Whenever a SEGV rears its ugly head, I can usually think back through the last 45 minutes of code I've written and see where changes I might've made could introduce the bug. Then I just put printf()'s where needed until its clear, and I'm off again...
This is why the mantra "Test Often" is a good one...
Incidentally, I've run into similar problems with uClinux, though these days I try real hard not to make changes to my kernel...
Duh. Have you not seen 3G phones in your neighborhood, capable of doing video?
iVideoPod would be a good place to put those recorded videos your girlfriend sent you on your v-phone while you were away in Iraq bombing nazi's^H^H^H^H^H^Hiraqi's^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsheep...
And anyway, you're forgetting something very vital and extremely important here: pr0n.
I'd use my iVideoPod in the bathroom, mostly. Saves having to hunt around for a fresh Hustler, anyway....
I think that the point is that there *will* be competition for an MS product, rather than MS getting there first and dominating.
The M$/TablePC issue has nothing to do with whether or not the TabletPC is a good idea - done well, it probably *is* a good idea.
It has everything to do with whether or not M$ get there first and prevent others from competing in this new market sector using underhanded techniques, that's all.
As, has been demonstrated, they are prone to doing...
I've decided I don't rant nearly often enough about shit like this and for some reason your post has set me off, so I'm gonna pitch in here and tell the/. world why, in my book, Apple can do no wrong (for now).
I am not someone who cares what/. mods do by now, so I'll light one up and let 'er rip.
Here goes:
My 500mhz tibook ('chipped', incidentally, from a 400mhz one, quite happily) gives me *plenty* of bang for the buck and for me: IT IS THE PERFECT COMPUTER (almost).
Why? A few good reasons:
- 1Gig of RAM [this is !pure sex! to old-timers, lemme tell you... and it's/portable/, too, no way!?]
- Case design is *PHAT* and groovy, and goes extremely well with my perspex furniture, next to my 19" rack here in the living room...
- The display just can't be beat. I'm yet to be as impressed with a laptop display as I was with the one on the tiBook when I first saw it up close and personal...
- OSX
But now, really, the *ONLY* reason worth arguing about and in this case the tiBook truly shines for me:
- Productivity
Now, I am really, really productive on this box.
About as productive as I, personally, could ever be without getting some sort of scarey Rael'ian upgrade.
I should say that I'm not a 'typical' user, though I don't think there is such a thing actually.
I'm a (mostly C+Unix, still, after all these years) programmer, since - essentially - '79.
Well, I started using Unix and mostly hacking around then, anyway, but even still the line at that time between programmer/user was always pretty blurry.
During the 80's and 90's my platform-of-choice was always whatever unix-box was available. These were computers: so well made they could do more than one thing at a time, inherently.
Performance back then, at least in my personal sphere, was often expressed in terms of *modem* speed. CPU speed? Well, that was already being measured and appropriated out of our direct control, as it is about to become, yawn, with.Net... but man, in the shops I worked in during the late 80's and 90's if you had Ethernet to the local microwave link (56k) to the computer room across town, holy shit. *That* was performance.
As a programmer, I've always had the notion of running my code on distant computers.
CPU-speed was something for the *ADMINS* to worry about, based on user-demand, not me. As long as my code ran as well as it possibly could, and did the job, that was just fine.
Coder vs. Admin vs. User. In that order.
It seems to me, then, that the more you get involved in administering a box, the more you fret about its performance and get sucked into the upgrade loop... hey, maybe MS' bugs were a *positive* thing for them and their slick hardware bed-partners, eh?
On the other hand, it's always sweet as a coder to work out how to make things run faster without needing *any* new hardware... That's the best possible result from the above equation, in my opinion... (API's that imply that this can still happen always get my vote!)
And anyway, no matter what you do, there's *always* a way to make code run faster and better without needing hardware upgrades... at least from my perspective.
Getting back to my rant-topic, with the tiBook I am extremely productive, and extraordinarily content as a computer programmer and user.
With my tiBook I can quite happily replace a small network of PC's I used to use for development with 4 VirtualPC sessions instead, each running its own particular PC-based OS (mostly BSD and Linux for me, but I have a Windows image around if I ever... shudder... need to get things working under Win32/CYGWIN. I can barely tolerate a 'make' in that universe on *good* hardware anyway...).
Admittedly, these were ancient PC's (Pentium-I and -II class), but nevertheless they were, in spite of their hardware specs, being used productively in my computer room, and they're even virtually productive 'now' in VPC land.
(Not to mention that - when needed - I can *really* push my apps into the free space that 1GIG provides: portably. Whoa. Did I mention 'pure sex'? 64k was sexy, 1GIG is out of control)
So yeah, I guess I'm moderately old-school, computer-wise but for some reason this results in me feeling honestly that OSX is a dream to code for, from inside to out, top to bottom. It is the apex of a loooong - in computer-market terms - computing history.
I honestly do *not* want to get caught up in the horrid trap that is Windows: here's a strange thought - computer hardware should be getting *faster* as code is better and better tuned as it ages, not slower!!! It's the API's, dummy! The API's are Microsofts' hamster-wheel - they'll *never* get faster, only slower!
As someone who first cut their teeth in Windows hacking with the *first beta* of Microsoft Virtual C (not C++) for Windows3.1 (Pre-WFW 3.11) and subsequently ran screaming in terror back to his MIPS/RISCOS login until Borland came along, I think you can get the point about OSX being nice to code for...
Speaking of that lovely MIPS login and all it offered to my personal working/coding (and thus, computing) 'heritage', I suppose I should admit that my 'personal hardware' history leading up to tiBook glory is a little off-beat. I guess it goes something like this:
-- Apple II - okay, hands up who *didn't* grow up trying to convince their folks to buy them one of these when they came out? That would have been me, but only because I spent *all* my free time in the Computerland Apple store, hacking away. I didn't *NEED* to buy it, what I needed to do was quit school and make enough money to own my own computer, fast! Heh heh... then Dad bought me:
-- Oric-1 + Modem. First personal computer, mostly a terminal, but it could play games and run a plotter. That was neat. With this, I discovered Unix at a lovely 300 baud, and thus C...
Oh boy. I didn't *need* to own the computer in order to use it... oh boy, oh boy, oh boy...
Skip forward 5 or so years to '87/'88:
-- MIPS R3230, across the room but accessible when I needed to load a tape. I had a couple shit 286's running Desqview, which was my first 'sniff' at PC-land... but they only ever ran telnet to that box.
-- MIPS Magnum Pizza-box (first 'desktop' computer, and by that I mean it was on my desktop rather than sitting in the computer room next to the other MIPS, WANG, and Tandem systems I worked on, where, actually, it belonged. To have it on my desk was the only way to guarantee nobody else bigger than me would use it, sort of...)
(I should note that during the MIPS-era I'd lusted after a Next Cube, 5 weeks before it was announced by Steve, publicly. Somehow the MIPS guys had details on it, and boy did I want it. (Mostly as a *TERMINAL*, but I had designs on that DSP... a *TERMINAL* with a DSP! WAY COOL!!) I'd heard that NextStep was sweet (later found this to be true with NS4/Intel) but alas the box was just too expensive for me to justify it to the bosses as a 'new terminal', so I missed out on that one. It hurt to see Next die, but it was well-deserved.)
-- AST 486 running something horrid. I think it was early versions of SCO Unix. That was a nice thing to see on cheap PC's, but I remember it had weird int's. I mostly did filesystem work then, and I *HATED* the test disks from this box for their endian'ness! If you can't guess why, I'll tell you: I never had the SOURCE!
-- Then I dl'ed this thing called Linux in '93 from some fast server in Finland, and got it running on whatever PC-hardware was around. At this point in time, I still didn't care much for PC hardware: I don't care what anyone says, the *mentality* of an 8-bit design is still there... but somehow, Linux made it better.
I became a PC user and Windows developer during the darkness that was the 90's, mostly due to client requirements, but I gave up soon after Windows 98. Microsoft can eat shit: I'm not working to make them bigger and greedier any longer, no matter *what* they try to offer me. It's a trap, programmers!
However, around '94/'95, there was hope for my personal computing needs, such as they were (Ethernet to something fast was always more important than my desktop system, though, as a coder...)
-- SGI Boxen, too many to mention, mostly Indigo2/Indy class though. I decided I couldn't afford an Octane, and O2 was too close to PC territory and then, a few months later, that Windows NT-ONLY workstation scared me off SGI for good... FOR SHAME! I thought there was hope for SGI when I saw that laptop in the tornado movie, but godamn it was only a prop and not even a very good one at that. Too bad, but it set the fires a-burnin' that would only later be put out by my tiBook...
-- For general-purpose hacking and coder-chops (its important!) I scrounged and got myself a BeBox. This was a *fantastic* hacking box. Man, what a great idea. Unix-ish'isms, a promising GUI, and a tight new kernel. Hey, even the filesystem was groovy: AND IT HAS MIDI!!! Yay!
Damn, did I pick a loser. Oh well, at least I'd avoided Amiga!
-- So, for production (that is what we're talking about here) at this point I had to switch to PC laptops running Linux. Oh, the pain, the agony, after so many beautiful years of avoiding Intel... still, we had some good times, me and Linux and I loved her from the start (still do, deeply!), until the golden era began:
-- tiBook running OSX.
And now, here we are.
In my opinion, Apple is a computer company that has survived for so long and is now, even still, worth supporting. Maybe IBM too. I conside their Linux work to be amends, though.
Steve is back at Apple and he has delivered on his promise:
OSX. PowerPC. Totally Portable.
You can groove in BSD-land with you-name-it shell, mix and match even, or play nice and cool in Cocoa-land with Objective-C...
Hack away at pure C with the tried and true (POSIX), or do fancy-schmancy graphics tomfoolery with PDF-based widgets and glorious things like Aqua. With what is, frankly, a pretty fresh API for a GUI - oddly enough it also feels well proven, actually, I'd say. Maybe there's some OpenGL mojo in there, too.
Oh, I forgot to mention Java (I don't do Java), but hey: I've heard tiBooks are *primo* Java hacking boxes, and the JDK integration in OSX is smoovier and far less S&M'ish to... other... 'operating systems'. I believe you can actually *get* to Java in OSX, heh heh...
MySQL. Linux-friendly. fink. gcc. gcc *3.1*.
A 'Media hub', and then iSome... Watch -or- burn DVD's (so sci-fi!).
All of this: WHILE SITTING UNDER A TREE!
Plus, no matter how far I travel (and I've travelled far) I am yet to see any other laptop *function* as well in tems of pure hardware design. It's aged, but its aged well and it has actually survived our journeys together.
Every other laptop I've ever owned would have been completely grungy and getto by now - however, this tibook has somehow managed to maintain its shine and lustre thorugh an almost complete circumnavigation of the planet.
Okay so its 'aged beauty' might have something to do with the fact that I've *actually* replaced my own keyboard, case and hard drive (not to mention the aforementioned chippin' for speed) - but how many times can you say you've done *THAT* with a PC notebook? (see www.pbparts.com for starters, a link *all* tiBookers should appreciate and use well, as I have...)
Development-wise, I've never *EVER* had to be worried about processor speeds. Whatever flavour chip is available, I've always been able to run my code *plenty* fast.
Performance != Productivity.
CPU speeds are irrelevant now. They have gone past the point where human perception really matters - and not only that, parallelism technologies are on the rapid track (Internet++) to putting us all where we can just *rent* extra CPU time where its needed: on computational backends like the terribly-late.Net, etc.
Arguing, or actually, getting caught up in arguments about CPU speeds is a dead giveaway that the person doing the arguing is someone who simply isn't using their computer productively enough, and thus they have time to notice... which as a phenomena, is oddly enough, also observable in someone with a 'slow' computer...
The tiBook is the perfect computer. Look at its heritage. You cannot argue with its heritage.
Okay. I think I've said enough about this. I now return to a state of torpor. Thank you for reading.
[Incidentally, I'd happily trade a mint vintage BeBox for a vintage ~mint NS Cube, if anyones interested... oh, and yah, before anyone starts, I know that "Productivity != Games", which is the only/other/ reason I can see for getting a decent PC these days, and it is a bad one. IMHO.]
Damn, we've finally invented a network where one protocol can *actually* consume another protocol.
Gotta read these RFC's... Sci-fi cyberpunk fantasies will never quite sound the same..
Reminds me of Soggy Noodle...
on
H2O/IP
·
· Score: 5, Funny
... a few years back during a LAAAATE night hacking session on a device driver for some hardware, I decided I'd had enough and needed to do something fun.
I unglued myself from the swetty membrane that had formed between the edges of my ass and the chair, delved deep into foggy memory banks for details on how to move my arms and legs, got up and robo'ed to the kitchen with curled fingers to make pasta. It was a LOOONG code session, damn.
Halfway back, I got the idea to use noodles to connect the device I was working on to my PC, just for fun. Easy enough to do: the serial line from my debugger to the outboard gear was just three wires.
Some avid hacking with duct-tape, judicious use of PCB-posts, and 10 minutes later, I had things working!! I could talk to my device over the soggy noodle!
So funny, sending commands over pasta!
Okay, I went home after that. It didn't work so well the next day, when the pasta had dried up and stuck to the edges of the PCB... and I got a few odd looks from a co-worker as I cleaned up, chuckling to myself, but hey...
As a lifetime entrepreneur myself, I think this is actually an interesting article on slashdot - what *are* the new technology markets, in the opinion of/. readers?
And don't say 'Portman dolls' or "land grabs in the Soviet Union"!
I personally asked this question myself (of myself) a few years ago and decided that one way to approach it is to look at any computer technology market in which Microsoft has not established a foothold... and I settled in the digital musical instrument industry, for which I'm quite qualified to work in, as well as extremely interested. I'm lucky to work in this business now - having founded my fair share of big Internet companies in the 90's, I'm glad to be out of that field and working in one I like... a lot.
Microsoft don't have a synthesizer on the market (shudder), yet this industry (in which I work) is still very fresh and new, and expanding yearly.
Traditionally, musical-instrument manufacturing and design has been pretty resilient to the types of techniques that MS uses to dominate - well, what about doing something cool in this market?
Why this "MS"-slant to my evaluation? Well, since I practically grew up in the industry (wrote my first code at 8 years old back in '78), I've watched the MS juggernaut make its way, and I get a feeling that any tech industry in which MS *doesnt* have a presence, or intention, is a growth market. Thus, its ripe for entrepreneurs... by the time MS gets to it, it's usually fairly well established.
There's a lot of room for improvement in this industry right now.
You might also want to have a look at other markets along similar lines. I know, for example, that there's a fairly good potential for automated agriculture systems right now - agricultural markets are looking to get very high tech in the growth processes - maybe there's a way you can apply computer skills to these markets?
Embedded Linux systems monitoring and maintaining massive hydroponic farms efficiently and productively? Why not? If the product is good, it could sell very well - especially in foreign markets. (Don't mention the Netherlands, heh heh...)
In summary, what I would do is look at markets that are *not* being reviewed by the ever-hungry eyes and mouths of big corporations, yet which still traditionally generate income and revenue, and see if there is something in there you can apply your entrepreneurial skills.
Good luck, and remember: successful entrepreneurs are usually the ones who work hard in a field in which they are intensely personally interested.
Entrepreneurs are nothing but smart people who have the desire to do well for themselves.
Nothing in this article suggests that the poster is *not* this.
Fact is, anyone who ever had an inkling to start out on their own is an entrepreneur. Anyone who decides to stop working for 'the man' and actually tackle a new market, or try something new and exciting in face of the adversity - well, that's entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is not an elite club.
I'm sick up and fed of all these yuppy elite entrepreneur scum who think they're so godamned wonderful because they had some good idea... side-effect of all those cool 'become an entrepreneur' multi-level marketing campaigns, indcidentally...
What I need (as a C programmer) is a way of getting all the data structures in my program written out to XML, then sucked back in again.
Here's the caveat: Easily.
Surely someones' got some tools for taking C code-style structs and turning them into an.XML file somewhere... but I'll be damned if I can find it. (libexpat is half-way there, but still a pain - writing handler functions for a parser is great and all, but...)
All this talk of the wonder of XML and the benefits of using it as a store methodology is great and everything, but the 'ease-of-use' factor isn't really there with XML, as promised.
In the end, if you want to use XML programmatically, it's still just as much of a pain in the ass to use as if you were writing good-ol' C fread/fwrite-style save-/load-to-disk functions. The only difference is, with XML you get to read the results a little easier than raw binary structs written to disk.
If I'm clueless about these things please feel free to beat me with a stick. It's just that libexpat and the like are a *lot* of overhead for someone who just wants to be able to save and load data structures into an.xml file...
I'll bet all the 15" displays have been removed from the warehouses because Hillary Rosen's crack team of technologists and lint-pickers have discovered that these sized displays are actually *perfect* for view movies on in proper aspect ratio, and thus are a violation of the DMCA.
Or maybe these screens are featured in the next Star Wars movie and Lucas' has had Jobs' over for dinner again to remind him about that whole 'clone wars' argument.
Oh, oh wait, I know... *TERRORISTS* are stockpiling them to make a Beowoulf out of the LCD controller chips in a canny attempt at foiling the FBI, who aren't sure about anything that doesn't run on the federally approved standard MS INtel chips.
Aliens? Okay, no, that's weak. How about Bill Clinton?!! I'm sure he has something to do with it...
Slashdot Mirror
Easy: test often.
...
...
Whenever a SEGV rears its ugly head, I can usually think back through the last 45 minutes of code I've written and see where changes I might've made could introduce the bug. Then I just put printf()'s where needed until its clear, and I'm off again...
This is why the mantra "Test Often" is a good one
Incidentally, I've run into similar problems with uClinux, though these days I try real hard not to make changes to my kernel
You idiot.
A terrorist is someone who kills by doing something that is *not* usual.
Saying a terrorist is 'usually' something is completely misunderstanding the nature of the problem.
This truck is scarey. It's an urban-assault vehicle intended for use in Western Democracies.
There is no other battlefield for it.
Been writing code since 1978, and the only debugging tool I've ever needed is:
printf();
Seriously, an over-reliance on debugging tools is something I've *definitely* seen come into this industry.
Bah. Chimps.
Goals... Plans... they're fantasies, they're part of a dream world... -- Wally Shawn
Just like Apple rumors.
You have to do it *every day* for a year, at exactly the same time.
So, you'd have to do something like this, every day:
1. Get up.
2. Wank.
3. Check clock.
4. At 10:41:32 am, take picture
5. Profit!!!
1. Invent Alu-beanie concept.
2. Wait for the Bush administrations to implement New World Order version 2.0
3. Patent Alu-beanie
4. Profit!
In Soviet Russia, they didn't have Alu on the free market, so they just used mud...
Its not possible.
iVideoPod would be a wankers dream.
Sheesh, its as if you guys have never even dreamt of pocket porn...
Duh. Have you not seen 3G phones in your neighborhood, capable of doing video?
...
....
iVideoPod would be a good place to put those recorded videos your girlfriend sent you on your v-phone while you were away in Iraq bombing nazi's^H^H^H^H^H^Hiraqi's^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsheep
And anyway, you're forgetting something very vital and extremely important here: pr0n.
I'd use my iVideoPod in the bathroom, mostly. Saves having to hunt around for a fresh Hustler, anyway
I think that the point is that there *will* be competition for an MS product, rather than MS getting there first and dominating.
The M$/TablePC issue has nothing to do with whether or not the TabletPC is a good idea - done well, it probably *is* a good idea.
It has everything to do with whether or not M$ get there first and prevent others from competing in this new market sector using underhanded techniques, that's all.
As, has been demonstrated, they are prone to doing...
Hi.
/. world why, in my book, Apple can do no wrong (for now).
/. mods do by now, so I'll light one up and let 'er rip.
... and it's /portable/, too, no way!?]
.Net... but man, in the shops I worked in during the late 80's and 90's if you had Ethernet to the local microwave link (56k) to the computer room across town, holy shit. *That* was performance.
... hey, maybe MS' bugs were a *positive* thing for them and their slick hardware bed-partners, eh?
... shudder ... need to get things working under Win32/CYGWIN. I can barely tolerate a 'make' in that universe on *good* hardware anyway...).
...
...
...
...)
...
...
... other ... 'operating systems'. I believe you can actually *get* to Java in OSX, heh heh ...
.Net, etc.
/other/ reason I can see for getting a decent PC these days, and it is a bad one. IMHO.]
I've decided I don't rant nearly often enough about shit like this and for some reason your post has set me off, so I'm gonna pitch in here and tell the
I am not someone who cares what
Here goes:
My 500mhz tibook ('chipped', incidentally, from a 400mhz one, quite happily) gives me *plenty* of bang for the buck and for me: IT IS THE PERFECT COMPUTER (almost).
Why? A few good reasons:
- 1Gig of RAM [this is !pure sex! to old-timers, lemme tell you
- Case design is *PHAT* and groovy, and goes extremely well with my perspex furniture, next to my 19" rack here in the living room...
- The display just can't be beat. I'm yet to be as impressed with a laptop display as I was with the one on the tiBook when I first saw it up close and personal...
- OSX
But now, really, the *ONLY* reason worth arguing about and in this case the tiBook truly shines for me:
- Productivity
Now, I am really, really productive on this box.
About as productive as I, personally, could ever be without getting some sort of scarey Rael'ian upgrade.
I should say that I'm not a 'typical' user, though I don't think there is such a thing actually.
I'm a (mostly C+Unix, still, after all these years) programmer, since - essentially - '79.
Well, I started using Unix and mostly hacking around then, anyway, but even still the line at that time between programmer/user was always pretty blurry.
During the 80's and 90's my platform-of-choice was always whatever unix-box was available. These were computers: so well made they could do more than one thing at a time, inherently.
Performance back then, at least in my personal sphere, was often expressed in terms of *modem* speed. CPU speed? Well, that was already being measured and appropriated out of our direct control, as it is about to become, yawn, with
As a programmer, I've always had the notion of running my code on distant computers.
CPU-speed was something for the *ADMINS* to worry about, based on user-demand, not me. As long as my code ran as well as it possibly could, and did the job, that was just fine.
Coder vs. Admin vs. User. In that order.
It seems to me, then, that the more you get involved in administering a box, the more you fret about its performance and get sucked into the upgrade loop
On the other hand, it's always sweet as a coder to work out how to make things run faster without needing *any* new hardware... That's the best possible result from the above equation, in my opinion... (API's that imply that this can still happen always get my vote!)
And anyway, no matter what you do, there's *always* a way to make code run faster and better without needing hardware upgrades... at least from my perspective.
Getting back to my rant-topic, with the tiBook I am extremely productive, and extraordinarily content as a computer programmer and user.
With my tiBook I can quite happily replace a small network of PC's I used to use for development with 4 VirtualPC sessions instead, each running its own particular PC-based OS (mostly BSD and Linux for me, but I have a Windows image around if I ever
Admittedly, these were ancient PC's (Pentium-I and -II class), but nevertheless they were, in spite of their hardware specs, being used productively in my computer room, and they're even virtually productive 'now' in VPC land.
(Not to mention that - when needed - I can *really* push my apps into the free space that 1GIG provides: portably. Whoa. Did I mention 'pure sex'? 64k was sexy, 1GIG is out of control)
So yeah, I guess I'm moderately old-school, computer-wise but for some reason this results in me feeling honestly that OSX is a dream to code for, from inside to out, top to bottom. It is the apex of a loooong - in computer-market terms - computing history.
I honestly do *not* want to get caught up in the horrid trap that is Windows: here's a strange thought - computer hardware should be getting *faster* as code is better and better tuned as it ages, not slower!!! It's the API's, dummy! The API's are Microsofts' hamster-wheel - they'll *never* get faster, only slower!
As someone who first cut their teeth in Windows hacking with the *first beta* of Microsoft Virtual C (not C++) for Windows3.1 (Pre-WFW 3.11) and subsequently ran screaming in terror back to his MIPS/RISCOS login until Borland came along, I think you can get the point about OSX being nice to code for
Speaking of that lovely MIPS login and all it offered to my personal working/coding (and thus, computing) 'heritage', I suppose I should admit that my 'personal hardware' history leading up to tiBook glory is a little off-beat. I guess it goes something like this:
-- Apple II - okay, hands up who *didn't* grow up trying to convince their folks to buy them one of these when they came out? That would have been me, but only because I spent *all* my free time in the Computerland Apple store, hacking away. I didn't *NEED* to buy it, what I needed to do was quit school and make enough money to own my own computer, fast! Heh heh... then Dad bought me:
-- Oric-1 + Modem. First personal computer, mostly a terminal, but it could play games and run a plotter. That was neat. With this, I discovered Unix at a lovely 300 baud, and thus C
Oh boy. I didn't *need* to own the computer in order to use it... oh boy, oh boy, oh boy
Skip forward 5 or so years to '87/'88:
-- MIPS R3230, across the room but accessible when I needed to load a tape. I had a couple shit 286's running Desqview, which was my first 'sniff' at PC-land... but they only ever ran telnet to that box.
-- MIPS Magnum Pizza-box (first 'desktop' computer, and by that I mean it was on my desktop rather than sitting in the computer room next to the other MIPS, WANG, and Tandem systems I worked on, where, actually, it belonged. To have it on my desk was the only way to guarantee nobody else bigger than me would use it, sort of
(I should note that during the MIPS-era I'd lusted after a Next Cube, 5 weeks before it was announced by Steve, publicly. Somehow the MIPS guys had details on it, and boy did I want it. (Mostly as a *TERMINAL*, but I had designs on that DSP... a *TERMINAL* with a DSP! WAY COOL!!) I'd heard that NextStep was sweet (later found this to be true with NS4/Intel) but alas the box was just too expensive for me to justify it to the bosses as a 'new terminal', so I missed out on that one. It hurt to see Next die, but it was well-deserved.)
-- AST 486 running something horrid. I think it was early versions of SCO Unix. That was a nice thing to see on cheap PC's, but I remember it had weird int's. I mostly did filesystem work then, and I *HATED* the test disks from this box for their endian'ness! If you can't guess why, I'll tell you: I never had the SOURCE!
-- Then I dl'ed this thing called Linux in '93 from some fast server in Finland, and got it running on whatever PC-hardware was around. At this point in time, I still didn't care much for PC hardware: I don't care what anyone says, the *mentality* of an 8-bit design is still there... but somehow, Linux made it better.
I became a PC user and Windows developer during the darkness that was the 90's, mostly due to client requirements, but I gave up soon after Windows 98. Microsoft can eat shit: I'm not working to make them bigger and greedier any longer, no matter *what* they try to offer me. It's a trap, programmers!
However, around '94/'95, there was hope for my personal computing needs, such as they were (Ethernet to something fast was always more important than my desktop system, though, as a coder...)
-- SGI Boxen, too many to mention, mostly Indigo2/Indy class though. I decided I couldn't afford an Octane, and O2 was too close to PC territory and then, a few months later, that Windows NT-ONLY workstation scared me off SGI for good... FOR SHAME! I thought there was hope for SGI when I saw that laptop in the tornado movie, but godamn it was only a prop and not even a very good one at that. Too bad, but it set the fires a-burnin' that would only later be put out by my tiBook
-- For general-purpose hacking and coder-chops (its important!) I scrounged and got myself a BeBox. This was a *fantastic* hacking box. Man, what a great idea. Unix-ish'isms, a promising GUI, and a tight new kernel. Hey, even the filesystem was groovy: AND IT HAS MIDI!!! Yay!
Damn, did I pick a loser. Oh well, at least I'd avoided Amiga!
-- So, for production (that is what we're talking about here) at this point I had to switch to PC laptops running Linux. Oh, the pain, the agony, after so many beautiful years of avoiding Intel... still, we had some good times, me and Linux and I loved her from the start (still do, deeply!), until the golden era began:
-- tiBook running OSX.
And now, here we are.
In my opinion, Apple is a computer company that has survived for so long and is now, even still, worth supporting. Maybe IBM too. I conside their Linux work to be amends, though.
Steve is back at Apple and he has delivered on his promise:
OSX. PowerPC. Totally Portable.
You can groove in BSD-land with you-name-it shell, mix and match even, or play nice and cool in Cocoa-land with Objective-C
Hack away at pure C with the tried and true (POSIX), or do fancy-schmancy graphics tomfoolery with PDF-based widgets and glorious things like Aqua. With what is, frankly, a pretty fresh API for a GUI - oddly enough it also feels well proven, actually, I'd say. Maybe there's some OpenGL mojo in there, too.
Oh, I forgot to mention Java (I don't do Java), but hey: I've heard tiBooks are *primo* Java hacking boxes, and the JDK integration in OSX is smoovier and far less S&M'ish to
MySQL. Linux-friendly. fink. gcc. gcc *3.1*.
A 'Media hub', and then iSome... Watch -or- burn DVD's (so sci-fi!).
All of this: WHILE SITTING UNDER A TREE!
Plus, no matter how far I travel (and I've travelled far) I am yet to see any other laptop *function* as well in tems of pure hardware design. It's aged, but its aged well and it has actually survived our journeys together.
Every other laptop I've ever owned would have been completely grungy and getto by now - however, this tibook has somehow managed to maintain its shine and lustre thorugh an almost complete circumnavigation of the planet.
Okay so its 'aged beauty' might have something to do with the fact that I've *actually* replaced my own keyboard, case and hard drive (not to mention the aforementioned chippin' for speed) - but how many times can you say you've done *THAT* with a PC notebook? (see www.pbparts.com for starters, a link *all* tiBookers should appreciate and use well, as I have...)
Development-wise, I've never *EVER* had to be worried about processor speeds. Whatever flavour chip is available, I've always been able to run my code *plenty* fast.
Performance != Productivity.
CPU speeds are irrelevant now. They have gone past the point where human perception really matters - and not only that, parallelism technologies are on the rapid track (Internet++) to putting us all where we can just *rent* extra CPU time where its needed: on computational backends like the terribly-late
Arguing, or actually, getting caught up in arguments about CPU speeds is a dead giveaway that the person doing the arguing is someone who simply isn't using their computer productively enough, and thus they have time to notice... which as a phenomena, is oddly enough, also observable in someone with a 'slow' computer...
The tiBook is the perfect computer. Look at its heritage. You cannot argue with its heritage.
Okay. I think I've said enough about this. I now return to a state of torpor. Thank you for reading.
[Incidentally, I'd happily trade a mint vintage BeBox for a vintage ~mint NS Cube, if anyones interested... oh, and yah, before anyone starts, I know that "Productivity != Games", which is the only
... sounds an awful lot like an LCD screen to me, which'd be prior art.
What's special about their patent? Are the surfaces non-planar or some such thing?
Damn, we've finally invented a network where one protocol can *actually* consume another protocol.
... Sci-fi cyberpunk fantasies will never quite sound the same..
Gotta read these RFC's
... a few years back during a LAAAATE night hacking session on a device driver for some hardware, I decided I'd had enough and needed to do something fun.
... and I got a few odd looks from a co-worker as I cleaned up, chuckling to myself, but hey...
I unglued myself from the swetty membrane that had formed between the edges of my ass and the chair, delved deep into foggy memory banks for details on how to move my arms and legs, got up and robo'ed to the kitchen with curled fingers to make pasta. It was a LOOONG code session, damn.
Halfway back, I got the idea to use noodles to connect the device I was working on to my PC, just for fun. Easy enough to do: the serial line from my debugger to the outboard gear was just three wires.
Some avid hacking with duct-tape, judicious use of PCB-posts, and 10 minutes later, I had things working!! I could talk to my device over the soggy noodle!
So funny, sending commands over pasta!
Okay, I went home after that. It didn't work so well the next day, when the pasta had dried up and stuck to the edges of the PCB
Microsoft: We Invented the Shell in 2003.
Hey man, back off on C.
In fact, it's totally disgusting of you to cast mud upon...
Is it just me, or are Indian techie bitchslaps just far more impressive, linguistically...
... I can say that I'd use it, if it meant I could take my OSX apps and - relatively easily - move them to Linux-land...
Of course, audio API's are a different story.
First of all, I'm sickened by the responses.
/. readers?
... and I settled in the digital musical instrument industry, for which I'm quite qualified to work in, as well as extremely interested. I'm lucky to work in this business now - having founded my fair share of big Internet companies in the 90's, I'm glad to be out of that field and working in one I like ... a lot.
As a lifetime entrepreneur myself, I think this is actually an interesting article on slashdot - what *are* the new technology markets, in the opinion of
And don't say 'Portman dolls' or "land grabs in the Soviet Union"!
I personally asked this question myself (of myself) a few years ago and decided that one way to approach it is to look at any computer technology market in which Microsoft has not established a foothold
Microsoft don't have a synthesizer on the market (shudder), yet this industry (in which I work) is still very fresh and new, and expanding yearly.
Traditionally, musical-instrument manufacturing and design has been pretty resilient to the types of techniques that MS uses to dominate - well, what about doing something cool in this market?
Why this "MS"-slant to my evaluation? Well, since I practically grew up in the industry (wrote my first code at 8 years old back in '78), I've watched the MS juggernaut make its way, and I get a feeling that any tech industry in which MS *doesnt* have a presence, or intention, is a growth market. Thus, its ripe for entrepreneurs... by the time MS gets to it, it's usually fairly well established.
There's a lot of room for improvement in this industry right now.
You might also want to have a look at other markets along similar lines. I know, for example, that there's a fairly good potential for automated agriculture systems right now - agricultural markets are looking to get very high tech in the growth processes - maybe there's a way you can apply computer skills to these markets?
Embedded Linux systems monitoring and maintaining massive hydroponic farms efficiently and productively? Why not? If the product is good, it could sell very well - especially in foreign markets. (Don't mention the Netherlands, heh heh...)
In summary, what I would do is look at markets that are *not* being reviewed by the ever-hungry eyes and mouths of big corporations, yet which still traditionally generate income and revenue, and see if there is something in there you can apply your entrepreneurial skills.
Good luck, and remember: successful entrepreneurs are usually the ones who work hard in a field in which they are intensely personally interested.
Keep that in mind!
Entrepreneurs are nothing but smart people who have the desire to do well for themselves.
Nothing in this article suggests that the poster is *not* this.
Fact is, anyone who ever had an inkling to start out on their own is an entrepreneur. Anyone who decides to stop working for 'the man' and actually tackle a new market, or try something new and exciting in face of the adversity - well, that's entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is not an elite club.
I'm sick up and fed of all these yuppy elite entrepreneur scum who think they're so godamned wonderful because they had some good idea
It may be cheesy and sophomoric, but it works.
He is a fuckin' ratfink. Actually, I think the word 'fink' needs to be broadly applied to all of America's current ruling aristocracy.
What I need (as a C programmer) is a way of getting all the data structures in my program written out to XML, then sucked back in again.
.XML file somewhere ... but I'll be damned if I can find it. (libexpat is half-way there, but still a pain - writing handler functions for a parser is great and all, but ...)
.xml file ...
Here's the caveat: Easily.
Surely someones' got some tools for taking C code-style structs and turning them into an
All this talk of the wonder of XML and the benefits of using it as a store methodology is great and everything, but the 'ease-of-use' factor isn't really there with XML, as promised.
In the end, if you want to use XML programmatically, it's still just as much of a pain in the ass to use as if you were writing good-ol' C fread/fwrite-style save-/load-to-disk functions. The only difference is, with XML you get to read the results a little easier than raw binary structs written to disk.
If I'm clueless about these things please feel free to beat me with a stick. It's just that libexpat and the like are a *lot* of overhead for someone who just wants to be able to save and load data structures into an
I'll bet all the 15" displays have been removed from the warehouses because Hillary Rosen's crack team of technologists and lint-pickers have discovered that these sized displays are actually *perfect* for view movies on in proper aspect ratio, and thus are a violation of the DMCA.
... *TERRORISTS* are stockpiling them to make a Beowoulf out of the LCD controller chips in a canny attempt at foiling the FBI, who aren't sure about anything that doesn't run on the federally approved standard MS INtel chips.
...
Or maybe these screens are featured in the next Star Wars movie and Lucas' has had Jobs' over for dinner again to remind him about that whole 'clone wars' argument.
Oh, oh wait, I know
Aliens? Okay, no, that's weak. How about Bill Clinton?!! I'm sure he has something to do with it
Bill Gates doesn't do anything cool.
/. reader, he must be told.
As he is an active
We dont have any problem with MS, yet ...
As long as there is rock and roll, we're okay.
No question about it in my mind.
...
MS love Developers like Bush likes an ass-whoopin'