I think Miguel was dismissive of Microsoft's security problems because he won't be affected by them. Buffer overflows are implementation problems, and the Mono project is doing a completely independent implementation of.NET. Microsoft's design is sound, they just tend to write shitty code.
I'll put it another way. Who cares if Windows is built like a screen door? One of the big selling points of.NET (and therefore Mono) is that I can run the same web services on my secure *nix box that my neigbor runs on his virus-laden Windows box. So long as the security model is sound (and it looks like it is), then I can run Miguel's stable and secure Mono instead of the crap coming out of Redmond.
Remember, Microsoft has used some really good ideas in the past (OLE, the registry, microkernel architecture, Active Directory). It's just that their actual implementation of those ideas has been truly awful. Miguel is getting around that by writing his own code.
Linux can make it on the desktop, as long as they don't try to be a "me-too" Windowsalike.
Personally, I think making a "Windows-ish" distro is the best move the Linux community can make. Linux's biggest selling point is not that it's more stable, has a better design, is more secure, etc. Linux's biggest selling point is that it's free (as in beer).
Think about it. On the one hand you have an OS that runs all of your games, all of your apps, feels familiar, and costs 100-2000 dollars per computer (Windows XP). On the other hand, you have an OS that does all of the same things but is free (Linux). Which one are you going to choose? More to the point, what is your management going to choose? Having a "windowsalike" distro is a potent weapon for corporate acceptance.
Of course, if you don't like your Linux Windows-flavored, just use a distro more to your liking. You've got other choices, you know.
I'm a webmaster that uses OS X for my desktop, and I love it. For Java/Web development, OS X is fantastic. It has java, perl, and all of your unix tools built in by default. Apache comes standard as well, but you'll probably want to compile your own flavor to match your production environment. If you're doing design work, you get the benefit of the Macintosh graphics apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.
I can't really speak for C++, since I use Apple's Cocoa dev environment which is built for Java or Objective C. However gcc comes with the free developer's tools, so I imagine you can do all your C++ stuff with the standard unix tools. For my purposes, I've found OS X to easily match Linux for dev work once you get used to the idiosyncracies.
I'm currently running a slash-ish website (using PhpSlice) on the company intranet for corporate news/software downloads/etc. I'd really like to use it for system documentation, but design of these sites is much better for presenting current news than creating manageable archives.
Now I'm wondering if a wiki would help me at all. Has anyone out there used wikis to get real work done? If so, what are their strengths? Brainstorming? Archiving knowledge? Creating dialogue? I'm curious to hear from those webmasters "out in the trenches" that are actually using this tool.
For the life of me, I will never understand the community here at Slashdot. We bash and bash and bash Apple for not being open enough, too expensive, or whatever. Then JonKatz writes that "Apple doesn't get it" and suddenly everyone's rushing to defend Apple's honor. Bizarre.
As for you, Jon, I'm going to have to disagree with you myself. In today's world, trying to compete with the PC manufacturers for Ma and Pa Kettle's business is a low-margin sucker's game. Jobs knows that some of us are willing to pay for a premium computer. Those customers will keep Apple in the black long after PCs have become commodity hardware and they're all being assembled in Taiwan.
All Apple has to do is provide interoperability with open standards and continue to make innovative products, and they'll be around for a long long time. Regardless of market share.
One great thing about the new iMac...
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 5, Insightful
is that it doesn't look like a computer. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Apple is the one computer company that is doing anything original with case design and form factor. Sony has the most stylish x86 boxes out there, but they still look like... boxes. We've hit the point where we don't HAVE to build computers that look like bricks, but you wouldn't know it by looking at PCs these days.
Kudos to Apple for daring to do something a little different, even if it does make us think of a desk lamp.;)
Produce a sexy business plan > IPO > Sell stock to the unwitting public.
Many venture capitalists didn't fund businesses with the expectation of them ever making a profit. They funded businesses with the expectation of them going public and making a killing on the stock market. Many of these businesses were never built to be profitable. They were built to look good to the unwary investor. Now that the bubble has burst and investors are wary, only the profitable will survive.
The sick thing is that most people didn't care about the long-term viability of companies like VA Linux so long as they had an "exit strategy" for getting their money out (usually selling stock to the public). Now that the carnage has commenced, the people being burned are either idealists who really want to make the company work or greedy bastards that didn't get out in time.
The law of Wall Street: The bulls survive and the bears survive, but the pigs get eaten.
Naturally Microsoft's pet programming language will integrate well with Windows. I'd wager that a lot of.NET is written in C#, just like a lot of Unix is written in C (Guess what a unix hacker's favorite language is...).
That's not to say that your point is invalid. However, for an OS X user like myself better Windows integration is useless. The real question is: How good is C# when you're not on Windows? If C# is just for a Microsoft environment, then I see it being doomed to the same fate as Visual Basic. Put another way, it has to offer compelling features for people on other platforms or the cross-platform functionality is useless. What is in C# to make it attractive to say, Mac users?
Wishing doesn't make it so, Mr. President. Networks are designed to let people share information. Even if you cut yourself entirely off from the Internet, you leave yourself wide open to moles, leaks, and all sorts of human error. A private network may make the human security holes even wider because it gives you a false sense of safety. I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on secure open protocols and sensible security policies. Security is a mindset, not a technology.
It's a Macintosh G4 Cube with a Barracuda ATA IV hard drive and an Apple Studio Display (15"). No fan for the processor, no fan for the power supply, no fan for the video card, the hard drive is silent (thank you Seagate!), and my monitor doesn't have that CRT whine or make any noise when changing resolutions. I'm using a Microsoft optical mouse, so I don't even have mouse ball noise:). The only thing that makes noise is the DVD drive, which sounds like a plane taking off, but I don't ever use it.
Pretty sweet, but it's starting to show its age with only a 450 Mhz processor. I don't know what I'm going to do when I have to upgrade. Once you've had silence, you can't go back.
It's well worth it. I think the current interest in quiet PCs is encouraging. Computers are plenty fast for most of us, so the next big push is going to be making them easier to live with. FireWire/USB, screwless cases, and "quiet" PCs are going to be increasingly popular in the future. I think that Apple's quiet and handy little Cube was a hint of things to come. Too bad they overcharged...
Interestingly enough, the automobile industry followed a lot of the same trends. Horsepower and size were initially everything. There were always the economy models, but the real push was for bigger and faster cars. Now that even a Honda Civic has enough horsepower to get the job done, people are buying for different reasons. Style, comfort, and ease of use are BIG selling points for cars now, while horsepower is just another "nice feature" and the power enthusiast is relegated to a niche market.
You can already see the trend at work. The Athlon is a kick-ass processor, but needing a monster heatsink and fans doesn't make them easy to live with. Ditto for the P4. The Crusoe is making inroads right now just for its' low heat output and the fact that it's "good enough". The main selling point for Seagate's Barracuda ATA IV is its' silence, despite the swarm of larger or faster drives (I bought one). Bulky/noisy/hot overclocker machines will always be there, but I'd look for mainstream PCs to get a LOT more friendly in the next couple years.
Seriously though, sometimes code (or pseudocode) is a more concise way of getting an idea across. Look at the number of == or != statements in the subject lines of Slashdot posts. Just an observation...
I imagine that they disqualify 98 and NT because neither of those have USB support. Any Windows released after '98 should have the requisite USB support (that includes Windows 98 and Win2K).
Of course USB is dog slow for this kind of product. For the same amount of scratch you can get an iPod with a five gig capacity and FireWire connectivity. Just my $0.02.
Re:I'm buying one purely for the tiny firewire hd
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Apple releases iPod
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· Score: 2
Apple itself says that this can be used as a FireWire HD.
Yep, that's my Chronicle. Glad to see that their commitment to quality hasn't changed. Sadly, the Chronicle's known as the GOOD paper in San Francisco. The Examiner's even worse.
We see the world through the filter of our own experience. When something like this is posted on Slashdot, where a lot of people eat/sleep/breathe computers, the first idea is naturally going to be, "How can this make my computer better?".
By your super-motor idea, I imagine that you deal with motors quite a bit (perhaps as an engineer?). It's just a matter of perspective.
Actually, the Macintosh already does this. They're called "creator codes" and they link the file to the program that created it. Files created with iTunes will always open in iTunes, even if you've installed some other mp3 player.
Problem is, it's a pain in the arse. If I open up a text file created in OS 9, OS X will fire up the whole OS 9 environment just so it can run the OS 9 version of SimpleText instead of the OS X version (which is usually already running). Personally, I'd rather be able to have a single favorite program handle all of a particular type of file.
As a carpal-tunnel sufferer, I would be ecstatic to see WIMP (or at least the P) go away. Face it, our current input devices are less than ergonomic by their very nature. A fundamental shift in computer interaction would probably be towards an interface more suited to the human than the machine. Our current system of sitting motionless, staring at a screen, twitching a mouse, and banging on a keyboard are as archaic (and potentially painful) as the lawn sickle.
I firmly believe that my grandkids won't be using a keyboard and mouse like I do. They also will probably never know the term "RSI", and they'll wonder why Grandpa's wrists make those funny noises.
Great idea, but it doesn't get us out of the WIMP paradigm. You're just replacing your mouse with a more efficient type of pointer.
Really, that's the problem in a nutshell. We are so used to the WIMP interface, that the best we can vizualize is an improvement of the WIMP system. Until we can come up with a totally different metaphor for interacting with our computers, we won't see WIMP go away. Personally, I think it will take a "mad genius" type to break out of the WIMP paradigm and move us forward.
What you're complaining about are "creator codes", and I agree with you. They're a pain in the arse. Whenever I try and read a "readme" from OS 9, OS X fires up the whole Classic environment just to use OS 9's simpletext. That's ridiculous.
What this boils down to is what John Siracusa (of Ars Technica)dubbed "metadata". Neither the Mac or the PC has a particularly elegant (IMHO) way to handle metadata right now, so we're stuck with these half-assed awkward solutions like file extensions and creator codes. Interestingly, Linux does not seem overly bound by backwards-compatibility needs. Maybe we could devise a better solution for the *nix world?
I desperately want to agree with you. Really, I do. The United States has a long tradition of doing very nasty bloody things under the name of "patriotism" or "defending liberty" or what-have-you. Vietnam comes readily to mind. I really want to believe that this is one of those times when we should be casting about for an olive branch instead of a rifle, because peace is the best solution.
I really do want to agree with you, but I can't. This is one of those rare times when violence is our only option. We did not choose this conflict. We did not select whether or not to fight. Our attackers made no demands, and therefore we must assume that they wish only our destruction. You speak of our "demands on a non-negotiable billet". Our attackers did not even attempt a diplomatic solution to their grievance before slaughtering our civilians. Not only that, but they did not even give us terms by which they would stop attacks. We have been painted into a corner, and we lash out because it is our last option.
Really, what would you have us do? Doing nothing will simply cost us more lives, as the terrorist attcks continue. Continued diplomacy seems fruitless, as the Bin Laden has made his stance quite clear: His version of Islam cannot co-exist with other cultures, or even less militant versions of Islam. More to the point, he will not be sated until we have been violently subdued. He has left us no room for negotiation, and so we must fight.
War is a nasty, brutal, ugly thing. I wish to my core that we could avoid it. However, this is not the "Imperialistic U.S." slaughtering civilians to protect our "national interests". This is self-defense in a fight that we did not start.
HP is getting out of the chip business. HP is getting out of the OS business. They are acquiring Compaq, who is also leaving the OS and chip businesses.
My question is this: What now differentiates HewPaq from say, Dell? The only thing I can think of is HP's printer business, but I don't think that alone would be enough to keep them afloat. I'm genuinely curious. What is HP doing to keep themselves relevant?
Re:What are you gonna do with it?
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Webpads, Anyone?
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· Score: 2
how many MP3s can you store? One?
You don't have to store MP3s. You store all of your MP3s on your workstation/server and stream them to your webpad. 802.11 is certainly fast enough.
The potential uses for this are plentiful. I can hook it up to my stereo and stream audio. I can have my web recipes in the kitchen. I can chill on the porch and surf while listening to music. I'm thinking of it largely as a dumb terminal that connects wirelessly. I don't need it to have much horsepower because it can pull everything off of larger machines (ala X and other UNIX goodness). What's important to me is that it's:
Small
Light
Cheap
The fact that it uses Linux makes it even sweeter because it'll be infinitely hackable. Sign me up.
It's irritating that IBM produced a lemon, but it's even more disappointing that they've been unresponsive to their customers. Customer service makes a world of difference, especially with commodity items like hard drives. They say that a happy customer tells five people about their experience while an unhappy customer tells twenty-five. Well, thanks to Slashdot, an unhappy customer has told thousands of potential customers to stay away from this drive. A little more responsiveness to this customer's problem would have prevented that.
In contrast, a good experience can make a loyal customer. I recently purchased a Seagate Barracuda ATA IV because of its' speed and silence. When I finally installed the drive, it started making a really irritating squealing sound. I contacted Seagate, and they quickly wrote back a helpful e-mail along with some software to fix the problem. Not only did they make me a happy customer, but they prevented me from becoming an unhappy customer and bitching to all of my friends about it. IBM would do well to take note.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Miguel was dismissive of Microsoft's security problems because he won't be affected by them. Buffer overflows are implementation problems, and the Mono project is doing a completely independent implementation of .NET. Microsoft's design is sound, they just tend to write shitty code.
I'll put it another way. Who cares if Windows is built like a screen door? One of the big selling points of .NET (and therefore Mono) is that I can run the same web services on my secure *nix box that my neigbor runs on his virus-laden Windows box. So long as the security model is sound (and it looks like it is), then I can run Miguel's stable and secure Mono instead of the crap coming out of Redmond.
Remember, Microsoft has used some really good ideas in the past (OLE, the registry, microkernel architecture, Active Directory). It's just that their actual implementation of those ideas has been truly awful. Miguel is getting around that by writing his own code.
Linux can make it on the desktop, as long as they don't try to be a "me-too" Windowsalike.
Personally, I think making a "Windows-ish" distro is the best move the Linux community can make. Linux's biggest selling point is not that it's more stable, has a better design, is more secure, etc. Linux's biggest selling point is that it's free (as in beer).
Think about it. On the one hand you have an OS that runs all of your games, all of your apps, feels familiar, and costs 100-2000 dollars per computer (Windows XP). On the other hand, you have an OS that does all of the same things but is free (Linux). Which one are you going to choose? More to the point, what is your management going to choose? Having a "windowsalike" distro is a potent weapon for corporate acceptance.
Of course, if you don't like your Linux Windows-flavored, just use a distro more to your liking. You've got other choices, you know.
I'm a webmaster that uses OS X for my desktop, and I love it. For Java/Web development, OS X is fantastic. It has java, perl, and all of your unix tools built in by default. Apache comes standard as well, but you'll probably want to compile your own flavor to match your production environment. If you're doing design work, you get the benefit of the Macintosh graphics apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.
I can't really speak for C++, since I use Apple's Cocoa dev environment which is built for Java or Objective C. However gcc comes with the free developer's tools, so I imagine you can do all your C++ stuff with the standard unix tools. For my purposes, I've found OS X to easily match Linux for dev work once you get used to the idiosyncracies.
I'm currently running a slash-ish website (using PhpSlice) on the company intranet for corporate news/software downloads/etc. I'd really like to use it for system documentation, but design of these sites is much better for presenting current news than creating manageable archives.
Now I'm wondering if a wiki would help me at all. Has anyone out there used wikis to get real work done? If so, what are their strengths? Brainstorming? Archiving knowledge? Creating dialogue? I'm curious to hear from those webmasters "out in the trenches" that are actually using this tool.
For the life of me, I will never understand the community here at Slashdot. We bash and bash and bash Apple for not being open enough, too expensive, or whatever. Then JonKatz writes that "Apple doesn't get it" and suddenly everyone's rushing to defend Apple's honor. Bizarre.
As for you, Jon, I'm going to have to disagree with you myself. In today's world, trying to compete with the PC manufacturers for Ma and Pa Kettle's business is a low-margin sucker's game. Jobs knows that some of us are willing to pay for a premium computer. Those customers will keep Apple in the black long after PCs have become commodity hardware and they're all being assembled in Taiwan.
All Apple has to do is provide interoperability with open standards and continue to make innovative products, and they'll be around for a long long time. Regardless of market share.
is that it doesn't look like a computer. Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Apple is the one computer company that is doing anything original with case design and form factor. Sony has the most stylish x86 boxes out there, but they still look like... boxes. We've hit the point where we don't HAVE to build computers that look like bricks, but you wouldn't know it by looking at PCs these days.
Kudos to Apple for daring to do something a little different, even if it does make us think of a desk lamp. ;)
Actually, the standard business plan was:
Produce a sexy business plan > IPO > Sell stock to the unwitting public.
Many venture capitalists didn't fund businesses with the expectation of them ever making a profit. They funded businesses with the expectation of them going public and making a killing on the stock market. Many of these businesses were never built to be profitable. They were built to look good to the unwary investor. Now that the bubble has burst and investors are wary, only the profitable will survive.
The sick thing is that most people didn't care about the long-term viability of companies like VA Linux so long as they had an "exit strategy" for getting their money out (usually selling stock to the public). Now that the carnage has commenced, the people being burned are either idealists who really want to make the company work or greedy bastards that didn't get out in time.
The law of Wall Street: The bulls survive and the bears survive, but the pigs get eaten.
Naturally Microsoft's pet programming language will integrate well with Windows. I'd wager that a lot of .NET is written in C#, just like a lot of Unix is written in C (Guess what a unix hacker's favorite language is...).
That's not to say that your point is invalid. However, for an OS X user like myself better Windows integration is useless. The real question is: How good is C# when you're not on Windows? If C# is just for a Microsoft environment, then I see it being doomed to the same fate as Visual Basic. Put another way, it has to offer compelling features for people on other platforms or the cross-platform functionality is useless. What is in C# to make it attractive to say, Mac users?
Wishing doesn't make it so, Mr. President. Networks are designed to let people share information. Even if you cut yourself entirely off from the Internet, you leave yourself wide open to moles, leaks, and all sorts of human error. A private network may make the human security holes even wider because it gives you a false sense of safety. I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on secure open protocols and sensible security policies. Security is a mindset, not a technology.
It's a Macintosh G4 Cube with a Barracuda ATA IV hard drive and an Apple Studio Display (15"). No fan for the processor, no fan for the power supply, no fan for the video card, the hard drive is silent (thank you Seagate!), and my monitor doesn't have that CRT whine or make any noise when changing resolutions. I'm using a Microsoft optical mouse, so I don't even have mouse ball noise :). The only thing that makes noise is the DVD drive, which sounds like a plane taking off, but I don't ever use it.
Pretty sweet, but it's starting to show its age with only a 450 Mhz processor. I don't know what I'm going to do when I have to upgrade. Once you've had silence, you can't go back.
It's well worth it. I think the current interest in quiet PCs is encouraging. Computers are plenty fast for most of us, so the next big push is going to be making them easier to live with. FireWire/USB, screwless cases, and "quiet" PCs are going to be increasingly popular in the future. I think that Apple's quiet and handy little Cube was a hint of things to come. Too bad they overcharged...
Interestingly enough, the automobile industry followed a lot of the same trends. Horsepower and size were initially everything. There were always the economy models, but the real push was for bigger and faster cars. Now that even a Honda Civic has enough horsepower to get the job done, people are buying for different reasons. Style, comfort, and ease of use are BIG selling points for cars now, while horsepower is just another "nice feature" and the power enthusiast is relegated to a niche market.
You can already see the trend at work. The Athlon is a kick-ass processor, but needing a monster heatsink and fans doesn't make them easy to live with. Ditto for the P4. The Crusoe is making inroads right now just for its' low heat output and the fact that it's "good enough". The main selling point for Seagate's Barracuda ATA IV is its' silence, despite the swarm of larger or faster drives (I bought one). Bulky/noisy/hot overclocker machines will always be there, but I'd look for mainstream PCs to get a LOT more friendly in the next couple years.
<? echo "Darn Java geeks..."; ?>
Seriously though, sometimes code (or pseudocode) is a more concise way of getting an idea across. Look at the number of == or != statements in the subject lines of Slashdot posts. Just an observation...
I meant "Any Windows released after '95..."
I knew that "preview" button was there for a reason!
I imagine that they disqualify 98 and NT because neither of those have USB support. Any Windows released after '98 should have the requisite USB support (that includes Windows 98 and Win2K).
Of course USB is dog slow for this kind of product. For the same amount of scratch you can get an iPod with a five gig capacity and FireWire connectivity. Just my $0.02.
Apple itself says that this can be used as a FireWire HD.
Check out the spec sheet under "Capacity".
Yep, that's my Chronicle. Glad to see that their commitment to quality hasn't changed. Sadly, the Chronicle's known as the GOOD paper in San Francisco. The Examiner's even worse.
We see the world through the filter of our own experience. When something like this is posted on Slashdot, where a lot of people eat/sleep/breathe computers, the first idea is naturally going to be, "How can this make my computer better?".
By your super-motor idea, I imagine that you deal with motors quite a bit (perhaps as an engineer?). It's just a matter of perspective.
Actually, the Macintosh already does this. They're called "creator codes" and they link the file to the program that created it. Files created with iTunes will always open in iTunes, even if you've installed some other mp3 player.
Problem is, it's a pain in the arse. If I open up a text file created in OS 9, OS X will fire up the whole OS 9 environment just so it can run the OS 9 version of SimpleText instead of the OS X version (which is usually already running). Personally, I'd rather be able to have a single favorite program handle all of a particular type of file.
As a carpal-tunnel sufferer, I would be ecstatic to see WIMP (or at least the P) go away. Face it, our current input devices are less than ergonomic by their very nature. A fundamental shift in computer interaction would probably be towards an interface more suited to the human than the machine. Our current system of sitting motionless, staring at a screen, twitching a mouse, and banging on a keyboard are as archaic (and potentially painful) as the lawn sickle.
I firmly believe that my grandkids won't be using a keyboard and mouse like I do. They also will probably never know the term "RSI", and they'll wonder why Grandpa's wrists make those funny noises.
Great idea, but it doesn't get us out of the WIMP paradigm. You're just replacing your mouse with a more efficient type of pointer.
Really, that's the problem in a nutshell. We are so used to the WIMP interface, that the best we can vizualize is an improvement of the WIMP system. Until we can come up with a totally different metaphor for interacting with our computers, we won't see WIMP go away. Personally, I think it will take a "mad genius" type to break out of the WIMP paradigm and move us forward.
What you're complaining about are "creator codes", and I agree with you. They're a pain in the arse. Whenever I try and read a "readme" from OS 9, OS X fires up the whole Classic environment just to use OS 9's simpletext. That's ridiculous.
What this boils down to is what John Siracusa (of Ars Technica)dubbed "metadata". Neither the Mac or the PC has a particularly elegant (IMHO) way to handle metadata right now, so we're stuck with these half-assed awkward solutions like file extensions and creator codes. Interestingly, Linux does not seem overly bound by backwards-compatibility needs. Maybe we could devise a better solution for the *nix world?
I desperately want to agree with you. Really, I do. The United States has a long tradition of doing very nasty bloody things under the name of "patriotism" or "defending liberty" or what-have-you. Vietnam comes readily to mind. I really want to believe that this is one of those times when we should be casting about for an olive branch instead of a rifle, because peace is the best solution.
I really do want to agree with you, but I can't. This is one of those rare times when violence is our only option. We did not choose this conflict. We did not select whether or not to fight. Our attackers made no demands, and therefore we must assume that they wish only our destruction. You speak of our "demands on a non-negotiable billet". Our attackers did not even attempt a diplomatic solution to their grievance before slaughtering our civilians. Not only that, but they did not even give us terms by which they would stop attacks. We have been painted into a corner, and we lash out because it is our last option.
Really, what would you have us do? Doing nothing will simply cost us more lives, as the terrorist attcks continue. Continued diplomacy seems fruitless, as the Bin Laden has made his stance quite clear: His version of Islam cannot co-exist with other cultures, or even less militant versions of Islam. More to the point, he will not be sated until we have been violently subdued. He has left us no room for negotiation, and so we must fight.
War is a nasty, brutal, ugly thing. I wish to my core that we could avoid it. However, this is not the "Imperialistic U.S." slaughtering civilians to protect our "national interests". This is self-defense in a fight that we did not start.
HP is getting out of the chip business. HP is getting out of the OS business. They are acquiring Compaq, who is also leaving the OS and chip businesses.
My question is this: What now differentiates HewPaq from say, Dell? The only thing I can think of is HP's printer business, but I don't think that alone would be enough to keep them afloat. I'm genuinely curious. What is HP doing to keep themselves relevant?
how many MP3s can you store? One?
You don't have to store MP3s. You store all of your MP3s on your workstation/server and stream them to your webpad. 802.11 is certainly fast enough.
The potential uses for this are plentiful. I can hook it up to my stereo and stream audio. I can have my web recipes in the kitchen. I can chill on the porch and surf while listening to music. I'm thinking of it largely as a dumb terminal that connects wirelessly. I don't need it to have much horsepower because it can pull everything off of larger machines (ala X and other UNIX goodness). What's important to me is that it's:
- Small
- Light
- Cheap
The fact that it uses Linux makes it even sweeter because it'll be infinitely hackable. Sign me up.It's irritating that IBM produced a lemon, but it's even more disappointing that they've been unresponsive to their customers. Customer service makes a world of difference, especially with commodity items like hard drives. They say that a happy customer tells five people about their experience while an unhappy customer tells twenty-five. Well, thanks to Slashdot, an unhappy customer has told thousands of potential customers to stay away from this drive. A little more responsiveness to this customer's problem would have prevented that.
In contrast, a good experience can make a loyal customer. I recently purchased a Seagate Barracuda ATA IV because of its' speed and silence. When I finally installed the drive, it started making a really irritating squealing sound. I contacted Seagate, and they quickly wrote back a helpful e-mail along with some software to fix the problem. Not only did they make me a happy customer, but they prevented me from becoming an unhappy customer and bitching to all of my friends about it. IBM would do well to take note.