Dreamworks already announced that they're giving up on 2D animation. The only major studio doing cel work now is Sony, which is gearing up to have a full feature animation department staffed by people who came over from both Disney and Dreamworks. They'll be doing CG, too, but one of their first major pictures will be Tam Lin, directed by Roger Allers and Brenda Chapman (The Lion King and Prince of Egypt) and written by Neil Gaiman, with conceptual art by Brian and Wendy Froud.
That's really what Flash MX, as distinct from previous versions, is trying to do -- essentially replace the somewhat shaky idea of browser-side Java applications. And while this kind of use for Flash is very rare right now, it does it extremely well--it's a far more lightweight system than Java, and sometimes that has its advantages. And Flash MX has a pretty complete set of methods for both full-featured GUIs and data access/manipulation.
Flash gets a bad rap because it was abused a great deal for its first couple of years. So was client-side Java, though. Macromedia, to their credit, has worked pretty hard at giving Flash the capability to be fast and unobtrusive, even to the point of having good accessibility options and automatically creating non-Flash alternatives. And while Flash is certainly still used predominantly for fluffery, a lot of it I don't even notice as Flash but for the faster, smoother animated interaction with the site when I'm using a Flash-enabled browser.
I'm not a Flash developer and doubt I'm really going to put the effort into it on my own--but it's not the Great Force for Evil that people make it out to be.
While all the standard disclaimers apply, I think that if SCO only claims the Linux kernel falls under the DMBL (Darl's Magic Beans License), they can distribute all the other GPL software that makes up the GNU/Linux system without legal difficulty as long as they don't violate provisions of the GPL in doing so. The DMBL kernel with the GPL userland utilities is "mere aggregation" in GPL terms (section 2).
The only real question is whether or not the GPL requires you to make the source code for GPL software you distribute available from your servers rather than simply saying, "the unmodified code is available at [public server]" when asked. This may violate section 3 of the GPL, but if the identical source code is widely available from other documented sources, it might be hard to make stick.
This doesn't affect the legality of the DMBL, obviously, but the call for GPL developers to send cease-and-desist orders to SCO may be irrelevant to anyone who isn't a kernel contributor. To those who are, of course, it'd fall on deaf ears, since I suspect SCO will do their damndest to claim that their all-powerful Unix licenses reach forward through time and cover all changes made to "their" source code in perpetuity.
Yes, there is a word for this, and the word is well-rounded. (And I don't mean the kind of roundness you get by sitting on your duff in front of the GameCube.)
I think people are missing the basic point here, but I think people miss the point of most attempts at "canons." They're not tally sheets that give you elitism points, but an attempt to define fairly well-agreed-upon classics across a wide spectrum of a given field. Anyone who's a serious student of literature should know at least a few canonical works, and that's doubly important if you're a writer with any professional aspirations greater than writing a book or two under an assumed name as a TV show tie-in. "I want to write science fiction, why should I know anything about Faulkner" is a stupid question, and it deserves a stupid answer: you should know something about Faulkner because he was a great effing writer,, and you might get some much better understanding on how to tell stories in your chosen genre if you make an attempt at understanding why people consider Faulkner such a good writer. (You don't even have to like his work, but you need to understand it.)
Likewise, if you're going to be a game developer, yes, you really should have a broader understanding of games and their history than just a couple recent games close to what you think you want to develop. Why should a computer gamer know things like old SPI and Avalon Hill board games? Because if you're doing a military simulation, these people may well have thought of how to express things in game terms that you haven't. It doesn't matter that you have no interest in making a pen-and-paper game like Axis and Allies. Likewise, someone making a modern computer FRPG might want to look at 1979's Temple of Apshai, which had percentage ratings for health and fatigue instead of hit points, and hid a surprising amount of mechanics in its melee system--not to mention a "dungeon" that, even in its dirt-simple overhead view, allowed much more complex room shapes than modern dungeon crawls, and had traps, monsters and room descriptions that all fit the scenario's theme instead of just throwing random creatures from the Monster Manual at players. (Actually, someone making a modern FRPG might just look at any system other than Dungeons & Dragons for once.)
I think "trumping capitalism" was a silly description, but I also think your analysis is a little too glib.
Neither of these (the original price, or the re-importation) are examples of a pure free market system. Copyright ensures that the textbook is only available from one producer (the publisher); there's no competition in production at all, therefore, but only among distributors. And, as someone else pointed out, the problem being solved by the text-book reimporting is essentially a problem of price-fixing. The producer is able to set baseline prices differently in different countries in a manner completely independent of demand. (If a course requires book X, you don't get book Y on the same subject that's 15% less, you get book X.) It hardly requires anything that smacks of "communism" for the reimportation to be stopped; it just requires the producers to raise prices in other countries to make this no longer cost-effective.
This kind of end-run is a makeshift way to address the problem, but the real problem is addressed only by radical deregulation (removing the monopoly power of copyright) or greater regulation (imposed price controls on the market). Both of those would get different sets of people highly outraged, of course, and the former one is becoming a classic neolibertarian dilemma: "intellectual property" is arguably a form of property right, the virtual foundation of capitalism, yet also arguably a form of government-granted monopoly.
Actually, yes, some probably will, but it's going to depend on the label, isn't it? I'm going to guess that artist-owned labels, a la Mailboat Records, are going to get a fair amount to the artists. In point of fact, Mailboat has some albums which have only been available through the iTunes music store so far, although they're going to be released on physical media by month's end.
I'm not dissing your point, but it's not Apple's fault--or for that matter, Tower Records' fault, or any other place selling songs on either digital or physical media--if artists aren't being paid very well by their publishers. Increasingly, artists are opting out of the broken major-label system, and while I'm sure most of them aren't doing substantially better, the chances are that most of them aren't doing any worse.
And that's one advantage that Apple does potentially give independent labels that places like Tower don't: equal footing.
I'm under no illusions about Apple doing this out of a sense of noble goodness, but so what? The entire recording industry "as we know it" may well be changing--but it's a sea change, not a sudden cataclysmic shift, as independent artist-owned labels find ways to get better distribution, taking advantage of new technology in ways the major labels can't or won't. If Apple remains open to independent labels and opens further (as they've clearly started to), they're going to be a force for this change, not an impediment to it.
I hope you were being facetious. "UCSD" is an extremely well-known abbreviation for the University of California at San Diego.
I looked at the "nastygram" and it wasn't particularly nasty; it was very straightforward, not unduly legalistic, and indicated that UCSD had contacted the ucsduncensored.com people a couple weeks ago and had apparently been blown off. Furthermore, this isn't a case where the USCD in the domain name was referring to something else (it was clearly "the" UCSD), and it wasn't a parody site that could claim First Amendment protection--it was a community site for UCSD students, and one that accepted advertising (look at Google's cache of the site).
You can argue UCSD is being undiplomatic or churlish, but they're hardly acting out of legal bounds here--and I'm not sure it's that ridiculous to start with, because it's not a UCSD service and putting "UCSD" in the front of the name suggests it is. Independent publications in college towns that are there to provide alternatives to official services don't use the college name in their name, even if they may use it in the subtitle. For instance, the "Independent Alligator" is referring to the University of Florida Gators, but they're not the "University of Florida Alligator," and if they tried to call themselves that, UF would be firmly within their rights to slap them. (Yes, "UCSD Uncensored" getting dinged for this is ironic, but the legal point still stands.)
No. The GPL doesn't protect the users' rights, it protects the developers' rights. I know this is contrary to both the FSF's line and RMS's fervent belief. With all due respect, they're wrong, too.
If I'm a developer I will choose the license of my software based on whether (a) I want to make money from it, and (b) whether I want anyone else to make money from it. That last point is something that a lot of the "BSD good, GPL evil" folks don't get. If I want to give code away as a gift, I may not want someone else to turn that code into a commercial product. And in fact, if I'm making money in some fashion that's tangentially related to that code (perhaps it's a limited version of a commercial product, or I'm selling support, or what have you), it may be in my business interest not to release it with a license that helps competitors.
If I'm a user, then unless I'm a programmer, it doesn't matter to me what free software license a program is released under. If I'm a programmer, I may well find the BSD license "more free," because it places less conditions on what I can use BSD-licensed code for.
From a commercial standpoint, BSD (or LGPL) licensing is great if you want to provide, say, a reference implementation you want to be able to be used, in whole or part, in commercial products. But if you have some rationale for releasing your code under a free software license but do not want to enable competitors make money off your work, the GPL is your friend.
And that rationale is entirely developer-driven, not user-driven. The BSD license doesn't give a developer more rights than the GPL -- unless you consider it a "right" to have your work used in a commercial product without consent. As a developer, I would choose the GPL license to assert my right to prevent users from doing that. Prevent. Deny. Restrict.
This isn't a bad thing, or a good thing, it's just a thing. But the choice between open source licenses is made by developers based on how they want to see their code used, and the defining differences between all licenses are the restrictions placed on that use.
The penchant for calling usage restrictions "freedoms" is the one thing that irks me about the FSF. I can't change a few things around in Emacs and sell it under a different name with no source because it's under the GPL. If it was using a BSD license, I could. That is a restriction. I understand the rationale and fully support it. (Including financial support, by buying the printed manual directly from the FSF.) But it's extremely tendentious to insist that users are made "more free" by GPL software.
With only one exception I can think of right now, every company I've been at has had a majority of top-level execs, including CEOs, who worked their way up through their industry on the engineering side. Some of them worked on some very high profile stuff in their respective industries, from teams at Sperry-Univac to helping to launch Electronic Arts. (Even the company that I'm calling an exception landed great executive-level talent on occasion, including one of the co-authors of Wizardry. They're an exception because they tended to drive the talented execs away quickly.)
Executives don't lose their brains when they become execs, but they lose direct contact with technologies. They're managing people--and managing companies, hopefully well. It's a different skill set. That doesn't mean they don't keep up with technologies--at least in the best cases--but they'll be keeping up with it at a "high-level view," not an engineering view.
Sure, there are a lot of bullpucky artists in executive offices. There's a lot of ones in engineering, too. But the problem with most "dotbombs" wasn't executives who lacked technical skills. It was executives who were techies -- with no business skills.
That's my recollection, as well. Copyrighting work could be done simply by writing "Copyright (c) 1987 Joe Blow" and publishing the work. And the thing is, that copyright may mean that Roland can sue them out of existence--the fact that the copyright isn't registered may not matter, because the copyright is easily provable.
I think people are also forgetting that the Sound Canvas is intended to be "backwards-compatible" with the MT-32 (even though there's a discussion in this thread talking about the differences, I know). And Roland still sells a software version of the Sound Canvas... which means that this freeware emulated MT-32 probably is competing with a current product in Roland's eyes.
That would be "nearly every major publishing house and professional magazine." Still. This is slowly changing, but it's literally been only the last couple of years that I've been seeing submission requirements that even allow electronic submission to all but the smallest of presses.
Actually, I'll backpedal a little on that. Not everyone demands Courier, but it's still considered a mark of professionalism by most editors/publishers. It's a sign that you, as a writer, have done enough basic research to know what proper manuscript format is. The assumption is that if you haven't put in the hour or two to find this and learn this, the chances are you're not serious about your storytelling, either. It may seem like a rickety assumption, but I know when I was receiving about 20 manuscripts a week for a small press magazine I edited in the late '90s, manuscripts that didn't follow canonical format but were worth reading anyway really did prove the exceptions to the rule.
What most editors--I can't speak for you--still do demand is double-spaced, 12-point text with ample margins, visual indication of emphasis (underlines in monospaced fonts or italics in proportional), and a header which indicates page number, story title and author name on each page except the first. Most editors still demand hard copy, and if they don't, would strongly prefer soft copy that meets those formats so they can print it out if they want to.
And this is the major thing that keeps me from trying to move to text editors from word processors: I need to be able to produce formatted text, however simple the formatting is, and I don't want to have to think about embedded formatting codes the way TeX (or God forbid troff) would require while I'm writing. And, ironically, those text formatters don't do a good job for manuscript formatting anyway--they want to do real typesetting. I don't really need any more power than WordStar 4.0 had, but I don't want any less, either.
On the Mac currently we're suffering a deluge of "writers' word processors" which try to strip writing down to the "bare essentials," which universally means they've added cutesy UI things for margin notes or tabs for chapters, while offering far less formatting ability than TextEdit or WordPad while offering no more editing capability. It's the worst of both worlds!
The earliest forms of computer music involved putting an AM radio near the computer and executing code snippets that would produce the desired sound (interference) on the radio.
...which is why the TRS-80 Model I was taken off the market in 1980 and replaced with the Model III. (Seriously.) You can't do that with any FCC-approved PC on the market now that I'm aware of, and I doubt you can do it with any portable device currently on the market, either.
I admit I'm dubious about the dangers electronic devices present to aircraft, too. I understand the "better safe than sorry" mentality and there have been some good points made about the theoretical dangers--but you overstate the "crapness" of consumer electronics. Unless the device is actually intentionally broadcasting (like a cell phone, or if two people set up a peer-to-peer wireless network in the cabin, perhaps!), the level of interference even an electrically "noisy" but still FCC-approved device is going to be capable of producing isn't going to cause interference with a jetliner's instrumentation unless it's less than a foot the instrument panel. (Those very noisy TRS-80 Model Is could only do the AM radio trick if the radio was set within a foot or two of the CPU. Yes, I say that as a former TRS-80 owner.)
I'm tempted to say something flippant, like "but I don't want to stop consuming, dammit." And there's some truth to that. But your point is well-taken... there are just caveats. If you're good enough at both the actual work you want to do and at selling yourself, you can cut your ties to the working life. And if you're in the right area. Those are bigger "ifs" than you're making them out to be.
Through an odd chain of events, I ended up moving to Silicon Valley in November of last year; I'm employed in large part because of a friend who kept throwing positions his company was opening up at me until one of them stuck. Even so, I'm a "fulltime contractor," which equates to all the work and no benefits other than pay. In fact, I'm actually making less money than I was in Tampa. (My expenses are also slightly lower.)
Fortunately, I like the company I'm at and I like the people I work with, and this is keeping the negatives (no benefits, wonky hours, long commute) in a fragile balance. But the reality is that right now I don't have the money saved up to just cut my ties and hope. (Well, technically, I do, but that money's to pay taxes next year--and given that this is my first time doing the 1099 thing, I have a strong suspicion I'm not setting aside enough and that I'm going to face penalties for not having done estimated taxes.) If I did, let's face it: I'm in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash and my last few jobs were web development on FreeBSD, Solaris and OS X using PHP. The fact that I actually know good typography and layout and can apply it to web pages (using XHTML, CSS and all those other buzzwords) does me very little good--by resume I look like every other Java-less web monkey. My work now, in fact, is doing data analysis with Microsoft Excel. Someone in this part of the country just cutting loose as you suggest better expect to move out of IT entirely, or better have the resources to move--even if it's just an hour or two away where the streets aren't filled with desperate contractors holding signs reading "Will hack Linux for food."
I doubt I'll ever move into a field that's unrelated to computers, but I'm starting to seriously look at fields that involve just using computers as tools for other things--pushing into fine typography and book design, for instance. I don't think I.T. is a bad general field to be in (there's always going to be a demand, let's face it), but it's a field I sort of blundered into, and I'm having to face the fact that I don't have the breadth of experience employers are increasingly looking for nor, if I'm honest with myself, the interest to develop that breadth. (I've tried to learn Java for years. I'm farther along in learning Cocoa programming.)
So as enchanting as the "free yourself from that slave job you have" mantra may be, people need to ask themselves if they're really able to do that, and if the answer is "no," how they can get to that point if it's really their goal. Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and surviving uninjured requires either sheer dumb luck or some planning--and one probably shouldn't count on the dumb luck.
Nothing really new is POSSIBLE in [fantasy], since excluding the modern world seems to be the whole point.
That would seem to be very broadly dismissive of urban fantasy and magic realism, Mr. Robinson. Charles de Lint, Terri Windling, Emma Bull, Neil Gaiman... simply check the list of World Fantasy Award winners for a decade or so. Better yet, actually read a couple of those books. That Sean Stewart's Galveston has no space stations hardly makes its scope less sweeping--nor its insights less sharp.
With all due respect, anyone making the "science fiction = deep, fantasy = escapist" argument has been blithely ignoring fantasy over the last decade or two and just might not have been paying that close attention to start with. It's a nearly identical mistake to that made by those who used to (or still) argue "contemporary = deep, science fiction = escapist." That's an irony I've always wondered about.
In the past, Apple stuck with the GCC compiler because that's what they're using on their machine. I don't see why (some) people have been so tremendously uptight about this; it's not like their benchmarks showed the G5 dunking the P4's head in the toilet and mopping the floor with it, they just showed it being competitive. GCC may be mediocre, but it's mediocre on all platforms. This may not be the most spiffy way to try to eliminate compiler effects from a test and it may not even be the Official SPEC Way, but it's still probably a better way to do it than to say "go ahead, compare our scores with GCC against Intel's special compiler with the '-optimize-for-spec-test' flag" like the loudest critics seem to think they should have.
If you don't like VeriTest's testing methods, you don't get to use them in either case. I did a bit of digging on this and wrote it up on my website a while ago.
Back in October 2002, IBM gave estimated SPEC results for the 1.8 GHz PPC970 with a SPECfp of 1057 and a SPECint of 937. Intel's own results for the 3.06 GHz P4 are SPECfp 1077 and SPECint 1088. Given that the P4 is running at a 70% higher clock speed and in the better integer case is only 16% faster--and in floating point operations is closer to 1%--I think it's difficult to make the case that the P4 is blowing any doors off. (If you extrapolate IBM's figures for what the 2 GHz G5 would do, it comes very close to parity with the P4 on integer and outstrips it on floating point.) The contention that two 2 GHz PPC970s would outperform two 3 GHz Xeons doesn't seem to be stretching things.
Governments don't get pegged as greedy corporations because governments aren't for-profit enterprises. Simplistic, but accurate. Barring passing raises for themselves, legislators (who generally will make a lot more money once they get out of public office even with any such raise) don't stand to appreciably benefit from "organizational greed" in the way that corporate executives do. Governments have a mandate to serve everyone, and the implementation of that invariably sets off arguments across the political spectrum about its fairness, but it's quite different than a mandate to steadily grow profits and increase returns for shareholders.
I think it'd be fascinating to figure out who's pushing for this tax specifically and what the money that would be raised for it would be targeted for. It's quite possible it has very little to do with the technology at all, and that it has to do with the fact that most states, not just California, are suddenly finding themselves running deficits after the collapse of the dotcom bubble. Governments tend to spend all the revenue they take in (rest assured that if they tried to save any of it, citizens' watchdog groups would scream, whether it was for tax refunds or for funding of neglected projects), and citizens and municipalities tend to expect that revenue to keep coming--when it suddenly drops, panic sets in. Why Florida in particular for such a tax? Hanging chad jokes aside, Florida is the most populous state in the land that doesn't have a state income tax. That deficit's gotta be made up somewhere, but instituting a state income tax ain't gonna happen and significantly raising existing taxes isn't something most politicians (particularly in a very Republican state) are keen on stumping for. That means trying to find new revenue sources, and what might be dubbed the "Weird Tax Category" is going to come up a lot.
As other people have pointed out, BTW, this appears to be not a proposed "infrastructure tax," but a tax on the purchase of networking equipment--in effect a special sales tax on new purchases, in the same way a luxury tax is.
Except that Microsoft has nothing to gain if SCO really commits "legal suicide." They stand to potentially gain if Linux loses credibility with business market, sure--but if SCO's case gets demolished, all that backfires. And if Microsoft makes a direct investment that isn't something like a license purchase, it looks like they're handing SCO money just to keep the suit going--which isn't going to gain either them or SCO points in the PR department.
So far the most active involvement Microsoft has shown in this is licensing their Unix technology from SCO--which, IIRC, is a continuation of a license from SCO's predecessor company (what's now Tarantella). Unless something else tangible comes to light, the most Microsoft can be accused of here is taking advantage of SCO's claims for added publicity.
At any rate, have you actually heard anything from Microsoft about this since SCO started really getting into their headless chicken dance? Didn't think so. And as many people have pointed out, SCO's stance on copyright law somehow trumping software license provisions would hit Microsoft, too. If they continue on the path they're on, SCO will have no friends in Redmond.
Oddly, this is pretty much the reason the (in)famous movie critic at the New Yorker, Pauline Kael, disparaged the original Star Wars: she thought it was far more driven by visuals than by story, and that it could set a bad precedent that could last generations, if studios took its success as a spur to focus ever more on topping one another in the effects department and let story go completely by the wayside.
I'll be honest--if I'd read Kael's review when I was growing up (I was 10 when Star Wars came out in 1977), I'd have been incensed. But when I saw the movie again for the 20th anniversary release, I was shocked at just how bad the script was. I know this is still blasphemy, but listen to the dialogue objectively sometime--concentrating on it just as a movie, not as an icon. I can all but guarantee it'll be depressing just how leaden the writing is. There's a famous quote from Harrison Ford on the set of that first movie, when he exclaimed, "You can write this shit, George, but you can't say it."
I've been more interested in what the original Caldera folks, Ransom Love and particularly Bryan Sparks, make of this. SCO was always an uninteresting company (to me, at least), but Caldera wasn't. Even though they got less interesting even before their transformation into total dweebitude, they started out pursuing "pipe dreams" of Linux credibility in the enterprise and a viable desktop Linux before anyone else did. The "Linux will take over the world" mentality has its antecedents in the work Sparks and Love were doing back at Novell circa 1993-94 on the Corvair/Expose project. (And as I've noted before, it's ironic to see the anti-SCO crowd dragging Ray Noorda's name through the mud so frequently, given that he was a lunatic anti-Microsoft crusader--Corvair was, at least according to Infoworld reports of the day, an attempt to use a Linux kernel with DR-DOS to make a 32-bit Windows-compatible OS before Windows 95 was out.)
Love is largely out of the computer scene these days, I think, but Sparks isn't--he's running DeviceLogics and owns DR-DOS (again). Anyone tried to interview him?
Save for what's fairly obviously a bug in Word's rendering routine itself that sometimes appears when deleting characters in existing text (it "hesitates" until the cursor is moved), Word keeps up with my typing on my 550 MHz G4 with 512M RAM. I type 70-90 WPM, depending on what I'm working on. Is it possible that you're exaggerating for effect, or do you really type 300+ WPM?
Actually, I don't think Kamen was the one making the grand claims--other people were. He was guilty primarily of keeping silent and letting those claims build up rather than standing up and saying, "Well, those are things I'd hope will happen long-term, but please don't expect world-shaking things from our first products, which will likely be limited in quantity and fairly expensive." He thought being "officially quiet" was a sufficient way of managing expectation and that the hype would be good, rather than creating a backlash.
Having said that, I'm kind of surprised at the reaction, too. Even if the initial Segway doesn't go anywhere and even if the Segway company itself goes under, I'd really expect people to be able to look at this and imagine what it could be, rather than ripping it to shreds for its current limitations. I grant that when people circa 1979 looked at TRS-80's running Scripsit and printing on a 9-pin dot matrix printer and funky descenders, it'd have been difficult to imagine what word processing--let alone desktop publishing--would be like in fifteen years. Fortunately, not everyone assumed microcomputers would never catch up to Selectrics. I don't expect that in two or three decades we'll all be zipping around on our Segway HTs in Segway lanes--but I wouldn't at all be surprised if descendants of this technology become very commonplace in metro areas as personal public transportation.
Except that they started out in hell, because their founder ripped off Thom Henderson's ARC to make his original program.
Back in the BBS days, we were all rallied to support good ol' Phil against the evil Big Company, System Enhancement Associates, who was suing to keep Phil's faster PKARC from eating the original ARC program's lunch. BBS sysops were encouraged to boycott ARC. It worked. It ruined System Enhancement Associates.
Except the funny thing is, SEA was right. They won the lawsuit because Katz hadn't just reimplemented ARC, he stole their source code. That always gets left out of the retelling, even though the reason ZIP exists as a format is because Katz was ultimately prevented from using the ARC format and compression routine. The reality is also that even then, PKWare was a bigger company than SEA ever was. ARC was a commercial program, but had a very unusual license (for the time) allowing people free access to the source code if they wanted to port it to non-DOS platforms. Katz baldly abused this license and, in the end, got away with it. ZIP did end up with an improved compression scheme which I presume PKWare came up with, although there's some evidence that the all-but-ignored ARC 7 outperformed it. (PKARC was, IIRC, based on ARC 5.)
Ben Baker has a description of the history of this whole affair at the website of Thom Henderson (ARC's author). Henderson also has his own commentary, which I would describe as "gently acid."
Despite the free availability of emulators, people consistently pay thousands of dollars for an Altair 8800 or Imsai 8080. I would if I could afford it.
Fortunately for you, you can get a brand-new IMSAI Series Two, designed by the original IMSAI people, with an, um, ultrafast 20 MHz ZS180 processor, 1M of RAM and an original state-of-the-art S-100 backplane bus. (Actually, I shouldn't make too much fun of the S-100; I remember back in the days when the 80386 was the fastest x86 processor, S-100 backplane DOS cards were faster than conventional PCs.)
Meanwhile, though, I think I'll stick with running xtrs, the TRS-80 emulator, when I need to be reminded how far we've come. I missed the days of front panel switches, but, I don't think I really missed them, ya know?
Slashdot Mirror
Dreamworks already announced that they're giving up on 2D animation. The only major studio doing cel work now is Sony, which is gearing up to have a full feature animation department staffed by people who came over from both Disney and Dreamworks. They'll be doing CG, too, but one of their first major pictures will be Tam Lin, directed by Roger Allers and Brenda Chapman (The Lion King and Prince of Egypt) and written by Neil Gaiman, with conceptual art by Brian and Wendy Froud.
That's really what Flash MX, as distinct from previous versions, is trying to do -- essentially replace the somewhat shaky idea of browser-side Java applications. And while this kind of use for Flash is very rare right now, it does it extremely well--it's a far more lightweight system than Java, and sometimes that has its advantages. And Flash MX has a pretty complete set of methods for both full-featured GUIs and data access/manipulation.
Flash gets a bad rap because it was abused a great deal for its first couple of years. So was client-side Java, though. Macromedia, to their credit, has worked pretty hard at giving Flash the capability to be fast and unobtrusive, even to the point of having good accessibility options and automatically creating non-Flash alternatives. And while Flash is certainly still used predominantly for fluffery, a lot of it I don't even notice as Flash but for the faster, smoother animated interaction with the site when I'm using a Flash-enabled browser.
I'm not a Flash developer and doubt I'm really going to put the effort into it on my own--but it's not the Great Force for Evil that people make it out to be.
While all the standard disclaimers apply, I think that if SCO only claims the Linux kernel falls under the DMBL (Darl's Magic Beans License), they can distribute all the other GPL software that makes up the GNU/Linux system without legal difficulty as long as they don't violate provisions of the GPL in doing so. The DMBL kernel with the GPL userland utilities is "mere aggregation" in GPL terms (section 2).
The only real question is whether or not the GPL requires you to make the source code for GPL software you distribute available from your servers rather than simply saying, "the unmodified code is available at [public server]" when asked. This may violate section 3 of the GPL, but if the identical source code is widely available from other documented sources, it might be hard to make stick.
This doesn't affect the legality of the DMBL, obviously, but the call for GPL developers to send cease-and-desist orders to SCO may be irrelevant to anyone who isn't a kernel contributor. To those who are, of course, it'd fall on deaf ears, since I suspect SCO will do their damndest to claim that their all-powerful Unix licenses reach forward through time and cover all changes made to "their" source code in perpetuity.
Yes, there is a word for this, and the word is well-rounded. (And I don't mean the kind of roundness you get by sitting on your duff in front of the GameCube.)
I think people are missing the basic point here, but I think people miss the point of most attempts at "canons." They're not tally sheets that give you elitism points, but an attempt to define fairly well-agreed-upon classics across a wide spectrum of a given field. Anyone who's a serious student of literature should know at least a few canonical works, and that's doubly important if you're a writer with any professional aspirations greater than writing a book or two under an assumed name as a TV show tie-in. "I want to write science fiction, why should I know anything about Faulkner" is a stupid question, and it deserves a stupid answer: you should know something about Faulkner because he was a great effing writer,, and you might get some much better understanding on how to tell stories in your chosen genre if you make an attempt at understanding why people consider Faulkner such a good writer. (You don't even have to like his work, but you need to understand it.)
Likewise, if you're going to be a game developer, yes, you really should have a broader understanding of games and their history than just a couple recent games close to what you think you want to develop. Why should a computer gamer know things like old SPI and Avalon Hill board games? Because if you're doing a military simulation, these people may well have thought of how to express things in game terms that you haven't. It doesn't matter that you have no interest in making a pen-and-paper game like Axis and Allies. Likewise, someone making a modern computer FRPG might want to look at 1979's Temple of Apshai, which had percentage ratings for health and fatigue instead of hit points, and hid a surprising amount of mechanics in its melee system--not to mention a "dungeon" that, even in its dirt-simple overhead view, allowed much more complex room shapes than modern dungeon crawls, and had traps, monsters and room descriptions that all fit the scenario's theme instead of just throwing random creatures from the Monster Manual at players. (Actually, someone making a modern FRPG might just look at any system other than Dungeons & Dragons for once.)
I think "trumping capitalism" was a silly description, but I also think your analysis is a little too glib.
Neither of these (the original price, or the re-importation) are examples of a pure free market system. Copyright ensures that the textbook is only available from one producer (the publisher); there's no competition in production at all, therefore, but only among distributors. And, as someone else pointed out, the problem being solved by the text-book reimporting is essentially a problem of price-fixing. The producer is able to set baseline prices differently in different countries in a manner completely independent of demand. (If a course requires book X, you don't get book Y on the same subject that's 15% less, you get book X.) It hardly requires anything that smacks of "communism" for the reimportation to be stopped; it just requires the producers to raise prices in other countries to make this no longer cost-effective.
This kind of end-run is a makeshift way to address the problem, but the real problem is addressed only by radical deregulation (removing the monopoly power of copyright) or greater regulation (imposed price controls on the market). Both of those would get different sets of people highly outraged, of course, and the former one is becoming a classic neolibertarian dilemma: "intellectual property" is arguably a form of property right, the virtual foundation of capitalism, yet also arguably a form of government-granted monopoly.
Actually, yes, some probably will, but it's going to depend on the label, isn't it? I'm going to guess that artist-owned labels, a la Mailboat Records, are going to get a fair amount to the artists. In point of fact, Mailboat has some albums which have only been available through the iTunes music store so far, although they're going to be released on physical media by month's end.
I'm not dissing your point, but it's not Apple's fault--or for that matter, Tower Records' fault, or any other place selling songs on either digital or physical media--if artists aren't being paid very well by their publishers. Increasingly, artists are opting out of the broken major-label system, and while I'm sure most of them aren't doing substantially better, the chances are that most of them aren't doing any worse.
And that's one advantage that Apple does potentially give independent labels that places like Tower don't: equal footing.
I'm under no illusions about Apple doing this out of a sense of noble goodness, but so what? The entire recording industry "as we know it" may well be changing--but it's a sea change, not a sudden cataclysmic shift, as independent artist-owned labels find ways to get better distribution, taking advantage of new technology in ways the major labels can't or won't. If Apple remains open to independent labels and opens further (as they've clearly started to), they're going to be a force for this change, not an impediment to it.
I hope you were being facetious. "UCSD" is an extremely well-known abbreviation for the University of California at San Diego.
I looked at the "nastygram" and it wasn't particularly nasty; it was very straightforward, not unduly legalistic, and indicated that UCSD had contacted the ucsduncensored.com people a couple weeks ago and had apparently been blown off. Furthermore, this isn't a case where the USCD in the domain name was referring to something else (it was clearly "the" UCSD), and it wasn't a parody site that could claim First Amendment protection--it was a community site for UCSD students, and one that accepted advertising (look at Google's cache of the site).
You can argue UCSD is being undiplomatic or churlish, but they're hardly acting out of legal bounds here--and I'm not sure it's that ridiculous to start with, because it's not a UCSD service and putting "UCSD" in the front of the name suggests it is. Independent publications in college towns that are there to provide alternatives to official services don't use the college name in their name, even if they may use it in the subtitle. For instance, the "Independent Alligator" is referring to the University of Florida Gators, but they're not the "University of Florida Alligator," and if they tried to call themselves that, UF would be firmly within their rights to slap them. (Yes, "UCSD Uncensored" getting dinged for this is ironic, but the legal point still stands.)
No. The GPL doesn't protect the users' rights, it protects the developers' rights. I know this is contrary to both the FSF's line and RMS's fervent belief. With all due respect, they're wrong, too.
If I'm a developer I will choose the license of my software based on whether (a) I want to make money from it, and (b) whether I want anyone else to make money from it. That last point is something that a lot of the "BSD good, GPL evil" folks don't get. If I want to give code away as a gift, I may not want someone else to turn that code into a commercial product. And in fact, if I'm making money in some fashion that's tangentially related to that code (perhaps it's a limited version of a commercial product, or I'm selling support, or what have you), it may be in my business interest not to release it with a license that helps competitors.
If I'm a user, then unless I'm a programmer, it doesn't matter to me what free software license a program is released under. If I'm a programmer, I may well find the BSD license "more free," because it places less conditions on what I can use BSD-licensed code for.
From a commercial standpoint, BSD (or LGPL) licensing is great if you want to provide, say, a reference implementation you want to be able to be used, in whole or part, in commercial products. But if you have some rationale for releasing your code under a free software license but do not want to enable competitors make money off your work, the GPL is your friend.
And that rationale is entirely developer-driven, not user-driven. The BSD license doesn't give a developer more rights than the GPL -- unless you consider it a "right" to have your work used in a commercial product without consent. As a developer, I would choose the GPL license to assert my right to prevent users from doing that. Prevent. Deny. Restrict.
This isn't a bad thing, or a good thing, it's just a thing. But the choice between open source licenses is made by developers based on how they want to see their code used, and the defining differences between all licenses are the restrictions placed on that use.
The penchant for calling usage restrictions "freedoms" is the one thing that irks me about the FSF. I can't change a few things around in Emacs and sell it under a different name with no source because it's under the GPL. If it was using a BSD license, I could. That is a restriction. I understand the rationale and fully support it. (Including financial support, by buying the printed manual directly from the FSF.) But it's extremely tendentious to insist that users are made "more free" by GPL software.
With only one exception I can think of right now, every company I've been at has had a majority of top-level execs, including CEOs, who worked their way up through their industry on the engineering side. Some of them worked on some very high profile stuff in their respective industries, from teams at Sperry-Univac to helping to launch Electronic Arts. (Even the company that I'm calling an exception landed great executive-level talent on occasion, including one of the co-authors of Wizardry. They're an exception because they tended to drive the talented execs away quickly.)
Executives don't lose their brains when they become execs, but they lose direct contact with technologies. They're managing people--and managing companies, hopefully well. It's a different skill set. That doesn't mean they don't keep up with technologies--at least in the best cases--but they'll be keeping up with it at a "high-level view," not an engineering view.
Sure, there are a lot of bullpucky artists in executive offices. There's a lot of ones in engineering, too. But the problem with most "dotbombs" wasn't executives who lacked technical skills. It was executives who were techies -- with no business skills.
That's my recollection, as well. Copyrighting work could be done simply by writing "Copyright (c) 1987 Joe Blow" and publishing the work. And the thing is, that copyright may mean that Roland can sue them out of existence--the fact that the copyright isn't registered may not matter, because the copyright is easily provable.
I think people are also forgetting that the Sound Canvas is intended to be "backwards-compatible" with the MT-32 (even though there's a discussion in this thread talking about the differences, I know). And Roland still sells a software version of the Sound Canvas... which means that this freeware emulated MT-32 probably is competing with a current product in Roland's eyes.
That would be "nearly every major publishing house and professional magazine." Still. This is slowly changing, but it's literally been only the last couple of years that I've been seeing submission requirements that even allow electronic submission to all but the smallest of presses.
Actually, I'll backpedal a little on that. Not everyone demands Courier, but it's still considered a mark of professionalism by most editors/publishers. It's a sign that you, as a writer, have done enough basic research to know what proper manuscript format is. The assumption is that if you haven't put in the hour or two to find this and learn this, the chances are you're not serious about your storytelling, either. It may seem like a rickety assumption, but I know when I was receiving about 20 manuscripts a week for a small press magazine I edited in the late '90s, manuscripts that didn't follow canonical format but were worth reading anyway really did prove the exceptions to the rule.
What most editors--I can't speak for you--still do demand is double-spaced, 12-point text with ample margins, visual indication of emphasis (underlines in monospaced fonts or italics in proportional), and a header which indicates page number, story title and author name on each page except the first. Most editors still demand hard copy, and if they don't, would strongly prefer soft copy that meets those formats so they can print it out if they want to.
And this is the major thing that keeps me from trying to move to text editors from word processors: I need to be able to produce formatted text, however simple the formatting is, and I don't want to have to think about embedded formatting codes the way TeX (or God forbid troff) would require while I'm writing. And, ironically, those text formatters don't do a good job for manuscript formatting anyway--they want to do real typesetting. I don't really need any more power than WordStar 4.0 had, but I don't want any less, either.
On the Mac currently we're suffering a deluge of "writers' word processors" which try to strip writing down to the "bare essentials," which universally means they've added cutesy UI things for margin notes or tabs for chapters, while offering far less formatting ability than TextEdit or WordPad while offering no more editing capability. It's the worst of both worlds!
...which is why the TRS-80 Model I was taken off the market in 1980 and replaced with the Model III. (Seriously.) You can't do that with any FCC-approved PC on the market now that I'm aware of, and I doubt you can do it with any portable device currently on the market, either.
I admit I'm dubious about the dangers electronic devices present to aircraft, too. I understand the "better safe than sorry" mentality and there have been some good points made about the theoretical dangers--but you overstate the "crapness" of consumer electronics. Unless the device is actually intentionally broadcasting (like a cell phone, or if two people set up a peer-to-peer wireless network in the cabin, perhaps!), the level of interference even an electrically "noisy" but still FCC-approved device is going to be capable of producing isn't going to cause interference with a jetliner's instrumentation unless it's less than a foot the instrument panel. (Those very noisy TRS-80 Model Is could only do the AM radio trick if the radio was set within a foot or two of the CPU. Yes, I say that as a former TRS-80 owner.)
I'm tempted to say something flippant, like "but I don't want to stop consuming, dammit." And there's some truth to that. But your point is well-taken... there are just caveats. If you're good enough at both the actual work you want to do and at selling yourself, you can cut your ties to the working life. And if you're in the right area. Those are bigger "ifs" than you're making them out to be.
Through an odd chain of events, I ended up moving to Silicon Valley in November of last year; I'm employed in large part because of a friend who kept throwing positions his company was opening up at me until one of them stuck. Even so, I'm a "fulltime contractor," which equates to all the work and no benefits other than pay. In fact, I'm actually making less money than I was in Tampa. (My expenses are also slightly lower.)
Fortunately, I like the company I'm at and I like the people I work with, and this is keeping the negatives (no benefits, wonky hours, long commute) in a fragile balance. But the reality is that right now I don't have the money saved up to just cut my ties and hope. (Well, technically, I do, but that money's to pay taxes next year--and given that this is my first time doing the 1099 thing, I have a strong suspicion I'm not setting aside enough and that I'm going to face penalties for not having done estimated taxes.) If I did, let's face it: I'm in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash and my last few jobs were web development on FreeBSD, Solaris and OS X using PHP. The fact that I actually know good typography and layout and can apply it to web pages (using XHTML, CSS and all those other buzzwords) does me very little good--by resume I look like every other Java-less web monkey. My work now, in fact, is doing data analysis with Microsoft Excel. Someone in this part of the country just cutting loose as you suggest better expect to move out of IT entirely, or better have the resources to move--even if it's just an hour or two away where the streets aren't filled with desperate contractors holding signs reading "Will hack Linux for food."
I doubt I'll ever move into a field that's unrelated to computers, but I'm starting to seriously look at fields that involve just using computers as tools for other things--pushing into fine typography and book design, for instance. I don't think I.T. is a bad general field to be in (there's always going to be a demand, let's face it), but it's a field I sort of blundered into, and I'm having to face the fact that I don't have the breadth of experience employers are increasingly looking for nor, if I'm honest with myself, the interest to develop that breadth. (I've tried to learn Java for years. I'm farther along in learning Cocoa programming.)
So as enchanting as the "free yourself from that slave job you have" mantra may be, people need to ask themselves if they're really able to do that, and if the answer is "no," how they can get to that point if it's really their goal. Going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and surviving uninjured requires either sheer dumb luck or some planning--and one probably shouldn't count on the dumb luck.
That would seem to be very broadly dismissive of urban fantasy and magic realism, Mr. Robinson. Charles de Lint, Terri Windling, Emma Bull, Neil Gaiman... simply check the list of World Fantasy Award winners for a decade or so. Better yet, actually read a couple of those books. That Sean Stewart's Galveston has no space stations hardly makes its scope less sweeping--nor its insights less sharp.
With all due respect, anyone making the "science fiction = deep, fantasy = escapist" argument has been blithely ignoring fantasy over the last decade or two and just might not have been paying that close attention to start with. It's a nearly identical mistake to that made by those who used to (or still) argue "contemporary = deep, science fiction = escapist." That's an irony I've always wondered about.
In the past, Apple stuck with the GCC compiler because that's what they're using on their machine. I don't see why (some) people have been so tremendously uptight about this; it's not like their benchmarks showed the G5 dunking the P4's head in the toilet and mopping the floor with it, they just showed it being competitive. GCC may be mediocre, but it's mediocre on all platforms. This may not be the most spiffy way to try to eliminate compiler effects from a test and it may not even be the Official SPEC Way, but it's still probably a better way to do it than to say "go ahead, compare our scores with GCC against Intel's special compiler with the '-optimize-for-spec-test' flag" like the loudest critics seem to think they should have.
If you don't like VeriTest's testing methods, you don't get to use them in either case. I did a bit of digging on this and wrote it up on my website a while ago.
Back in October 2002, IBM gave estimated SPEC results for the 1.8 GHz PPC970 with a SPECfp of 1057 and a SPECint of 937. Intel's own results for the 3.06 GHz P4 are SPECfp 1077 and SPECint 1088. Given that the P4 is running at a 70% higher clock speed and in the better integer case is only 16% faster--and in floating point operations is closer to 1%--I think it's difficult to make the case that the P4 is blowing any doors off. (If you extrapolate IBM's figures for what the 2 GHz G5 would do, it comes very close to parity with the P4 on integer and outstrips it on floating point.) The contention that two 2 GHz PPC970s would outperform two 3 GHz Xeons doesn't seem to be stretching things.
Governments don't get pegged as greedy corporations because governments aren't for-profit enterprises. Simplistic, but accurate. Barring passing raises for themselves, legislators (who generally will make a lot more money once they get out of public office even with any such raise) don't stand to appreciably benefit from "organizational greed" in the way that corporate executives do. Governments have a mandate to serve everyone, and the implementation of that invariably sets off arguments across the political spectrum about its fairness, but it's quite different than a mandate to steadily grow profits and increase returns for shareholders.
I think it'd be fascinating to figure out who's pushing for this tax specifically and what the money that would be raised for it would be targeted for. It's quite possible it has very little to do with the technology at all, and that it has to do with the fact that most states, not just California, are suddenly finding themselves running deficits after the collapse of the dotcom bubble. Governments tend to spend all the revenue they take in (rest assured that if they tried to save any of it, citizens' watchdog groups would scream, whether it was for tax refunds or for funding of neglected projects), and citizens and municipalities tend to expect that revenue to keep coming--when it suddenly drops, panic sets in. Why Florida in particular for such a tax? Hanging chad jokes aside, Florida is the most populous state in the land that doesn't have a state income tax. That deficit's gotta be made up somewhere, but instituting a state income tax ain't gonna happen and significantly raising existing taxes isn't something most politicians (particularly in a very Republican state) are keen on stumping for. That means trying to find new revenue sources, and what might be dubbed the "Weird Tax Category" is going to come up a lot.
As other people have pointed out, BTW, this appears to be not a proposed "infrastructure tax," but a tax on the purchase of networking equipment--in effect a special sales tax on new purchases, in the same way a luxury tax is.
Except that Microsoft has nothing to gain if SCO really commits "legal suicide." They stand to potentially gain if Linux loses credibility with business market, sure--but if SCO's case gets demolished, all that backfires. And if Microsoft makes a direct investment that isn't something like a license purchase, it looks like they're handing SCO money just to keep the suit going--which isn't going to gain either them or SCO points in the PR department.
So far the most active involvement Microsoft has shown in this is licensing their Unix technology from SCO--which, IIRC, is a continuation of a license from SCO's predecessor company (what's now Tarantella). Unless something else tangible comes to light, the most Microsoft can be accused of here is taking advantage of SCO's claims for added publicity.
At any rate, have you actually heard anything from Microsoft about this since SCO started really getting into their headless chicken dance? Didn't think so. And as many people have pointed out, SCO's stance on copyright law somehow trumping software license provisions would hit Microsoft, too. If they continue on the path they're on, SCO will have no friends in Redmond.
Oddly, this is pretty much the reason the (in)famous movie critic at the New Yorker, Pauline Kael, disparaged the original Star Wars: she thought it was far more driven by visuals than by story, and that it could set a bad precedent that could last generations, if studios took its success as a spur to focus ever more on topping one another in the effects department and let story go completely by the wayside.
I'll be honest--if I'd read Kael's review when I was growing up (I was 10 when Star Wars came out in 1977), I'd have been incensed. But when I saw the movie again for the 20th anniversary release, I was shocked at just how bad the script was. I know this is still blasphemy, but listen to the dialogue objectively sometime--concentrating on it just as a movie, not as an icon. I can all but guarantee it'll be depressing just how leaden the writing is. There's a famous quote from Harrison Ford on the set of that first movie, when he exclaimed, "You can write this shit, George, but you can't say it."
I've been more interested in what the original Caldera folks, Ransom Love and particularly Bryan Sparks, make of this. SCO was always an uninteresting company (to me, at least), but Caldera wasn't. Even though they got less interesting even before their transformation into total dweebitude, they started out pursuing "pipe dreams" of Linux credibility in the enterprise and a viable desktop Linux before anyone else did. The "Linux will take over the world" mentality has its antecedents in the work Sparks and Love were doing back at Novell circa 1993-94 on the Corvair/Expose project. (And as I've noted before, it's ironic to see the anti-SCO crowd dragging Ray Noorda's name through the mud so frequently, given that he was a lunatic anti-Microsoft crusader--Corvair was, at least according to Infoworld reports of the day, an attempt to use a Linux kernel with DR-DOS to make a 32-bit Windows-compatible OS before Windows 95 was out.)
Love is largely out of the computer scene these days, I think, but Sparks isn't--he's running DeviceLogics and owns DR-DOS (again). Anyone tried to interview him?
Save for what's fairly obviously a bug in Word's rendering routine itself that sometimes appears when deleting characters in existing text (it "hesitates" until the cursor is moved), Word keeps up with my typing on my 550 MHz G4 with 512M RAM. I type 70-90 WPM, depending on what I'm working on. Is it possible that you're exaggerating for effect, or do you really type 300+ WPM?
Actually, I don't think Kamen was the one making the grand claims--other people were. He was guilty primarily of keeping silent and letting those claims build up rather than standing up and saying, "Well, those are things I'd hope will happen long-term, but please don't expect world-shaking things from our first products, which will likely be limited in quantity and fairly expensive." He thought being "officially quiet" was a sufficient way of managing expectation and that the hype would be good, rather than creating a backlash.
Having said that, I'm kind of surprised at the reaction, too. Even if the initial Segway doesn't go anywhere and even if the Segway company itself goes under, I'd really expect people to be able to look at this and imagine what it could be, rather than ripping it to shreds for its current limitations. I grant that when people circa 1979 looked at TRS-80's running Scripsit and printing on a 9-pin dot matrix printer and funky descenders, it'd have been difficult to imagine what word processing--let alone desktop publishing--would be like in fifteen years. Fortunately, not everyone assumed microcomputers would never catch up to Selectrics. I don't expect that in two or three decades we'll all be zipping around on our Segway HTs in Segway lanes--but I wouldn't at all be surprised if descendants of this technology become very commonplace in metro areas as personal public transportation.
If the Big Macs at that McDonald's have fur, I wouldn't want them, either.
Except that they started out in hell, because their founder ripped off Thom Henderson's ARC to make his original program.
Back in the BBS days, we were all rallied to support good ol' Phil against the evil Big Company, System Enhancement Associates, who was suing to keep Phil's faster PKARC from eating the original ARC program's lunch. BBS sysops were encouraged to boycott ARC. It worked. It ruined System Enhancement Associates.
Except the funny thing is, SEA was right. They won the lawsuit because Katz hadn't just reimplemented ARC, he stole their source code. That always gets left out of the retelling, even though the reason ZIP exists as a format is because Katz was ultimately prevented from using the ARC format and compression routine. The reality is also that even then, PKWare was a bigger company than SEA ever was. ARC was a commercial program, but had a very unusual license (for the time) allowing people free access to the source code if they wanted to port it to non-DOS platforms. Katz baldly abused this license and, in the end, got away with it. ZIP did end up with an improved compression scheme which I presume PKWare came up with, although there's some evidence that the all-but-ignored ARC 7 outperformed it. (PKARC was, IIRC, based on ARC 5.)
Ben Baker has a description of the history of this whole affair at the website of Thom Henderson (ARC's author). Henderson also has his own commentary, which I would describe as "gently acid."
Fortunately for you, you can get a brand-new IMSAI Series Two, designed by the original IMSAI people, with an, um, ultrafast 20 MHz ZS180 processor, 1M of RAM and an original state-of-the-art S-100 backplane bus. (Actually, I shouldn't make too much fun of the S-100; I remember back in the days when the 80386 was the fastest x86 processor, S-100 backplane DOS cards were faster than conventional PCs.)
Meanwhile, though, I think I'll stick with running xtrs, the TRS-80 emulator, when I need to be reminded how far we've come. I missed the days of front panel switches, but, I don't think I really missed them, ya know?