Re:A special flop the Slashdot crowd will apprecia
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 3, Informative
ha.. I also have an old 8100 that's loaded with mkLinux, it's sitting about 3 feet from my desk right now, haven't booted it up in years.
I think what really killed A/UX was MAE, the Mac Application Environment for Unix, which was how you got Mac apps running on A/UX. I think I recall it ran on other platforms like SUN. There was a lot of pressure to release it on more platforms, which Apple definitely did NOT want to do. The last thing Apple ever wanted was to see a Mac GUI running on Intel hardware, and that's where they saw it going.
Now if you want a REALLY obscure Apple Unix, here's one: SCO Xenix for Lisa. I actually configured and delivered one to a client. He had a custom written accounting package, he got a serial I/O board and hung 4 dumb terminals off the Lisa, and had 5 working terminals (including the Lisa) to do data entry. I just couldn't believe it when I saw the Lisa boot up to a command line and run Unix. After seeing the Lisa's distinctive white screen with black type for so long, seeing white text on a dark Lisa screen was like staring into a black hole.
A special flop the Slashdot crowd will appreciate:
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 4, Interesting
OK, here's a REAL flop that is so obscure, I bet that 99.9% of Macheads never heard of it, even if they were Mac users at the time it shipped:
A/UX, the first Unix OS for Mac.
A/UX included special battery support for the Macintosh Portable (yeah, the first portable, the flop, the really heavy one that used lead-acid batteries) and also had sleep support, which was totally unheard of at that time.
I took a certification class in A/UX, and the Apple guys told me they didn't seriously expect to sell many units, the product only existed to fulfill requirements for government sales that specified a Unix OS must be available for any personal computer CPU being requisitioned. Nevermind that the users never intended to USE Unix, the bids were rigged against Macs by specifying Unix must be available, and it wasn't, so that meant Macs were disqualified from bids and only PCs would be considered. But Apple won back some major government business by meeting this petty requirement. Cost em a bundle though.
It shouldn't be hard to produce sufficient popcorn, I could devise several different hot-air popper machines, it doesn't have to be particularly elaborate since the popcorn doesn't have to be edible. But delivery is a little trickier.
Go to a rental shop and rent a truck or machinery used for installing blow-in insulation. These are usually mounted on the back of a truck, it has a big hopper where you pour in the insulation (which is usually a sort of crumbled up paper fibers). That's hooked up to a motor-driven compressed air gadget, sort of like a vacuum in reverse, the insulation is propelled down a corrugated plastic hose about 6 inches in diameter. The machine is designed to have enough force to blast the insulation through enough tubing to reach from the truck out front, through the house and up to the 2nd or 3rd floor attic, which you then fill with a layer of insulation about 6 inches deep. My neighbor ran an insulation business, and I've seen the machines in action and it delivers an astonishing amount of material in a short time, it shouldn't take long to fill up a house with popcorn using one of these devices. But you're going to need a HELL of a lot of pre-popped popcorn. I leave it to you to estimate the volume required, but somehow I have a vision of two or three 18foot rental trucks filled with popcorn.
OK, this is the THIRD time this stupid story has been posted. And STILL there is not one single bit of IPTV. Can we just agree to not post this story ever again? Or at least until there IS such a thing as IPTV?
Yes, you are precisely correct. Under FCC regulations, every cable system that provides HDTV is required to provide their customers with a firewire-enabled decoder. All you have to do is ask for it.
This means anyone can get HDTV recording capability for free with any Mac. It takes tons of disk space, but it's already encoded so it shouldn't take huge amounts of processing power. The Mac Mini is just the machine for this job.
Yeah, those guys at Disney, Dreamworks, and ILM are real idiots for using Linux for their blockbuster films when it's not up to the task.
Yeah, the quoted commenter is a real idiot who doesn't know the difference between film and video.
The question is about video editing. Pros at Disney, Dreamworks, and ILM do not use linux for video editing. Their famous linux systems are primarily render farms, single purpose systems. Video editing at the pro level is primarily done on Avid or Final Cut Pro systems. Even if we were talking about film and not video, Linux is not the OS of choice. Products like Motion, Combustion, flame, and other high end production software does not run on linux.
I noticed one thing conspicuously absent from their list of:Things we're doing to avoid this crap in the future..." That item is:
"Put a big sign next to the EPO button saying 'Do NOT Press This Button, it cuts off power to the entire building, it is not a light switch nor a door switch. Push this button only if your life is in danger. If your life is not in danger and you push this button, your life WILL be in danger."
Yep, call me a Zealot, whatever. I DEMAND cross platform compatibility (on my SUN kit, on my HP kit, my IBM kit -- and on my Intel kit). Apple sure is compatible -- that's why X Windows is supplied with the machine.
Apparently Mr. Zealot doesn't recall his favorite SUN platform's proprietary GUI, Motif.
You're not getting the point. Mac users have wanted to be free from Microsoft long before there ever was such a thing as Linux, or even Windows for that matter. This is the natural market for Open Office. Open Office is intended to make a cross-platform open format for documents. If you only support your primary market, you've just made it into a single-platform PC product again. So the project has failed its goal.
You can't ignore the largest Unix vendor in the world: Apple. You're just cutting your own throat if you ignore a huge segment of the market for your software. Projects succeed when people USE the software.
Stanislav Lem wrote a story about bacteria communicating in Morse. I vaguely remember it, a scientist noticed the resemblance between the dots and bars of bacteria growing on a petri dish, so he mutated bacteria until it was capable of spelling out morse code and communicating in words. Alas I don't remember the whole story, or the title, anyone remember it?
I remember a good story about Nick. When ThinkSecret started advertising, Brian at the now-defunct artificialcheese.com website decided to advertise. Brian didn't like Nick very much so he sent the $100 fee in nickels. He got a big cloth bag from the bank, spray painted a neat dollar sign on the side with a stencil, filled it with nickels, boxed it all up and sent it by UPS to ThinkSecret. He documented every step on his website with photographs, but alas, those pages were left behind when he redesigned the Artificial Cheese website.
I mailed Brian several times to see if Nick accepted his ads and the bag of nickels, but I never got an answer.
Yeah, I thought this was going to be regular live action too. And this book deserves to be a regular film. All the action is plain old reality, is are hardly any SF geekery except the "scramble suit" to disguise someone's identity. This film SHOULD be a live action film. That's one of the main points of this film, that it happens in a reality so close to ours, not some unimaginably unrealistic SF world. This film is about the 1970s, not the 2070s.
You obviously haven't been watching the pro digital audio market lately. I can do all the effects you described with digital preprocessors, if you're worried about mangling your waveforms in postprocessing due to sampling limits. But you go ahead and live with your tape hiss and dropouts, and keep convincing yourself analog is superior. Meanwhile, the digital recording world is moving on to 128khz/48bit sampling which is way beyond anything even you could possibly need.
Unlikely. 2in videotape was never used in cart form, it was always on reels, HUGE reels. I've seen the old beasts in the backrooms at CBS in Hollywood. These machines weren't used for editing, they were used for broadcast network feeds back in the early days of color TV.
I think you're thinking of the old 3/4 inch tape carts, which were common in the 1970s.
I didn't know there were even 250 people who still used analog reel-to-reel tapes. Perhaps there were more people making the tape than using the tape.
Re:I don't know his exact requirements, but...
on
PDAs for a Disabled Man?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Has he considered a large binder full of tabbed pages with common phrases in it? At the front or back could be a notepad and a marker to write with. The local ALS clinic showed my Mom a similar device. The booklet is about 18in by 2in, with a few dozen pages, each page has 5 or 6 squares with different phrases in big type. It clips on the top of a board with the alphabet printed on it, so you can point to letters to spell out words. The little booklet has tabs for common subjects, like food, medicines, how you feel, etc. and has a blank pages in each tabbed section so you can add your own phrases. It's simple to use, you just flip open the tab you want and point, then spell out extra words on the letter board for stuff that isn't in the booklet. The booklet's pages are all laminated plastic so you can write on it with a marker you can rub off and rewrite. You could easily make such a booklet on your own, just design some pages on the computer, take em to Kinkos to laminate and bind them in a plastic spiral binder. But a lot of professionals who specialize in assistive devices put a lot of thought into what kind of phrases are needed, so you'd probably be better off using one of the booklets that already exist. I mean, how expensive could it be? And Medicare would probably pay for it anyway.
Fortunately my Mom isn't so disabled that she needs this booklet gadget.. yet. But she's such a luddite, it's perfect for a technophobe like her. I'm sure she'll use this device eventually.
I'm going through the same thing, my mom is slowly wasting away from ALS. Unfortunately, my mom hates anything mechanical and won't use assistive devices. The most technologically advanced gadget she'll use is a Magnedoodle tablet to write on (she's lost her voice completely).
I suggest you contact the local branch of the Muscular Dystropy Association, they also cover ALS patients. They will hook you up with experts in assistive devices, it's their profession so they know everything that's available. Devices that are suggested by doctors or professional health care aides are generally paid for by Medicare, the MDA even says they'll help pay for assistive devices is you can't afford them. Some of the dedicated text-to-speech devices are pretty amazing, they're designed for people with limited function, so they're very simple to operate, without superfluous bells and whistles.
Are you serious? One coding error could affect HUNDREDS of patients. Does nobody read RISKS Digest anymore? Coding failures in medical equipment has been under continual discussion on RISKS for many years. All you're doing here is trading one risk for another, a risk that more people are taking on faith, since everyone KNOWS that computers are infallible. Yeah right.
It's not an uncommon point of confusion, most people wouldn't know the difference between a real GPS and the cel-tower triangulation systems (do they have an acronym for that system yet?)
The carnavi systems (like cabs use) are all GPS, but the cel phone units aren't satellite based. There isn't enough room in a cel phone for a decent GPS receiver. I've seen handheld GPS units, but even the smallest are 3 or 4x the size of a typical cel phone.
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A REAL geek would use Explosive Forming.
ha.. I also have an old 8100 that's loaded with mkLinux, it's sitting about 3 feet from my desk right now, haven't booted it up in years.
I think what really killed A/UX was MAE, the Mac Application Environment for Unix, which was how you got Mac apps running on A/UX. I think I recall it ran on other platforms like SUN. There was a lot of pressure to release it on more platforms, which Apple definitely did NOT want to do. The last thing Apple ever wanted was to see a Mac GUI running on Intel hardware, and that's where they saw it going.
Now if you want a REALLY obscure Apple Unix, here's one: SCO Xenix for Lisa. I actually configured and delivered one to a client. He had a custom written accounting package, he got a serial I/O board and hung 4 dumb terminals off the Lisa, and had 5 working terminals (including the Lisa) to do data entry. I just couldn't believe it when I saw the Lisa boot up to a command line and run Unix. After seeing the Lisa's distinctive white screen with black type for so long, seeing white text on a dark Lisa screen was like staring into a black hole.
OK, here's a REAL flop that is so obscure, I bet that 99.9% of Macheads never heard of it, even if they were Mac users at the time it shipped:
A/UX, the first Unix OS for Mac.
A/UX included special battery support for the Macintosh Portable (yeah, the first portable, the flop, the really heavy one that used lead-acid batteries) and also had sleep support, which was totally unheard of at that time.
I took a certification class in A/UX, and the Apple guys told me they didn't seriously expect to sell many units, the product only existed to fulfill requirements for government sales that specified a Unix OS must be available for any personal computer CPU being requisitioned. Nevermind that the users never intended to USE Unix, the bids were rigged against Macs by specifying Unix must be available, and it wasn't, so that meant Macs were disqualified from bids and only PCs would be considered. But Apple won back some major government business by meeting this petty requirement. Cost em a bundle though.
yeah, but popcorn is considerably less dense than fiber fill insulation, I bet you it runs a lot faster blowing popcorn than insulation.
It shouldn't be hard to produce sufficient popcorn, I could devise several different hot-air popper machines, it doesn't have to be particularly elaborate since the popcorn doesn't have to be edible. But delivery is a little trickier.
Go to a rental shop and rent a truck or machinery used for installing blow-in insulation. These are usually mounted on the back of a truck, it has a big hopper where you pour in the insulation (which is usually a sort of crumbled up paper fibers). That's hooked up to a motor-driven compressed air gadget, sort of like a vacuum in reverse, the insulation is propelled down a corrugated plastic hose about 6 inches in diameter. The machine is designed to have enough force to blast the insulation through enough tubing to reach from the truck out front, through the house and up to the 2nd or 3rd floor attic, which you then fill with a layer of insulation about 6 inches deep.
My neighbor ran an insulation business, and I've seen the machines in action and it delivers an astonishing amount of material in a short time, it shouldn't take long to fill up a house with popcorn using one of these devices. But you're going to need a HELL of a lot of pre-popped popcorn. I leave it to you to estimate the volume required, but somehow I have a vision of two or three 18foot rental trucks filled with popcorn.
OK, this is the THIRD time this stupid story has been posted. And STILL there is not one single bit of IPTV. Can we just agree to not post this story ever again? Or at least until there IS such a thing as IPTV?
Yes, you are precisely correct. Under FCC regulations, every cable system that provides HDTV is required to provide their customers with a firewire-enabled decoder. All you have to do is ask for it.
0 40 426151111599
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20
This means anyone can get HDTV recording capability for free with any Mac. It takes tons of disk space, but it's already encoded so it shouldn't take huge amounts of processing power. The Mac Mini is just the machine for this job.
Yeah, the quoted commenter is a real idiot who doesn't know the difference between film and video.
The question is about video editing. Pros at Disney, Dreamworks, and ILM do not use linux for video editing. Their famous linux systems are primarily render farms, single purpose systems. Video editing at the pro level is primarily done on Avid or Final Cut Pro systems.
Even if we were talking about film and not video, Linux is not the OS of choice. Products like Motion, Combustion, flame, and other high end production software does not run on linux.
I noticed one thing conspicuously absent from their list of :Things we're doing to avoid this crap in the future..." That item is:
"Put a big sign next to the EPO button saying 'Do NOT Press This Button, it cuts off power to the entire building, it is not a light switch nor a door switch. Push this button only if your life is in danger. If your life is not in danger and you push this button, your life WILL be in danger."
Apparently Mr. Zealot doesn't recall his favorite SUN platform's proprietary GUI, Motif.
You're not getting the point. Mac users have wanted to be free from Microsoft long before there ever was such a thing as Linux, or even Windows for that matter. This is the natural market for Open Office.
Open Office is intended to make a cross-platform open format for documents. If you only support your primary market, you've just made it into a single-platform PC product again. So the project has failed its goal.
You can't ignore the largest Unix vendor in the world: Apple. You're just cutting your own throat if you ignore a huge segment of the market for your software. Projects succeed when people USE the software.
Stanislav Lem wrote a story about bacteria communicating in Morse. I vaguely remember it, a scientist noticed the resemblance between the dots and bars of bacteria growing on a petri dish, so he mutated bacteria until it was capable of spelling out morse code and communicating in words. Alas I don't remember the whole story, or the title, anyone remember it?
I remember a good story about Nick. When ThinkSecret started advertising, Brian at the now-defunct artificialcheese.com website decided to advertise. Brian didn't like Nick very much so he sent the $100 fee in nickels. He got a big cloth bag from the bank, spray painted a neat dollar sign on the side with a stencil, filled it with nickels, boxed it all up and sent it by UPS to ThinkSecret. He documented every step on his website with photographs, but alas, those pages were left behind when he redesigned the Artificial Cheese website.
I mailed Brian several times to see if Nick accepted his ads and the bag of nickels, but I never got an answer.
Yeah, I thought this was going to be regular live action too. And this book deserves to be a regular film. All the action is plain old reality, is are hardly any SF geekery except the "scramble suit" to disguise someone's identity. This film SHOULD be a live action film. That's one of the main points of this film, that it happens in a reality so close to ours, not some unimaginably unrealistic SF world. This film is about the 1970s, not the 2070s.
You obviously haven't been watching the pro digital audio market lately. I can do all the effects you described with digital preprocessors, if you're worried about mangling your waveforms in postprocessing due to sampling limits.
But you go ahead and live with your tape hiss and dropouts, and keep convincing yourself analog is superior. Meanwhile, the digital recording world is moving on to 128khz/48bit sampling which is way beyond anything even you could possibly need.
You can do all that stuff with digital postprocessing.
Unlikely. 2in videotape was never used in cart form, it was always on reels, HUGE reels. I've seen the old beasts in the backrooms at CBS in Hollywood. These machines weren't used for editing, they were used for broadcast network feeds back in the early days of color TV.
I think you're thinking of the old 3/4 inch tape carts, which were common in the 1970s.
I didn't know there were even 250 people who still used analog reel-to-reel tapes. Perhaps there were more people making the tape than using the tape.
I'm going through the same thing, my mom is slowly wasting away from ALS. Unfortunately, my mom hates anything mechanical and won't use assistive devices. The most technologically advanced gadget she'll use is a Magnedoodle tablet to write on (she's lost her voice completely).
I suggest you contact the local branch of the Muscular Dystropy Association, they also cover ALS patients. They will hook you up with experts in assistive devices, it's their profession so they know everything that's available. Devices that are suggested by doctors or professional health care aides are generally paid for by Medicare, the MDA even says they'll help pay for assistive devices is you can't afford them. Some of the dedicated text-to-speech devices are pretty amazing, they're designed for people with limited function, so they're very simple to operate, without superfluous bells and whistles.
Are you serious? One coding error could affect HUNDREDS of patients. Does nobody read RISKS Digest anymore? Coding failures in medical equipment has been under continual discussion on RISKS for many years.
All you're doing here is trading one risk for another, a risk that more people are taking on faith, since everyone KNOWS that computers are infallible. Yeah right.
Well I'll be damned. Are these phones actually shipping? The latest and greatest phone demos I've seen were still non-GPS units.
It's not an uncommon point of confusion, most people wouldn't know the difference between a real GPS and the cel-tower triangulation systems (do they have an acronym for that system yet?)
The carnavi systems (like cabs use) are all GPS, but the cel phone units aren't satellite based. There isn't enough room in a cel phone for a decent GPS receiver. I've seen handheld GPS units, but even the smallest are 3 or 4x the size of a typical cel phone.
Sorry, nobody in Japan has a cel phone with GPS capability. They're all based on triangulation between cel tower locations, not GPS.