I just tried to order that Creative PCI TNT2 Vanta from Dabs, and after a couple of weeks of 'on order from manufacturer', the order was cancelled since the manufacturer had discontinued it! Feh. Or was that just Dabs? I haven't found it anywhere else, nor the G200 PCI Dual-head, which I know did exist.
I already have a reasonable AGP video card (a GeForce DDR), but I'd like a second (and perhaps third - I have spare monitors) screen since both OSes I use now support it (Win2k and XFree86 - on FreeBSD currently), but this support seems to have arrived just as hardware manufacturers have given up completely on PCI!
What I really want is a G200/G400 dual-head PCI, but you can't get them anywhere! Someone could do really nicely making a decent-spec PCI video card specifically to be a second head - not super-fast, but reasonable. Re-release the PCI TNT. Make a GeForce NotSoUltra (same capabilities, 1/4 of the bandwidth). Whatever. I think there really is a market for second-screen video cards.
(of course, I'd also like nVidia to support 3d on other Xfree86 implementations rather than just provide a great big linux-only binary hackup, but that's another story. I don't use GL on X too much, although partly because of this)
What do they know about perl? They don't even USE it as their database package!
What do you know about perl? It's a programming language, not a database package!
(Besides, as someone else pointed out, they use mod_perl - the smarter perl for apache)
Lethal Weapon (2, I think) - Rene Rousso's character uses her Amiga to access police databases. I always wondered what Paul in Neighbours did with that thing...
If I remember correctly, it was a Connection Machine CM5 from Thinking Machines - one of the first massively parallel machines, with a (I thought) Apple Quadra running as the 'control terminal' bit - although the software it ran was SGI's fsn. It's hard to confuse a Crimson with a Quadra... (see for yourself)
My understanding of the SGI 'Jurassic Park' specials was that it was because SGI rendered the movie - the metaballs dinosaurs stuff, rather than product placement. It was a while ago though.
I've always understood mentions of the "United States" like that to refer to the states themselves, as general entities, not to individuals within the State, but I can't think how you would define the Welfare of an entire State. Fair enough:)
"One responsibility of the government is to help its citizens when they require it." is just not true. It'd be nice to think so, but I don't think it is.
Society has a responsibility to help it's members. Government has a responsibility to govern to protect the borders of the country, establish and enforce laws to protect life and liberty, and collect taxes enough to fund the first two. Last time I looked at the constitution, there was nothing about helping those who are poor, IIRC - it was a few months ago, and it's not my government, but anyway...
I actually agree with you - the rich should pay the taxes for more or less the reasons you state, but in the literal sense, it's not a requirement.
"What I describe has been done and is VERY OLD (> 20 years). "
Indeed - I still have somewhere a mid-80's Omni with a little piece on this, so it must be a fair bit older than that. Is Omni still going? Whoever imported it into the UK seems to have given up on it, at least. It was like Playboy but with UFOs instead of naked chicks.
From 1977, according to fortune(1):
"There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olsen (President of Digital Equipment Corporation),
Convention of the World Future Society, in Boston, 1977
Quite how he came to that conclusion in 1977 is another matter, since the Altair was outstripping demand and the Apple II had just launch (IIRC)...
MD has it's own SCMS-alike copy-protection - you can't digitally copy a recording you made on a minidisc. They also managed to make an interesting looking data format (MD-Data) out of the same discs in such a way as to make them *really* annoying - the computer can't read Audio MD at all, or (more importantly) write it. The data format has pretty much died now - it would have been something like 200Mb on a $3 2-inch disk - quite neat.
It would be a whole lot less annoying if Sony didn't continually run ads suggesting MD let's you record, re-record and edit to your heart's content. Which is true, as long as it's not from another Minidisc.
Why anyone would buy pre-recorded MDs is beyond me. I have an MD walkman which is a HUGE improvement on my old Sony tape walkman - track skips, CD-ish sound, recording - and I can see the point for a car system, but I'll be keeping my CDs for now thanks.
I wouldn't buy any Sony new media format for at least a year or so, to see if (a) they license it (b) they don't just get bored with it (c) they don't screw it up in some other way. Oh, and if it really works, the price will drop a lot - CD players and recorders both started out damn expensive.
Is there really a need for ia64 support? Just to be sure - I'm not misunderstanding we're talking about something other than Itanium/Merced am I? Isn't it (a) not available, and (b) not slated to be available any time soon? If so, what is the 'need'? Whose is the need?
(I personally am not outraged or upset by RH7.0 - I learnt from 5.0 and 6.0 not to get an RH n.0 release for a little while...)
Hmmm, I really tried a little to make this not sound inflammatory - it's a serious question.
I saw this thing last week while looking to see if Logitech made a MS Strategic Commander clone (they didn't). Logitech claim on the iFeel pages that there are "No more issues with too small print or information clutter" - WTF? It's obviously not accurate enough vibrations that you can feel embossed type... what's that about?
Every US company that has publicly traded stock is required to put that on all press releases, AFAICT... it's nothing ominous. I guess the SEC got sick of people wanting to sue when company X said that 'the next version of their product would be a world leader' and it tanked.
Asimov has been dead for about 8 years, which would have put a dent in even his prodigous output (but not enough to stop the last Foundation book appearing posthumously)...
Indeed - I have a lowend (R4600PC/133) Indy, and while it's lovely for UI things (the UI is written with this spec of system in mind) and X, now it has a bunch of RAM you get to notice the speed of the system. When I first got it, it spent it's time swapping, but now the disk is silent, so it's pure "thinking time" when it takes a few seconds to figure out manpages, or compile code or whatever. I think I figured out that my Indy was roughly P100 speed from the specmarks tables, although it has rather different ratios of integer to floating point performance.
I do have the 'top-of-the-range' graphics option though, and that is not really anything to write home about, even on the basic gouraud-shaded stuff it ought to do well. There's something about these boxes though - as soon as the O2s are below about $1200 (soon), I'll be looking again:)
The R3000 Indigos (there were R4000 ones too) ran at 33Mhz, IIRC. I would imagine you're looking at fast 386 style speeds.
Try http://www.specbench.org/cgi-bin/osgresults
to find out more. I couldn't see any SGIs that old in the listings, but other things with the same class of CPU were: Decstation 3000 series (and 5000 I think) and the MIPS Magnum. For compute comparisons they'd probably be useful. Then find the Intel part with similar speeds (it'll probably be two - one for FP and a different one for int).
Since rendering (in a farm situation) is pretty much pure computation, I would have thought it wasn't worth your while - although it *would* look nice, and it'd sound impressive to PHB types - one small thing: make sure your Indigo's come *with* keyboards and mice - you see a lot of people on the newsgroups looking for those things - they're not standard PS/2 ones.
[anyone have an R4400SC/200 module they want to get rid of?;-) ]
No - the question was: "brings new ideas to the table" not: "successfully markets new ideas" or "sell the same old ideas successfully". By your rules, you wouldn't be allowed to mention A/UX;-)
So Apple will complete a re-org before MS do. Neither company is doing anything revolutionary, aside from trying to merge two products into something evolutionary without making it suck too much (while telling you it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, of course).
Also, I didn't at any stage trot out the old 'Apple stole everything from Xerox' line. I merely said that Xerox did invent all those things at PARC during the seventies, making them a company that "brings new ideas to the table". They did. It's true. It's also true Apple took the ideas and added to them, but the lisa and the mac that followed were bigger jumps in marketing than technology, in my opinion.
Don't be so sensitive about your mac. If you like it, stick with it. Good for you.
I personally find them varying between infuriating and acceptable depending on the day, but that isn't anything to do with old or new ideas either.
Microsoft. No, really. They may have the ethical qualities of lichen, and the quality control to match, but they *do* advance their products in (mostly) meaningful ways most years. They spend a great deal on usability testing, and use that to tweak the corners of their apps - which is why (IMHO) MS Office works a whole lot more smoothly than Staroffice or others (once you've killed the paperclip and most of intellisense - they weren't a great idea).
Apple is just now (after 15 years) producing an OS with multitasking, and they are doing it by taking the (25 year old) BSD kernel. NT has been doing this, multithreading and a reasonable filesystem to support multiuser computing since launch in 1993(?). It's wasn't great. It's getting better. IIRC, System 7 was the first MacOS to have task *switching* built in...
To the table - Xerox. They don't seem to be able to market their way out of a paper bag, but Xerox have brought us: Mice, Bitmap Displays, Windows, Smalltalk (OO computing), Ethernet, Laser Printing, Desktop Publishing, Hypertext (I believe - wasn't Englebart at PARC when demoing his mouse?). Notice these aren't even specific products, they are entire new concepts.
SGI - desktop digital video (O2/IndyVideo in 1993/4). desktop digital audio (Indigo in 1991/2). desktop high-performance 3d graphics (most of the late 80s to present) - I'm (literally) bending desktop to include more recent machines though. I was seriously impressed when I got my old Indy - it had all this cool stuff in it, as standard, and the base OS would happily talk to it all and just *work*.
I'm not really advocating MS or Xerox here - given a choice between eternal hell with Apple and with MS, I'd probably choose MS, because at least then I could network my pain with most of the rest of hell. I'd rather be using an SGI - they're pretty on the inside as well as outside.
The only things I can think of that Apple did innovate are wires, I think: ADB was neat, although I think Sun had a similar thing first, and Firewire would have been universal if USB (and Apple's licensing) hadn't gotten in the way.
Oh wait - those glassy looking buttons.
Richard P Feynmann's autobiographies ("Surely You're Joking Mr Feynmann", and "What do YOU care what other people think?") also discuss some of the IBM card calculators, and things that were done to minimise errors and steamline the calculations done at Los Alamos, although more as anecdotes than in any real specifics.
Both books, and especially the first one, are an entertaining read for anyone with even a slight physics interest too - I'd recommend them.
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I just tried to order that Creative PCI TNT2 Vanta from Dabs, and after a couple of weeks of 'on order from manufacturer', the order was cancelled since the manufacturer had discontinued it! Feh. Or was that just Dabs? I haven't found it anywhere else, nor the G200 PCI Dual-head, which I know did exist.
I already have a reasonable AGP video card (a GeForce DDR), but I'd like a second (and perhaps third - I have spare monitors) screen since both OSes I use now support it (Win2k and XFree86 - on FreeBSD currently), but this support seems to have arrived just as hardware manufacturers have given up completely on PCI!
What I really want is a G200/G400 dual-head PCI, but you can't get them anywhere! Someone could do really nicely making a decent-spec PCI video card specifically to be a second head - not super-fast, but reasonable. Re-release the PCI TNT. Make a GeForce NotSoUltra (same capabilities, 1/4 of the bandwidth). Whatever. I think there really is a market for second-screen video cards.
(of course, I'd also like nVidia to support 3d on other Xfree86 implementations rather than just provide a great big linux-only binary hackup, but that's another story. I don't use GL on X too much, although partly because of this)
What do they know about perl? They don't even USE it as their database package!
What do you know about perl? It's a programming language, not a database package!
(Besides, as someone else pointed out, they use mod_perl - the smarter perl for apache)
Lethal Weapon (2, I think) - Rene Rousso's character uses her Amiga to access police databases. I always wondered what Paul in Neighbours did with that thing...
If I remember correctly, it was a Connection Machine CM5 from Thinking Machines - one of the first massively parallel machines, with a (I thought) Apple Quadra running as the 'control terminal' bit - although the software it ran was SGI's fsn. It's hard to confuse a Crimson with a Quadra... (see for yourself)
My understanding of the SGI 'Jurassic Park' specials was that it was because SGI rendered the movie - the metaballs dinosaurs stuff, rather than product placement. It was a while ago though.
"Of course, to much of that stuff could wind you up on sent us the the next Darwin Awards" -
what? That's not right - that's not even wrong.
Now I can't stop thinking about someone filing the 'extrasmall' off of them and relabelling them 'large', ala Pentium IIIs...
Or you could use nero, and skip all that WAV business... Nifty software, Nero.
http://www.ahead.de/
I've always understood mentions of the "United States" like that to refer to the states themselves, as general entities, not to individuals within the State, but I can't think how you would define the Welfare of an entire State. Fair enough :)
"One responsibility of the government is to help its citizens when they require it." is just not true. It'd be nice to think so, but I don't think it is.
Society has a responsibility to help it's members. Government has a responsibility to govern to protect the borders of the country, establish and enforce laws to protect life and liberty, and collect taxes enough to fund the first two. Last time I looked at the constitution, there was nothing about helping those who are poor, IIRC - it was a few months ago, and it's not my government, but anyway...
I actually agree with you - the rich should pay the taxes for more or less the reasons you state, but in the literal sense, it's not a requirement.
"What I describe has been done and is VERY OLD (> 20 years). "
Indeed - I still have somewhere a mid-80's Omni with a little piece on this, so it must be a fair bit older than that. Is Omni still going? Whoever imported it into the UK seems to have given up on it, at least. It was like Playboy but with UFOs instead of naked chicks.
From 1977, according to fortune(1):
"There is is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olsen (President of Digital Equipment Corporation),
Convention of the World Future Society, in Boston, 1977
Quite how he came to that conclusion in 1977 is another matter, since the Altair was outstripping demand and the Apple II had just launch (IIRC)...
MD has it's own SCMS-alike copy-protection - you can't digitally copy a recording you made on a minidisc. They also managed to make an interesting looking data format (MD-Data) out of the same discs in such a way as to make them *really* annoying - the computer can't read Audio MD at all, or (more importantly) write it. The data format has pretty much died now - it would have been something like 200Mb on a $3 2-inch disk - quite neat.
It would be a whole lot less annoying if Sony didn't continually run ads suggesting MD let's you record, re-record and edit to your heart's content. Which is true, as long as it's not from another Minidisc.
Why anyone would buy pre-recorded MDs is beyond me. I have an MD walkman which is a HUGE improvement on my old Sony tape walkman - track skips, CD-ish sound, recording - and I can see the point for a car system, but I'll be keeping my CDs for now thanks.
I wouldn't buy any Sony new media format for at least a year or so, to see if (a) they license it (b) they don't just get bored with it (c) they don't screw it up in some other way. Oh, and if it really works, the price will drop a lot - CD players and recorders both started out damn expensive.
"it's related to the need for ia64 support"
Is there really a need for ia64 support? Just to be sure - I'm not misunderstanding we're talking about something other than Itanium/Merced am I? Isn't it (a) not available, and (b) not slated to be available any time soon? If so, what is the 'need'? Whose is the need?
(I personally am not outraged or upset by RH7.0 - I learnt from 5.0 and 6.0 not to get an RH n.0 release for a little while...)
Hmmm, I really tried a little to make this not sound inflammatory - it's a serious question.
I saw this thing last week while looking to see if Logitech made a MS Strategic Commander clone (they didn't). Logitech claim on the iFeel pages that there are "No more issues with too small print or information clutter" - WTF? It's obviously not accurate enough vibrations that you can feel embossed type... what's that about?
Every US company that has publicly traded stock is required to put that on all press releases, AFAICT... it's nothing ominous. I guess the SEC got sick of people wanting to sue when company X said that 'the next version of their product would be a world leader' and it tanked.
And here before that even...
Well, I left that bit out :-)
BTInternet Free Internet isn't strictly speaking a scam, but it's not the hot party that I expected.
this story is at least 5 years old...
7 16,9992+1+9870,00.html?kw=isaac%20asimov
Asimov has been dead for about 8 years, which would have put a dent in even his prodigous output (but not enough to stop the last Foundation book appearing posthumously)...
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5
"Belgian Telecom (http://www.bt.com.) "
Did you even look at this link? It's BRITISH TELECOM you fool. Please let us all know what bastion of journalism your mom works for...
Indeed - I have a lowend (R4600PC/133) Indy, and while it's lovely for UI things (the UI is written with this spec of system in mind) and X, now it has a bunch of RAM you get to notice the speed of the system. When I first got it, it spent it's time swapping, but now the disk is silent, so it's pure "thinking time" when it takes a few seconds to figure out manpages, or compile code or whatever. I think I figured out that my Indy was roughly P100 speed from the specmarks tables, although it has rather different ratios of integer to floating point performance.
:)
;-) ]
I do have the 'top-of-the-range' graphics option though, and that is not really anything to write home about, even on the basic gouraud-shaded stuff it ought to do well. There's something about these boxes though - as soon as the O2s are below about $1200 (soon), I'll be looking again
The R3000 Indigos (there were R4000 ones too) ran at 33Mhz, IIRC. I would imagine you're looking at fast 386 style speeds.
Try http://www.specbench.org/cgi-bin/osgresults
to find out more. I couldn't see any SGIs that old in the listings, but other things with the same class of CPU were: Decstation 3000 series (and 5000 I think) and the MIPS Magnum. For compute comparisons they'd probably be useful. Then find the Intel part with similar speeds (it'll probably be two - one for FP and a different one for int).
Since rendering (in a farm situation) is pretty much pure computation, I would have thought it wasn't worth your while - although it *would* look nice, and it'd sound impressive to PHB types - one small thing: make sure your Indigo's come *with* keyboards and mice - you see a lot of people on the newsgroups looking for those things - they're not standard PS/2 ones.
[anyone have an R4400SC/200 module they want to get rid of?
No - the question was: "brings new ideas to the table" not: "successfully markets new ideas" or "sell the same old ideas successfully". By your rules, you wouldn't be allowed to mention A/UX ;-)
So Apple will complete a re-org before MS do. Neither company is doing anything revolutionary, aside from trying to merge two products into something evolutionary without making it suck too much (while telling you it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, of course).
Also, I didn't at any stage trot out the old 'Apple stole everything from Xerox' line. I merely said that Xerox did invent all those things at PARC during the seventies, making them a company that "brings new ideas to the table". They did. It's true. It's also true Apple took the ideas and added to them, but the lisa and the mac that followed were bigger jumps in marketing than technology, in my opinion.
Don't be so sensitive about your mac. If you like it, stick with it. Good for you.
I personally find them varying between infuriating and acceptable depending on the day, but that isn't anything to do with old or new ideas either.
Umm- that's the (6-7 years pre-mac) Apple I made of wood, and the Apple II that was made popular by Visicalc (or maybe you mean the Mac with Excel).
Microsoft. No, really. They may have the ethical qualities of lichen, and the quality control to match, but they *do* advance their products in (mostly) meaningful ways most years. They spend a great deal on usability testing, and use that to tweak the corners of their apps - which is why (IMHO) MS Office works a whole lot more smoothly than Staroffice or others (once you've killed the paperclip and most of intellisense - they weren't a great idea).
Apple is just now (after 15 years) producing an OS with multitasking, and they are doing it by taking the (25 year old) BSD kernel. NT has been doing this, multithreading and a reasonable filesystem to support multiuser computing since launch in 1993(?). It's wasn't great. It's getting better. IIRC, System 7 was the first MacOS to have task *switching* built in...
To the table - Xerox. They don't seem to be able to market their way out of a paper bag, but Xerox have brought us: Mice, Bitmap Displays, Windows, Smalltalk (OO computing), Ethernet, Laser Printing, Desktop Publishing, Hypertext (I believe - wasn't Englebart at PARC when demoing his mouse?). Notice these aren't even specific products, they are entire new concepts.
SGI - desktop digital video (O2/IndyVideo in 1993/4). desktop digital audio (Indigo in 1991/2). desktop high-performance 3d graphics (most of the late 80s to present) - I'm (literally) bending desktop to include more recent machines though. I was seriously impressed when I got my old Indy - it had all this cool stuff in it, as standard, and the base OS would happily talk to it all and just *work*.
I'm not really advocating MS or Xerox here - given a choice between eternal hell with Apple and with MS, I'd probably choose MS, because at least then I could network my pain with most of the rest of hell. I'd rather be using an SGI - they're pretty on the inside as well as outside.
The only things I can think of that Apple did innovate are wires, I think: ADB was neat, although I think Sun had a similar thing first, and Firewire would have been universal if USB (and Apple's licensing) hadn't gotten in the way.
Oh wait - those glassy looking buttons.
Richard P Feynmann's autobiographies ("Surely You're Joking Mr Feynmann", and "What do YOU care what other people think?") also discuss some of the IBM card calculators, and things that were done to minimise errors and steamline the calculations done at Los Alamos, although more as anecdotes than in any real specifics.
Both books, and especially the first one, are an entertaining read for anyone with even a slight physics interest too - I'd recommend them.