So don't assume it'll be a cake walk with credit cards.
Bingo. I own a small consulting corporation and we handle software registration (using a policy we call serviceware; something like shareware meets open source) using PayPal. It is far better to use something like PayPal than doing regular CC processing ourselves. We simply don't have the kind of registration volume that makes a merchant account a resonable solution. And PayPal is still better than some specific services for shareware registration such as www.kagi.com.
Finally, for the customers, PayPal represents a service that is generally useful beyond our company. They don't have to enter in all their personal info again for our site. They don't have to trust us with their credit card numbers. From a merchant standpoint, you have to reach a certain level before it becomes a value proposition to move all those things in-house.
It would be a real shame to lose the most important piece of Transmeta's technology - the code morphing. Lower power was just a side benefit.
You know, I'd like to think geeks, especially Slashdot geeks, were beyond getting sucked in by marketing buzzwords. What today is called "code morphing" was last year called a "virtual machine" and in the last decade simply called an "emulator". Guess what; emulation sucks. If that was Transmeta's most import piece of technology, they really didn't bring anything new to the market and were doomed to failure from the word go.
Sure, that doesn't seem useful to someone running Windows applications, but think about how easy it would be to create specialized embedded devices. If you needed a processor with only 30 instructions, instead of the 4 billion provided by present-day CISC technology, you could create a pseudo-RISC layer on top of the chip and write software optimized for those procedures.
Or, call me crazy, you could just use an actual, existing RISC layer and do away with all the overhead of emulation.
I'll be very disappointed if, in 30 years I find myself thinking how it should've revolutionized the industry, but was instead forgotten about.
No doubt you expect Java to have some sort of lasting impact on the industry as well . . .
The low power consumption was nice for laptops, but they missed the real target. The code morphing would have made this a great chip for small enterprises with limited resources that need a sandbox that can emulate different platforms, or home users that want to run both PC and Mac. There was the potential to make a real dual-booting machine.
Any Mac user can already run PC software with VirtualPC and they don't even need to reboot.
Emulation is not unique, or even popular in most cases. If that was Transmeta's big innovation then they were doomed to begin with.
I dont believe it can be done. Not until we have real 3d displays with 3d input devices and probably not even then.
Just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it can't be done. In fact, we already have it in some ways. We have virtual window managers, which give us a sense of being able to move our "view" left/right/up/down. Overlapping windows are used to give the illusion of depth. So the logical progression from the desktop metaphor is to somewhat of a "space" metaphor with your screen being a particular view in space.
Why? Because most of those working with computers are working with information.
You're a bloody genius! I really want to hear about all the people who are using computers without using information.
Information is almost always most efficiently conveyed via text, sometimes with added images. Text and images are 2d. You spend most of your time working with a 2d environment, in either case. So where is the gain in 3d?
You're argument is as invalid as the "I'm working with text, so all I need is a command line" arguments of days past. If you really think that "efficient" information == text, you really don't work with information much. Manipulating information with depth, even the illusion of depth, can be extremely useful at times, just like multiple xterms can be useful at times.
not to mention the problem that 3d spatial awareness isnt exactly something that most people find easy
People who have problems working in three dimensions don't usually live long, so I don't think ignoring that part of the market will be a big deal.
When all is said and done, though, I mostly agree with you. 3D will be very hard to do right. I don't want to have to run down a hallway to a door labeled Slashdot, go in and walk up to a counter and look at a "menu" of recent articles and "order" the comments from. No thank you; I'll just click on my bookmark. In many ways, bringing that kind of VR mentality to the desktop is exactly the wrong way to introduce 3D.
". . . we would agree that the resulting composition of zeroes and ones would not convey ideas."
Conclusion:
Code == Free Speech
Compiled Code != Free Speech
This is a really interesting opinion for the court to give, and is behind the reasoning I used when I started the DataFetish site when the whole DeCSS issue got underway. When it gets right down to it, it gets tricky to say that a particular encoding (ASCII source) can in any way be considered free speech moreso than some other encoding (compiled binary) of the same "idea" on the computer. My take on it for the DataFetish site was to present documents with completely opaque encodings, so you just get back a bunch of ones and zeroes; meaningless without using a corresponding decoder.
The opinion seems to reasonably say that a binary sequence doesn't really represent anything unless it is decoded into something that can be considered protected. The double edge is that any binary sequence can be said to encode any kind of information; it's just a matter of the decoder having the proper algorithm to do the transformation. So (in theory:-) I could potentially have a copy of Windows XP up on the DataFetish site, it's just that you may not know which encoding I've used. If MS tries to circumvent the encoding to see if I have XP, they've gone and violated our old friend the DMCA. Ain't technology grand?:-)
It seems odd that someone would invent one system for themself, and a completely different one for all others... although this mess probably evolved, as mess does.
Probably evolved? There was no "all other" when everything began. I imagine a hopefully not too distant future when there is a colony on the moon and people there are bitching because they've been assigned the.moon TLD but we're still using.com down here instead of "planet codes". Look at it this way: there was already enough momentum for the existing TLDs when country codes came into the picture that essentially nobody switched; can you really expect anyone to switch now?
Lots of.co.uk companies think it is cool to be a.com! Depending on what you are looking for, you can be limited by adding.co.uk as a constraint - esp if bargain hunting.
You support my point. Geography matter for some things, but for the vast majority of things on the Internet, the content goes beyond a single country. Trying to assign that content to a single country is a huge mistake.
In fact, if you think about it, a limited company is a legal entity, so it must be tied to laws of at least one country.
Why? And even if that legal tangle exists, what does it have to do with the domain name of a company? If VA drops Slashdot and the crew moves to Zimbabwe, what do I care? Why should it suddenly become necessary to start using.slashdot.org.zw?
Slashdot is.us because of it's US biased content. The Onion is.us too, since at calls itself 'America's Finest News Source' (go there and look at the title bar of your browser yourself).
You're completely missing the point. Just because their origins are the US doesn't say jack about their audience/customers. I think it makes some sense for companies like Yahoo that provide localized content to have a presence within a country code, but I don't think it's a good idea to force sites like Slashdot, or anyone wanting to deal with an international audience, to be country specific. Don't you realize the absolute mess that will cause? You think domain disputes got ugly with just the highest level domains, and now you want to bring in country level disputes and open the can on international claims on country codes?
For a lot of things on the Internet, country codes simply don't make sense. They do help for some things, but let's not make the mistake of trying to jam everything into neat little country containers.
It's always annoyed me how the world seems to use country codes for it's TLD's, and then the US has some other TLDs that is just uses.
Bastards! What, do they think they invented the Internet or something?
For example, when shopping online I want to know if a company will ship to the UK. If it is a.co.uk company I can be sure it will. If it is a.com, it might or might not.
So why not just stick to.co.uk companies? How will using the.us TLD help you here, since it is quite possible for a company in the States to ship to the UK? Your real complaint seems to be that there are some companies using purportedly international domain like.com (although, really,.int is the OTID) without having a certain level of international support. Just as the new TLDs don't solve any real problems, increased usage of the.us TLD doesn't solve your real problem.
Essentially it seems logical for organisations to just register the TLDs for the countries in which they operate/are registered, and for the.com TLD to be scrapped (Although this would never happen).
And what is the "logical" solution to country neutral organizations? Should I really care where in the world Slashdot or The Onion is? You're taking outdated geographical notions and superimposing them on the Internet, which goes beyond illogical to simply unreasonable. There's more to the Internet than bloody shopping.
Interesting cultural generalisations, but email is incredibly popular in the US, and SMS is basically 'email in your pocket'.
Not really. The biggest hurdle from that actually being true is that email tends to suck on phones and even PDAs. The issue to most people is that it's a pain to compose messages without a full keyboard. I love being able to recieve a quick SMS page on my phone (always sent from a computer), but it's not anything I'll be using to reply with any time soon. It just doesn't make sense.
SMSs are often used when you simply can't talk on the phone - the classic example is school kids passing notes in class, but it's also useful in meetings and in nightclubs where it's too noisy to talk but you can text.
That simply won't fly because, well, people aren't that stupid in the States. Do you think that a teacher who sees Billy playing with his cell phone during class can't figure out what's going on? And if a meeting (or nightclub) is so loud and, more important, irrelevant that your time is better spent pounding out a text message with a crappy cell phone keypad, then you simply leave. Sorry, but I don't see any compelling reason we'll be seeing mass adoption of this for two way messaging in the States.
In the UK text messaging (SMS) is huge. Almost everyone over the age of 12 now has a phone, and teens are famous here for communicating mostly by SMS.
Don't neglect the cultural differences that will affect technology adoption. The States are, shall we say, a more "vocal" culture than either the UK or Japan. While teens there may shyly exchange notes so as not to disturb the authorities (parent/teachers/whatever), teen in the US openly challenge existing authorities directly (for better or worse). Marketing a painful series of 5 minutes of text messaging to replace a 5 second phone call, especially when you have a bloody phone sitting there in your hand, just isn't working here.
The instant messaging analogy is correct - people don't want to talk to other people all the time - why do you think that Post-It Notes became so popular?
A bad analogy; stickies simply replaced paper clip notes and had the advantage of attachment in context. Text chat clients, and text communication in general, are popular when the conversation doesn't need to be instantly interactive. Voice can be seen as a polling technology and text as interrupt driven. I call you because I have some immediate need to talk to you, and I'll leave a message if you're not there, but I don't want to be playing a lot of "telephone tag".
The expectation of text is different. I don't expect you to see it right away and I don't expect you to respond right away, nor do you expect me to expect anything else. But the tricky thing is, based on those expectations, the SMS solution isn't particularly necessary or even compelling (at least in the US). If you have the expectation of a response time of over an hour, why would I pay hundreds more just to painfully type in a response in minutes? Perhaps the nature of text messaging is changing such that people are expecting more immediate responses, but that doesn't explain why they'll put up with the clumsy text entry when a quick phone call is much easier.
Now WebTV and Mac, that are.5% and 1.5% of this website? They probably aren't worth spending resources on beyond testing on the Mac, but you have to evaluate your costs.
A couple things to keep in mind are that 1) it's not about the platform or even the browser, but the supported browser features, so it's not WebTV or the Mac that's really at issue, but what it is you want to put on your web site that available/popular browsers support, and 2) it's not just about losing customer you already have, but also about losing out on attracting new customers. I can't tell you the number of times I've been locked out by a web site and just decided to do business elsewhere. Don't let monitoring your logs influence your decisions too much because it could be a source of negative feedback; maybe WebTV users would be 90% of your business if you'd just support their desire to give you money instead of locking them out because they can't run some eye candy plug-in.
Perhaps you should read more about what the exobiologists are propsing.
Perhaps I should. Tell me, is one of the things they are proposing the possibility that this Martian bacteria is actually Earth bacteria that has made an interplanetary round trip? If they have some base theory that life can hibernate in space, doesn't that make carbon-based life on other planets even less interesting than before?
It is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't done enough chemistry (which I'm assuming, on little evidence, that you have not) just how unique carbon and water properties are.
Look, I can be pompous and idiotic too:
It is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't done enough physics (which I'm assuming, on little evidence, that you have not) just how universal Newton's laws are. From objects the size of a million suns to the atom, whether they're at rest or traveling billions of miles an hour, Newton's work has allowed us to predict, with an exactness, their behavior.
See how easy it is to act like a know-it-all and end up being a fool? That fact that you are so certain you are right is the surest indication that you are quite wrong.
To choose another, perhaps better, counterexample: We are quite certain that our Sun shines due to nuclear fusion. Is it foolish to assume that no other stars shine due to alternate processes? Once you know enough about the science involved, the essential nature of the processes in question become obvious.
Oh my, that was really funny! Very few things are actually "obvious" and scientists like Heisenberg have even stated that it's impossible to even know certain things. So feel free to think humans are ever-so-smart-and-clever, but the fact is we are the trailer trash of the galaxy, which is true even if there is no other life out there, and we don't know shit.
This is not to say that alternate biochemistries are impossible. Perhaps there is something exotic in the atmosphere of Jupiter, or even some sort of low-temperature activity on Pluto, but in the inner Solar System, water wins hands down.
It's easy to declare a winner if you don't allow anyone else to play the game.
Some scientists are now theorizing that life was thrown about amongst most of the bodies of the inner Solar System in the early days.
Perhaps some basic building blocks would have survived travel between planets, but I would hardly call such things life. Yes, one could assume that those blocks would build a similar base in whatever primordial ooze they found themselves, but if the real intent is to find life as you imply, the search should be broader than hunting for just water. Water is the hunt not for the purpose of finding alien life, though, but rather for the purpose of seeing if Mars could support human life without us having to lug a lot of water there ourselves; it's a completely reasonable and selfish goal.
At least the more recent idea of sister planets was closer to the truth.
Not really. While it's nice to think that life on planets near the Earth would be similar to life on Earth, I think that is as foolish as the earlier thinking that the atmosphere must be similar based on proximity. All we have learned is that life as we know it is not possible in the environments they provide. My point is that if we really want to find life, and not just some Star Trek notion of extraordinarily similar humanoid life, we need to stop making assumptions on what it should be.
It's impossible to eliminate really exotic biochemistries, but in the inner Solar System water-based life has an overwhelming advantage for many of the same reasons that life is also carbon based: those chemicals are unbelievably versatile, far more so than any other form of chemistry.
I can't help but think there must be intelligent aliens out there who sit around thinking that the element that is their chemical base is unbelievably versatile and who would eliminate the need for H2O as being an exotic biochemistry. Quite simply, life as we know it makes sense because it's all that we know. Finding more fossils of carbon-based water-dependent bacteria just isn't that interesting.
If it's using the Toshiba 1.8" drive, you're looking at a top end of 12MB/s, which means a about 50x the speed of USB.
The video on the Apple site only makes claims of 30x USB speeds and 10s/album (or roughly 6-8MB/s), so that's inline with what you'd expect.
(assuming it's the same drive that someone pointed out in another post, is listed for $400, without the mp3 playing ability, at smartdisk.com)
The LaCie site list a 30MB FireWire pocket drive of roughly the same physical size for $350, and one that is has twice as much storage as the iPod for $219. If storage is the main desire, there are better routes to go. To pay roughly $300 more simply to play mp3s seems a bit much.
Re:I'm buying one purely for the tiny firewire hd
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$370 for the 30GB
The LaCie site says it can actually be had for $350, so you're saying you're willing to pay roughly $50 more for 1/6th the storage because it has a slightly smaller form factor? I suppose it could be worth it for you, but I certainly won't be buying an iPod until it comes down to at least $299. And if I buy a firewire drive before that happens, I likely won't be buying an iPod at all. They really need to make it so it easily hooks into my car stereo, too, and/or my home audio system. As it sits, this is just a slightly advanced mp3 player, not something that's particularly amazing.
Learning where the water is is a necessary prerequisite to finding what life may still exist. If there is life still there, it will be close to water.
What makes you think that? Why does everyone see to think they know what "life" is? Such statements remind me of early speculation that Mars or even Venus could be "sister planets" to Earth that humans could live on if we could just reach them. Then we discovered that their atmospheres are, uh, less than hospitable. To believe that all life requires water is equally foolish. In fact, I'd say that when it comes to alien life and alien intelligence, it will be so alien when we first get exposed to it that we won't recognize it as either for the most part.
Re:That sound you hear...
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Hell, I don't even see it because it's up there in banner ad space, which is completely ignored when scanning the page for content. Like the banner ads themselves, I think it will prove to be essentially useless even if people don't turn it off.
I wish/. posters and moderators would just sit and think for a couple of minutes.. (I guess I shouldn't expect more from slashdot.) Try going for something that's actually insightful or interesting or informative instead of knee-jerk anti-Microsoft.
I love your bold "do as I say and not as I do" approach. Everyone else does happen to think they're posting some content, and they're wrong no more often than you are.
This can be brought back to the locked door argument that comes up over and over again. Just because someone's lock is faulty doesn't mean that it's okay to break into their home. Same with writing a virus.
You might have a point if burglary were called "residential terrorism", but it's not. Likewise, there is no need to couch old problems with the media buzzwords of today. By making everything seem like an act of terrorism, it's just one more way the true terrorists are eating away at the freedom in the world.
Whether it's industrial terrorism or not should depend on the intent of the person who released the virus, and whether or not they believed or intended it would attack an industry rather than just a specific person - which would be a more ordinary crime instead.
You're just barely missing the point. The so-called "industrial" crimes are label as such because they are simply crimes that are committed with corporations as both the victim and the perpetrator. If a lone nut is the perp, it's just the regular crime it always was (e.g., USPS guy going postal is not the same thing as a FedEx driver being told to spray the local mail station with gunfire). And that's to say nothing of the increasingly common, over-broad use of the word "terrorism". Viri are not inherently industrial in nature nor are they necessarily acts of terror.
The point isn't whether Apple should push upgradability, the point is that they actively went out of their way to prevent upgrades. Fine, if someone never upgrades their iMac, they don't upgrade it. But why intentionally take away that freedom from the customer? It doesn't hurt the ones who don't choose to exercise that freedom.
I encourage you to actually look at an iMac sometime. It's simply not a box built for hardware geeks! It's constructed around the monitor, damn it, and the bloody thing is just 15" at that! People that care about expandability get the G4 tower.
I agree that the iMac isn't intended for someone like me, but it's symptomatic of arrogance of the company.
Bwahahahaha! It's called absolutely nailing your target market. The iMac was a huge success. I can see how something like the would piss off an Apple hater like yourself.
Give me a quote: What did Sun say about Java that was flat-out untrue?
You don't get to make such demands when you yourself have failed to give any direct quotes of what you claim are Apple "lies". For every one you produce (that is actually a lie), I will produce a lie from another major technology company.
Apple is not "hyping" their products when they claim it's "twice as fast", they are lying about them.
Heh. Is that what sticks in your craw? As I recall, any claims they made likely had qualifying phrases around it like "up to" and "for certain tasks". That is called marketing, and is common with all technology companies publishing benchmark figures.
So if you're a minority company, it's OK to lie about your products and mislead your customers?
You are a total laugh riot. It seems as though "de facto" and "true" mean the same thing to you.
Put it this way, if Intel made claims that they were "twice as fast" as the G4 for one specific, useless benchmark but played it up like all applications were twice as fast, would you or other Mac people like you give them the same benefit? I highly doubt it.
What benefit? It was a silly (both in a good way and a bad way) campaign for Apple because anybody that really does care about raw speed is going to be influenced much by marketing. Hell, when I was evaluating notebooks some years back (when a 25MHz 486 was tops) for some pure number crunching tasks, I compiled both DOS and Mac versions to verify which one really was faster for what I wanted it to do. The PC did win, too, which is ultimately what got me involved in Linux. I'd run the same test again today if heavy number crunching mattered to me as much, but right now, for what I want to do, my 2x450 G4 running Mac OS X is just fine for my desktop, and my Linux server is still a smoothly running 300MHz Cyrix MII.
Also, Intel is perhaps a worse offender by releasing a next generation chip that is actually slower at the same clock speed than their own last generation chip simply so they could pull ahead in the MHz "benchmark". And do you expect me to come down on AMD for relabelling their chips with a higher number than their clock rate? Sorry to disappoint you, but I actually understand the point of marketing and the techniques used, so Apple and AMD (and Intel) can do anything they like to push their product because it doesn't influence my reality. Shame that it influences yours so much.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, I'm saying that very few software vendors would bother going through the hassle.
Hassle? I repeat: "with the sum total effort of the developer being a mouse click to enable that platform (just like when NeXT provided cross platform support)." It was so bloody easy to do that just about every NeXT app was released as a fat binary.
It would take years to get vendors to redistribute x86 binaries.
Untrue, for the most part. The roots of OS X are the x86 and the OPENSTEP OS from NeXT. That is why OS X users get a "new" browser like OmniWeb (and other Cocoa software) that is so polished; it's actually been around for years. From the Carbon side, I believe the bulk of that was pushed over to the x86 when Apple shipped QuickTime for Windows. In reality, if Apple wanted it, vendors are probably only 3-6 months away from x86 support, with the sum total effort of the developer being a mouse click to enable that platform (just like when NeXT provided cross platform support).
There are different levels of "locked in". If I buy a software package for the PC, I can . . . I can . . . I can . . . Apple, in the case of the iMac, intentionally made it difficult if not impossible to upgrade.
Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you're not the target market for the iMac? You also seem deeply fascinated with what you could do with your PC instead of what you will do with it. Mac users aren't like that for the most part. I mean, what reaction would you expect to get if you stood outside an Apple Store and started telling buyers things like "You know you wont be able to upgrade the video card in that!" and "You'll be stuck at 800MHz until you buy a new computer, you fool!" Thing is, odds are, you'll get the same strange looks you'd get from PC buyers outside a CompUSA telling them they could do those things.
But I have a Linux box that I use all day, in addition to my Win2K box, so it's more curiosity than something I can't do without.
Seems somewhat ironic that you need two PCs to get Unix and Windows together on your desk to accomplish what one Mac can get you, but I'm sure you paid less for both of them than a single Mac would have run you; not being "locked in" must be so great . . .
Ah yes, the ol' "well, everyone lies" argument. No, everyone DOES NOT flat out lie and mislead like Apple does. Can you find exaggerations by other computer companies? Sure. But not at the level of disinformation that Apple puts out.
Aw, you gotta be shittin' me! From Sun's Java hype to the XP and.Net hype of MS, to the users of dead operating systems like BeOS and Amiga who still seem to think they'll take over the world like they were promised. Face it, you have a bone to pick with Apple for whatever reason that isn't tied to an objective reality. That's fine; I have friends who are Applephobic, too. To think that Apple is in any way the only or even worst offender, though, is self-indulgence to feed that phobia.
And by the way, you will get no argument from me that many Linux advocates don't live in any kind of reality, either. But that's different from a company taking someone's money in unethical ways.
Apple is not "taking" anyone's money. They are not criminals; not the bad guys you'd like to believe they are. What they are is a minority company leveraging whatever advantage they can get to fight a company that isn't happy have "just" 95% of the market. Apple as Evil? I mean, really!
As the other poster said, I have never seen files of the same type with the wrong type code.
Maybe not what the OP meant, but I would classify no type code to be wrong. The use of extension association databases can also cause problems (e.g., some site feeds you foo.jpg which is really a GIF image).
If you drag a JPEG file to it, it will open normally. If you drag that JPEG to a program that doesn't support JPEG, you can't open it, instead of opening it and getting garbage as happens in this review. If you double-click on the file, the app that created it launches. Best of all worlds.
Then you live in a small world. User file actions need to be stored as user preferences, not directly on the file system. In my world, Eric creates his JPEG files with an application I don't have (say Photoshop), but I still want a double-click to open those files in my favorite viewer (say Preview). I also have certain JPEG files I want to have open in GraphicConverter, but nobody else on the network edits them with that. Metadata handling is definitely getting better, but it still is not happening at the user level and is thus a far cry away from being the best of all worlds.
The point is that you are locked in if you don't want to throw away your investment.
Uh, do I need to even point out that your statement is true for most anything? From your OS to your hardware to your car and house, you're "locked in" if you think of it as an investment.
Yeah, in a crappy, emulated environment. It's real convenient having to fire up the emulator. Why not just use the apps you want to use on a native hardware?
This from the guy who was just waxing on about investments? What matters is that you could evaluate the x86 offerings on a Mac before having to drop a wad on a new system right away. I'd say you're more locked into a PC because there is no VirtualPPC software to let you test out OS X.
Apple is a pack of liars when it comes to their advertising.
You say that as though they were the only ones. Everyone twists and turns whatever statistics they get their hands on for their own benefit. It happens in the Linux community, too, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
So don't assume it'll be a cake walk with credit cards.
Bingo. I own a small consulting corporation and we handle software registration (using a policy we call serviceware; something like shareware meets open source) using PayPal. It is far better to use something like PayPal than doing regular CC processing ourselves. We simply don't have the kind of registration volume that makes a merchant account a resonable solution. And PayPal is still better than some specific services for shareware registration such as www.kagi.com.
Finally, for the customers, PayPal represents a service that is generally useful beyond our company. They don't have to enter in all their personal info again for our site. They don't have to trust us with their credit card numbers. From a merchant standpoint, you have to reach a certain level before it becomes a value proposition to move all those things in-house.
It would be a real shame to lose the most important piece of Transmeta's technology - the code morphing. Lower power was just a side benefit.
You know, I'd like to think geeks, especially Slashdot geeks, were beyond getting sucked in by marketing buzzwords. What today is called "code morphing" was last year called a "virtual machine" and in the last decade simply called an "emulator". Guess what; emulation sucks. If that was Transmeta's most import piece of technology, they really didn't bring anything new to the market and were doomed to failure from the word go.
Sure, that doesn't seem useful to someone running Windows applications, but think about how easy it would be to create specialized embedded devices. If you needed a processor with only 30 instructions, instead of the 4 billion provided by present-day CISC technology, you could create a pseudo-RISC layer on top of the chip and write software optimized for those procedures.
Or, call me crazy, you could just use an actual, existing RISC layer and do away with all the overhead of emulation.
I'll be very disappointed if, in 30 years I find myself thinking how it should've revolutionized the industry, but was instead forgotten about.
No doubt you expect Java to have some sort of lasting impact on the industry as well . . .
The low power consumption was nice for laptops, but they missed the real target. The code morphing would have made this a great chip for small enterprises with limited resources that need a sandbox that can emulate different platforms, or home users that want to run both PC and Mac. There was the potential to make a real dual-booting machine.
Any Mac user can already run PC software with VirtualPC and they don't even need to reboot. Emulation is not unique, or even popular in most cases. If that was Transmeta's big innovation then they were doomed to begin with.
I dont believe it can be done. Not until we have real 3d displays with 3d input devices and probably not even then.
Just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it can't be done. In fact, we already have it in some ways. We have virtual window managers, which give us a sense of being able to move our "view" left/right/up/down. Overlapping windows are used to give the illusion of depth. So the logical progression from the desktop metaphor is to somewhat of a "space" metaphor with your screen being a particular view in space.
Why? Because most of those working with computers are working with information.
You're a bloody genius! I really want to hear about all the people who are using computers without using information.
Information is almost always most efficiently conveyed via text, sometimes with added images. Text and images are 2d. You spend most of your time working with a 2d environment, in either case. So where is the gain in 3d?
You're argument is as invalid as the "I'm working with text, so all I need is a command line" arguments of days past. If you really think that "efficient" information == text, you really don't work with information much. Manipulating information with depth, even the illusion of depth, can be extremely useful at times, just like multiple xterms can be useful at times.
not to mention the problem that 3d spatial awareness isnt exactly something that most people find easy
People who have problems working in three dimensions don't usually live long, so I don't think ignoring that part of the market will be a big deal.
When all is said and done, though, I mostly agree with you. 3D will be very hard to do right. I don't want to have to run down a hallway to a door labeled Slashdot, go in and walk up to a counter and look at a "menu" of recent articles and "order" the comments from. No thank you; I'll just click on my bookmark. In many ways, bringing that kind of VR mentality to the desktop is exactly the wrong way to introduce 3D.
". . . we would agree that the resulting composition of zeroes and ones would not convey ideas."
Conclusion:
Code == Free Speech
Compiled Code != Free Speech
This is a really interesting opinion for the court to give, and is behind the reasoning I used when I started the DataFetish site when the whole DeCSS issue got underway. When it gets right down to it, it gets tricky to say that a particular encoding (ASCII source) can in any way be considered free speech moreso than some other encoding (compiled binary) of the same "idea" on the computer. My take on it for the DataFetish site was to present documents with completely opaque encodings, so you just get back a bunch of ones and zeroes; meaningless without using a corresponding decoder.
The opinion seems to reasonably say that a binary sequence doesn't really represent anything unless it is decoded into something that can be considered protected. The double edge is that any binary sequence can be said to encode any kind of information; it's just a matter of the decoder having the proper algorithm to do the transformation. So (in theory :-) I could potentially have a copy of Windows XP up on the DataFetish site, it's just that you may not know which encoding I've used. If MS tries to circumvent the encoding to see if I have XP, they've gone and violated our old friend the DMCA. Ain't technology grand? :-)
It seems odd that someone would invent one system for themself, and a completely different one for all others... although this mess probably evolved, as mess does.
Probably evolved? There was no "all other" when everything began. I imagine a hopefully not too distant future when there is a colony on the moon and people there are bitching because they've been assigned the .moon TLD but we're still using .com down here instead of "planet codes". Look at it this way: there was already enough momentum for the existing TLDs when country codes came into the picture that essentially nobody switched; can you really expect anyone to switch now?
Lots of .co.uk companies think it is cool to be a .com! Depending on what you are looking for, you can be limited by adding .co.uk as a constraint - esp if bargain hunting.
You support my point. Geography matter for some things, but for the vast majority of things on the Internet, the content goes beyond a single country. Trying to assign that content to a single country is a huge mistake.
In fact, if you think about it, a limited company is a legal entity, so it must be tied to laws of at least one country.
Why? And even if that legal tangle exists, what does it have to do with the domain name of a company? If VA drops Slashdot and the crew moves to Zimbabwe, what do I care? Why should it suddenly become necessary to start using .slashdot.org.zw?
Slashdot is .us because of it's US biased content. The Onion is .us too, since at calls itself 'America's Finest News Source' (go there and look at the title bar of your browser yourself).
You're completely missing the point. Just because their origins are the US doesn't say jack about their audience/customers. I think it makes some sense for companies like Yahoo that provide localized content to have a presence within a country code, but I don't think it's a good idea to force sites like Slashdot, or anyone wanting to deal with an international audience, to be country specific. Don't you realize the absolute mess that will cause? You think domain disputes got ugly with just the highest level domains, and now you want to bring in country level disputes and open the can on international claims on country codes?
For a lot of things on the Internet, country codes simply don't make sense. They do help for some things, but let's not make the mistake of trying to jam everything into neat little country containers.
It's always annoyed me how the world seems to use country codes for it's TLD's, and then the US has some other TLDs that is just uses.
Bastards! What, do they think they invented the Internet or something?
For example, when shopping online I want to know if a company will ship to the UK. If it is a .co.uk company I can be sure it will. If it is a .com, it might or might not.
So why not just stick to .co.uk companies? How will using the .us TLD help you here, since it is quite possible for a company in the States to ship to the UK? Your real complaint seems to be that there are some companies using purportedly international domain like .com (although, really, .int is the OTID) without having a certain level of international support. Just as the new TLDs don't solve any real problems, increased usage of the .us TLD doesn't solve your real problem.
Essentially it seems logical for organisations to just register the TLDs for the countries in which they operate/are registered, and for the .com TLD to be scrapped (Although this would never happen).
And what is the "logical" solution to country neutral organizations? Should I really care where in the world Slashdot or The Onion is? You're taking outdated geographical notions and superimposing them on the Internet, which goes beyond illogical to simply unreasonable. There's more to the Internet than bloody shopping.
Interesting cultural generalisations, but email is incredibly popular in the US, and SMS is basically 'email in your pocket'.
Not really. The biggest hurdle from that actually being true is that email tends to suck on phones and even PDAs. The issue to most people is that it's a pain to compose messages without a full keyboard. I love being able to recieve a quick SMS page on my phone (always sent from a computer), but it's not anything I'll be using to reply with any time soon. It just doesn't make sense.
SMSs are often used when you simply can't talk on the phone - the classic example is school kids passing notes in class, but it's also useful in meetings and in nightclubs where it's too noisy to talk but you can text.
That simply won't fly because, well, people aren't that stupid in the States. Do you think that a teacher who sees Billy playing with his cell phone during class can't figure out what's going on? And if a meeting (or nightclub) is so loud and, more important, irrelevant that your time is better spent pounding out a text message with a crappy cell phone keypad, then you simply leave. Sorry, but I don't see any compelling reason we'll be seeing mass adoption of this for two way messaging in the States.
In the UK text messaging (SMS) is huge. Almost everyone over the age of 12 now has a phone, and teens are famous here for communicating mostly by SMS.
Don't neglect the cultural differences that will affect technology adoption. The States are, shall we say, a more "vocal" culture than either the UK or Japan. While teens there may shyly exchange notes so as not to disturb the authorities (parent/teachers/whatever), teen in the US openly challenge existing authorities directly (for better or worse). Marketing a painful series of 5 minutes of text messaging to replace a 5 second phone call, especially when you have a bloody phone sitting there in your hand, just isn't working here.
The instant messaging analogy is correct - people don't want to talk to other people all the time - why do you think that Post-It Notes became so popular?
A bad analogy; stickies simply replaced paper clip notes and had the advantage of attachment in context. Text chat clients, and text communication in general, are popular when the conversation doesn't need to be instantly interactive. Voice can be seen as a polling technology and text as interrupt driven. I call you because I have some immediate need to talk to you, and I'll leave a message if you're not there, but I don't want to be playing a lot of "telephone tag".
The expectation of text is different. I don't expect you to see it right away and I don't expect you to respond right away, nor do you expect me to expect anything else. But the tricky thing is, based on those expectations, the SMS solution isn't particularly necessary or even compelling (at least in the US). If you have the expectation of a response time of over an hour, why would I pay hundreds more just to painfully type in a response in minutes? Perhaps the nature of text messaging is changing such that people are expecting more immediate responses, but that doesn't explain why they'll put up with the clumsy text entry when a quick phone call is much easier.
Now WebTV and Mac, that are .5% and 1.5% of this website? They probably aren't worth spending resources on beyond testing on the Mac, but you have to evaluate your costs.
A couple things to keep in mind are that 1) it's not about the platform or even the browser, but the supported browser features, so it's not WebTV or the Mac that's really at issue, but what it is you want to put on your web site that available/popular browsers support, and 2) it's not just about losing customer you already have, but also about losing out on attracting new customers. I can't tell you the number of times I've been locked out by a web site and just decided to do business elsewhere. Don't let monitoring your logs influence your decisions too much because it could be a source of negative feedback; maybe WebTV users would be 90% of your business if you'd just support their desire to give you money instead of locking them out because they can't run some eye candy plug-in.
Perhaps you should read more about what the exobiologists are propsing.
Perhaps I should. Tell me, is one of the things they are proposing the possibility that this Martian bacteria is actually Earth bacteria that has made an interplanetary round trip? If they have some base theory that life can hibernate in space, doesn't that make carbon-based life on other planets even less interesting than before?
It is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't done enough chemistry (which I'm assuming, on little evidence, that you have not) just how unique carbon and water properties are.
Look, I can be pompous and idiotic too:
It is difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't done enough physics (which I'm assuming, on little evidence, that you have not) just how universal Newton's laws are. From objects the size of a million suns to the atom, whether they're at rest or traveling billions of miles an hour, Newton's work has allowed us to predict, with an exactness, their behavior.
See how easy it is to act like a know-it-all and end up being a fool? That fact that you are so certain you are right is the surest indication that you are quite wrong.
To choose another, perhaps better, counterexample: We are quite certain that our Sun shines due to nuclear fusion. Is it foolish to assume that no other stars shine due to alternate processes? Once you know enough about the science involved, the essential nature of the processes in question become obvious.
Oh my, that was really funny! Very few things are actually "obvious" and scientists like Heisenberg have even stated that it's impossible to even know certain things. So feel free to think humans are ever-so-smart-and-clever, but the fact is we are the trailer trash of the galaxy, which is true even if there is no other life out there, and we don't know shit.
This is not to say that alternate biochemistries are impossible. Perhaps there is something exotic in the atmosphere of Jupiter, or even some sort of low-temperature activity on Pluto, but in the inner Solar System, water wins hands down.
It's easy to declare a winner if you don't allow anyone else to play the game.
Some scientists are now theorizing that life was thrown about amongst most of the bodies of the inner Solar System in the early days.
Perhaps some basic building blocks would have survived travel between planets, but I would hardly call such things life. Yes, one could assume that those blocks would build a similar base in whatever primordial ooze they found themselves, but if the real intent is to find life as you imply, the search should be broader than hunting for just water. Water is the hunt not for the purpose of finding alien life, though, but rather for the purpose of seeing if Mars could support human life without us having to lug a lot of water there ourselves; it's a completely reasonable and selfish goal.
At least the more recent idea of sister planets was closer to the truth.
Not really. While it's nice to think that life on planets near the Earth would be similar to life on Earth, I think that is as foolish as the earlier thinking that the atmosphere must be similar based on proximity. All we have learned is that life as we know it is not possible in the environments they provide. My point is that if we really want to find life, and not just some Star Trek notion of extraordinarily similar humanoid life, we need to stop making assumptions on what it should be.
It's impossible to eliminate really exotic biochemistries, but in the inner Solar System water-based life has an overwhelming advantage for many of the same reasons that life is also carbon based: those chemicals are unbelievably versatile, far more so than any other form of chemistry.
I can't help but think there must be intelligent aliens out there who sit around thinking that the element that is their chemical base is unbelievably versatile and who would eliminate the need for H2O as being an exotic biochemistry. Quite simply, life as we know it makes sense because it's all that we know. Finding more fossils of carbon-based water-dependent bacteria just isn't that interesting.
If it's using the Toshiba 1.8" drive, you're looking at a top end of 12MB/s, which means a about 50x the speed of USB.
The video on the Apple site only makes claims of 30x USB speeds and 10s/album (or roughly 6-8MB/s), so that's inline with what you'd expect.
(assuming it's the same drive that someone pointed out in another post, is listed for $400, without the mp3 playing ability, at smartdisk.com)
The LaCie site list a 30MB FireWire pocket drive of roughly the same physical size for $350, and one that is has twice as much storage as the iPod for $219. If storage is the main desire, there are better routes to go. To pay roughly $300 more simply to play mp3s seems a bit much.
$370 for the 30GB
The LaCie site says it can actually be had for $350, so you're saying you're willing to pay roughly $50 more for 1/6th the storage because it has a slightly smaller form factor? I suppose it could be worth it for you, but I certainly won't be buying an iPod until it comes down to at least $299. And if I buy a firewire drive before that happens, I likely won't be buying an iPod at all. They really need to make it so it easily hooks into my car stereo, too, and/or my home audio system. As it sits, this is just a slightly advanced mp3 player, not something that's particularly amazing.
Learning where the water is is a necessary prerequisite to finding what life may still exist. If there is life still there, it will be close to water.
What makes you think that? Why does everyone see to think they know what "life" is? Such statements remind me of early speculation that Mars or even Venus could be "sister planets" to Earth that humans could live on if we could just reach them. Then we discovered that their atmospheres are, uh, less than hospitable. To believe that all life requires water is equally foolish. In fact, I'd say that when it comes to alien life and alien intelligence, it will be so alien when we first get exposed to it that we won't recognize it as either for the most part.
Hell, I don't even see it because it's up there in banner ad space, which is completely ignored when scanning the page for content. Like the banner ads themselves, I think it will prove to be essentially useless even if people don't turn it off.
I wish /. posters and moderators would just sit and think for a couple of minutes.. (I guess I shouldn't expect more from slashdot.) Try going for something that's actually insightful or interesting or informative instead of knee-jerk anti-Microsoft.
I love your bold "do as I say and not as I do" approach. Everyone else does happen to think they're posting some content, and they're wrong no more often than you are.
This can be brought back to the locked door argument that comes up over and over again. Just because someone's lock is faulty doesn't mean that it's okay to break into their home. Same with writing a virus.
You might have a point if burglary were called "residential terrorism", but it's not. Likewise, there is no need to couch old problems with the media buzzwords of today. By making everything seem like an act of terrorism, it's just one more way the true terrorists are eating away at the freedom in the world.
Whether it's industrial terrorism or not should depend on the intent of the person who released the virus, and whether or not they believed or intended it would attack an industry rather than just a specific person - which would be a more ordinary crime instead.
You're just barely missing the point. The so-called "industrial" crimes are label as such because they are simply crimes that are committed with corporations as both the victim and the perpetrator. If a lone nut is the perp, it's just the regular crime it always was (e.g., USPS guy going postal is not the same thing as a FedEx driver being told to spray the local mail station with gunfire). And that's to say nothing of the increasingly common, over-broad use of the word "terrorism". Viri are not inherently industrial in nature nor are they necessarily acts of terror.
The point isn't whether Apple should push upgradability, the point is that they actively went out of their way to prevent upgrades. Fine, if someone never upgrades their iMac, they don't upgrade it. But why intentionally take away that freedom from the customer? It doesn't hurt the ones who don't choose to exercise that freedom.
I encourage you to actually look at an iMac sometime. It's simply not a box built for hardware geeks! It's constructed around the monitor, damn it, and the bloody thing is just 15" at that! People that care about expandability get the G4 tower.
I agree that the iMac isn't intended for someone like me, but it's symptomatic of arrogance of the company.
Bwahahahaha! It's called absolutely nailing your target market. The iMac was a huge success. I can see how something like the would piss off an Apple hater like yourself.
Give me a quote: What did Sun say about Java that was flat-out untrue?
You don't get to make such demands when you yourself have failed to give any direct quotes of what you claim are Apple "lies". For every one you produce (that is actually a lie), I will produce a lie from another major technology company.
Apple is not "hyping" their products when they claim it's "twice as fast", they are lying about them.
Heh. Is that what sticks in your craw? As I recall, any claims they made likely had qualifying phrases around it like "up to" and "for certain tasks". That is called marketing, and is common with all technology companies publishing benchmark figures.
So if you're a minority company, it's OK to lie about your products and mislead your customers?
You are a total laugh riot. It seems as though "de facto" and "true" mean the same thing to you.
Put it this way, if Intel made claims that they were "twice as fast" as the G4 for one specific, useless benchmark but played it up like all applications were twice as fast, would you or other Mac people like you give them the same benefit? I highly doubt it.
What benefit? It was a silly (both in a good way and a bad way) campaign for Apple because anybody that really does care about raw speed is going to be influenced much by marketing. Hell, when I was evaluating notebooks some years back (when a 25MHz 486 was tops) for some pure number crunching tasks, I compiled both DOS and Mac versions to verify which one really was faster for what I wanted it to do. The PC did win, too, which is ultimately what got me involved in Linux. I'd run the same test again today if heavy number crunching mattered to me as much, but right now, for what I want to do, my 2x450 G4 running Mac OS X is just fine for my desktop, and my Linux server is still a smoothly running 300MHz Cyrix MII.
Also, Intel is perhaps a worse offender by releasing a next generation chip that is actually slower at the same clock speed than their own last generation chip simply so they could pull ahead in the MHz "benchmark". And do you expect me to come down on AMD for relabelling their chips with a higher number than their clock rate? Sorry to disappoint you, but I actually understand the point of marketing and the techniques used, so Apple and AMD (and Intel) can do anything they like to push their product because it doesn't influence my reality. Shame that it influences yours so much.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done, I'm saying that very few software vendors would bother going through the hassle.
Hassle? I repeat: "with the sum total effort of the developer being a mouse click to enable that platform (just like when NeXT provided cross platform support)." It was so bloody easy to do that just about every NeXT app was released as a fat binary.
Look, if I were to say I was CEO because some daft VC tossed $20 million my way, they'd put me away!
V'q ebg13 gung, ohg abobql'f tbvat gb ernq guvf qrrc.
It would take years to get vendors to redistribute x86 binaries.
Untrue, for the most part. The roots of OS X are the x86 and the OPENSTEP OS from NeXT. That is why OS X users get a "new" browser like OmniWeb (and other Cocoa software) that is so polished; it's actually been around for years. From the Carbon side, I believe the bulk of that was pushed over to the x86 when Apple shipped QuickTime for Windows. In reality, if Apple wanted it, vendors are probably only 3-6 months away from x86 support, with the sum total effort of the developer being a mouse click to enable that platform (just like when NeXT provided cross platform support).
(Without the space...grrr)
You know, if you were using OS X and had InstantLinks installed, you could easily open those broken, text URLs. No "grrr" necessary! :-)
There are different levels of "locked in". If I buy a software package for the PC, I can . . . I can . . . I can . . . Apple, in the case of the iMac, intentionally made it difficult if not impossible to upgrade.
Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you're not the target market for the iMac? You also seem deeply fascinated with what you could do with your PC instead of what you will do with it. Mac users aren't like that for the most part. I mean, what reaction would you expect to get if you stood outside an Apple Store and started telling buyers things like "You know you wont be able to upgrade the video card in that!" and "You'll be stuck at 800MHz until you buy a new computer, you fool!" Thing is, odds are, you'll get the same strange looks you'd get from PC buyers outside a CompUSA telling them they could do those things.But I have a Linux box that I use all day, in addition to my Win2K box, so it's more curiosity than something I can't do without.
Seems somewhat ironic that you need two PCs to get Unix and Windows together on your desk to accomplish what one Mac can get you, but I'm sure you paid less for both of them than a single Mac would have run you; not being "locked in" must be so great . . .
Ah yes, the ol' "well, everyone lies" argument. No, everyone DOES NOT flat out lie and mislead like Apple does. Can you find exaggerations by other computer companies? Sure. But not at the level of disinformation that Apple puts out.
Aw, you gotta be shittin' me! From Sun's Java hype to the XP and .Net hype of MS, to the users of dead operating systems like BeOS and Amiga who still seem to think they'll take over the world like they were promised. Face it, you have a bone to pick with Apple for whatever reason that isn't tied to an objective reality. That's fine; I have friends who are Applephobic, too. To think that Apple is in any way the only or even worst offender, though, is self-indulgence to feed that phobia.
And by the way, you will get no argument from me that many Linux advocates don't live in any kind of reality, either. But that's different from a company taking someone's money in unethical ways.
Apple is not "taking" anyone's money. They are not criminals; not the bad guys you'd like to believe they are. What they are is a minority company leveraging whatever advantage they can get to fight a company that isn't happy have "just" 95% of the market. Apple as Evil? I mean, really!
As the other poster said, I have never seen files of the same type with the wrong type code.
Maybe not what the OP meant, but I would classify no type code to be wrong. The use of extension association databases can also cause problems (e.g., some site feeds you foo.jpg which is really a GIF image).
If you drag a JPEG file to it, it will open normally. If you drag that JPEG to a program that doesn't support JPEG, you can't open it, instead of opening it and getting garbage as happens in this review. If you double-click on the file, the app that created it launches. Best of all worlds.
Then you live in a small world. User file actions need to be stored as user preferences, not directly on the file system. In my world, Eric creates his JPEG files with an application I don't have (say Photoshop), but I still want a double-click to open those files in my favorite viewer (say Preview). I also have certain JPEG files I want to have open in GraphicConverter, but nobody else on the network edits them with that. Metadata handling is definitely getting better, but it still is not happening at the user level and is thus a far cry away from being the best of all worlds.
The point is that you are locked in if you don't want to throw away your investment.
Uh, do I need to even point out that your statement is true for most anything? From your OS to your hardware to your car and house, you're "locked in" if you think of it as an investment.
Yeah, in a crappy, emulated environment. It's real convenient having to fire up the emulator. Why not just use the apps you want to use on a native hardware?
This from the guy who was just waxing on about investments? What matters is that you could evaluate the x86 offerings on a Mac before having to drop a wad on a new system right away. I'd say you're more locked into a PC because there is no VirtualPPC software to let you test out OS X.
Apple is a pack of liars when it comes to their advertising.
You say that as though they were the only ones. Everyone twists and turns whatever statistics they get their hands on for their own benefit. It happens in the Linux community, too, you know.