Because I was a computer-room assistant back in college I got a couple of Unix accounts (that's what they were called) to learn and possibly help the grad students who were doing all the "cool" stuff on them (as opposed to showing a freshman how to print from WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (F7 baby!)). The problem with the Unix machines (a SunOS and an Ultrix box) was that they both had accounting turned on and so I had $5000 of computer time to use until I had to go back and ask for more, which they actually gave only begrudgingly. I guess some departments really paid some $$$ for access.
Anyway, along comes Linux (not.01 but some very pre-1.0 version) and somebody else put it on a Gateway2000 486 machine) and all of a sudden I had, along with all the other assistants, a Unix-like machine we could call our own, do whatever we want and not worry about screwing up the "real" work being done. So when it came to learning how the Unix-world worked, I learned far more on that early Linux box than either SunOS or Ultrix if only because I didn't have to deal all the accounting stuff.
The funny thing is that I remember feeling that the Linux box responded better than the Sun machine or the VAX in that it seemed to handle more users better (though I suppose on the Linux box we were just mucking about with standard commands instead of doing heavy-duty work).
I bought a 17" MacBookPro loaded with the max ram and a fast disk (7200rpm) and it has done everything that my dual G5 tower can do but faster; I use Final Cut Pro for making videos (using an attached FW800 disk similar to what I have on the G5), the screen is large and sharp (and I could add an additional monitor if I really needed to, but with 17" I haven't needed to), and what I've got is essentially a portable editing studio that I can put into a backpack. It even plays games well. It's true that I can't upgrade the video card, but I've never done that on my G5, or any machine I've built. Typically if I'm thinking of a video card upgrade, it's because performance was starting to suffer in a game I was into at the time and what I really needed to do was a full upgrade of the box (ditch those 4200rpm disks, more faster ram, etc.).
So yeah, I realize I can do without a desktop and am not thinking of a new one anytime soon. That doesn't stop me from drooling over the idea of an 8-core machine, I just hope that in a few years it will be available in a laptop.
Because of the Internet and the...questionable... use of advertising, it's not about the games per se but the stories of how those games came into being. Exhibit A: Daikatana, the story of which has been recounted in depth many times as the overreaching hubris of John Romero ("JR is going to make you his b**ch" is still probably the most extreme use of advertising *ever*). Exhibit B: Duke Nukem which is a story told in a million blog and Slashdot posts, the real story will probably be a very interesting read (and maybe Amazon will do a package deal of the book and the game).
If anything, companies should embrace this more, as GFPS (generic first person shooter) of the month comes and goes with maybe a weekend rental from Blockbuster, there's years of blood sweat and tears from the developers only to have their game disappear into the mist of time, not memory.
Though I would argue that Atari's E.T. probably walks away with everything; it was so bad it's funny (for about 1 second), and the story of its creation also makes a good story (6 weeks to write, millions of carts ordered, Arizona landfill, fall of Atari, etc.)
You're absolutely right...the thing Pixar does *best* is tell a good story, which for some reason nobody else seems able to do as well. Combine good stories with their tech and Pixar is rightly the ten ton gorilla in the film industry (I specifically said film and not just animation or cgi because they put out films that work so much better than most of the crap coming from Hollywood these days).
Pixar has a tendency to push the boundaries in their films: Monsters Inc. gave us amazing hair and fur (just watch the way Sully's fur sways and even shows up in shadows), Finding Nemo was all about realistic water, and I'd argue that Ratatoullie does amazing things with light (specifically, the natural light in the kitchen scenes). If anything, it seems they push the bar so *freaking* *high* in their films that it's almost impossible to match. Certainly it's got to be depressing for the movie maker in the garage who has Pixar-sized dreams and then realizes that he's not only not coming close, he's never in the same race.
I played Zork the way it was meant to be played..on a PDP-11 with a DecWriter for a screen. Ah, if only I hadn't thrown away all those printouts...
The real thing for me was that it represented a whole Universe...so many games have their own tiny world and outside of that particular game, it doesn't exist. Zork, I think, really developed the concept of a "world of Zork" that included its own history (hysterically told in the manuals that came with the games) and the Zorkmid shows up in a couple of other games as well. I really felt like I was in a whole other world, that games like WoW do very well graphically, but then it was all up to the imagination, the images of, 25+ years on, I still have; I can still see that white house now the way I first imagined it.
I haven't played the actual game in probably 15 years, but I almost don't need to..it's like that happy memory of good times that just stays with you and doesn't fade.
Now that Parallels and VMware on the Mac have their coherence mode, I don't need to even *see* windows on my mac desktop; I can just run that one-off program that I need to without having to resort to dealing with windows.
And, because I'm not looking at windows while I'm using the programs, XP works perfectly well; why install Vista when it has such outrageous requirements and I'm just going to hide it anyway.
Isn't everyone a fanboy for some reason or another? Aren't the Ford guys who put that Calvin sticker peeing on a Chevy logo (and vice versa) fanboys? And how about all those Harley Davidson tattoos out there, would you call that 300 lbs leather-clad biker a fanboy? And then there's the people who watch a particular tv show and say "Hey, you gotta watch this..." and then is hurt that you don't have any interest in watching a bald guy picking songs from a juke box in a Jersey restaurant.
Finally, I know a guy who is as close to a luddite as you can get..no computer, no tv, just a regular phone and a radio for electronics. Prefers reading to everything else and doesn't give a whiz about what bike he rides, what clothes he buys, anything; whatever's on sale and fits he gets. But if you ask what he's reading, he'll say he's reading Grapes of Wrath for the umpteenth time and then he'll talk your ear off about how Steinbeck is the only good writer America ever produced, and on and on for an hour or more. So that makes him a Steinbeck fanboy, doesn't it?
I see no reason why it won't...I'm fully expecting it to support my 450mhz G4 from 2000. Tiger runs fine on it in all 32-bit mode and I would imagine Leopard is the same way; if the hardware can't support it, it won't use it.
Remember Apple has their fat binary architecture where one program might have multiple executables for different platforms (i.e. Intel, PowerPC) and now 64 and 32 bit.
So I'm fully expecting them to support everything Tiger supports, though I'm sure this is on the wane...I wouldn't be surprised if Leopard ended up being the last PowerPC version.
I have not tried this myself (though I suppose it'd be a cool experiment using VMware) but I'm guessing that ultimately you'd probably be SOL for the stuff on the disk, though as I understand it the pool would still be up and running, with some directories and files unavailable.
This is just total utter complete speculation on my part, but one of the features of ZFS I like is the pool concept where you just add disks to the total storage space and then carve it up any way you see fit. I tested this with Solaris 10 on VMware and it really is just that easy...add the disk to the machine, then register it with the pool. Done. No muss, no fuss. I was shocked at how fast and easy it was.
Anyway, where I'm going with this is: Why should we still have disks on the desktop? If all the physical disks are just part of one big pool, you do away with needing to see the various disk icons and instead have something maybe similar to "This computer" with a different organizational structure; you see Applications as a group (a la the original Windows Program Manager) while your home directory stays the same in the nested-folder style.
What I'm really wondering is if ZFS could be an integral part of a totally redesigned Finder interface that allows for Apple to get away from the traditional Disk/Directory paradigm. I know Unix in general really doesn't support a disk paradigm at all (which is why I've always preferred Unix over Windows...none of the C: or D: business) and it'd be great to have the same thing on the Mac with Apple's capability for superior interfaces.
I have one thing to say to all of you ][ users...
on
The Apple II At 30
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· Score: 1
I concur with your statement...for the year we've had our DS, our two kids (5 & 2) have banged on it (the 2yo broke a stylus on it in that the stylus itself snapped in half) and the screen is still registers every movement. I put a plastic film on the screen figuring that abuse would happen and I still havent' had to replace it.
I used vi on a VT100 attached to a vax running BSD back in 1990 and I use vi (vim) today on a MacBook Pro that could handle more simultaneous users than the vax did. It was always fast to start then, and it's fast to start today, though now I have colors, split windows, and a bajillion other features I struggle to remember.
It's interesting to see that the machines have gotten faster, software more complex, etc., etc., but software like vim just keeps on truckin'. Too bad we don't have more software like this.
Why does C/C++ never get any love? C and C++ make it onto these lists all the time, then a number of/.'ers claim how it won't die, but live on as a niche or embedded language, etc. In other words, it's a useful language but for a bygone time.
???
How does anyone believe this? It is extremely likely that *every* *single* *program* you use is written in C or C++. Even the languages that supposedly replace C & C++ are written in... C and C++. Java? Written in C++. Ruby? Written in C. Python? C. The operating system, the editors, the web servers, everything at some point got washed through a C/C++ compiler and generated some flavor of a.out. At the end of the day something has to actually allocate a block of memory for that untyped variable in and the only languages that do that are C and C++.
Maybe the problem is that with C is that there are no illusions, no smoke and mirrors: it's all about the raw bytes and memory blocks. Strings? We got char arrays (don't forget to leave room for the null terminator!). C++ gives you the smoke and mirrors, but maybe too much so (I'm looking at you, operator=() ) plus it keeps all the bit slinging power of C...combine all that together and you have a language that is rightly described as... complex (then there's templates...)
Every language, every tool, has its purpose and C and C++ doesn't fit the bill across the board; I have written big web CGI programs in C and let's just say it was unpleasant. But I wouldn't think to write an operating system in Ruby either (not that I'm in the habit of writing operating systems). If anything, I fear the loss of people writing in C and C++ because that's where the bits actually get slung and, as other people have pointed out, there are literally no limits to what you can do...the next Rubys, Pythons, Javas, etc., will still need to be written in C and C++ simply because they are the languages that offer maximum flexibility with maximum performance with maximum headache (j/k about that last one...sort of).
I worked at a world-wide bank that ran its entire operations on a pair of ES/9000 mainframes from IBM and, while insanely expensive, requiring a full-time staff of 12 people (for each machine), requiring a separate floor on the building, etc. etc., I have still never seen anything that came close to the horsepower these things had. They simply wiped the floor with everything else out there.
As an example, it calculated a person's balance by starting with their opening balance, then went down the vsam file, adding and subtracting amounts, till it reached the bottom and gave the total. This process was instantaneous, even given all the other things it was doing.
Sure there are better ways to do it, like storing the data in a real RDMS, using a trigger to update a "balance" field so it's a quick query instead of a lot of calculations, etc., but I wonder if so much of what we do is simply making the best of essentially a hardware deficiency; the baddest Intel-based Linux box probably couldn't do what this 20 year old mainframe can do, so we make it do the same thing but in different ways.
Working with the mainframe programmers, all Cobol folks, made me think always of that great Dilbert cartoon of the smug Unix guy giving Wally a nickel and saying "get yourself a real computer"... these people did not worry about efficiency for the most part simply because the machine was so fast, they didn't need to.
So ultimately it's too bad that mainframes, for all their horsepower, really do resemble, to a certain extent, the moniker "dinosaur" in that their mammoth bulk simply couldn't get them out of the tar pits of cost and space.
The coda to this is that, once you've used JSO on TSO, every Unix command looks like it's written in the Queen's English by comparison.
I emailed him as well after buying Code Money on iTMS and while it wasn't the next day, also got a terse but funny response to my email that essentially read "You rock!"
I had never done that before and was wondering why; I appreciate the music and all, but figured that buying it was my way of indicating to him my appreciation. At least, that's how it's perceived to the "big" artists; your chances of getting a "hey, thanks!" email from Bowie or the Rolling Stones is nil. But smaller bands, smaller solos, they come across as the "regular Joes" who happen to make great music and they by that nature seem more approachable. I've seen stadium rock with an army of bouncers in front of the stage, and then there's the guy with the guitar playing on the mat next to you at the pub and is more capable, and presumably more receiving, of any compliments you're willing to throw his way.
I've played with it and it's basically "email server in a box"...just turn it on and point your mail app at it. I can't speak for specific features because it's been awhile now since I last checked it out.
You're absolutely spot on. The most reliable setup is one where one vendor provides the hardware and an OS designed with that hardware in mind. Solaris on Sparc, AIX on Power, OSX on Macs, even VMS on Alpha...the OS has an intimate knowledge of the hardware and the vendor doesn't have to spend the time worrying about wacky situations like what I found myself in: my RH 4 setup didn't understand the SAS controller in a new Dell server, and worse, would panic because it was expecting PS/2 ports (for whatever reason) and there was only USB (but even weirder, in the Dell BIOS, they still reference them).
I use FF exclusively on both the Mac and Windows, and I think the Mac version works *better* than on Windows...the Mac version doesn't get sluggish after opening and closing a lot of tabs, doesn't gobble up half a gig of ram, and I have never had it just up and quit on me like it does on Windows.
I find FF on the Mac is also more tolerant of some of the more... baroque addons; I admit to being an addon junkie and addons that claim to be fully cross-platform crash on Windows while I've never had an addon crash FF on the Mac.
So, hey, if they want to make FF better, that's awesome, but to me, it's enhancement, not fixing.
I want a print-out of something so I can mark it up, scribble, etc. If I want the level of quality this thing suggests, I'll take it to a bureau and get it professionally printed and bound.
It also reminds me of an office I worked in back-in-the-day where the copier had an odometer and Xerox charged based on the monthly count; it was cheaper to have a typist re-type the one page or two page document 3 or 4 times. If we needed a lot of copies, which wasn't often, we might take it to the local Kinkos, depending on what we wanted. Xerox eventually canceled the contract because it was more expensive to send a guy to read the meter than what they were billing. Funny thing is, they let us keep the copier.
I got a copy of Office2007 for going to some dog-n-pony show Microsoft was having, and what's funny is that what they gave out was a disc that contained some presentations on it, and the license code; you had to actually download Office from their website to get it.
I find that all very tacky, but whatever, I downloaded it. The thing I haven't done is install it; I just haven't found any reason to do so. I "get" the ribbon idea, so it's not a new thing, but I think at the end of the day I just can't get worked up about a word processor or spreadsheet program like I might have at one time. For all the work I do, word processing and presentations and spreadsheet juggling just doesn't make it worth to me to move from Office2000.
Same thing with Vista. I already own a Mac at home so I am already familiar with the interface and features;), and given all the negatives about it (DRM, slow, buggy, etc.) I see absolutely zero need to upgrade to that too; *maybe* if they'd shipped something "revolutionary" like WinFS, maybe that would have compelled me. As it stands, Microsoft has done nothing to inspire me nor given me any confidence they will be able to do so in the future.
To answer your question: No, we cannot stop being attached to physical buildings. It's impossible; building are just a larger manifestation of the objects we project feelings onto because of something special. What is a house to the passerby was a home to somebody who would think of all the good and bad things that happened there.
I grew up in a house that was 200+ years old. It had been in my family for generations. Because of circumstances, we had to move out and the house was purchased by the city and deliberately burned down for fire fighter training; it was deemed "no historical value".
What means nothing to you might mean the world to someone else. Maybe Shockley's building doesn't enlist more than casual, curio-type feelings from the majority of the world, and maybe it's not worth saving; I don't know, and I don't care, I've never been to California, and that wasn't ever on my list of sights-to-see, so to me I have no emotional interest in this particular place. That doesn't mean it doesn't enlist strong feelings to someone else. And if that someone else can raise the $$$ to save it, hey, great. Maybe open a vegetable stand or something.
But to your original point, it's not a sign of "growing up" that you stop caring about something. If anything, as you get older you start caring about a *lot* of things; maybe too much.:)
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Because I was a computer-room assistant back in college I got a couple of Unix accounts (that's what they were called) to learn and possibly help the grad students who were doing all the "cool" stuff on them (as opposed to showing a freshman how to print from WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (F7 baby!)). The problem with the Unix machines (a SunOS and an Ultrix box) was that they both had accounting turned on and so I had $5000 of computer time to use until I had to go back and ask for more, which they actually gave only begrudgingly. I guess some departments really paid some $$$ for access.
.01 but some very pre-1.0 version) and somebody else put it on a Gateway2000 486 machine) and all of a sudden I had, along with all the other assistants, a Unix-like machine we could call our own, do whatever we want and not worry about screwing up the "real" work being done. So when it came to learning how the Unix-world worked, I learned far more on that early Linux box than either SunOS or Ultrix if only because I didn't have to deal all the accounting stuff.
Anyway, along comes Linux (not
The funny thing is that I remember feeling that the Linux box responded better than the Sun machine or the VAX in that it seemed to handle more users better (though I suppose on the Linux box we were just mucking about with standard commands instead of doing heavy-duty work).
I bought a 17" MacBookPro loaded with the max ram and a fast disk (7200rpm) and it has done everything that my dual G5 tower can do but faster; I use Final Cut Pro for making videos (using an attached FW800 disk similar to what I have on the G5), the screen is large and sharp (and I could add an additional monitor if I really needed to, but with 17" I haven't needed to), and what I've got is essentially a portable editing studio that I can put into a backpack. It even plays games well. It's true that I can't upgrade the video card, but I've never done that on my G5, or any machine I've built. Typically if I'm thinking of a video card upgrade, it's because performance was starting to suffer in a game I was into at the time and what I really needed to do was a full upgrade of the box (ditch those 4200rpm disks, more faster ram, etc.).
So yeah, I realize I can do without a desktop and am not thinking of a new one anytime soon. That doesn't stop me from drooling over the idea of an 8-core machine, I just hope that in a few years it will be available in a laptop.
Because of the Internet and the ...questionable... use of advertising, it's not about the games per se but the stories of how those games came into being. Exhibit A: Daikatana, the story of which has been recounted in depth many times as the overreaching hubris of John Romero ("JR is going to make you his b**ch" is still probably the most extreme use of advertising *ever*). Exhibit B: Duke Nukem which is a story told in a million blog and Slashdot posts, the real story will probably be a very interesting read (and maybe Amazon will do a package deal of the book and the game).
If anything, companies should embrace this more, as GFPS (generic first person shooter) of the month comes and goes with maybe a weekend rental from Blockbuster, there's years of blood sweat and tears from the developers only to have their game disappear into the mist of time, not memory.
Though I would argue that Atari's E.T. probably walks away with everything; it was so bad it's funny (for about 1 second), and the story of its creation also makes a good story (6 weeks to write, millions of carts ordered, Arizona landfill, fall of Atari, etc.)
You're absolutely right...the thing Pixar does *best* is tell a good story, which for some reason nobody else seems able to do as well. Combine good stories with their tech and Pixar is rightly the ten ton gorilla in the film industry (I specifically said film and not just animation or cgi because they put out films that work so much better than most of the crap coming from Hollywood these days).
Pixar has a tendency to push the boundaries in their films: Monsters Inc. gave us amazing hair and fur (just watch the way Sully's fur sways and even shows up in shadows), Finding Nemo was all about realistic water, and I'd argue that Ratatoullie does amazing things with light (specifically, the natural light in the kitchen scenes). If anything, it seems they push the bar so *freaking* *high* in their films that it's almost impossible to match. Certainly it's got to be depressing for the movie maker in the garage who has Pixar-sized dreams and then realizes that he's not only not coming close, he's never in the same race.
Well, back to inking the cels...
I played Zork the way it was meant to be played..on a PDP-11 with a DecWriter for a screen. Ah, if only I hadn't thrown away all those printouts...
The real thing for me was that it represented a whole Universe...so many games have their own tiny world and outside of that particular game, it doesn't exist. Zork, I think, really developed the concept of a "world of Zork" that included its own history (hysterically told in the manuals that came with the games) and the Zorkmid shows up in a couple of other games as well. I really felt like I was in a whole other world, that games like WoW do very well graphically, but then it was all up to the imagination, the images of, 25+ years on, I still have; I can still see that white house now the way I first imagined it.
I haven't played the actual game in probably 15 years, but I almost don't need to..it's like that happy memory of good times that just stays with you and doesn't fade.
And if you want something similar on the Mac, use Filemaker. They even have a Windows version.
Now that Parallels and VMware on the Mac have their coherence mode, I don't need to even *see* windows on my mac desktop; I can just run that one-off program that I need to without having to resort to dealing with windows.
And, because I'm not looking at windows while I'm using the programs, XP works perfectly well; why install Vista when it has such outrageous requirements and I'm just going to hide it anyway.
Isn't everyone a fanboy for some reason or another? Aren't the Ford guys who put that Calvin sticker peeing on a Chevy logo (and vice versa) fanboys? And how about all those Harley Davidson tattoos out there, would you call that 300 lbs leather-clad biker a fanboy? And then there's the people who watch a particular tv show and say "Hey, you gotta watch this..." and then is hurt that you don't have any interest in watching a bald guy picking songs from a juke box in a Jersey restaurant.
Finally, I know a guy who is as close to a luddite as you can get..no computer, no tv, just a regular phone and a radio for electronics. Prefers reading to everything else and doesn't give a whiz about what bike he rides, what clothes he buys, anything; whatever's on sale and fits he gets. But if you ask what he's reading, he'll say he's reading Grapes of Wrath for the umpteenth time and then he'll talk your ear off about how Steinbeck is the only good writer America ever produced, and on and on for an hour or more. So that makes him a Steinbeck fanboy, doesn't it?
I see no reason why it won't...I'm fully expecting it to support my 450mhz G4 from 2000. Tiger runs fine on it in all 32-bit mode and I would imagine Leopard is the same way; if the hardware can't support it, it won't use it.
Remember Apple has their fat binary architecture where one program might have multiple executables for different platforms (i.e. Intel, PowerPC) and now 64 and 32 bit.
So I'm fully expecting them to support everything Tiger supports, though I'm sure this is on the wane...I wouldn't be surprised if Leopard ended up being the last PowerPC version.
It seems that they have some built-in redundancy:
a nge/knowledge/solaris_zfs_perf.html#28
http://www.sun.com/emrkt/campaign_docs/expertexch
I have not tried this myself (though I suppose it'd be a cool experiment using VMware) but I'm guessing that ultimately you'd probably be SOL for the stuff on the disk, though as I understand it the pool would still be up and running, with some directories and files unavailable.
This is just total utter complete speculation on my part, but one of the features of ZFS I like is the pool concept where you just add disks to the total storage space and then carve it up any way you see fit. I tested this with Solaris 10 on VMware and it really is just that easy...add the disk to the machine, then register it with the pool. Done. No muss, no fuss. I was shocked at how fast and easy it was.
Anyway, where I'm going with this is: Why should we still have disks on the desktop? If all the physical disks are just part of one big pool, you do away with needing to see the various disk icons and instead have something maybe similar to "This computer" with a different organizational structure; you see Applications as a group (a la the original Windows Program Manager) while your home directory stays the same in the nested-folder style.
What I'm really wondering is if ZFS could be an integral part of a totally redesigned Finder interface that allows for Apple to get away from the traditional Disk/Directory paradigm. I know Unix in general really doesn't support a disk paradigm at all (which is why I've always preferred Unix over Windows...none of the C: or D: business) and it'd be great to have the same thing on the Mac with Apple's capability for superior interfaces.
pr#6
I concur with your statement...for the year we've had our DS, our two kids (5 & 2) have banged on it (the 2yo broke a stylus on it in that the stylus itself snapped in half) and the screen is still registers every movement. I put a plastic film on the screen figuring that abuse would happen and I still havent' had to replace it.
I used vi on a VT100 attached to a vax running BSD back in 1990 and I use vi (vim) today on a MacBook Pro that could handle more simultaneous users than the vax did. It was always fast to start then, and it's fast to start today, though now I have colors, split windows, and a bajillion other features I struggle to remember.
It's interesting to see that the machines have gotten faster, software more complex, etc., etc., but software like vim just keeps on truckin'. Too bad we don't have more software like this.
Why does C/C++ never get any love? C and C++ make it onto these lists all the time, then a number of /.'ers claim how it won't die, but live on as a niche or embedded language, etc. In other words, it's a useful language but for a bygone time.
... C and C++. Java? Written in C++. Ruby? Written in C. Python? C. The operating system, the editors, the web servers, everything at some point got washed through a C/C++ compiler and generated some flavor of a.out. At the end of the day something has to actually allocate a block of memory for that untyped variable in and the only languages that do that are C and C++.
... complex (then there's templates...)
???
How does anyone believe this? It is extremely likely that *every* *single* *program* you use is written in C or C++. Even the languages that supposedly replace C & C++ are written in
Maybe the problem is that with C is that there are no illusions, no smoke and mirrors: it's all about the raw bytes and memory blocks. Strings? We got char arrays (don't forget to leave room for the null terminator!). C++ gives you the smoke and mirrors, but maybe too much so (I'm looking at you, operator=() ) plus it keeps all the bit slinging power of C...combine all that together and you have a language that is rightly described as
Every language, every tool, has its purpose and C and C++ doesn't fit the bill across the board; I have written big web CGI programs in C and let's just say it was unpleasant. But I wouldn't think to write an operating system in Ruby either (not that I'm in the habit of writing operating systems). If anything, I fear the loss of people writing in C and C++ because that's where the bits actually get slung and, as other people have pointed out, there are literally no limits to what you can do...the next Rubys, Pythons, Javas, etc., will still need to be written in C and C++ simply because they are the languages that offer maximum flexibility with maximum performance with maximum headache (j/k about that last one...sort of).
I worked at a world-wide bank that ran its entire operations on a pair of ES/9000 mainframes from IBM and, while insanely expensive, requiring a full-time staff of 12 people (for each machine), requiring a separate floor on the building, etc. etc., I have still never seen anything that came close to the horsepower these things had. They simply wiped the floor with everything else out there.
... these people did not worry about efficiency for the most part simply because the machine was so fast, they didn't need to.
As an example, it calculated a person's balance by starting with their opening balance, then went down the vsam file, adding and subtracting amounts, till it reached the bottom and gave the total. This process was instantaneous, even given all the other things it was doing.
Sure there are better ways to do it, like storing the data in a real RDMS, using a trigger to update a "balance" field so it's a quick query instead of a lot of calculations, etc., but I wonder if so much of what we do is simply making the best of essentially a hardware deficiency; the baddest Intel-based Linux box probably couldn't do what this 20 year old mainframe can do, so we make it do the same thing but in different ways.
Working with the mainframe programmers, all Cobol folks, made me think always of that great Dilbert cartoon of the smug Unix guy giving Wally a nickel and saying "get yourself a real computer"
So ultimately it's too bad that mainframes, for all their horsepower, really do resemble, to a certain extent, the moniker "dinosaur" in that their mammoth bulk simply couldn't get them out of the tar pits of cost and space.
The coda to this is that, once you've used JSO on TSO, every Unix command looks like it's written in the Queen's English by comparison.
I emailed him as well after buying Code Money on iTMS and while it wasn't the next day, also got a terse but funny response to my email that essentially read "You rock!"
I had never done that before and was wondering why; I appreciate the music and all, but figured that buying it was my way of indicating to him my appreciation. At least, that's how it's perceived to the "big" artists; your chances of getting a "hey, thanks!" email from Bowie or the Rolling Stones is nil. But smaller bands, smaller solos, they come across as the "regular Joes" who happen to make great music and they by that nature seem more approachable. I've seen stadium rock with an army of bouncers in front of the stage, and then there's the guy with the guitar playing on the mat next to you at the pub and is more capable, and presumably more receiving, of any compliments you're willing to throw his way.
They provide a pre-built virtual machine to try out a full installation with no setup.
I've played with it and it's basically "email server in a box"...just turn it on and point your mail app at it. I can't speak for specific features because it's been awhile now since I last checked it out.
....I had *completely* forgotten about that thing since the article about its introduction scrolled off the front page of Slashdot.
You're absolutely spot on. The most reliable setup is one where one vendor provides the hardware and an OS designed with that hardware in mind. Solaris on Sparc, AIX on Power, OSX on Macs, even VMS on Alpha...the OS has an intimate knowledge of the hardware and the vendor doesn't have to spend the time worrying about wacky situations like what I found myself in: my RH 4 setup didn't understand the SAS controller in a new Dell server, and worse, would panic because it was expecting PS/2 ports (for whatever reason) and there was only USB (but even weirder, in the Dell BIOS, they still reference them).
I use FF exclusively on both the Mac and Windows, and I think the Mac version works *better* than on Windows...the Mac version doesn't get sluggish after opening and closing a lot of tabs, doesn't gobble up half a gig of ram, and I have never had it just up and quit on me like it does on Windows.
... baroque addons; I admit to being an addon junkie and addons that claim to be fully cross-platform crash on Windows while I've never had an addon crash FF on the Mac.
I find FF on the Mac is also more tolerant of some of the more
So, hey, if they want to make FF better, that's awesome, but to me, it's enhancement, not fixing.
I want a print-out of something so I can mark it up, scribble, etc. If I want the level of quality this thing suggests, I'll take it to a bureau and get it professionally printed and bound.
It also reminds me of an office I worked in back-in-the-day where the copier had an odometer and Xerox charged based on the monthly count; it was cheaper to have a typist re-type the one page or two page document 3 or 4 times. If we needed a lot of copies, which wasn't often, we might take it to the local Kinkos, depending on what we wanted. Xerox eventually canceled the contract because it was more expensive to send a guy to read the meter than what they were billing. Funny thing is, they let us keep the copier.
I got a copy of Office2007 for going to some dog-n-pony show Microsoft was having, and what's funny is that what they gave out was a disc that contained some presentations on it, and the license code; you had to actually download Office from their website to get it.
;), and given all the negatives about it (DRM, slow, buggy, etc.) I see absolutely zero need to upgrade to that too; *maybe* if they'd shipped something "revolutionary" like WinFS, maybe that would have compelled me. As it stands, Microsoft has done nothing to inspire me nor given me any confidence they will be able to do so in the future.
I find that all very tacky, but whatever, I downloaded it. The thing I haven't done is install it; I just haven't found any reason to do so. I "get" the ribbon idea, so it's not a new thing, but I think at the end of the day I just can't get worked up about a word processor or spreadsheet program like I might have at one time. For all the work I do, word processing and presentations and spreadsheet juggling just doesn't make it worth to me to move from Office2000.
Same thing with Vista. I already own a Mac at home so I am already familiar with the interface and features
To answer your question: No, we cannot stop being attached to physical buildings. It's impossible; building are just a larger manifestation of the objects we project feelings onto because of something special. What is a house to the passerby was a home to somebody who would think of all the good and bad things that happened there.
:)
I grew up in a house that was 200+ years old. It had been in my family for generations. Because of circumstances, we had to move out and the house was purchased by the city and deliberately burned down for fire fighter training; it was deemed "no historical value".
What means nothing to you might mean the world to someone else. Maybe Shockley's building doesn't enlist more than casual, curio-type feelings from the majority of the world, and maybe it's not worth saving; I don't know, and I don't care, I've never been to California, and that wasn't ever on my list of sights-to-see, so to me I have no emotional interest in this particular place. That doesn't mean it doesn't enlist strong feelings to someone else. And if that someone else can raise the $$$ to save it, hey, great. Maybe open a vegetable stand or something.
But to your original point, it's not a sign of "growing up" that you stop caring about something. If anything, as you get older you start caring about a *lot* of things; maybe too much.