geez, from the sounds of things Nokia should have licensed Calligrapher or whatever it's called these days. (Russian company originally, IIRC, at one time owned by SGI, then either spunoff or otherwise became independent... They used to sell OCR software for wince machines that was pretty good, but not appreciably better than M$'s transcribe(? or whatever it's called...). They also produced the original cursive OCR for the Newton which was fairly decent with a good sized dictionary, pretty much a must for decent OCR. (Printed text should work better, but it's slower inputting info, and if you can't even print decently, well... and spacing of characters can be problematic...)
Had they done this at least the keyboard part would have gone away, as this device shouldn't even really expect to have a keyboard excepting in rare situations as it's a TABLET! otherwise it'd be a funky NOTEBOOK!
Still sounds sort of nifty, esp. at the price, but overall I'd still think that I'd rather go with a Tabletpc or an origami device with a full windows install, etc. They're not that much more expensive and offer greater(if not notebook class) performance and capabilities, plus on the Tabletpcs there do exist linux distros that support them to an extent, but then you'd be back to crappy OCR again. Hmm... so, I guess I'd be much happier with either a full notebook with some decent horsepower or an origami as the Tabletpcs are even more stunted now v. when they first appeared they weren't that much more poorly off than current notebooks...
...the fleecing comes in where? or is that they are to not have to pay for the pipes that they use? after all no one is forcing them to use these services, or attempt to buy what they have.
This is actually pretty funny since all of these wiseguys promote bandwidth heavy uses of their services in advertisements. Now they are pissed that people are actually using the advertised bandwidth heavy applications?! WTF.
yes, annoying isn't it? Got the message for Omniweb, and tried IE5.1 on MAC OS X and got the very same message
It's nice to see a portable handheld game system that MIGHT offer some serious competition to Nintendo, finally. The price I think is a little high for it to be very successful though. IIRC the GBA is now ~$70, and available everywhere.
Hopefully they survive long enough to support a competitive price and wider distribution, along with a good game library. If they come up with a decent selection of RPGs they might just be able to carve out a nice niche even if they can never end of going toe-to-toe with Nintendo.
Any word on battery life yet?
or backlighting?
who is/are lik-sang?
...and the ever mandatory(here) any get linux up on it?
in any event, I'm still waiting for a tablet PC ala Newton with a common OS(pref not Windoze/x86) of some sort, good HWR, and all the bells and whistles(mostly) of a notebook at least, and at a notebook(or less) price. Should be feasible with 1.8" drives(no CD/DVD), PCMCIA, 802.11b, 10/100/1G ether, IrDA, USB, firewire, external video port, ~4 x 6 x 1" and possibly, the new fuel cell battery.
I believe that copying Windoze is done is the mistaken belief that people who actually have to use Windoze enjoy the Windoze GUI.
While I use Windoze, mainly for gaming anymore, and work, I find the GUI to be pretty pathetic. It is ugly(even XP to me) and has irritating application/GUI behavior.
Trying to find good applications (especially shareware) is like trying to walk through a minefield. (Linux/*BSD/etc ad nauseum don't really have any/much(?) shareware, and the Mac OS shareware is, by and large, top notch.)
Anyways, I'm digressing from the topic, so I shall return to it:
A second argument for copying the Windoze GUI is the mistaken belief that people will persevere to the point at which they can have access to a GUI under Linux/*BSD/etc. The theory here being, that at this point it will look and, sort of, behave like Windoze, so users will be comnfortable. This blatantly ignore various gapings holes: poor quality installers with poor hardware detection capabilities, poor system management tools especially for those who want/only understand GUIs, lack of solid desktop suites of applications and various niche desktop applications. (There are FAR too many projects all working on the same type of application. I have seen 10s or more of defunct application projects along with slowly progressing(for whatever reason) other applications. There are very few commercial applications available to fill some of the niches.)
GIMP does a good job of image editing, but I don't use Photoshop or whatever to compar eit with.
Staroffice is ok, but bloated and slow. Bottom line is that for word processing and spreadsheet compatibility with M$ equivalents it gets the job done, eventually.
Text editors: the best text editors remain CLI applications: vi, emacs. Yes, X versions exist but the UI is pure crap(worse than usual for plain X11.)
Netscape provides a halfway decent email client and news client. (GUI pine & tin are my other favorites, but non-GUI.)
etc. ad nauseum
Now add to this (actually this sort of goes with system management) package dependency hell for systems using RPM. (The VAST majority of systems out there. I actually prefer.tgz myself.)
In essence, I generally use system based on Linux and *BSD as servers, Windoze a semi-expensive(getting cheaper) game machine, and Mac OS X as my primary desktop OS. (With the added bonus of being able to everything that I could do under Linux/*BSD as well without having to actually go there. System management, etc. isn't perfect, but it beats the crap out of most other UNIX/like systems, plus I can always dive to a very low configuration file level much more easily under this and UNIX/like OSes than under Windoze(mostly.) A feature that I always liked for ease of use/fallback.)
care to clarify what sort of power that linux has that OS X doesn't? (can't be the applications/servers as OSX runs all of the important ones: GIMP, mySQL, postgreSQL, PHP, Perl, Python, kerberos, ad nauseum There's probably a good market for Aqua front ends for these that OS X Server doesn't cover... A good chance for counter M$ point-and-click crap argument, i.e. sysadmining for clueless morons.)
iMac: yawn, but I'm sure that some of the commentators that I heard were correct in that average buyers with little tolerance for playing around with their machines would be more interested in the iMac due to design and bundled apps: iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and iPhoto.
I wish that the flat panel was 1280x1024, and that 1G+ G4/G5s were introduced. I was at least expecting a TiPB upgrade as those were also missing from displays at Compuseless for the last several weeks, whereas the old iMacs were still present.
Also, at least on notebooks, I've noticed that LCD refreshes seem a tad slow for FPS games, e.g. Quake III, Unreal Tournament. Are the "desktop" LCDs any better? (i.e. there seems to be an amount of ghosting when playing these games...)
While it does raise the bar on design & included hardware again, I just don't like all-in-ones with no bus card(of some type) expansion slots.
14" iBook screen?! why the screen res is still only 1024x768, and it utterly ruins the form factor for no increase in screen res. Now if it had a G4 as well... The iBooks are nice machines, with the best battery life I've ever experienced in notebooks: Dell, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, HP, and Apple.
I was also pining for an updated Newton, or other PDA from Apple.
My original IIcx came with 6.0.x (5? 4?), and a few other 68030 models followed with (ci, si) with 6.0.x variants.
now, I have to admit that I don't recall what model that system 7 came out with, but it was still great. A full OS (to 7.1) that could fit onto a 1.4M floppy w/a decent GUI. Aaaahhh, I still remember the cx getting almost as good performance as the Sun IPCs w/matlab... hacking random crap with resedit & co.... flakey power supplies, but I digress...
...and on an actually on-topic note, I ran across an Atari 800 (IIRC) running a web server a few years ago...
and I also seem to recall a PIC chip based server the size of a matchbox or quarter, which actually had a slashdot article. Must've been, oh 3 or so year back when people were PIC chip happy. ($100 dev kits and all...)
...erm...in case you haven't noticed the VAST majority of internet users still use modems...
also, as mentioned in another reply, if given the option to enter a "low bandwidth" or "high bandwidth" version of a site, I ALWAYS choose the low. I generally HATE flash, and excessive use of LARGE graphic/sound files even on a broadband connection.
As a matter of fact, I long for the old days of the generic grey background, blue links, and limited graphics/sound. So many sites these days seem to think that to have a good site it has be chock full of flash, graphics, sound and other crap(nifty/useless features that suck down as many resources as they can get their grubby fingers on, sort of like windoze.)
yes, separated from DARPAnet way back in the late 80s, IIRC.
HOWEVER, I have seen so MANY subcontractors working on defense contracts trying to get generic internet connections fo whatever reasonsm, while I'm sure that they have milnet access on same or directly accessible machines that its disgusting.
Then again the Clintonistas would say that we don't understand we don't really need to ensure zero tolerance of physical interconnects between genero internet and milnet to ensure security. Go figure.
Actually, I agree with most, the season following the movie is when the show really started going downhill. Actually it was more like it fell off of a cliff. I believe that the real slide began when they moved the set to California, but I cannot remember whether that was before or after the movie.
The show was, basically, the characters, and they should have ended it when Duchovny didn't want to come back.
while I agree with Linus' assertion wrt performance, today's processors are more than able to handle microkernels. The flaws that Linus derides were conscious design decisions to provide as much efficiency & protection as possible.
Classic applications in OS X will, of course, not be protected by the nature of their environment, but they are still protected from affecting the OS as a whole. This was the whole point. Of course OS X is NOT perfect, but then again, neither were/are linux kernels 0.xx, 1.xx, 2.2.xx, 2.4.x, and 2.5.xx. No OS will ever be perfect. They will always offer tradeoffs. Are WINE applications completely protected? If they are, does each single WINE run application run in its own context? This increases the basic system requirements v. running all WINE apps under a single controlling architecure, e.g. classic in OS X.
Monolithic kernels, also increase the basic system requirements of a system. They require resources for each and every "feature" run at compile times, and add in opportunities for poorly written code to run amok as more and more pieces of the OS are always running, and loaded at startup. Even the lauded mod architecture is susceptible to this flaw, in the same way that microkernel architectures are by dynamically loading needed/required components. There exists NO perfect OS/kernel design, and there never will be one. Selection of the base OS type is dependent upon the designers needs and requirements, which at the time Linus originally developed linux were efficiency and speed v. current processor design and efficiency. (Same as other readers have pointed out in the CISC v. RISC debates.)
This entire discussion should be dropped. If monolithic kernels meet your requirements, great, if not use a microkernel design, a hybrid, or something entire NEW! This should be the crux of this argument, as it is EXTREMELY important that we not fixate and religisize a particular development environment, kernel, OS, whatever, etc. Diversity (not the PC kind) is what drives technological advancement, unless all of you truly wish to live in a wintel world!
Perhaps this entire article was really designed to provoke this kind of discussion...
Side notes: the 80386 was not REALLY designed to handle a multitasking environment, and hence was not optimized to provide optimal context switchin performance. I hazard to guess (I have not studied this closely, mind you) that the 680X0, MIPS, SPARC, etc. architectures provide a lower penalty for context switched v. x86 designs as they were intentionally designed to operate in multitasking environments. i.e. let us also not be so architecturually centric in our discussions
My question is:
why do we need Bluetooth when 802.11b already has a pretty good foothold, and does support low power chipsets? Additionally more versatile higher powered drivers could be used, but run at lower power (programmatically) while still allowing the potential for longer range communication if desired. Not to mention that 802.11b is in relatively widespread use, and the technology works, as demonstrated by this posting.
you already have an Xbox. It'd called your desktop x86 PC running Windows. I bet that within 6mos. of the Xbox release that there will be found a way to simply run Xbox games on a standard, recent, Windows desktop, or a hack porting the Xbox version of windows to a standard desktop. Then again, it looks like the vast majority of Xbox games will just be PC (x86) ports anyways.
This brings up a secondary comments that I have to make on gaming consoles:
Where are they going? I note that even the PS2 is slated to have an onslaught of PC game ports. I buy consoles to play console style games that are heavily & cleanly integrated with the console hardware v. PC games that sort of work with this flakey hardware or that flakey hardware, massively suck system resources, etc.
The big difference here is the console style game v. the desktop style game. Traditional console games have ALWAYS played differently (feel? subjectively?) than desktop games, which was the major draw for me, along with the fact that consoles usually had better hardware at release than comparable desktops, at the cost of optimization for a single purpose, with hardware costs subsidized by software licensing.
PS3 chip: That supercomputer on a chip sounds like an MPC/IBM(?) 7400 power based architecture to me. I can't see any reason why ppc linux wouldn't be easily ported to it, if that is the case... It's nice to see ppc moving to so many platforms, if only they could do something about power usage, but I digress. Seriously for this type of platform a 7400 based architecture is perfect, but I think that kicking out another console that soon is bad for business. (Lowers ROI cycle.)
Hopefully one of these guys will come up with a modifiable/upgradable bus system, where new systems would allow simply plugging in a new CPU/GPU/storage card(s.) This should be more feasible with this type of embedded device, while raising the ROI cycle even further (short term.) These guys should not be designing a new I/O bus every time that they come out with a new system.
Managers having no brains, I'll agree with, but engineers having no brains is another story.
Engineers at least understand (for the most part) exactly what is going (to an extent) at all levels of projects they are attached to, unlike managers and programmers who tend to be extrememly narrowly(overly?) focused on relatively minor components of projects, or atechnical components(managers.)
I've noticed that programmers tend to memorize/become attached to a single API or extrmemely small set of APIs, leading to their general obsolescence. Engineers on the other hand tend to be used to switching tools/APIs fairly frequently for various projects, and tend to be more adaptable to new situations and projects where as your programmer buddy would need extensive training to fit in again.
Slashdot Mirror
geez, from the sounds of things Nokia should have licensed Calligrapher or whatever it's called these days. (Russian company originally, IIRC, at one time owned by SGI, then either spunoff or otherwise became independent... They used to sell OCR software for wince machines that was pretty good, but not appreciably better than M$'s transcribe(? or whatever it's called...). They also produced the original cursive OCR for the Newton which was fairly decent with a good sized dictionary, pretty much a must for decent OCR. (Printed text should work better, but it's slower inputting info, and if you can't even print decently, well... and spacing of characters can be problematic...)
Had they done this at least the keyboard part would have gone away, as this device shouldn't even really expect to have a keyboard excepting in rare situations as it's a TABLET! otherwise it'd be a funky NOTEBOOK!
Still sounds sort of nifty, esp. at the price, but overall I'd still think that I'd rather go with a Tabletpc or an origami device with a full windows install, etc. They're not that much more expensive and offer greater(if not notebook class) performance and capabilities, plus on the Tabletpcs there do exist linux distros that support them to an extent, but then you'd be back to crappy OCR again. Hmm... so, I guess I'd be much happier with either a full notebook with some decent horsepower or an origami as the Tabletpcs are even more stunted now v. when they first appeared they weren't that much more poorly off than current notebooks...
er... Apple has a beta version of gcc 3.1 with full objective C support AND altivec supprot.
...the fleecing comes in where? or is that they are to not have to pay for the pipes that they use? after all no one is forcing them to use these services, or attempt to buy what they have.
This is actually pretty funny since all of these wiseguys promote bandwidth heavy uses of their services in advertisements. Now they are pissed that people are actually using the advertised bandwidth heavy applications?! WTF.
THERE IS A GOD! That assinine show, otherwise known as Futurama has BEEN cancelled!
Is there any reason why this extra-moronic show should NOT be cancelled for anything else?
even the grass growing show would be better! woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
haven't these people heard of divx? and look at what a roaring success that was as a business model.
yes, annoying isn't it? Got the message for Omniweb, and tried IE5.1 on MAC OS X and got the very same message
It's nice to see a portable handheld game system that MIGHT offer some serious competition to Nintendo, finally. The price I think is a little high for it to be very successful though. IIRC the GBA is now ~$70, and available everywhere.
Hopefully they survive long enough to support a competitive price and wider distribution, along with a good game library. If they come up with a decent selection of RPGs they might just be able to carve out a nice niche even if they can never end of going toe-to-toe with Nintendo.
Any word on battery life yet?
or backlighting?
who is/are lik-sang?
...and the ever mandatory(here) any get linux up on it?
in any event, I'm still waiting for a tablet PC ala Newton with a common OS(pref not Windoze/x86) of some sort, good HWR, and all the bells and whistles(mostly) of a notebook at least, and at a notebook(or less) price. Should be feasible with 1.8" drives(no CD/DVD), PCMCIA, 802.11b, 10/100/1G ether, IrDA, USB, firewire, external video port, ~4 x 6 x 1" and possibly, the new fuel cell battery.
I believe that copying Windoze is done is the mistaken belief that people who actually have to use Windoze enjoy the Windoze GUI.
.tgz myself.)
While I use Windoze, mainly for gaming anymore, and work, I find the GUI to be pretty pathetic. It is ugly(even XP to me) and has irritating application/GUI behavior.
Trying to find good applications (especially shareware) is like trying to walk through a minefield. (Linux/*BSD/etc ad nauseum don't really have any/much(?) shareware, and the Mac OS shareware is, by and large, top notch.)
Anyways, I'm digressing from the topic, so I shall return to it:
A second argument for copying the Windoze GUI is the mistaken belief that people will persevere to the point at which they can have access to a GUI under Linux/*BSD/etc. The theory here being, that at this point it will look and, sort of, behave like Windoze, so users will be comnfortable. This blatantly ignore various gapings holes: poor quality installers with poor hardware detection capabilities, poor system management tools especially for those who want/only understand GUIs, lack of solid desktop suites of applications and various niche desktop applications. (There are FAR too many projects all working on the same type of application. I have seen 10s or more of defunct application projects along with slowly progressing(for whatever reason) other applications. There are very few commercial applications available to fill some of the niches.)
GIMP does a good job of image editing, but I don't use Photoshop or whatever to compar eit with.
Staroffice is ok, but bloated and slow. Bottom line is that for word processing and spreadsheet compatibility with M$ equivalents it gets the job done, eventually.
Text editors: the best text editors remain CLI applications: vi, emacs. Yes, X versions exist but the UI is pure crap(worse than usual for plain X11.)
Netscape provides a halfway decent email client and news client. (GUI pine & tin are my other favorites, but non-GUI.)
etc. ad nauseum
Now add to this (actually this sort of goes with system management) package dependency hell for systems using RPM. (The VAST majority of systems out there. I actually prefer
In essence, I generally use system based on Linux and *BSD as servers, Windoze a semi-expensive(getting cheaper) game machine, and Mac OS X as my primary desktop OS. (With the added bonus of being able to everything that I could do under Linux/*BSD as well without having to actually go there. System management, etc. isn't perfect, but it beats the crap out of most other UNIX/like systems, plus I can always dive to a very low configuration file level much more easily under this and UNIX/like OSes than under Windoze(mostly.) A feature that I always liked for ease of use/fallback.)
Civilization III for the mac should be out soon. IIRC Macplay is doing the port.
care to clarify what sort of power that linux has that OS X doesn't? (can't be the applications/servers as OSX runs all of the important ones: GIMP, mySQL, postgreSQL, PHP, Perl, Python, kerberos, ad nauseum There's probably a good market for Aqua front ends for these that OS X Server doesn't cover... A good chance for counter M$ point-and-click crap argument, i.e. sysadmining for clueless morons.)
iMac: yawn, but I'm sure that some of the commentators that I heard were correct in that average buyers with little tolerance for playing around with their machines would be more interested in the iMac due to design and bundled apps: iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and iPhoto.
I wish that the flat panel was 1280x1024, and that 1G+ G4/G5s were introduced. I was at least expecting a TiPB upgrade as those were also missing from displays at Compuseless for the last several weeks, whereas the old iMacs were still present.
Also, at least on notebooks, I've noticed that LCD refreshes seem a tad slow for FPS games, e.g. Quake III, Unreal Tournament. Are the "desktop" LCDs any better? (i.e. there seems to be an amount of ghosting when playing these games...)
While it does raise the bar on design & included hardware again, I just don't like all-in-ones with no bus card(of some type) expansion slots.
14" iBook screen?! why the screen res is still only 1024x768, and it utterly ruins the form factor for no increase in screen res. Now if it had a G4 as well... The iBooks are nice machines, with the best battery life I've ever experienced in notebooks: Dell, Toshiba, Fujitsu, IBM, HP, and Apple.
I was also pining for an updated Newton, or other PDA from Apple.
bzzzt
... flakey power supplies, but I digress...
wrong answer!
My original IIcx came with 6.0.x (5? 4?), and a few other 68030 models followed with (ci, si) with 6.0.x variants.
now, I have to admit that I don't recall what model that system 7 came out with, but it was still great. A full OS (to 7.1) that could fit onto a 1.4M floppy w/a decent GUI. Aaaahhh, I still remember the cx getting almost as good performance as the Sun IPCs w/matlab... hacking random crap with resedit & co.
...and on an actually on-topic note, I ran across an Atari 800 (IIRC) running a web server a few years ago...
and I also seem to recall a PIC chip based server the size of a matchbox or quarter, which actually had a slashdot article. Must've been, oh 3 or so year back when people were PIC chip happy. ($100 dev kits and all...)
...erm...in case you haven't noticed the VAST majority of internet users still use modems...
also, as mentioned in another reply, if given the option to enter a "low bandwidth" or "high bandwidth" version of a site, I ALWAYS choose the low. I generally HATE flash, and excessive use of LARGE graphic/sound files even on a broadband connection.
As a matter of fact, I long for the old days of the generic grey background, blue links, and limited graphics/sound. So many sites these days seem to think that to have a good site it has be chock full of flash, graphics, sound and other crap(nifty/useless features that suck down as many resources as they can get their grubby fingers on, sort of like windoze.)
yes, separated from DARPAnet way back in the late 80s, IIRC.
HOWEVER, I have seen so MANY subcontractors working on defense contracts trying to get generic internet connections fo whatever reasonsm, while I'm sure that they have milnet access on same or directly accessible machines that its disgusting.
Then again the Clintonistas would say that we don't understand we don't really need to ensure zero tolerance of physical interconnects between genero internet and milnet to ensure security. Go figure.
Actually, I agree with most, the season following the movie is when the show really started going downhill. Actually it was more like it fell off of a cliff. I believe that the real slide began when they moved the set to California, but I cannot remember whether that was before or after the movie.
The show was, basically, the characters, and they should have ended it when Duchovny didn't want to come back.
a G4/500 cube!
while I agree with Linus' assertion wrt performance, today's processors are more than able to handle microkernels. The flaws that Linus derides were conscious design decisions to provide as much efficiency & protection as possible.
Classic applications in OS X will, of course, not be protected by the nature of their environment, but they are still protected from affecting the OS as a whole. This was the whole point. Of course OS X is NOT perfect, but then again, neither were/are linux kernels 0.xx, 1.xx, 2.2.xx, 2.4.x, and 2.5.xx. No OS will ever be perfect. They will always offer tradeoffs. Are WINE applications completely protected? If they are, does each single WINE run application run in its own context? This increases the basic system requirements v. running all WINE apps under a single controlling architecure, e.g. classic in OS X.
Monolithic kernels, also increase the basic system requirements of a system. They require resources for each and every "feature" run at compile times, and add in opportunities for poorly written code to run amok as more and more pieces of the OS are always running, and loaded at startup. Even the lauded mod architecture is susceptible to this flaw, in the same way that microkernel architectures are by dynamically loading needed/required components. There exists NO perfect OS/kernel design, and there never will be one. Selection of the base OS type is dependent upon the designers needs and requirements, which at the time Linus originally developed linux were efficiency and speed v. current processor design and efficiency. (Same as other readers have pointed out in the CISC v. RISC debates.)
This entire discussion should be dropped. If monolithic kernels meet your requirements, great, if not use a microkernel design, a hybrid, or something entire NEW! This should be the crux of this argument, as it is EXTREMELY important that we not fixate and religisize a particular development environment, kernel, OS, whatever, etc. Diversity (not the PC kind) is what drives technological advancement, unless all of you truly wish to live in a wintel world!
Perhaps this entire article was really designed to provoke this kind of discussion...
Side notes: the 80386 was not REALLY designed to handle a multitasking environment, and hence was not optimized to provide optimal context switchin performance. I hazard to guess (I have not studied this closely, mind you) that the 680X0, MIPS, SPARC, etc. architectures provide a lower penalty for context switched v. x86 designs as they were intentionally designed to operate in multitasking environments. i.e. let us also not be so architecturually centric in our discussions
My question is: why do we need Bluetooth when 802.11b already has a pretty good foothold, and does support low power chipsets? Additionally more versatile higher powered drivers could be used, but run at lower power (programmatically) while still allowing the potential for longer range communication if desired. Not to mention that 802.11b is in relatively widespread use, and the technology works, as demonstrated by this posting.
you already have an Xbox. It'd called your desktop x86 PC running Windows. I bet that within 6mos. of the Xbox release that there will be found a way to simply run Xbox games on a standard, recent, Windows desktop, or a hack porting the Xbox version of windows to a standard desktop. Then again, it looks like the vast majority of Xbox games will just be PC (x86) ports anyways.
This brings up a secondary comments that I have to make on gaming consoles:
Where are they going? I note that even the PS2 is slated to have an onslaught of PC game ports. I buy consoles to play console style games that are heavily & cleanly integrated with the console hardware v. PC games that sort of work with this flakey hardware or that flakey hardware, massively suck system resources, etc.
The big difference here is the console style game v. the desktop style game. Traditional console games have ALWAYS played differently (feel? subjectively?) than desktop games, which was the major draw for me, along with the fact that consoles usually had better hardware at release than comparable desktops, at the cost of optimization for a single purpose, with hardware costs subsidized by software licensing.
PS3 chip: That supercomputer on a chip sounds like an MPC/IBM(?) 7400 power based architecture to me. I can't see any reason why ppc linux wouldn't be easily ported to it, if that is the case... It's nice to see ppc moving to so many platforms, if only they could do something about power usage, but I digress. Seriously for this type of platform a 7400 based architecture is perfect, but I think that kicking out another console that soon is bad for business. (Lowers ROI cycle.)
Hopefully one of these guys will come up with a modifiable/upgradable bus system, where new systems would allow simply plugging in a new CPU/GPU/storage card(s.) This should be more feasible with this type of embedded device, while raising the ROI cycle even further (short term.) These guys should not be designing a new I/O bus every time that they come out with a new system.
Managers having no brains, I'll agree with, but engineers having no brains is another story.
Engineers at least understand (for the most part) exactly what is going (to an extent) at all levels of projects they are attached to, unlike managers and programmers who tend to be extrememly narrowly(overly?) focused on relatively minor components of projects, or atechnical components(managers.)
I've noticed that programmers tend to memorize/become attached to a single API or extrmemely small set of APIs, leading to their general obsolescence. Engineers on the other hand tend to be used to switching tools/APIs fairly frequently for various projects, and tend to be more adaptable to new situations and projects where as your programmer buddy would need extensive training to fit in again.
Compaq research was involved with the porting...
Here's an idea: try reading the referential links before commenting, but I had forgotten, this require literacy.