... Actually this means I'll have to wait an extra day to work on my project for my distributed / parallel computing course. So this experiment also gets to help me procrastinate:)
It's actually a good thing for Sun that the antitrust trial focused almost exclusively on the browser issue. And the findings of fact still stand, whether the DoJ crumpled or not.
Microsoft's ability to bribe politicians is one thing, but it doesn't grant them immunity from legal action on the part of those they may have wronged in the past. (I'll reserve judgment on their guilt until more evidence is presented, but I wouldn't put it past them considering what they did to Apple, Borland or Netscape)
Look, making fun of Microsoft is like hating the Yankees. You can't call yourself a baseball fan if you don't live in New York but still like the Yankees. Just saying "They have to be the best, they win all the time, that's why I like them" makes you sound like a twit.
Similarly, statements like "if windows was so bad, then why do so many people choose to use it" doesn't contribute anything to the discussion, and just shows that you're trying to justify your existance in some way or another, and supporting a winning team seems to do it for you. But I'm not here to judge.
It's actually quite the eye opener to be able to go through their mathematics courses and see how the material differs from the stuff they teach at my school. Most of it is pretty similar, and this certainly takes away the mystique that MIT had before I took a look at it all. I guess if your admissions standards and tuition fees are astronomically high that's enough too keep a stellar reputation.
Seriously, why can't I easily find a wireless bluetooth mouse? Why should I have a stupid little dongle hanging off my laptop when it has bluetooth built right in? Isn't this exactly the kind of thing it was designed for? I should just be able to put my laptop down on a table and start using the mouse that's sitting there.
Simply the nature of technology
on
Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One person can no longer reasonably understand an entire process. Programmers don't write their own bootstrap code anymore, and despite the jeers of the geezers who used to debug by reading paper tape, we still seem to get by.
Not that the loss of the chance to do a little tinkering in one's job isn't a sad state of affairs, it is. But if I was the guy who wrote the cheques at Boeing's R&D department, the word 'tinker' would probably send me into a conniption.
Just think, there was a virus attack on the USPS network last fall, and it was front page news for months, even though it only infected a handful of network nodes.
Meanwhile Klez keeps popping up in my Inbox again and again..
Albeit a big one. The current system's source code looks like this:
if skin == brown then threat = high
This is just as great an invasion of civil rights as somebody checking out what you bought on EBay. Of course it might not seem like it if one hasn't been unjustly targetted because of one's race before.
Re:KDE-Gnome desktop integration
on
KDE Adopting Mono
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· Score: 3, Funny
When you're happy that cut and paste actually works I think it's a sign you've been using X-Windows for too long.
Re:Uhhhh.. No. I don't like either of them.
on
Animatrix Trailer
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· Score: 1, Troll
I'd like to report that I'm not a troll, as far as I know, and I very much hate anime. I've seen the good stuff, and a good deal of the bad stuff, and on reflection, its certainly nothing to warrant being a fan of it. Lame plots, shallow stereotypical characters, screwed up attitudes towards women and silly effects aren't enough for me I'm afraid.
... How well do they do with Photoshop batch processing?
I'm actually partly serious here, I think wider publication of more 'real-world' performance figures is in order. The people who frequent sites like Tom's Hardware and Anand are the only ones who really care about raw benchmark numbers. The rest of the world is more interested in getting their work done more quickly.
But NeXT didn't get out of the hardware market quickly enough and support hardware choice with enough earnest and IMO ended up falling as a result.
Didn't get out of the hardware business fast enough? That's an interesting postulation, but I know a few people who still use NeXT workstations for certain tasks, and none who use OpenStep on x86. There has been exactly one successful OS vendor on the x86 platform, but many Unix companies have carved out a good market for themselves selling purpose-built high quality hardware, which apple is doing right now. Putting OS X on that shitty beige Dell with the WinModem, funky sound card, and god-knows-what other cheap knockoff hardware won't give the average user any kind of benefit, if the thing even works at all. This is the problem Linux is running into and having much difficulty with.
Any fool who can't figure out how to email a file to herself instead of carrying around an unreliable floppy disk has no business writing about computers. The floppy is dead, long live the networked computer.
The idea of proprietary hardware is something like what Palladium might end up being, where only approved code can be run on a given platform. Last I checked, Linux ran perfectly well on Apple hardware. And if you open the things up, you see pretty much the same thing you'd see inside a PC, save for a PPC processor for an x86 one, and there's nothing in the G4 that you can't read about in a spec from Motorola (same situation as Intel's chips, for the most part).
Is the watermark system going to affect how people produce music? Say for example, the SACD format becomes adopted as the standard audio format. If I own a small record label, how am I supposed to distribute my bands' music? Will I have to pay some arbitrary royalty fee to someone like Sony just so people can listen to music? Will such fees and required equipment make the barrier to entry for the recording business significantly higher? This kind of thing affects many more people than just your average slashdotter with an mp3 habbit.
... Let's see, what's the refresh rate on my monitor again?
Is my mouse Microsoft or Logitech? It just says Hewlett Packard on it, how am I supposed to know?
Root password? Who the heck is root and why should I let him on my computer?
Linux might be easier to install, but to get the thing working right is another matter. IMO, it's not enough to assume the user doesn't know something, you should assume that the user doesn't care and doesn't need to know, all the user wants is to get some work done.
I mean really, discovering the perfect toilet paper algorithm seems all well and good, but I fear the consequence will be that people start to disregard the 'you empty it, you replace it' rule. Good usability does not require that the user be shielded from the process. Rather, the user should be well aware that, once a role is emptied, it needs to be replaced. If the issue is that guests mess up the system, I suggest hanging out with a smarter group of friends.
Disclaimer: This post was written deliberately in the long-practiced computer science tradition of over-analyzing simple problems.
Re:POWER ISA == PowerPC ISA?
on
PowerPC Goes 64 bit
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I believe the current PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER's, with the exception of AltiVec, which sounds like IBM has cloned with their claim of 160+ vector processing instructions. Also, the claim is that 32-bit PPC code should be binary compatible with this 64-bit chip. Sounds like a processor tailor-made for Apple to me, but there's not enough detail yet, and Apple is being very tight-lipped on its future processor plans.
Was wondering if anyone familiar with Quicken and GnuCash could give a good comparison of the features and usability of both programs, from the standpoint of someone who wants to start managing his or her personal finances. Would it be worth it to buy crossover and quicken, or could the average user get the hang of GnuCash easily enough?
During the video unveiling the Xserve, just before the Q&A section I believe, Steve Jobs started talking about some of the upcoming features in Jaguar. In describing inkwell, he says it used handwriting technology from "you know what", generating chuckles from the audience.
Insert conspiracies here about Jobs not liking the Newton because it was invented after he left Apple.
With the latest release of OpenOffice for OS X you can save, print and cut-and-paste just fine. As long as it works, and costs exactly $499 less then Office v.X then I think more than a few people will give it a try once they hear about it, aqua or no aqua.
Slashdot Mirror
... Actually this means I'll have to wait an extra day to work on my project for my distributed / parallel computing course. So this experiment also gets to help me procrastinate :)
It's actually a good thing for Sun that the antitrust trial focused almost exclusively on the browser issue. And the findings of fact still stand, whether the DoJ crumpled or not.
Microsoft's ability to bribe politicians is one thing, but it doesn't grant them immunity from legal action on the part of those they may have wronged in the past. (I'll reserve judgment on their guilt until more evidence is presented, but I wouldn't put it past them considering what they did to Apple, Borland or Netscape)
Look, making fun of Microsoft is like hating the Yankees. You can't call yourself a baseball fan if you don't live in New York but still like the Yankees. Just saying "They have to be the best, they win all the time, that's why I like them" makes you sound like a twit.
Similarly, statements like "if windows was so bad, then why do so many people choose to use it" doesn't contribute anything to the discussion, and just shows that you're trying to justify your existance in some way or another, and supporting a winning team seems to do it for you. But I'm not here to judge.
You should have also warned about the Ellen Feiss lookalike contest being mostly guys. Scary scary stuff.
You'd think the average slashdotter would whine and bitch if he realized he paid full price for a beer just before happy hour.
It's actually quite the eye opener to be able to go through their mathematics courses and see how the material differs from the stuff they teach at my school. Most of it is pretty similar, and this certainly takes away the mystique that MIT had before I took a look at it all. I guess if your admissions standards and tuition fees are astronomically high that's enough too keep a stellar reputation.
Seriously, why can't I easily find a wireless bluetooth mouse? Why should I have a stupid little dongle hanging off my laptop when it has bluetooth built right in? Isn't this exactly the kind of thing it was designed for? I should just be able to put my laptop down on a table and start using the mouse that's sitting there.
Not that the loss of the chance to do a little tinkering in one's job isn't a sad state of affairs, it is. But if I was the guy who wrote the cheques at Boeing's R&D department, the word 'tinker' would probably send me into a conniption.
Just think, there was a virus attack on the USPS network last fall, and it was front page news for months, even though it only infected a handful of network nodes.
Meanwhile Klez keeps popping up in my Inbox again and again..
Albeit a big one. The current system's source code looks like this:
if skin == brown then threat = high
This is just as great an invasion of civil rights as somebody checking out what you bought on EBay. Of course it might not seem like it if one hasn't been unjustly targetted because of one's race before.
When you're happy that cut and paste actually works I think it's a sign you've been using X-Windows for too long.
Oh and I also hate the Matrix. Thanks.
And if it was prime.
You'll ruin it for everybody. Just sit back, and bill the extra hours while you play quake, no one will tell, really.
I'm actually partly serious here, I think wider publication of more 'real-world' performance figures is in order. The people who frequent sites like Tom's Hardware and Anand are the only ones who really care about raw benchmark numbers. The rest of the world is more interested in getting their work done more quickly.
Didn't get out of the hardware business fast enough? That's an interesting postulation, but I know a few people who still use NeXT workstations for certain tasks, and none who use OpenStep on x86. There has been exactly one successful OS vendor on the x86 platform, but many Unix companies have carved out a good market for themselves selling purpose-built high quality hardware, which apple is doing right now. Putting OS X on that shitty beige Dell with the WinModem, funky sound card, and god-knows-what other cheap knockoff hardware won't give the average user any kind of benefit, if the thing even works at all. This is the problem Linux is running into and having much difficulty with.
Any fool who can't figure out how to email a file to herself instead of carrying around an unreliable floppy disk has no business writing about computers. The floppy is dead, long live the networked computer.
The idea of proprietary hardware is something like what Palladium might end up being, where only approved code can be run on a given platform. Last I checked, Linux ran perfectly well on Apple hardware. And if you open the things up, you see pretty much the same thing you'd see inside a PC, save for a PPC processor for an x86 one, and there's nothing in the G4 that you can't read about in a spec from Motorola (same situation as Intel's chips, for the most part).
Is the watermark system going to affect how people produce music? Say for example, the SACD format becomes adopted as the standard audio format. If I own a small record label, how am I supposed to distribute my bands' music? Will I have to pay some arbitrary royalty fee to someone like Sony just so people can listen to music? Will such fees and required equipment make the barrier to entry for the recording business significantly higher? This kind of thing affects many more people than just your average slashdotter with an mp3 habbit.
Is my mouse Microsoft or Logitech? It just says Hewlett Packard on it, how am I supposed to know?
Root password? Who the heck is root and why should I let him on my computer?
Linux might be easier to install, but to get the thing working right is another matter. IMO, it's not enough to assume the user doesn't know something, you should assume that the user doesn't care and doesn't need to know, all the user wants is to get some work done.
Disclaimer: This post was written deliberately in the long-practiced computer science tradition of over-analyzing simple problems.
I believe the current PowerPC instruction set is a subset of the POWER's, with the exception of AltiVec, which sounds like IBM has cloned with their claim of 160+ vector processing instructions. Also, the claim is that 32-bit PPC code should be binary compatible with this 64-bit chip. Sounds like a processor tailor-made for Apple to me, but there's not enough detail yet, and Apple is being very tight-lipped on its future processor plans.
Was wondering if anyone familiar with Quicken and GnuCash could give a good comparison of the features and usability of both programs, from the standpoint of someone who wants to start managing his or her personal finances. Would it be worth it to buy crossover and quicken, or could the average user get the hang of GnuCash easily enough?
Insert conspiracies here about Jobs not liking the Newton because it was invented after he left Apple.
With the latest release of OpenOffice for OS X you can save, print and cut-and-paste just fine. As long as it works, and costs exactly $499 less then Office v.X then I think more than a few people will give it a try once they hear about it, aqua or no aqua.