At this studio I worked at, we went through dozens of PCs through the years, always upgrading, always replacing broken equipment (those NT-based SGI machines were the worst... we ended up replacing every single one of them), etc.
Meanwhile, the payroll computer was a 1991-vintage Mac Quadra 700 running some custom Foxbase program (precursor to FoxPro). When I left in 2002, it was still running, still cutting checks.
I too have a raft of Mac hardware from 1999-onward that is still in use; I have a 1999 G4 that runs Apache and MySQL for web development and it's worked flawlessly all this time (save the video card fan is now making grinding noises).
True story: Last night I decided to hook up an old Betamax (does that deserve to be on the list too? Too soon?) and popped in a tape of the Bears-Patriots Superbowl game. And the first commercial, as if on queue, was an IBM ad for some educational program called "Writing to Read" that showed kids using the software on PCjrs. It got me thinking that the PCjr was just badly used...with the cartridges and the floppy, it could have been a great educational tool or vertical-market appliance where the software was on the cart, and you could put in a floppy (5.25!) for your data or whatever. No hard disk issues, no re-installation of the machine went belly-up, and presumably immune to jokers trying to mess with it.
The most telling part of the commercial, though, was at the end, where the announcer said that if you wanted more information, please write to the address below. In this Internet age, you get so used to having a URL slapped on everything, when you see a commercial, even though you *know* it's 6 years before the web was even invented, it's still a shock.
...that could potentially be affected by this. Imagine Microsoft suing you because you bought a machine with Linux instead of Windows: "You made the wrong choice in your OS...please install Windows or we'll sue."
I suppose *that* particular situation is taken care of by the fact you get a machine with Windows whether you want to or not, for the most part, but if this were actually allowed, and actually went for Diebold (God forbid), then this litigenous society will have been taken to a whole new level:
"You made the wrong choice flying SouthWest. Buy a ticket on United now or we'll sue." "You purchased Fords for your fleet vehicles when Chevy is the obviously better choice. Switch or we'll sue."
etc.
Now that I think about it, consider the NEW Pepsi challenge:
"I like the taste of cup A." "You've made the wrong choice. Say you like what's in cup B or we'll sue." "Um...I like the taste of cup B?" "Great! Tell us why!"
Will the Rushmore technology that was so attractive to Microsoft in the first place be included in whatever they release? The way I understand it, Microsoft bought FoxPro from FoxBase to get Rushmore to add to Access 2, and then they wanted to dump FP. Apparently there was such a vocal outcry that they've kept FoxPro going, until now.
I'm curious because I really want to know what made FoxPro the speed demon it's always purported to be. I read somewhere that it was the first dbase-class database program that used bitmap indexes, but that was contradicted by another article from somewhere else.
Sadly, while I agree with you, I have a friend who I use as the "Joe Sixpack" acid test, and the only thing he wants to change is the price of the PS3. He uses Internet radio to stream the same classic rock songs from the local radio station, and when told it could be shut down, his response is to say "whatever...I'll just go back to listening to the radio."
The thing that galls me the most is that he has absolutely no concern about America's place in the world. To him, America *is* the world. His rationale? We've got every type of climate and terrain, somebody from every country in the world, and "all the brains to last my lifetime" (his words). He has no kids so he doesn't give a flying fig about the future more than the next release of GTA.
I get the impression there are a lot of these people about.
I don't know why GTA is always mentioned when somebody talks about games involving cars...yes it's a driving game, but there's a big difference between driving a car to mow down people and driving a car to win a race. The former is just silly and uses the car as a vehicle (pun intended) to drive (pun intended also) a story or a plot. The latter is, depending on the game, a true test of how driving is supposed to be done, or not done.
True story, as it just happened a couple of months ago: For the first time in my life my car severely fishtailed on me and without ever having experienced it before in real life, I knew what to do in that I had slammed enough rally cars into the snow in various games like GT4 to know "oh, when the car goes like this, I should do that..." and I translated my controller movements into real turns of the wheel. And it worked! I got out of it and kept going.
In this case I feel like my time with GT4 made me a better driver because I recognized a situation I had never experienced in real life but had so many times in the game that I was able to "figure it out". I'm not even going to pretend I'm ready to take an Aston-Martin Vanquish out on the Nurenburg, but I get the difference between "real" driving and "fantasy ha-ha no big deal if I crash a $600k car into the wall at 200mph" type.
Frankly, if I really had a Vanquish, I'd be too nervous about getting it into an accident that I doubt I'd ever leave the garage.
I made a mistake in a Ruby program where I swapped two sets of numbers and stuffed the wrong ones into a database table, which caused all kinds of major hassles...why didn't Ruby stop me from being so stupid? Why didn't Ruby know that I was putting cost into price and price into cost? What a stupid language...Can we please stop using Ruby?
To your point, every programmer makes mistakes in every language. C has the distinction of being the language that most operating systems and even other languages (e.g. Ruby) are written in, so when a bug comes up in said operating system or language, people always shake their fist at C and say how direct access to memory is evil and must be avoided like the plague.
Problem is, *somebody's* gotta do it. Those variables in don't come for free, even though it seems like it. Behind the covers Matz or Guido or whomever had to malloc() and cast and deal with all that nitty gritty to give the illusion that it's all for free. When a problem comes up, as it inevitably will, they fix it and move on.
It all comes down to problem domain. If I need to parse a text file and put some data into a database table, I'll whip up a Ruby script and away I go. If I need to write an operating system or a new language, I'll pick the tool that gives me the most flexibility and power, always acknowledging that I'm juggling chainsaws, and that for me, as for pretty much everyone else in the same boat, is C.
You hit upon something here...the Dreamcast really was a *revolutionary* product. It had a modem and then a NIC before any other console, it had a memory card that doubled as a super mini game system, and it had a wide selection of games that looked awesome (Soul Calibur) and had quirky but fun gameplay (Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, etc.).
I didn't have an original Playstation (was a N64 user) so I wasn't looking forward to the PS2, and when it came out it didn't have the cool stuff that the Dreamcast had (Maraccas as a game controller, anyone?) and its original game lineup looked crummy (I played TTT and thought it was a pixelated mess and it kind of ruined the whole Tekken franchise for me). What got me was all the "matter of fact" statements that while the Dreamcast was nice, the PS2 will simply blow it away. Well, yes, it did, but only with an installed base upgrading and getting a DVD player. If the DC had used DVDs, I think they would have had a much better fight.
So the PS3 is here and it's basically a warmed-over PS2. New disc technology and new graphics technology...both just like the PS2, and they finally wised up to the reality of the Internet and added connectivity. I may get one to play Gran Turismo 5, but it'll be selling for $199 or less by the time I do.
Yes, I was aware they existed and I have used MacOpener in the past. It worked well and I was always happy with it; I was excited about a free alternative.
This would be great, as then Windows would be able to read (and presumably write) to HFS+ file systems. I could finally use my Mac-formatted iPod on a windows machine!
Does anyone else see the irony of a report on free/libre/open software being delivered as a pdf?
(Yes, I know there are plenty of free/libre/open pdf creators, but this report, according to the properties, was created using "Acrobat Elements 7.0 (Windows)").
But in this case I refer to Jobs, not the community at large.
$500 for a phone isn't worth it, but as a pda/ipod/phone, hell yes. This thing is too big and cool to just think of it as a phone, but as the real pda I've always wanted with phone functionality. The key part of the pda aspect is not the browser or Google maps, but the funky 3rd party applications that people would write, I would write, to extend its usefulness. Games, personal database stuff, hell even a stupid tip calculator would make it worth just that bit more to me.
*But* there are reports in this very discussion that there will be no 3rd party SDK available. In that case, they've killed a *lot* of what I wanted it for and will stick with cheaper phones. At least my razr, for all its flaws, can run my custom java apps.
And that's why I want it. Frankly, I was willing to get it even without activating the phone; now I'm not sure I want it at all.
I'll go on the line and say that, while an unabashed fan, I always want something that "works", regardless of who makes it. It's like that famous quote: "I know good art when I see it"...I see in the iPod a clean, easy-to-use but extremely powerful mp3 player. With the iPhone, I see the convergence of many devices coming together in a way that, judging entirely by the screen shots, might really work for me in a way that a Blackberry does, but with additional video/audio functionality and cheaper development costs.
I was a fan of the pocketpc-based phone when I first heard of it because that appealed to me...a phone but with more power to be a pda replacement. It's a great idea, but, IMHO, the implementation sucked. It was fragile and ultimately, was still trying to ram "WINDOWS" down your throat.
The hallmark of Microsoft is that they seem to always be tooting their own horn, flapping their arms up and down and saying "look at me, I did something right!" Apple products have done a very good job of just getting out of the way and getting you to what you want to do. From the screen shots, it looks like the iPhone keeps out of your way when you're doing something, which I really like.
So while I was never in the "one device, one purpose!" camp (which ultimately leads to a lot of gadgets), I want whatever device I have to do *all* of its intended functions well. The ROKR is actually a pretty nice phone; iTunes is basically bolted on, so I would argue that it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be...people were expecting the iPhone with the ROKR and obviously that wasn't the case. If you judge it as a decent phone which happens to have some modest mp3 capabilities, then you won't be disappointed.
I agree...I've been developing Mac apps for awhile and already have some ideas for this thing. I can't wait to see what kind of dev tools they include in XCode 3 for it.
Plus, the idea of having an open ssh session to your phone/ipod/whatever is kinda cool (in a geek sort of way).
I have a similar DirectTV-based Tivo and from what I gathered from googling around, the usb ports are disconnected inside the box itself.
The Tivo software is also at least a full point release behind the Series2, which my folks have and what my DirectTV Tivo claims to be. That's the killer, I believe...my folks Tivo have all the neat features like TivoToGo, etc., which I believe requires version 7 or somesuch, while the DirectTV ones are, from what I understand, permanently at 6-something.
Basically, DirectTV made a deal with Tivo but then Rupert Murdoch bought them and got them to switch to a different, in-house developed DVR which doesn't use Tivo's software. I doubt you can even get the Tivo versions anymore.
The only benefit we've got with the DirectTV version is being able to record two shows at once, or record and watch, but I understand the Tivo-branded series 3 solves that problem too. It's too bad, I would love to be able to get the updates via a usb-to-ethernet instead of having a phone cord that stretches across the living room, but with DirectTV it just ain't gonna happen. *Sigh*
I did play it, and it has one of my favorite lines from any game: "It's context sensitive. That means... it's sensitive... to context." Dunno why but that line *still* makes me laugh.
Supposedly they'd been supposedly working on a Conker game since around the original BK came out. Okay, maybe it was late in the project and they realized it was too much like BK and they had to restart it. I agree with you in that it has the best story of any of the N64-era Rare games (PD definitely included).
My biggest issue is not the game, but that BFD, to me, came to symbolize Rare the company. They can be brilliant, but around BFD they just stopped caring. I don't know if it was hubris that "we're Rare!" or "We're part of Microsoft!" but taking four years to do a port of an existing, published game, is up there with spending 10 years creating one in terms of lunacy. Were they too busy with booze and hookers to make it into the office all that time?
I'm still shocked that Microsoft bought Rare; they were already on the downward slide during the N64's lifetime (which could arguably be said to have started with Banjo Kazooie as a far more colorful and better designed game than Mario64 (which to me always seemed more like a really fun demo). BK was awesome, Diddy Kong Racing was a much better version than MarioKart, and GoldenEye was their zenith. After that, what more did they release? Banjo Twooie, which was in no way what had been eluded to, but seemed like a warmed-over DK. Perfect Dark Zero? Sorry, Laura Croft was still too much in her heyday to start another "chick-with-guns-oh-my!" franchise, and it too had the warmed over glow of a GoldenEye codebase with different graphics. Conker's Bad Fur Day was the real tell-tale sign of a slide. It was, I believe, the last cart released for the N64 by anybody, and instead of something cool, we got a South Park inspired DK (again!).
Then they basically sat out the XBox, Ghoulies notwithstanding. To think that after, what, 4 years, the best they could come up with was a mediocre platformer (again a modified DK ripoff) and then a *port*? An almost 1-for-1 port of BFD? *That* was the best they could come up with?
Meanwhile I recall reading an article about Rare's headquarters, and how they have these "sheds" with developers busily working away on games. What games? What justifies having such a large operation and put out the same warmed-over stuff again and again. Oh, right, they were working on the 360 launch title. What was that ground-breaking game? Perfect Dark Zero? No, really, what was it? I must have missed it.
The Stamper brothers are living proof that there are people who can sell snow to Eskimos. I would love to have seen the song-n-dance they threw for Microsoft to justify the price they paid. Microsoft threw their money away on a has-been who have been locked into this DK/GoldenEye glow for waaaay too long.
Can anyone who has used Fusion tell me whether it supports Workstation's snapshot functionality? That is, IMHO, the greatest feature *ever*; an OS-level undo. I just know I'm going to need this trying to install Oracle 10g on a ZFS partition on Solaris 10.
Absolutely. In law firms it's almost de rigeur to have a gig or more in your mailbox. Lawyers are required to keep everything they get for a case and that includes emails which may have attachments, multiple versions of the attachments, etc. Some firms can have SANs devoted entirely to their mail server, plus clustering, etc. While the rank-n-file get fixed-size mailboxes, attorneys are unlimited.
What's funny is that the attorney database is segregated so it gets backup priority; if you just work at the help desk or are an assistant or some such, you may or may not lose your email in a bad crash (that presumably took out both boxes), but attorneys have a pretty high confidence they won't lose anything (which, given the nature of the business, is a good idea, really).
Welllllll.....it's a stretch, but I could imagine that the globe represents, well, everything. At least, everything that is physical to our lives. Yes space this, other planets, stars, that, but all the things that affect us either directly or indirectly can for the most part be confined to the one big spinning blue and white beach ball.
There's a VMWare image of the OLPC system (forget where...found the link on OSNews.com) and I downloaded it and played with it a bit. The "Sugar" interface is one those things that presumably works better on the intended hardware, because moving the mouse around to get to the "desktop" or whatever it was got old really fast.
The other issue, which I can appreciate is a very non-trivial task because it has to work with non-computer savvy kids (and presumably adults) in a variety of languages, is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it. A couple of apps I still don't understand what they do.
Being that it's Linux underneath, the standard ctrl-alt-backspace killed the interface and I was able to log in as root (no password) and poke around. The one programming language they include is Perl, and that got me thinking about why not give the kids an interface or some capability to develop their own software too? The next killer app could be written by a kid on a OLPC machine. It looked like they also included a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) as well, but I only saw the interface come up once and wasn't able to get back to it again. Would they ship the docs in all languages as well?
Not only is it not open source, it's unbelievably expensive...40k per processor for the required database backend, plus $40k for Oracle's application server (oc4j) and then if I remember correctly Portal (the actual CMS product) is multiple thousands (and always per processor, and dual cores count as 1.5 processors).
That said, Portal is a really really nice product and probably the best example of a Java-based CMS that I've seen. I've compared it to a souped up Plone or Mambo. I set up a demo site for my company and everybody loved it. The deal breaker, as you could imagine, was the cost.
You can download it all at otn.oracle.com and give it a try, but like I said, it's a *serious* investment and ultimately couldn't justify the cost when such good free systems (like the aforementioned Plone and Mambo) exist.
As one who has written a major web-based trading application I can state that C++ rocks the server too. The thing that I've come to realize having done both C++ and Java work is that Java's real secret is its libraries, not the language. The language is fine sure, garbage collection is pretty sweet, etc., but the fact is that all of those things can be done in C++ (don't want multiple inheritance? Fine, don't use it. Want garbage collection? Well...it's a stretch, but I allocate everything I can on the stack and if I have to hit new/delete, it has to be for something *very* special.)
The libraries are where Java is soooo much nicer than C++ in that all that stuff is already there for you where my collection of C++ libraries are of variable quality and don't come close to matching the breadth of what you get out-of-the-box with any Java implementation.
That said, my C++ web apps handle literally a million+ transactions a day. I've seen 7 million transactions take place in a single 24-hour period and the software has been rock solid from day one. I'm sure the same thing can be done with Java, but when I was asked, the thought of giving up control to an app server scared me and my team enough that we stuck with C++.
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At this studio I worked at, we went through dozens of PCs through the years, always upgrading, always replacing broken equipment (those NT-based SGI machines were the worst ... we ended up replacing every single one of them), etc.
Meanwhile, the payroll computer was a 1991-vintage Mac Quadra 700 running some custom Foxbase program (precursor to FoxPro). When I left in 2002, it was still running, still cutting checks.
I too have a raft of Mac hardware from 1999-onward that is still in use; I have a 1999 G4 that runs Apache and MySQL for web development and it's worked flawlessly all this time (save the video card fan is now making grinding noises).
True story: Last night I decided to hook up an old Betamax (does that deserve to be on the list too? Too soon?) and popped in a tape of the Bears-Patriots Superbowl game. And the first commercial, as if on queue, was an IBM ad for some educational program called "Writing to Read" that showed kids using the software on PCjrs. It got me thinking that the PCjr was just badly used...with the cartridges and the floppy, it could have been a great educational tool or vertical-market appliance where the software was on the cart, and you could put in a floppy (5.25!) for your data or whatever. No hard disk issues, no re-installation of the machine went belly-up, and presumably immune to jokers trying to mess with it.
The most telling part of the commercial, though, was at the end, where the announcer said that if you wanted more information, please write to the address below. In this Internet age, you get so used to having a URL slapped on everything, when you see a commercial, even though you *know* it's 6 years before the web was even invented, it's still a shock.
...that could potentially be affected by this. Imagine Microsoft suing you because you bought a machine with Linux instead of Windows: "You made the wrong choice in your OS...please install Windows or we'll sue."
I suppose *that* particular situation is taken care of by the fact you get a machine with Windows whether you want to or not, for the most part, but if this were actually allowed, and actually went for Diebold (God forbid), then this litigenous society will have been taken to a whole new level:
"You made the wrong choice flying SouthWest. Buy a ticket on United now or we'll sue."
"You purchased Fords for your fleet vehicles when Chevy is the obviously better choice. Switch or we'll sue."
etc.
Now that I think about it, consider the NEW Pepsi challenge:
"I like the taste of cup A."
"You've made the wrong choice. Say you like what's in cup B or we'll sue."
"Um...I like the taste of cup B?"
"Great! Tell us why!"
Will the Rushmore technology that was so attractive to Microsoft in the first place be included in whatever they release? The way I understand it, Microsoft bought FoxPro from FoxBase to get Rushmore to add to Access 2, and then they wanted to dump FP. Apparently there was such a vocal outcry that they've kept FoxPro going, until now.
I'm curious because I really want to know what made FoxPro the speed demon it's always purported to be. I read somewhere that it was the first dbase-class database program that used bitmap indexes, but that was contradicted by another article from somewhere else.
Sadly, while I agree with you, I have a friend who I use as the "Joe Sixpack" acid test, and the only thing he wants to change is the price of the PS3. He uses Internet radio to stream the same classic rock songs from the local radio station, and when told it could be shut down, his response is to say "whatever...I'll just go back to listening to the radio."
The thing that galls me the most is that he has absolutely no concern about America's place in the world. To him, America *is* the world. His rationale? We've got every type of climate and terrain, somebody from every country in the world, and "all the brains to last my lifetime" (his words). He has no kids so he doesn't give a flying fig about the future more than the next release of GTA.
I get the impression there are a lot of these people about.
I don't know why GTA is always mentioned when somebody talks about games involving cars ...yes it's a driving game, but there's a big difference between driving a car to mow down people and driving a car to win a race. The former is just silly and uses the car as a vehicle (pun intended) to drive (pun intended also) a story or a plot. The latter is, depending on the game, a true test of how driving is supposed to be done, or not done.
True story, as it just happened a couple of months ago: For the first time in my life my car severely fishtailed on me and without ever having experienced it before in real life, I knew what to do in that I had slammed enough rally cars into the snow in various games like GT4 to know "oh, when the car goes like this, I should do that..." and I translated my controller movements into real turns of the wheel. And it worked! I got out of it and kept going.
In this case I feel like my time with GT4 made me a better driver because I recognized a situation I had never experienced in real life but had so many times in the game that I was able to "figure it out". I'm not even going to pretend I'm ready to take an Aston-Martin Vanquish out on the Nurenburg, but I get the difference between "real" driving and "fantasy ha-ha no big deal if I crash a $600k car into the wall at 200mph" type.
Frankly, if I really had a Vanquish, I'd be too nervous about getting it into an accident that I doubt I'd ever leave the garage.
I made a mistake in a Ruby program where I swapped two sets of numbers and stuffed the wrong ones into a database table, which caused all kinds of major hassles...why didn't Ruby stop me from being so stupid? Why didn't Ruby know that I was putting cost into price and price into cost? What a stupid language...Can we please stop using Ruby?
To your point, every programmer makes mistakes in every language. C has the distinction of being the language that most operating systems and even other languages (e.g. Ruby) are written in, so when a bug comes up in said operating system or language, people always shake their fist at C and say how direct access to memory is evil and must be avoided like the plague.
Problem is, *somebody's* gotta do it. Those variables in don't come for free, even though it seems like it. Behind the covers Matz or Guido or whomever had to malloc() and cast and deal with all that nitty gritty to give the illusion that it's all for free. When a problem comes up, as it inevitably will, they fix it and move on.
It all comes down to problem domain. If I need to parse a text file and put some data into a database table, I'll whip up a Ruby script and away I go. If I need to write an operating system or a new language, I'll pick the tool that gives me the most flexibility and power, always acknowledging that I'm juggling chainsaws, and that for me, as for pretty much everyone else in the same boat, is C.
You hit upon something here...the Dreamcast really was a *revolutionary* product. It had a modem and then a NIC before any other console, it had a memory card that doubled as a super mini game system, and it had a wide selection of games that looked awesome (Soul Calibur) and had quirky but fun gameplay (Jet Set Radio, Space Channel 5, etc.).
I didn't have an original Playstation (was a N64 user) so I wasn't looking forward to the PS2, and when it came out it didn't have the cool stuff that the Dreamcast had (Maraccas as a game controller, anyone?) and its original game lineup looked crummy (I played TTT and thought it was a pixelated mess and it kind of ruined the whole Tekken franchise for me). What got me was all the "matter of fact" statements that while the Dreamcast was nice, the PS2 will simply blow it away. Well, yes, it did, but only with an installed base upgrading and getting a DVD player. If the DC had used DVDs, I think they would have had a much better fight.
So the PS3 is here and it's basically a warmed-over PS2. New disc technology and new graphics technology...both just like the PS2, and they finally wised up to the reality of the Internet and added connectivity. I may get one to play Gran Turismo 5, but it'll be selling for $199 or less by the time I do.
Yes, I was aware they existed and I have used MacOpener in the past. It worked well and I was always happy with it; I was excited about a free alternative.
This would be great, as then Windows would be able to read (and presumably write) to HFS+ file systems. I could finally use my Mac-formatted iPod on a windows machine!
Does anyone else see the irony of a report on free/libre/open software being delivered as a pdf?
(Yes, I know there are plenty of free/libre/open pdf creators, but this report, according to the properties, was created using "Acrobat Elements 7.0 (Windows)").
But in this case I refer to Jobs, not the community at large.
$500 for a phone isn't worth it, but as a pda/ipod/phone, hell yes. This thing is too big and cool to just think of it as a phone, but as the real pda I've always wanted with phone functionality. The key part of the pda aspect is not the browser or Google maps, but the funky 3rd party applications that people would write, I would write, to extend its usefulness. Games, personal database stuff, hell even a stupid tip calculator would make it worth just that bit more to me.
*But* there are reports in this very discussion that there will be no 3rd party SDK available. In that case, they've killed a *lot* of what I wanted it for and will stick with cheaper phones. At least my razr, for all its flaws, can run my custom java apps.
And that's why I want it. Frankly, I was willing to get it even without activating the phone; now I'm not sure I want it at all.
I'll go on the line and say that, while an unabashed fan, I always want something that "works", regardless of who makes it. It's like that famous quote: "I know good art when I see it"...I see in the iPod a clean, easy-to-use but extremely powerful mp3 player. With the iPhone, I see the convergence of many devices coming together in a way that, judging entirely by the screen shots, might really work for me in a way that a Blackberry does, but with additional video/audio functionality and cheaper development costs.
I was a fan of the pocketpc-based phone when I first heard of it because that appealed to me...a phone but with more power to be a pda replacement. It's a great idea, but, IMHO, the implementation sucked. It was fragile and ultimately, was still trying to ram "WINDOWS" down your throat.
The hallmark of Microsoft is that they seem to always be tooting their own horn, flapping their arms up and down and saying "look at me, I did something right!" Apple products have done a very good job of just getting out of the way and getting you to what you want to do. From the screen shots, it looks like the iPhone keeps out of your way when you're doing something, which I really like.
So while I was never in the "one device, one purpose!" camp (which ultimately leads to a lot of gadgets), I want whatever device I have to do *all* of its intended functions well. The ROKR is actually a pretty nice phone; iTunes is basically bolted on, so I would argue that it wasn't as bad as people made it out to be...people were expecting the iPhone with the ROKR and obviously that wasn't the case. If you judge it as a decent phone which happens to have some modest mp3 capabilities, then you won't be disappointed.
Did anyone catch that they're dropping "Computer" from the name? Now it's just going to be "Apple Inc.".
Now those Apple ][ badges look *really* dated now!
I agree...I've been developing Mac apps for awhile and already have some ideas for this thing. I can't wait to see what kind of dev tools they include in XCode 3 for it.
Plus, the idea of having an open ssh session to your phone/ipod/whatever is kinda cool (in a geek sort of way).
I have a similar DirectTV-based Tivo and from what I gathered from googling around, the usb ports are disconnected inside the box itself.
The Tivo software is also at least a full point release behind the Series2, which my folks have and what my DirectTV Tivo claims to be. That's the killer, I believe...my folks Tivo have all the neat features like TivoToGo, etc., which I believe requires version 7 or somesuch, while the DirectTV ones are, from what I understand, permanently at 6-something.
Basically, DirectTV made a deal with Tivo but then Rupert Murdoch bought them and got them to switch to a different, in-house developed DVR which doesn't use Tivo's software. I doubt you can even get the Tivo versions anymore.
The only benefit we've got with the DirectTV version is being able to record two shows at once, or record and watch, but I understand the Tivo-branded series 3 solves that problem too. It's too bad, I would love to be able to get the updates via a usb-to-ethernet instead of having a phone cord that stretches across the living room, but with DirectTV it just ain't gonna happen. *Sigh*
I did play it, and it has one of my favorite lines from any game: "It's context sensitive. That means ... it's sensitive ... to context." Dunno why but that line *still* makes me laugh.
Supposedly they'd been supposedly working on a Conker game since around the original BK came out. Okay, maybe it was late in the project and they realized it was too much like BK and they had to restart it. I agree with you in that it has the best story of any of the N64-era Rare games (PD definitely included).
My biggest issue is not the game, but that BFD, to me, came to symbolize Rare the company. They can be brilliant, but around BFD they just stopped caring. I don't know if it was hubris that "we're Rare!" or "We're part of Microsoft!" but taking four years to do a port of an existing, published game, is up there with spending 10 years creating one in terms of lunacy. Were they too busy with booze and hookers to make it into the office all that time?
I'm still shocked that Microsoft bought Rare; they were already on the downward slide during the N64's lifetime (which could arguably be said to have started with Banjo Kazooie as a far more colorful and better designed game than Mario64 (which to me always seemed more like a really fun demo). BK was awesome, Diddy Kong Racing was a much better version than MarioKart, and GoldenEye was their zenith. After that, what more did they release? Banjo Twooie, which was in no way what had been eluded to, but seemed like a warmed-over DK. Perfect Dark Zero? Sorry, Laura Croft was still too much in her heyday to start another "chick-with-guns-oh-my!" franchise, and it too had the warmed over glow of a GoldenEye codebase with different graphics. Conker's Bad Fur Day was the real tell-tale sign of a slide. It was, I believe, the last cart released for the N64 by anybody, and instead of something cool, we got a South Park inspired DK (again!).
Then they basically sat out the XBox, Ghoulies notwithstanding. To think that after, what, 4 years, the best they could come up with was a mediocre platformer (again a modified DK ripoff) and then a *port*? An almost 1-for-1 port of BFD? *That* was the best they could come up with?
Meanwhile I recall reading an article about Rare's headquarters, and how they have these "sheds" with developers busily working away on games. What games? What justifies having such a large operation and put out the same warmed-over stuff again and again. Oh, right, they were working on the 360 launch title. What was that ground-breaking game? Perfect Dark Zero? No, really, what was it? I must have missed it.
The Stamper brothers are living proof that there are people who can sell snow to Eskimos. I would love to have seen the song-n-dance they threw for Microsoft to justify the price they paid. Microsoft threw their money away on a has-been who have been locked into this DK/GoldenEye glow for waaaay too long.
Can anyone who has used Fusion tell me whether it supports Workstation's snapshot functionality? That is, IMHO, the greatest feature *ever*; an OS-level undo. I just know I'm going to need this trying to install Oracle 10g on a ZFS partition on Solaris 10.
Absolutely. In law firms it's almost de rigeur to have a gig or more in your mailbox. Lawyers are required to keep everything they get for a case and that includes emails which may have attachments, multiple versions of the attachments, etc. Some firms can have SANs devoted entirely to their mail server, plus clustering, etc. While the rank-n-file get fixed-size mailboxes, attorneys are unlimited.
What's funny is that the attorney database is segregated so it gets backup priority; if you just work at the help desk or are an assistant or some such, you may or may not lose your email in a bad crash (that presumably took out both boxes), but attorneys have a pretty high confidence they won't lose anything (which, given the nature of the business, is a good idea, really).
And make it work as a 32x32 icon. In 8-bit color.
Welllllll.....it's a stretch, but I could imagine that the globe represents, well, everything. At least, everything that is physical to our lives. Yes space this, other planets, stars, that, but all the things that affect us either directly or indirectly can for the most part be confined to the one big spinning blue and white beach ball.
:)
Other than that, I got nothin'.
There's a VMWare image of the OLPC system (forget where...found the link on OSNews.com) and I downloaded it and played with it a bit. The "Sugar" interface is one those things that presumably works better on the intended hardware, because moving the mouse around to get to the "desktop" or whatever it was got old really fast.
The other issue, which I can appreciate is a very non-trivial task because it has to work with non-computer savvy kids (and presumably adults) in a variety of languages, is that the icons didn't make any sense to me, nor did most of the interface. I got that the globe icon was a browser, but that was pretty much it. A couple of apps I still don't understand what they do.
Being that it's Linux underneath, the standard ctrl-alt-backspace killed the interface and I was able to log in as root (no password) and poke around. The one programming language they include is Perl, and that got me thinking about why not give the kids an interface or some capability to develop their own software too? The next killer app could be written by a kid on a OLPC machine. It looked like they also included a version of Squeak (Smalltalk) as well, but I only saw the interface come up once and wasn't able to get back to it again. Would they ship the docs in all languages as well?
Not only is it not open source, it's unbelievably expensive...40k per processor for the required database backend, plus $40k for Oracle's application server (oc4j) and then if I remember correctly Portal (the actual CMS product) is multiple thousands (and always per processor, and dual cores count as 1.5 processors).
That said, Portal is a really really nice product and probably the best example of a Java-based CMS that I've seen. I've compared it to a souped up Plone or Mambo. I set up a demo site for my company and everybody loved it. The deal breaker, as you could imagine, was the cost.
You can download it all at otn.oracle.com and give it a try, but like I said, it's a *serious* investment and ultimately couldn't justify the cost when such good free systems (like the aforementioned Plone and Mambo) exist.
They ain't Java, but they are free.
As one who has written a major web-based trading application I can state that C++ rocks the server too. The thing that I've come to realize having done both C++ and Java work is that Java's real secret is its libraries, not the language. The language is fine sure, garbage collection is pretty sweet, etc., but the fact is that all of those things can be done in C++ (don't want multiple inheritance? Fine, don't use it. Want garbage collection? Well...it's a stretch, but I allocate everything I can on the stack and if I have to hit new/delete, it has to be for something *very* special.)
The libraries are where Java is soooo much nicer than C++ in that all that stuff is already there for you where my collection of C++ libraries are of variable quality and don't come close to matching the breadth of what you get out-of-the-box with any Java implementation.
That said, my C++ web apps handle literally a million+ transactions a day. I've seen 7 million transactions take place in a single 24-hour period and the software has been rock solid from day one. I'm sure the same thing can be done with Java, but when I was asked, the thought of giving up control to an app server scared me and my team enough that we stuck with C++.