sure who I'm voting for, I'm damn sure what I'm voting for. I fully expect Gore or Bush to win, but at least I will not have voted for either of them.
People, if you want your vote to matter, DON'T vote for the lesser of two evils, go out and educate your selves about the options. Then vote for who you believe is right. It's as simple as that.
Do you honestly think that everyone who has ever received a paycheck from the US Govt is some brainwashed zombie who can't be trusted to tie his own shoes without somehow involving himself in a conspiracy? Man, you've got to be outrageously paranoid.
Big Brother? Man, there's so much stumbling over red tape and procedure, I seriously doubt the white hairs that run our govmt could organize anything so conspiratorial as a Big Brother scenario.
While I agree that the Athlon is by far the superior chip, I think Intel is doing just fine. Why? Name recognition. It's as simple as that. It's always been Intel's strength; even back in the days of the Intel/AMD/Cyrix 686 'wars'. As long as AMD refuses to run TV commercials, Intel won't even sweat.
JoeSchmoe: Hey, I just got a new computer.
Geek: Oh yeah? What'd you get?
JoeSchmoe: It screams! It's an 800MHz Pentium with 256 Megs of RAM, 20 Gig hdd,...
Geek: Nice, but I would have gone with an Athlon.
JoeSchmoe: A what?
Geek: An Athlon. You know, AMD?
JoeSchmoe: AMwho?
Okay, so that's a bad thing to do and probably violates the GPL.
But what I want to know is: What good do examples do if you don't have the source?! Sure, I suppose if this "compiler" "compiles" binary to binary it'd be good to have a binary to "compile", but for an example to be really informative I'd want it to go all the way to source code. I'd want to see that the code written for Linux "ports" unchanged to Solaris.
So, what the hell is Sun saving by NOT throwing the source on the disk? By including it, they'd add value AND make it legal. I just don't get it I guess.
In a closed system, more roads do NOT cause more traffic.
The problem arises when you open the system to outside influence. In the case of computers, that outside influence (as has been pointed out) is bloatware and higher quality formats. In the physical world, you won't find your new super-duper highway clogged if the population using it doesn't grow.
The problems arise when communities allow unchecked economic growth in their area. Everyone wants the new mall or supermarket, but then they're surprised when there's more traffic? If you want to alleviate traffic, widen the roads then stop letting big business build. (And by build, I mean retail, business, housing, etc.) Simple. Oh, wait, you want a booming economy too? Tough.;p
I hate to do this but, I'm gonna have to *shudder* defend that annoying little paper clip to some degree. However, first let me start by saying I absolutely loathe the retarded little bugger. With that out of the way, here's why...(and how I'd fix it)
The general idea is a good one: allow users to open a dialog with their computer to answer questions, get tips, and learn how to better interact with the program. The implementation, on the other hand, is completely shot.
1. It's understanding is limited and based on simple keywords. If a neophite is looking to sort their incoming mail into various folders they're going to want to ask, "How do I sort my mail into various incoming folders?" I don't have Outlook in front of me (thank heavens) so I can't test this, but I'm sure if you ask Clippy the Wonder Idiot about sorting it'll give you help on sorting the view of the current folder by received date, subject, author, etc. Not what the user really wants. If you don't know they proper keywords, you're out of luck.
2. It's power is limited on telling the user how to do a task instead of doing what the user tells it to do. Essentially it is a help document look up, and a poor one at that. What users need is an agent like Clippy the Do-Nothing Motormouth that actually does something. The user above doesn't really want to know HOW to sort their incoming mail, they just want it done. So instead of asking, "How do I...," they should be telling, "Do this..." And if the task they want to accomplish takes 180 steps and affects 7246 files, then Clippy should do the job with a smile and ask for more when finished.
3. It's interface is inconvenient in an attempt to be unobtrusive. This is especially true in today's world of large monitors. A perfect example occured to me just the other day (after Clippy mysteriously reappeared on my desktop). I was flipping through mail at work when Clippy spouted something about a custom form error with a particular email. Of course, I could do nothing with Outlook until I had answered Clippy, but that involved moving my eyes across 21 inches of screen just to see what he was complaining about, then getting my mouse over there to tell it to ignore the error. There is a reason, after all, for error messages to pop up right in front of you.
So there are three things I hate about Clippy the No Good Lay-About Chatterbox. But underlying this latest failure from MS, is a genuinely good idea. So, how would I fix it? (...if I had the source code, that is...)
1. Synonyms and simple grammar. The Anti-Mac article was right, the old text adventures had great, if simplistic, language skills.
2. Give it the power to actually DO something. Hey, I don't want to be micromanaged by a silly looking paper clip. This thing's supposed to be working for me. Don't tell me how to sort my mail or convert this document, do it.
3. I'm afraid the only idea I have for ease of access is speech recognition and audio output. There are, of course, problems with this aproach, but I'm not claiming to be a genius here. What is needed is another method of input so that visual attention is not drawn from the task at hand and your hands don't have to make yet another context switch between the keyboard and mouse.
After all of this, I think that perhaps Clippy is an essential baby step before we can run. For the time being, though, that annoying baby is banished from my desktop.
Oh god, that poor Carrera. I almost wept. Not to mention the poor TT.
What's the point of putting great cars in movies just to destroy them? Bond's beautiful Z8 also comes to mind. Damn them. If they want to throw one of those machines away, give it to me. Hell, I think I'd pay $8 just to watch a Z8 or Carrera zip around for two hours.:)
It's been a while since I was into all this security stuff, so I'm a bit foggy on what C2 requires in the way of accounting. However, the contractor I work for has had us securing our SGIs according to DoD standards. Now, I don't know whether these conform to C2 or not, but they're very very tight boxes now.
From what I've seen in securing these SGIs, I don't believe I'd have any problems tightening down my Linux boxen at home in the same way. As far as accounting goes, the real issue is that a sysadmin can tell who the physical person is behind that user name. That means getting rid of shared accounts, strengthening passwords, etc.
Granted, you won't be able to get a keystroke by keystroke log of a user's session, but that would be too much information anyway. There are, of course, commands that you'd want to monitor and most of these provide logging themselves (such as 'su'), while it would be easy to write wrappers for other commands that don't provide logging (things like 'chmod' && 'chown').
Again, I don't recall what C2 requires, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get there with the tools already available.
Hope this helps. And if I'm completely off my rocker, please let me know. I'd always love to learn more.
>>It really is getting to be a bit rediculus IMHO.
Rediculous only in the fact that they're looking to convince Joe User that he needs 800MHz to use email, surf the web, and balance a checkbook.
Gamers obviously benefit, but also consider folks like myself.
One of my hobbies happens to be 3D graphics and quite frankly, I'm tired of waiting 6-12 hours for a single high quality image to render on my old workhorse (and let's not talk about animations.) Every MHz jump means worlds to me as it relates directly with FP performance and thus render time.
So it's not just the Quake lovers that'll benefit, but anyone creating art, anyone into signal processing (I'm sure they're out there), anyone into simulations, anyone doing architectural design, etc.
Granted, we're probably in the minority, but there are those of us out there that use our home PCs for compute intensive tasks and we don't want to spend $20k for a computer that can deliver performance.
I was a bit worried myself when I realized Futurama wasn't going to follow the Simpsons next season. I'd imagine, though, that they've just moved it. It seems Fox has come to believe that following the Simpsons is a good place to birth shows before burying them in the middle of the week. Take "That 70's Show" for example: started out following the Simpsons then moved to Tuesdays.
We'll have to wait and see, I guess, what they do with it, but I'd bet it pops up at a very weak time during the week.
Note that a Harrier is a jet aircraft, meaning that yes, it's deafeningly loud. Most modern helicopters, likewise, power their rotors with jet engines and are similarly loud.
If this thing runs on unleaded gas (and not jet fuel) I can assure you that it's a much MUCH quieter ride. Probably closer in volume to a Harley or two.
Thanks for your overview. I have a question though. When you say the disks are warranteed for a year, is that for the cost of the disk, or the cost of the data on the disk? I can't imagine a company providing reimbursement for lost data, but any other warranty is pretty useless since the disks cost next to nothing.
These glasses + Cadillac's night vision system
on
DVD in your Glasses
·
· Score: 1
Wow, let's give this guy a grant. I like the way he thinks. Now, just get the system to highlight police cars in bright yellow and I'll shell out the big bucks. Not that I ever break the law, mind you.:)
They do. Those I-glasses have been around for at least 5 years and there has been a model that allows head tracking for most of that time. The only new idea in this article is hooking up to a DVD player for movies. Only downside with the I-glasses is their comparitively low resolution...IIRC they're limited to 640x480, though they've probably jumped to 800x600 by now.
Can't help you with your second question though. I've never actually used a pair. I've been waiting for them to increase resolution and decrease price before giving 'em a go.
Slashdot Mirror
So you can kick back on your couch or in your lay-Z-boy or, even better, on the toilet and read slashdot. I'd love to have this thing, but I'm not about to shell out $400 for it.
~~Galen~~
Thank Eris SOMEONE could inject a little perspective into this gripe fest.
Reality check here...
Apple is a hardware company. SGI is a hardware company. Sun is a hardware company. Microsoft is an applications company. RedHat, SuSE, etc. are distributors (for the most part).
What's my point? There's not a single company out there making money developing and selling an OS. MSWindows? MS lives on it's applications revenue and subsidises it's OS with the money. Apple can afford to develop and support OSX only through the sales of hardware. Why would Apple shoot themselves in the foot (read wallet) by making OSX available on anything other than their hardware?
Sure, Jobs is a bit crazy, but I would like to think he's not completely looney.
~~Galen~~
Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of this century's most innovative and influential architects and he never had formal instruction.
My point is that a piece of paper says you can memorize facts and problem solving techniques long enough to pass a test or write a paper. No more, no less. A degree doesn't guarantee the apptitude of an applicant.
~~Galen~~
I can't wait to check out the miniseries, but I think the GLOWING blue eyes of the Fremen are going to drive me batty. I think actual "blue within blue" would be so much more disconcerting than a silly neon-eyeball special effect. In all but the best light levels, "blue within blue" eyes would turn the eyes into black pits....creepy. I can understand the movie makers wanting to make sure we get it, but man, turn the volume down.
I'm a little afraid that much of this series is going to suffer a similar problem of taking what are supposed to be subtleties, turning up the volume, and hammering them into us repeatedly.
May the God-Emporer save us from catering to those with short attention spans and little imagination.
~~Galen~~
Amen!
:)
I absolutely refuse to work more than 8hrs a day. Period. Hell, I'd even get time and a half if I did, but I don't. Work simply is NOT the most important thing to me. And taking it one step father, ANYTHING I do that's at all work related gets charged to the company. That includes commute. Amazingly, my manager agrees with me on this. Hell, with 60 mi a day just getting to work and back puts 21000 miles on my car in a year. Not to mention 350 hours/year of my time.
My point? Our employers don't give us anything for free, so don't give them anything either.
(Hmpf...suddenly I don't really feel like being at work.)
People, if you want your vote to matter, DON'T vote for the lesser of two evils, go out and educate your selves about the options. Then vote for who you believe is right. It's as simple as that.
Here are a couple of links that I find relevant:
The Libertarian Party
The Green Party
One of Nader's sites.
Those, of course, are only a limited sampling from my bookmarks, but they're a start.
~~Galen~~
What the hell are you babbling about?
Do you honestly think that everyone who has ever received a paycheck from the US Govt is some brainwashed zombie who can't be trusted to tie his own shoes without somehow involving himself in a conspiracy? Man, you've got to be outrageously paranoid.
Big Brother? Man, there's so much stumbling over red tape and procedure, I seriously doubt the white hairs that run our govmt could organize anything so conspiratorial as a Big Brother scenario.
While I agree that the Athlon is by far the superior chip, I think Intel is doing just fine. Why? Name recognition. It's as simple as that. It's always been Intel's strength; even back in the days of the Intel/AMD/Cyrix 686 'wars'. As long as AMD refuses to run TV commercials, Intel won't even sweat.
...
JoeSchmoe: Hey, I just got a new computer.
Geek: Oh yeah? What'd you get?
JoeSchmoe: It screams! It's an 800MHz Pentium with 256 Megs of RAM, 20 Gig hdd,
Geek: Nice, but I would have gone with an Athlon.
JoeSchmoe: A what?
Geek: An Athlon. You know, AMD?
JoeSchmoe: AMwho?
Sad but true.
galen.
Okay, so that's a bad thing to do and probably violates the GPL.
But what I want to know is: What good do examples do if you don't have the source?! Sure, I suppose if this "compiler" "compiles" binary to binary it'd be good to have a binary to "compile", but for an example to be really informative I'd want it to go all the way to source code. I'd want to see that the code written for Linux "ports" unchanged to Solaris.
So, what the hell is Sun saving by NOT throwing the source on the disk? By including it, they'd add value AND make it legal. I just don't get it I guess.
Foo.
In a closed system, more roads do NOT cause more traffic.
;p
The problem arises when you open the system to outside influence. In the case of computers, that outside influence (as has been pointed out) is bloatware and higher quality formats. In the physical world, you won't find your new super-duper highway clogged if the population using it doesn't grow.
The problems arise when communities allow unchecked economic growth in their area. Everyone wants the new mall or supermarket, but then they're surprised when there's more traffic? If you want to alleviate traffic, widen the roads then stop letting big business build. (And by build, I mean retail, business, housing, etc.) Simple. Oh, wait, you want a booming economy too? Tough.
Stop asking for more and use better what we have.
I hate to do this but, I'm gonna have to *shudder* defend that annoying little paper clip to some degree. However, first let me start by saying I absolutely loathe the retarded little bugger. With that out of the way, here's why...(and how I'd fix it)
The general idea is a good one: allow users to open a dialog with their computer to answer questions, get tips, and learn how to better interact with the program. The implementation, on the other hand, is completely shot.
1. It's understanding is limited and based on simple keywords. If a neophite is looking to sort their incoming mail into various folders they're going to want to ask, "How do I sort my mail into various incoming folders?" I don't have Outlook in front of me (thank heavens) so I can't test this, but I'm sure if you ask Clippy the Wonder Idiot about sorting it'll give you help on sorting the view of the current folder by received date, subject, author, etc. Not what the user really wants. If you don't know they proper keywords, you're out of luck.
2. It's power is limited on telling the user how to do a task instead of doing what the user tells it to do. Essentially it is a help document look up, and a poor one at that. What users need is an agent like Clippy the Do-Nothing Motormouth that actually does something. The user above doesn't really want to know HOW to sort their incoming mail, they just want it done. So instead of asking, "How do I...," they should be telling, "Do this..." And if the task they want to accomplish takes 180 steps and affects 7246 files, then Clippy should do the job with a smile and ask for more when finished.
3. It's interface is inconvenient in an attempt to be unobtrusive. This is especially true in today's world of large monitors. A perfect example occured to me just the other day (after Clippy mysteriously reappeared on my desktop). I was flipping through mail at work when Clippy spouted something about a custom form error with a particular email. Of course, I could do nothing with Outlook until I had answered Clippy, but that involved moving my eyes across 21 inches of screen just to see what he was complaining about, then getting my mouse over there to tell it to ignore the error. There is a reason, after all, for error messages to pop up right in front of you.
So there are three things I hate about Clippy the No Good Lay-About Chatterbox. But underlying this latest failure from MS, is a genuinely good idea. So, how would I fix it? (...if I had the source code, that is...)
1. Synonyms and simple grammar. The Anti-Mac article was right, the old text adventures had great, if simplistic, language skills.
2. Give it the power to actually DO something. Hey, I don't want to be micromanaged by a silly looking paper clip. This thing's supposed to be working for me. Don't tell me how to sort my mail or convert this document, do it.
3. I'm afraid the only idea I have for ease of access is speech recognition and audio output. There are, of course, problems with this aproach, but I'm not claiming to be a genius here. What is needed is another method of input so that visual attention is not drawn from the task at hand and your hands don't have to make yet another context switch between the keyboard and mouse.
After all of this, I think that perhaps Clippy is an essential baby step before we can run. For the time being, though, that annoying baby is banished from my desktop.
Just thinking out loud,
Todd Pafford
Also, don't forget Men In Black. The MIB headquaters was run on SGIs apparently...or at least some unix with MWM or FVWM.
Oh god, that poor Carrera. I almost wept. Not to mention the poor TT.
:)
What's the point of putting great cars in movies just to destroy them? Bond's beautiful Z8 also comes to mind. Damn them. If they want to throw one of those machines away, give it to me. Hell, I think I'd pay $8 just to watch a Z8 or Carrera zip around for two hours.
Weeping,
Galen
This is all well and good... but what's wrong with raw vegetables? I hardly ever cook my food, and don't see how it adds enjoyment to eating...
Sure, we could all live on raw veggies, but who wants to? I say cook my food, and my interfaces.
It's been a while since I was into all this security stuff, so I'm a bit foggy on what C2 requires in the way of accounting. However, the contractor I work for has had us securing our SGIs according to DoD standards. Now, I don't know whether these conform to C2 or not, but they're very very tight boxes now.
From what I've seen in securing these SGIs, I don't believe I'd have any problems tightening down my Linux boxen at home in the same way. As far as accounting goes, the real issue is that a sysadmin can tell who the physical person is behind that user name. That means getting rid of shared accounts, strengthening passwords, etc.
Granted, you won't be able to get a keystroke by keystroke log of a user's session, but that would be too much information anyway. There are, of course, commands that you'd want to monitor and most of these provide logging themselves (such as 'su'), while it would be easy to write wrappers for other commands that don't provide logging (things like 'chmod' && 'chown').
Again, I don't recall what C2 requires, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get there with the tools already available.
Hope this helps. And if I'm completely off my rocker, please let me know. I'd always love to learn more.
>>It really is getting to be a bit rediculus IMHO.
Rediculous only in the fact that they're looking to convince Joe User that he needs 800MHz to use email, surf the web, and balance a checkbook.
Gamers obviously benefit, but also consider folks like myself.
One of my hobbies happens to be 3D graphics and quite frankly, I'm tired of waiting 6-12 hours for a single high quality image to render on my old workhorse (and let's not talk about animations.) Every MHz jump means worlds to me as it relates directly with FP performance and thus render time.
So it's not just the Quake lovers that'll benefit, but anyone creating art, anyone into signal processing (I'm sure they're out there), anyone into simulations, anyone doing architectural design, etc.
Granted, we're probably in the minority, but there are those of us out there that use our home PCs for compute intensive tasks and we don't want to spend $20k for a computer that can deliver performance.
My 3.14159 cents,
Galen
I was a bit worried myself when I realized Futurama wasn't going to follow the Simpsons next season. I'd imagine, though, that they've just moved it. It seems Fox has come to believe that following the Simpsons is a good place to birth shows before burying them in the middle of the week. Take "That 70's Show" for example: started out following the Simpsons then moved to Tuesdays.
We'll have to wait and see, I guess, what they do with it, but I'd bet it pops up at a very weak time during the week.
My 3.14159 cents,
Galen
Note that a Harrier is a jet aircraft, meaning that yes, it's deafeningly loud. Most modern helicopters, likewise, power their rotors with jet engines and are similarly loud.
:)
If this thing runs on unleaded gas (and not jet fuel) I can assure you that it's a much MUCH quieter ride. Probably closer in volume to a Harley or two.
Either way, I want one.
Thanks for your overview. I have a question though. When you say the disks are warranteed for a year, is that for the cost of the disk, or the cost of the data on the disk? I can't imagine a company providing reimbursement for lost data, but any other warranty is pretty useless since the disks cost next to nothing.
Wow, let's give this guy a grant. I like the way he thinks. Now, just get the system to highlight police cars in bright yellow and I'll shell out the big bucks. Not that I ever break the law, mind you. :)
They do. Those I-glasses have been around for at least 5 years and there has been a model that allows head tracking for most of that time. The only new idea in this article is hooking up to a DVD player for movies. Only downside with the I-glasses is their comparitively low resolution...IIRC they're limited to 640x480, though they've probably jumped to 800x600 by now.
Can't help you with your second question though. I've never actually used a pair. I've been waiting for them to increase resolution and decrease price before giving 'em a go.