I'm sure that some of you have worked in large server rooms with a big red emergency power shutoff button on the wall...
At my old university, one of these server rooms was emptied as new, smaller hardware came available and the room was no longer needed. They turned this room into an office for a student organization... leaving the large red button, but taking the "Emergency Shutoff" sign.
This unlabeled button sat neglected on the wall of this little office for about 7 or 8 years until one day a curious student just had to find out what the button did...
The network for all of the engineering schools at this university of 36,000 students went down for most of a day..
The best part is that the button is still in the little office with the students, and it is still unlabeled yet fully functional... They did hide it behind a file cabinet, though:)
Who want's to have their trade shows run by the "Trade Shows for Dummies" company, when instead they can have them run by the alpha geeks! Maybe Jobs could even do a switch ad for O'Reilly:)
1. Read about lake Vostok... there is volcanic activity there. The bacteria came up through the volcano not down through the ice.
2. There is mounting evidence that life on Earth may have started in Earth's mantle and later moved into the oceans and then the surface.
We don't know if there is life on these moons, they just look like good places to look.
Re:There have always been 2 types of engineers
on
Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 2
On the plus side, if you actually achieve something, many of those mindless majority will adore you with almost the same fervour usually reserved for Britney Spears. Hmm, a little scary, that. Perhaps that's why there are problems with innovation...
If you have a good idea, the little trolls will try and steal it... If you have a great idea, they will run you out of town on a rail for fear that they can't cope with a new way of doing things.
every OS can get the serial number of the CPU or BIOS or ethernet card... some software use these serial number to enforce their licenses.
The government doesn't need a central registry of these serial numbers. If you're suspected of pirating, they can look at your computer and check the serial number after they get a court order... standard constitutional stuff.
I have two bachelors degrees in Physics and in Aerospace Engineering. Employers only saw the one degree that they wanted and ignored the other. I have gained lots of valuable insights from taking classes in both majors, but I would have gained that from a minor in Physics as well.
If you want the 2nd degree, go for it... but it probably won't help much in getting a job. One degree is enough to get you through the door... after that degrees are just like merit badges.
How the heck do you think they'll be able to match this supposed "unique identifier" to an actual person? By SSN? By some sort of government registry of "unique identifiers"?
The serial number of the computer used to encode the files would probably be good enough to find any software pirates... or each CD-burner could encode its serial number on any cd it makes.. this could easily be done via hardware/software and be very effective.
What would you like to prove my claims (what claims are in question)?
I'm not familiar with Copland... what were its features? How do its features compare to OS X? What Copland technology did Apple abandon with OS X?
I don't. I think one bad decision maker can drive a project into the ground.
Do you mean a scapegoat? I work on engineering projects that must be done on time and done correctly or else we loose the mission. The whole team checks on everyone else and when someone else makes a mistake they help them fix it. Sure a big part of this is a corporate culture that has arisen from years of working these kinds of problems. But a key of this corporate culture is that everyone on the team takes responsibility for the project's success. If someone else messes up I don't view it as making failure of the project their fault, I view it as more work for the rest of us to fix where they messed up.
Nice to you think so highly of yourself, and so low of everyone else. Hard to say, but you're probably right (in implication) that you get the attention of UNIX types by conformity.
And as far as the alpha geeks, I'm not an alpha geek -- I was just using a term in common parlance. I didn't mean to imply that Unix was better than the old Mac OS X, but it is different and has different strengths that Apple was able to benefit from by infusing new Unix blood into Mac OS X. OS X is much more modular and its internals are much easier to tinker with than the old mac os.
Be or Nautilus or other technology also would have given Apple new ideas and enriched their operating system. The key is that Apple needed some new ideas because the old mac OS only made progress by gilding the same lily over and over again... it never made any 'big' innovations on the scale of its original big innovations.
You really should take a look at Cocoa and learn how to use it... it's a really exciting technology and I think it is Apple's biggest edge over Sun, Linux and Microsoft. Cocoa doesn't add features like 3D talking web pages, it is a new way of developing software that makes building complex programs easier... so now it's easier and takes less time to add other features like 3D multi-lingual talking web pages... Restated in buzzwords: Cocoa is a meta-feature. I think cocoa is a big innovation on the same scale as the original mac GUI.
This article is one big rant. I wish he had more information to back up his claims. The article just seemed to be overly bitter calling NeXT "liars" and claiming that the engineers were hit with unrealistic expectations.
Hey, I'm an engineer and I think it takes everyone on a project to make it fail. On successful projects you have only 10% of the people doing all of the work and fixing the other people's mistakes... most projects succeed in spite of bad management or bad subsystem X.
Mac OS was on a death march because of the fundamental underlying technologies and a culture that was stuck in only one way of doing things... and windows is on a similar death march. OS X takes technology from the UNIX way of thinking and from the NeXT way of thinking to make a platform that is a developers dream. I think this is what puts OS X beyond Windows and will eventually lead to new "killer apps" that will save Apple. I really doubt that if Apple had went with Copland so many alpha geeks would be flocking to Mac... I doubt slashdot would have added an Apple page or O'Reilly would have a macdevcenter.
Hey, I doubt that IBM's new desktop Power4 chip will have DRM... If Apple isn't going to use the Power4, maybe IBM might be planning to sell Linux desktops with Power4... Big Blue Penguin!
The article comments on how Apple has gone out of its way to break third party menu extras and how apple blocks full functionality of a dock replacement.
I don't mean to be an apologist for apple, but I can see a valid reason for doing this. I think apple wants to prevent any third party from replacing the dock (a menu extra could replace the dock). If a third party dock becomes very popular developers may decide to develop for it rather than use apple's dock and apple's APIs. Some sort of super-dock (or super-menu) could hijack OS X software development by offering extra functionality in an API that Apple doesn't have.
Say some developer decided to embrace and extend OS X by replacing the dock with a "task bar" that mimicked the windows look and feel and implemented.NET so that windows apps could be ported more easily... Apple would provide hardware, a kernal, and a PDF windowing system, but a third party would control the UI...
I know this is being paranoid... but I think it's reasonable for apple to keep control of the dock and the menu extras until they feel that their software has matured.
I'm too lazy to call.... does anyone have any pricing information on any of the touchscreen macs or add on kits... how much does the price of a mac go up to add a touchscreen?
If it's more than $99 I think I'll just stick to a graphics tablet..
I missed it before... you can see a second even bigger fan in the quicktime VR. Look under the drives, facing the massive heat sinks... Does a G4 really give out this much heat?? I wonder if this is a sign of a Power4 in our future:)
Entropy marches ever onward. The 2nd law of thermodynamics makes it very difficult to uncook a pizza, unbrew a beer, or unspoil a banana. All of that disorder isn't reversible.
Of course, if you bury the rotten banana under a banana tree then you could get a fresh banana from the tree eventually... but that new banana would only be partly made from the rotten banana - other material would have gone into its construction.
Can inkwell do unicode character sets? I hope so, because I want to be able to enter equations via graphics tablet... Just imagine inkwell hooked up to something like mathematica:)
Of course the first thing I'm going to do when I get to play with inkwell is run vi.
They have Qt for OS X, but I think you have to pay for it... and there is XDarwin to run X11 apps.. you should be able to get what you've written for Linux to run on OS X without much work...
Of course, the real joy of mac is learning cocoa... it's yummy.
If they use the JAVA-Cocoa bridge, Apple can speed things up by adding functionality to Cocoa. Apple already has the basic functionality of a word processor built into the application kit (multiple fonts, spell checking, WYSYWIG printing).
I wouldn't be suprised if OS 10.3 has a few new cocoa classes like NSWordProcessorView, NSSpreadSheetView, NSRelationalDatabase. These would be subclasses of existing Cocoa classes like NSTextView, NSTableView, and NSData.
I think this fits Apples strategy of making development for the Mac quick and easy. This benefits them in several ways: 1) They attract more badly needed developers to their platform 2) They can churn out iApps much more quickly than M$ 4) Once developers have tasted Cocoa, they don't want to go back 5) With so much work done in the Cocoa frameworks, Apple can make the frameworks run faster and make all the apps on a system runs faster. 6) If apple changes processors, they can make it real easy to port cocoa apps to the new architecture since all of the machine dependent stuff is done in their APIs.
Do you have any ideas for making money with alice... say, tying it to speech recognition and text to speech and put it in animatronic mice at theme parks?
As far as interplanetary travel, these techniques are generally slower than using the slingshot effect... but faster than using ion engines. If you want to explore around the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, or whatever these techniques are just as fast as using the slingshot effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that some of you have worked in large server rooms with a big red emergency power shutoff button on the wall...
:)
At my old university, one of these server rooms was emptied as new, smaller hardware came available and the room was no longer needed. They turned this room into an office for a student organization... leaving the large red button, but taking the "Emergency Shutoff" sign.
This unlabeled button sat neglected on the wall of this little office for about 7 or 8 years until one day a curious student just had to find out what the button did...
The network for all of the engineering schools at this university of 36,000 students went down for most of a day..
The best part is that the button is still in the little office with the students, and it is still unlabeled yet fully functional... They did hide it behind a file cabinet, though
Who want's to have their trade shows run by the "Trade Shows for Dummies" company, when instead they can have them run by the alpha geeks! Maybe Jobs could even do a switch ad for O'Reilly :)
1. Read about lake Vostok... there is volcanic activity there. The bacteria came up through the volcano not down through the ice.
2. There is mounting evidence that life on Earth may have started in Earth's mantle and later moved into the oceans and then the surface.
We don't know if there is life on these moons, they just look like good places to look.
On the plus side, if you actually achieve something, many of those mindless majority will adore you with almost the same fervour usually reserved for Britney Spears. Hmm, a little scary, that. Perhaps that's why there are problems with innovation...
If you have a good idea, the little trolls will try and steal it... If you have a great idea, they will run you out of town on a rail for fear that they can't cope with a new way of doing things.
Moderate me as bitter..
every OS can get the serial number of the CPU or BIOS or ethernet card... some software use these serial number to enforce their licenses.
The government doesn't need a central registry of these serial numbers. If you're suspected of pirating, they can look at your computer and check the serial number after they get a court order... standard constitutional stuff.
I have two bachelors degrees in Physics and in Aerospace Engineering. Employers only saw the one degree that they wanted and ignored the other. I have gained lots of valuable insights from taking classes in both majors, but I would have gained that from a minor in Physics as well.
If you want the 2nd degree, go for it... but it probably won't help much in getting a job. One degree is enough to get you through the door... after that degrees are just like merit badges.
How the heck do you think they'll be able to match this supposed "unique identifier" to an actual person? By SSN? By some sort of government registry of "unique identifiers"?
/software and be very effective.
The serial number of the computer used to encode the files would probably be good enough to find any software pirates... or each CD-burner could encode its serial number on any cd it makes.. this could easily be done via hardware
What would you like to prove my claims (what claims are in question)?
I'm not familiar with Copland... what were its features? How do its features compare to OS X? What Copland technology did Apple abandon with OS X?
I don't. I think one bad decision maker can drive a project into the ground.
Do you mean a scapegoat? I work on engineering projects that must be done on time and done correctly or else we loose the mission. The whole team checks on everyone else and when someone else makes a mistake they help them fix it. Sure a big part of this is a corporate culture that has arisen from years of working these kinds of problems. But a key of this corporate culture is that everyone on the team takes responsibility for the project's success. If someone else messes up I don't view it as making failure of the project their fault, I view it as more work for the rest of us to fix where they messed up.
Nice to you think so highly of yourself, and so low of everyone else. Hard to say, but you're probably right (in implication) that you get the attention of UNIX types by conformity.
And as far as the alpha geeks, I'm not an alpha geek -- I was just using a term in common parlance. I didn't mean to imply that Unix was better than the old Mac OS X, but it is different and has different strengths that Apple was able to benefit from by infusing new Unix blood into Mac OS X. OS X is much more modular and its internals are much easier to tinker with than the old mac os.
Be or Nautilus or other technology also would have given Apple new ideas and enriched their operating system. The key is that Apple needed some new ideas because the old mac OS only made progress by gilding the same lily over and over again... it never made any 'big' innovations on the scale of its original big innovations.
You really should take a look at Cocoa and learn how to use it... it's a really exciting technology and I think it is Apple's biggest edge over Sun, Linux and Microsoft. Cocoa doesn't add features like 3D talking web pages, it is a new way of developing software that makes building complex programs easier... so now it's easier and takes less time to add other features like 3D multi-lingual talking web pages... Restated in buzzwords: Cocoa is a meta-feature. I think cocoa is a big innovation on the same scale as the original mac GUI.
This article is one big rant. I wish he had more information to back up his claims. The article just seemed to be overly bitter calling NeXT "liars" and claiming that the engineers were hit with unrealistic expectations.
Hey, I'm an engineer and I think it takes everyone on a project to make it fail. On successful projects you have only 10% of the people doing all of the work and fixing the other people's mistakes... most projects succeed in spite of bad management or bad subsystem X.
Mac OS was on a death march because of the fundamental underlying technologies and a culture that was stuck in only one way of doing things... and windows is on a similar death march. OS X takes technology from the UNIX way of thinking and from the NeXT way of thinking to make a platform that is a developers dream. I think this is what puts OS X beyond Windows and will eventually lead to new "killer apps" that will save Apple. I really doubt that if Apple had went with Copland so many alpha geeks would be flocking to Mac... I doubt slashdot would have added an Apple page or O'Reilly would have a macdevcenter.
Hey, I doubt that IBM's new desktop Power4 chip will have DRM... If Apple isn't going to use the Power4, maybe IBM might be planning to sell Linux desktops with Power4... Big Blue Penguin!
The article comments on how Apple has gone out of its way to break third party menu extras and how apple blocks full functionality of a dock replacement.
.NET so that windows apps could be ported more easily... Apple would provide hardware, a kernal, and a PDF windowing system, but a third party would control the UI...
I don't mean to be an apologist for apple, but I can see a valid reason for doing this. I think apple wants to prevent any third party from replacing the dock (a menu extra could replace the dock). If a third party dock becomes very popular developers may decide to develop for it rather than use apple's dock and apple's APIs. Some sort of super-dock (or super-menu) could hijack OS X software development by offering extra functionality in an API that Apple doesn't have.
Say some developer decided to embrace and extend OS X by replacing the dock with a "task bar" that mimicked the windows look and feel and implemented
I know this is being paranoid... but I think it's reasonable for apple to keep control of the dock and the menu extras until they feel that their software has matured.
jeesh... I'm a troll for wondering how much touch screesn cost? the web site doesn't have any prices and I can't call from work...
I though someone is slashdot land would have called and found out..
I'm too lazy to call.... does anyone have any pricing information on any of the touchscreen macs or add on kits... how much does the price of a mac go up to add a touchscreen?
If it's more than $99 I think I'll just stick to a graphics tablet..
I'll agree about no up front ports - it would be nice.
There's two USB ports on the keyboard and two on the monitor... why put any on the front of the case??
I missed it before... you can see a second even bigger fan in the quicktime VR. Look under the drives, facing the massive heat sinks... Does a G4 really give out this much heat?? I wonder if this is a sign of a Power4 in our future :)
* processor heatsink is considerably larger than previous models, but lacks a fan
Well, if you look at apple's site you can see a fan... but it looks like its up by the CD/DVD drives. What's up with that?
Entropy marches ever onward. The 2nd law of thermodynamics makes it very difficult to uncook a pizza, unbrew a beer, or unspoil a banana. All of that disorder isn't reversible.
Of course, if you bury the rotten banana under a banana tree then you could get a fresh banana from the tree eventually... but that new banana would only be partly made from the rotten banana - other material would have gone into its construction.
Of course the first thing I'm going to do when I get to play with inkwell is run vi.
Exactly!! Success is failing quickly. (I think that might even be a quote from Gates)
They have Qt for OS X, but I think you have to pay for it... and there is XDarwin to run X11 apps.. you should be able to get what you've written for Linux to run on OS X without much work...
Of course, the real joy of mac is learning cocoa... it's yummy.
If they use the JAVA-Cocoa bridge, Apple can speed things up by adding functionality to Cocoa. Apple already has the basic functionality of a word processor built into the application kit (multiple fonts, spell checking, WYSYWIG printing).
I wouldn't be suprised if OS 10.3 has a few new cocoa classes like NSWordProcessorView, NSSpreadSheetView, NSRelationalDatabase. These would be subclasses of existing Cocoa classes like NSTextView, NSTableView, and NSData.
I think this fits Apples strategy of making development for the Mac quick and easy. This benefits them in several ways: 1) They attract more badly needed developers to their platform 2) They can churn out iApps much more quickly than M$ 4) Once developers have tasted Cocoa, they don't want to go back 5) With so much work done in the Cocoa frameworks, Apple can make the frameworks run faster and make all the apps on a system runs faster. 6) If apple changes processors, they can make it real easy to port cocoa apps to the new architecture since all of the machine dependent stuff is done in their APIs.
This story should have been submitted as a "Bug" :)
Do you have any ideas for making money with alice... say, tying it to speech recognition and text to speech and put it in animatronic mice at theme parks?
here they want to use the instability to their advantage, so they _want_ to go flying far off course.
As far as interplanetary travel, these techniques are generally slower than using the slingshot effect... but faster than using ion engines. If you want to explore around the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, or whatever these techniques are just as fast as using the slingshot effect.