developing a cross-platform app is a hedge against MS stealing your ideas
the flaw in your argument is that *your market* might be contained to the microsoft platform. no matter how you develop cross platform products, you may not sell enough.
a better hedge, might be to develop for *vertical markets*, something MS has traditionally avoided.
What do slackware users perceive as its strengths?
you can install it on old machines and get better access to latest file systems and linux kernel and openSSH. Thought I've got it to install on a 16M machine I've yet to start installation on a 8M machine.
I picked up a ps2 probably within the first 100 as they where released in australia. one of the compelling reasons is the back catalogue of software. The sweet spot in terms of developers writing for platforms is probably starts from the 3rd or 4th series of title releases. This means as soon as I got the ps2 home I had compelling games.
Hogs of war
Final fantasy VII
Adventures of pooh
GT2
SMG
Digimon 2003
Railway tycoon
some of these are for the ankle biters but show me the latest *equivalent* (all for less than $40).
low res graphics comes second to playability for me anyway. this may explain why I still enjoy playing trek and adventure (one of the first games I played ~ on a commodore pet) on my openbsd box.
currently reading "the inmates running the asylum" [0-672-32614-0] by alan cooper (creator of MSVB) and how this will result in pretty crappy results. The book cites many examples of products that forget that computers require software (that is hard to write) resulting in unusable products.
There is a huge segment of the market with 64-128M PCs who don't want to be forced to upgrade their hardware just so as to run XP. If Linux could run responsively on that much memory, it could own that market. But instead, modern distros are too slow.
But lets forget gnome and kde. Even the installers are bulking up. I installed mandrake 5.3 on the 486 (equiv RH 6.2) ok looking to see if I could utilise some of the latest mandrake. forget it the installer required at least 64M. 5.3 would install with 16M.) Thats bloat.
CSIRAC - (1949 - 1961) - digital computer, entire machine housed at melbourne museum (victoria, australia) after service with CSIRO ( formerly called CSIR), Radio physics lab Sydney University finally residing at Melbourne University.
one of last original computers intact
CSIR Mk1 or CSIRAC designed by team lead by Maston Beard and Trevor Pearcey for CSIR (CSIRO) primary store of 768 20-bit words magnetic drum 4,096 word capacity 10ms access time clock speed 1000Hz serial bus paper tape input
30 KW power requirement crt output of registers high level programming via language INTERPROGRAM audio output for errors first computer programmed for music emululator available
I've got a mandrake 10 (com. ed.) running now. for a commodity box. it does the job. but the drakx (system config tool) installer sucks. I thought I had a (real - guts) problem with it. It was interesting to use mandrake 5.3 (with the redhat installer) to get the network card to install. It turned out to be a raid problem and ripping it out solved it.
from there, drakx was a usability (lipstick) problem. option selection is the biggest problem. not a showstopper but a PIA.
No article on Nanobacteria would be complete without a reference to Philla Uwins. A geologist who in 1999 was inspecting (deep, hot and old) drilling samples from the Western Australian coastline with a scanning electron microscope discovered unusual possible life forms from 20nm to 150nm, christening them nanobes. Well below the accepted 200nm miniumum thought possible for life. (it is thought that no living thing can contain the necessary machinary in containers below 200nm).
What followed is probably more interesting than this reported story (the discovery of nanobes in blood and their possible link to disease predates this article). Things started to hot up in the nanobe world when some research money came forward to see if these nanobes contained the necessary DNA to disprove the many *non life advocates*. Even physicist Paul Davies (Australian centre for Astrobiology) pondered the possibility that nanobes could be a possible link between life and non-life.
Armed with some results the Unwin team sent off a paper to every *major* reputable scientific journal only to have them turned down. The most common reason.... too controversial.
So I read this story and think of *mayo* clinic and the *ohhh must be reputable* tag that goes with it and thinking why hasn't Nature or some other journal taken so long to publish these ideas?. Science publishing appears to be more about convincing publishers (and peers) less about looking at the data.
The postscript to the story: The dot com crash in 2000 killed off more research into the DNA tests, the possible application of the nanobes into eating plastic (nanobes had a voracious appetite for petri dishes) and a potential commercial spin off. Phillipa still works at UQ.
give a child a computer and they may learn how to solve a problem. teach a child to think and they will learn to solve problems. for life.
Edward DeBono was televised a couple of weeks ago on the national press club highlighting once again the need for thinking skills to be taught. I routinely teach my 2yo that, computers are dumb and start from there.
On a side note the most interesting comment DeBono talked about was on original idea generation. He commented that when companies cannot compete with price (India, China), when skill competancy has been commoditized, new idea generation becomes the differentiator. Teaching, how think early is even more important.
while your talking about the subject, in Free as in Freedom (free online version), ISBN: 0-596-00287-4, you can read here a specific example of what motivated Stallman in the search for free software and more importantly what context he uses the term.
Since IBM used Microsoft to provide the operating system, clone vendors also needed to use Microsoft, if they were going to claim complete IBM compatibility. They could manufacture compatible hardware, but the operating system was proprietary.
so the hardware became commodity (thank heavens) but the software (the important bit) didn't. allowing MS to capture that market. but at successive points MS has *retained* it's market share and improved it. IBM had the chance to dictate to the market (remember that IBM was the bully in those days, MS wasn't on the radar) but lost out (because PC's where seen as toys in the KLOC world of IBM. IBM might have allowed an open hardware architecture to copied but thats all it did. It lost the plot with OS2 (has to run on mainframes and PC's) and has been relegated to history status, wrt the PC.
it was open standards that allowed Microsoft to get where they are today.
Yes and no. What happened to the MS software competitors along the way? MS through accident, bullying and perserverence killed of it's competitors. Gone from the commercial PC's are DrDOS, GEM, OS2, AmigaOS, insert your irrelevent software operating system (for mainstream business. a certain percentage of users will always use obscure OS's).
But MS is in trouble. There's a new creature in town. Stable, able to be used from embedded markets to mainframes. It doesn't eat much and make users happy. Long live Linux, *BSD and the open operating systems that follow.
for all the problems that MS do bring to the market I can still remember the cost of Macs (in AUS) as always being well above comodity PC's with MS software. MS has always traditionally had low entry costs (hah eat my own words) pre say 1998.
Consider Macs, easier yes. but they still cost a lot. What about Xerox. Parc was not geared up to selling. It was at that time a thinktank for very smart engineers. Alto, easy to use but never destined to be commercialised. Consider it. The mouse (Englebart), smalltalk (Alan Kay), ethernet (metcalfe, boggs[see networking] ) all within Parc but never commercialised within Parc.
For all it's faults, Microsoft kick started the personal PC revolution to the masses. Say what you like about the quality of the software, usability, the price we pay for it and the tatics the company employs.
They excelled in bringing together the mouse, languages, hardware (forget networking... took ages) - the bits needed to use a computer in the form of operating system(s) a lot like say Ford did with the T-Ford: exploiting all those developers who built the components ecessary to build cars.
"If you lose a card, and if the customer does not detect that loss, then the card wasn't very important. If, however, at an interaction planning meeting, the customer says: 'Hay [sic], where's that card about blah, blah, blah,' you'll find it easy to recreate."
I remember going through XP programming or Planning XP and finding a beauty... (paraphrased)
... if you need some testing infrastructure, database, web interface etc and have trouble justifing it to the client
just re-word a story so it has to be completed within the current itteration....
XP is full of such pragmatic sidesteps that are against the rules, but required to get things done. sometimes the client needs to be told what is required and not the other way around.
for this reason developers who strictly adhere to it's rules are forever going to be caught off balance.
My biggest gripe with XP is customers writing stories that define their own problems. It just does not happen with shrink wrap applications. I suspect that this only works with certain types of application development say internal products.
doesn't everyone have a copy of a Hawking on their desk? I checked out the current Hawking book I was thumbing through (Non math)...
Steven Hawkings, A life in Science, White. M, Gribben. J, Penguin '92, 0-14-015615-1
and on page 139 it outlines a the bet over Cygnus X-1 (the first black hole discovered ~95%) where Kip Thorne (Caltech) bets that it does not contain a black hole.
If it is true, Thorne owes Hawking a years subscription to Penthouse. Thorne wins it was a 4 year subscription to Private Eye (English statirical mag).
A lot of stress is caused by poor coping skills. You can say "no," you know. In fact, in my experience the ability to say "no" is important. All my managers have had that skill, and that's how they got their jobs.
and a lot of stress is caused by PHB's using force (especially in downturns where monetary reward is more efficeint but in low supply) . coping skills help to a point, but it is control and the lack of it that is a major factor in stress in the workplace.
some work situations are not as accomodating - you dont do what I say, I'll sack you!
Couple lack of control with *inappropriate* technology, unreasonable deliverables and what you get is the equivalent of human battery hens all pumped with cortisol.
"... Overly cautious generals kill more of their own men than overly aggressive generals. The best commanders in history are those who've been able to achieve a remarkable balance between caution and audacity while simultaneously inspiring their men to do things that no sane person should be able to do..."
No. The best commander(s) are those who coerce their enemy into submission without force.
"... supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting..."
Intellectual Property departments are sharing source code with the Taxation Departments instead of spending tax dollars
I'm cynical enough to say the tactical decision to use OS is election related. It's the timing that gives it away.
SOE restricts its systems to IBM mainframe technologies such as the z/OS operating system and Cool:Gen development environment for back-office functions, Microsoft's Windows for its mid-range server and desktop platform and.NET as its front-end development environment.
Here's the crux of the matter. Wait till we get the mid range servers and more importantly the desktop. The SOE is the easy part. I dont know if changing the desktop is a good thing. All I know is it must cost a fair bit of $$$'s for the latter 2.
PS: good to see a hairy bearded ex-sausage'r at the slash - goon
but it fails to give a result on the first search. I tried the googlewhack favourite... french military victories. Didn't give me any usable info straight away... excuse the homerism... <its_nuclear>ohhh owww just pretty images</its_nuclear> (how does that go with lynx?)
the description of the technology is a bit sketchy....
search stuck out as one of the areas where there was a problem not being solved by technology, where our minds were forced to do too much work, and where simple principles of cognitive function were not being applied. [mooter.com - how tech works]
It looks like idea of a javascript front end to show group relationships linked to a standard search. It has a page size of 16Kb and runs in qwirks mode in mozilla. The use of Javascript must be a pain to develop and test on different browsers. Theres no support for multibyte characters. compare standard search to google then moot
Slashdot Mirror
visicalc ~ dan bricklin (danbrickin.com)
apple 2 ~ steve wozniak (woz.org) , others (folklore.org)...
the flaw in your argument is that *your market* might be contained to the microsoft platform. no matter how you develop cross platform products, you may not sell enough.
a better hedge, might be to develop for *vertical markets*, something MS has traditionally avoided.
I might try to get X to work as it's a hack box for the ankle biter (just learning to read) ~ though he is having fun using OpenBSD playing Adventure.
Of all the distro's looks like slackware really goes to the effort of keeping the hardware requirments light.
you can install it on old machines and get better access to latest file systems and linux kernel and openSSH. Thought I've got it to install on a 16M machine I've yet to start installation on a 8M machine.
I picked up a ps2 probably within the first 100 as they where released in australia. one of the compelling reasons is the back catalogue of software. The sweet spot in terms of developers writing for platforms is probably starts from the 3rd or 4th series of title releases. This means as soon as I got the ps2 home I had compelling games.
some of these are for the ankle biters but show me the latest *equivalent* (all for less than $40).
low res graphics comes second to playability for me anyway. this may explain why I still enjoy playing trek and adventure (one of the first games I played ~ on a commodore pet) on my openbsd box.
It's the how well games play, not the dancing bear. get it?
ps: I wouln't mind getting a gamecube there's some great games written for it.
very much doubt all PS2 development will stop. beleive it or not PS1 games are still being developed but for a different market ~ younger kids
reading a fellow perl monger's log over at use.perl.org how Advogato suddenly dropped of the earth, now winer.
blogs aren't for free ... so I'm not supprised. but it does raise the question why users cannot set up/mirror blogs on their own domains?
currently reading "the inmates running the asylum" [0-672-32614-0] by alan cooper (creator of MSVB) and how this will result in pretty crappy results. The book cites many examples of products that forget that computers require software (that is hard to write) resulting in unusable products.
I miss the days I could run gnome on my 486 museum piece (saw the mobo at the museum not long ago).
But lets forget gnome and kde. Even the installers are bulking up. I installed mandrake 5.3 on the 486 (equiv RH 6.2) ok looking to see if I could utilise some of the latest mandrake. forget it the installer required at least 64M. 5.3 would install with 16M.) Thats bloat.
CSIRAC - (1949 - 1961) - digital computer, entire machine housed at melbourne museum (victoria, australia) after service with CSIRO ( formerly called CSIR), Radio physics lab Sydney University finally residing at Melbourne University.
Interesting facts ...
one of last original computers intact
CSIR Mk1 or CSIRAC designed by team lead by Maston Beard and Trevor Pearcey for CSIR (CSIRO)
primary store of 768 20-bit words
magnetic drum 4,096 word capacity
10ms access time
clock speed 1000Hz
serial bus
paper tape input
30 KW power requirement
crt output of registers
high level programming via language INTERPROGRAM
audio output for errors
first computer programmed for music
emululator available
references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRAC
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac/csirac.html
story on recreations of some of the original music tracks CSIRAC
50th Anniversary of the CSIRAC
the reason I'm not using redhat is stability. M10 is nice and stable as a desktop. I'm not going to waste my time using a V1.0 (fedora) product.
I've got to agree M10 has done a good job on the desktop. it just works. plus theres a decent supply of documentation
I've got a mandrake 10 (com. ed.) running now. for a commodity box. it does the job. but the drakx (system config tool) installer sucks. I thought I had a (real - guts) problem with it. It was interesting to use mandrake 5.3 (with the redhat installer) to get the network card to install. It turned out to be a raid problem and ripping it out solved it.
from there, drakx was a usability (lipstick) problem. option selection is the biggest problem. not a showstopper but a PIA.
No article on Nanobacteria would be complete without a reference to Philla Uwins. A geologist who in 1999 was inspecting (deep, hot and old) drilling samples from the Western Australian coastline with a scanning electron microscope discovered unusual possible life forms from 20nm to 150nm, christening them nanobes. Well below the accepted 200nm miniumum thought possible for life. (it is thought that no living thing can contain the necessary machinary in containers below 200nm).
What followed is probably more interesting than this reported story (the discovery of nanobes in blood and their possible link to disease predates this article). Things started to hot up in the nanobe world when some research money came forward to see if these nanobes contained the necessary DNA to disprove the many *non life advocates*. Even physicist Paul Davies (Australian centre for Astrobiology) pondered the possibility that nanobes could be a possible link between life and non-life.
Armed with some results the Unwin team sent off a paper to every *major* reputable scientific journal only to have them turned down. The most common reason.... too controversial.
So I read this story and think of *mayo* clinic and the *ohhh must be reputable* tag that goes with it and thinking why hasn't Nature or some other journal taken so long to publish these ideas?. Science publishing appears to be more about convincing publishers (and peers) less about looking at the data.
The postscript to the story: The dot com crash in 2000 killed off more research into the DNA tests, the possible application of the nanobes into eating plastic (nanobes had a voracious appetite for petri dishes) and a potential commercial spin off. Phillipa still works at UQ.
assorted links
http://www.uq.edu.au/nanoworld/uwins.html
http://aca.mq.edu.au/PaulDavies/pdavies.html
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s201
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s13
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,427
check out this article featured on plus magazine (maths web magazine by cambridge university - part of the millennuim mathematics programme.) by Livio entitled, "The golden ratio and aesthetics".
Edward DeBono was televised a couple of weeks ago on the national press club highlighting once again the need for thinking skills to be taught. I routinely teach my 2yo that, computers are dumb and start from there.
On a side note the most interesting comment DeBono talked about was on original idea generation. He commented that when companies cannot compete with price (India, China), when skill competancy has been commoditized, new idea generation becomes the differentiator. Teaching, how think early is even more important.
found someone already using MS VC to build perl (miniperl) for windows at perlmonks.
while your talking about the subject, in Free as in Freedom (free online version), ISBN:
0-596-00287-4, you can read here a specific example of what motivated Stallman in the search for free software and more importantly what context he uses the term.
so the hardware became commodity (thank heavens) but the software (the important bit) didn't. allowing MS to capture that market. but at successive points MS has *retained* it's market share and improved it. IBM had the chance to dictate to the market (remember that IBM was the bully in those days, MS wasn't on the radar) but lost out (because PC's where seen as toys in the KLOC world of IBM. IBM might have allowed an open hardware architecture to copied but thats all it did. It lost the plot with OS2 (has to run on mainframes and PC's) and has been relegated to history status, wrt the PC.
it was open standards that allowed Microsoft to get where they are today.
Yes and no. What happened to the MS software competitors along the way? MS through accident, bullying and perserverence killed of it's competitors. Gone from the commercial PC's are DrDOS, GEM, OS2, AmigaOS, insert your irrelevent software operating system (for mainstream business. a certain percentage of users will always use obscure OS's).
But MS is in trouble. There's a new creature in town. Stable, able to be used from embedded markets to mainframes. It doesn't eat much and make users happy. Long live Linux, *BSD and the open operating systems that follow.
for all the problems that MS do bring to the market I can still remember the cost of Macs (in AUS) as always being well above comodity PC's with MS software. MS has always traditionally had low entry costs (hah eat my own words) pre say 1998.
Consider Macs, easier yes. but they still cost a lot. What about Xerox. Parc was not geared up to selling. It was at that time a thinktank for very smart engineers. Alto, easy to use but never destined to be commercialised. Consider it. The mouse (Englebart), smalltalk (Alan Kay), ethernet (metcalfe, boggs[see networking] ) all within Parc but never commercialised within Parc.
For all it's faults, Microsoft kick started the personal PC revolution to the masses. Say what you like about the quality of the software, usability, the price we pay for it and the tatics the company employs.
They excelled in bringing together the mouse, languages, hardware (forget networking ... took ages) - the bits needed to use a computer in the form of operating system(s) a lot like say Ford did with the T-Ford: exploiting all those developers who built the components ecessary to build cars.
I remember going through XP programming or Planning XP and finding a beauty... (paraphrased)
... if you need some testing infrastructure, database, web interface etc and have trouble justifing it to the client- just re-word a story so it has to be completed within the current itteration.
...
XP is full of such pragmatic sidesteps that are against the rules, but required to get things done. sometimes the client needs to be told what is required and not the other way around.for this reason developers who strictly adhere to it's rules are forever going to be caught off balance.
My biggest gripe with XP is customers writing stories that define their own problems. It just does not happen with shrink wrap applications. I suspect that this only works with certain types of application development say internal products.
doesn't everyone have a copy of a Hawking on their desk? I checked out the current Hawking book I was thumbing through (Non math) ...
and on page 139 it outlines a the bet over Cygnus X-1 (the first black hole discovered ~95%) where Kip Thorne (Caltech) bets that it does not contain a black hole.
If it is true, Thorne owes Hawking a years subscription to Penthouse. Thorne wins it was a 4 year subscription to Private Eye (English statirical mag).
and a lot of stress is caused by PHB's using force (especially in downturns where monetary reward is more efficeint but in low supply) . coping skills help to a point, but it is control and the lack of it that is a major factor in stress in the workplace.
- some work situations are not as accomodating - you dont do what I say, I'll sack you!
Couple lack of control with *inappropriate* technology, unreasonable deliverables and what you get is the equivalent of human battery hens all pumped with cortisol.No. The best commander(s) are those who coerce their enemy into submission without force.
"... supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting[Sun Tsu - Pt 2. Attack by Strategem]
I'm cynical enough to say the tactical decision to use OS is election related. It's the timing that gives it away.
SOE restricts its systems to IBM mainframe technologies such as the z/OS operating system and Cool:Gen development environment for back-office functions, Microsoft's Windows for its mid-range server and desktop platform and
Here's the crux of the matter. Wait till we get the mid range servers and more importantly the desktop. The SOE is the easy part. I dont know if changing the desktop is a good thing. All I know is it must cost a fair bit of $$$'s for the latter 2.
PS: good to see a hairy bearded ex-sausage'r at the slash - goon
the description of the technology is a bit sketchy ....
It looks like idea of a javascript front end to show group relationships linked to a standard search. It has a page size of 16Kb and runs in qwirks mode in mozilla. The use of Javascript must be a pain to develop and test on different browsers. Theres no support for multibyte characters. compare standard search to google then moot
http://www.google.com/search?q=french+military+vi- then selecting again
.....
http://www.mooter.com/moot?query=french%20militar