Its not that they allow people to pirate the software. (you are correct though that piracy is just another way to extend the market domination) The way that they dominate PC markets is to for computer makers to bundle all their crap with every PC made. This way everyone has a copy whether they want one of not and they have no reason to buy a competing product even if it is better.
> "Geeks like learning new things, and when they pop out at the end of the process they're entirely brainwashed," he said.
I was surprised by this quote too. The implication that developers at MS are some sort of automatons taht are easily brainwashed is amazing. I'm no fan of MS, its products or its tactics but the developers who work there are robots. I have found the MS people I have met to be pretty party-line company guys but they did have brains and were capable of independent thought. The other problem with training like this is that without reinforcement from management it is not terrible useful. Sure some of the developers will "get religion" and will be absolutely scrupulous about writing secure code, but others will get lazy, forget the training or go back to old bad habits. Without code review and standards enforced by management in some way training is ineffective.
My favorite is a commercial product (so shoot me) called Perforce. It has this very handy concept called changelists, where all modifications to the repository are made via a changelist. The nice thing is that any changelist can have any combination of files in the repository in it, and a uaser can work on multiple concurrent changes. From what I can tell from my somewhat limited experience with CVS, there is no way to do exactly what Perforce does, and I like the Perforce model better.
The downside is that the server and client licences are not cheap.
> A) the rest of the industry to copy the iPod (which is probably inevitable but could take up to a year including a good interface) or B) Apple to come out with a 10gig or larger iPod (maybe less than 6 months now)
the rest of the industry is copying the iPod rather quickly. As for the 10GB drive, you'll have to wait for a 10GB drive in the 1.8" form factor. Since the 5GB drive is currently the max for that form factor, the 10GB may take a while to appear.
Linux *does* support the Archos products, as of Kernel version 2.4.14 or so. Look for the "isd200" driver in the USB section. It looks like a SCSI drive to the system. I use it all the time:)
Mine never skips when playing a playlist, even a list generated from a random selection of songs on the box. The only think that has made it skip much is when the MP3's are encoded at over 192Kbps. Also, you should check that you have the latest revision of the firmware downloaded off of their site. Of course it could be that when I hacked mine the 30GB drive I put in has a much better data throughput than the original 6GB drive.
I also have a Toshiba 30GB drive in my Jukebox 6000 (does that make it a Jukebox 30000?) Tishiba's highest capacity drive in the 9.5mm form factor is 40GB. I don't think that the 48GB drives you see on Pricewatch are 9.5mm, I think they are 12.5mm, which will not fit in the Archos. I'm not certain, but I think that 40GB is the max for now, but just a few months ago when I upgraded my Jukebox 30GB was the max. I suspect that by the end of 2002 you will be able to buy a 100GB drive that will fit.
> I still can't understand why anyone would invest 15 hours in loading a USB device....
I have invested at least this much time, I guess, because I have about 20GB of songs on my upgraded 30 GB Archos. The thing is that I only invested maybe five minutes at a time, over a period of about 4 months. The reason I hacked it up to 30GB was so that it would be a download-once operation - I don't need to constantly shuffle what is on the toy because it has *everything*. My entire CD collection, plus what I have managed to pirate off of friends.
Get an Archos jukebox recorder. It has a 6GB hard drive, will record to MP3 from line in, and can easily be taken apart and upgraded to a 40GB drive. No, it doesn't have the sexy FireWire connection, it has USB, but I find that USB is fast enough for my uses. I wish Archos would come out with a firewire version of the jukebox and recorder - I'd get one immediately.
Re:iPod price vs. Toshiba drive price
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 5, Informative
> Um, dude, look on pricewatch at the prices for 2.5" IDE drives. Like $150 for a 30gb.
Yeah, too bad this is a 1.8" drive - much smaller. 5GB is currently the highest capacity Toshiba makes.
> 3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?
Mostly I chat with my fellow workers, but what I really do to have fun and unwind is *LEAVE WORK*
My job is not my life, no matter how much I enjoy it. If I really enjoy the company of my coworkers that much I invite them out with me.
Does Saddam have *any* missles capable of reaching the US? No. Has he ever had such missles? No. Are missles from Iraq a threat to the US? No. Do we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars defending against missles from Iraq? No.
I remember reading this in the 70's...
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 1
My copy of the paperback (one of those black covered ones they did all his titles in) had several pages at the beginning of the book misordered, which made an already confusing beginning even more so. The next time I read it a few years later it was a different edition that had the correct page ordering.
I would also recommend "Creatures of Light and Darrkness" which uses the Egyptian deities (among others) as its starting point.
The PC I was writing programs for in 1977 was a Sol-20, made by Processor Technology. Like the Altair it had an 8080 CPU and an S-100 bus, but unlike the Altair it had a built in keyboard, casette tape controller and video bios. It may have been the first PC that had a keyboard and video as part of the unit, but I'm not sure. Later we added a Northstar 80k floppy drive to it to make it faster easier to save programs. Thinking back, I didn't actually get *paid* to program it until 1978, but I was programming it as part of a class at my high school in fall of 1977.
One of the things I got paid for was to convert a bunch of programs written in BASIC on a DEC of some sort to run on the Sol. We had a paper tape reader that consisted of a small light sensitive tape reading unit and a lamp. We manually pulled the tapes through this thing - not too fast or there would be tons of errors. We then corrected all the arrors and translated the BASIC to the dialect the Sol used.
Later we got an Exidy Sorceror, a Z-80 based machine that had some cool bitmapped graphics.
The first sentence of the introduction is "When I started working at Microsoft back in March of 1990 it was just another software company." He then goes onto explain that he never expected Microsoft to become what it has. Now either he was incredibly ignorant, incredibly naive or both. I've been in this business a long time (I was paid to write programs for PCs in 1977, before floppy disks were commonly available, much less PC OSes) and I knew back in the mid-80's that Microsoft wanted to completely control the PC software industry. I remember making statements to that effect to friends in 1985.
> Too bad the movie isn't out on video. It was shot at least partially on Long Island. The jailbreak was filmed at the Nassau County Jail in Mineola.
There were also some great helicopter shots of Manhattan including the World Trade Center towers during their construction. I haven't seen all the movies made from Dortmunder novels but this is the best of the ones I've seen.
Apparently it is not out on video because obert Redford owns the video rights and refuses to allow it released.
>> In theory, Martin Lawrence (here playing good-hearted thief Kevin Caffery) should have made a great John Dortmunder, the sleazy but sweet hero of Donald Westlake's book, also played by Robert Redford in l972's Hot Rock, an earlier adaptation of the novel What's The Worst That Can Happen?.
The Hot Rock was the first Dortmunder novel, WTWTCH was the seventh I think. I find it surprising that Katz thinks Martin Lawrence would make a great Dortmunder. The word that comes to mind when describing Dortmunder is "morose," not a word I would ever apply to Lawrence. Dortmunder's capers never come off right, and his gang of compentent but unlucky sidekicks don't help things. I would recommend these novels as fun light reading. I always love the little asides by the regulars in the O.J. Bar and Grill. The one about the "unwritten law" is particularly funny.
There will never be a Dormunder on flim who is like the one in the books. No one would write a script for a comedy with a morose, cynical, beaten down by the world main character. I would love to see that Dortmunder because I think it would make a better movie.
> The tenor of the responses here are incredibly risk-averse. Obviously you shouldn't forsake eating or paying your rent for stock options, but if the company pans out, that 20% salary you gave up for options could end up coming back to you a hundred fold over the long run. I'm not strictly advocating options to everyone, but you only live once...why not roll the dice?
Why not is easy. I know someone who made enough on options 12 years ago to put a down payment on a decent but not fancy house in Berkeley. I know someone who did some contract work for a startup, was paid in options, and made many millions when that stock hit big in the dotcom runup. But for each of those I know twenty or more who made little or nothing on their options or who owe huge AMT tax debts because of poor option exercise decisions. The point is not to aviod all risk, but not to sell yourself short on salary in exchange for options. The vast majority of people who do this end up with little to show for it other than worthless paper. Roll the dice maybe, but be sure you know exactly what the terms of the wager are first.
I could not agree more with your points, with this exception:
>5. Is it really so hard to carry spare change to use a pay phone?
Where I live (SF Bay Area) it is getting harder to find pay phones. They are being removed and by businesses that find they don't make money any more because so many people have cell phones. This really sucks for those of us who don't care to carry a cell phone but need to make occasional calls away from home or work.
I am always amazed at people who claim that the only effect of the IBM antitrust suit was the enriching of lawyers or the wasting of taxpayer dollars. The mist significant effect of the antitrust suit was the incredible growth of the computer industry itself, led by the PC industry. Because of the antitrust suit, IBM published the detailed specs of all of their machines, including the IBM PC right down to providing BIOS source. This resulted in many companies cloning the PC and led to tremendous innovation in PC design as these companies competed for market advantage. If it weren't for the antitrust suit IBM would never have provided the information necessary for the clones to be produced and the PC market would never have grown the way we did. Look at what Apple did, keeping the Mac closed and crushing the cloners. IBM would have done exactly the same thing.
It would be easy to mak ethe argument that the main beneficiaries of this "failed" suit are Microsoft, Compaq and Dell.
Oh boy - thats a whopper! There is no consistentcy whatsoever in the Unix/Linux command line interface. The only thing cocsistent is that you have to type all the commands into the shell. There is no consistency in command naming, command parameters, I/O conventions (does it take stdin input or not, etc) configuration file structures or locations, temporary file usage, naming, location, error logging and log formatting or anything else. This is one of the major drawbacks to new users learning to use the command line interface and to system admins in setting up systems. If you want to see a reasonably consistent CLI, the best place I know of is IBM's OS/400. Its a bear to use and I wouldn't wish AS/400 programming on anyone but at least the CLI is consistent, easy to use, easy to find a command if you don't know its name and easy to find the command's parameters if you don't know them.
Ditch X11 for what? Are there any viable alternatives to X11 that provide the features it has, provides significant additional featurer and is mature enough to replace X11?
Standardize on either KDE/QT or GTK/GNOME - I can see some advantage to doing this but without X11 underlying them either would have to be ported to your X replacement which is definitely a major effort. I can say that there would be a holy war to decide which to standardize on unlike any seen in the Linux world before.
Finally, a good human interface specification would be a huge benefit for the community, but who would approve it and how would it be enforced? Deciding who sits on your suggested board would be a big enough problem. How would you deal with an app that didn't meet the guidelines? How would you prevent a ditribution from including it? Maybe there could be a "100% LinuxGUI Compliant" label that could be applied but who would police the use of that?
Unfortunately I don't see it possible to enforce much of anything interms of Linux standard when any joe hack can start a project and no one can stop them from violating any standard out there eith deliberately of by accident. This is one of the advantages of a corporate development effort - if management has any guts it can require the developers to toe the standards line.
Is that something like your standard Classic Rock FM radio station? Or more like the Modern Rock alternative? For me FM radio in general is a rock boring technology but YMMV:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Its not that they allow people to pirate the software. (you are correct though that piracy is just another way to extend the market domination) The way that they dominate PC markets is to for computer makers to bundle all their crap with every PC made. This way everyone has a copy whether they want one of not and they have no reason to buy a competing product even if it is better.
> "Geeks like learning new things, and when they pop out at the end of the process they're entirely brainwashed," he said.
I was surprised by this quote too. The implication that developers at MS are some sort of automatons taht are easily brainwashed is amazing. I'm no fan of MS, its products or its tactics but the developers who work there are robots. I have found the MS people I have met to be pretty party-line company guys but they did have brains and were capable of independent thought.
The other problem with training like this is that without reinforcement from management it is not terrible useful. Sure some of the developers will "get religion" and will be absolutely scrupulous about writing secure code, but others will get lazy, forget the training or go back to old bad habits. Without code review and standards enforced by management in some way training is ineffective.
My favorite is a commercial product (so shoot me) called Perforce. It has this very handy concept called changelists, where all modifications to the repository are made via a changelist. The nice thing is that any changelist can have any combination of files in the repository in it, and a uaser can work on multiple concurrent changes. From what I can tell from my somewhat limited experience with CVS, there is no way to do exactly what Perforce does, and I like the Perforce model better.
The downside is that the server and client licences are not cheap.
> A) the rest of the industry to copy the iPod (which is probably inevitable but could take up to a year including a good interface) or B) Apple to come out with a 10gig or larger iPod (maybe less than 6 months now)
the rest of the industry is copying the iPod rather quickly. As for the 10GB drive, you'll have to wait for a 10GB drive in the 1.8" form factor. Since the 5GB drive is currently the max for that form factor, the 10GB may take a while to appear.
Linux *does* support the Archos products, as of Kernel version 2.4.14 or so. Look for the "isd200" driver in the USB section. It looks like a SCSI drive to the system. I use it all the time :)
Mine never skips when playing a playlist, even a list generated from a random selection of songs on the box. The only think that has made it skip much is when the MP3's are encoded at over 192Kbps. Also, you should check that you have the latest revision of the firmware downloaded off of their site. Of course it could be that when I hacked mine the 30GB drive I put in has a much better data throughput than the original 6GB drive.
I also have a Toshiba 30GB drive in my Jukebox 6000 (does that make it a Jukebox 30000?) Tishiba's highest capacity drive in the 9.5mm form factor is 40GB. I don't think that the 48GB drives you see on Pricewatch are 9.5mm, I think they are 12.5mm, which will not fit in the Archos. I'm not certain, but I think that 40GB is the max for now, but just a few months ago when I upgraded my Jukebox 30GB was the max. I suspect that by the end of 2002 you will be able to buy a 100GB drive that will fit.
> I still can't understand why anyone would invest 15 hours in loading a USB device....
I have invested at least this much time, I guess, because I have about 20GB of songs on my upgraded 30 GB Archos. The thing is that I only invested maybe five minutes at a time, over a period of about 4 months. The reason I hacked it up to 30GB was so that it would be a download-once operation - I don't need to constantly shuffle what is on the toy because it has *everything*. My entire CD collection, plus what I have managed to pirate off of friends.
> Audio in.
Get an Archos jukebox recorder. It has a 6GB hard drive, will record to MP3 from line in, and can easily be taken apart and upgraded to a 40GB drive. No, it doesn't have the sexy FireWire connection, it has USB, but I find that USB is fast enough for my uses. I wish Archos would come out with a firewire version of the jukebox and recorder - I'd get one immediately.
> Um, dude, look on pricewatch at the prices for 2.5" IDE drives. Like $150 for a 30gb.
Yeah, too bad this is a 1.8" drive - much smaller. 5GB is currently the highest capacity Toshiba makes.
> 3. What do you to unwind and have a bit of 'fun' in the workplace?
Mostly I chat with my fellow workers, but what I really do to have fun and unwind is *LEAVE WORK*
My job is not my life, no matter how much I enjoy it. If I really enjoy the company of my coworkers that much I invite them out with me.
> And "ruinously" expensive? Assuming 8x8 characters, 256 of them will only take up 2k, or 8 2112 chips. Even 8x16 chars would take up "only" 4k.
Didn't many of the original Sols only have 4k of memory? I remember when ours got its first 16k memory card - we were in fat city!
Does Saddam have *any* missles capable of reaching the US? No. Has he ever had such missles? No. Are missles from Iraq a threat to the US? No. Do we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars defending against missles from Iraq? No.
My copy of the paperback (one of those black covered ones they did all his titles in) had several pages at the beginning of the book misordered, which made an already confusing beginning even more so. The next time I read it a few years later it was a different edition that had the correct page ordering.
I would also recommend "Creatures of Light and Darrkness" which uses the Egyptian deities (among others) as its starting point.
The PC I was writing programs for in 1977 was a Sol-20, made by Processor Technology. Like the Altair it had an 8080 CPU and an S-100 bus, but unlike the Altair it had a built in keyboard, casette tape controller and video bios. It may have been the first PC that had a keyboard and video as part of the unit, but I'm not sure. Later we added a Northstar 80k floppy drive to it to make it faster easier to save programs. Thinking back, I didn't actually get *paid* to program it until 1978, but I was programming it as part of a class at my high school in fall of 1977.
One of the things I got paid for was to convert a bunch of programs written in BASIC on a DEC of some sort to run on the Sol. We had a paper tape reader that consisted of a small light sensitive tape reading unit and a lamp. We manually pulled the tapes through this thing - not too fast or there would be tons of errors. We then corrected all the arrors and translated the BASIC to the dialect the Sol used.
Later we got an Exidy Sorceror, a Z-80 based machine that had some cool bitmapped graphics.
And of course it was parodied by the Simpsons in on of the early "Treehouse of Horrors" episodes.
The first sentence of the introduction is "When I started working at Microsoft back in March of 1990 it was just another software company." He then goes onto explain that he never expected Microsoft to become what it has. Now either he was incredibly ignorant, incredibly naive or both. I've been in this business a long time (I was paid to write programs for PCs in 1977, before floppy disks were commonly available, much less PC OSes) and I knew back in the mid-80's that Microsoft wanted to completely control the PC software industry. I remember making statements to that effect to friends in 1985.
> Too bad the movie isn't out on video. It was shot at least partially on Long Island. The jailbreak was filmed at the Nassau County Jail in Mineola.
There were also some great helicopter shots of Manhattan including the World Trade Center towers during their construction. I haven't seen all the movies made from Dortmunder novels but this is the best of the ones I've seen.
Apparently it is not out on video because obert Redford owns the video rights and refuses to allow it released.
>> In theory, Martin Lawrence (here playing good-hearted thief Kevin Caffery) should have made a great John Dortmunder, the sleazy but sweet hero of Donald Westlake's book, also played by Robert Redford in l972's Hot Rock, an earlier adaptation of the novel What's The Worst That Can Happen?.
The Hot Rock was the first Dortmunder novel, WTWTCH was the seventh I think. I find it surprising that Katz thinks Martin Lawrence would make a great Dortmunder. The word that comes to mind when describing Dortmunder is "morose," not a word I would ever apply to Lawrence. Dortmunder's capers never come off right, and his gang of compentent but unlucky sidekicks don't help things. I would recommend these novels as fun light reading. I always love the little asides by the regulars in the O.J. Bar and Grill. The one about the "unwritten law" is particularly funny.
There will never be a Dormunder on flim who is like the one in the books. No one would write a script for a comedy with a morose, cynical, beaten down by the world main character. I would love to see that Dortmunder because I think it would make a better movie.
> The tenor of the responses here are incredibly risk-averse. Obviously you shouldn't forsake eating or paying your rent for stock options, but if the company pans out, that 20% salary you gave up for options could end up coming back to you a hundred fold over the long run. I'm not strictly advocating options to everyone, but you only live once...why not roll the dice?
Why not is easy. I know someone who made enough on options 12 years ago to put a down payment on a decent but not fancy house in Berkeley. I know someone who did some contract work for a startup, was paid in options, and made many millions when that stock hit big in the dotcom runup. But for each of those I know twenty or more who made little or nothing on their options or who owe huge AMT tax debts because of poor option exercise decisions. The point is not to aviod all risk, but not to sell yourself short on salary in exchange for options. The vast majority of people who do this end up with little to show for it other than worthless paper. Roll the dice maybe, but be sure you know exactly what the terms of the wager are first.
I could not agree more with your points, with this exception:
>5. Is it really so hard to carry spare change to use a pay phone?
Where I live (SF Bay Area) it is getting harder to find pay phones. They are being removed and by businesses that find they don't make money any more because so many people have cell phones. This really sucks for those of us who don't care to carry a cell phone but need to make occasional calls away from home or work.
I am always amazed at people who claim that the only effect of the IBM antitrust suit was the enriching of lawyers or the wasting of taxpayer dollars. The mist significant effect of the antitrust suit was the incredible growth of the computer industry itself, led by the PC industry. Because of the antitrust suit, IBM published the detailed specs of all of their machines, including the IBM PC right down to providing BIOS source. This resulted in many companies cloning the PC and led to tremendous innovation in PC design as these companies competed for market advantage. If it weren't for the antitrust suit IBM would never have provided the information necessary for the clones to be produced and the PC market would never have grown the way we did. Look at what Apple did, keeping the Mac closed and crushing the cloners. IBM would have done exactly the same thing.
It would be easy to mak ethe argument that the main beneficiaries of this "failed" suit are Microsoft, Compaq and Dell.
> The command line is a consistent interface.
Oh boy - thats a whopper! There is no consistentcy whatsoever in the Unix/Linux command line interface. The only thing cocsistent is that you have to type all the commands into the shell. There is no consistency in command naming, command parameters, I/O conventions (does it take stdin input or not, etc) configuration file structures or locations, temporary file usage, naming, location, error logging and log formatting or anything else. This is one of the major drawbacks to new users learning to use the command line interface and to system admins in setting up systems. If you want to see a reasonably consistent CLI, the best place I know of is IBM's OS/400. Its a bear to use and I wouldn't wish AS/400 programming on anyone but at least the CLI is consistent, easy to use, easy to find a command if you don't know its name and easy to find the command's parameters if you don't know them.
A few questions -
Ditch X11 for what? Are there any viable alternatives to X11 that provide the features it has, provides significant additional featurer and is mature enough to replace X11?
Standardize on either KDE/QT or GTK/GNOME - I can see some advantage to doing this but without X11 underlying them either would have to be ported to your X replacement which is definitely a major effort. I can say that there would be a holy war to decide which to standardize on unlike any seen in the Linux world before.
Finally, a good human interface specification would be a huge benefit for the community, but who would approve it and how would it be enforced? Deciding who sits on your suggested board would be a big enough problem. How would you deal with an app that didn't meet the guidelines? How would you prevent a ditribution from including it? Maybe there could be a "100% LinuxGUI Compliant" label that could be applied but who would police the use of that?
Unfortunately I don't see it possible to enforce much of anything interms of Linux standard when any joe hack can start a project and no one can stop them from violating any standard out there eith deliberately of by accident. This is one of the advantages of a corporate development effort - if management has any guts it can require the developers to toe the standards line.
Is that something like your standard Classic Rock FM radio station? Or more like the Modern Rock alternative? For me FM radio in general is a rock boring technology but YMMV :-)