Sheesh. The very first commercial Pong game was a stand up arcade machine. It was in the Andy Capp's bar in Silicon Valley. It had been around before, played on IIRC oscilliscopes, and wasn't even as old as Spacewar, but it's generally regarded to be the first arcade video game.
The story goes that the day after it had been set up, Atari got a phone call from the owner of the bar. He complained that the damn game was already broken. Having blown all of their cash, they sent a guy to check it out. He discovered that there were so many quarters in the machine that it had filled up the little cardboard box inside that caught them, and that the slots were totally full. Then they knew that they were going to make a lot of money.
And so they did until Atari crashed terribly in the early 80's.
As an interesting note, it took a while before they let go of the pong idea. There were a lot of pong variants. About the last was Breakout, in which a pong paddle used a ball to disintegrate bricks. The employee who ostensibly worked on it was Steve Jobs, and he recruited his friend Steve Wozniak to do the actual work. Then cheated the Woz out of most of the money.
One of the motivations Woz had when designing the Apple was to be able to play Brickout.
Yeah - it's possible, but IIRC about five years passed between boxing and the Apple I.
Also of course, the second Apple Computer was started with VC. The first one (founded by Jobs, Woz and Wayne) was funded largely IIRC by the sale of Jobs' VW minibus and Woz's HP calculator.
It doesn't even matter if you ordered online from the Disney Store or if you did it from your home in the same state. As long as Disney has ANY presence in your state, they have to collect the tax directly. If you live in Nome, Alaska and use the web for everything, and the only Disney Store is in Juneau, they still get the sales tax when you place the order.
Jobs and the Woz really were blue boxers, but that was some time before they started Apple; I don't recall that they used the blue box money to start the company.
re: Sales tax, you're wrong. If the company you're doing does business in the state you purchase in, you need to pay tax. Thus, as long as you live in the same state that the Disney Store you're buying at is in, you have to pay taxes. (actually, you have to pay taxes no matter what, but they rely on you to remit them yourself when the business isn't in a position to do so)
As it stands, I believe that Apple and Disney both have presences in all 50 states - you're out of luck unless your state has no sales tax at all.
Well sure. Personally what _I_ had wondered was, did he come from a post-apocalyptic future in which the world was conquered by robotic Harlan Ellisons;)
No that's not a technical argument. Having things like Colorsync available are technical matters - sure you could work without them, but it would be harder. Technical issue or personal preference?
I mean, I know people who did DTP for decades on heavily-customized PDPs with special video terminals. They could do a lot of the stuff I could do with Quark and Illustrator. But it took them longer, and wasn't as easy. How would you classify that?
Unless there's a truly compelling reason to switch, and even the crappy underpinnings of the OS (ie stability) isn't enough btw, there's no reason to. The most tempting system to me after the Mac has always been NeXT. Or BeOS. Well, we're getting NeXT rsn, and BeOS just doesn't have enough apps.
I honestly don't think that this would work b/c you would deliberately get intoxicated in order to weasel around the contract. What's really needed is a third party installer program that installs the Windows files for you w/o any licenses. Sounds like a good job for some reverse engineers.
The right that an author acquires for copyrighted works is the exclusive right to sell copies that he makes. Of course, the author can charge any amount for copies when he sells them, but he can't force other people who he _sells_ to, to set particular prices. (e.g. Alice sells Bob her book for $100. She tells him that Bob can't sell it unless he does so for $200. Alice has no actual power to force Bob to agree)
Of course, rather than sell copyrighted material outright (which is totally distinct from selling the copyright, btw) it is possible to license it. This is a whole different kettle of fish. If you can only acquire a work through license, and not sale, then the author can indeed impose additional restrictions that normal copyright law prohibits.
However, the Supremes have IIRC taken the line that unless you agree to a license as a precondition to acquiring the work, it's a sale. Thus when you buy a book and pay money for it, unless you had to agree to a contract FIRST, you aren't legally obligated to do anything the author wants. In the case of the GPL, in order to acquire even more rights (like the right to make and redistribute your own copies of a work that is GPLed but which you do not hold the copyright to) you can agree to it. But you can use and modify the software w/o agreeing to the GPL. You just can't distribute more copies than you legally acquire, nor can the copies be modified.
No. This doesn't significantly effect the GPL at all.
There is nothing stopping you from NOT agreeing to the GPL, and still being able to resell legally made copies you acquire, use them, or modify them. But if you don't agree to the GPL, regular copyright law applies. Which means that you can't sell copies you make, you can't sell copies you modify (unless there are REALLY SIGNIFICANT modifications that effectively turn the software into something totally different) but you can sell copies that the copyright holder or GPL licensors make or modify provided that you legally got them from them.
The GPL does not restrict what you can do with software it covers when you agree; you never had the right (w/o holding the copyright or agreeing to the GPL) to make and distribute changed copies anyway as long as it's covered by copyright. The GPL lets you, provided that you make the source available. It's stupid to say that giving some permission to do additional stuff is restrictive, b/c it only would be if they gave you permission to do even more stuff.
There is a great amount of contention over this issue. My opinion (and this whole matter has _barely_ been touched on in the courts) is that if you buy it, you own it. You can agree to a restrictive license later on, but unless you have to agree to one in order to get it out of the store, you're not bound.
Thus, if you go to CompUSA (what a mistake already!) and buy a copy of Windows, it's yours. You own it. Not the copyright, mind you, just the one copy. If you can install it without having to agree to the EULA, good for you - the EULA doesn't apply. Still doesn't mean that there's a hell of a lot that you can do with it, but you're only bound by regular copyright law and not the damn license.
Managing to install it w/o their installer is an exercise left to the reader.
Well, the Newt is more powerful than the Palm, has a better UI (probably the best pen-based UI ever) and can do more than the Palm.
OTOH, it's bigger, it's more expensive, they aren't being made anymore (Airport would be great for a new Newt though... drool...) and it was released too early and got a lot of negative press. The way that demo Newts tended to be very confused from having to deal with hundreds of different handwriting styles for extremely short periods never helped either.
If I had enough spare cash, I'd buy a Newton 2100. I've been offered Palms, but I don't really find them interesting enough. But no one said you HAVE to like either one. No one size fits all. Not your size, not my size.
Actually, only Steve and his NeXT cronies ever really said that. Possibly because Gil let them take over the company that bought _them_ out.
Gil wasn't as bad as say, Spindler (who was not bad AFAIK in Europe but wasn't at all right for the big chair) but he wasn't stupid. He did good work beginning the turnaround. The Newt really took off under him, and he developed the prototypes of the current machines. An all in one translucent low-end machine and easy to open (nearly translucent - it was dropped at the last minute) minitowers.
I think my favorite was Mike Scott. Steve isn't the person I'd want to hold the keys either.
Twenty bucks says that you had a machine based on the Quadra 800 case. (e.g. Power Mac 8100, 9500, etc.) Man did that thing suck. But you should take a look at the current minitowers.
While most of the same stuff that you can do on a Mac can be done on other platforms (and I'm an art person who works almost exclusively on a Mac) it's not comfortable. Things don't work the same, or work as well together. There's not much point in abandoning the skills we've already honed. Not to mention the massive reinvestment we'd have to make in software, typefaces, hardware, etc.
Photoshop is cross-platform, but I'd go nuts if I had to use it on an IBM. It doesn't 'feel' right. Even Window's crappy mouse tracking and screen resolution/gamma are parts of this.
The Jargon File implies that it's been around long before the Mac. Amdahl appears to have coined the word in the early 1970's when he left IBM and became a target of IBM FUD.
But yeah, it's more closely associated with MS now than IBM. Just imagine one day though when MS reforms (more or less) as IBM did (more or less) and we're all bitching about someone else;)
Bob isn't an innovation. IIRC IBM messed around with a 'real life' UI that was very similar in the 70s-80s. It sucked. General Magic had a very similar UI for their Magic Cap PDA in the early 90's about a year before Bob came out. It also sucked. (although General Magic did do some interesting work) Then Bob came along and was simply another in a long line of sucky UIs. Nothing innovative about it, unless MS has redefined innovation to mean imitation.
Of course from a visual standpoint those particular pie menus are ugly as sin. C'mon, we've all got computers that can do neat stuff these days; how about displaying the items in a more attractive way than several scattered blocks of text? A circle to help unify the items and indicate to the user that these things are all related might be good for starters.
While I agree, capitalism does have a well-known problem with not being stable. It tends to break down and generate corporatism - kind of like pollution, or cancer. Unfortunately those dopey economists haven't come up with anything both self-regulating and good yet.;)
So if you couldn't repaint it, you'd turn down a nicely painted VW or something for a powerful, but primer gray 'Vette? With obscene messages painted along the sides?
The look is also important. It'd be nicer if the cases were more interchangable so that people could get a very nice case and keep it forever, swapping out the guts from time to time.
I have a Blue and White G3, but I'd love a nice cherry or maple case as long as it wasn't a bitch to work with. Yet another instance of Your Milage May Vary.
Where the hell are you getting this from? USB is an extraordinarily generic standard. Hell man, it's Intel's, not Apple's!
In '86 Apple brought out the Apple Desktop Bus for input devices. It was really sweet because it could automatically recognize hardware hooked into it, daisy chained stuff, and was generally quite cool. NeXT also used it. It was quite a change from the first four Macs, which had a reverse-wired phone cord for the keyboard and a 9 pin serial jack for the mouse.
PS/2 meanwhile wasn't more than a glint in IBM's eye at the time.
So why on earth, when Apple wanted to cut costs and eliminate the pricey ADB hardware, would they take a step DOWN and use PS/2 or serial inputs? Neither was as good as ADB. USB, OTOH, was better - more devices, better tolerance for overly large power draws, and more widespread support.
USB devices are cheap, unless you go out looking for the ones that have cases that match your other Apple hardware. There are no functional differences. There's nothing proprietary about Mac keyboards or mice anymore.
But I also go for feel over looks. Which is why I have the iPuck that came with my G3, and my trusty rusty Apple Extended Keyboard II that's the oldest component I still have, other than a 14 year old SCSI ribbon cable. But if you don't like the Mac stuff, you can plug USB IBM stuff right in and have no worries. (and of course I had a Motorola-made Mac clone logic board a few years ago that had it's own PS/2 port on it for some reason - that was wierd, but it worked;)
What's really funny is that it's better to use your whole hand (or at least many fingers) instead of a single one. Most Mac people do this already - there's only one button, so it just gets mashed by several fingers. I use my first three fingers to click, personally. Thus the stress of clicking the button is distributed across several fingers rather than all being concentrated in one spot.
Multibutton mice tend to lock users into having to use one finger or the next or the next; each one having to bear the strain itself. (especially the first finger)
I still won't say that the rumored new mouse isn't stupid till I see it, but I can see where they're coming from.
I have big hands and I love the iPuck. It fits right underneath my palm. I can kick it back and forth with my fingers even. Nothing rests on the top (my fingers arch over it) though I do touch it along the sides. Never any problems with telling which way it faces. I love it to death. Can't believe that I used the old, bigger ADB and ADB II mice for so long.
So while you don't have to like it, don't tell me that it's necessarily bad. I think it's great.
For the love of god, get a Newton. Keyboard/Mouse based UIs _can_ work with a pen, but never very well. I seriously suggest to you that if you're interested in pen-based interfaces, that you get a late-model (e.g. MessagePad 2100) Newton. The UI was designed from the ground up for this sort of thing. It's absolutely great. My favorite was erasing things. You scratched them out. Then they 'poofed' away in a cloud of smoke;)
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Sheesh. The very first commercial Pong game was a stand up arcade machine. It was in the Andy Capp's bar in Silicon Valley. It had been around before, played on IIRC oscilliscopes, and wasn't even as old as Spacewar, but it's generally regarded to be the first arcade video game.
The story goes that the day after it had been set up, Atari got a phone call from the owner of the bar. He complained that the damn game was already broken. Having blown all of their cash, they sent a guy to check it out. He discovered that there were so many quarters in the machine that it had filled up the little cardboard box inside that caught them, and that the slots were totally full. Then they knew that they were going to make a lot of money.
And so they did until Atari crashed terribly in the early 80's.
As an interesting note, it took a while before they let go of the pong idea. There were a lot of pong variants. About the last was Breakout, in which a pong paddle used a ball to disintegrate bricks. The employee who ostensibly worked on it was Steve Jobs, and he recruited his friend Steve Wozniak to do the actual work. Then cheated the Woz out of most of the money.
One of the motivations Woz had when designing the Apple was to be able to play Brickout.
Yeah - it's possible, but IIRC about five years passed between boxing and the Apple I.
Also of course, the second Apple Computer was started with VC. The first one (founded by Jobs, Woz and Wayne) was funded largely IIRC by the sale of Jobs' VW minibus and Woz's HP calculator.
It doesn't even matter if you ordered online from the Disney Store or if you did it from your home in the same state. As long as Disney has ANY presence in your state, they have to collect the tax directly. If you live in Nome, Alaska and use the web for everything, and the only Disney Store is in Juneau, they still get the sales tax when you place the order.
Jobs and the Woz really were blue boxers, but that was some time before they started Apple; I don't recall that they used the blue box money to start the company.
re: Sales tax, you're wrong. If the company you're doing does business in the state you purchase in, you need to pay tax. Thus, as long as you live in the same state that the Disney Store you're buying at is in, you have to pay taxes. (actually, you have to pay taxes no matter what, but they rely on you to remit them yourself when the business isn't in a position to do so)
As it stands, I believe that Apple and Disney both have presences in all 50 states - you're out of luck unless your state has no sales tax at all.
Well sure. Personally what _I_ had wondered was, did he come from a post-apocalyptic future in which the world was conquered by robotic Harlan Ellisons ;)
No that's not a technical argument. Having things like Colorsync available are technical matters - sure you could work without them, but it would be harder. Technical issue or personal preference?
I mean, I know people who did DTP for decades on heavily-customized PDPs with special video terminals. They could do a lot of the stuff I could do with Quark and Illustrator. But it took them longer, and wasn't as easy. How would you classify that?
Unless there's a truly compelling reason to switch, and even the crappy underpinnings of the OS (ie stability) isn't enough btw, there's no reason to. The most tempting system to me after the Mac has always been NeXT. Or BeOS. Well, we're getting NeXT rsn, and BeOS just doesn't have enough apps.
I honestly don't think that this would work b/c you would deliberately get intoxicated in order to weasel around the contract. What's really needed is a third party installer program that installs the Windows files for you w/o any licenses. Sounds like a good job for some reverse engineers.
The right that an author acquires for copyrighted works is the exclusive right to sell copies that he makes. Of course, the author can charge any amount for copies when he sells them, but he can't force other people who he _sells_ to, to set particular prices. (e.g. Alice sells Bob her book for $100. She tells him that Bob can't sell it unless he does so for $200. Alice has no actual power to force Bob to agree)
Of course, rather than sell copyrighted material outright (which is totally distinct from selling the copyright, btw) it is possible to license it. This is a whole different kettle of fish. If you can only acquire a work through license, and not sale, then the author can indeed impose additional restrictions that normal copyright law prohibits.
However, the Supremes have IIRC taken the line that unless you agree to a license as a precondition to acquiring the work, it's a sale. Thus when you buy a book and pay money for it, unless you had to agree to a contract FIRST, you aren't legally obligated to do anything the author wants. In the case of the GPL, in order to acquire even more rights (like the right to make and redistribute your own copies of a work that is GPLed but which you do not hold the copyright to) you can agree to it. But you can use and modify the software w/o agreeing to the GPL. You just can't distribute more copies than you legally acquire, nor can the copies be modified.
No. This doesn't significantly effect the GPL at all.
There is nothing stopping you from NOT agreeing to the GPL, and still being able to resell legally made copies you acquire, use them, or modify them. But if you don't agree to the GPL, regular copyright law applies. Which means that you can't sell copies you make, you can't sell copies you modify (unless there are REALLY SIGNIFICANT modifications that effectively turn the software into something totally different) but you can sell copies that the copyright holder or GPL licensors make or modify provided that you legally got them from them.
The GPL does not restrict what you can do with software it covers when you agree; you never had the right (w/o holding the copyright or agreeing to the GPL) to make and distribute changed copies anyway as long as it's covered by copyright. The GPL lets you, provided that you make the source available. It's stupid to say that giving some permission to do additional stuff is restrictive, b/c it only would be if they gave you permission to do even more stuff.
There is a great amount of contention over this issue. My opinion (and this whole matter has _barely_ been touched on in the courts) is that if you buy it, you own it. You can agree to a restrictive license later on, but unless you have to agree to one in order to get it out of the store, you're not bound.
Thus, if you go to CompUSA (what a mistake already!) and buy a copy of Windows, it's yours. You own it. Not the copyright, mind you, just the one copy. If you can install it without having to agree to the EULA, good for you - the EULA doesn't apply. Still doesn't mean that there's a hell of a lot that you can do with it, but you're only bound by regular copyright law and not the damn license.
Managing to install it w/o their installer is an exercise left to the reader.
Well, the Newt is more powerful than the Palm, has a better UI (probably the best pen-based UI ever) and can do more than the Palm.
OTOH, it's bigger, it's more expensive, they aren't being made anymore (Airport would be great for a new Newt though... drool...) and it was released too early and got a lot of negative press. The way that demo Newts tended to be very confused from having to deal with hundreds of different handwriting styles for extremely short periods never helped either.
If I had enough spare cash, I'd buy a Newton 2100. I've been offered Palms, but I don't really find them interesting enough. But no one said you HAVE to like either one. No one size fits all. Not your size, not my size.
Actually, only Steve and his NeXT cronies ever really said that. Possibly because Gil let them take over the company that bought _them_ out.
Gil wasn't as bad as say, Spindler (who was not bad AFAIK in Europe but wasn't at all right for the big chair) but he wasn't stupid. He did good work beginning the turnaround. The Newt really took off under him, and he developed the prototypes of the current machines. An all in one translucent low-end machine and easy to open (nearly translucent - it was dropped at the last minute) minitowers.
I think my favorite was Mike Scott. Steve isn't the person I'd want to hold the keys either.
Twenty bucks says that you had a machine based on the Quadra 800 case. (e.g. Power Mac 8100, 9500, etc.) Man did that thing suck. But you should take a look at the current minitowers.
While most of the same stuff that you can do on a Mac can be done on other platforms (and I'm an art person who works almost exclusively on a Mac) it's not comfortable. Things don't work the same, or work as well together. There's not much point in abandoning the skills we've already honed. Not to mention the massive reinvestment we'd have to make in software, typefaces, hardware, etc.
Photoshop is cross-platform, but I'd go nuts if I had to use it on an IBM. It doesn't 'feel' right. Even Window's crappy mouse tracking and screen resolution/gamma are parts of this.
The Jargon File implies that it's been around long before the Mac. Amdahl appears to have coined the word in the early 1970's when he left IBM and became a target of IBM FUD.
;)
But yeah, it's more closely associated with MS now than IBM. Just imagine one day though when MS reforms (more or less) as IBM did (more or less) and we're all bitching about someone else
Bob isn't an innovation. IIRC IBM messed around with a 'real life' UI that was very similar in the 70s-80s. It sucked. General Magic had a very similar UI for their Magic Cap PDA in the early 90's about a year before Bob came out. It also sucked. (although General Magic did do some interesting work) Then Bob came along and was simply another in a long line of sucky UIs. Nothing innovative about it, unless MS has redefined innovation to mean imitation.
In Mosaic (Netscape's a newcomer ;) unseen links were blue and seen links red. But you could change them, if you wanted.
Of course from a visual standpoint those particular pie menus are ugly as sin. C'mon, we've all got computers that can do neat stuff these days; how about displaying the items in a more attractive way than several scattered blocks of text? A circle to help unify the items and indicate to the user that these things are all related might be good for starters.
While I agree, capitalism does have a well-known problem with not being stable. It tends to break down and generate corporatism - kind of like pollution, or cancer. Unfortunately those dopey economists haven't come up with anything both self-regulating and good yet. ;)
So if you couldn't repaint it, you'd turn down a nicely painted VW or something for a powerful, but primer gray 'Vette? With obscene messages painted along the sides?
The look is also important. It'd be nicer if the cases were more interchangable so that people could get a very nice case and keep it forever, swapping out the guts from time to time.
I have a Blue and White G3, but I'd love a nice cherry or maple case as long as it wasn't a bitch to work with. Yet another instance of Your Milage May Vary.
Where the hell are you getting this from? USB is an extraordinarily generic standard. Hell man, it's Intel's, not Apple's!
;)
In '86 Apple brought out the Apple Desktop Bus for input devices. It was really sweet because it could automatically recognize hardware hooked into it, daisy chained stuff, and was generally quite cool. NeXT also used it. It was quite a change from the first four Macs, which had a reverse-wired phone cord for the keyboard and a 9 pin serial jack for the mouse.
PS/2 meanwhile wasn't more than a glint in IBM's eye at the time.
So why on earth, when Apple wanted to cut costs and eliminate the pricey ADB hardware, would they take a step DOWN and use PS/2 or serial inputs? Neither was as good as ADB. USB, OTOH, was better - more devices, better tolerance for overly large power draws, and more widespread support.
USB devices are cheap, unless you go out looking for the ones that have cases that match your other Apple hardware. There are no functional differences. There's nothing proprietary about Mac keyboards or mice anymore.
But I also go for feel over looks. Which is why I have the iPuck that came with my G3, and my trusty rusty Apple Extended Keyboard II that's the oldest component I still have, other than a 14 year old SCSI ribbon cable. But if you don't like the Mac stuff, you can plug USB IBM stuff right in and have no worries. (and of course I had a Motorola-made Mac clone logic board a few years ago that had it's own PS/2 port on it for some reason - that was wierd, but it worked
What's really funny is that it's better to use your whole hand (or at least many fingers) instead of a single one. Most Mac people do this already - there's only one button, so it just gets mashed by several fingers. I use my first three fingers to click, personally. Thus the stress of clicking the button is distributed across several fingers rather than all being concentrated in one spot.
Multibutton mice tend to lock users into having to use one finger or the next or the next; each one having to bear the strain itself. (especially the first finger)
I still won't say that the rumored new mouse isn't stupid till I see it, but I can see where they're coming from.
I have big hands and I love the iPuck. It fits right underneath my palm. I can kick it back and forth with my fingers even. Nothing rests on the top (my fingers arch over it) though I do touch it along the sides. Never any problems with telling which way it faces. I love it to death. Can't believe that I used the old, bigger ADB and ADB II mice for so long.
So while you don't have to like it, don't tell me that it's necessarily bad. I think it's great.
For the love of god, get a Newton. Keyboard/Mouse based UIs _can_ work with a pen, but never very well. I seriously suggest to you that if you're interested in pen-based interfaces, that you get a late-model (e.g. MessagePad 2100) Newton. The UI was designed from the ground up for this sort of thing. It's absolutely great. My favorite was erasing things. You scratched them out. Then they 'poofed' away in a cloud of smoke ;)
It was nearly as good as the Grouch....