If you're including the pre-IBM-PC era, ZiLOG introduced the Z80 (an unauthorized improvement on the 8080) in 1976. The 8080 didn't run MS-DOS, but in the days before Armonk entered the microcomputer market, CP/M was the "industry standard" OS, and the Z80 was a serious alternative to Intel's offering. It was even more popular than the 8080 itself, powering TRS-80s, Sinclairs, later game consoles, current embedded systems, etc.
If I was a company currently using Alpha, it seems like a dead-end choice to buy yet another Alpha-based machine, knowing this was the last one. Seems like a better decision to migrate away now, rather than just prolong it.
Well, people started migrating away from Alpha years ago, which is why HPaqital made the decision they've just announced.
But if that shiny new Alpha box in the window is going to be supported for another several years, and I need a bigger box that runs all my Alpha machine code right now, why wouldn't I buy it? I'm probably going to buy a new system after that in several years anyway, but that's a purchasing decision to make then, not now. This announcement simply means I can spend the time between now and then making sure all of my applications can run on something else... which is a lot better than doing it this month because the bigger box I just ordered has a PowerPC or something in it.
the x86 stuff... was a solely Intel offering for a very long time (close to 15 years, I think)
Which 15 years? In the early years of the "IBM PC" architecture, Intel (which didn't have the manufacturing capacity it has today) directly licenced Harris, AMD, IBM, and Hitachi to make their own 808x/80286 chips. (Lots of IBM-brand computers had "IBM Inside", not Intel.) There were also the NEC V20 and V30 chips, which were unlicenced 808x clones. Then AMD, Cyrix, IBM, and TI all produced 386-equivalents, and then the whole slew of 486-alikes that prompted Intel to switch to the trademarkable "Pentium" name, while others sold similar "586" and "686" chips. Which brings us to the modern crop of AMD Athlons, Transmeta Crusoes, VIA C3's and such to which you referred. I'm not sure there was even a 15-month period in which Intel was the only source of x86-compatible CPUs.
In its current state on Mac OS X, the X11 version is usable for fairly technical people.
Definitely. Between home and office I have a couple Athlon desktops and a Pentium2 laptop running Linux, a Pentium3 running Win2K, a G5 PMac, and a G3 iBook. OOo works adequately for me on all of them, which has been an incredible convenience, because no matter which one I'm sitting in front of, I can (through the magic of Samba and/or FTP) pull up the same documents to work on. And as a matter of fact, the one I run OOo on the most is the G3 iBook.
Well, if you want to completely ignore the point about increasingly unwieldy district sizes causing poor representation, and the conflicting values from one region to another about what "should be handled by the states"... then you've hit upon a brilliant idea that's gotten nowhere in 150 years.
The constitution originally called for one repersentative for every 30,000 citizens. If this had not been changed, there would be about 10,000 representatives today.
What this points out is that republics don't scale well to this level. You either have too many representatives to make a functioning legislature (the above option), or too many citizens per representative (the option the U.S. actually tood).
I know this is never going to happen, but I wonder if we'd be better off splitting the U.S. into several nations along geopolitical lines (say: Northeast, Midwest, Plains/Mountains, Pacific, The South) in an EU-style free trade confederation. Legislative districts could be cut into fractions (maybe low-density states like Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Alaska would finally get districts), and there'd be less conflict between the values of one region vs. the values of another. (e.g. New Englanders could stop bitching about Texas, Carolinians could stop whining about California.) Maybe if Lincoln had just let the Confederacy go....
So, if I run modified AGPL software on an intranet site, I have to release my modifications to the entire internet?
No, you have to release your modifications to your entire intranet. Which should be no big deal. It's only when you run it on an externally-accessible network (i.e. you distribute the app) that the source-code-distribution requirement really kicks in.
Highlander... "2"? I'm a big fan, and I'm pretty sure there's no such thing. They went straight from 1 to 3. For some reason.
The Star Trek movies did the same thing, going directly from IV to VI, skipping V. Ask around at a Trek con and you'll find many pointy-eared and bat'leth-wielding fans who'll insist that this is true.
Worst as in 'insult to the intelligence':
Beastmaster
I never saw the movie, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the TV series. (TiVo started recording it for me, so I checked it out.) It's no great piece of drama, I admit. There's the improbably attractive and youthful cast, inexpensive FX, two-dimensional writing, etc. But it seems that everyone involved knows that they're not doing Shakespeare, so they don't take it too seriously... but they take it seriously enough to be entertaining about it. It's a straightforward wholesome adolescent adventure story, and it works on that level. And did I mention that the actors are attractive and youthful?
Lost in Translation seems to be a film that works when you see it in a cinema, but doesn't work on home video. At least that's the impression I get based on people's reactions to it compared to how they saw it.
All these movies beg the questions: At what point do they first realize it and say "It's too late to go back now?" Is it ever really too late?
It's never too late to stop a movie in production (or post-production) before it's released. There are complete (down to the copyright and union seal in the credits), distribution-ready films that have never been released, even direct to video. I'm sure the are better examples, but I know that before Blade broke the jinx, Marvel produced an embarrassing string of superhero movies that were so bad that some of them are known today only through bootlegs. (The Fantastic Four film is legendary in its baditude.) Knockaround Guys probably would have sat on a shelf forever, except that Vin Diesel became a "star" with Fast & Furious and XXX after it was made, suddenly giving it some box-office potential. And TV networks are notorious for cancelling new series that may already have several months' episodes in the can, and never airing them (instead broadcasting more advertiser-friendly fare).
There are all sort of so-bad-they're-good movies out there (the James Whale library, Rocky Horror), and a steady supply of so-stupid-they're-bad movies that no one expects anything of (e.g. low-budget teen sex comedies, Alien vs. Predator). Open it up to "of all time" and there's just too much garbage to pick through.
But the worst this-was-supposed-to-be-good-but-it's-crap movies I've seen in recent memory have been Riddick (a bunch of "clever" "ideas" apparently ripped out of a sullen 14-year-old's spiral notebook, then glued together with a hefty FX budget, but no story) and Anger Management (which seemed more like a psych experiment intended to see how many lame gags and how much spastic acting the audience would put up with without going ballistic themselves).
Your F-150 may drive like a sedan, but it crashes rather differently. Bottom line: it does more damage. Not as much as your brother-in-law's semi, but still a heck of a lot more than my brother-in-law's Jetta.
You'll pardon me for being more concerned about your driving competence than of his.
A voice-driven interface that surprisingly few people take advantage of.
It's not so surprising. Hardly anyone takes advantage of it because voice-command for a computer is generally such a useless feature. We've been brainwashed by decades of Starfleet captains giving orders to Mrs. Roddenberry's voice, but it simply wouldn't work that way.
For example, it's completely impractical in shared environments. Imagine the cacophony of a business class airline cabin with people talking to their computers. A few years ago when one of my coworkers activated voice input on his Mac, the rest of us used to have a blast shouting out at random, "Menu, Special, Shut Down!" Sure, it "works", but it doesn't work.
And beyond the puzzle of recognising speech (which computers can do well enough, with enough GHz at their disposal), there's the far greater challenge of getting them to understand the meaning of it, and to figure out how to act on it. Syntax is easy; semantics and solution are the real killers. Maybe by Jim Kirk's time we'll have that licked, but you'll notice that he was usually the only one on the bridge who got to use the voice interface; Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, and Spock all did their jobs by pushing buttons.
Hummers, Ford Extinctions, and the like are already a menace to lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles, regardless of power source. There's an arms race taking place on our roads, as drivers opt for better armament against bigger and more hazardous vehicles. "Drive defensively" has come to mean "make sure yours is bigger than the other guy's" instead of "be careful". You need additional training and a special licence to operate a semi or a bus, but not for a Ford F150, despite the fact that in unskilled hands, they're a serious menace to other drivers.
"There's no innovation. Linux is still in the business of cloning existing technology."
As compared to new technology like window/mouse interfaces (never mind Xerox, Apple), IP connectivity (never mind *n*x), web browsers (never mind Mosaic, Netscape), web servers (never mind NCSA, Apache), long filenames (never mind Apple, *n*x), that Microsoft "innovated" with Windows.
Yes, I took all of those into account, Would-Be-Senator. I'm sorry if someone who's made your particular lifestyle choices (e.g. building a new house instead of buying an existing one, buying new cars often enough to be concerned about the additional taxes on them, and does the meaning of the word "luxury" escape you?) is experiencing a higher rate of taxation than someone with a more modest income and less self-oriented consumerist way of life, but... that's your own damn fault. Don't be so myopic as to assume that everyone has fscked themselves over as badly as you have.
Yeah, well my centuries of standard usage can beat up your dictionary.:P It looks like poor proofreading at Oxford, because I'm sure they know better. Check any other lexicon and they'll specify that "A.D." ordinarily goes before the number. Go look at the inscriptions on some cornerstones, or some ancient manuscripts, and you'll see this confirmed.
"Anno Domini 2004" ("in the Year of the Lord 2004") tells you that we're talking about the 2004th year of Jesus' Lordship. "2004 in the Year of the Lord" is syntactically nonsensical (at best it would refer to 2004 of something in the Year of Jesus' birth).
The only reason the likes of "2004 A.D." has crept into common usage is because people are more accustomed to the likes of "399 B.C." (which reads sensically if you spell it out as "Before Christ"). Since people generally don't know what exactly it stands for and how to read it, they assume it also goes after the year. It does not.
Slashdot Mirror
Competition is nothing new to Intel.
Well, people started migrating away from Alpha years ago, which is why HPaqital made the decision they've just announced.
But if that shiny new Alpha box in the window is going to be supported for another several years, and I need a bigger box that runs all my Alpha machine code right now, why wouldn't I buy it? I'm probably going to buy a new system after that in several years anyway, but that's a purchasing decision to make then, not now. This announcement simply means I can spend the time between now and then making sure all of my applications can run on something else... which is a lot better than doing it this month because the bigger box I just ordered has a PowerPC or something in it.
Which 15 years? In the early years of the "IBM PC" architecture, Intel (which didn't have the manufacturing capacity it has today) directly licenced Harris, AMD, IBM, and Hitachi to make their own 808x/80286 chips. (Lots of IBM-brand computers had "IBM Inside", not Intel.) There were also the NEC V20 and V30 chips, which were unlicenced 808x clones. Then AMD, Cyrix, IBM, and TI all produced 386-equivalents, and then the whole slew of 486-alikes that prompted Intel to switch to the trademarkable "Pentium" name, while others sold similar "586" and "686" chips. Which brings us to the modern crop of AMD Athlons, Transmeta Crusoes, VIA C3's and such to which you referred. I'm not sure there was even a 15-month period in which Intel was the only source of x86-compatible CPUs.
*(2.3kg with battery)
Definitely. Between home and office I have a couple Athlon desktops and a Pentium2 laptop running Linux, a Pentium3 running Win2K, a G5 PMac, and a G3 iBook. OOo works adequately for me on all of them, which has been an incredible convenience, because no matter which one I'm sitting in front of, I can (through the magic of Samba and/or FTP) pull up the same documents to work on. And as a matter of fact, the one I run OOo on the most is the G3 iBook.
Well, if you want to completely ignore the point about increasingly unwieldy district sizes causing poor representation, and the conflicting values from one region to another about what "should be handled by the states"... then you've hit upon a brilliant idea that's gotten nowhere in 150 years.
What this points out is that republics don't scale well to this level. You either have too many representatives to make a functioning legislature (the above option), or too many citizens per representative (the option the U.S. actually tood).
I know this is never going to happen, but I wonder if we'd be better off splitting the U.S. into several nations along geopolitical lines (say: Northeast, Midwest, Plains/Mountains, Pacific, The South) in an EU-style free trade confederation. Legislative districts could be cut into fractions (maybe low-density states like Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Alaska would finally get districts), and there'd be less conflict between the values of one region vs. the values of another. (e.g. New Englanders could stop bitching about Texas, Carolinians could stop whining about California.) Maybe if Lincoln had just let the Confederacy go....
No, you have to release your modifications to your entire intranet. Which should be no big deal. It's only when you run it on an externally-accessible network (i.e. you distribute the app) that the source-code-distribution requirement really kicks in.
Gosh, I can hardly wait for the /. index-page article announcing 2.6.8.1.1!
If that's all the longer you can last (and just watching a movie), it's no wonder you don't have a girlfriend.
You must be American.
The Star Trek movies did the same thing, going directly from IV to VI, skipping V. Ask around at a Trek con and you'll find many pointy-eared and bat'leth-wielding fans who'll insist that this is true.
At least it's how I get through the night.
I never saw the movie, but I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the TV series. (TiVo started recording it for me, so I checked it out.) It's no great piece of drama, I admit. There's the improbably attractive and youthful cast, inexpensive FX, two-dimensional writing, etc. But it seems that everyone involved knows that they're not doing Shakespeare, so they don't take it too seriously... but they take it seriously enough to be entertaining about it. It's a straightforward wholesome adolescent adventure story, and it works on that level. And did I mention that the actors are attractive and youthful?
Lost in Translation seems to be a film that works when you see it in a cinema, but doesn't work on home video. At least that's the impression I get based on people's reactions to it compared to how they saw it.
It's never too late to stop a movie in production (or post-production) before it's released. There are complete (down to the copyright and union seal in the credits), distribution-ready films that have never been released, even direct to video. I'm sure the are better examples, but I know that before Blade broke the jinx, Marvel produced an embarrassing string of superhero movies that were so bad that some of them are known today only through bootlegs. (The Fantastic Four film is legendary in its baditude.) Knockaround Guys probably would have sat on a shelf forever, except that Vin Diesel became a "star" with Fast & Furious and XXX after it was made, suddenly giving it some box-office potential. And TV networks are notorious for cancelling new series that may already have several months' episodes in the can, and never airing them (instead broadcasting more advertiser-friendly fare).
And sincerely, the Dudley Moore movie was charming without being overly saccharine.
See, kids, this is a perfect example of why you should never surf while drunk: I meant Ed Wood. Mea culpa.
But the worst this-was-supposed-to-be-good-but-it's-crap movies I've seen in recent memory have been Riddick (a bunch of "clever" "ideas" apparently ripped out of a sullen 14-year-old's spiral notebook, then glued together with a hefty FX budget, but no story) and Anger Management (which seemed more like a psych experiment intended to see how many lame gags and how much spastic acting the audience would put up with without going ballistic themselves).
You'll pardon me for being more concerned about your driving competence than of his.
It's not so surprising. Hardly anyone takes advantage of it because voice-command for a computer is generally such a useless feature. We've been brainwashed by decades of Starfleet captains giving orders to Mrs. Roddenberry's voice, but it simply wouldn't work that way.
For example, it's completely impractical in shared environments. Imagine the cacophony of a business class airline cabin with people talking to their computers. A few years ago when one of my coworkers activated voice input on his Mac, the rest of us used to have a blast shouting out at random, "Menu, Special, Shut Down!" Sure, it "works", but it doesn't work.
And beyond the puzzle of recognising speech (which computers can do well enough, with enough GHz at their disposal), there's the far greater challenge of getting them to understand the meaning of it, and to figure out how to act on it. Syntax is easy; semantics and solution are the real killers. Maybe by Jim Kirk's time we'll have that licked, but you'll notice that he was usually the only one on the bridge who got to use the voice interface; Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, and Spock all did their jobs by pushing buttons.
Hummers, Ford Extinctions, and the like are already a menace to lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles, regardless of power source. There's an arms race taking place on our roads, as drivers opt for better armament against bigger and more hazardous vehicles. "Drive defensively" has come to mean "make sure yours is bigger than the other guy's" instead of "be careful". You need additional training and a special licence to operate a semi or a bus, but not for a Ford F150, despite the fact that in unskilled hands, they're a serious menace to other drivers.
The full support for USB iPods with iTunes sounds like good news to me.
As compared to new technology like window/mouse interfaces (never mind Xerox, Apple), IP connectivity (never mind *n*x), web browsers (never mind Mosaic, Netscape), web servers (never mind NCSA, Apache), long filenames (never mind Apple, *n*x), that Microsoft "innovated" with Windows.
Yes, I took all of those into account, Would-Be-Senator. I'm sorry if someone who's made your particular lifestyle choices (e.g. building a new house instead of buying an existing one, buying new cars often enough to be concerned about the additional taxes on them, and does the meaning of the word "luxury" escape you?) is experiencing a higher rate of taxation than someone with a more modest income and less self-oriented consumerist way of life, but... that's your own damn fault. Don't be so myopic as to assume that everyone has fscked themselves over as badly as you have.
"Anno Domini 2004" ("in the Year of the Lord 2004") tells you that we're talking about the 2004th year of Jesus' Lordship. "2004 in the Year of the Lord" is syntactically nonsensical (at best it would refer to 2004 of something in the Year of Jesus' birth).
The only reason the likes of "2004 A.D." has crept into common usage is because people are more accustomed to the likes of "399 B.C." (which reads sensically if you spell it out as "Before Christ"). Since people generally don't know what exactly it stands for and how to read it, they assume it also goes after the year. It does not.