That would be Jay Miner's dog Michy. Michy, legend says, was the codesigner of the original Amiga chipset: when Jay added something to a chip layout, if Michy didn't nod in approval Jay would take the feature back out.
> Dave Nee?lle
Needle
> Ronald H. Nicholson j
Also to be found inside the case of the 128K Mac. Lucky bastard: he switched jobs just in time to be part of history not once, but twice.
> Joe Pillow
This is not a real person. Legend says this fictitious name was used to buy an airline seat, one version says the seat was used to carry an early Amiga breadboard prototype to a trade show, another version says it was just for an extra seat in which to store a whole bunch of spare pillows for the team.
The message board I run on my site (http://flyingmice.com/squid/moobunny/amiga/) would probably be considered a user interface nightmare by most yardsticks. The main message index looks like a spreadsheet - it's a vast, imposing green-and-black grid full of numbers in sequence. The order is counterintuitive, new messages are on the left, new threads are at the top, but on the message display pages themselves, the threads are listed newest ones at bottom.
But yet I constantly hear from people how much they love it, it's so easy to use.
I get away with this sick design because I know who my audience is. These are knowledgeable computer professionals, who aren't afraid of a short learning curve, and who prefer having the most information presented to them in the most efficient way possible. This interface frustrates the hell out of the inexperienced, but is absolutely ideal for its audience.
The final authority on any user interface is, always, the user.
I thought the idea was, to show the world how Linux is BETTER than Windows, rather than emulate Windows' famously flawed user interface pixel-for-pixel.
Did anyone ever think that the admittedly knee-jerk reactions of school administrators might actually have saved lives?
if lives were saved (even one,) isn't that *worth it*?
Scenario:
The Columbine d00dz had been planning this shooting gallery stunt for a YEAR. They have stockpiled weapons, built bombs, and bought snazzy-looking trenchcoats specially for the occasion.
The week before the Big Bang is supposed to go down, the school bans trenchcoats.
Harris and Klebold look at each other and say "damn, we can't wear trenchcoats. Let's call the whole thing off." The next night, all the guns, bombs, ammo, and trenchcoats they planned to use, are sunk into the river in a large trash bag, never to be seen again, and Harris and Klebold become youth ministers.
Katz 1.0 has an interesting feature that allows him to select topics that get us talking. Unfortunately he is also crippled by two serious bugs:
his writing skills are atrocious, not unlike what I write after not sleeping for 32 hours
he tends to run topics into the ground.
I think for Katz 2.0, assuming you don't release his source code and let us fix him ourselves, you should implement the following fixes:
An alarm that sounds when he has posted two stories on a single topic, where the second story adds nothing significant to the first.
A formal logic engine to catch glaring fallacies.
A PPM - pointless paragraph demultiplexer - which would allow boring paragraphs to be condensed to the smallest unit of speech that contains the same meaning. The number of passes would be configurable in preferences, e.g. three passes would reduce this entire story to simply "machines take over the world, mpeg at eleven." Note that the PPM is only really necessary on Katz, and does not need incorporated into Slashdot in general.
I've never seen Slashdot as a community. It's a news source with a built-in newsgroup.
Conversations here last as long as the story that spawned them remains on the Front Page. Form friendships? I do good if I can remember people here by their signatures. Certainly the discussions don't last long enough for people to get to KNOW each other.
There are sites that get it right - but Slashdot's focus is on the stories and the conversation, not on the community. It shows.
"Stuff that matters" - to Slashdot anyway. It's news for nerds, stuff that matters To SOMEONE. Yes, I agree Slashdot has gone overboard with a Boing ball on the icon bar at least once a week. No worse than some of the other silly off-topic stuff that goes up there, I guess the red and white just flags more attention.
But it DOES matter. Some of us want new computers that are not Windows, are not Mac, and are not UNIX. (Yes, this is an alien concept for some people around here.) Some of us LIKE how the Amiga works and would like to see a memory-protected, multiprocessing-enabled, theme-configurable version of it running on quad 500MHz G4's - or as close to that as we can get within our price range. Some of us were hoping Gateway would actually do something meaningful with the technology - and if anything, the Iwin "Amiga clone" hoax has proven that PEOPLE ARE VERY INTERESTED in buying such boxes if someone bothers to build them. Gateway has the clout, the resources, and the people (or HAD the people before they all resigned in disgust) to make a kick-ass computer for people who WANT kick-ass computers, and instead they have reduced it all to a contradictory-sounding software-only information appliance that will have far less of a market than the Amiga itself. Notice each successive press release has been a diminishment of the strategy.
Now, frankly, I don't want Gateway to manufacture anything with an Amiga nameplate - I just want them to stop being condescending and insulting to the Amiga user base, and continue to piss on us by acting as though WE should still be waiting with baited breath on THEM.
Perhaps most importantly, my A1200 still runs and is still VERY much in active use, for Web surfing, email, word processing, and 3D work. For me the Amiga (the classic Amiga, not the crap Gateway wants to sell me) will continue to be "stuff that matters" until the last Amiga on earth fails to power up. I acknowledge its limitations and I wish for better - but it also continues to be useful, while my Linux box rusts in the closet.
What's laughable is just that Gateway honestly expects us to take them seriously after all this. The rest of it - the years wasted, the technology they're just SITTING on, the resources they could have put into developing and marketing the Amiga (or some like-minded alternative system) to bust it into the mainstream in a big way, which they are now throwing away in order to make some kind of software-only "information appliance", is not humor - it's tragedy.
I've always had people problems. I find that I am better prepared to deal with people when I am suitably "fueled" - enough rest, enough food, no sugar crashes, no caffeine cravings, no bad weather on approach. But when I'm not operating on a full tank, my behavior tends toward autism all the way around: focus problems (the aforementioned crowd situation improves if I can find something to do, like read or draw), nervous twitches (like obsessively twiddling fingers on alternate hands to make myself "balanced" - don't ask), etc.
I do have a host of other problems too, which can contribute: hypoglycemia, severe caffeine addiction, sleep problems (maybe related to the caffeine), hypersensitivity to approaching storms (they make me drowsy!), and an extremely sheltered upbringing. I will never know how much of my introversion is due to that sheltered upbringing, btw - I suspect some of it is innate, or else I would have undoubtedly found ways around the parental restrictions that kept me away from other kids.
But the point is, I honestly don't know. Autism rings true for much of what I display as "symptoms", but yet those symptoms come and go based on other environmental factors, and some "symptoms" appear directly traceable to psychology alone. Clues to the real nature of "autism", perhaps - that it might in fact be psychological and not physiological in nature? Hints at an autism-like mental illness afflicting people with isolated childhoods? Or just the totally normal and expected result of someone who grew up the way I did and wound up an Amiga user who drinks ~4 liters of Diet Pepsi a day?:-)
I do agree, however, with whoever mentioned the fact that the general populace seems more than willing to accept people like me as "mentally ill" but yet would never dare try to classify jocks as ill. I keep remembering the hype over the Phantom Menace premiere, where they focused on the lines of strangely dressed people - while ignoring the lines of strangely dressed people at sporting events. Painting your face in team colors is okay, painting your face like Maul isn't. Being rude to people who interrupt your football game is okay, being rude to people who interrupt your Quake game is not. Loud rowdy behavior in a sports bar is okay, quiet rowdy behavior in a monitor's soft glow is not. If this is how society defines normal, they have no right to wonder why I keep to myself. Revealing that socially awkward and/or unusually focused behavior is the result of autism will only serve to encourage those who just don't like geeks in the first place, even if true, it will probably be used to marginalize us even further (and frustrate them when we do not wish to be "cured" of a disease from which we cannot be said to suffer).
On the other hand, I do have a girlfriend, though I keep wondering when I'm going to learn what's really wrong with her that balances out the incongruous fact that she actually LIKES me. The list of possibilities so far: she is escaped from an asylum, she is a well-programmed spy from the star cluster 671 Getax, she is a mass murderer, or she is not real and I'm the only human who perceives her.:-)
The new 'graphite' look is obviously designed to appeal to PHB's and wearers of grey suits
No.
Some of us out here prefer the original Casablanca to the colorized. Some of us think a NeXT cube in any color but black would be stupid-looking (even in SGI metallic purple it just wouldn't look right). Some people in this world prefer Akira to Pokemon, Empire Strikes Back to Phantom Menace, Ani DiFranco to Christina Aguilera. Does taste require that we prefer happy cheerful things, or that the only reason someone would offer black as a color is so people with monochrome brains and monochrome lives would buy it? I am an artist, a so-called creative type - should everything I own be painted in dayglo or 70s racecar metallic purple? Or do you just think that the graphite scheme merely represents a lack of color, rather than a color to itself?
I don't know who Apple designed the Graphite scheme for, but I DO know - and I suspect Apple knows - that there are lots of artists and creative types who like a touch of oomph to things, serious oomph with ass-kicking potential, and would rather have something imposing and monochrome and dark as opposed to a bright happy jellybean. Has nothing to do with PHBs and suits - and in fact a PHB would STILL be unhappy with the brooding presence of a graphite iMac, and would continue to be unhappy until it shipped in opaque beige.
A hint: PHBs and suits never list black as their favorite color.
The graph makes more sense if you relabel its axes: x=number of individuals of a species, y=number of species with exactly that number of individuals.
In other words: we aren't talking about the likelihood that you will encounter an individual of the species, we're talking about counting the species itself. A few really common species, a good spread of "average" species, and a few species represented by few individuals.
'Course I could just be full of it. Wouldn't be the first time...
3.5 ain't even OUT yet. I was kinda hoping they'd release it before the $#!+ hit the fan, so at least we'd get SOMETHING from them before they implode... at this rate, the only actual thing ever done at Amiga Inc. (which isn't even true, they OUTSOURCED it) will probably never be released.
"no one knows how the human brain works but we all use that"
That's debatable for some of us.:-)
As to the documentational aspect, it's not so much knowing HOW it works, it's KNOWING it works. Stuff that no one understands that everyone uses, at least has been "shown to work" by extensive testing - and at least someone somewhere had SOME idea how it was originally supposed to work.
How do you test boundary conditions on an evolved circuit which may have "extra" boundaries inside? Maybe it has developed an accumulator that counts to 33 in analog, skips 34 (it counts 33 twice), and is fine from 35 up - that just happens to work under the test conditions that don't care about #3. Better examples anyone?
We've been following this story all week, and it is absolutely definitely indisputably positively a HOAX.
No one has ever HEARD of the spectacular PowerSE product they claim is their flagship software - even though they claim its first release was in 1993.
They have surprisingly few screenshots of their software - and what they do have are suspiciously boring and devoid of actually displaying FEATURES. This makes perfect sense if screenshots are not merely a keyclick away, but actually require doctoring in paint programs (the few meaningless PowerSE screenshots on their site are obviously NeXTstep screenshots heavily doctored).
All their pages used to have meta tags listing the author as Martin Steinbach, the guy claiming to be their CEO (of what they say is a 300-person company, mind you). When people noticed this and began mentioning it publicly, suddenly the meta tags all change and now the company has an "internet division".
Their software downloads section is perpetually broken.
Most of what is described for the A510 and A1010 feature list is either unachievable or impractical at the listed price points. Some of what's listed would seem to require Herculean engineering efforts, yet iWin seems to have pulled it out of their hats.
Read the specs on their site for what PowerSE is capable of doing. Why aren't we all using this instead of VMware or WINE?
The tech specs are all suspiciously vague and misleading-sounding, but not in a way that can be blamed on poor translations.
It's not yet clear what purpose is to be served by perpetrating such an elaborate (and expensive!) hoax, but especially in light of the Godlike specs of PowerSE, it is the only reasonable conclusion.
Amiga users for some reason are USED to keeping machines alive for the better part of a decade. Probably has something to do with the fact that the Amiga has never obeyed Moore's Law, and Amiga owners don't expect them to - aside from 3D rendering and Web browsing, Amigas don't get slower the way PCs seem to do.
Amigas also accept processor upgrades with ease, which again adds to the notion that the machine does not have an expiration date. (Unfortunately this also leads to the infamous brag-about-your-Amiga-sigs, not so much to have the fastest Amiga on the block, but to have an Amiga the farthest away from how it shipped from the factory as possible. We took pride in outdoing Commodore...)
End result: 13-year-old Amigas crawling headlong into the millennium...
Slashdot Mirror
> Paw Print
That would be Jay Miner's dog Michy. Michy, legend says, was the codesigner of the original Amiga chipset: when Jay added something to a chip layout, if Michy didn't nod in approval Jay would take the feature back out.
> Dave Nee?lle
Needle
> Ronald H. Nicholson j
Also to be found inside the case of the 128K Mac. Lucky bastard: he switched jobs just in time to be part of history not once, but twice.
> Joe Pillow
This is not a real person. Legend says this fictitious name was used to buy an airline seat, one version says the seat was used to carry an early Amiga breadboard prototype to a trade show, another version says it was just for an extra seat in which to store a whole bunch of spare pillows for the team.
He probably still could. Prior art apparently means nothing...
I put down 2 64-oz (2L) jugs of Pepsi a day, DOWN from 4 a couple summers ago. I guess that makes my record just slightly below 256 oz in 24 hours.
I'm gonna need to find a cheap source of replacement kidneys by the time I'm 30, no?
The message board I run on my site (http://flyingmice.com/squid/moobunny/amiga/) would probably be considered a user interface nightmare by most yardsticks. The main message index looks like a spreadsheet - it's a vast, imposing green-and-black grid full of numbers in sequence. The order is counterintuitive, new messages are on the left, new threads are at the top, but on the message display pages themselves, the threads are listed newest ones at bottom.
But yet I constantly hear from people how much they love it, it's so easy to use.
I get away with this sick design because I know who my audience is. These are knowledgeable computer professionals, who aren't afraid of a short learning curve, and who prefer having the most information presented to them in the most efficient way possible. This interface frustrates the hell out of the inexperienced, but is absolutely ideal for its audience.
The final authority on any user interface is, always, the user.
I thought the idea was, to show the world how Linux is BETTER than Windows, rather than emulate Windows' famously flawed user interface pixel-for-pixel.
Did anyone ever think that the admittedly knee-jerk reactions of school administrators might actually have saved lives?
if lives were saved (even one,) isn't that *worth it*?
Scenario:
The Columbine d00dz had been planning this shooting gallery stunt for a YEAR. They have stockpiled weapons, built bombs, and bought snazzy-looking trenchcoats specially for the occasion.
The week before the Big Bang is supposed to go down, the school bans trenchcoats.
Harris and Klebold look at each other and say "damn, we can't wear trenchcoats. Let's call the whole thing off." The next night, all the guns, bombs, ammo, and trenchcoats they planned to use, are sunk into the river in a large trash bag, never to be seen again, and Harris and Klebold become youth ministers.
Suuuuuuuuure.
What will be required for us to accept machines as people?
Ask me again when we have learned to treat all HUMANS as people.
I think for Katz 2.0, assuming you don't release his source code and let us fix him ourselves, you should implement the following fixes:
Just my thoughts.
ObSmiley
Of course, if programming is accepted as an art form, I wonder where that puts Windows?
Stuck to a refrigerator with a magnet like the hideous, only-a-parent-could-love-it first grade art project it is, would be my vote.
I've never seen Slashdot as a community. It's a news source with a built-in newsgroup.
Conversations here last as long as the story that spawned them remains on the Front Page. Form friendships? I do good if I can remember people here by their signatures. Certainly the discussions don't last long enough for people to get to KNOW each other.
There are sites that get it right - but Slashdot's focus is on the stories and the conversation, not on the community. It shows.
Oh, to make a liar out of me, on their website, they talk about AmigaOS 3.5. I guess that's something
Outsourced.
"Stuff that matters" - to Slashdot anyway. It's news for nerds, stuff that matters To SOMEONE. Yes, I agree Slashdot has gone overboard with a Boing ball on the icon bar at least once a week. No worse than some of the other silly off-topic stuff that goes up there, I guess the red and white just flags more attention.
But it DOES matter. Some of us want new computers that are not Windows, are not Mac, and are not UNIX. (Yes, this is an alien concept for some people around here.) Some of us LIKE how the Amiga works and would like to see a memory-protected, multiprocessing-enabled, theme-configurable version of it running on quad 500MHz G4's - or as close to that as we can get within our price range. Some of us were hoping Gateway would actually do something meaningful with the technology - and if anything, the Iwin "Amiga clone" hoax has proven that PEOPLE ARE VERY INTERESTED in buying such boxes if someone bothers to build them. Gateway has the clout, the resources, and the people (or HAD the people before they all resigned in disgust) to make a kick-ass computer for people who WANT kick-ass computers, and instead they have reduced it all to a contradictory-sounding software-only information appliance that will have far less of a market than the Amiga itself. Notice each successive press release has been a diminishment of the strategy.
Now, frankly, I don't want Gateway to manufacture anything with an Amiga nameplate - I just want them to stop being condescending and insulting to the Amiga user base, and continue to piss on us by acting as though WE should still be waiting with baited breath on THEM.
Perhaps most importantly, my A1200 still runs and is still VERY much in active use, for Web surfing, email, word processing, and 3D work. For me the Amiga (the classic Amiga, not the crap Gateway wants to sell me) will continue to be "stuff that matters" until the last Amiga on earth fails to power up. I acknowledge its limitations and I wish for better - but it also continues to be useful, while my Linux box rusts in the closet.
With that kind of "spirit" it should spit pea soup, levitate off its desk, and spin its monitor through 360 degrees constantly.
What's laughable is just that Gateway honestly expects us to take them seriously after all this. The rest of it - the years wasted, the technology they're just SITTING on, the resources they could have put into developing and marketing the Amiga (or some like-minded alternative system) to bust it into the mainstream in a big way, which they are now throwing away in order to make some kind of software-only "information appliance", is not humor - it's tragedy.
Let's hope they deliver an Amiga box sometime soon
What did you read, anyway? Not the same executive update I saw...
I've always had people problems. I find that I am better prepared to deal with people when I am suitably "fueled" - enough rest, enough food, no sugar crashes, no caffeine cravings, no bad weather on approach. But when I'm not operating on a full tank, my behavior tends toward autism all the way around: focus problems (the aforementioned crowd situation improves if I can find something to do, like read or draw), nervous twitches (like obsessively twiddling fingers on alternate hands to make myself "balanced" - don't ask), etc.
:-)
:-)
I do have a host of other problems too, which can contribute: hypoglycemia, severe caffeine addiction, sleep problems (maybe related to the caffeine), hypersensitivity to approaching storms (they make me drowsy!), and an extremely sheltered upbringing. I will never know how much of my introversion is due to that sheltered upbringing, btw - I suspect some of it is innate, or else I would have undoubtedly found ways around the parental restrictions that kept me away from other kids.
But the point is, I honestly don't know. Autism rings true for much of what I display as "symptoms", but yet those symptoms come and go based on other environmental factors, and some "symptoms" appear directly traceable to psychology alone. Clues to the real nature of "autism", perhaps - that it might in fact be psychological and not physiological in nature? Hints at an autism-like mental illness afflicting people with isolated childhoods? Or just the totally normal and expected result of someone who grew up the way I did and wound up an Amiga user who drinks ~4 liters of Diet Pepsi a day?
I do agree, however, with whoever mentioned the fact that the general populace seems more than willing to accept people like me as "mentally ill" but yet would never dare try to classify jocks as ill. I keep remembering the hype over the Phantom Menace premiere, where they focused on the lines of strangely dressed people - while ignoring the lines of strangely dressed people at sporting events. Painting your face in team colors is okay, painting your face like Maul isn't. Being rude to people who interrupt your football game is okay, being rude to people who interrupt your Quake game is not. Loud rowdy behavior in a sports bar is okay, quiet rowdy behavior in a monitor's soft glow is not. If this is how society defines normal, they have no right to wonder why I keep to myself. Revealing that socially awkward and/or unusually focused behavior is the result of autism will only serve to encourage those who just don't like geeks in the first place, even if true, it will probably be used to marginalize us even further (and frustrate them when we do not wish to be "cured" of a disease from which we cannot be said to suffer).
On the other hand, I do have a girlfriend, though I keep wondering when I'm going to learn what's really wrong with her that balances out the incongruous fact that she actually LIKES me. The list of possibilities so far: she is escaped from an asylum, she is a well-programmed spy from the star cluster 671 Getax, she is a mass murderer, or she is not real and I'm the only human who perceives her.
Beowulf cluster!!!
(someone had to say it...)
Why not? In monochrome it would look like the head of some kind of anime monster.
The new 'graphite' look is obviously designed to appeal to PHB's and wearers of grey suits
No.
Some of us out here prefer the original Casablanca to the colorized. Some of us think a NeXT cube in any color but black would be stupid-looking (even in SGI metallic purple it just wouldn't look right). Some people in this world prefer Akira to Pokemon, Empire Strikes Back to Phantom Menace, Ani DiFranco to Christina Aguilera. Does taste require that we prefer happy cheerful things, or that the only reason someone would offer black as a color is so people with monochrome brains and monochrome lives would buy it? I am an artist, a so-called creative type - should everything I own be painted in dayglo or 70s racecar metallic purple? Or do you just think that the graphite scheme merely represents a lack of color, rather than a color to itself?
I don't know who Apple designed the Graphite scheme for, but I DO know - and I suspect Apple knows - that there are lots of artists and creative types who like a touch of oomph to things, serious oomph with ass-kicking potential, and would rather have something imposing and monochrome and dark as opposed to a bright happy jellybean. Has nothing to do with PHBs and suits - and in fact a PHB would STILL be unhappy with the brooding presence of a graphite iMac, and would continue to be unhappy until it shipped in opaque beige.
A hint: PHBs and suits never list black as their favorite color.
The graph makes more sense if you relabel its axes: x=number of individuals of a species, y=number of species with exactly that number of individuals.
In other words: we aren't talking about the likelihood that you will encounter an individual of the species, we're talking about counting the species itself. A few really common species, a good spread of "average" species, and a few species represented by few individuals.
'Course I could just be full of it. Wouldn't be the first time...
3.5 ain't even OUT yet. I was kinda hoping they'd release it before the $#!+ hit the fan, so at least we'd get SOMETHING from them before they implode... at this rate, the only actual thing ever done at Amiga Inc. (which isn't even true, they OUTSOURCED it) will probably never be released.
A good self-consistent paranoid conspiracy theory would be an IMPROVEMENT over the information we (don't) have right now...
"no one knows how the human brain works but we all use that"
:-)
That's debatable for some of us.
As to the documentational aspect, it's not so much knowing HOW it works, it's KNOWING it works. Stuff that no one understands that everyone uses, at least has been "shown to work" by extensive testing - and at least someone somewhere had SOME idea how it was originally supposed to work.
How do you test boundary conditions on an evolved circuit which may have "extra" boundaries inside? Maybe it has developed an accumulator that counts to 33 in analog, skips 34 (it counts 33 twice), and is fine from 35 up - that just happens to work under the test conditions that don't care about #3. Better examples anyone?
We've been following this story all week, and it is absolutely definitely indisputably positively a HOAX.
No one has ever HEARD of the spectacular PowerSE product they claim is their flagship software - even though they claim its first release was in 1993.
They have surprisingly few screenshots of their software - and what they do have are suspiciously boring and devoid of actually displaying FEATURES. This makes perfect sense if screenshots are not merely a keyclick away, but actually require doctoring in paint programs (the few meaningless PowerSE screenshots on their site are obviously NeXTstep screenshots heavily doctored).
All their pages used to have meta tags listing the author as Martin Steinbach, the guy claiming to be their CEO (of what they say is a 300-person company, mind you). When people noticed this and began mentioning it publicly, suddenly the meta tags all change and now the company has an "internet division".
Their software downloads section is perpetually broken.
Most of what is described for the A510 and A1010 feature list is either unachievable or impractical at the listed price points. Some of what's listed would seem to require Herculean engineering efforts, yet iWin seems to have pulled it out of their hats.
Read the specs on their site for what PowerSE is capable of doing. Why aren't we all using this instead of VMware or WINE?
The tech specs are all suspiciously vague and misleading-sounding, but not in a way that can be blamed on poor translations.
It's not yet clear what purpose is to be served by perpetrating such an elaborate (and expensive!) hoax, but especially in light of the Godlike specs of PowerSE, it is the only reasonable conclusion.
Amiga users for some reason are USED to keeping machines alive for the better part of a decade. Probably has something to do with the fact that the Amiga has never obeyed Moore's Law, and Amiga owners don't expect them to - aside from 3D rendering and Web browsing, Amigas don't get slower the way PCs seem to do.
Amigas also accept processor upgrades with ease, which again adds to the notion that the machine does not have an expiration date. (Unfortunately this also leads to the infamous brag-about-your-Amiga-sigs, not so much to have the fastest Amiga on the block, but to have an Amiga the farthest away from how it shipped from the factory as possible. We took pride in outdoing Commodore...)
End result: 13-year-old Amigas crawling headlong into the millennium...