Seeing as there's plenty of crash-related jokes already, I'll just skip to the chase and ask the question most on my mind:
WTF???
I can't honestly believe this ECU will be running some flavor of windows (NT Embedded? Win2k embedded? XP embedded? WinCE?) and what they bring to the table. Microsoft went on about how WinCE 3.0 was a "real time" OS, but what other than the PocketPC has it been used for?
And while we're at it, what's the point of an OS in a car in the first place? I would think that the number of items that a computer has to deal with are fixed (I'm sure there's a lot, but it's not like you're going to install software on a car) and presumably the OS is some unbelievably simple scheduler a la the DSKY of the Apollo days... a simple interrupt mechanism, a priority queue, and lots of inputs...
Okay, I can't resist one:
"The program 'Brakes' has become unresponsive. Do you want to end the task?"
Um...have you done any programming on the mac, AC? Carbon is the cleaned up legacy API of the pre-OSX days. The idea was that you wrote to Carbon when developing your OS9 app, and then it should pretty much run unmodified in OS X (presuming a recompile to make it OS X native lest your app fire up the classic layer).
In that regard, Carbon is meant to run on other platforms only if you consider OS9 another platform. I think you are thinking that Objective C is somehow a bastardized version of C. It's not; Objective C is the full C language with additional object-oriented components a la C++, but not to the extreme that C++ takes it. Plus, Objective C gives you run time typing, which C++ does not provide (static, compile-time typing). This makes it very easy to get information about objects and is the basis of the key-value system that runs most of Cocoa. Objective C is inspired by Smalltalk and uses a number of its concepts whilst C++ was influenced heavily on Simula2 (I'm pretty sure). Regardless, both can call strncpy(), malloc() etc. if you want.
If you want write truly cross-platform C, you write to the standard C API *only* and let the users get their input and output via stdin and stdout. Not very graphical, but hey, you want cross platform, right?
Not only do I concur, but I would argue that anyone who is going to do anything remotely graphical should spend some time learning about window regions, bitblt, things like that. I'm not saying they have to do it all, but show them what it takes just to draw a line on the screen, and keep it there (or move it around with a mouse). *Then* you'll not only get an appreciation for the amount of memory and cpu spent, but what it takes to actually display all that eye candy on the screen.
I was mostly a back-end systems programmer until I got a job writing real-time charting software...you learn to optimize *everything* in a hurry because you can't waste time blt'ing to the screen. Taught me an *enormous* amount of how computers work, and the respect for people who write anything graphical.
I can attest that VB can be used in situations that may not be the best fit for it (trading systems, large spreadsheet-based forecasting applications), but as others have said, it's a great tool for "one off" or prototype apps where it's important to get the gist of it going.
That said, what a lot of people don't realize is that Apple has their own VB-like environment with XCode, Cocoa and Objective C. I have been able to prototype and write apps in XCode pretty much the way I did in VB, but I have C as the language, C++ if I want it, and the full API of the system, instead of being limited to what's available in a VBX/OCX or using unnatural syntax to make Win32 calls. Yes, it's Mac only, but that's not a hinderance...the bulk of the application (model and controller) are more easily ported (if necessary) than anything.net.
I've read a number of posts that talk about being able to tweak the kernel for speed speed speed and now you can't with the x86 version of Darwin. Well, really, who did? Who took the time to install Darwin x86 and tweak the hell out of the kernel so that they could run whatever as fast as possible? And how did they deal with the lack of brainshare as opposed to Linux or even FreeBSD, the lack of tweaked configurations for compiling ("Hmm, what am I supposed to do with x86-UNKNOWN?")? Plus, if they were going balls-out for speed, what did they do for a compiler? I guess gcc was good enough and Intel's icc a non-starter.
The point I'm trying to make is that all Apple has done is make *one* flavor of Darwin non-Open Source. So there's only half as much warm-n-fuzzy feeling in this particular arena. BFD; if I want to squeeze insane performance out of my 8 processor 16 gig ram box, I'll consult any number of Linux sites that talk about this and have active, working communities behind it.
Think about it...ATMs are the machines you want to go after, with the large sums of $$$ and all, but besides the obvious security cameras and such, they're typically embedded in a wall; you have access to the slot for the card, the screen, and buttons (if it has buttons). You can't tamper with the machines if you're not given any way to do so. Yes, there are free-standing ATMs but they are like today's voting machines...untrustworthy and I won't use 'em.
So why not design the voting machines in such a way as that you can't get access to anything but the screen? I'm thinking of something like sinking them in a table or somesuch so you can only touch the screen and nothing more. I remember the lever-based voting machines I used kept all the "good stuff" in back, outside the curtain; if you wanted to tamper with that, you did it in the full view of the public.
I would argue a NeXT computer should be part of any display, only because you can show it to people familar with MacOS X and then tell them that this machine has been around since *1990*.
There's one aspect of mainframes that, as of 2003 at my old company, was still in place: charge by the *cycle*. IBM mainframes have done this for years (I believe the 360 had an actual odometer, and an IBM rep would come in and read the number and preparae the invoice based on that).
It may not be every application, but I know that IBM's MQSeries product (now called WebsphereMQ, I believe) had a per-cycle cost on big iron (on top of some huge monthly maintenance fee). I know this because I wrote some middleware to go between MQ and a webserver, and for a week I was testing it and we got hit with a $10k bill.
I think mainframes are amazing machines, but they're also the gift that keeps on giving...to IBM. It's my understanding that a certain amount of backlash against mainframes in general (besides punch cards) was that you were charged to use the machine, regardless of whether or not your program compiled, ran, etc....every pass through the compiler, every load, every output, was $$$.
VS2005 is awful. We skipped VS7 and 7.1 and finally moved to VS2005 because it fully supports the C++98 standard (yes, so did 7.1, but I couldn't convince management). I fire up a small program and get a ton of warnings saying that strncpy, strncat, sprintf, etc., are all depreciated, and I should use the "safer" ones that won't allow for buffer overflows.
Well, guess what...they're not depreciated. Microsoft decided to go around the ISO standards committee and decide that they would label all these functions in such a way as to suggest that str*() functions were going to go away sometime soon. Only VS2005 supports the _s functions, which, surprise surprise, makes your code completely Windows dependent. Yes it's just a warning, and yes you can turn it off, but on a project-by-project basis...there's no global default for this.
They also renamed the Standard Template Library to to "SCL" just because they can. Gee, the rest of the world knows it as STL, but with VS2005 you gotta look for it by another name.
What's sad is that VS2005 came out after Herb Sutter, a member of the ISO standards committe and I'd argue #2 in the food chain of important C++ guys went to work for them. He's actually responsible for some of this. Hey, Herb...thanks for letting me compile Loki, but you can stick bogus depreciation warnings and that whole managed C++ crap where the sun don't shine.
I'd even like to say the editor itself is better, but it's not. It's a resource pig and slow on my top-o-the-line P4 box. I have to say, I'm almost kind of glad...I'd gotten a bit too used to code-completion, but because VS2005 is so slow, I really now have the reason to check and remember the parameters to functions.
And don't get me started on converting MFC or ATL projects from VS6 to VS2005. It's almost easier just to move the code manually.
I always use a monitor class with multithreaded programming; the class handles all the synching and nothing is shared between the threads. In essence, the monitor is a singleton and each thread makes a call to something like g_monitor.getwork(&work) and inside getwork() I do (in pseudocode) wait on mutex, get mutex, pop work off queue, release mutex, hand work back to caller.
Googling doesn't get me a good link to post, but I know it's a common concept in multithreaded programming and has always worked for me...I have never encountered a race condition or a deadlock and I've used this on some pretty intense server apps.
I love OS X, but I love the hardware more. Have you ever used a Powerbook? Mine is a 4 year old war horse that has been all over the world, been dropped, been sat on, had water spilled into the keyboard, has scratches galore, but keeps on running, and running well.
You pay for their hardware because their hardware is worth it. Everyone has their "dead computer" story, regardless of who made it, but I've seen far fewer dead Macs than Dells or Gateways.
BerkeleyDB, InnoDB, and now this new one, provide the actual backing store; e.g. what gets written to the disk. MySQL is, as far as I've been able to tell, basically a front end that gives a SQL interface to dealing with records stored in files maintained by one of these other products.
That said, this is no trivial feat; the raw BerkeleyDB is not very user friendly and I wouldn't even know how to optimize access to it (I've used it for a couple of small projects that needed a little more than flat files, but not a full blown db). What MySQL has done is provide the standard SQL language and some extra code to optimize to the best of their ability the retrieval and storage of records from these binary files.
It's also these back ends where MySQL gets things like ACID; it's up to the back end to make sure that the data can be written completely in one shot, and if not, somehow signal the MySQL part to activate a rollback (I'm presuming here...I'm not certain this is how it works in MySQL but it would make sense insofar as they're backend agnostic).
As one who has foolishly written a database back-end system, I can attest that it is *not* trivial and while Oracle's purchases may just be predatory, they did get some good technology in the process (though I'm guessing neither holds a candle to Oracle's) and I can see why they'd want to throw their hats into another company's ring instead of taking on the task themselves.
...I have to say I do a lot of channel hopping. I pledge to my local station, but because of the regionals, I end up listening to a lot of programming I simply won't get otherwise: Saturday nights is WNYC with Stiles on Your Dials (like that old music), then switch to VPR for Hearts of Space (trippy music to work to), then sometimes Alaska for reports on the Salmon or IDITEROD (or however you spell it) stories, etc.
Because most of the stations stream, I've got a playlist in iTunes just for NPR stations and then will hop around as the mood suits (hmm...what's going on in El Paso today?) Sure All Things Considered is the same everywhere, but that's what makes it great: the standard NPR lineup is the "anchor" that gives you the common platform that all the other stations build off of.
To me, NPR is like the blue ribbon seal of quality in radio; not every program appeals to everyone (I'm looking at you, Whaddya Know), but I'm more willing to experiment because I know it's, at it's heart, NPR.
If anything, it makes me want to give to each of the stations I listen to, to pay for the streaming, but there's so many, it would seem almost insulting to give each one a couple of bucks when I'd rather give a lot more. Sigh, I guess it's time to invent the better moustrap and rake in the licensing fees...then I'll have enough to give to all the stations I listen to.
I totally agree with you on this; it'd be great if VMWare makes an OS X version or if Apple uses something like Xen themselves; I'll take what I can get, but what I want is to not have to actually reboot out of OS X just to run one crummy Windows-only app and lose all my other apps, like email, chat, etc....
To all the people thinking that this is the end of OS X, the end of gaming, "just like OS/2", etc., the difference is that, to me, this changes nothing...I use OS X as my native environment 95% of the time. The other 5% is using specific Windows software that will not ever see a Mac port.
That I can use my Mac to boot natively into XP to use that app is a huge win; I don't need to keep a POS Dell around just for that one app on Windows. Plus, assuming the MacBook is built like my PowerBook, it'll work for me for years as a war horse that can take the punishment I have inflicted on it (hello round-the-world photo shoot, using the PB as my darkroom and portfolio case)
Remember, Apple is a hardware company...they make real stuff that comes in padded boxes. That they can make both kick-ass hardware, *and* a kick-ass operating system doesn't change the fact that, rightly or wrongly, Windows and Dell are still the kings of the hill. Apple has saved me from having to buy a new PC *and* a new copy of Windows with it. That's less money for Microsoft and Dell, and more for Apple (when I get my MacBook).
While I'm a space junkie (specifically Apollo) as much as the next/.'er, Apollo was primarily a political win with scientific and technological benefits.
That said, yes, the benefits of *getting there* were worth it, but I don't know of any value to the rocks brought back other than for, as the article puts it, geology postdocs.
I'm sure there would be more advances in science and technology in a moonbase and later a launchpad to Mars. The space fanboi in me says "sign me up!", but the realist (who I try to drown out as much as possible) looks at the haze in the sky, the 60 degree temps in January, and any recent picture of New Orleans and thinks that maybe we really should be trying to get our local house in order before opening branch offices.
I'm all for pushing the boundries, and I really want to think my kids or their kids might be able to kick back on a Mars beach, but I think I can speak for most of/. when I say that no one wants to use all that jim-dandy technology to get us to Mars because that's the planet of "last resort", to use the hurricane-related term.
I'm always shocked (shocked!) that the problems outlined in The Mythical Man Month are still happening, years and years after the fact. I too have been on projects where the knee-jerk reaction is "let's get more people!" and it has always been a disaster. In fact, one project I was on was hosed by a single commented line (long story) done by a consultant who was there for two days, and never even knew how the system worked (or else he wouldn't have done what he did).
On the other hand, how can projects like the Apollo Space Program succeed? Compared to any computer project, it's unbelievable that anyone can manage all the parts, companies, and research that went in to sending a man to the moon. I read a book, available on NASA's website (sorry, don't have the URL) which described what it took just to build the crawler and superstructure, and I think it was hundreds and hundreds of pages of minutia that I can't believe actually came together.
What's worse of all is that it's one thing to say "this time it's different because...", but with Microsoft they're not saying anything; they seem resigned to the screw up and figure that their monopoly will simply carry the day. "Yeah, we've botched it, but so what? You're gonna use it, you have no choice!"
Google Pages, Google Word (or whatever they're calling it), Gmail, etc. etc.... isn't this the online future that Netscape promised with Navigator 4? Presuming your browser handles the various tech, the OS you use really does become more or less irrelevant as all work is done entirely in the context of html.
We're seeing it with the bigger apps too....Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle (those are the ones I'm familar with) are all browser based. Sure a lot of the world (read: most of the world) is still running off of Excel workbooks and Word documents, but even Microsoft is toying with an online version of Office. I can almost imagine a time when a Mac mini really is all you need (with the exception of games, of course).
I think, in a large part, that it's how the game makes you feel at that unterminable level that makes it worthy of the "remember when". My game was Adventure on the 2600, as I'll bet was also for a lot of people here on/. No part of the game stands up to scrutiny today; the graphics are beyond laughable, the levels were, small, fixed, and unexciting, and the gameplay repetitious.
And I loved it and have nothing but the fondest of memories of it even now.
Yes the graphics have gotten better, but the games aren't as engaging for some reason (at least for me). More realism = less need for imagination = less emotional involvement in the game. I wonder if this is really the gaming plateau we've all been fearing: the games are bigger, better, faster, and totally divorced from my psyche. Franchises should be a help here, but I can't think of any franchise, save Shenmue (and we know how that worked out) that gives you multi-game characters (Link doesn't count because as the stories go, it's not the same one). I would have thought FF was it (and for a lot of people it is), but I found the world *too* big, and too populated with characters you never see again to make that emotional leap.
Here's hoping that the $2000 sdk price of the revolution will inspire a renaissance in games, bringing new games with some heart and soul back into our lives.
I asked this very question and the answer was a cagey "stay tuned for an announcement...". I suppose they could come back and say "no way, no how", but I see no reason why they wouldn't, short of some insurmountable technical hurdle, which given the miracles VMWare performs on a daily basis for me, doesn't seem likely.
I think it'd be win-win for them...VirtualPC is now controlled by Microsoft and maybe they'll update it, maybe they won't, but VMWare has nothing to lose, and they have the better product as well. This could very well be one of the most killer apps for the Mac platform. Sad, but I'd rather take my Mac to work and run Windows under VMWare than use a POS Dell.
I'd say that getting VMWare would be the most popular app available on an Intel Mac after (maybe before) Office. Plus the fact that VMWare's guest OS can fill the screen when running locally, it's like dual booting but without the lack of stability.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"It looks like you're creating a letter, would you like assistance with this, bee-yatch?"
Seeing as there's plenty of crash-related jokes already, I'll just skip to the chase and ask the question most on my mind:
... a simple interrupt mechanism, a priority queue, and lots of inputs...
WTF???
I can't honestly believe this ECU will be running some flavor of windows (NT Embedded? Win2k embedded? XP embedded? WinCE?) and what they bring to the table. Microsoft went on about how WinCE 3.0 was a "real time" OS, but what other than the PocketPC has it been used for?
And while we're at it, what's the point of an OS in a car in the first place? I would think that the number of items that a computer has to deal with are fixed (I'm sure there's a lot, but it's not like you're going to install software on a car) and presumably the OS is some unbelievably simple scheduler a la the DSKY of the Apollo days
Okay, I can't resist one:
"The program 'Brakes' has become unresponsive. Do you want to end the task?"
Um...have you done any programming on the mac, AC? Carbon is the cleaned up legacy API of the pre-OSX days. The idea was that you wrote to Carbon when developing your OS9 app, and then it should pretty much run unmodified in OS X (presuming a recompile to make it OS X native lest your app fire up the classic layer).
In that regard, Carbon is meant to run on other platforms only if you consider OS9 another platform. I think you are thinking that Objective C is somehow a bastardized version of C. It's not; Objective C is the full C language with additional object-oriented components a la C++, but not to the extreme that C++ takes it. Plus, Objective C gives you run time typing, which C++ does not provide (static, compile-time typing). This makes it very easy to get information about objects and is the basis of the key-value system that runs most of Cocoa. Objective C is inspired by Smalltalk and uses a number of its concepts whilst C++ was influenced heavily on Simula2 (I'm pretty sure). Regardless, both can call strncpy(), malloc() etc. if you want.
If you want write truly cross-platform C, you write to the standard C API *only* and let the users get their input and output via stdin and stdout. Not very graphical, but hey, you want cross platform, right?
Not only do I concur, but I would argue that anyone who is going to do anything remotely graphical should spend some time learning about window regions, bitblt, things like that. I'm not saying they have to do it all, but show them what it takes just to draw a line on the screen, and keep it there (or move it around with a mouse). *Then* you'll not only get an appreciation for the amount of memory and cpu spent, but what it takes to actually display all that eye candy on the screen.
I was mostly a back-end systems programmer until I got a job writing real-time charting software...you learn to optimize *everything* in a hurry because you can't waste time blt'ing to the screen. Taught me an *enormous* amount of how computers work, and the respect for people who write anything graphical.
I can attest that VB can be used in situations that may not be the best fit for it (trading systems, large spreadsheet-based forecasting applications), but as others have said, it's a great tool for "one off" or prototype apps where it's important to get the gist of it going.
.net.
That said, what a lot of people don't realize is that Apple has their own VB-like environment with XCode, Cocoa and Objective C. I have been able to prototype and write apps in XCode pretty much the way I did in VB, but I have C as the language, C++ if I want it, and the full API of the system, instead of being limited to what's available in a VBX/OCX or using unnatural syntax to make Win32 calls. Yes, it's Mac only, but that's not a hinderance...the bulk of the application (model and controller) are more easily ported (if necessary) than anything
I've read a number of posts that talk about being able to tweak the kernel for speed speed speed and now you can't with the x86 version of Darwin. Well, really, who did? Who took the time to install Darwin x86 and tweak the hell out of the kernel so that they could run whatever as fast as possible? And how did they deal with the lack of brainshare as opposed to Linux or even FreeBSD, the lack of tweaked configurations for compiling ("Hmm, what am I supposed to do with x86-UNKNOWN?")? Plus, if they were going balls-out for speed, what did they do for a compiler? I guess gcc was good enough and Intel's icc a non-starter.
The point I'm trying to make is that all Apple has done is make *one* flavor of Darwin non-Open Source. So there's only half as much warm-n-fuzzy feeling in this particular arena. BFD; if I want to squeeze insane performance out of my 8 processor 16 gig ram box, I'll consult any number of Linux sites that talk about this and have active, working communities behind it.
Think about it...ATMs are the machines you want to go after, with the large sums of $$$ and all, but besides the obvious security cameras and such, they're typically embedded in a wall; you have access to the slot for the card, the screen, and buttons (if it has buttons). You can't tamper with the machines if you're not given any way to do so. Yes, there are free-standing ATMs but they are like today's voting machines...untrustworthy and I won't use 'em.
So why not design the voting machines in such a way as that you can't get access to anything but the screen? I'm thinking of something like sinking them in a table or somesuch so you can only touch the screen and nothing more. I remember the lever-based voting machines I used kept all the "good stuff" in back, outside the curtain; if you wanted to tamper with that, you did it in the full view of the public.
I would argue a NeXT computer should be part of any display, only because you can show it to people familar with MacOS X and then tell them that this machine has been around since *1990*.
There's one aspect of mainframes that, as of 2003 at my old company, was still in place: charge by the *cycle*. IBM mainframes have done this for years (I believe the 360 had an actual odometer, and an IBM rep would come in and read the number and preparae the invoice based on that).
It may not be every application, but I know that IBM's MQSeries product (now called WebsphereMQ, I believe) had a per-cycle cost on big iron (on top of some huge monthly maintenance fee). I know this because I wrote some middleware to go between MQ and a webserver, and for a week I was testing it and we got hit with a $10k bill.
I think mainframes are amazing machines, but they're also the gift that keeps on giving...to IBM. It's my understanding that a certain amount of backlash against mainframes in general (besides punch cards) was that you were charged to use the machine, regardless of whether or not your program compiled, ran, etc....every pass through the compiler, every load, every output, was $$$.
Sorry 'bout that; the first sentence in the paragraph refered to OSX so I thought that's what you were talking about.
You don't need to log out and back in as an admin in OSX...just supply the username and password of an admin on the box.
VS2005 is awful. We skipped VS7 and 7.1 and finally moved to VS2005 because it fully supports the C++98 standard (yes, so did 7.1, but I couldn't convince management). I fire up a small program and get a ton of warnings saying that strncpy, strncat, sprintf, etc., are all depreciated, and I should use the "safer" ones that won't allow for buffer overflows.
Well, guess what...they're not depreciated. Microsoft decided to go around the ISO standards committee and decide that they would label all these functions in such a way as to suggest that str*() functions were going to go away sometime soon. Only VS2005 supports the _s functions, which, surprise surprise, makes your code completely Windows dependent. Yes it's just a warning, and yes you can turn it off, but on a project-by-project basis...there's no global default for this.
They also renamed the Standard Template Library to to "SCL" just because they can. Gee, the rest of the world knows it as STL, but with VS2005 you gotta look for it by another name.
What's sad is that VS2005 came out after Herb Sutter, a member of the ISO standards committe and I'd argue #2 in the food chain of important C++ guys went to work for them. He's actually responsible for some of this. Hey, Herb...thanks for letting me compile Loki, but you can stick bogus depreciation warnings and that whole managed C++ crap where the sun don't shine.
I'd even like to say the editor itself is better, but it's not. It's a resource pig and slow on my top-o-the-line P4 box. I have to say, I'm almost kind of glad...I'd gotten a bit too used to code-completion, but because VS2005 is so slow, I really now have the reason to check and remember the parameters to functions.
And don't get me started on converting MFC or ATL projects from VS6 to VS2005. It's almost easier just to move the code manually.
I always use a monitor class with multithreaded programming; the class handles all the synching and nothing is shared between the threads. In essence, the monitor is a singleton and each thread makes a call to something like g_monitor.getwork(&work) and inside getwork() I do (in pseudocode) wait on mutex, get mutex, pop work off queue, release mutex, hand work back to caller.
Googling doesn't get me a good link to post, but I know it's a common concept in multithreaded programming and has always worked for me...I have never encountered a race condition or a deadlock and I've used this on some pretty intense server apps.
Just my $0.02.
I love OS X, but I love the hardware more. Have you ever used a Powerbook? Mine is a 4 year old war horse that has been all over the world, been dropped, been sat on, had water spilled into the keyboard, has scratches galore, but keeps on running, and running well.
You pay for their hardware because their hardware is worth it. Everyone has their "dead computer" story, regardless of who made it, but I've seen far fewer dead Macs than Dells or Gateways.
BerkeleyDB, InnoDB, and now this new one, provide the actual backing store; e.g. what gets written to the disk. MySQL is, as far as I've been able to tell, basically a front end that gives a SQL interface to dealing with records stored in files maintained by one of these other products.
That said, this is no trivial feat; the raw BerkeleyDB is not very user friendly and I wouldn't even know how to optimize access to it (I've used it for a couple of small projects that needed a little more than flat files, but not a full blown db). What MySQL has done is provide the standard SQL language and some extra code to optimize to the best of their ability the retrieval and storage of records from these binary files.
It's also these back ends where MySQL gets things like ACID; it's up to the back end to make sure that the data can be written completely in one shot, and if not, somehow signal the MySQL part to activate a rollback (I'm presuming here...I'm not certain this is how it works in MySQL but it would make sense insofar as they're backend agnostic).
As one who has foolishly written a database back-end system, I can attest that it is *not* trivial and while Oracle's purchases may just be predatory, they did get some good technology in the process (though I'm guessing neither holds a candle to Oracle's) and I can see why they'd want to throw their hats into another company's ring instead of taking on the task themselves.
...I have to say I do a lot of channel hopping. I pledge to my local station, but because of the regionals, I end up listening to a lot of programming I simply won't get otherwise: Saturday nights is WNYC with Stiles on Your Dials (like that old music), then switch to VPR for Hearts of Space (trippy music to work to), then sometimes Alaska for reports on the Salmon or IDITEROD (or however you spell it) stories, etc.
Because most of the stations stream, I've got a playlist in iTunes just for NPR stations and then will hop around as the mood suits (hmm...what's going on in El Paso today?) Sure All Things Considered is the same everywhere, but that's what makes it great: the standard NPR lineup is the "anchor" that gives you the common platform that all the other stations build off of.
To me, NPR is like the blue ribbon seal of quality in radio; not every program appeals to everyone (I'm looking at you, Whaddya Know), but I'm more willing to experiment because I know it's, at it's heart, NPR.
If anything, it makes me want to give to each of the stations I listen to, to pay for the streaming, but there's so many, it would seem almost insulting to give each one a couple of bucks when I'd rather give a lot more. Sigh, I guess it's time to invent the better moustrap and rake in the licensing fees...then I'll have enough to give to all the stations I listen to.
I totally agree with you on this; it'd be great if VMWare makes an OS X version or if Apple uses something like Xen themselves; I'll take what I can get, but what I want is to not have to actually reboot out of OS X just to run one crummy Windows-only app and lose all my other apps, like email, chat, etc....
To all the people thinking that this is the end of OS X, the end of gaming, "just like OS/2", etc., the difference is that, to me, this changes nothing...I use OS X as my native environment 95% of the time. The other 5% is using specific Windows software that will not ever see a Mac port.
That I can use my Mac to boot natively into XP to use that app is a huge win; I don't need to keep a POS Dell around just for that one app on Windows. Plus, assuming the MacBook is built like my PowerBook, it'll work for me for years as a war horse that can take the punishment I have inflicted on it (hello round-the-world photo shoot, using the PB as my darkroom and portfolio case)
Remember, Apple is a hardware company...they make real stuff that comes in padded boxes. That they can make both kick-ass hardware, *and* a kick-ass operating system doesn't change the fact that, rightly or wrongly, Windows and Dell are still the kings of the hill. Apple has saved me from having to buy a new PC *and* a new copy of Windows with it. That's less money for Microsoft and Dell, and more for Apple (when I get my MacBook).
Seems like a pretty smart move to me.
...the movie is worth watching at all, DVD or theatre.
While I'm a space junkie (specifically Apollo) as much as the next /.'er, Apollo was primarily a political win with scientific and technological benefits.
/. when I say that no one wants to use all that jim-dandy technology to get us to Mars because that's the planet of "last resort", to use the hurricane-related term.
That said, yes, the benefits of *getting there* were worth it, but I don't know of any value to the rocks brought back other than for, as the article puts it, geology postdocs.
I'm sure there would be more advances in science and technology in a moonbase and later a launchpad to Mars. The space fanboi in me says "sign me up!", but the realist (who I try to drown out as much as possible) looks at the haze in the sky, the 60 degree temps in January, and any recent picture of New Orleans and thinks that maybe we really should be trying to get our local house in order before opening branch offices.
I'm all for pushing the boundries, and I really want to think my kids or their kids might be able to kick back on a Mars beach, but I think I can speak for most of
Here you go
I'm always shocked (shocked!) that the problems outlined in The Mythical Man Month are still happening, years and years after the fact. I too have been on projects where the knee-jerk reaction is "let's get more people!" and it has always been a disaster. In fact, one project I was on was hosed by a single commented line (long story) done by a consultant who was there for two days, and never even knew how the system worked (or else he wouldn't have done what he did).
On the other hand, how can projects like the Apollo Space Program succeed? Compared to any computer project, it's unbelievable that anyone can manage all the parts, companies, and research that went in to sending a man to the moon. I read a book, available on NASA's website (sorry, don't have the URL) which described what it took just to build the crawler and superstructure, and I think it was hundreds and hundreds of pages of minutia that I can't believe actually came together.
What's worse of all is that it's one thing to say "this time it's different because...", but with Microsoft they're not saying anything; they seem resigned to the screw up and figure that their monopoly will simply carry the day. "Yeah, we've botched it, but so what? You're gonna use it, you have no choice!"
Google Pages, Google Word (or whatever they're calling it), Gmail, etc. etc. ... isn't this the online future that Netscape promised with Navigator 4? Presuming your browser handles the various tech, the OS you use really does become more or less irrelevant as all work is done entirely in the context of html.
We're seeing it with the bigger apps too....Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle (those are the ones I'm familar with) are all browser based. Sure a lot of the world (read: most of the world) is still running off of Excel workbooks and Word documents, but even Microsoft is toying with an online version of Office. I can almost imagine a time when a Mac mini really is all you need (with the exception of games, of course).
I think, in a large part, that it's how the game makes you feel at that unterminable level that makes it worthy of the "remember when". My game was Adventure on the 2600, as I'll bet was also for a lot of people here on /. No part of the game stands up to scrutiny today; the graphics are beyond laughable, the levels were, small, fixed, and unexciting, and the gameplay repetitious.
And I loved it and have nothing but the fondest of memories of it even now.
Yes the graphics have gotten better, but the games aren't as engaging for some reason (at least for me). More realism = less need for imagination = less emotional involvement in the game. I wonder if this is really the gaming plateau we've all been fearing: the games are bigger, better, faster, and totally divorced from my psyche. Franchises should be a help here, but I can't think of any franchise, save Shenmue (and we know how that worked out) that gives you multi-game characters (Link doesn't count because as the stories go, it's not the same one). I would have thought FF was it (and for a lot of people it is), but I found the world *too* big, and too populated with characters you never see again to make that emotional leap.
Here's hoping that the $2000 sdk price of the revolution will inspire a renaissance in games, bringing new games with some heart and soul back into our lives.
I asked this very question and the answer was a cagey "stay tuned for an announcement...". I suppose they could come back and say "no way, no how", but I see no reason why they wouldn't, short of some insurmountable technical hurdle, which given the miracles VMWare performs on a daily basis for me, doesn't seem likely.
:)
I think it'd be win-win for them...VirtualPC is now controlled by Microsoft and maybe they'll update it, maybe they won't, but VMWare has nothing to lose, and they have the better product as well. This could very well be one of the most killer apps for the Mac platform. Sad, but I'd rather take my Mac to work and run Windows under VMWare than use a POS Dell.
I'd say that getting VMWare would be the most popular app available on an Intel Mac after (maybe before) Office. Plus the fact that VMWare's guest OS can fill the screen when running locally, it's like dual booting but without the lack of stability.