At home, I generally use Seinfeld names (my Linux server's always been Kramer, my wife's iMac is Elaine, my old 7200 is Jerry, and my Win98 PC is George - the lovable loser that he is). My iBook is named toiletseat, and my old PowerBook 3400 is named Beanie, for the propellerhead hat icon I used for the hard drive. My Mandrake workstation is named Bushwood, the country club from Caddyshack (my all-time favorite film, since I love low comedy and play a lot of golf).
At my old company, the servers had boring names, but the shares were all with a different theme for each server. We had Ren & Stimpy, the Simpsons, the Brady Bunch, and the Beatles (after the first four, we moved on to Beatle wives, first wives, Pete Best, and Stu Sutcliffe). We use boring names at the place I work now (don't blame me - we were using the scheme when I got here). We just name the server for it's task (Company-Mail, Company-Production, Company-File, etc).
Another thing at my old company - I had one of the cool (at the time) Mac Quadra 840AV systems, with the DSP chip for video and audio processing. Then I needed to give it up for our color department, but I kept the drive and put it in a slower Mac. The Mac was renamed Helen Keller, since it was both blind and deaf. From then until the day I left, That remained the name of whatever Mac I used.
I had the newer LASIK version of the surgery, where they cut a flap into the epithelial layer of your eye (only a few microns thick), lift it out of the way, and then lase the actual corneal tissue. This is generally more effective than the older PRK surgery, with a significantly faster recovery time, though more expensive. At the center I went to (New England Eye Center at Tufts/NEMC), they charged $1500 per eye for PRK, $2000 per for LASIK.
The actual procedure has been described in many other places in this thread, but here's my $.02:
From the moment they give you the Valium until you are done, it's about a half hour. The majority of the time is just waiting for the Valium to kick in. The actual procedure takes about 10 minutes, of which the majority is prep time. The keratome (the device that makes the incision) is only about a minute, and the laser generally fires for about 10 seconds. At the very end, you start to get a whiff of the tissue burned, which is a little weird. Recovery is nearly instantaneous, I was able to see out of each eye within about a half-hour (though I kept the plastic shield on each eye anyways). NEEC will generally try to do your two eyes about 2 weeks apart, starting with your non-dominant eye first in case they find that a further adjustment is needed. Follow-up appointments are frequent: I went in the day after each surgery, a week after, and then I went after a month, two months, and six months. I have one more follow-up appointment in early February (the surgeries were this past January).
Before, I had a -3.25 prescription (I'm not quite sure what it translates to), and now I have 20/15 vision in both eyes. No noticable side effects like haloing or anything like that - I don't seem to be any more sensitive to glare than I was before. If anything, I'm a hair farsighted now - it takes me a moment to shift focus from far to near (I can shift the other way as fast as ever). It's not a problem so much as something different I had to adjust to.
It wound up costing me about $3000, factoring in the flex savings plan I used and the $1000 I had to come up with out-of pocket. My company lets me advance my total flex contribution at any point during the year, and then takes it out of my paycheck tax-free throughout the year. So I was able to front-load it and get all the money in January, which was nice. I saved about $1000 in taxes that way and lowered the effective price from $4000 to $3000. If your employer has a flex plan, use it by all means. A handful of insurers may pay for it directly, in which case I wish I had worked for one of them when I did the surgery, but most insurers will not pay.
Beats the hell out of glasses, I can certainly say - though I do sometimes have the old "ghost reflex" of pushing the non-existent glasses up on my nose...
The first thing I did after the surgeries were complete was go out and buy a pair of the funkiest Oakley wraparounds I could find. Because I could!
I feel like we're on a death watch now, ever since the early '90s. The patient rallied briefly and was going to get a hardware transplant, but the doctors decided not to perform the surgery - now the patient is back on the death watch. Bummer.
It's not like excessive media attention hurts "Linux, the company". Linux is, fundamentally, an operating system that is built for the use and pleasure of those who develop it. For most of the developers, it's a hobby, and only a few (albeit a high-placed few) are paid to develop Linux. Most packages are built simply because a small group of people think it'd be useful to have software Foo, so they hack on Foo.
Even if Linux, the commercial proposition, died tomorrow, we'd still have a bunch of handy distros that are sold for the sake of convenience, but built for the love of the system.
Andrew Leonard has been pretty good at covering the movement, but the thing that he (and most others) tends to miss is that the traditional rules just don't apply to Linux. If they did, we wouldn't have gotten this far.
When the Patriots set a record for worst spanking in a Super Bowl, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When the ball went through Buckner's legs, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When Mike Dukakis got crushed in the '88 presidential election, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When our economy went in the tank in the early '90s, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When, in the midst of a boom, all our key local institutions (New England Telephone, Jordan Marsh, Digital, Shawmut bank, and many others) got gobbled by out-of-state companies, leaving us a corporate backwater, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When the Sox spit the bit again, to the hated Yankees, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
But the.commonwealth? Now I'm embarassed! Gawd, I wish I could pimp-slap whoever paid for that clunker!
For a better view of our fine state, try The Massholes page. Much more appropriate than some lame-ass marketing slogan...
I'll take it! But I won't share it with Rich... It can join Kramer, Bushwood, and my iBook in the Geek Room instead where I'll give it the respect it so richly deserves.
Rich is a pretty good programmer for a business dweeb - he does 4GL stuff well and he was a whiz on the Newton when it came out (he wrote a Sybase front end for it - it was cool). But I think that an Amiga might be beyond him a tad. - -Josh Turiel
You can stab it, shoot it, poison it, drown it, and let the platform wither with neglect, but IT JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
This isn't intended to be a troll (I really don't know the answer), but how much cool stuff was in Amiga anyways that we can't get out of today's operating systems? I know that Amiga was way ahead of it's time for 1985 (I, with my lowly Apple IIc, drooled with envy at my friend Ken's Amiga 1000), but wouldn't it be simpler at this point, technically speaking, to try and duplicate the Amiga's best features in Linux, BeOS, or MacOS X?
The original iMac (Rev. A) used an ATI RAGE IIc with 2 MB VRAM, expandable to 6. The Rev. B, C, and D (233, 266, 333 MHz - 266 was the beginning of "flavored" iMacs) all use the ATI RAGE Pro, with 6MB VRAM. All A-D iMacs are PCI-based. The Blue & White (Yosemite) G3 Macs use ATI RAGE Pro video, but run on a "special" 66 MHz PCI slot. The Wall Street and Lombard PowerBooks use the ATI RAGE Pro LT. Lombard may use AGP, I'm not sure. I know that Wall Street is PCI. iBook uses the RAGE Mobility video chipset - a tweaked version of the RAGE Pro LT that's supposed to be pin-compatible. It has 4 MB of VRAM (embedded), and the iBook uses a 2X AGP bus for video. Finally, the G4 macs all use the ATI RAGE 128 chipset on an AGP 2X bus.
The ATI RAGE 128-based cards are available as retail cards for the Yosemite G3 Macs, as well as for earlier G3 and PCI PowerMacs. But they're constrained by PCI.
Virtually all earlier PCI Macs (clones included) use the older ATI Mach64 chipset and it's cousins. The PowerBook 3400 and the original PowerBook G3 (also known as the 3500 or Kanga) use Cirrus Logic video chipsets, with no 3-D acceleration on board.
I do think that there's OpenGL support for the RAGE IIc and Mach64, but I'm not sure. It wouldn't be too fast, though, given the constraints of both PCI and the earlier ATI chipsets. Fortunately, the Rev. A iMac is the only one that sold in high volume, and it was only on the market for about 2 months (it was announced in May, but it wasn't available until August) before they up-revved it to the B and switched to the RAGE Pro.
Imagine the possibilities if it was used under NT or something where processes die an a regular basis... (naah - you'd need a body bag for all the dead admins)
On a more serious note, the idea of using a 3-D interface of some sort has been around for a long time. Using Doom (or any 1PS engine) as a front end is a fairly novel and potentially useful way to take advantage of 3-D for a limited set of tasks. I'm not sure how you'd -HUP a process (visually, that is), and there's other places the idea needs refining, but the idea is quite interesting.
I think you'd use Q3 to kill processes on someone else's machine, not your own, wouldn't you? After all, that's what "team play" is about, right?
Palm dominates now because they have ease-of-use, battery life, and a form factor that's much better than Microsoft's devices. Not because of color. I can see how color could be an enhancement to some aspects of the user experience (like, for instance, overdue to-do entries appearing in red), but the danger for Palm is that, although current small device color screens are pretty good, they are likely to require a larger form factor and burn more battery.
It all ties in to what a Palm is for "the average users". I, for one, use a Palm not because it has color - this didn't even enter into my thinking when I bought it. I use a Palm because it fits into a pocket, runs for a long time on a charge, and works with my Mac just as well as it works with my PC (except my Mac can't sync AvantGo yet). If color spoils either the size or battery life, I'll stick with my Palm III, thank you very much.
(or maybe I'll get one of those slick HandSprings - but I digress...)
After all the fuss (with virtually no official word from Apple, just rumors), Apple ends up doing even more than anybody hoped, and is honoring wholesale orders too - not just Apple Store orders. I guess we need to stop picking on them for a while.
When you look at it, Apple did what they cood with a bad processor availability situation, and used this as leverage with their chip vendors to resolve a fork in the architecture. Remember, Apple was getting G4 processors directly from Motorola only - IBM hadn't been planning to build AltiVec enabled chips. IBM was doing fine with copper-based G3 processors and the embedded stuff. Now IBM is on the AltiVec bandwagon, Apple will get a more stable supply, and six months from now nobody will remember the fab problems that triggered this in the first place.
Regardless, Linux is still Linux. The API's are the same, the system's resources and libraries are the same, and the file system is just about the same. There are a few differences here and there (mainly in things like library/kernel versions and install script methods), but it's not the issue it is on other Unix versions, and because of the Open Source model, it never will be.
There's incentive for most vendors to package their distro in a standard format (or at least support RPM installation), because they'll have off-the-shelf compatibility with the increasing number of applications available for the platform. Forking costs you the penalty of breaking that compatibility - now you've lost control of your commercial applications market. Where things get proprietary is in places like install procedures and/or bundled goodies (or sometimes in system management - like SuSE does), but once installed, Linux is Linux. All praise the penguin.
Sun almost Gets It, but not quite. They were founded on the premise of utilizing an open software platform, but (originally) on highly closed systems. Then they opened up the processor architecture, but held onto the software (which, by then, was a pretty funky Unix). Now, they agonize over whether or not to open up the crown jewels, but more as a reflex to the two latest driving factors in their business:
1: Hatred of Microsoft 2: Fear of Linux
You know, there's a lot of parallels between Apple and Sun when it comes to being control freaks at the corporate level if you think about it... Neither one is quite willing to give up those family jewels to the world, but they want desperately to reap the benefits of openness anyways.
And both companies come heart-breakingly close to Getting It, only to shy away. "Open" Solaris? Whoopee. Put it under a GPL-like or even a BSD license, now we're talking. Other than that, thanks for playing - you lose.
Apple actually did the Right Thing for once - be still my beating heart!
For all their neat hardware and unique software and "cool" consumer appeal, Apple has a long and distinguished history of doing things that really piss off customers (the 1988 price hike, the cancellation of Performa free tech support, the PowerPC upgrade fiascos, etc.) yet they miraculously retain goodwill despite that. It's fine if Apple wants to change the base configs in order to ship product (they actually added RAM to a couple of them in this action), but cancelling existing orders was pure foolishness. It's good they saw the error of their ways. Were I Jobs, I'd have changed the speeds on the base models, filled all the existing orders except the G4-500's, and then asked the customers for those if they wanted to wait or if they wanted a 450 with more RAM instead. That's the only fair thing to do. I'm glad Apple finally seems to have gotten it for once.
I'm growing more and more skeptical of analysis firms as time passes. It's easy to produce a piece of research stating whatever the analyst thinks anyways, by simply taking a few points of data and extrapolating it to the absurd extreme. Gartner and their ilk have produced reports that say Linux will, in fact dominate the marketplace, and reports that claim the opposite within short intervals of one another. My own choice is to believe none of the above.
Trend analysis doesn't generally account for some important factors, like goodwill (or lack thereof) towards vendors, or technical obstacles and breakthroughs that may happen in a development effort. They tend to assume that obstacles (like NT's code bloat or Linux's lack of high-quality SMP support) are insurmountable and that the technical status quo will remain indefinitely. This means that, by analysis standards, current trends will continue indefinitely. If some of the analysis I've read over recent years had worked out as anticipated, then:
1: Apple would be in Chapter 7 bankruptcy
2: Linux would either a: be non-existent b: have over a 50% market share
3: Novell would be out of business
4: Microsoft Windows NT would have nearly a 100% market share on servers and desktops, and
5: so would OS/2
6: Microsoft SQL Server would have killed off Oracle
7: We'd all have fully interactive TV sets now (shouting at your TV doesn't count - most of them don't answer).
I'm not trying to paint all analysis with the same brush, but I really don't see much good stuff from these companies.
Keeping a national museum of artifacts and items of historical interest is a far cry from subsidizing art. The former I have no problem with, as opposed to some of my more extreme libertarian compatriots. For instance, the National Archives, Smithsonian Institution (in fact, I'm a member of the Smithsonian), and Library of Congress don't bother me. Some of the political issues that come up with these institutions (like the recent war exhibit controversy at the Smithsonian) I have been annoyed by, but I don't question their existence or need. Where do I draw the line? In Josh's world, the Brooklyn Museum should not exist, at least not in a form that ever got subsidized rent and operating funds. If a private institution wanted to incorporate as the "Brooklyn Museum", rent space, and solicit funds, that's fine with me, and I have no objection to their right to exhibit whatever they wish.
But the Josh government I dream of is very severely limited in powers and scope, and only attends to matters of direct, national interest (preservation of historical items is in that category to me). States and cities should not be in the museum business, and none of the above should be in the art business. I like art, I buy art, I make my own value judgments on art. There are plenty of private venues for art (both for-profit and non-profit in nature), including art that I find distasteful. I'm not interested in paying for any of it with taxpayer funds, though I'm perfectly happy with the existence of it.
...but freedom entails the right for people to be stupid, closed-minded, and sheep-like. In other words, a person is, in fact, free to say or think what they want, but they aren't therefore protected by force from the consequences of their words and thoughts.
That may be foolish, and it may be wrong, but it's not censorship. It's society.
I, for one, don't think taxpayer money should pay for any art, regardless of content. Im I a censor? No. I'm not interested in viewpoints or content. I simply don't think government should subsidize any businesses. But what about the Internet, you ask? Wasn't that subsidized?
Well, the Internet was a defense research project. The bacic technology was invented under defense auspices. But it didn't become the pervasive entity it is today until it was turned over to the private sector.
Just remember, freedom includes a nearly unlimited right to foolishness.
This was covered in an earlier slashdot thread this summer. Faster USB is great. 12 MBits/sec is fast by serial port standards, but not fast enough for some of the things people want to use USB for (low-end video transfer, external mass storage, Ethernet, etc.). Despite that, there's a great mass market for Firewire, too. Here's why:
1: USB already has low-speed, misbehaved, "legacy" devices that need to be backwards compatible with the new spec. Firewire's legacy peripherals operate at 200 Mbits/sec. 'nuff said.
2: USB requires processor arbitration to run the bus. Firewire doesn't.
3: USB's design is specifically as a low-cost interface for PC peripherals. The hub-based design is a byproduct of this. Firewire is designed as a more general-purpose, device/device interface. Firewire can nicely connect consumer products to one another, no PC required.
However, USB has a higher "theoretical" maximum number of devices supported per controller, 127 (in USB 1.1), versus Firewire's 64. In practice, 64 Firewire devices is do-able, if silly. More than 4-5 USB devices (with a powered external hub) is pushing the limits. The only place where USB reaches the upper limits is at USB technology bake-offs.
I love USB (heck, it's in all my PC's and both my home Macs), and it's a great cross-platform standard for computer-oriented low-end to midrange peripherals. Firewire is better for high-end devices (prepress scanners, hard drives, video equipment, etc.), but it's a general-purpose interface, and that's why it will ultimately do well. The two interfaces are not, by any stretch of the imagination, mutually exclusive. Anybody who thinks that you can only use one either needs to buy a Mac to prove otherwise or board the cluetrain.
We've heard these updates before. How old is Opera by now, and since when have they been promining ports "real soon now"? It's a nice Windows browser, but the window of opportunity has slammed shut for them. In the time since Opera first started planning ports, Macs have gotten a version of IE that's actually not too bad (and fairly quick), Linux users are in the process of getting decent browsers with KDE and Gnome, and Mozilla is actually starting to finally grow up, and in public where everyone can see the progress.
In the early days when Netscape and Microsoft first started heading up the bloatware path, Opera had a nice market opportunity, but I think it's been squandered. Nobody's going to pay for a closed-source browser, however spiffy, when there's a reasonable selection of respectable open _and_ closed browsers, all of which are free. It's time the Opera folks started a new project.
I could see his point in a "general market" publication, but Jane's is a specialty publication aimed at a very detail-oriented crowd. Cyber warfare is not a subject that most people understand yet, so Jane's turned to an audience that was likely to have a lot of real experts, and submitted it for (essentially) peer review. Upon peer review, the paper did not stand up on it's own, so it was canned.
What's interesting here is Jane's response, publishing an article composed of the best and most insightful of the comments on the original paper. That's different. But the peer review concept is as old as the ages.
What we need to be aware of here, as well, is that by the standards of Jane's knowledge, even script kiddies are security experts. That's not a knock, it's just to point out that they aren't up to speed on this subject yet.
- -Josh Turiel
Re:Gee, why bother with cats?
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 2
J. Danforth got his name for a real obvious reason - he's unusually dumb, even by the highest dumb cat standard. Millie, on the other hand, got her name because, in the words of my wife, "she looks like a Millie". There was no White House connotation meant there, though both cats entered our lives during the Bush administration.
The Bush Millie was a Springer Spaniel. She died a year or two ago, if I recall. - -Josh Turiel
Gee, why bother with cats?
on
The Cat Cam
·
· Score: 2
I could have told them exactly what my cats see. They see food. And that's about it. Every once in a while my cat J. Danforth sees the little red dot from my laser pointer, which he is convinced is a small rodent, and my other cat Millie only sees food and places to sleep.
Right now, there's a generation of people who "understand" that you really have no privacy left in this society, and most of them are under 35 (they came of age during the PC era), give or take a few years. People growing up today don't really expect privacy, they're used to targeted junk mail, credit reports, demographic data being pulled up on them, and leaving a trail on the web. As these younger generations move into control over society gradually, the public attitudes that lead people like Rutt to delete as much of themselves as possible will change. Since everyone is transparent themselves, they won't be as inclined to look at a 10 year-old posting and cry "gotcha!" (the old "people in glass houses" thing, in the future, everyone will live in a glass house).
Today, though, I understand Rutt's impulse. I refuse on principle to delete my words from places - I try to think about what I say with the knowledge that it is permanent being a factor. I keep as much of my private self private as I can, and don't sweat the details. My drivers' license has a random number, I deliberately give wacky answers when required to give demographic info, fake phone numbers when possible, etc. I also vary my middle initial a lot to see who's renting my name out to other companies. Anybody who really wants to can find out anything they want to know about me, but I like throwing monkey wrenches in "the system" when I can just for fun...
So it's a shame that he deleted his postings, but understandable in this not-yet-enlightened era.
From what little I could decipher, it looks like their intent is to have a tool they can use to stop the Pez traders and speculators if they want (some of those folks can give the manufacturer a bad name by misrepresenting themselves or screwing customers) - and taking them off the web is a handy way to do so. But they are going about it in a brain-damaged way by trying to paint the whole web with this brush. Their policy also has the effect of (in theory) banning fan sites, legitimate dealers of Pez, reviewers, and news sites from mentioning the name. Trademarks can, AFAIK, be policed for appropriate usage, and precedent has been made on the issue of META tags (thanks to Playboy, if I recall), but Pez's policy goes overboard and would be likely to get smacked down in court.
When it comes to trademarks, I believe it goes something like this: Referring to Xerox as a copier company: OK Talking about "making xeroxes of that paper": BAD (Xerox is a trademark, not a term - the "correct" reference would be to "making copies") Putting "Xerox" as a META tag in your page: Gray area - but probably not OK Writing about Xerox (the company or the products)in your website: OK! Selling Xerox products over the web, by name: Probably OK, depending on your reseller agreement and if it allows Net sales by your company. Definitely OK if you have no agreement but have the products.
Substitute "Pez" for Xerox above and you're pretty close to an AUP for Pez as well (except it would sound weird to say "I'm going to go down and make some pezzes of this report", wouldn't it?)
I've got a feeling Pez is in for a bit of a Net spanking...
Slashdot Mirror
At home, I generally use Seinfeld names (my Linux server's always been Kramer, my wife's iMac is Elaine, my old 7200 is Jerry, and my Win98 PC is George - the lovable loser that he is). My iBook is named toiletseat, and my old PowerBook 3400 is named Beanie, for the propellerhead hat icon I used for the hard drive. My Mandrake workstation is named Bushwood, the country club from Caddyshack (my all-time favorite film, since I love low comedy and play a lot of golf).
At my old company, the servers had boring names, but the shares were all with a different theme for each server. We had Ren & Stimpy, the Simpsons, the Brady Bunch, and the Beatles (after the first four, we moved on to Beatle wives, first wives, Pete Best, and Stu Sutcliffe). We use boring names at the place I work now (don't blame me - we were using the scheme when I got here). We just name the server for it's task (Company-Mail, Company-Production, Company-File, etc).
Another thing at my old company - I had one of the cool (at the time) Mac Quadra 840AV systems, with the DSP chip for video and audio processing. Then I needed to give it up for our color department, but I kept the drive and put it in a slower Mac. The Mac was renamed Helen Keller, since it was both blind and deaf. From then until the day I left, That remained the name of whatever Mac I used.
- -Josh Turiel
I had the newer LASIK version of the surgery, where they cut a flap into the epithelial layer of your eye (only a few microns thick), lift it out of the way, and then lase the actual corneal tissue. This is generally more effective than the older PRK surgery, with a significantly faster recovery time, though more expensive. At the center I went to (New England Eye Center at Tufts/NEMC), they charged $1500 per eye for PRK, $2000 per for LASIK.
The actual procedure has been described in many other places in this thread, but here's my $.02:
From the moment they give you the Valium until you are done, it's about a half hour. The majority of the time is just waiting for the Valium to kick in. The actual procedure takes about 10 minutes, of which the majority is prep time. The keratome (the device that makes the incision) is only about a minute, and the laser generally fires for about 10 seconds. At the very end, you start to get a whiff of the tissue burned, which is a little weird. Recovery is nearly instantaneous, I was able to see out of each eye within about a half-hour (though I kept the plastic shield on each eye anyways). NEEC will generally try to do your two eyes about 2 weeks apart, starting with your non-dominant eye first in case they find that a further adjustment is needed. Follow-up appointments are frequent: I went in the day after each surgery, a week after, and then I went after a month, two months, and six months. I have one more follow-up appointment in early February (the surgeries were this past January).
Before, I had a -3.25 prescription (I'm not quite sure what it translates to), and now I have 20/15 vision in both eyes. No noticable side effects like haloing or anything like that - I don't seem to be any more sensitive to glare than I was before. If anything, I'm a hair farsighted now - it takes me a moment to shift focus from far to near (I can shift the other way as fast as ever). It's not a problem so much as something different I had to adjust to.
It wound up costing me about $3000, factoring in the flex savings plan I used and the $1000 I had to come up with out-of pocket. My company lets me advance my total flex contribution at any point during the year, and then takes it out of my paycheck tax-free throughout the year. So I was able to front-load it and get all the money in January, which was nice. I saved about $1000 in taxes that way and lowered the effective price from $4000 to $3000. If your employer has a flex plan, use it by all means. A handful of insurers may pay for it directly, in which case I wish I had worked for one of them when I did the surgery, but most insurers will not pay.
Beats the hell out of glasses, I can certainly say - though I do sometimes have the old "ghost reflex" of pushing the non-existent glasses up on my nose...
The first thing I did after the surgeries were complete was go out and buy a pair of the funkiest Oakley wraparounds I could find. Because I could!
- -Josh Turiel
"This just in: The Amiga is still dead."
I feel like we're on a death watch now, ever since the early '90s. The patient rallied briefly and was going to get a hardware transplant, but the doctors decided not to perform the surgery - now the patient is back on the death watch. Bummer.
- -Josh Turiel
It's not like excessive media attention hurts "Linux, the company". Linux is, fundamentally, an operating system that is built for the use and pleasure of those who develop it. For most of the developers, it's a hobby, and only a few (albeit a high-placed few) are paid to develop Linux. Most packages are built simply because a small group of people think it'd be useful to have software Foo, so they hack on Foo.
Even if Linux, the commercial proposition, died tomorrow, we'd still have a bunch of handy distros that are sold for the sake of convenience, but built for the love of the system.
Andrew Leonard has been pretty good at covering the movement, but the thing that he (and most others) tends to miss is that the traditional rules just don't apply to Linux. If they did, we wouldn't have gotten this far.
- -Josh Turiel
I've lived here since 1984, and that means:
.commonwealth? Now I'm embarassed! Gawd, I wish I could pimp-slap whoever paid for that clunker!
When the Patriots set a record for worst spanking in a Super Bowl, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When the ball went through Buckner's legs, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When Mike Dukakis got crushed in the '88 presidential election, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When our economy went in the tank in the early '90s, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When, in the midst of a boom, all our key local institutions (New England Telephone, Jordan Marsh, Digital, Shawmut bank, and many others) got gobbled by out-of-state companies, leaving us a corporate backwater, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
When the Sox spit the bit again, to the hated Yankees, I wasn't embarassed to say "I'm from Massachusetts".
But the
For a better view of our fine state, try The Massholes page. Much more appropriate than some lame-ass marketing slogan...
- -Josh Turiel
My goof. I thought it was Rage Pro. I'm sure I've got the PCI-66 part right, though.
- -Josh Turiel
I'll take it! But I won't share it with Rich... It can join Kramer, Bushwood, and my iBook in the Geek Room instead where I'll give it the respect it so richly deserves.
Rich is a pretty good programmer for a business dweeb - he does 4GL stuff well and he was a whiz on the Newton when it came out (he wrote a Sybase front end for it - it was cool). But I think that an Amiga might be beyond him a tad.
- -Josh Turiel
You can stab it, shoot it, poison it, drown it, and let the platform wither with neglect, but IT JUST WON'T DIE!!!!
This isn't intended to be a troll (I really don't know the answer), but how much cool stuff was in Amiga anyways that we can't get out of today's operating systems? I know that Amiga was way ahead of it's time for 1985 (I, with my lowly Apple IIc, drooled with envy at my friend Ken's Amiga 1000), but wouldn't it be simpler at this point, technically speaking, to try and duplicate the Amiga's best features in Linux, BeOS, or MacOS X?
- -Josh Turiel
The state of Mac video cards right now is:
The original iMac (Rev. A) used an ATI RAGE IIc with 2 MB VRAM, expandable to 6.
The Rev. B, C, and D (233, 266, 333 MHz - 266 was the beginning of "flavored" iMacs) all use the ATI RAGE Pro, with 6MB VRAM. All A-D iMacs are PCI-based.
The Blue & White (Yosemite) G3 Macs use ATI RAGE Pro video, but run on a "special" 66 MHz PCI slot.
The Wall Street and Lombard PowerBooks use the ATI RAGE Pro LT. Lombard may use AGP, I'm not sure. I know that Wall Street is PCI.
iBook uses the RAGE Mobility video chipset - a tweaked version of the RAGE Pro LT that's supposed to be pin-compatible. It has 4 MB of VRAM (embedded), and the iBook uses a 2X AGP bus for video.
Finally, the G4 macs all use the ATI RAGE 128 chipset on an AGP 2X bus.
The ATI RAGE 128-based cards are available as retail cards for the Yosemite G3 Macs, as well as for earlier G3 and PCI PowerMacs. But they're constrained by PCI.
Virtually all earlier PCI Macs (clones included) use the older ATI Mach64 chipset and it's cousins. The PowerBook 3400 and the original PowerBook G3 (also known as the 3500 or Kanga) use Cirrus Logic video chipsets, with no 3-D acceleration on board.
I do think that there's OpenGL support for the RAGE IIc and Mach64, but I'm not sure. It wouldn't be too fast, though, given the constraints of both PCI and the earlier ATI chipsets. Fortunately, the Rev. A iMac is the only one that sold in high volume, and it was only on the market for about 2 months (it was announced in May, but it wasn't available until August) before they up-revved it to the B and switched to the RAGE Pro.
- -Josh Turiel
Imagine the possibilities if it was used under NT or something where processes die an a regular basis... (naah - you'd need a body bag for all the dead admins)
On a more serious note, the idea of using a 3-D interface of some sort has been around for a long time. Using Doom (or any 1PS engine) as a front end is a fairly novel and potentially useful way to take advantage of 3-D for a limited set of tasks. I'm not sure how you'd -HUP a process (visually, that is), and there's other places the idea needs refining, but the idea is quite interesting.
I think you'd use Q3 to kill processes on someone else's machine, not your own, wouldn't you? After all, that's what "team play" is about, right?
- -Josh Turiel
Palm dominates now because they have ease-of-use, battery life, and a form factor that's much better than Microsoft's devices. Not because of color. I can see how color could be an enhancement to some aspects of the user experience (like, for instance, overdue to-do entries appearing in red), but the danger for Palm is that, although current small device color screens are pretty good, they are likely to require a larger form factor and burn more battery.
It all ties in to what a Palm is for "the average users". I, for one, use a Palm not because it has color - this didn't even enter into my thinking when I bought it. I use a Palm because it fits into a pocket, runs for a long time on a charge, and works with my Mac just as well as it works with my PC (except my Mac can't sync AvantGo yet). If color spoils either the size or battery life, I'll stick with my Palm III, thank you very much.
(or maybe I'll get one of those slick HandSprings - but I digress...)
- -Josh Turiel
After all the fuss (with virtually no official word from Apple, just rumors), Apple ends up doing even more than anybody hoped, and is honoring wholesale orders too - not just Apple Store orders. I guess we need to stop picking on them for a while.
When you look at it, Apple did what they cood with a bad processor availability situation, and used this as leverage with their chip vendors to resolve a fork in the architecture. Remember, Apple was getting G4 processors directly from Motorola only - IBM hadn't been planning to build AltiVec enabled chips. IBM was doing fine with copper-based G3 processors and the embedded stuff. Now IBM is on the AltiVec bandwagon, Apple will get a more stable supply, and six months from now nobody will remember the fab problems that triggered this in the first place.
- -Josh Turiel
Regardless, Linux is still Linux. The API's are the same, the system's resources and libraries are the same, and the file system is just about the same. There are a few differences here and there (mainly in things like library/kernel versions and install script methods), but it's not the issue it is on other Unix versions, and because of the Open Source model, it never will be.
There's incentive for most vendors to package their distro in a standard format (or at least support RPM installation), because they'll have off-the-shelf compatibility with the increasing number of applications available for the platform. Forking costs you the penalty of breaking that compatibility - now you've lost control of your commercial applications market. Where things get proprietary is in places like install procedures and/or bundled goodies (or sometimes in system management - like SuSE does), but once installed, Linux is Linux. All praise the penguin.
- -Josh Turiel
Sun almost Gets It, but not quite. They were founded on the premise of utilizing an open software platform, but (originally) on highly closed systems. Then they opened up the processor architecture, but held onto the software (which, by then, was a pretty funky Unix). Now, they agonize over whether or not to open up the crown jewels, but more as a reflex to the two latest driving factors in their business:
1: Hatred of Microsoft
2: Fear of Linux
You know, there's a lot of parallels between Apple and Sun when it comes to being control freaks at the corporate level if you think about it... Neither one is quite willing to give up those family jewels to the world, but they want desperately to reap the benefits of openness anyways.
And both companies come heart-breakingly close to Getting It, only to shy away. "Open" Solaris? Whoopee. Put it under a GPL-like or even a BSD license, now we're talking. Other than that, thanks for playing - you lose.
- -Josh Turiel
Apple actually did the Right Thing for once - be still my beating heart!
For all their neat hardware and unique software and "cool" consumer appeal, Apple has a long and distinguished history of doing things that really piss off customers (the 1988 price hike, the cancellation of Performa free tech support, the PowerPC upgrade fiascos, etc.) yet they miraculously retain goodwill despite that. It's fine if Apple wants to change the base configs in order to ship product (they actually added RAM to a couple of them in this action), but cancelling existing orders was pure foolishness. It's good they saw the error of their ways. Were I Jobs, I'd have changed the speeds on the base models, filled all the existing orders except the G4-500's, and then asked the customers for those if they wanted to wait or if they wanted a 450 with more RAM instead. That's the only fair thing to do. I'm glad Apple finally seems to have gotten it for once.
- -Josh Turiel
I'm growing more and more skeptical of analysis firms as time passes. It's easy to produce a piece of research stating whatever the analyst thinks anyways, by simply taking a few points of data and extrapolating it to the absurd extreme. Gartner and their ilk have produced reports that say Linux will, in fact dominate the marketplace, and reports that claim the opposite within short intervals of one another. My own choice is to believe none of the above.
Trend analysis doesn't generally account for some important factors, like goodwill (or lack thereof) towards vendors, or technical obstacles and breakthroughs that may happen in a development effort. They tend to assume that obstacles (like NT's code bloat or Linux's lack of high-quality SMP support) are insurmountable and that the technical status quo will remain indefinitely. This means that, by analysis standards, current trends will continue indefinitely. If some of the analysis I've read over recent years had worked out as anticipated, then:
1: Apple would be in Chapter 7 bankruptcy
2: Linux would either
a: be non-existent
b: have over a 50% market share
3: Novell would be out of business
4: Microsoft Windows NT would have nearly a 100% market share on servers and desktops, and
5: so would OS/2
6: Microsoft SQL Server would have killed off Oracle
7: We'd all have fully interactive TV sets now (shouting at your TV doesn't count - most of them don't answer).
I'm not trying to paint all analysis with the same brush, but I really don't see much good stuff from these companies.
- -Josh Turiel
Keeping a national museum of artifacts and items of historical interest is a far cry from subsidizing art. The former I have no problem with, as opposed to some of my more extreme libertarian compatriots. For instance, the National Archives, Smithsonian Institution (in fact, I'm a member of the Smithsonian), and Library of Congress don't bother me. Some of the political issues that come up with these institutions (like the recent war exhibit controversy at the Smithsonian) I have been annoyed by, but I don't question their existence or need. Where do I draw the line? In Josh's world, the Brooklyn Museum should not exist, at least not in a form that ever got subsidized rent and operating funds. If a private institution wanted to incorporate as the "Brooklyn Museum", rent space, and solicit funds, that's fine with me, and I have no objection to their right to exhibit whatever they wish.
But the Josh government I dream of is very severely limited in powers and scope, and only attends to matters of direct, national interest (preservation of historical items is in that category to me). States and cities should not be in the museum business, and none of the above should be in the art business. I like art, I buy art, I make my own value judgments on art. There are plenty of private venues for art (both for-profit and non-profit in nature), including art that I find distasteful. I'm not interested in paying for any of it with taxpayer funds, though I'm perfectly happy with the existence of it.
- -Josh Turiel
...but freedom entails the right for people to be stupid, closed-minded, and sheep-like. In other words, a person is, in fact, free to say or think what they want, but they aren't therefore protected by force from the consequences of their words and thoughts.
That may be foolish, and it may be wrong, but it's not censorship. It's society.
I, for one, don't think taxpayer money should pay for any art, regardless of content. Im I a censor? No. I'm not interested in viewpoints or content. I simply don't think government should subsidize any businesses. But what about the Internet, you ask? Wasn't that subsidized?
Well, the Internet was a defense research project. The bacic technology was invented under defense auspices. But it didn't become the pervasive entity it is today until it was turned over to the private sector.
Just remember, freedom includes a nearly unlimited right to foolishness.
- -Josh Turiel
This was covered in an earlier slashdot thread this summer. Faster USB is great. 12 MBits/sec is fast by serial port standards, but not fast enough for some of the things people want to use USB for (low-end video transfer, external mass storage, Ethernet, etc.). Despite that, there's a great mass market for Firewire, too. Here's why:
1: USB already has low-speed, misbehaved, "legacy" devices that need to be backwards compatible with the new spec. Firewire's legacy peripherals operate at 200 Mbits/sec. 'nuff said.
2: USB requires processor arbitration to run the bus. Firewire doesn't.
3: USB's design is specifically as a low-cost interface for PC peripherals. The hub-based design is a byproduct of this. Firewire is designed as a more general-purpose, device/device interface. Firewire can nicely connect consumer products to one another, no PC required.
However, USB has a higher "theoretical" maximum number of devices supported per controller, 127 (in USB 1.1), versus Firewire's 64. In practice, 64 Firewire devices is do-able, if silly. More than 4-5 USB devices (with a powered external hub) is pushing the limits. The only place where USB reaches the upper limits is at USB technology bake-offs.
I love USB (heck, it's in all my PC's and both my home Macs), and it's a great cross-platform standard for computer-oriented low-end to midrange peripherals. Firewire is better for high-end devices (prepress scanners, hard drives, video equipment, etc.), but it's a general-purpose interface, and that's why it will ultimately do well. The two interfaces are not, by any stretch of the imagination, mutually exclusive. Anybody who thinks that you can only use one either needs to buy a Mac to prove otherwise or board the cluetrain.
- -Josh Turiel
We've heard these updates before. How old is Opera by now, and since when have they been promining ports "real soon now"? It's a nice Windows browser, but the window of opportunity has slammed shut for them. In the time since Opera first started planning ports, Macs have gotten a version of IE that's actually not too bad (and fairly quick), Linux users are in the process of getting decent browsers with KDE and Gnome, and Mozilla is actually starting to finally grow up, and in public where everyone can see the progress.
In the early days when Netscape and Microsoft first started heading up the bloatware path, Opera had a nice market opportunity, but I think it's been squandered. Nobody's going to pay for a closed-source browser, however spiffy, when there's a reasonable selection of respectable open _and_ closed browsers, all of which are free. It's time the Opera folks started a new project.
- -Josh Turiel
I could see his point in a "general market" publication, but Jane's is a specialty publication aimed at a very detail-oriented crowd. Cyber warfare is not a subject that most people understand yet, so Jane's turned to an audience that was likely to have a lot of real experts, and submitted it for (essentially) peer review. Upon peer review, the paper did not stand up on it's own, so it was canned.
What's interesting here is Jane's response, publishing an article composed of the best and most insightful of the comments on the original paper. That's different. But the peer review concept is as old as the ages.
What we need to be aware of here, as well, is that by the standards of Jane's knowledge, even script kiddies are security experts. That's not a knock, it's just to point out that they aren't up to speed on this subject yet.
- -Josh Turiel
J. Danforth got his name for a real obvious reason - he's unusually dumb, even by the highest dumb cat standard. Millie, on the other hand, got her name because, in the words of my wife, "she looks like a Millie". There was no White House connotation meant there, though both cats entered our lives during the Bush administration.
The Bush Millie was a Springer Spaniel. She died a year or two ago, if I recall.
- -Josh Turiel
I could have told them exactly what my cats see. They see food. And that's about it. Every once in a while my cat J. Danforth sees the little red dot from my laser pointer, which he is convinced is a small rodent, and my other cat Millie only sees food and places to sleep.
- -Josh Turiel
Right now, there's a generation of people who "understand" that you really have no privacy left in this society, and most of them are under 35 (they came of age during the PC era), give or take a few years. People growing up today don't really expect privacy, they're used to targeted junk mail, credit reports, demographic data being pulled up on them, and leaving a trail on the web. As these younger generations move into control over society gradually, the public attitudes that lead people like Rutt to delete as much of themselves as possible will change. Since everyone is transparent themselves, they won't be as inclined to look at a 10 year-old posting and cry "gotcha!" (the old "people in glass houses" thing, in the future, everyone will live in a glass house).
Today, though, I understand Rutt's impulse. I refuse on principle to delete my words from places - I try to think about what I say with the knowledge that it is permanent being a factor. I keep as much of my private self private as I can, and don't sweat the details. My drivers' license has a random number, I deliberately give wacky answers when required to give demographic info, fake phone numbers when possible, etc. I also vary my middle initial a lot to see who's renting my name out to other companies. Anybody who really wants to can find out anything they want to know about me, but I like throwing monkey wrenches in "the system" when I can just for fun...
So it's a shame that he deleted his postings, but understandable in this not-yet-enlightened era.
- -Josh Turiel
From what little I could decipher, it looks like their intent is to have a tool they can use to stop the Pez traders and speculators if they want (some of those folks can give the manufacturer a bad name by misrepresenting themselves or screwing customers) - and taking them off the web is a handy way to do so. But they are going about it in a brain-damaged way by trying to paint the whole web with this brush. Their policy also has the effect of (in theory) banning fan sites, legitimate dealers of Pez, reviewers, and news sites from mentioning the name. Trademarks can, AFAIK, be policed for appropriate usage, and precedent has been made on the issue of META tags (thanks to Playboy, if I recall), but Pez's policy goes overboard and would be likely to get smacked down in court.
When it comes to trademarks, I believe it goes something like this:
Referring to Xerox as a copier company: OK
Talking about "making xeroxes of that paper": BAD (Xerox is a trademark, not a term - the "correct" reference would be to "making copies")
Putting "Xerox" as a META tag in your page: Gray area - but probably not OK
Writing about Xerox (the company or the products)in your website: OK!
Selling Xerox products over the web, by name: Probably OK, depending on your reseller agreement and if it allows Net sales by your company. Definitely OK if you have no agreement but have the products.
Substitute "Pez" for Xerox above and you're pretty close to an AUP for Pez as well (except it would sound weird to say "I'm going to go down and make some pezzes of this report", wouldn't it?)
I've got a feeling Pez is in for a bit of a Net spanking...
- -Josh Turiel