Seriously, they've had dual processor machines in the past, just it seemed that the only application capable of taking advantage of it was Photoshop and some of its better written plugins. Not even the MacOS knew how to deal with the second CPU. Now BeOS on the other hand....
It runs like poop. Yes, it's better than IE3 or IE4 for solaris (the latter being able to bring the X server to its knees it was so bad), but it still has all the little annoying "features":
Bringing a window to front when you don't want it to
Causing your X server to groan under the stress of code not written with X in mind
No proper java (actually uses appletviewer which is a debatable good/bad)
Editing options is PAINFULLY slow even on a fast machine
Well, if there was one company which ever did this (at least to some extent) it was Apple Computer back in the late 1970's. If you may recall, the Apple ][ Reference Manuals came with fold-out schematics in the back. Damn, that was nice.
Actually, the two products (of significance) that I can recall having the schematics were the Apple ][ and the Moog Rogue synthesizer (recall the article on Robert Moog from a few weeks ago). Never got around to building any of the stuff, but with a little bit of electrical engineering knowledge, you learned a lot about how to solve some complex and interesting problems.
Almost twenty years ago is a memory you recalled once in an interview that I read in a magazine I can't remember at this time. It was basically describing how the two of you used to drive around in the late Cliff Burton's blue Volkswagen listening over and over to a tape simply labelled 'MISFITS' on a piece of masking tape. Despite the fact you couldn't stand it after a while (and Cliff's drumming on the dashboard), the fact here is that you were practicing something that most people in the world do: listening to "pirated" music.
This tape was obviously not a store purchased tape, and while it could be argued that Mr. Burton did at that time (if not later) legally own copies of the music on that cassette, it was still, by legal definition, an illegal copy.
I'm not saying Napster is right or wrong. I'm not saying what you did back then is right or wrong. I'm trying to get at the idea that you've been there; having copies of music. Personally, I'm more like Mr. Ulrich in the way that I collect a large amount of music, and quite frankly, even though I have numerous opportunities to make a cassette or CD of someone's album, I much prefer to have the physical store-bought item (liner note, album photographs, etc). However, this is something that something that many people do and even you yourselves have.
Allowing this free exchange of music shouldn't hurt you, Metallica, much. Isn't it true that most of your revenue comes from the sale of Metallica related items and concert sales? Surely the potential loss of sales due to Napster trading isn't going to effect your bottom line to a dramatic extent.
I can't believe they let this guy write.. Doesn't the editor of PC week at least know something about the topic?
Mr. Tasheck almost had a good point in regards to the 'disruptive technology' comment. Linux is not a disruptive technology (hold on..), it is an OS. HOWEVER, you take disruptive for its true definition, and it is a disruptive technology; disruptive can be good or bad. In the case which I think John Patrick is referring to is that it has disrupted the industry into rethinking a lot of their methods of business. Look, if it wasn't for Open Source, Linux, Mozilla, etc., then would we have the source code to Java or Solaris today? How about the fact that more web servers are powered by Apache than any other software in the world? And going with the "free" concept of Linux, would we have Borland compilers for free today?
All in all, yes, Linux is a disruptive technology in that it made the software industry shed a new light on things. And as for John Tascheck, he's just another one of those writers who has NO IDEA of what is going on and probably barely knows how to power up Microsoft Word on his blueberry iMac.
(Let's see.. how to insert an Amiga blurb into this thread.. ah HA!)
One of the things that I really liked about the BeOS back when it came out was that they were quoted as having the "BeOS be the spiritual descendant of the Amiga". Basically, they had studied the Amiga and everything that Commodore had done right and WRONG.
One thing Be has done right is that they delivered a superior multimedia operating system with the hardware to support it (read: BeBox). Another thing they did right was to make the OS lean, mean and damn quick.
One thing Commodore did wrong was to ignore their community; while there was a tremendous amount of support out there (and back in the day, from CBM itself), they failed to keep their product up to date with the rest of the world. In this, I mean more of the management decisions which kept the Amiga behind the times (read: AAA chipset) amongst other things.
If Be has learned anything from the Amiga and Commodore, it is that they have a damn fine product which is relegated to a niche community of power users, and that as long as people are out there salivating over BeOS, they better support the damn thing and keep it up to date. I know this takes time, money and resources, but I strongly believe that there will always be BeOS users out there. Heck, people are still using OS/2, eh?
I'm not a big BeOS user, I always wanted a BeBox and I was certainly an Amiga fanatic. I just don't want to see BeOS fall behind and out of the picture - they need to stay a step ahead of the other operating systems out there.
I'm certainly impressed by the numbers the new boards are producing, but I just want to express my stance on this:
I'm still using a Pentium Pro 200 that I bought in August 1997. The only reason why it's still a viable gaming machine is because of the Voodoo2 card I have in it.
So what should this mean? Not much other than I only wish PCI versions were still available;-)
Man, I love Moog synthesizers. I used to have a Rogue, which is basically a dual oscillator single tone keyboard (4 octave, if I remember correctly). Those things are great!
It won't be up until tomorrow, but you can check out some "conceptual moog drawings" I did about 15 years ago at http://www.tribrothers.com/brian/moog/.
Great. Stuff a Pentium 55C in there and watch your AA batteries get sucked down in 3 minutes. Lithium doesn't make a difference. The Pentiums are hogs anyway. Why not just go with a color palm pilot? Or for that matter, why not just get a color GameBoy? The merging of the two doesn't make much sense beyond bragging rights.
Ok, this is my first rant ever towards the site. Do the posters even check what each other is doing or are they just goofing around all day? C'mon.. this site USED to have at least 70% interest catch, now I only read about one or two articles a day.
It was one thing when someone other than CmdrTaco was double posting something, but now he's doing it too which means he doesn't even pay attention to his site!
Moderators: go ahead and troll/offtopic/etc this; you're just violating the rule that you shouldn't decrement a score if you don't agree with the message content
I wonder what they're going to consider the 'Palm III Version'. If you think about it, the Palm VII is essentially a Palm III with wireless capabilities. More specifically, the same form factor, and the same screen as the original Palm III (the 4-shade display versus the newer and clearer 16-shade display). CPU power probably doesn't really fit in it here since the difference is minor (for normal use). Maybe this newer version wold be the better display? Then it would be more of a Palm IIIx? Oh, just create it as another number for crying out loud...
Slightly O.T., but since a lot of threads debate it, here's my 2
I'm very disappointed in the state of commercial audio formats these days. CDs sound cleaned, sampled, starched, digitized and seem to lack "feeling". Tapes always sucked, but they let you bring your music into the car back in the 70s and 80s before car CD players. Now with the thought of DVD-Audio, I'm apalled- MP3s are nice, but we're going to have some level of "digital mangling" in our audio? (read: DVD uses all sorts of compression which does a good job, but is NOT PURE.)
This is why I long for Vinyl. I'm still one of those "geeks" who listens to records (and yes, I own that fantastic Technics record player too. Best turntable I ever bought!). Without trying to bore you people too much, here are a few reasons why I feel the way I do about vinyl (and why this movie hits a heart string) (By the way, if you're not an audiophile, you probably don't understand half of this)
Analog - its the real image of the sound wave, not a digitally reconstructed image of it.
Broader frequency range - yes, believe it or not, with a good record player and a good record, it is capable of having a 10Hz - 30,000KHz frequency range where a CD only is capable of doing 20Hz - 28,000KHz. Ever play a 45RPM? (note: I'm not sure of the exact high frequencies, but I am sure of the low frequencies)
Classical music sounds better on it (a deep cello has no soul on a CD)
The artwork. This you cannot debate - I was devastated the day I saw my favorite record albums reduced from their 12" x 12" (or 12" x 24" if you talk gatefold) to some folded up crappy 5.5" CD image. The only good thing they had was when CDs first came out and had those enormous (and useless) cardboard boxes, they partially salvaged some albums (e.g. Jimi Hendrix)
It's a tough argument, but there is just something lost. I personally feel there is still quite a bit to experiencing a good record versus an impersonal CD. True, it is more convenient to have CDs and they're less delicate than LPs, but I digress..
It's funny how few of today's kids (teenagers and younger) may have never seen a record before; same idea as my watching a young kid stand befuddled at a rotary pay phone back 10 years ago (honestly had no idea how to work it).
Wait, so the record companies pay radio stations to play records (payola). Payola is deemed illegal (circa mid-1950's if I'm remembering correctly). Now with the popularity of internet streaming radio stations, the radio station has to start paying back the record company?
Puh-leez. What about radio stations such as WFMU (91.1 FM for NYC-area listeners) which are non-commercial yet stream their content on the internet? What about the fact that they sometimes play records that are not only obscure but possibly over 60 years old? Or does this only apply to popular commercial music?
I would like to think that the FBI is a bit brighter than to think that A.C. is a real person..
I don't want to go through the search and href routine right now, but there were some articles posted here probably about a year ago where a news source made some kind of comment 'about that Anonymous Coward person' and what A.C. had to say. Sheesh.
Crap or not, the MCSE is the only way to get a job interview in most cases. Think about a college degree.. Nowadays it doesn't really get you much other than a foot in the door at a company for an interview. Same thing with the MCSE for the most part. I don't have one and I certainly know more than most of the MCSE people I've met, but that's just the way it is.
Its about time that there is some WMF support under UNIX. There are just too many sites that only support WMF nowadays that have content that I want to view. Next we'll have to get the 3D Jokeman to be in some non-windows format!
Tell me about it. I have had my Netcom account for many years, but have considered dropping it in the past year or so.. I used to refer friends to them because they "were for serious Internet people".. for example, someone would complain about how their ISP was always going down, so I'd tell them how Netcom had little to no downtime because they were run so well. As soon as the initial merger happened, the quality of the service fell apart. I still have it today simply because once in a while I need a dialup (I do mainly DSL), and it does have national coverage. However, the web support pages have become more retarted to use and the network simply isn't as reliable.
It's a shame that when we want streaming media on the web, we have a choice of Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. The first choice is obvious to anyone reading this message, but the second choice is the shame; while the players work, they just never seem to be nearly as good as they are on any other platform. I guess to be more descriptive, I've been using RealPlayer on Solaris for about two years now, and I've never been that impressed with the output, and the Linux version is pretty much on par here. The video isn't very good, the controls don't work quite well (try double-sizing the window during playback.. still see video? I don't) and if you really want to nit-pick, try using the menu bar while your NumLock key is on!
I also have the two media players installed on a WinNT box. I really don't like all the flashy extra garbage that RealPlayer has put in to their application, and honestly I think that is making their player less appealing to me. You can turn it all off, but I still don't like the fact that I've got 5MB (or whatever) of useless binary on my drive for crap I'll never use (yet, I keep getting informed to upgrade to the latest version so I can get my news ticker! ooh!).
Beta or not, I hope the media software for the UNIX world improves. That's my rant, and I'm sticking to it!
This is obviously a total marketing ploy, but hey. Why didn't they pay me off sooner? Let's look at some "fantastic" game controllers of the past 25 years..
Odyssey2: Large sticks that looked and felt analog but were actually digital. One fire button (oh, I mean 'action' button). Threw my wrist out slinging that stick back and forth with K.C. Munchkin.
Atari 2600: Classic controllers, but caused nice blisters on my left hand (holding the base). Had a tendency to cause you to strengthen your stick hand since they had so much give past their digital switch.
Intellivision: Shoot the person who came up with this controller. If you didn't get some kind of stress injury trying to press those tiny damn fire buttons on the sides of the controllers while trying to press the number pad (through an overlay) while trying to fiddle with that disc "joystick" that rotated for no electrical reason.. still, had the best football and baseball games to date.
Colecovision: Shoot this person, too. Only really got blisters on my right hand since it cupped the "joystick mushroom" or whatever the heck you want to call that thing. They got it right when they created the Super Action Controllers which felt like holding a Sabre sword. If the games weren't so damn good (at the time), then I think there would have been ritual destructions of these controllers.
Vectrex: Someone was trying to get it right here, but the size was all screwed up. Wouldn't mind stuffing Macintosh guts in this thing, though.
Coleco Gemini (2600 clone): Had to mention this, because this was a ridiculous controller; half joystick, half paddle. Not too many injuries with this, but the controller felt cheap enough that it probably should have been paid by some of us.
Atari 5200: Another casualty like with the Intellivision; who put those fire buttons there? I think I busted a few fingers with those.
Nintendo Entertainment System: The bread winner; THESE people actually thought this was a decent controller? HA! The first time I actually considered permanent physical damage was after playing with these controllers. Sure, they were familiar to people who used to play with the old Nintendo LCD handheld games, but who ever said those were good controllers in the first place? Nintendo should have been paying us back then. I figure they're about 15 years late on this one..
Sega Master System: Someone was smoking Nintendo's crack, but figured they could make it even more annoying by putting a screw thread in the middle of the 'joy-whatever' so that you could screw in a little stick "to make it a real joystick". HA! Injuries by the dozens here, I'm sure.
TurboGrafix 16: No comment.
Sega Genesis: The crack is getting better.
Super Nintendo: The dawning of the age of the complex controller. Injuries are not just happening as a result of stupidly designed controllers, but now you've got 45 buttons to memorize.
Sony Playstation: Another multi-button wonder. Fingers hurting yet?
Nintendo 64: What the hell is that joystick doing there? See article for this thread.
Ok, a bit of a rant, but the point comes down to that I think after using all of these systems, Atari, Magnavox, Coleco, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Bally, etc. all owe me a buttload of money for the hand problems I have today. I did have a lot of fun with them over the years, but please.. who the heck designs controllers? Whatever..
Slashdot Mirror
(I can feel the moderation now..)
Seriously, they've had dual processor machines in the past, just it seemed that the only application capable of taking advantage of it was Photoshop and some of its better written plugins. Not even the MacOS knew how to deal with the second CPU. Now BeOS on the other hand....
--
- Bringing a window to front when you don't want it to
- Causing your X server to groan under the stress of code not written with X in mind
- No proper java (actually uses appletviewer which is a debatable good/bad)
- Editing options is PAINFULLY slow even on a fast machine
Fun.--
Hmm.. I only have IE for Solaris installed on this box for just such occasions.
--
Actually, the two products (of significance) that I can recall having the schematics were the Apple ][ and the Moog Rogue synthesizer (recall the article on Robert Moog from a few weeks ago). Never got around to building any of the stuff, but with a little bit of electrical engineering knowledge, you learned a lot about how to solve some complex and interesting problems.
--
Almost twenty years ago is a memory you recalled once in an interview that I read in a magazine I can't remember at this time. It was basically describing how the two of you used to drive around in the late Cliff Burton's blue Volkswagen listening over and over to a tape simply labelled 'MISFITS' on a piece of masking tape. Despite the fact you couldn't stand it after a while (and Cliff's drumming on the dashboard), the fact here is that you were practicing something that most people in the world do: listening to "pirated" music.
This tape was obviously not a store purchased tape, and while it could be argued that Mr. Burton did at that time (if not later) legally own copies of the music on that cassette, it was still, by legal definition, an illegal copy.
I'm not saying Napster is right or wrong. I'm not saying what you did back then is right or wrong. I'm trying to get at the idea that you've been there; having copies of music. Personally, I'm more like Mr. Ulrich in the way that I collect a large amount of music, and quite frankly, even though I have numerous opportunities to make a cassette or CD of someone's album, I much prefer to have the physical store-bought item (liner note, album photographs, etc). However, this is something that something that many people do and even you yourselves have.
Allowing this free exchange of music shouldn't hurt you, Metallica, much. Isn't it true that most of your revenue comes from the sale of Metallica related items and concert sales? Surely the potential loss of sales due to Napster trading isn't going to effect your bottom line to a dramatic extent.
--
Now if it opened up a splash screen, that's a story. This is whining.
--
Mr. Tasheck almost had a good point in regards to the 'disruptive technology' comment. Linux is not a disruptive technology (hold on..), it is an OS. HOWEVER, you take disruptive for its true definition, and it is a disruptive technology; disruptive can be good or bad. In the case which I think John Patrick is referring to is that it has disrupted the industry into rethinking a lot of their methods of business. Look, if it wasn't for Open Source, Linux, Mozilla, etc., then would we have the source code to Java or Solaris today? How about the fact that more web servers are powered by Apache than any other software in the world? And going with the "free" concept of Linux, would we have Borland compilers for free today?
All in all, yes, Linux is a disruptive technology in that it made the software industry shed a new light on things. And as for John Tascheck, he's just another one of those writers who has NO IDEA of what is going on and probably barely knows how to power up Microsoft Word on his blueberry iMac.
My two cents; no refunds.
--
One of the things that I really liked about the BeOS back when it came out was that they were quoted as having the "BeOS be the spiritual descendant of the Amiga". Basically, they had studied the Amiga and everything that Commodore had done right and WRONG.
One thing Be has done right is that they delivered a superior multimedia operating system with the hardware to support it (read: BeBox). Another thing they did right was to make the OS lean, mean and damn quick.
One thing Commodore did wrong was to ignore their community; while there was a tremendous amount of support out there (and back in the day, from CBM itself), they failed to keep their product up to date with the rest of the world. In this, I mean more of the management decisions which kept the Amiga behind the times (read: AAA chipset) amongst other things.
If Be has learned anything from the Amiga and Commodore, it is that they have a damn fine product which is relegated to a niche community of power users, and that as long as people are out there salivating over BeOS, they better support the damn thing and keep it up to date. I know this takes time, money and resources, but I strongly believe that there will always be BeOS users out there. Heck, people are still using OS/2, eh?
I'm not a big BeOS user, I always wanted a BeBox and I was certainly an Amiga fanatic. I just don't want to see BeOS fall behind and out of the picture - they need to stay a step ahead of the other operating systems out there.
My 2 - no refunds.
--
I'm still using a Pentium Pro 200 that I bought in August 1997. The only reason why it's still a viable gaming machine is because of the Voodoo2 card I have in it.
So what should this mean? Not much other than I only wish PCI versions were still available ;-)
--
It won't be up until tomorrow, but you can check out some "conceptual moog drawings" I did about 15 years ago at http://www.tribrothers.com/brian/moog/.
Poot.
--
(> Catalog
DISK VOLUME 254
B 203 PERL.KERNEL
A 002 HELLO
T 091 DOCUMENTATION
(> Quake3
Invalid command. Type ? for menu
(> Drat!
Invalid command. Type ? for menu
(> Return to regular OS
(by the way, site is definately
--
Great. Stuff a Pentium 55C in there and watch your AA batteries get sucked down in 3 minutes. Lithium doesn't make a difference. The Pentiums are hogs anyway. Why not just go with a color palm pilot? Or for that matter, why not just get a color GameBoy? The merging of the two doesn't make much sense beyond bragging rights.
--
It was one thing when someone other than CmdrTaco was double posting something, but now he's doing it too which means he doesn't even pay attention to his site!
Moderators: go ahead and troll/offtopic/etc this; you're just violating the rule that you shouldn't decrement a score if you don't agree with the message content
--
My two cents...
--
One more thing to silence the FUD.
--
I'm very disappointed in the state of commercial audio formats these days. CDs sound cleaned, sampled, starched, digitized and seem to lack "feeling". Tapes always sucked, but they let you bring your music into the car back in the 70s and 80s before car CD players. Now with the thought of DVD-Audio, I'm apalled- MP3s are nice, but we're going to have some level of "digital mangling" in our audio? (read: DVD uses all sorts of compression which does a good job, but is NOT PURE.)
This is why I long for Vinyl. I'm still one of those "geeks" who listens to records (and yes, I own that fantastic Technics record player too. Best turntable I ever bought!). Without trying to bore you people too much, here are a few reasons why I feel the way I do about vinyl (and why this movie hits a heart string)
(By the way, if you're not an audiophile, you probably don't understand half of this)
It's a tough argument, but there is just something lost. I personally feel there is still quite a bit to experiencing a good record versus an impersonal CD. True, it is more convenient to have CDs and they're less delicate than LPs, but I digress..
It's funny how few of today's kids (teenagers and younger) may have never seen a record before; same idea as my watching a young kid stand befuddled at a rotary pay phone back 10 years ago (honestly had no idea how to work it).
Oh well. Rant off.
--
Puh-leez. What about radio stations such as WFMU (91.1 FM for NYC-area listeners) which are non-commercial yet stream their content on the internet? What about the fact that they sometimes play records that are not only obscure but possibly over 60 years old? Or does this only apply to popular commercial music?
--
TiVo crashes sometimes?
(I'll let you put that one together for a moment)
--
I don't want to go through the search and href routine right now, but there were some articles posted here probably about a year ago where a news source made some kind of comment 'about that Anonymous Coward person' and what A.C. had to say. Sheesh.
--
Crap or not, the MCSE is the only way to get a job interview in most cases. Think about a college degree.. Nowadays it doesn't really get you much other than a foot in the door at a company for an interview. Same thing with the MCSE for the most part. I don't have one and I certainly know more than most of the MCSE people I've met, but that's just the way it is.
--
Its about time that there is some WMF support under UNIX. There are just too many sites that only support WMF nowadays that have content that I want to view. Next we'll have to get the 3D Jokeman to be in some non-windows format!
--
Oh well..
--
I also have the two media players installed on a WinNT box. I really don't like all the flashy extra garbage that RealPlayer has put in to their application, and honestly I think that is making their player less appealing to me. You can turn it all off, but I still don't like the fact that I've got 5MB (or whatever) of useless binary on my drive for crap I'll never use (yet, I keep getting informed to upgrade to the latest version so I can get my news ticker! ooh!).
Beta or not, I hope the media software for the UNIX world improves. That's my rant, and I'm sticking to it!
--
Ok, a bit of a rant, but the point comes down to that I think after using all of these systems, Atari, Magnavox, Coleco, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Bally, etc. all owe me a buttload of money for the hand problems I have today. I did have a lot of fun with them over the years, but please.. who the heck designs controllers? Whatever..
--
Nice.. Now I just need to find a decent motherboard manufacturer that produces dual/quad processor configurations for these beasts.
--