ow can they compete with mp3's that can be acquired for free, have no restriction AND can play on any platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) or portable device?
Don't you get it? That's the point - The music industry is forcing everything to WMA format (and possibly other heavily DRM-ed formats in the future. I'll call them all WMA for brevity here.)
They know it will take a few years, but that they will eventually win. Here's the scenario:
1) Make all current and classic songs only available "legally" in WMA formats. Already happening through most "legal" online music services, and the customers are biting. Augment this by encouraging the creation of more and more embedded car/portable players that support WMA only, or support mp3 as a second-class citizen. This is also already beginning to happen.
2) Eliminate CDs or cripple them with technology to prevent ripping. The latter is beginning - they can't reliably stop ripping now, but they'll keep at it, but it won't matter because we can expect some new releases in WMA formats only in the near future.
At that point, they've won the war, although battles will continue to be fought for some time. The trendy crowd will swallow WMA hook line and sinker to get the latest rapcrap music, so they'll get away with not having CDs available.
Once this has happened, mp3, Ogg, and the rest will irrelevant, since you can't transcode across psychoacoustic models without the result sounding horrible, even for bad music. That means WMA will be the only way to get high fidelity rapcrap (an oxymoron if ever there was one) but it *will* sell.
Your whole argument assumes the record companies will make music available in some non-DRM'ed form for ripping. They won't - they intend to squash that within a year or two, and with WMA'ed audio as the only option, they'll swing the consumer electronics (CE) industry behind them, barring some extraordinary set of circumstances. I really don't see that the customers have enough power to be very effective at doing anything about this. If they can continue to arm-twist the CE vendors, they will win by default for all except a few rebel geeks. (If Ogg players were readily available, I might change my tune, but we don't have those, do we? And very few CE vendors are willing to endure draw the withering fire from Microsoft and the RIAA that such a product would surely bring, especially since they are incresingly owned by or otherwise entangles with the record companies themselves.)
I'll always love the Commodore. My SX-64 was the first "real" computer (the various dev boards and Sinclairs weren't quite in that category...) I ever owned, and it was my primary computer for several years, getting me through all those ugly college Senior papers.
Just after I graduated, I found out about a new program called GEOS. This was perhaps the greatest hack in computer history - an entire graphical windowing environment that ran on the C64 - with apps for word processing, spreadsheet, real bitmapped fonts rather than only the ones your printer knew about and everything!
It was 90% of what a Mac could do, at a fraction of the price. It was slightly buggy, but usable - my grad student papers and all my job search letters and my resume were produced under GEOS, and actually looked as nice as anything the Mac could produce without the unbelievably expensive LaserWriters.
GEOS lived on for many years, and was still trying to make its way in life as a PDA OS as recently as a year or two ago.
I loved the simplicity of the Commodore, but eventually, its simplicity became a pain, and Commodore forgot who their customers were (in one of the most notable corporate implosions of the 1980's) and never came out with a really credible growth path. When they finally decided to abandon all their strengths and build third-rate PC clones, the game was up.
I miss GEOS, I miss the C=64, and I miss the excitement of what could be done then easier than it can be today. In 1985, I had a C-64-based voice-controlled home automation system. You could do the same thing today, but it would cost more, be more of a pain, and work no better than that one did. That says something profound about the lack of real progress in many important dimensions over the past 15-20 years...
I haven't seen anything as innovative as GEOS since Palm OS, and it's looking like it will be a long time before we get to see anything like that again...
Much as I used to like JavaScript, I now firmly believe that it's an Evil (tm) technology
Actually, JavaScript is really the most open and standard thing out there - I'm working on a project now where we decided JavaScript/ECMAscript was the way to go simply because it's the gold standard of interoperability across platforms. Even Java itself isn't as compatible, with weird bugs often arising depending on the exact JVM/JRE in use. (The differnces between JavaScript/JScript/ECMAScript are not nearly so likely to trip you up.)
That's not to say that JavaScript can't be used to do stupid things, but I'd say JavaScript is considerably more open and standard than CSS, and the closest thing we have to a platform that can be assumed to be present and usable regardless of the type of computer you're on.
Three months ago, I though JavaScript was a toy language. In some ways, it is, of course, but I now think it may well be the most important language we have, simply because it *is* everywhere, and works pretty much the same regardless of location. Just as XML is the lingua franca of data transfer, JavaScipt is the lingua franca of programs to deal with that data. Get used to JavaScript - it's your friend.
Even though Microsoft lost, Bush's DOJ stopped pursuing the case and that was that. Nothing ended up being done.
This is just blatant (and incorrect) Bush-bashing. The Clinton administration had backed away from going after Microsoft years before (and the states coalitions self-destructed almost as soon as they started, once MS leaned *hard* on OEMs and parts suppliers all over the country.) In fact, the DoJ began actively "losing" their case long before Bush was even a candidate. They did this in many ways, but mostly by restricting the entire argument of MS's misbehaviour to one tiny thing, which was a relatively small offense, given al lthe MS had done wrong: bundling the browser with the OS. Other huge infringements that could have been used were completely ignored, as MS had Reno bought and paid for within weeks of her press conference announcing the DOJ was going after Microsoft. The things ignored included the truly damning evidence from the Caldera suit, which clearly showed Gates and other top MS honchos were directly involved in deliberate efforts to ensure that other products could NOT operate with Windows, even if that meant adding encrypted code specifically to break those products: a very clear abuse of monopoly power.
In reality, the Bush administration just looked at the hash that Reno and the DoJ had made of an eminently winnable case and (quite correctly) decided that there was no point throwing good money after bad. The damage was done - Reno and the DoJ had had the best of all possible positions, and totally blown it. As much as I would have liked to see things turn out differently, this was the right call, given the situation.
And yes, I'm pretty familiar with what went on, as I was up to my armpits in IBM lawyers dealing with this from IBM's perspective for quite a while, and left Dell to avoid having to lie to the DoJ to protect Microsoft, which my boss quite probably would have expected had I stayed. (He did not hold a particularly high view of the law, even after being directly responsible for Dell having to shell out the largest corporate fine in Federal Trade Commission history - with "no admission of wrongdoing", of course...)
There's no question MS abused thier monopoly power, but the Sherman antitrust act has really been a complete joke since the forces for monopoly managed to keep Teddy Roosevelt from being elected president in 1912. (No that I think they were directly implicated in his shooting (there's no evidence I'm aware of there), but they cetainly did everything they could to capitalize on it, kmowing that he was the only candidate that would be sure to cause trouble for the monopolists, and would very likely ask Congress for even stricter regulations and penalty of monopoly abuse. The game's been over since then, and the monopolists won..)
Filesystem benchmarks can be remarkably inconsistent. These tables do not display average difference between runs. Usually this means that the methodology used to do the benchmarking is lax, and thus, untrustworthy.
Not only that, those charts were generated on 1998-vintage hardware with nothing in the way of modern disks or controllers. As always, the only real benchmark that matters is the one that reflects your *actual* environment.
This is not just a filesystems test, folks - disk controllers (especially if RAIDED), PCI bus bandwidth and motherboard chipset, file sizes and I/O mix, and a zillion other things all greatly affect these kinds of benchmark results. If you want maningful numbers, you'll have to generate them yourself. Fortunately, he provided the scripts, so you don't have to write your own, as we did a couple of years ago. (Get to know the benchmarks, too - both Bonnie(++) and Iozone have quirks that affect the results. And you'll porobably want to add Intel's Iometer, too if you want to be able to compare your setup with most of the publised results out there. Despite the fact that it requires Windows, it's a decent benchmark, but harder to understand and use than Bonnie.
There is not only NO reason to provide sixth graders with laptops, but a great deal of evidence that doing so is harmful to their education.
I have a whole list of bookmarks pointing to studies, but this article from a year or two ago is a decent summary of how "The Education Technology Mania" is infesting our schools, wasting our tax dollars, and being nothing but an incredibly expensive babysitter to let teachers avoid real interaction with their students (this used to be called "teaching".) A slightly older (but still quite true article from the Atlantic describes "The Computer Delusion" in a bit more detail, including this chilling quote that in effect enshrines illiteracy:
"In a poll taken last year, US teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more 'essential' than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, or physics... than reading modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway or classic ones such as Plato and Shakespeare."
READ the articles above, and you'll realize: Schools don't need computers - Computers are just a dodge to keep parents from realizing that schools and teachers are already failing miserably at anything approaching education. Playing along with the educrats game is not only ridiculously expensive, it's an unpardonable assault on the children that will be intellectually raped and robbed in the process.
There are no "computer skills" transferred by expensive laptop purchasing programs that cannot be conveyed in a week of instruction. I was one of the first to receive such "revolutionary new education" - it equipped me to program in an obsolete language and use obsolete applications on an obsolete computer - I use exactly ZERO of that knowledge today, and the concepts imparted (which are admittedly still useful) could be learned by even a poor student in an afternoon or two.
Stop wasting our money and start TEACHING our students!
Yes, there is a danger. The trouble is that Google is currently the best search engine across a number of criteria...
I love Google, and it's been my preferred search engine since before most people could spell it, much less consider using it as a verb, but it is a bit frightening how their competion has sublimed away into nothingness over the past few years. AltaVista is a shadow of its former self, Northern Lights never really got their act fully together, Lycos is probably the best alternative, but distantly back from Google. Saddest of all is Infoseek, which was once the reigning king of search engines, and easily the best and most capable search engine on the net - at least until Disney bought Infoseek and emasculated it into the pitiful "Go" search engine about hte time Google began to rise to prominence.
Is Google really too big to have any competition now? If so, that's *really* scary...
Some may object, saying that missile defense violates this or that international treaty. However, it's the only way to go. In fact, it wouldn't really cost anything, since we need to build a missile defense shield anyway to protect against attacks from Iran and North Korea. Asteroids are merely another threat that could be neutralized by such a system.
Sorry, but that's a bit ridiculous. Most SDI type defensive weapns are NOT kinetic energy weapons, but big honking chemical lasers, masers or the like. They work because the skin of a missile is necessarily fairly thin, so you don't have to create deep damage in order to knock one down.
A missile defense system can easily blow a few thousandths of an inch worth of aluminum off an incoming missile (enough to destroy it, given the delicate aerodynamic balance involved) but would not even polish the surface of a big rock...
It's kinda like the bad SciFi movie, where the Earth scientists are firing their ray gun at some sort of alien/monster. One of the hero/scientists says incredulously of the unfazed creature, "We're giving it more that 3 Million Electron Volts!!" At this point, several viewers break out in laughter as another (the physicist, of course) yells at the screen, "Throw a rock at it, stupid, and you'll transfer more energy!"
Kinda the same thing with using SDI weapons to stop big space rocks. Your trusty slingshot would do about as much good. Remember, KE = 1/2 mv^2. When both mass and velocity are *big* (WAY bigger than any missile!), and it's headed your way, you have a real problem...
"New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre.
Although this seems quite close by astronomical standards, it's still not really all that close - when you realize that Geosynchronous orbit is approximately three Earth Diameters out there, then it becomes clear that this non-trivial-but-not-enormous rock missed Earth by more than six Earth diameters. (Still, anything large passing inside the orbit of the Moon is a bit surprising, isn't it?)
Let's face facts though - if we get nailed by a big one, it's just our time to go, and Hollywood silliness notwithstanding, there's nothing we could do about it anyway...
When you have enough consideration for others here to use correct grammar and capitalization (so that your post is at least readable), I'll respond to your arguments (which I are pretty weak, BTW.)
Really, though, couldn't you take another minute or two to make your post readable? Isn't the idea here to communicate? Or is your goal just to restate a politically correct position poplular among some \. readers?
MacOS X is by far the best desktop environment _I've_ ever used, and it's far better than XP. It does tend to be more expensive, of course.
Like they say, you get what you pay for. I love OS X, too, but I don't think it's markedly superior to XP for most desktop use. It's a better gee-whiz media machine, but as far as getting real work out the door, no, it's really no better, and although the software situation is getting much better, there are still at least two orders of magnitude more quality software for XP than for OS X. Visio alone is enough reason for me to stay with a Windows desktop, and has been the main thing keeping me in MS-land since 1999. (And you can't share local Mac printers with PCs in OS X, either. (At least not without stupid and very un-Mac-like Samba hacking. Grrrrr.)
Even they aren't perfect, but they're closer than anybody else. Oh, and "Mail" rocks, hard.
Ugh. The Jaguar Mail program is a helicopter crash (those are *always* ugly...) It doesn't have half the features Netscape/Mozilla Mail has, and it seems riddled with bugs that prevent correct interoperablity with Windows users. My Dad uses Jaguar, and I'm about to move him off Mail and onto Mozilla Mail just to get Microsoft attachments working cleanly with PC mail users. (AppleCare's answer to Mail's refusal to properly tag an attachment as say, application/ms-word (or whatever it is...) instead of application/octet-stream was, "Use another Mail program - that's just the way Mail is for some users..." This is not an acceptable answer in today's world, where MS is dominant, whether Apple likes it or not.)
I've also spent several hours rebuilding (by hand, the sed/awk way) mailboxes botched by that stupid program. (At least it gets points for using a standard and fixable mailbox format, unlike the Microsoft mail tools.) I'm glad you're happy with it, but IMO, Mail is among the worst MUAs I've ever seen, and a huge dark smudge on the image of the Mac as a "just works" computer...
That might be true for some desktop machines. However, as the annoyed user of a recent Dell laptop running WinXP, I disagree. I tried using suspend and hibernate on this laptop a few times. It worked the first couple times I tried it. Then, I started having weird problems, such as "no keyboard after resume", or "mouse and touchpad mysteriously die after unlocking" or "spontaneous reboot on resume."
I don't know whether your Dell is an Inspiron (just a badge-engineered Compal or Quanta box, usually using a fairly standard Phoenix BIOS) or a Latitude (Dell's attempt to justify a 2-3X cost differential for the "enterprise" market.)
The Latitude BIOS is truly weird, and does things no BIOS should really *ever* do. If they are still using that same code, I expect they're having fits with it, since the people that wrote it and really understood it (mostly one guy) left Dell some time ago.
Here's how weird it is: I was Program Manager in charge of getting Win98 to run on Dell's laptops when it came out. ACPI support in W98 was completely broken, but it worked perfectly in NT, which unlike 9x, was developed in a reasonably professional way at MS. This problem was so severe that it threatened to keep us from shipping Win98 at launch, something that *absolutely must never happen* in Dell's world. (Whether it works for the customer is almost a secondary concern to letting Michael keep Bill happy.)
Our brilliant BIOS programmer (actually a Unix/Linux/BSD guy, by inclination and interest) came up with an idea after noticing that each OS made the initial ACPI call slightly differently: Hold off on setting up the BIOS for power management until that call is made, then re-write the BIOS tables for whichever OS is actually running. Brilliant in one way, doomed in another: we were able to ship at launch (and it actually worked!) and were the only OEM to do so for several months. This was dirtectly responsible for establishing Dell as a much more serious laptop player, as corporate customers *had to have* the latest and greatest MS OS, regardless of warts. But sooner or later, you have to pay the piper - If Microsofft has *ever* changed those bizarre little differences in the way 9x and NT-derived OSes make that initial ACPI call, ugly failure can be the only result. (I don't even want to think about the confusion something like VMware could cause...)
Check to make sure you're running the recommended BIOS for your machine and OS combination and DO NOT run other versions.
There's a reason I prefer ThinkPads and PowerBooks...
Freepdf, if you're not doing prepress stuff, it is actually better than acrobat (I use 4.0) IMO.
FreePDF is actually just the destestable GhostScript in a half-assed Windows printer wrapper. (It only simplifies the GhostScript setup by a little bit, go figure...)
GhostScript is not even remotely comparable to Acrobat Distiller for quality, compatibility, and fidelity to the original document. The fonts are atrocious. GS is bad for English and horrible for anything else. (Try using it to produce a PDF including Hebrew, Greek, Chinese or Korean to see what I mean - you'll be lucky to get half of it to show up.)
I wish there was a better alternative to Acrobat Distiller, but so far, I've found nothing else that's even in the same league. (To be honest, I'm really surprised this is still the case more than ten years on, but it shows how difficult it can be to focus open source development even in areas where there is a real demand...)
Or better still, PDFCreator does all that for nothing with with no ads or nagging - completely GPL. Comes with a proper no-hassle installer, and is as easy to set up and use as PDF995 or similar.
PDFCreator and PDF995 are both very light duty tools. They're not bad tools, but they're not even close to a real substitute for Acrobat Distiller. (And remember, Acrobat is a LOT more than just the Distiller.)
Both PDFCreator and PDF995 are OK for very simple stuff, but break down badly when you throw anything non-trivial at them. Even moderately complex graphics, or (especially) non-English fonts will blow either of these sky-high, while Acrobat Distiller will plow right through and deliver a perfect rendering with near-100% reliability. You get what you pay for - it's still true, even in today's open source world...
Yeah, tried using that mode once on Windows98: Restarting after the hibernate didn't go as smoothly as one hoped:
Oh, come on now... I'm no MS apologist, but Win98's power management support was notoriously bug infested. (I know - I was Program Manager for Dell's laptops when it was introduced!)
Comparing this to W2K or XP is like comparing DOS to VMS. There are similarities, but they are only superficial. Power managment in XP is flawless, and implemented FAR better than in even the latest mainstream Linux distros, which always seem to be two years behind the times in hardware support. (
Sadly, PM has never been very good in Linux, I think mostly because of the anti-MS bias - If you don't hang out at the Windows Hardware Developer Conference, how are you going to know enough about the PCxx standards (which, like it or not, *define* what a PC is and how it works) to write good PM code? Answer: You can't!
I have to say though, despite the fact that I really dislike some of Microsoft's business practices, I recently upgraded my primary desktop to XP, and it's *by far* the best desktop environment I've ever used (after expunging IE/OE for Mozilla). Like it or not, XP is a real OS, and particularly as a desktop (still 100% BSD/Linux for servers), it's the most stable and functional setup I've seen. (And this is with the low-budget XP Home, since I didn't really need the few extra features of Pro they charge another $100+ for.)
If I sound surprised, it's because I am - W2K was the first "real OS" from Redmond, and XP is a much bigger improvement on it than I expected. Now if they could just secure it, and would quit intentionally breaking things... (like for instance *every* (older) version of Visio - Grrrr)
Do we really trust an amazon sponsored search engine when looking for "books on computers"? Do we really believe that they will give us unskewed results?
Why not? Your proposition doesn't even make sense. In fact, Amazon has shown that they are quite willing to give honest results, even when doing so may result in them losing the sale themselves. (Although they do still get a small cut of these other sales.)
Example:
1) Amazon lists used books on the same page as thier new ones. 2) I was looking for a digital camera this morning. In additon to the price from Amazon directly for the camer I was looking for, they include on the same main page for that camera, ads (including prices) for the same camera from three competitive vendors, including J&R and Ritz Camera.
Not only is there NO evidence of your assertion, there IS substantial evidence to the contrary.
But why would anyone think that Amazon could be trusted for e-commerce searches? If someone is selling a product for a lower price than Amazon is, do you really think that their search engine will point me there?
But they already do, and have been for quite a while. (If you actually used Amazon, or really knew anything about it, you'd know this.)
It's not really that unusual to have the "available used or new from [price]" line be lower than Amazon's new price. One of the great things about Amazon's business model is that it encourages this kind of openness. They took quite a bit of heat forthis not long ago, when some authors strenuously objected to Amazon offering used copies of thier books listed on the same page as new ones. (And Amazon itself doesn't even sell used books, although they do get a small cut of used sales through partners.)
It's hard to imagine a more fair, balanced, and open business model than Amazon's, regardless of the popularity of Slashdot Amazon-bashing...
And I, and others, have pointed out XML is a horrible data storage format.
Major counterpoint:
It doesn't matter. The value of XML is not its utility as a data storage format for either databases or documents, but rather its utility as a data communications format.
In this role, XML (often along with Java) is the modern Ligua Franca of applications in the digital world, and will be with us for years to come, because it solves a very real problem in a relatively easy way. The fact that it's not suitably elegant or shaped for your tastes in no way diminishes its usefulness. Rail on against XML if you want to - the rest of us are using it, warts and all.
(Lingua Franca is Latin for "Frankish Language" - the mish-mash of European and Mediterranean toungues that was the universal language in ports throughout the known/trading world several hundred years ago, much as "broken English" is today.)
[flame]No, actually, according to Stallman's stated position, we're supposed to all work for tips as waiters and give software away. It's not clear if even charging for support is permissible in the FSF's thinking, since that would involve putting money and software in the same context, something that apparently must never be done...[/flame]
No, that is not Stallman's stated position, it is SCO's stated beliefe of Stallman's position. Stallman's stated position is that it is okay to charge for software, and in fact he gets paid to write software. What he wants people to do is share the code so everyone's software is better. That sounds good to me. Software Libre!
Funny, since Stallman's comments about how programmers should give away their software and work as waiters to pay the rent is well-known and documented all over the net. (I will confess I haven't tracked down the original source of the quote - Stallman bores me to tears, is flat wrong (wooly thinking and careless adherence to discredited eastern bloc dogmas always produces wrong results), and I have better things to do with my time...)
until I see a solid version of something to replace Act and an accounting system, the windows PCs stay.
There is no money in software. Its an art and like any art, after it stops being trendy, there is no cash in it.
Sorry, but you're missin ghte point a bit - yes, part of Sun's announcement is about offering a lower cost alternative to the MS desktop, but the REAL news is the all for one price set of server, back office, and middleware apps that are the things eating people's lunch today. Sun's approach of offering al this for one very reasonable low price will be a wild success if it "just works" as advertised. As I said in another posting, I'll withhold final judgment until they deliver, but I think they've got a good chance of pulling this off.
I looked at that website, and its the same old young-Earth creationism drivel taht's been making the rounds for decades. No integrity, no credibility, and no science.
Then you didn't look at all. There's quite a bit there, and the first time through, it took me over a week to read through just the archives of the Disclosure articles. There is indeed quite a bit of science there, much of it quoted form evolutionist journals...
The Linksys EFG80 is close to the same price, looks more useful, it will talk to a UPS, is expandable, and is primarily a network storage device, not a backup solution. I think it will work in a mixed network environment, not just XP boxes. It also does not assume an Internet broadband connection which worries me about this new offering since if I have sensitive stuff on my machines.
Unfortunately, the product seems to be pretty much abandoned, even though it's probably the best implementaitn of the idea since the original Zenith Z-Stor server. The Linksys is the only small server appliance I know of I know of that has the ability to RAID-1 mirror the disks for safety and/or periodic backups, or RAID-0 stripe for more capacity. I think they upgraded the 40GB HD to 80 GB almost two years ago, and there have been no substantial price drops or any improvements at all since then. Too bad...
Slashdot Mirror
ow can they compete with mp3's that can be acquired for free, have no restriction AND can play on any platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) or portable device?
Don't you get it? That's the point - The music industry is forcing everything to WMA format (and possibly other heavily DRM-ed formats in the future. I'll call them all WMA for brevity here.)
They know it will take a few years, but that they will eventually win. Here's the scenario:
1) Make all current and classic songs only available "legally" in WMA formats. Already happening through most "legal" online music services, and the customers are biting. Augment this by encouraging the creation of more and more embedded car/portable players that support WMA only, or support mp3 as a second-class citizen. This is also already beginning to happen.
2) Eliminate CDs or cripple them with technology to prevent ripping. The latter is beginning - they can't reliably stop ripping now, but they'll keep at it, but it won't matter because we can expect some new releases in WMA formats only in the near future.
At that point, they've won the war, although battles will continue to be fought for some time. The trendy crowd will swallow WMA hook line and sinker to get the latest rapcrap music, so they'll get away with not having CDs available.
Once this has happened, mp3, Ogg, and the rest will irrelevant, since you can't transcode across psychoacoustic models without the result sounding horrible, even for bad music. That means WMA will be the only way to get high fidelity rapcrap (an oxymoron if ever there was one) but it *will* sell.
Your whole argument assumes the record companies will make music available in some non-DRM'ed form for ripping. They won't - they intend to squash that within a year or two, and with WMA'ed audio as the only option, they'll swing the consumer electronics (CE) industry behind them, barring some extraordinary set of circumstances. I really don't see that the customers have enough power to be very effective at doing anything about this. If they can continue to arm-twist the CE vendors, they will win by default for all except a few rebel geeks. (If Ogg players were readily available, I might change my tune, but we don't have those, do we? And very few CE vendors are willing to endure draw the withering fire from Microsoft and the RIAA that such a product would surely bring, especially since they are incresingly owned by or otherwise entangles with the record companies themselves.)
I'll always love the Commodore. My SX-64 was the first "real" computer (the various dev boards and Sinclairs weren't quite in that category...) I ever owned, and it was my primary computer for several years, getting me through all those ugly college Senior papers.
Just after I graduated, I found out about a new program called GEOS. This was perhaps the greatest hack in computer history - an entire graphical windowing environment that ran on the C64 - with apps for word processing, spreadsheet, real bitmapped fonts rather than only the ones your printer knew about and everything!
It was 90% of what a Mac could do, at a fraction of the price. It was slightly buggy, but usable - my grad student papers and all my job search letters and my resume were produced under GEOS, and actually looked as nice as anything the Mac could produce without the unbelievably expensive LaserWriters.
GEOS lived on for many years, and was still trying to make its way in life as a PDA OS as recently as a year or two ago.
I loved the simplicity of the Commodore, but eventually, its simplicity became a pain, and Commodore forgot who their customers were (in one of the most notable corporate implosions of the 1980's) and never came out with a really credible growth path. When they finally decided to abandon all their strengths and build third-rate PC clones, the game was up.
I miss GEOS, I miss the C=64, and I miss the excitement of what could be done then easier than it can be today. In 1985, I had a C-64-based voice-controlled home automation system. You could do the same thing today, but it would cost more, be more of a pain, and work no better than that one did. That says something profound about the lack of real progress in many important dimensions over the past 15-20 years...
I haven't seen anything as innovative as GEOS since Palm OS, and it's looking like it will be a long time before we get to see anything like that again...
Obviously the work of the Teleban...
Someone please mod Parent up as +1 "Punny"...
Much as I used to like JavaScript, I now firmly believe that it's an Evil (tm) technology
Actually, JavaScript is really the most open and standard thing out there - I'm working on a project now where we decided JavaScript/ECMAscript was the way to go simply because it's the gold standard of interoperability across platforms. Even Java itself isn't as compatible, with weird bugs often arising depending on the exact JVM/JRE in use. (The differnces between JavaScript/JScript/ECMAScript are not nearly so likely to trip you up.)
That's not to say that JavaScript can't be used to do stupid things, but I'd say JavaScript is considerably more open and standard than CSS, and the closest thing we have to a platform that can be assumed to be present and usable regardless of the type of computer you're on.
Three months ago, I though JavaScript was a toy language. In some ways, it is, of course, but I now think it may well be the most important language we have, simply because it *is* everywhere, and works pretty much the same regardless of location. Just as XML is the lingua franca of data transfer, JavaScipt is the lingua franca of programs to deal with that data. Get used to JavaScript - it's your friend.
Even though Microsoft lost, Bush's DOJ stopped pursuing the case and that was that. Nothing ended up being done.
This is just blatant (and incorrect) Bush-bashing. The Clinton administration had backed away from going after Microsoft years before (and the states coalitions self-destructed almost as soon as they started, once MS leaned *hard* on OEMs and parts suppliers all over the country.) In fact, the DoJ began actively "losing" their case long before Bush was even a candidate. They did this in many ways, but mostly by restricting the entire argument of MS's misbehaviour to one tiny thing, which was a relatively small offense, given al lthe MS had done wrong: bundling the browser with the OS. Other huge infringements that could have been used were completely ignored, as MS had Reno bought and paid for within weeks of her press conference announcing the DOJ was going after Microsoft. The things ignored included the truly damning evidence from the Caldera suit, which clearly showed Gates and other top MS honchos were directly involved in deliberate efforts to ensure that other products could NOT operate with Windows, even if that meant adding encrypted code specifically to break those products: a very clear abuse of monopoly power.
In reality, the Bush administration just looked at the hash that Reno and the DoJ had made of an eminently winnable case and (quite correctly) decided that there was no point throwing good money after bad. The damage was done - Reno and the DoJ had had the best of all possible positions, and totally blown it. As much as I would have liked to see things turn out differently, this was the right call, given the situation.
And yes, I'm pretty familiar with what went on, as I was up to my armpits in IBM lawyers dealing with this from IBM's perspective for quite a while, and left Dell to avoid having to lie to the DoJ to protect Microsoft, which my boss quite probably would have expected had I stayed. (He did not hold a particularly high view of the law, even after being directly responsible for Dell having to shell out the largest corporate fine in Federal Trade Commission history - with "no admission of wrongdoing", of course...)
There's no question MS abused thier monopoly power, but the Sherman antitrust act has really been a complete joke since the forces for monopoly managed to keep Teddy Roosevelt from being elected president in 1912. (No that I think they were directly implicated in his shooting (there's no evidence I'm aware of there), but they cetainly did everything they could to capitalize on it, kmowing that he was the only candidate that would be sure to cause trouble for the monopolists, and would very likely ask Congress for even stricter regulations and penalty of monopoly abuse. The game's been over since then, and the monopolists won..)
Filesystem benchmarks can be remarkably inconsistent. These tables do not display average difference between runs. Usually this means that the methodology used to do the benchmarking is lax, and thus, untrustworthy.
Not only that, those charts were generated on 1998-vintage hardware with nothing in the way of modern disks or controllers. As always, the only real benchmark that matters is the one that reflects your *actual* environment.
This is not just a filesystems test, folks - disk controllers (especially if RAIDED), PCI bus bandwidth and motherboard chipset, file sizes and I/O mix, and a zillion other things all greatly affect these kinds of benchmark results. If you want maningful numbers, you'll have to generate them yourself. Fortunately, he provided the scripts, so you don't have to write your own, as we did a couple of years ago. (Get to know the benchmarks, too - both Bonnie(++) and Iozone have quirks that affect the results. And you'll porobably want to add Intel's Iometer, too if you want to be able to compare your setup with most of the publised results out there. Despite the fact that it requires Windows, it's a decent benchmark, but harder to understand and use than Bonnie.
You have a girlfriend? What are you doing on Slashdot?
The same thing as those of us married to absolutely gorgeous Redheads...
I have a whole list of bookmarks pointing to studies, but this article from a year or two ago is a decent summary of how "The Education Technology Mania" is infesting our schools, wasting our tax dollars, and being nothing but an incredibly expensive babysitter to let teachers avoid real interaction with their students (this used to be called "teaching".) A slightly older (but still quite true article from the Atlantic describes "The Computer Delusion" in a bit more detail, including this chilling quote that in effect enshrines illiteracy: READ the articles above, and you'll realize: Schools don't need computers - Computers are just a dodge to keep parents from realizing that schools and teachers are already failing miserably at anything approaching education. Playing along with the educrats game is not only ridiculously expensive, it's an unpardonable assault on the children that will be intellectually raped and robbed in the process.
There are no "computer skills" transferred by expensive laptop purchasing programs that cannot be conveyed in a week of instruction. I was one of the first to receive such "revolutionary new education" - it equipped me to program in an obsolete language and use obsolete applications on an obsolete computer - I use exactly ZERO of that knowledge today, and the concepts imparted (which are admittedly still useful) could be learned by even a poor student in an afternoon or two.
Stop wasting our money and start TEACHING our students!
Yes, there is a danger. The trouble is that Google is currently the best search engine across a number of criteria...
I love Google, and it's been my preferred search engine since before most people could spell it, much less consider using it as a verb, but it is a bit frightening how their competion has sublimed away into nothingness over the past few years. AltaVista is a shadow of its former self, Northern Lights never really got their act fully together, Lycos is probably the best alternative, but distantly back from Google. Saddest of all is Infoseek, which was once the reigning king of search engines, and easily the best and most capable search engine on the net - at least until Disney bought Infoseek and emasculated it into the pitiful "Go" search engine about hte time Google began to rise to prominence.
Is Google really too big to have any competition now? If so, that's *really* scary...
Some may object, saying that missile defense violates this or that international treaty. However, it's the only way to go. In fact, it wouldn't really cost anything, since we need to build a missile defense shield anyway to protect against attacks from Iran and North Korea. Asteroids are merely another threat that could be neutralized by such a system.
Sorry, but that's a bit ridiculous. Most SDI type defensive weapns are NOT kinetic energy weapons, but big honking chemical lasers, masers or the like. They work because the skin of a missile is necessarily fairly thin, so you don't have to create deep damage in order to knock one down.
A missile defense system can easily blow a few thousandths of an inch worth of aluminum off an incoming missile (enough to destroy it, given the delicate aerodynamic balance involved) but would not even polish the surface of a big rock...
It's kinda like the bad SciFi movie, where the Earth scientists are firing their ray gun at some sort of alien/monster. One of the hero/scientists says incredulously of the unfazed creature, "We're giving it more that 3 Million Electron Volts!!" At this point, several viewers break out in laughter as another (the physicist, of course) yells at the screen, "Throw a rock at it, stupid, and you'll transfer more energy!"
Kinda the same thing with using SDI weapons to stop big space rocks. Your trusty slingshot would do about as much good. Remember, KE = 1/2 mv^2. When both mass and velocity are *big* (WAY bigger than any missile!), and it's headed your way, you have a real problem...
How can you possibly make that assertion? Since an asteroid that misses leaves no evidence, who knows how close they've come in the past.
It's like the security goon that got up and said, (in front of senior management, no less) "We have never had an undetected break-in on our network."
The room sat in stunned silence for a moment... (Kinda like that AFLAC commercial with Yogi Berra. You've seen it if you watch baseball.)
"New Scientist reports that an asteroid about the size of a small house passed just 88,000 kilometres from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the closest approach of a natural object ever recorded. Geostationary communication satellites circle the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre.
Although this seems quite close by astronomical standards, it's still not really all that close - when you realize that Geosynchronous orbit is approximately three Earth Diameters out there, then it becomes clear that this non-trivial-but-not-enormous rock missed Earth by more than six Earth diameters. (Still, anything large passing inside the orbit of the Moon is a bit surprising, isn't it?)
Let's face facts though - if we get nailed by a big one, it's just our time to go, and Hollywood silliness notwithstanding, there's nothing we could do about it anyway...
When you have enough consideration for others here to use correct grammar and capitalization (so that your post is at least readable), I'll respond to your arguments (which I are pretty weak, BTW.)
Really, though, couldn't you take another minute or two to make your post readable? Isn't the idea here to communicate? Or is your goal just to restate a politically correct position poplular among some \. readers?
MacOS X is by far the best desktop environment _I've_ ever used, and it's far better than XP. It does tend to be more expensive, of course.
Like they say, you get what you pay for. I love OS X, too, but I don't think it's markedly superior to XP for most desktop use. It's a better gee-whiz media machine, but as far as getting real work out the door, no, it's really no better, and although the software situation is getting much better, there are still at least two orders of magnitude more quality software for XP than for OS X. Visio alone is enough reason for me to stay with a Windows desktop, and has been the main thing keeping me in MS-land since 1999. (And you can't share local Mac printers with PCs in OS X, either. (At least not without stupid and very un-Mac-like Samba hacking. Grrrrr.)
Even they aren't perfect, but they're closer than anybody else. Oh, and "Mail" rocks, hard.
Ugh. The Jaguar Mail program is a helicopter crash (those are *always* ugly...) It doesn't have half the features Netscape/Mozilla Mail has, and it seems riddled with bugs that prevent correct interoperablity with Windows users. My Dad uses Jaguar, and I'm about to move him off Mail and onto Mozilla Mail just to get Microsoft attachments working cleanly with PC mail users. (AppleCare's answer to Mail's refusal to properly tag an attachment as say, application/ms-word (or whatever it is...) instead of application/octet-stream was, "Use another Mail program - that's just the way Mail is for some users..." This is not an acceptable answer in today's world, where MS is dominant, whether Apple likes it or not.)
I've also spent several hours rebuilding (by hand, the sed/awk way) mailboxes botched by that stupid program. (At least it gets points for using a standard and fixable mailbox format, unlike the Microsoft mail tools.) I'm glad you're happy with it, but IMO, Mail is among the worst MUAs I've ever seen, and a huge dark smudge on the image of the Mac as a "just works" computer...
That might be true for some desktop machines. However, as the annoyed user of a recent Dell laptop running WinXP, I disagree. I tried using suspend and hibernate on this laptop a few times. It worked the first couple times I tried it. Then, I started having weird problems, such as "no keyboard after resume", or "mouse and touchpad mysteriously die after unlocking" or "spontaneous reboot on resume."
I don't know whether your Dell is an Inspiron (just a badge-engineered Compal or Quanta box, usually using a fairly standard Phoenix BIOS) or a Latitude (Dell's attempt to justify a 2-3X cost differential for the "enterprise" market.)
The Latitude BIOS is truly weird, and does things no BIOS should really *ever* do. If they are still using that same code, I expect they're having fits with it, since the people that wrote it and really understood it (mostly one guy) left Dell some time ago.
Here's how weird it is: I was Program Manager in charge of getting Win98 to run on Dell's laptops when it came out. ACPI support in W98 was completely broken, but it worked perfectly in NT, which unlike 9x, was developed in a reasonably professional way at MS. This problem was so severe that it threatened to keep us from shipping Win98 at launch, something that *absolutely must never happen* in Dell's world. (Whether it works for the customer is almost a secondary concern to letting Michael keep Bill happy.)
Our brilliant BIOS programmer (actually a Unix/Linux/BSD guy, by inclination and interest) came up with an idea after noticing that each OS made the initial ACPI call slightly differently: Hold off on setting up the BIOS for power management until that call is made, then re-write the BIOS tables for whichever OS is actually running. Brilliant in one way, doomed in another: we were able to ship at launch (and it actually worked!) and were the only OEM to do so for several months. This was dirtectly responsible for establishing Dell as a much more serious laptop player, as corporate customers *had to have* the latest and greatest MS OS, regardless of warts. But sooner or later, you have to pay the piper - If Microsofft has *ever* changed those bizarre little differences in the way 9x and NT-derived OSes make that initial ACPI call, ugly failure can be the only result. (I don't even want to think about the confusion something like VMware could cause...)
Check to make sure you're running the recommended BIOS for your machine and OS combination and DO NOT run other versions.
There's a reason I prefer ThinkPads and PowerBooks...
Freepdf, if you're not doing prepress stuff, it is actually better than acrobat (I use 4.0) IMO.
FreePDF is actually just the destestable GhostScript in a half-assed Windows printer wrapper. (It only simplifies the GhostScript setup by a little bit, go figure...)
GhostScript is not even remotely comparable to Acrobat Distiller for quality, compatibility, and fidelity to the original document. The fonts are atrocious. GS is bad for English and horrible for anything else. (Try using it to produce a PDF including Hebrew, Greek, Chinese or Korean to see what I mean - you'll be lucky to get half of it to show up.)
I wish there was a better alternative to Acrobat Distiller, but so far, I've found nothing else that's even in the same league. (To be honest, I'm really surprised this is still the case more than ten years on, but it shows how difficult it can be to focus open source development even in areas where there is a real demand...)
Or better still, PDFCreator does all that for nothing with with no ads or nagging - completely GPL. Comes with a proper no-hassle installer, and is as easy to set up and use as PDF995 or similar.
PDFCreator and PDF995 are both very light duty tools. They're not bad tools, but they're not even close to a real substitute for Acrobat Distiller. (And remember, Acrobat is a LOT more than just the Distiller.)
Both PDFCreator and PDF995 are OK for very simple stuff, but break down badly when you throw anything non-trivial at them. Even moderately complex graphics, or (especially) non-English fonts will blow either of these sky-high, while Acrobat Distiller will plow right through and deliver a perfect rendering with near-100% reliability. You get what you pay for - it's still true, even in today's open source world...
Yeah, tried using that mode once on Windows98: Restarting after the hibernate didn't go as smoothly as one hoped:
Oh, come on now... I'm no MS apologist, but Win98's power management support was notoriously bug infested. (I know - I was Program Manager for Dell's laptops when it was introduced!)
Comparing this to W2K or XP is like comparing DOS to VMS. There are similarities, but they are only superficial. Power managment in XP is flawless, and implemented FAR better than in even the latest mainstream Linux distros, which always seem to be two years behind the times in hardware support. (
Sadly, PM has never been very good in Linux, I think mostly because of the anti-MS bias - If you don't hang out at the Windows Hardware Developer Conference, how are you going to know enough about the PCxx standards (which, like it or not, *define* what a PC is and how it works) to write good PM code? Answer: You can't!
I have to say though, despite the fact that I really dislike some of Microsoft's business practices, I recently upgraded my primary desktop to XP, and it's *by far* the best desktop environment I've ever used (after expunging IE/OE for Mozilla). Like it or not, XP is a real OS, and particularly as a desktop (still 100% BSD/Linux for servers), it's the most stable and functional setup I've seen. (And this is with the low-budget XP Home, since I didn't really need the few extra features of Pro they charge another $100+ for.)
If I sound surprised, it's because I am - W2K was the first "real OS" from Redmond, and XP is a much bigger improvement on it than I expected. Now if they could just secure it, and would quit intentionally breaking things... (like for instance *every* (older) version of Visio - Grrrr)
Do we really trust an amazon sponsored search engine when looking for "books on computers"? Do we really believe that they will give us unskewed results?
Why not? Your proposition doesn't even make sense. In fact, Amazon has shown that they are quite willing to give honest results, even when doing so may result in them losing the sale themselves. (Although they do still get a small cut of these other sales.)
Example:
1) Amazon lists used books on the same page as thier new ones.
2) I was looking for a digital camera this morning. In additon to the price from Amazon directly for the camer I was looking for, they include on the same main page for that camera, ads (including prices) for the same camera from three competitive vendors, including J&R and Ritz Camera.
Not only is there NO evidence of your assertion, there IS substantial evidence to the contrary.
But why would anyone think that Amazon could be trusted for e-commerce searches? If someone is selling a product for a lower price than Amazon is, do you really think that their search engine will point me there?
But they already do, and have been for quite a while. (If you actually used Amazon, or really knew anything about it, you'd know this.)
It's not really that unusual to have the "available used or new from [price]" line be lower than Amazon's new price. One of the great things about Amazon's business model is that it encourages this kind of openness. They took quite a bit of heat forthis not long ago, when some authors strenuously objected to Amazon offering used copies of thier books listed on the same page as new ones. (And Amazon itself doesn't even sell used books, although they do get a small cut of used sales through partners.)
It's hard to imagine a more fair, balanced, and open business model than Amazon's, regardless of the popularity of Slashdot Amazon-bashing...
And I, and others, have pointed out XML is a horrible data storage format.
Major counterpoint:
It doesn't matter. The value of XML is not its utility as a data storage format for either databases or documents, but rather its utility as a data communications format.
In this role, XML (often along with Java) is the modern Ligua Franca of applications in the digital world, and will be with us for years to come, because it solves a very real problem in a relatively easy way. The fact that it's not suitably elegant or shaped for your tastes in no way diminishes its usefulness. Rail on against XML if you want to - the rest of us are using it, warts and all.
(Lingua Franca is Latin for "Frankish Language" - the mish-mash of European and Mediterranean toungues that was the universal language in ports throughout the known/trading world several hundred years ago, much as "broken English" is today.)
[flame]No, actually, according to Stallman's stated position, we're supposed to all work for tips as waiters and give software away. It's not clear if even charging for support is permissible in the FSF's thinking, since that would involve putting money and software in the same context, something that apparently must never be done...[/flame]
No, that is not Stallman's stated position, it is SCO's stated beliefe of Stallman's position. Stallman's stated position is that it is okay to charge for software, and in fact he gets paid to write software. What he wants people to do is share the code so everyone's software is better. That sounds good to me. Software Libre!
Funny, since Stallman's comments about how programmers should give away their software and work as waiters to pay the rent is well-known and documented all over the net. (I will confess I haven't tracked down the original source of the quote - Stallman bores me to tears, is flat wrong (wooly thinking and careless adherence to discredited eastern bloc dogmas always produces wrong results), and I have better things to do with my time...)
until I see a solid version of something to replace Act and an accounting system, the windows PCs stay.
There is no money in software. Its an art and like any art, after it stops being trendy, there is no cash in it.
Sorry, but you're missin ghte point a bit - yes, part of Sun's announcement is about offering a lower cost alternative to the MS desktop, but the REAL news is the all for one price set of server, back office, and middleware apps that are the things eating people's lunch today. Sun's approach of offering al this for one very reasonable low price will be a wild success if it "just works" as advertised. As I said in another posting, I'll withhold final judgment until they deliver, but I think they've got a good chance of pulling this off.
I looked at that website, and its the same old young-Earth creationism drivel taht's been making the rounds for decades. No integrity, no credibility, and no science.
Then you didn't look at all. There's quite a bit there, and the first time through, it took me over a week to read through just the archives of the Disclosure articles. There is indeed quite a bit of science there, much of it quoted form evolutionist journals...
The Linksys EFG80 is close to the same price, looks more useful, it will talk to a UPS, is expandable, and is primarily a network storage device, not a backup solution. I think it will work in a mixed network environment, not just XP boxes. It also does not assume an Internet broadband connection which worries me about this new offering since if I have sensitive stuff on my machines.
Unfortunately, the product seems to be pretty much abandoned, even though it's probably the best implementaitn of the idea since the original Zenith Z-Stor server. The Linksys is the only small server appliance I know of I know of that has the ability to RAID-1 mirror the disks for safety and/or periodic backups, or RAID-0 stripe for more capacity. I think they upgraded the 40GB HD to 80 GB almost two years ago, and there have been no substantial price drops or any improvements at all since then. Too bad...