I tried to submit this story to Slashdot twice (not complaining, just stating), once when I couldn't tell anyone that Roxio was buying Napster, just that "someone" was, and a second time when the press release hit the wire.
Roxio is trying to buy "substantially all" of Napster's assets which is mainly the Napster name and the IP patents Napster has. Roxio passed on the physical assets (obviously) as it didn't need them, and on just buying the company outright as it didn't want to inherit Napster's debt load or pending lawsuits. The proposed sale is for $5 million in cash and 100,000 shares ($300-$400 thousand), and needs to be approved by the Delaware bankrupcy court handling Napster's bankrupcy.
What they intend to do is "secret" until Napster is actually bought, but with a reasonable assumption or two you can figure it out. Roxio's business is computer software, and about 40% of their income used to come from OEM bundling of lite versions of the software with computers and CD-R/RW drives. When the PC market took a dive, the OEM agreements made less, but also slowed the rate at which new users were upgrading from the lite to the standard version of the software which further reduced revenue. If you look at the income they reported this last summer, it was well below expectations and at that point the stock dove from the $16-$18 range to the $3-$5 range.
Roxio needs/wants a source of income that is not tied to how often people buy new computers or CD burners. A subscription music service may just be the ticket. Remember, Roxio has agreements and contacts with all the major recording labels and even with some movie houses.
For the record, I don't work for Roxio, I just know about an eighth of the company.
No matter how many times you roll those two dice, if they are truely random dice (perfectly equal probability of each side landing up) you will NEVER get a Bell curve out of them. Furthermore, the probability graph peaks at the value of 7 for two 6-sided dice (labeled 1-6, as such dice typically are), not at 6!
There are 36 ways for two 6-sided dice to turn up (6*6). There is one way each to roll a 2 or a 12, which is either double 1's or 6's. There are two ways to get either 3 (roll a 1 and a 2, roll a 2 and a 1) or 11 (roll a 5 and a 6, roll a 6 and a 5). There are three ways to get either a 4 or a 10, four ways to get 5 or 9 as the result, five ways to get 6 or 8, and six ways to roll a perfect 7. If you do the math, the probabilities from 2 to 12 (in order) are: 1/36, 2/36, 3/36, 4/36, 5/36, 6/36, 5/36, 4/36, 3/36, 2/36, 1/36. This is a straight line up, peaking at the probability for rolling 7, followed by a straight line down, which is obviously not a curve.
I submit to you that Gaijin's Introduction to Statistics may need some reworking.:-)
The graphs should have been discreet! Then again, maybe some of them WERE discreet, and the discreet data points blurred together.
Yeah, I'm just hammering on my "they used extremely large graph ranges" point again. Seriously, though, there is a hell of a difference between the 0- to 20-word graph on page 3 and the 0- to 400-word graphs on pages 4 and 5.
The 0- to 400-word graph on the last page doesn't even properly illustrate the difference between DDR and SDR because it uses such a huge range and totally ignores the smaller end of the spectrum (the more realistic situation) where DDR beats SDR by a wide margin.
First, a caveat: I've been a regular Ars reader for the last two years. That said, I did not care for this article for the following reasons:
It was too shallow for the truely technical and too contorted for the uninitiated to follow. The author mixed metaphors, then piled confusing illustration atop constant admonitions not to let the illustration mislead you.
It tried to cover theory and therefore didn't include any real-world examples drawn from either modern or historic system designs with the exception of a short blurb about the Apple G3. It switched haphazardly from assuming a 3 cycle latency on memory reads to 9, then back to 3, then to 6, without explaining where those numbers came from. Graphs have large ranges with no explaination of whether one would ever see a situation that mimics the higher end of the graph.
It was not internally consistent. The choice of bus speeds in the bandwidth examples jumps back and forth between 100 MHz and 133 MHz, which mean that the examples cannot be compared to each other. Also, the illustrations show what the bandwidth usage would be for a 4 word burst, then shows a graph that goes into the low hundreds of words.
Summing up, the article doesn't inform the technical, will confuse the non-technical, doesn't follow any consistent set of example conditions, contains very arbitrary graphs, and is generally poorly written. It is possible that I couldn't do any better (before I get flamed), but I doubt any technical writer worth his/her salt would do much worse.
Business took me to La Jolla (and San Diego, and Coronado, and...) for site acquisition just two weeks ago. If I had known about this I would have left some flaming dog poo, or a dead skunk, or at least a well-written opinion piece on the dangers of abusing IP laws, threats of frivolous lawsuits on national productivity, and possibility of countersuit in cases of filing of false patent claims to extort money in the state of California.
This may be a little off the mark, but no matter how you test the actual transaction processing PLEASE make sure the output conforms to W3C specifications. I'm on a big standards kick (have been a Mozilla User since it could be distributed on a floppy), and I have seen too many dynamic web apps which totally break HTML and XHTML rules. One site I visit regularly actually declares itself to be written in XHTML STRICT 1.0 in the DOCTYPE when it is clearly not (looks more like HTML 4.01, but broken).
Yeah, I know "Web Standards" are like "Nobel Laurate-Supermodels". Still, I dream of a better tomorrow where I can use a standards-compliant browser without pages breaking, and have my cancer cured by someone who invented instantaneous travel while looking FAAAAABULOUS.
Check out the W3C HTML Validation Service to test your code for standards compliance. I love seeing those little "W3C: HTML 4.01" images all over the place!
You have let Roxio know that you went back to a previous version? Why should they care, or even take you seriously? You are obviously extrapolating on what was actually said in the EULA based on nothing more than your own paranoid fantasies of software makers wanting to control your system. This does not make your complaint valid or credible.
For the record, I DO NOT work for Roxio. Also for the record, I DID work for Roxio in the past. While I cannot tell you why mention of DRM was added in recent Toast releases, the reason is abundantly obvious and has been guessed at corectly several times already. What I can tell you, however, is that Roxio does not have (nor do they particularly wish to write) automatic update code in Toast. Also, if they DID have auto-update code it would have to be mentioned SOMEWHERE in the legalese or else they could be accused of cracking your computer. Remember, the law prohibits unapproved access.
I am not a lawyer (so you know job I didn't hold at Roxio), but from what I recall of business law your statement "remember, it is allowed if it is not prohibited" is exactly false since the exact oposite is true. Unless something is explicitly stated to be allowed, it is NOT allowed by the contract.
Consider the ridiculous case of Roxio not mentioning that they are forbidden from killing your pets once you agree to the EULA. By your statement since they weren't DISALLOWED from killing your pets when you agreed to the EULA (it is not prohibited), they must have the legal right to slaughter Fluffy, and there is no recourse available to you.
I guess to summarize, please keep your half-assed, paranoid musings in your own head. There is enough scary, invasive, abusive crap going on in the industry without you making more stuff up.
Did I miss something critical because I was REALLY busy getting ready for a product release and only reading Cryptonomicon at night? I could swear that Enoch Root died in Sweden. Flip foreward 100 pages and he's merrily talking to Randy and/or conspiring to get into Golgotha, both taking place AFTER his death.
Did I miss something VITAL or is Stephenson on the crack pipe again?
Otherwise it was a pretty good book. Except for Andrew Loeb suddenly becoming the raving, slinking villain out of nowhere (WTF?). Except for the ending I saw coming. Except for...
Now, who wants to work on this OS for real? I suck at OS coding (as I haven't done ANY coding in 5 years), but I'll gladly be a beta-test space-monkey for you!
I've been a Microsoft customer for years now. I'm writing this on my Windows 2000 Pro system, using IE 5.5, and I may fire Office 2000 up to spellcheck this. I use these products on purpose, not because they came with my computer.
Goodbye Karma.
Now to redeem myself. Microsoft and the companies it pays to lobby our lawmakers have gotten out of hand. I'll wait while everybody says "Duh" right now. Here's what we should do about the "grassroots efforts" they are trying to fabricate: start our own.
I don't mean this in a pro-Linux sense, and especially not in a pro-regulation sense. What I propose is that American/.-ers start writing to the office of the Governor, local Congressman, Senator, and/or State Attorney General's office expressing concern over Microsofts lobbying behavior. Point to the LA Times article, point out that this was tried 3 years ago when MS was going to pay for "sponaneous letters of support" at the outset of the trial, and most of all be polite and concise about it. Mention being concerned about their stranglehold on the tech industry or behavior towards other companies or blatant disregard for the court rulings against them, but not as the main focus of your letter.
We have a huge use community here. Let's use it to correct a lie.
Andy Hunter
San Jose, CA
PS: This is the only time you'll see my real name anywhere online. I hope that says something here.
PPS: In my defense, I'm not submitting this in Mozilla because there was a submit bug in the nightly build from last night;-)
In my humble opinion, Be is greatly superior to both Linux and Windows. Before I'm moderated down as Flamebait, I want to point out that I have a triple-boot system, and have the experience in all three to make a pretty valid asessment.
Windows is sort of easy, very popular, and has excellent driver support. If it was honestly as bad as people say, it wouldn't exist because people WOULD look elsewhere. Windows is at least good enough for the unwashed masses.
Linux is an interesting experiment and a powerful *nix, especially for the money. The problem is it IS hard to use. Even KDE and GNOME only scratch the surface. It is a system built on a very old specification, and it shows. Users (not newbies, just users) want to use the system, not tweak it endlessly. Recompiling the Kernel, Libraries, and Apps to get good performance (mine sucked until I did the above) is time consuming, overly technical, and more than even many power user would be willing to do. Linux is a great *nix, but not a great Desktop OS.
Be is the youngest and still has a ways to go, but it shows the most promise. I fear it will die off because of Windows dominance or a shift to IAs by Be, but I hope not. It is very responsive, contains no overtly legacy code, has an Object Oriented API, boots in seconds (while MS tweaks Windows to get 3x the boot time), and is very stable. The only reason I don't use BeOS more is its small Application support and the fact that I haven't figured out PPPoE on Be yet and I can't live without my DSL.
I see an Open Source Be being disected and pasted on Linux (Bad Idea), being fractured as hackers paste on *nix concepts (Worse Idea), or being left to die by a community already focused on Linux (A Tradjedy). I hope Be makes it, but I don't think that the magic balm of OSS is the key. More likely Be would die a quick death as OSS, especially after the proprietary code (from other companies) is culled to keep copyright lawyers happy.
Based on what you've seen in the last 20+ years, what are the most important leaps foreward so far (in your humble opinion) besides the GUI and the microprocessor (too obvious)?
Looking ahead 5, 10, 20+ years, what still needs to happen to make computers more useful, powerful, widely accepted, affordable, whatever?
I guess I'm hoping for a little insight into the past (I was only born the year the Apple II was released) and some thoughts, not on where we're going, but on where we should be going.
I did a little digging on Mozilla.Org. I checked the tree status and it was "Closed" but not "Closed for M17". I checked the milestone plan and the planned date for M17 to be on the wire is today's date, which is obviously wrong. If you look at the top of that page, though, there is a note (with a really screwed up date) that says that M17 will be out in at least two weeks, no sooner. Now, this info is suspect since the date is actually for a year ago, but it wasn't there before so my guess is that the date is a fat-finger error.
On a side rant, I agree with the original poster (christophercook) here. People need to get their heads out of their asses and check to see that their "M17" download came out of the "nightly" directory and not the "milestone" directory. Duh?
For Consideration and Discussion...
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 1
I'm no addict and I'm certainly no expert, but I know what I like. Here's a short list.
Vampire Hunter D: This can actually be seen on TNT late at night, but heavily edited. Grab the full version. It is a distopian view of a future where vampires rule the world and man a slave race confronted with werewolves, mutants, will-o-wisps, and the like.
Fist of the North Star: NOT the live version with Malcom McDowell. This is perhaps the most violent anime I've seen and the ending is a bit odd and possibly even anti-climactic, but this is a must-see. A man who is betrayed by his best friend and brothers gets medieval on lots of asses.
Neo Tokyo: This is a group of four very different stories. It kinda defies other description, but I'll just say the one about the racer is probably the coolest anime I've seen.
The Ghost in the Shell: Cyberpunk. Need I say more?
Akira: The heartwarming story of a boy and his sudden ability to do amazing amounts of damage to whole brigades of army units. This is yet another futuristic story set after the world has rebuilt a bit from World War III (or IV or V), and takes place in Neo Tokyo, not to be confused with the movie previously mentioned. An orphan is exposed to a power source that drives him crazy while giving him the power to do whatever he wants to matter.
As you can all see, I watch the violent stuff, but this is the best I've seen. Ranma 1/2 can be funny, but I don't personally like it much. Dragonball Z would be better if they didn't stretch every fight into a whole season (give or take) and center entire shows around one punch and one fireball. The old RoboTech stuff was cool, but I was 8 when I watched it and I really can't say whether I'd still like it.
Besides being a patently dumb name (sounds like a new Noble gas), Xeon is a chip with split personalities.
The original PII Xeons were the standard Deschutes (.25 micron PII) cores with full-speed L2 cache at 512 KB, 1 MB, and 2 MB. Those were replaced by the PIII Xeons that had the Katmai (.25 micron PIII) core with the same cache and sporting the addition of SSE. Both were rated for up to 8-way SMP. These are the Xeons that maxed out at 550 MHz.
There are a newer batch of Xeons based on the Coppermine core (.18 micron) that don't really differ from today's PIII's except that they are rated for multiprocessing (2-way only, I think). The Coppermine Xeons have 256 KB of on-chip L2 cache, just like the Coppermine PIII's, and can run on the 100 MHz or 133 MHz GTL+ bus, just like the Coppermine PIII's.
Skip ahead to the last week. PIII's are now rated as SMP (2-way only) capable. The Xeons being announced have SSE and on-chip cache, but the cache is (mostly) the same size as the old Katmai Xeons, namely 1 MB and 2 MB. I guess 512 KB is gone for good. Also, the new high-speed Xeons are capable of 8-way SMP, like the old Katmai and Deschutes Xeons.
One interesting note on the stability and scalability of Intel's bus design (remember it's been in use for 5 years+) is that they have pushed a bus that started at 60 and 66 MHz to 133 MHz, but in order to allow SMP beyond 2-way they can't get above 100 MHz.
GK
Please note that I did this all from memory and with all the holes in my for eating and hearing and whatnot I'm surprised all my memory hasn't leaked out yet. Now warned, you may flame away.
Hey, did you check out the big "IF" there, Sparky? I said "IF" it was so, then there were big problems. Yes, I read the article before I posted. Yes I know there isn't any official word on the matter from AOL.
The fact of the matter is, ever since jwz resigned there has been a lot of FUD bandied about in the press. We keep hearing (even from Mozilla insiders like Jamie) about the dearth of "outside help". Mozilla is regarded either as a savior or an albatross in the press, depending on what flavor of enema the particualr reporter is using this week.
I think that at the slightest hint (yes, even a rumor) of AOL doing anything fishy with the Mozilla project, they need to hear from the populace what we think of Mozilla. If the rumor is unfounded, we all wasted two minutes out of our day and AOL will still have a new respect for what the public's opinion of Mozilla is. If the rumor is true, it might disuade AOL from rash behavior.
I'm about to date myself, but when I was a kid the show Quantum Leap was canceled due to the perceived indifference of the public. A massive letter writing campaign brought it back from the proverbial can shortly therafter. Do you suppose that if the outpouring had come when there was even a hint that the network might cancel the show, the execs would never have done what they did?
I was quite far from going off half-cocked. I believe this is a prudent course of action, no matter what the truth of the rumor. Sorry if I only dealt with the worst case, but I had to go to work, and direct, if a bit too light in reasoned arguement, was all I had time for.
On a more personal note, may I suggest you get some counseling? You seem to have this "They can't see me so I'll say whatever I want to piss them off" attitude that is way too prevalent on the web today.
There are two things you should consider. First, there really are people at the other end of your little Anonymous Coward(ly) barbs, and I doubt many of them are morons. Second, you shouldn't feel clever for what you said. It was childish at best and I would have to care about your opinion before you could piss me off.
... for two reasons. First and foremost, Mozilla is on the way to being the most open and accessable browser ever, supporting all the W3C standards and running on numerous platforms. Secondly, if Mozilla is actually retracted (not just funding cut), then we've been lied to. When AOL took over they swore up and down that they would keep funding Mozilla, and at the very least that the Mozilla source code, such as it was, would be free for all time.
If this now turns out to be bull it would be a great blow, not only to Open Source but to AOL and Netscape's credebility.
I am not, for the record, an active contributor to the Mozilla project. Unfortunately, my limited experience with programming does not include anything that would make me more useful than harmful. I do, however, regularly help by downloading a nightly build or milestone and reporting on bugs. Similarly, I plan to take part in the BugZilla 300 by breaking down current bugs to the simplest test case so that the real engineers can stamp them out effectively.
Come on, folks. Let's all Slashdot AOL with what a bad idea it would be to try to close the mozilla sources!
Slashdot Mirror
Roxio is trying to buy "substantially all" of Napster's assets which is mainly the Napster name and the IP patents Napster has. Roxio passed on the physical assets (obviously) as it didn't need them, and on just buying the company outright as it didn't want to inherit Napster's debt load or pending lawsuits. The proposed sale is for $5 million in cash and 100,000 shares ($300-$400 thousand), and needs to be approved by the Delaware bankrupcy court handling Napster's bankrupcy.
What they intend to do is "secret" until Napster is actually bought, but with a reasonable assumption or two you can figure it out. Roxio's business is computer software, and about 40% of their income used to come from OEM bundling of lite versions of the software with computers and CD-R/RW drives. When the PC market took a dive, the OEM agreements made less, but also slowed the rate at which new users were upgrading from the lite to the standard version of the software which further reduced revenue. If you look at the income they reported this last summer, it was well below expectations and at that point the stock dove from the $16-$18 range to the $3-$5 range.
Roxio needs/wants a source of income that is not tied to how often people buy new computers or CD burners. A subscription music service may just be the ticket. Remember, Roxio has agreements and contacts with all the major recording labels and even with some movie houses.
For the record, I don't work for Roxio, I just know about an eighth of the company.
No matter how many times you roll those two dice, if they are truely random dice (perfectly equal probability of each side landing up) you will NEVER get a Bell curve out of them. Furthermore, the probability graph peaks at the value of 7 for two 6-sided dice (labeled 1-6, as such dice typically are), not at 6!
:-)
There are 36 ways for two 6-sided dice to turn up (6*6). There is one way each to roll a 2 or a 12, which is either double 1's or 6's. There are two ways to get either 3 (roll a 1 and a 2, roll a 2 and a 1) or 11 (roll a 5 and a 6, roll a 6 and a 5). There are three ways to get either a 4 or a 10, four ways to get 5 or 9 as the result, five ways to get 6 or 8, and six ways to roll a perfect 7. If you do the math, the probabilities from 2 to 12 (in order) are: 1/36, 2/36, 3/36, 4/36, 5/36, 6/36, 5/36, 4/36, 3/36, 2/36, 1/36. This is a straight line up, peaking at the probability for rolling 7, followed by a straight line down, which is obviously not a curve.
I submit to you that Gaijin's Introduction to Statistics may need some reworking.
Yeah, I'm just hammering on my "they used extremely large graph ranges" point again. Seriously, though, there is a hell of a difference between the 0- to 20-word graph on page 3 and the 0- to 400-word graphs on pages 4 and 5.
The 0- to 400-word graph on the last page doesn't even properly illustrate the difference between DDR and SDR because it uses such a huge range and totally ignores the smaller end of the spectrum (the more realistic situation) where DDR beats SDR by a wide margin.
Summing up, the article doesn't inform the technical, will confuse the non-technical, doesn't follow any consistent set of example conditions, contains very arbitrary graphs, and is generally poorly written. It is possible that I couldn't do any better (before I get flamed), but I doubt any technical writer worth his/her salt would do much worse.
Business took me to La Jolla (and San Diego, and Coronado, and...) for site acquisition just two weeks ago. If I had known about this I would have left some flaming dog poo, or a dead skunk, or at least a well-written opinion piece on the dangers of abusing IP laws, threats of frivolous lawsuits on national productivity, and possibility of countersuit in cases of filing of false patent claims to extort money in the state of California.
Whichever suited me at the time...
I've seen the author before, so I know she must be real. Her name was S1m0ne, or something...
This may be a little off the mark, but no matter how you test the actual transaction processing PLEASE make sure the output conforms to W3C specifications. I'm on a big standards kick (have been a Mozilla User since it could be distributed on a floppy), and I have seen too many dynamic web apps which totally break HTML and XHTML rules. One site I visit regularly actually declares itself to be written in XHTML STRICT 1.0 in the DOCTYPE when it is clearly not (looks more like HTML 4.01, but broken).
Yeah, I know "Web Standards" are like "Nobel Laurate-Supermodels". Still, I dream of a better tomorrow where I can use a standards-compliant browser without pages breaking, and have my cancer cured by someone who invented instantaneous travel while looking FAAAAABULOUS.
Check out the W3C HTML Validation Service to test your code for standards compliance. I love seeing those little "W3C: HTML 4.01" images all over the place!
</ENDRANT>
You have let Roxio know that you went back to a previous version? Why should they care, or even take you seriously? You are obviously extrapolating on what was actually said in the EULA based on nothing more than your own paranoid fantasies of software makers wanting to control your system. This does not make your complaint valid or credible.
For the record, I DO NOT work for Roxio. Also for the record, I DID work for Roxio in the past. While I cannot tell you why mention of DRM was added in recent Toast releases, the reason is abundantly obvious and has been guessed at corectly several times already. What I can tell you, however, is that Roxio does not have (nor do they particularly wish to write) automatic update code in Toast. Also, if they DID have auto-update code it would have to be mentioned SOMEWHERE in the legalese or else they could be accused of cracking your computer. Remember, the law prohibits unapproved access.
I am not a lawyer (so you know job I didn't hold at Roxio), but from what I recall of business law your statement "remember, it is allowed if it is not prohibited" is exactly false since the exact oposite is true. Unless something is explicitly stated to be allowed, it is NOT allowed by the contract.
Consider the ridiculous case of Roxio not mentioning that they are forbidden from killing your pets once you agree to the EULA. By your statement since they weren't DISALLOWED from killing your pets when you agreed to the EULA (it is not prohibited), they must have the legal right to slaughter Fluffy, and there is no recourse available to you.
I guess to summarize, please keep your half-assed, paranoid musings in your own head. There is enough scary, invasive, abusive crap going on in the industry without you making more stuff up.
You may mark me a Troll now.
Did I miss something VITAL or is Stephenson on the crack pipe again?
Otherwise it was a pretty good book. Except for Andrew Loeb suddenly becoming the raving, slinking villain out of nowhere (WTF?). Except for the ending I saw coming. Except for...
Now, who wants to work on this OS for real? I suck at OS coding (as I haven't done ANY coding in 5 years), but I'll gladly be a beta-test space-monkey for you!
I've been a Microsoft customer for years now. I'm writing this on my Windows 2000 Pro system, using IE 5.5, and I may fire Office 2000 up to spellcheck this. I use these products on purpose, not because they came with my computer.
Goodbye Karma.
Now to redeem myself. Microsoft and the companies it pays to lobby our lawmakers have gotten out of hand. I'll wait while everybody says "Duh" right now. Here's what we should do about the "grassroots efforts" they are trying to fabricate: start our own.
I don't mean this in a pro-Linux sense, and especially not in a pro-regulation sense. What I propose is that American /.-ers start writing to the office of the Governor, local Congressman, Senator, and/or State Attorney General's office expressing concern over Microsofts lobbying behavior. Point to the LA Times article, point out that this was tried 3 years ago when MS was going to pay for "sponaneous letters of support" at the outset of the trial, and most of all be polite and concise about it. Mention being concerned about their stranglehold on the tech industry or behavior towards other companies or blatant disregard for the court rulings against them, but not as the main focus of your letter.
We have a huge use community here. Let's use it to correct a lie.
Andy Hunter
San Jose, CA
PS: This is the only time you'll see my real name anywhere online. I hope that says something here.
PPS: In my defense, I'm not submitting this in Mozilla because there was a submit bug in the nightly build from last night ;-)
In my humble opinion, Be is greatly superior to both Linux and Windows. Before I'm moderated down as Flamebait, I want to point out that I have a triple-boot system, and have the experience in all three to make a pretty valid asessment.
Windows is sort of easy, very popular, and has excellent driver support. If it was honestly as bad as people say, it wouldn't exist because people WOULD look elsewhere. Windows is at least good enough for the unwashed masses.
Linux is an interesting experiment and a powerful *nix, especially for the money. The problem is it IS hard to use. Even KDE and GNOME only scratch the surface. It is a system built on a very old specification, and it shows. Users (not newbies, just users) want to use the system, not tweak it endlessly. Recompiling the Kernel, Libraries, and Apps to get good performance (mine sucked until I did the above) is time consuming, overly technical, and more than even many power user would be willing to do. Linux is a great *nix, but not a great Desktop OS.
Be is the youngest and still has a ways to go, but it shows the most promise. I fear it will die off because of Windows dominance or a shift to IAs by Be, but I hope not. It is very responsive, contains no overtly legacy code, has an Object Oriented API, boots in seconds (while MS tweaks Windows to get 3x the boot time), and is very stable. The only reason I don't use BeOS more is its small Application support and the fact that I haven't figured out PPPoE on Be yet and I can't live without my DSL.
I see an Open Source Be being disected and pasted on Linux (Bad Idea), being fractured as hackers paste on *nix concepts (Worse Idea), or being left to die by a community already focused on Linux (A Tradjedy). I hope Be makes it, but I don't think that the magic balm of OSS is the key. More likely Be would die a quick death as OSS, especially after the proprietary code (from other companies) is culled to keep copyright lawyers happy.
This question has two related parts.
Based on what you've seen in the last 20+ years, what are the most important leaps foreward so far (in your humble opinion) besides the GUI and the microprocessor (too obvious)?
Looking ahead 5, 10, 20+ years, what still needs to happen to make computers more useful, powerful, widely accepted, affordable, whatever?
I guess I'm hoping for a little insight into the past (I was only born the year the Apple II was released) and some thoughts, not on where we're going, but on where we should be going.
I did a little digging on Mozilla.Org. I checked the tree status and it was "Closed" but not "Closed for M17". I checked the milestone plan and the planned date for M17 to be on the wire is today's date, which is obviously wrong. If you look at the top of that page, though, there is a note (with a really screwed up date) that says that M17 will be out in at least two weeks, no sooner. Now, this info is suspect since the date is actually for a year ago, but it wasn't there before so my guess is that the date is a fat-finger error.
On a side rant, I agree with the original poster (christophercook) here. People need to get their heads out of their asses and check to see that their "M17" download came out of the "nightly" directory and not the "milestone" directory. Duh?
I'm no addict and I'm certainly no expert, but I know what I like. Here's a short list.
Vampire Hunter D: This can actually be seen on TNT late at night, but heavily edited. Grab the full version. It is a distopian view of a future where vampires rule the world and man a slave race confronted with werewolves, mutants, will-o-wisps, and the like.
Fist of the North Star: NOT the live version with Malcom McDowell. This is perhaps the most violent anime I've seen and the ending is a bit odd and possibly even anti-climactic, but this is a must-see. A man who is betrayed by his best friend and brothers gets medieval on lots of asses.
Neo Tokyo: This is a group of four very different stories. It kinda defies other description, but I'll just say the one about the racer is probably the coolest anime I've seen.
The Ghost in the Shell: Cyberpunk. Need I say more?
Akira: The heartwarming story of a boy and his sudden ability to do amazing amounts of damage to whole brigades of army units. This is yet another futuristic story set after the world has rebuilt a bit from World War III (or IV or V), and takes place in Neo Tokyo, not to be confused with the movie previously mentioned. An orphan is exposed to a power source that drives him crazy while giving him the power to do whatever he wants to matter.
As you can all see, I watch the violent stuff, but this is the best I've seen. Ranma 1/2 can be funny, but I don't personally like it much. Dragonball Z would be better if they didn't stretch every fight into a whole season (give or take) and center entire shows around one punch and one fireball. The old RoboTech stuff was cool, but I was 8 when I watched it and I really can't say whether I'd still like it.
Peace,
GK
Besides being a patently dumb name (sounds like a new Noble gas), Xeon is a chip with split personalities.
The original PII Xeons were the standard Deschutes (.25 micron PII) cores with full-speed L2 cache at 512 KB, 1 MB, and 2 MB. Those were replaced by the PIII Xeons that had the Katmai (.25 micron PIII) core with the same cache and sporting the addition of SSE. Both were rated for up to 8-way SMP. These are the Xeons that maxed out at 550 MHz.
There are a newer batch of Xeons based on the Coppermine core (.18 micron) that don't really differ from today's PIII's except that they are rated for multiprocessing (2-way only, I think). The Coppermine Xeons have 256 KB of on-chip L2 cache, just like the Coppermine PIII's, and can run on the 100 MHz or 133 MHz GTL+ bus, just like the Coppermine PIII's.
Skip ahead to the last week. PIII's are now rated as SMP (2-way only) capable. The Xeons being announced have SSE and on-chip cache, but the cache is (mostly) the same size as the old Katmai Xeons, namely 1 MB and 2 MB. I guess 512 KB is gone for good. Also, the new high-speed Xeons are capable of 8-way SMP, like the old Katmai and Deschutes Xeons.
One interesting note on the stability and scalability of Intel's bus design (remember it's been in use for 5 years+) is that they have pushed a bus that started at 60 and 66 MHz to 133 MHz, but in order to allow SMP beyond 2-way they can't get above 100 MHz.
GK
Please note that I did this all from memory and with all the holes in my for eating and hearing and whatnot I'm surprised all my memory hasn't leaked out yet. Now warned, you may flame away.
Hey, did you check out the big "IF" there, Sparky? I said "IF" it was so, then there were big problems. Yes, I read the article before I posted. Yes I know there isn't any official word on the matter from AOL.
The fact of the matter is, ever since jwz resigned there has been a lot of FUD bandied about in the press. We keep hearing (even from Mozilla insiders like Jamie) about the dearth of "outside help". Mozilla is regarded either as a savior or an albatross in the press, depending on what flavor of enema the particualr reporter is using this week.
I think that at the slightest hint (yes, even a rumor) of AOL doing anything fishy with the Mozilla project, they need to hear from the populace what we think of Mozilla. If the rumor is unfounded, we all wasted two minutes out of our day and AOL will still have a new respect for what the public's opinion of Mozilla is. If the rumor is true, it might disuade AOL from rash behavior.
I'm about to date myself, but when I was a kid the show Quantum Leap was canceled due to the perceived indifference of the public. A massive letter writing campaign brought it back from the proverbial can shortly therafter. Do you suppose that if the outpouring had come when there was even a hint that the network might cancel the show, the execs would never have done what they did?
I was quite far from going off half-cocked. I believe this is a prudent course of action, no matter what the truth of the rumor. Sorry if I only dealt with the worst case, but I had to go to work, and direct, if a bit too light in reasoned arguement, was all I had time for.
On a more personal note, may I suggest you get some counseling? You seem to have this "They can't see me so I'll say whatever I want to piss them off" attitude that is way too prevalent on the web today.
There are two things you should consider. First, there really are people at the other end of your little Anonymous Coward(ly) barbs, and I doubt many of them are morons. Second, you shouldn't feel clever for what you said. It was childish at best and I would have to care about your opinion before you could piss me off.
Regards,
Monkey-Boy
... for two reasons. First and foremost, Mozilla is on the way to being the most open and accessable browser ever, supporting all the W3C standards and running on numerous platforms. Secondly, if Mozilla is actually retracted (not just funding cut), then we've been lied to. When AOL took over they swore up and down that they would keep funding Mozilla, and at the very least that the Mozilla source code, such as it was, would be free for all time.
If this now turns out to be bull it would be a great blow, not only to Open Source but to AOL and Netscape's credebility.
I am not, for the record, an active contributor to the Mozilla project. Unfortunately, my limited experience with programming does not include anything that would make me more useful than harmful. I do, however, regularly help by downloading a nightly build or milestone and reporting on bugs. Similarly, I plan to take part in the BugZilla 300 by breaking down current bugs to the simplest test case so that the real engineers can stamp them out effectively.
Come on, folks. Let's all Slashdot AOL with what a bad idea it would be to try to close the mozilla sources!