Some of the language you used in example, such as "opportunities for growth", is plainly nonsense in that context. However, some of them are every bit as technical and specific a term as, say "object" would be to an OO programmer.
Take 'deliverable', for example. Nothing double-speak about that term, it's a business technical term with a specific meaning. 'Function' - though this one has the possibility for misuse, again it's a specific technical term to describe separation of responsibilities if applied to people, or specific capability if applied to a computer system (which may include both hardware and software).
Don't dismiss all of it, because some of it is exactly the kind of jargon you'd be used to in, say, programming. But keep an ear open for someone who's plainly speaking gibberish though.
How come this type of biography seems only to be available for Apple?
If you like this kind of stuff, you might be interested in On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. A very interesting read to anyone who was around at the time, in my case for the C64 and Amiga era - I missed out on the PETs.
The book talks about brushes with both Jobs and Woz as well - in fact it's significantly less than flattering to Apple and isn't exactly shining about Woz's ability as an engineer. I'm an Apple fan and have a number of their machines, but I've read enough positive things over the years to find it quite refreshing to read a negative view as well. The book is, to descend into cliche for a moment, a rattling good read.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm running it now - install is very fast, runtime very fast. Couple of notes though:
Can't access the physical CD
No sound
Other than that though, it's an excellent product. I've been running the Q front-end for Qemu, and used Virtual PC 7 on PPC. This blows them both away. But please can I have a sound card? Pretty please?
Usenet thread containing my walkthrough comments whilst I was performing the install is here (scroll down the thread a little).
Er, wouldn't that be the fan making the noise? CPUs have no moving parts.
No, it's not the fan. It's the CPU's idling mechanism, specifically its power-saving attempt. Up the CPU activity to around 5% and the noise goes away. I'd like to know if that's endemic to dual-core Intels at the moment, or if it's an Apple-specific problem.
What I'd like to know is if whether my noisy dual-core MacBook Pro (has the processor whining sound) is the only brand of dual-core Intel that's having this problem.
Does anyone have a PC laptop that's dual-core? I think Acer make them, maybe some others by now. Does anyone have one of these and if so, when the CPU is idle, do you get a high pitched electrical whining sound?
I'm likely to reject this machine because of noise. It's my second one too, one of the W8612 ones that a previous article suggested had the problems fixed. I can tell you that the processor noise one isn't. I'm likely to reject this one too, or at least force Apple to note my dissatisfaction so that I can get a replacement when they've got a quiet product out there.
Cheers,
Ian
So Boot Camp will be standard with Leopard...great. What about the thing that a lot of us actually want, virtualization from Apple, rumored to be in Leopard [macrumors.com]?
In my opinion, the existance of this tool only strengthens the rumour. If you're going to run a virtual Windows, you still need to have an actual installation of it lying around somewhere. Windows won't run from an HFS+ drive, it will need its own NTFS set-up somewhere - this tool will let you create such a set-up, ready to be dual-booted today and virtualised tomorrow.
How'd it manage to do the stairs? In the corners. Around the tops
of things. Its a gimmick mate. Which was my point.
Corners? Fine - did it with a brush. It didn't do the stairs. The tops of things - nope. So it's a gmmick? No, not at all.
If the argument is "have we reached a state of robo-nirvana?", then of course I concede. But your question was "when was the last time you saw a robot that was any help at all around the house" - and for that my answer stands. I was busy yesterday, but still the upstairs landing and room floors got cleaned which otherwise they wouldn't have done. Overnight, I had it doing the kitchen and dining room floors. During the day its been doing the kids' floors as they like to watch it.
Get the idea? The fact that it isn't C3PO personified does not make it a useless robot. I think if you come down from the sci-fi ideal of robots and start looking at what they actually are - automated devices to perform a task, such as have been used in industry for decades now - then I think you'll find the whole thing makes more sense. The perfect android won't just go "ping!" and arrive directly in front of you, you'll have to get there via a number of steps, with each step increasing the complexity of what's available. One step in that process is currently cleaning my floors and saving me hours, with which I'm very happy.
Has anyone stopped to ask why this is such a great idea? A robot is
just a computer with wheels (or legs). How exactly is this going to
help anyone anymore than a computer does already?
Err...by moving. Using its wheels (or legs).
...when was the last
time you saw a robot that was ANY practical use WHATSOEVER for
the home?
This weekend, as it vacuumed my house (shortness of video doesn't do it justice).
How timely. I bought my first home robot on Saturday, a Roomba vacuuming robot. It's working superbly, and am very happy with the frankly mindless job its doing having been transferred from either myself or my wife and over to a machine instead.
What I find interesting is that I have three kids, the eldest being four. They're going to grow up in a house where it's not considered unusual to have a robot pootling about the place doing domestic chores, whereas to my generation (I'm 34) that's still a "hey, cool!" thing. Nobody says "hey cool, you've got a washing machine!" anymore, at least no-one in the developed world (I'm in the UK).
I'm hoping that the Roomba is just the start of a number of domestic robots. I wouldn't mind one that could wash windows for example, both internal and external. Or a polishing robot. Or a mail-gaethering robot*, or preferable one robot capapble of doing all of it.
I would imaginethat by the time my kids are 34, domestic robots will be so common that even the phraseology will seem absolete. Sort of like your granny talking about the 'wireless', meaning something utterly different to what you mean by the wireless. They'd just be part of the normal experience of daily life. By getting kids used to the idea that there's nothing special about having a robot, such a day is hastened. And my floors get cleaned as well.
Cheers,
Ian
(*Forget the mail-gathering robot from the Hitchhiker's adventure game. I know about the mail-gathering robot from the Hitchhiker's adventure game. Damned babel fish machine...)
I misinterpreted the title at first, and thought it might mean Linux in the retail industry. I'll pass this anecdote on anyway though.
In the UK, the PC World chain is the main purveyor of PCs at retail. It, err...well. How shall we put this? It doesn't have the greatest reputation for knowledgeable staff and customer service. Alternative names I've heard for it are PC Woe and The Purple Temple Of Sadness (which is the best term I've heard for the place).
As you'd expect, it pushes cheap* PCs and whilst the odd Mac sits at the back somewhere, it's pretty much a Windows-only place, happily pushing Microsoft Anything and Norton at people.
It came as a surprise then, when I needed to grab a router right that moment and so went in, to find internal stock lists and part numbers getting checked using OpenOffice spreadsheets. Interested, I had a word with the guy doing the check and he said OpenOffice was used throughout the store.
I'm not certain as to whether he meant just that store or the entire chain, but it was interesting to see OpenOffice having taken over a shop so strongly identified with WinTel and Microsoft-only solutions.
Cheers,
Ian
*Not that I have anything against cheap PCs - all depends on people's needs really.
Why not just do it the easy way....keep one box as a windows box, or one that is dual boot win/linux...just for the few things you need winders for...like Quicken
Desktop use I'd agree with you, but I do a lot of work on trains so I want just one laptop that does everything. Until recently, this was a Powerbook running Virtual PC (Quicken isn't the slightest bit performance sensitive). Thanks to someone stealing my Powerbook however, I was forced to upgrade a bit faster than I'd have liked to and I now have an Intel laptop for which no Windows emulation is available yet, though Qemu work is promising.
Good points and I'd like to address them one by one.
I understand you need too keep your financial records accessible. However, myself, I would never let my data be tied up into a proprietary format.
13 years ago, that was the choice. There was no non-proprietary equivalent.
What happens if Quicken goes belly-up, or gets bought out, or any of a thousand other things that could happen to cause support for Quicken and/or its' current data formats to cease?
It's already happened - I use Quicken UK, and they've withdrawn from the UK market. But it doesn't matter to me - I use the 2002 Deluxe And Business Edition under an emulator Windows 2000, and the functionality is just the same. So long as a PC emulator exists, the software lives on.
I know that F/OSS tax/bookeeping software isn't as polished as its' Windows non-free brethren, but just the fact that I will always be able to access that data with whatever free and open-standard programs I wish to run makes up for the whistles and bells in my case.
Well...sort of. Free doesn't imply perpetual. I do agree with this point, but I'm more cautious in my backing for it. If a project dies, then whether the format was known or not doesn't really matter unless I'm prepared to pay a developer to get it imported into some new project, or do the work myself.
I understand the devil is in the details, and there may be certain details and facts of your situation that make switching to a more open solution extremely difficult or impossible at this time.
This is a key point - I've actually tried out many other packages to see if I could migrate away. None of them successfully imported my previous data files - they all got the balances wrong, the inter-account transfers wrong...nothing worked. Not even Quicken itself - the Mac version. So I'm a bit stuck at the moment, waiting for improvements and patiently filing bug reports.
I'd keep an eye on the major F/OSS tax/bookeeping software projects, and maybe even drop a forum post or an e-mail to the developers, stating what features/abilities/formats would be needed to be added or fixed to make using their software (and switching *away* from your current solution) more of a do-able, realistic task.
Absolutely, and that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm continuing to use Quicken 2002 under emulation, because it does the job and the job is rather important. But I'm not blindly following it - I do look around every so often to see if there's a place I can jump to.
That's a lot of cash and effort just to use quicken.
Quicken contains 13 years' worth of account data for me, including my business accounts and invoicing details. The monetary cost of getting access to that data is absolutely negligable compared to the data's worth to me.
If you've already got Mac hardware, then you're trying to get away from Microsoft. Why use M$ software on more expensive Mac hardware? Why use M$ software at all?
In my case, Quicken. Whilst there's a version of Quicken out on the Mac, it's not as good as the Windows version. I've been using Virtual PC on a Power Mac for this, but at the moment there's no fully working PC emulator for Intel-based Macs so running Windows will be my only hope to carry on using this app.
I'm more interested in the progress that's being made on Qemu and the Q port of it, but for now running Windows on an Intel Mac is still attractive to me.
Now, on the other hand, batman, spiderman etc. should be, and 'brand x superheros' also should be protected, but just superhero... that's just wrong
Batman is a normal English word - it's a rank in the British Army. I'm not sure if the rank is still current or not, and I'm not certain if it's only the British Army. But it's definitely not an invented word for superheroes. In fact, I've always suspected the idea for the Batman character came from the silliness of the original batman word.
Last I checked, QuickTime was a part of the iTunes installation under Windows. I think they meant to say Windows Media.
I think they really meant Quicktime Player, rather than Quicktime per se. Explaining that Quicktime is a framework which comes bundled with one possible player takes some time, and it's a game I gave up playing even here on Slashdot quite a while ago. You know the kind of thing: "Quicktime sucks! It can't play full screen!". Err...yes it can, you mean that particular player doesn't use that capability.
I wonder - does this imply that Leveno's machines will now be in Linux-supporting default configurations?
I realise the PC business is being sold, but I imagine IBM internally uses IBM-style PCs and I hazard that this might well continue on to Leveno PCs. If they're all moving to Linux, then the hardware must support that.
Slashdot Mirror
I can tell you that. Currently it is in a maze of twisty passages, all alike...
Cheers,
Ian
Take 'deliverable', for example. Nothing double-speak about that term, it's a business technical term with a specific meaning. 'Function' - though this one has the possibility for misuse, again it's a specific technical term to describe separation of responsibilities if applied to people, or specific capability if applied to a computer system (which may include both hardware and software).
Don't dismiss all of it, because some of it is exactly the kind of jargon you'd be used to in, say, programming. But keep an ear open for someone who's plainly speaking gibberish though.
Cheers,
Ian
Tuttle.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
If you like this kind of stuff, you might be interested in On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. A very interesting read to anyone who was around at the time, in my case for the C64 and Amiga era - I missed out on the PETs.
The book talks about brushes with both Jobs and Woz as well - in fact it's significantly less than flattering to Apple and isn't exactly shining about Woz's ability as an engineer. I'm an Apple fan and have a number of their machines, but I've read enough positive things over the years to find it quite refreshing to read a negative view as well. The book is, to descend into cliche for a moment, a rattling good read.
Cheers,
Ian
Other than that though, it's an excellent product. I've been running the Q front-end for Qemu, and used Virtual PC 7 on PPC. This blows them both away. But please can I have a sound card? Pretty please?
Usenet thread containing my walkthrough comments whilst I was performing the install is here (scroll down the thread a little).
Cheers,
Cheers,
Ian
No, it's not the fan. It's the CPU's idling mechanism, specifically its power-saving attempt. Up the CPU activity to around 5% and the noise goes away. I'd like to know if that's endemic to dual-core Intels at the moment, or if it's an Apple-specific problem.
Cheers
Ian
What I'd like to know is if whether my noisy dual-core MacBook Pro (has the processor whining sound) is the only brand of dual-core Intel that's having this problem. Does anyone have a PC laptop that's dual-core? I think Acer make them, maybe some others by now. Does anyone have one of these and if so, when the CPU is idle, do you get a high pitched electrical whining sound? I'm likely to reject this machine because of noise. It's my second one too, one of the W8612 ones that a previous article suggested had the problems fixed. I can tell you that the processor noise one isn't. I'm likely to reject this one too, or at least force Apple to note my dissatisfaction so that I can get a replacement when they've got a quiet product out there. Cheers, Ian
In my opinion, the existance of this tool only strengthens the rumour. If you're going to run a virtual Windows, you still need to have an actual installation of it lying around somewhere. Windows won't run from an HFS+ drive, it will need its own NTFS set-up somewhere - this tool will let you create such a set-up, ready to be dual-booted today and virtualised tomorrow.
Cheers,
Ian
Corners? Fine - did it with a brush. It didn't do the stairs. The tops of things - nope. So it's a gmmick? No, not at all.
If the argument is "have we reached a state of robo-nirvana?", then of course I concede. But your question was "when was the last time you saw a robot that was any help at all around the house" - and for that my answer stands. I was busy yesterday, but still the upstairs landing and room floors got cleaned which otherwise they wouldn't have done. Overnight, I had it doing the kitchen and dining room floors. During the day its been doing the kids' floors as they like to watch it.
Get the idea? The fact that it isn't C3PO personified does not make it a useless robot. I think if you come down from the sci-fi ideal of robots and start looking at what they actually are - automated devices to perform a task, such as have been used in industry for decades now - then I think you'll find the whole thing makes more sense. The perfect android won't just go "ping!" and arrive directly in front of you, you'll have to get there via a number of steps, with each step increasing the complexity of what's available. One step in that process is currently cleaning my floors and saving me hours, with which I'm very happy.
Cheers,
Ian
Err...by moving. Using its wheels (or legs).
This weekend, as it vacuumed my house (shortness of video doesn't do it justice).
Cheers,
Ian
What I find interesting is that I have three kids, the eldest being four. They're going to grow up in a house where it's not considered unusual to have a robot pootling about the place doing domestic chores, whereas to my generation (I'm 34) that's still a "hey, cool!" thing. Nobody says "hey cool, you've got a washing machine!" anymore, at least no-one in the developed world (I'm in the UK).
I'm hoping that the Roomba is just the start of a number of domestic robots. I wouldn't mind one that could wash windows for example, both internal and external. Or a polishing robot. Or a mail-gaethering robot*, or preferable one robot capapble of doing all of it.
I would imaginethat by the time my kids are 34, domestic robots will be so common that even the phraseology will seem absolete. Sort of like your granny talking about the 'wireless', meaning something utterly different to what you mean by the wireless. They'd just be part of the normal experience of daily life. By getting kids used to the idea that there's nothing special about having a robot, such a day is hastened. And my floors get cleaned as well.
Cheers,
Ian
(*Forget the mail-gathering robot from the Hitchhiker's adventure game. I know about the mail-gathering robot from the Hitchhiker's adventure game. Damned babel fish machine...)
Cheers,
Ian
In the UK, the PC World chain is the main purveyor of PCs at retail. It, err...well. How shall we put this? It doesn't have the greatest reputation for knowledgeable staff and customer service. Alternative names I've heard for it are PC Woe and The Purple Temple Of Sadness (which is the best term I've heard for the place).
As you'd expect, it pushes cheap* PCs and whilst the odd Mac sits at the back somewhere, it's pretty much a Windows-only place, happily pushing Microsoft Anything and Norton at people.
It came as a surprise then, when I needed to grab a router right that moment and so went in, to find internal stock lists and part numbers getting checked using OpenOffice spreadsheets. Interested, I had a word with the guy doing the check and he said OpenOffice was used throughout the store.
I'm not certain as to whether he meant just that store or the entire chain, but it was interesting to see OpenOffice having taken over a shop so strongly identified with WinTel and Microsoft-only solutions.
Cheers,
Ian
*Not that I have anything against cheap PCs - all depends on people's needs really.
Desktop use I'd agree with you, but I do a lot of work on trains so I want just one laptop that does everything. Until recently, this was a Powerbook running Virtual PC (Quicken isn't the slightest bit performance sensitive). Thanks to someone stealing my Powerbook however, I was forced to upgrade a bit faster than I'd have liked to and I now have an Intel laptop for which no Windows emulation is available yet, though Qemu work is promising.
Cheers,
Ian
I understand you need too keep your financial records accessible. However, myself, I would never let my data be tied up into a proprietary format.
13 years ago, that was the choice. There was no non-proprietary equivalent.
What happens if Quicken goes belly-up, or gets bought out, or any of a thousand other things that could happen to cause support for Quicken and/or its' current data formats to cease?
It's already happened - I use Quicken UK, and they've withdrawn from the UK market. But it doesn't matter to me - I use the 2002 Deluxe And Business Edition under an emulator Windows 2000, and the functionality is just the same. So long as a PC emulator exists, the software lives on.
I know that F/OSS tax/bookeeping software isn't as polished as its' Windows non-free brethren, but just the fact that I will always be able to access that data with whatever free and open-standard programs I wish to run makes up for the whistles and bells in my case.
Well...sort of. Free doesn't imply perpetual. I do agree with this point, but I'm more cautious in my backing for it. If a project dies, then whether the format was known or not doesn't really matter unless I'm prepared to pay a developer to get it imported into some new project, or do the work myself.
I understand the devil is in the details, and there may be certain details and facts of your situation that make switching to a more open solution extremely difficult or impossible at this time.
This is a key point - I've actually tried out many other packages to see if I could migrate away. None of them successfully imported my previous data files - they all got the balances wrong, the inter-account transfers wrong...nothing worked. Not even Quicken itself - the Mac version. So I'm a bit stuck at the moment, waiting for improvements and patiently filing bug reports.
I'd keep an eye on the major F/OSS tax/bookeeping software projects, and maybe even drop a forum post or an e-mail to the developers, stating what features/abilities/formats would be needed to be added or fixed to make using their software (and switching *away* from your current solution) more of a do-able, realistic task.
Absolutely, and that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm continuing to use Quicken 2002 under emulation, because it does the job and the job is rather important. But I'm not blindly following it - I do look around every so often to see if there's a place I can jump to.
Cheers,
Ian
Quicken contains 13 years' worth of account data for me, including my business accounts and invoicing details. The monetary cost of getting access to that data is absolutely negligable compared to the data's worth to me.
Cheers
Ian
In my case, Quicken. Whilst there's a version of Quicken out on the Mac, it's not as good as the Windows version. I've been using Virtual PC on a Power Mac for this, but at the moment there's no fully working PC emulator for Intel-based Macs so running Windows will be my only hope to carry on using this app.
I'm more interested in the progress that's being made on Qemu and the Q port of it, but for now running Windows on an Intel Mac is still attractive to me.
Cheers,
Ian
Batman is a normal English word - it's a rank in the British Army. I'm not sure if the rank is still current or not, and I'm not certain if it's only the British Army. But it's definitely not an invented word for superheroes. In fact, I've always suspected the idea for the Batman character came from the silliness of the original batman word.
Cheers,
Ian
Cheers,
Ian
I think they really meant Quicktime Player, rather than Quicktime per se. Explaining that Quicktime is a framework which comes bundled with one possible player takes some time, and it's a game I gave up playing even here on Slashdot quite a while ago. You know the kind of thing: "Quicktime sucks! It can't play full screen!". Err...yes it can, you mean that particular player doesn't use that capability.
Cheers,
Ian
As I understand it, the next Notes client will be an Eclipse-platform rich client. Here's an article about it
Cheers,
Ian
I realise the PC business is being sold, but I imagine IBM internally uses IBM-style PCs and I hazard that this might well continue on to Leveno PCs. If they're all moving to Linux, then the hardware must support that.
Cheers,
Ian
Oh dear. My mode of transportation has gone. Taxi time...
Cheers,
Ian