While you make an interesting point, the very concept of "file listing" and "directory" are also old OS-style ideas.
The people who are moving away from the pervasive OS idea are the same people who are moving away from the files-and-directories idea.
I don't care where I store my Word files. I don't care about directory structure. What I care about is being able to find the Word document I read half-way through last Wednesday, when I can't remember anything else about it.
But your point is still valid in this domain - there is a bandwidth problem which seems to require a CLI to overcome. Move mouse and click doesn't have a very high information rate.
In the future, my belief is that voice recognition will solve this problem. Because 99% of users simply are not capable of learning a CLI, but everyone is capable of explaining to another person what they want the computer to do.
I'm talking now about leaking some NDA'd information to some would-be PS2 emulator writers. NDAs don't work, because anyone can leak stuff with impunity.
Now who's going to leak to who? Are we going to get a hardcore of script kiddies with this inside information before the netadmins know about it? This would appear to multiply the problem rather than reduce it.
I really believe this mechanism has too much potential for abuse. Security through obscurity is often argued against, but people here seem to be forgetting the principle and saying that maybe it's OK for this one instance. I'm not sure it is.
Re:Things I don't need
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
Will do so tonight. Can't email about this from work;)
Re:Things I don't need
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
Forgive my OT-ness, but I tried disassembling my wife's iMac at the weekend to install some more RAM and I could not for the life of me work out how to disassemble it!
Is there anywhere on the web that has instructions? Can you even put more RAM into an iMac? [I'm no Mac expert, as you can tell!];)
Hardware is Apple's business, but many companies periodically review the very concept of "what their business is" - especially when in trouble, which is hardly rare for Apple;)
It seems to me that Apple have a chance of taking Windows out in the desktop market if they could get through the many, many, many porting issues.
Hands up who's written an app in VB and then had to recode the guts in a C++ DLL to get it to run fast enough;)
VB is fine as long as you only want to bounce events/messages around - for database front-ends it's great! But if you're trying to write a program which actually does some data processing, VB can be horrendous.
What would be great is a motherboard with side-on PCI slots, so you stack PCI cards vertically instead of horizonally - then possibly you could have a PCI-upgradeable system which is still only a few inches high. Maybe a 2x2 factor so you can lob 4 PCI cards in. I don't know if this is technically feasible, though.
It doesn't get much more proprietory. We're talking about 2 major custom chips with the "Emotion Engine" being a VVLSI chip incorporating basically all the processing power on the machine - the main CPU and it's two partner vector units - and the "GS" being a custom rendering engine. Just the IO/sound processor is an entire PS1 [minus graphics] which communicates with the PS2 stuff using a form of RPC! So it's not only proprietory, it's an extremely complex piece of hardware. It makes PCI look like RS232.
The Sony docs from phase 1 were complete - including the systems information you'd need for Linux e.g. cache control details, system-level instructions, page-mapping registers, etc. etc. But these docs were only ever printed in dead-tree format, so it's incredibly difficult for them to accidentally escape.
The Phase 2 docs are PDFs (I have a set at home which might escape if someone asks me nicely) but they miss out this important information.
Finally, you'd need some form of Trojan to boot the machine, at least until it's chipped - and if you take a PS2 apart, the first thing you notice is that chipping this mofo is not going to be easy! It's some of the densest electronics I've ever seen. The best bet right now seems to be "accidentally" putting a Trojan download program onto a game disk, probably hidden as a buffer-overflow bug which you trigger deliberately, possibly by sending a packet on the serial port input; possibly by inserting an unauthorized CD.
All this is assuming Sony will not be supportive... and I think that's a fair bet.
I think the Microsoft vs Sony war is going to be very interesting, but I don't think it's as easy to predict the outcome as you claim.
On the Nintendo side, however, things are more interesting. The Game Boy Advance is certainly *not* just a rumor - in fact, IIRC, it's being released March 1. Certainly, I know a lot of developers are working on GBA titles. GBA sounds like great fun to develop for *and* to play on, and where you mention convergence between X-Box and PC, perhaps we'll see convergence between GBA and PalmPilot?;)
After that, there's the GameCube. Now, remember that the N64 was a late entry. The GameCube is too. But despite late entry the N64 still sold a respectable number of games. Nintendo deal with this differently than Sony - Sony throw as many games at players as possible, in the belief that some of them will be popular. [If you throw enough shit, some will stick.] Nintendo, on the other hand, has very few games, but the average quality is far higher. They've done OK with this model on N64, so it remains to be seen how they do on GameCube.
This ain't over. Not by a long stretch. Sega has been the outsider since 1995, and it's just taken a long time to die. But MS, Sony and Nintendo still have some interesting fights ahead.
Never been to despair.com. But you can't fault the logic.
I was unfair to Slashdot; on occasion I have had rewarding interactions. One a few months ago about music support for Linux springs to mind. They are rare, but valuable. OTOH, I've lost count of the times I've made a reasonable effort at explaining my point of view (which are nothing if not contrary to popular belief around here), only to be flamed into oblivion by ACs with nothing to say expletives [enough to turn my Windows backdrop blue]. On the whole, my view of Slashdot is definitely colored by my experiences here [as you alluded to earlier].
Anyway, I don't consider my original post to be a flame. It contained a few unnecessary remarks - which you picked up - but largely (80%) it was an attempt at explaining what must have been wrong with the application of XP in this instance. I was responding to you saying that claiming XP has been misapplied is an invalid response. It isn't.
Mind you, if you were trying to hold your own against the onslaught of XP fanatics, perhaps I would have been wiser to have sided with you. But them's the breaks - one makes a judgement, sometimes one is wrong.
The only personality flaw of mine which has influenced these events is just that once people start with the personal attacks I do forget everything but "winning". That's a flamewar. I get the feeling we were continuing with it for much the same reason - pride.
Oh, dammit Salamander, I just realized you gave the "pretending to be another person" game away. You said you weren't interested in continuing in another thread.
Don't worry; my attitude at work is nothing like my attitude on Slashdot. Slashdot is a free-for-all flamefest. If you've posted here a long time you'll appreciate that. Corrections to one's usage of latin terms are always phrased like the one by the AC in this thread. They call one a "jerk" and attack one's motives - ad hominem, if I'm using the term correctly! I feel quite justified flaming in return, even if I have to work quite hard to invent a reason for my not being wrong;)
So my attitude when posting to Slashdot is a lot more gung-ho than my attitude when discussing stuff at work. From what you've seen of my posting here, Salamander, I can guarantee you would be amazed;)
Also, when I write I write for an audience. When I write an article for a magazine or a book, obviously my style is rather different. On Slashdot, the audience is me and people who happen to agree with what I'm saying. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.
Does this insight into the psychology of a Slashdot poster surprise you? Did you expect everyone here to have the same motives for being here that you do? I don't feel there are many deficiencies in my manner of communication - although I'm constantly looking for ways to improve my flamage. Flamage is, in its own way, enjoyable.
You seem to be one of the last here who still take this site seriously. I kind of respect that, and I kind of feel sorry for it. If you want a serious discussion about XP, you're not going to get it on Slashdot. I might learn something here (other than the headlines) once a month, and I do read most of what is posted. Most of it is absolute drivel.
I come here merely to vent these days. You seemed like an easy target. Boy, was I wrong in that!;)
At work I have to deal politely with people who actually do claim that unit tests are worthless (yeah, yeah, I know that's not your opinion, but at one point I thought it was). Christ, my "great attitude" is handy when that happens! But at the end of the day, having a good attitude won't help change the minds of the willfully ignorant, who tend to be in charge.
I'm not going to get into an email exchange with anyone on this site. Thanks for the offer, but I don't feel we have much useful to discuss.
</META>
... and despite being called on it, you continue to launch nothing but personal attacks, when the subject of the definition of ad hominem has been laid to rest.
You are really getting way too deep with this one, friend. You're taking everything far too personally. Debate is an intellectual pursuit. I argue with what you say. If you take it personally, that's your problem.
Your statements seem contradictory to me. If I say so, it is an expression of (and a function of) my point of view. Your point of view may differ. Again, don't take it personally, especially in a case where you can easily fix the problem by clarifying your original statements. But this, it seems, is beneath you.
I tell no lies here. I may be mistaken on points of fact. I may misunderstand you. This is not the same as lying. Every 8-year-old knows that.
Like I say, if you were really as reasonable as you pretend to be, you could have ended this entire argument in an instant - with a rhetoric bomb, as you put it. By simply admitting that your phrasing was unfortunate, and that your rant was just a rant and didn't represent your full opinions.
Instead, you chose to go the route of personal attacks and calling of names. I'm responding merely to this now; the debate about unit test is long passed. So it's a little bizarre for you to start telling me to grow up. Your conceit is astounding. It hits its zenith when you started psychobabbling.
Now, have you any other advice for a long and happy life, or can we stop this nonsense?
I'm amazed that's it's become this personal with you, Salamander. If I argue with what you say, it doesn't mean I have a personal axe to grind with you. You, on the other hand, seem incapable of making anything other than personal attacks. Like I said earlier, please grow up.
I must admit, I did enjoy this post. Your term "rhetoric bomb" is excellent, and your reflection of the term "magic bullet" in both rhetoric and engineering methodology was very good.
But I really don't care. I used the term ad hominem in a way which might be technically incorrect; but given a sympathetic audience I'm sure I could persuade them that my usage of the term was acceptable. You language lawyers seem to forget that language itself is about communication, and I don't believe I failed to communicate my major point - which is that ad-hoc methodologies fail under a load of more than 6 or 7 people. If I mis-used a Latin phrase in the process, I apologize most profounding, with much cap-tipping in the direction of Plato, Socrates et al, which I'm sure the AC will have read in the original.
Nonetheless, I'll argue with any Anonymous Coward who calls me a "jerk" on principle.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm widely acknowledged to be a loony, but I can't bring myself to make that argument ;)
Yes, I had exactly the same feeling. Incomprehensible garbage. I'd be more interested in reading Raskin's undiluted opinions.
The people who are moving away from the pervasive OS idea are the same people who are moving away from the files-and-directories idea.
I don't care where I store my Word files. I don't care about directory structure. What I care about is being able to find the Word document I read half-way through last Wednesday, when I can't remember anything else about it.
But your point is still valid in this domain - there is a bandwidth problem which seems to require a CLI to overcome. Move mouse and click doesn't have a very high information rate.
In the future, my belief is that voice recognition will solve this problem. Because 99% of users simply are not capable of learning a CLI, but everyone is capable of explaining to another person what they want the computer to do.
Now who's going to leak to who? Are we going to get a hardcore of script kiddies with this inside information before the netadmins know about it? This would appear to multiply the problem rather than reduce it.
I really believe this mechanism has too much potential for abuse. Security through obscurity is often argued against, but people here seem to be forgetting the principle and saying that maybe it's OK for this one instance. I'm not sure it is.
Thanks, man!
I'll find out what one is and let you know ;)
See other reply: I can't email you from work, I'll do this tonight.
Will do so tonight. Can't email about this from work ;)
Is there anywhere on the web that has instructions? Can you even put more RAM into an iMac? [I'm no Mac expert, as you can tell!] ;)
I'd just like to point out that some of us hardware hackers like the fact we have a nice, slow, open, 8MHz bus to play with ...
But the original Mac classic was an ugly grey box ;)
Well, the oodles of drivers certainly took a long time to get through - and I rebooted because I thought it had crashed ;)
But it was easy and intuitive. It was a piece of piss to install. You just had to wait a while.
It seems to me that Apple have a chance of taking Windows out in the desktop market if they could get through the many, many, many porting issues.
VB is fine as long as you only want to bounce events/messages around - for database front-ends it's great! But if you're trying to write a program which actually does some data processing, VB can be horrendous.
Those BSD guys are gonna be pissed.
What would be great is a motherboard with side-on PCI slots, so you stack PCI cards vertically instead of horizonally - then possibly you could have a PCI-upgradeable system which is still only a few inches high. Maybe a 2x2 factor so you can lob 4 PCI cards in. I don't know if this is technically feasible, though.
The Sony docs from phase 1 were complete - including the systems information you'd need for Linux e.g. cache control details, system-level instructions, page-mapping registers, etc. etc. But these docs were only ever printed in dead-tree format, so it's incredibly difficult for them to accidentally escape.
The Phase 2 docs are PDFs (I have a set at home which might escape if someone asks me nicely) but they miss out this important information.
Finally, you'd need some form of Trojan to boot the machine, at least until it's chipped - and if you take a PS2 apart, the first thing you notice is that chipping this mofo is not going to be easy! It's some of the densest electronics I've ever seen. The best bet right now seems to be "accidentally" putting a Trojan download program onto a game disk, probably hidden as a buffer-overflow bug which you trigger deliberately, possibly by sending a packet on the serial port input; possibly by inserting an unauthorized CD.
All this is assuming Sony will not be supportive ... and I think that's a fair bet.
On the Nintendo side, however, things are more interesting. The Game Boy Advance is certainly *not* just a rumor - in fact, IIRC, it's being released March 1. Certainly, I know a lot of developers are working on GBA titles. GBA sounds like great fun to develop for *and* to play on, and where you mention convergence between X-Box and PC, perhaps we'll see convergence between GBA and PalmPilot? ;)
After that, there's the GameCube. Now, remember that the N64 was a late entry. The GameCube is too. But despite late entry the N64 still sold a respectable number of games. Nintendo deal with this differently than Sony - Sony throw as many games at players as possible, in the belief that some of them will be popular. [If you throw enough shit, some will stick.] Nintendo, on the other hand, has very few games, but the average quality is far higher. They've done OK with this model on N64, so it remains to be seen how they do on GameCube.
This ain't over. Not by a long stretch. Sega has been the outsider since 1995, and it's just taken a long time to die. But MS, Sony and Nintendo still have some interesting fights ahead.
I was unfair to Slashdot; on occasion I have had rewarding interactions. One a few months ago about music support for Linux springs to mind. They are rare, but valuable. OTOH, I've lost count of the times I've made a reasonable effort at explaining my point of view (which are nothing if not contrary to popular belief around here), only to be flamed into oblivion by ACs with nothing to say expletives [enough to turn my Windows backdrop blue]. On the whole, my view of Slashdot is definitely colored by my experiences here [as you alluded to earlier].
Anyway, I don't consider my original post to be a flame. It contained a few unnecessary remarks - which you picked up - but largely (80%) it was an attempt at explaining what must have been wrong with the application of XP in this instance. I was responding to you saying that claiming XP has been misapplied is an invalid response. It isn't.
Mind you, if you were trying to hold your own against the onslaught of XP fanatics, perhaps I would have been wiser to have sided with you. But them's the breaks - one makes a judgement, sometimes one is wrong.
The only personality flaw of mine which has influenced these events is just that once people start with the personal attacks I do forget everything but "winning". That's a flamewar. I get the feeling we were continuing with it for much the same reason - pride.
Nice talking to you - at last! Take care,
Eddie
I wrote my last article in March, a few years after *never*.
Oh, dammit Salamander, I just realized you gave the "pretending to be another person" game away. You said you weren't interested in continuing in another thread.
Don't allow yourself to be annoyed by it. It shouldn't be important to an onlooker. If you are an onlooker, which I doubt.
Don't worry; my attitude at work is nothing like my attitude on Slashdot. Slashdot is a free-for-all flamefest. If you've posted here a long time you'll appreciate that. Corrections to one's usage of latin terms are always phrased like the one by the AC in this thread. They call one a "jerk" and attack one's motives - ad hominem, if I'm using the term correctly! I feel quite justified flaming in return, even if I have to work quite hard to invent a reason for my not being wrong ;)
So my attitude when posting to Slashdot is a lot more gung-ho than my attitude when discussing stuff at work. From what you've seen of my posting here, Salamander, I can guarantee you would be amazed ;)
Also, when I write I write for an audience. When I write an article for a magazine or a book, obviously my style is rather different. On Slashdot, the audience is me and people who happen to agree with what I'm saying. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.
Does this insight into the psychology of a Slashdot poster surprise you? Did you expect everyone here to have the same motives for being here that you do? I don't feel there are many deficiencies in my manner of communication - although I'm constantly looking for ways to improve my flamage. Flamage is, in its own way, enjoyable.
You seem to be one of the last here who still take this site seriously. I kind of respect that, and I kind of feel sorry for it. If you want a serious discussion about XP, you're not going to get it on Slashdot. I might learn something here (other than the headlines) once a month, and I do read most of what is posted. Most of it is absolute drivel.
I come here merely to vent these days. You seemed like an easy target. Boy, was I wrong in that! ;)
At work I have to deal politely with people who actually do claim that unit tests are worthless (yeah, yeah, I know that's not your opinion, but at one point I thought it was). Christ, my "great attitude" is handy when that happens! But at the end of the day, having a good attitude won't help change the minds of the willfully ignorant, who tend to be in charge.
I'm not going to get into an email exchange with anyone on this site. Thanks for the offer, but I don't feel we have much useful to discuss.
</META>
I give up. You win. Happy now?
Your statements seem contradictory to me. If I say so, it is an expression of (and a function of) my point of view. Your point of view may differ. Again, don't take it personally, especially in a case where you can easily fix the problem by clarifying your original statements. But this, it seems, is beneath you.
I tell no lies here. I may be mistaken on points of fact. I may misunderstand you. This is not the same as lying. Every 8-year-old knows that.
Like I say, if you were really as reasonable as you pretend to be, you could have ended this entire argument in an instant - with a rhetoric bomb, as you put it. By simply admitting that your phrasing was unfortunate, and that your rant was just a rant and didn't represent your full opinions.
Instead, you chose to go the route of personal attacks and calling of names. I'm responding merely to this now; the debate about unit test is long passed. So it's a little bizarre for you to start telling me to grow up. Your conceit is astounding. It hits its zenith when you started psychobabbling.
Now, have you any other advice for a long and happy life, or can we stop this nonsense?
I must admit, I did enjoy this post. Your term "rhetoric bomb" is excellent, and your reflection of the term "magic bullet" in both rhetoric and engineering methodology was very good.
But I really don't care. I used the term ad hominem in a way which might be technically incorrect; but given a sympathetic audience I'm sure I could persuade them that my usage of the term was acceptable. You language lawyers seem to forget that language itself is about communication, and I don't believe I failed to communicate my major point - which is that ad-hoc methodologies fail under a load of more than 6 or 7 people. If I mis-used a Latin phrase in the process, I apologize most profounding, with much cap-tipping in the direction of Plato, Socrates et al, which I'm sure the AC will have read in the original.
Nonetheless, I'll argue with any Anonymous Coward who calls me a "jerk" on principle.