Tune into next week's episode, where the fearless Dvorak discovers the woes of Windows 95 file sharing!
Seriously, people should assume that port scans are headed their way on a regular basis - and anyone who doesn't at least have a NAT router (I know NAT isn't a real firewall, but it'll beat 99.9% or the script kiddies out there) between themselves and the Internet should go out and get _some_ kind of firewall - the cable and DSL providers should be recommending these to all their customers, or at least implementing basic firewalls within the cable/DSL modems. At this point, everyone should implement some form of packet filtering - there's just too many script kiddies out there to assume any trust at all.
Macmillan, unlike most of the "boxed Linux" vendors (including Red Hat), has a solid understanding of the retail channel, and can get their product into the low-end stores and general market bookstores that wouldn't otherwise be moving product at all (or minimally). Solid general market distribution is the key to World Domination.
If the other vendors develop merchandising/packaging/distribution skills, they will gradually displace Macmillan in that channel. But until then, Macmillan takes a decent Linux product, bundles it with online textbooks and goodies, sells it to newbies and people looking for a bargain, and pays royalties to the developer of the distro they use. It's a win for everyone right now...
Morita really is more responsible than any other individual for the shape of the modern consumer electronics industry. Beta might not have been a "win" at the consumer level (it's still popular in the professional marketplace), but the Walkman (and all it's derivatives), the 3.5" floppy that's still the de facto compatibility benchmark in the computer industry, and the CD itself were all things that his Sony produced or collaborated on. Morita also was instrumental in accelerating the pace of product releases (creating a relentless consumer demand for "the latest model"), and moving away from the boxy, purely functional look that products once had - Sony has generally been a style leader.
Interestingly, I'm typing this on my new iBook - and Jobs' desire to produce products with a consumer-oriented "look" to them has been, by his own admission, profoundly influenced by Sony.
Although Morita stepped away from direct control over the company in the mid-'90s, I wonder if Sony risks losing a sense of direction without the founder present to "center" the company. It will be interesting to see. Sony still is strong in newer categories like CD recording and digital video (they are a leader in the deployment of FireWire devices), along with some of the more interesting PC designs (I'd love a PictureBook, oh yes...). Will they stay that way?
You don't normally find articles that well-written on hacking in the "normal" press, so I'm pleased. The normal NY Times policy would be to have Markoff do a hatchet job.
That said, I think that the computing world needs L0pht, and they need the CDC, for that matter. Hacking should be an above-ground activity, and the information returned should be to help others pursue their knowledge of the systems. L0pht goes out and finds information, then they make it free to all. That's the Right Thing. CDC makes tools to exploit the dumb things vendors do - the tools themselves are not good _or_ evil, but the users may be.
The only negative that sometimes comes from the activities of these groups is the legions of script kiddies racing off to put their k00l d00dz signatures on websites before the holes get plugged. But on the other hand, the script kiddies will be therre regardless, and get in eventually, anyways - it's the Infinite Monkeys Theorem come to life.
But that would never happen now, would it? But if Solaris were as completely open and unrestricted (not like Java or Mozilla, but like Linux itself), then I think yes, it would eventually kill off Linux. Remember, Solaris is already dual-platform (Sparc and x86), and further ports would certainly be done. And Solaris has perceptual advantages in the commercial market (it's Sun, it's "supported", it's well-established) that have kept Linux from growing even faster. I think enough people would "defect" from Linux to a truly free Solaris that the commercial focus would shift quickly.
Now, if you ask me if I'd switch or if people switching is a Good Thing, I'd say no. I'm happy on Linux, and I like what it represents in the computing world. Besides, Sun is in it for the money. Microsoft knows how to fight those kind of companies. That's why they don't know what to do about Linux.
Naw, it's not flamebait as far as I'm concerned - I mainly agree with you. Just keep in mind that there is a big difference between "buzz" between those who have the Geek Nature, and the rest of the world (affectionately known as the "room-temperature" crowd).
The average non-geek heard about Macs in the '80s as The Cool Thing. That doesn't mean they bought them, mind you, it just means that they were prominent in the culture. Linux occupies that niche in the general culture today. That doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether Linux will thrive or not, but it does help visibility among the Suits (which, after many years in the biz, I, too, now am). I've been using Linux for one thing or another for about five years, but now that it's on the cultural radar screen, justifying it's use on my network is much easier.
As far as the core geek community goes, you're completely right. Macs were never truly "cool" - all the "in-the-know" crowd waited eagerly for Amiga or hacked up their Apple II (or anything other than a DOS system). These people have been all over Linux for years, though. That said, a truly heavyweight core of geeks do use Macs, but not as enthusiasts - they just use them as real simple tools to get their net activity and home-based work done. Why? Because it's real easy to turn on a Mac and just Get Stuff Done, without brains required. And for all the people who hack at work and like to hack at home, there's probably an equivalent number of people who want to leave their brains at the office.
To the truly aware, Linux isn't "hot" or buzz-worthy - Linux just Is.
Linux/Open Source advocacy and Apple advocacy are really two different animals. Right now, Linux has the "buzz" that Apple had in the years immediately following Macintosh, but the industry has matured to the point where Apple is part of the Establishment, albeit an interesting part.
The Linux community of today has more in common with the hardcore computing enthusiasts of days past (the folks who soldered their own mainboards) than they do with the Apple crowd - though, of course, there are obvious overlaps (the anybody-but-Microsoft people, for instance, often have a foot in both camps). What's interesting is what I've noticed among several of the uber-hacker old-timers that I've had the opportunity to meet and converse with over the years: people, there's a lot of Net.gods who fit this:
At work, they hack Unix, or Linux, or BSD, and produce Open Source code. At home, a lot of them have Macs.
But there's no urgent need for people to be Mac advocates anymore - Apple is safe and sound and inhabiting a moderate-sized, highly profitable niche in the market. Linux, though, needs their support.
Not one of my finest posts (for which I apologise), but I just figured I'd toss it out there.
I won't belittle autism - one of my closest friends has an autistic daughter, and I've learned a little bit about what makes her special at the same time as it hurts her. My friend and his wife are raising her wonderfully, and she has a good prognosis to be able to eventually function in society.
That said, it bothers the hell out of me that virtually everything outside of a tiny band of human behavior is now being described as a "syndrome", or a "phobia", or something abnormal. Ausberger's, "Social Phobia", compulsive behavior (not the extreme stuff), hyperactivity - these are, for the most part, all examples of behavior that isn't that far removed from the mainstream, but now they've all been reduced to just another disease, treatable (usually) by Ritalin, Prozac, etc. Differences in behavior are what make humans human, and not some collective Hive-Mind! Again, there are people out there with legitimate, and severe conditions, and I don't want to belittle that, but we've taken it to absurd lengths.
Social phobia my ass! Some people are shy, some are gregarious. Ausberger's - so a lot of hyper-smart people can't relate to the idiots around them - that's a problem? Hyperactivity? That used to be known as "sit down and shut up, or else".
I'm not sure what's right here, but I know the way we're headed is wrong. To continue my rant theme from some of the recent threads I've seen, whatever happened to responsibility? To call all non-standard behaviors "disorders" keeps people from taking responsibility for their behavior and their lives.
...but it's real old news. Kryotech has made kits to supercool Alphas and Pentiums, so the Athlon isn't much of a leap for them. I think the Alpha folks had Kryotech on stage with them at Microprocessor Forum or some similar event this year to do the Alpha at 1 GHz demo.
Tom covered this back in early August, when he was in yet another "I'm better than you, puny humans" phase - he wrote an article announcing that he had figured out how to overclock Athlons, but that he wasn't going to tell anybody becouse it was just too technical for mere mortals. After a suitable interval of being flamed by the universe, he spilled the beans a couple of days later.
Tom's has gotten a little less interesting of late. I think part of that is because the hardware scene has been relatively static lately, - Athlon is the first radically new thing in a while as far as motherboards/processors go in the Wintel space (I'm not counting G4, guys - Tom doesn't cover that!).
This is an interesting contrast (which, by the way, paper does better, but I digress). Computers are better for things interactive - participatory activities like tutorials, surfing, email, and so forth. They are limited by environmental conditions (you can't use them in the damp outdoors, extreme heat or cold, bright sunlight) and battery life (paper gets much better battery life). Random access is generally faster on paper - the "indexing" technology is more sophisticated for books and newspapers, and is, in fact, an index (and/or table of contents).
Plus, paper is ideally suited to passive absorption of information - it's cheaper, more pervasive, and less sensitive to most conditions (neither most paper nor most computers work well underwater...). Society has built a massive infrastructure that is incredibly well-suited to the cheap manufacture and distribution of paper. Not to mention, paper producers that depend on advertising dollars make actual profits (newspapers and magazines), unlike those who use the computer screen as an advertising medium. Then again, the electronic folks have more valuable stock... (hello, Andover.Net!)
Many years back, I wrote a humor piece for a user group newsletter comparing the "first" PDA, the Newton MessagePad, to a similar device. The link is here, on my homenet server. Was I ahead of my time, or what?
Being "different" is not the sole criterium in determining geekitude. Galileo was a brilliant man, fine (by the time's standards) scientist, and made some important discoveries. But that does not necessarily make him a geek. Jon, your writing is very good, and generally relevant as hell (or at least interesting, even when it's not relevant), but please, man - get over the geek fixation!
I bet that a lot of people are going to run around in the streets like headless chickens, waiting for an apocalypse that doesn't happen (they don't even realize the Julian calendar is fundamentally screwed up, and 2000 isn't even 2000). The rest will have something that doesn't work (I already know my neat 4-head stereo VCR from 1992 won't handle Y2K, meaning I'll have to stop all my advance taping - oh, wait, in 7 years of owning it I have yet to tape anything - never mind!). There will be a few minor glitches, I'm sure - but I think for the most part the world will just keep on chugging along.
Me? I work for an insurance company, and I'm in charge of the desktop remediation. We've tested, and tested, and tested - and at this point every known element in our network is A-OK. I'm sure some user goofed up a spreadsheet date function or something, but we'll find out on Monday and deal with it then. The mainframe was fixes a year and a half ago. We already have a generator - it's tested, too. Ergo, I'm not worried.
Maybe it's just too early on Sunday morning for me to understand, but I realy didn't see much analysis in that article. I can sum it up as:
Unix: a 25 year-old overnight sensation.
More and more people like Linux because it's cheap and doesn't crash as much as Windows. Microsoft is a little bit nervous, but they're nervous about everything. That's why they're so rich. So Microsoft bought a better Unix compatibility layer than their old one. There's not that many applications for Linux, but more are coming RSN.
Did I miss anything? That said the same thing as the article, but in four sentences and a title. Whee. Even ZD has done better analysis than that.
Oh and by the way - to the fellow who could run Linux if only his PowerPoint shows would work - I've tried mine with StarOffice 5.1, and they work fine. There's not quite as many transition effects, that's all I could spot easily.
-Josh (maybe I won't be as grumpy after I've had some coffee: Must Get Coffee...)
...but this, this is beautiful. Now we have idiot vulture lawyers to go with idiot absentee parents - none of whom take any responsibility for anything. These aren't real lawyers, they're late-night ambulance chasers with delusions of grandeur. Schmucks, the lot of them.
I read this the other day, but never dreamed that it would be/. material...
These are emblematic of the morons and idiots we have for parents here in the US that give America a bad reputation. Can't anyone take responsibility for their actions at any age whatsoever? "Oh no, little Timmy likes his (Pokemon, Magic, Upper Deck, Beanie Baby, etc.) so much that he plays games to try and win more! But he sucks enough to lose! Oh my god, I have the answer - SUE THE MANUFACTURER!"
I mean, how dumb is that? No wonder Katz spends so much time lately writing about alienated teens. Is it me, or have the parents here in the US become more and more clueless with each generation? I really hope that when my wife and I have our own kids, my brains don't get washed away like these parents' brains have.
Hmmm... Net surfing in a speeding taxicab. If you crash, does that refer to the browser or to the cab itself? Or does that depend on what city's cabbies are driving?
Sure, he wants to knock off Net taxes. That's a Good Thing, I'd say. The Net is just another form of mail order with even more questionable jurisdiction from a taxation perspective (If I'm in Massachusetts, and I buy from an Oregon company who uses a server farm in Virginia that happens to route the packets to/from my system through NAPs in New Jersey and New York, who the hell gets my tax money???). But McCain is also pro-censorship, and anti-encryption. He's a decent human being, and I really get the impression about him that if he says something, it's because he believes it, not because his advisors told him to - but he's not exactly the most "wired" guy out there. For all his goofyness, Gore really is a little more clueful on things Net, and Bradley isn't bad, either - his Valley time at Stanford the last couple of years seems to have had an impact. But if the bottom line is Net freedom, then vote Libertarian - we're pro-choice on everything!
Don't count me in that group. I actually own a PowerBook 3400, iMac, and PowerMac 7200, all running OS 8.6 back at home (to go with my Win98 game PC, my Mandrake-based workstation, and my RedHat 6-based server - yes, I know I need a life!). The 7200 runs my home email server (Eudora's EIMS), and my wife uses the iMac. MacOS isn't bad for what it is, but there are issues that are fundamentally broken in the design that are only now getting dealt with after 15 years (and several false starts). Thread Manager is a decent implementation of preemptive multitasking on a limited basis for the platform, but I'm still from Missouri (the "Show Me" state) when it comes to fixing an issue as fundamental as the mouseclick.
But you're right - Apple's OS has the perception of being a toy, and that probably won't change in many minds even when OS X Workstation comes out, even though it'll be drastically wrong by then.
On the one hand, they have a pretty solid, Mach/BSD-based server OS (MacOS X Server) that includes all the essentials for Internet operation, runs MacOS apps, and has a client version on the way. And they've released significant portions of it as pseudo-Open Source. They hope all this will sell more Macs, and give them a free development team for additional services.
Then again, they sell a proprietary, single-tasking (Any system that stops processing when the mouse is held down is single-tasking, AFAIC) OS with loads of chrome on proprietary hardware.
People often forget that the only way (technically) to legally buy a copy of the MacOS is to have a Mac to run it on. And every Mac includes the MacOS, like it or not. Apple doesn't lose any sales up-front when a user buys Linux for their Mac, but they do lose the upgrade revenue stream. This obviously concerns them more than a little: Apple has made quite a bit of revenue off their more frequent MacOS upgrades since they started charging for them. It's quite profitable.
In the end, Apple has to decide whether Open Source is something to embrace fully or shy away from. They seem, in fits and starts, to be heading towards it - ultimately I think they'll open up more of the OS in an effort to wedge into as much software market share as possible. They may even plunge back into the clone market now that Apple has the ability to churn higher-performance designs quickly. One of the reasons they bailed out of cloning was that Apple took so long to design system in the old days that clone makers could easily beat them to market with the super high-performance systems that generate all the revenue. Power Computing did very nicely for a while on that model. Now Apple can ship the fastest systems as the CPUs are ready, and they make an increasing percentage of profit from software. The process is interesting to watch.
What is saving the Linux/PowerPC vendors right now is that a Mac is far from an ideal Linux platform - it's relatively expensive and non-expandable for the MIPS compared to a cheap PIII system that'll run the same OS. For the most part, Macs lose as a Linux platform, so Apple isn't losing too much software profit to the Linux vendors (remember, the upgrades cost money now!). If they were losing more, Apple would squash them like bugs.
So Intel is scaling back for now. No biggie. The 820 isn't going to be adopted that quickly, anyway - too much investment is out there in SDRAM for manufacturers and users to just leap to RDRAM. Eventually, that may make more sense but not yet. All this means is less inventory built up in the channel, and hopefully it means the slight bump they've had in BX availability will go away during the ramp-up.
If you think about it, Troy's an amazing specimen. Here's a fellow that's obviously a little touched, but smart as hell, living in the woods, selling scrap metal, and building the most sophisticated armor systems on the planet. The guy has built, regardless of his motive, some amazing stuff, and he at least has an appreciation of his "eccentricity", and he understands why some think it's funny. He's a little bitter about the $$$, but if you go bust the way he has, that's got to leave a mark.
The world needs more Troys out there. - -Josh Turiel
E-Machines, unlike the other low-cost "name" vendors, uses standard MicroATX-compatible cases and components, a huge plus in their favor. At least spec-wise, these are decent, if not cutting-edge products for the money. If their quality control sucks, that's a separate issue... The other vendors in the sub-$1000 space are generally using custom-built mobos and cases which are certainly cheaper to build in high volume (it's good to have a board fab in-house), but fully upgrade-free. At least if you outgrow an E-Machines PC down the road you don't have to trash the whole thing - just buy a better motherboard for it (the E-One, obviously, is not included in this part of the discussion).
Whether E-Machines, the company, is worth a bucket of warm spit or not is another story. They're shaping up to be a classic Valley story: The small vendor who enters the market with a splash, shakes up the status quo, only to make execution mistakes and piss off the established vendors, who manage to grind the upstart into dust, aided by the upstart's own mistakes.
The thing is, an Ebox isn't too bad for the bucks (assuming it works when you plug it in). I know more than a few happy E-Machines customers at my company who have no idea that the winmodem in it blows or that DVD running on a Rage Pro for decoding is pushing the bounds of reason. And I'm not going to be the one to tell them. They just know it works, and that they could afford it easily. It ain't the machine for the average/.er, but it's OK for it's purpose. I hope they stick around, personally.
Side note: Does anyone actually sign up for the ISP rebates? I've been advising people to not take them, and keep the freedom to use whatever ISP you want, especially with cable and DSL providers to choose from. Of course, using a high-speed connection also neatly sidesteps the winmodem problem...
Think about it: we design life forms today (spoil-resistant tomatoes, corn that produces natural insecticides, etc.). We've been tinkering with life through selective breeding for centuries - we had domesticated cattle, dogs, and horses generations ago and designed crops before scientists began to understand genetics and inheritence. Once we understood the science, it became less hit-or-miss in nature.
And once we started to understand the actual genetics behind things this century, the last 10-20 years or so have seen all sorts of directly "designed" life forms - they just started from an existing base and had the desired characteristics added. So we're already creating life. I'm not sure just how big a step this is, really. We're still designing a custom life form, just from smaller parts.
I tried to decide which one I prefer - here's my reasoning:
I think the web page version of Shatner features slightly better acting, and much, much better hair. But the meatware version has better sound quality than my PowerBook does (though it's close), and has gotten to hang out with Heather Locklear.
My vote: SimShatner. After all, even with better sound in the original, you'll only want to listen for so long - not to mention that one of these days, Heather's going to start aging. And she's held it off so long that it'll be catastrophic when it happens. There's just no room for another Dick Clark, female or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Tune into next week's episode, where the fearless Dvorak discovers the woes of Windows 95 file sharing!
Seriously, people should assume that port scans are headed their way on a regular basis - and anyone who doesn't at least have a NAT router (I know NAT isn't a real firewall, but it'll beat 99.9% or the script kiddies out there) between themselves and the Internet should go out and get _some_ kind of firewall - the cable and DSL providers should be recommending these to all their customers, or at least implementing basic firewalls within the cable/DSL modems. At this point, everyone should implement some form of packet filtering - there's just too many script kiddies out there to assume any trust at all.
Sucks, don't it?
- -Josh Turiel
Macmillan, unlike most of the "boxed Linux" vendors (including Red Hat), has a solid understanding of the retail channel, and can get their product into the low-end stores and general market bookstores that wouldn't otherwise be moving product at all (or minimally). Solid general market distribution is the key to World Domination.
If the other vendors develop merchandising/packaging/distribution skills, they will gradually displace Macmillan in that channel. But until then, Macmillan takes a decent Linux product, bundles it with online textbooks and goodies, sells it to newbies and people looking for a bargain, and pays royalties to the developer of the distro they use. It's a win for everyone right now...
- -Josh Turiel
Silly me. I thought Sparcs and Alphas were the Internet processors. I mean, don't most of the 'real' websites run on them?
Well bell my cat - it was Intel all along!
Gawd, how much did Intel pay a marketing company for that clunker of a name?
- -Josh Turiel
Morita really is more responsible than any other individual for the shape of the modern consumer electronics industry. Beta might not have been a "win" at the consumer level (it's still popular in the professional marketplace), but the Walkman (and all it's derivatives), the 3.5" floppy that's still the de facto compatibility benchmark in the computer industry, and the CD itself were all things that his Sony produced or collaborated on. Morita also was instrumental in accelerating the pace of product releases (creating a relentless consumer demand for "the latest model"), and moving away from the boxy, purely functional look that products once had - Sony has generally been a style leader.
Interestingly, I'm typing this on my new iBook - and Jobs' desire to produce products with a consumer-oriented "look" to them has been, by his own admission, profoundly influenced by Sony.
Although Morita stepped away from direct control over the company in the mid-'90s, I wonder if Sony risks losing a sense of direction without the founder present to "center" the company. It will be interesting to see. Sony still is strong in newer categories like CD recording and digital video (they are a leader in the deployment of FireWire devices), along with some of the more interesting PC designs (I'd love a PictureBook, oh yes...). Will they stay that way?
- -Josh Turiel
You don't normally find articles that well-written on hacking in the "normal" press, so I'm pleased. The normal NY Times policy would be to have Markoff do a hatchet job.
That said, I think that the computing world needs L0pht, and they need the CDC, for that matter. Hacking should be an above-ground activity, and the information returned should be to help others pursue their knowledge of the systems. L0pht goes out and finds information, then they make it free to all. That's the Right Thing. CDC makes tools to exploit the dumb things vendors do - the tools themselves are not good _or_ evil, but the users may be.
The only negative that sometimes comes from the activities of these groups is the legions of script kiddies racing off to put their k00l d00dz signatures on websites before the holes get plugged. But on the other hand, the script kiddies will be therre regardless, and get in eventually, anyways - it's the Infinite Monkeys Theorem come to life.
- -Josh Turiel
But that would never happen now, would it? But if Solaris were as completely open and unrestricted (not like Java or Mozilla, but like Linux itself), then I think yes, it would eventually kill off Linux. Remember, Solaris is already dual-platform (Sparc and x86), and further ports would certainly be done. And Solaris has perceptual advantages in the commercial market (it's Sun, it's "supported", it's well-established) that have kept Linux from growing even faster. I think enough people would "defect" from Linux to a truly free Solaris that the commercial focus would shift quickly.
Now, if you ask me if I'd switch or if people switching is a Good Thing, I'd say no. I'm happy on Linux, and I like what it represents in the computing world. Besides, Sun is in it for the money. Microsoft knows how to fight those kind of companies. That's why they don't know what to do about Linux.
- -Josh Turiel
Naw, it's not flamebait as far as I'm concerned - I mainly agree with you. Just keep in mind that there is a big difference between "buzz" between those who have the Geek Nature, and the rest of the world (affectionately known as the "room-temperature" crowd).
The average non-geek heard about Macs in the '80s as The Cool Thing. That doesn't mean they bought them, mind you, it just means that they were prominent in the culture. Linux occupies that niche in the general culture today. That doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether Linux will thrive or not, but it does help visibility among the Suits (which, after many years in the biz, I, too, now am). I've been using Linux for one thing or another for about five years, but now that it's on the cultural radar screen, justifying it's use on my network is much easier.
As far as the core geek community goes, you're completely right. Macs were never truly "cool" - all the "in-the-know" crowd waited eagerly for Amiga or hacked up their Apple II (or anything other than a DOS system). These people have been all over Linux for years, though. That said, a truly heavyweight core of geeks do use Macs, but not as enthusiasts - they just use them as real simple tools to get their net activity and home-based work done. Why? Because it's real easy to turn on a Mac and just Get Stuff Done, without brains required. And for all the people who hack at work and like to hack at home, there's probably an equivalent number of people who want to leave their brains at the office.
To the truly aware, Linux isn't "hot" or buzz-worthy - Linux just Is.
- -Josh Turiel
Linux/Open Source advocacy and Apple advocacy are really two different animals. Right now, Linux has the "buzz" that Apple had in the years immediately following Macintosh, but the industry has matured to the point where Apple is part of the Establishment, albeit an interesting part.
The Linux community of today has more in common with the hardcore computing enthusiasts of days past (the folks who soldered their own mainboards) than they do with the Apple crowd - though, of course, there are obvious overlaps (the anybody-but-Microsoft people, for instance, often have a foot in both camps). What's interesting is what I've noticed among several of the uber-hacker old-timers that I've had the opportunity to meet and converse with over the years: people, there's a lot of Net.gods who fit this:
At work, they hack Unix, or Linux, or BSD, and produce Open Source code. At home, a lot of them have Macs.
But there's no urgent need for people to be Mac advocates anymore - Apple is safe and sound and inhabiting a moderate-sized, highly profitable niche in the market. Linux, though, needs their support.
Not one of my finest posts (for which I apologise), but I just figured I'd toss it out there.
- -Josh Turiel
I won't belittle autism - one of my closest friends has an autistic daughter, and I've learned a little bit about what makes her special at the same time as it hurts her. My friend and his wife are raising her wonderfully, and she has a good prognosis to be able to eventually function in society.
That said, it bothers the hell out of me that virtually everything outside of a tiny band of human behavior is now being described as a "syndrome", or a "phobia", or something abnormal. Ausberger's, "Social Phobia", compulsive behavior (not the extreme stuff), hyperactivity - these are, for the most part, all examples of behavior that isn't that far removed from the mainstream, but now they've all been reduced to just another disease, treatable (usually) by Ritalin, Prozac, etc. Differences in behavior are what make humans human, and not some collective Hive-Mind! Again, there are people out there with legitimate, and severe conditions, and I don't want to belittle that, but we've taken it to absurd lengths.
Social phobia my ass! Some people are shy, some are gregarious. Ausberger's - so a lot of hyper-smart people can't relate to the idiots around them - that's a problem? Hyperactivity? That used to be known as "sit down and shut up, or else".
I'm not sure what's right here, but I know the way we're headed is wrong. To continue my rant theme from some of the recent threads I've seen, whatever happened to responsibility? To call all non-standard behaviors "disorders" keeps people from taking responsibility for their behavior and their lives.
Grumble!
- -Josh Turiel
...but it's real old news. Kryotech has made kits to supercool Alphas and Pentiums, so the Athlon isn't much of a leap for them. I think the Alpha folks had Kryotech on stage with them at Microprocessor Forum or some similar event this year to do the Alpha at 1 GHz demo.
Tom covered this back in early August, when he was in yet another "I'm better than you, puny humans" phase - he wrote an article announcing that he had figured out how to overclock Athlons, but that he wasn't going to tell anybody becouse it was just too technical for mere mortals. After a suitable interval of being flamed by the universe, he spilled the beans a couple of days later.
Tom's has gotten a little less interesting of late. I think part of that is because the hardware scene has been relatively static lately, - Athlon is the first radically new thing in a while as far as motherboards/processors go in the Wintel space (I'm not counting G4, guys - Tom doesn't cover that!).
- -Josh Turiel
This is an interesting contrast (which, by the way, paper does better, but I digress). Computers are better for things interactive - participatory activities like tutorials, surfing, email, and so forth. They are limited by environmental conditions (you can't use them in the damp outdoors, extreme heat or cold, bright sunlight) and battery life (paper gets much better battery life). Random access is generally faster on paper - the "indexing" technology is more sophisticated for books and newspapers, and is, in fact, an index (and/or table of contents).
Plus, paper is ideally suited to passive absorption of information - it's cheaper, more pervasive, and less sensitive to most conditions (neither most paper nor most computers work well underwater...). Society has built a massive infrastructure that is incredibly well-suited to the cheap manufacture and distribution of paper. Not to mention, paper producers that depend on advertising dollars make actual profits (newspapers and magazines), unlike those who use the computer screen as an advertising medium. Then again, the electronic folks have more valuable stock... (hello, Andover.Net!)
Many years back, I wrote a humor piece for a user group newsletter comparing the "first" PDA, the Newton MessagePad, to a similar device. The link is here, on my homenet server. Was I ahead of my time, or what?
- -Josh Turiel
Being "different" is not the sole criterium in determining geekitude. Galileo was a brilliant man, fine (by the time's standards) scientist, and made some important discoveries. But that does not necessarily make him a geek. Jon, your writing is very good, and generally relevant as hell (or at least interesting, even when it's not relevant), but please, man - get over the geek fixation!
- -Josh Turiel
I bet that a lot of people are going to run around in the streets like headless chickens, waiting for an apocalypse that doesn't happen (they don't even realize the Julian calendar is fundamentally screwed up, and 2000 isn't even 2000). The rest will have something that doesn't work (I already know my neat 4-head stereo VCR from 1992 won't handle Y2K, meaning I'll have to stop all my advance taping - oh, wait, in 7 years of owning it I have yet to tape anything - never mind!). There will be a few minor glitches, I'm sure - but I think for the most part the world will just keep on chugging along.
Me? I work for an insurance company, and I'm in charge of the desktop remediation. We've tested, and tested, and tested - and at this point every known element in our network is A-OK. I'm sure some user goofed up a spreadsheet date function or something, but we'll find out on Monday and deal with it then. The mainframe was fixes a year and a half ago. We already have a generator - it's tested, too. Ergo, I'm not worried.
Maybe I should go take some of those bets...
- -Josh Turiel
Maybe it's just too early on Sunday morning for me to understand, but I realy didn't see much analysis in that article. I can sum it up as:
Unix: a 25 year-old overnight sensation.
More and more people like Linux because it's cheap and doesn't crash as much as Windows.
Microsoft is a little bit nervous, but they're nervous about everything. That's why they're so rich.
So Microsoft bought a better Unix compatibility layer than their old one.
There's not that many applications for Linux, but more are coming RSN.
Did I miss anything? That said the same thing as the article, but in four sentences and a title. Whee. Even ZD has done better analysis than that.
Oh and by the way - to the fellow who could run Linux if only his PowerPoint shows would work - I've tried mine with StarOffice 5.1, and they work fine. There's not quite as many transition effects, that's all I could spot easily.
-Josh (maybe I won't be as grumpy after I've had some coffee: Must Get Coffee...)
- -Josh Turiel
...but this, this is beautiful. Now we have idiot vulture lawyers to go with idiot absentee parents - none of whom take any responsibility for anything. These aren't real lawyers, they're late-night ambulance chasers with delusions of grandeur. Schmucks, the lot of them.
- -Josh Turiel
I read this the other day, but never dreamed that it would be /. material...
.sig, I'm starting to wonder...
These are emblematic of the morons and idiots we have for parents here in the US that give America a bad reputation. Can't anyone take responsibility for their actions at any age whatsoever? "Oh no, little Timmy likes his (Pokemon, Magic, Upper Deck, Beanie Baby, etc.) so much that he plays games to try and win more! But he sucks enough to lose! Oh my god, I have the answer - SUE THE MANUFACTURER!"
I mean, how dumb is that? No wonder Katz spends so much time lately writing about alienated teens. Is it me, or have the parents here in the US become more and more clueless with each generation? I really hope that when my wife and I have our own kids, my brains don't get washed away like these parents' brains have.
Despite my
- -Josh Turiel
Hmmm... Net surfing in a speeding taxicab. If you crash, does that refer to the browser or to the cab itself? Or does that depend on what city's cabbies are driving?
- -Josh Turiel
Sure, he wants to knock off Net taxes. That's a Good Thing, I'd say. The Net is just another form of mail order with even more questionable jurisdiction from a taxation perspective (If I'm in Massachusetts, and I buy from an Oregon company who uses a server farm in Virginia that happens to route the packets to/from my system through NAPs in New Jersey and New York, who the hell gets my tax money???). But McCain is also pro-censorship, and anti-encryption. He's a decent human being, and I really get the impression about him that if he says something, it's because he believes it, not because his advisors told him to - but he's not exactly the most "wired" guy out there. For all his goofyness, Gore really is a little more clueful on things Net, and Bradley isn't bad, either - his Valley time at Stanford the last couple of years seems to have had an impact. But if the bottom line is Net freedom, then vote Libertarian - we're pro-choice on everything!
- -Josh Turiel
Don't count me in that group. I actually own a PowerBook 3400, iMac, and PowerMac 7200, all running OS 8.6 back at home (to go with my Win98 game PC, my Mandrake-based workstation, and my RedHat 6-based server - yes, I know I need a life!). The 7200 runs my home email server (Eudora's EIMS), and my wife uses the iMac. MacOS isn't bad for what it is, but there are issues that are fundamentally broken in the design that are only now getting dealt with after 15 years (and several false starts). Thread Manager is a decent implementation of preemptive multitasking on a limited basis for the platform, but I'm still from Missouri (the "Show Me" state) when it comes to fixing an issue as fundamental as the mouseclick.
But you're right - Apple's OS has the perception of being a toy, and that probably won't change in many minds even when OS X Workstation comes out, even though it'll be drastically wrong by then.
- -Josh Turiel
On the one hand, they have a pretty solid, Mach/BSD-based server OS (MacOS X Server) that includes all the essentials for Internet operation, runs MacOS apps, and has a client version on the way. And they've released significant portions of it as pseudo-Open Source. They hope all this will sell more Macs, and give them a free development team for additional services.
Then again, they sell a proprietary, single-tasking (Any system that stops processing when the mouse is held down is single-tasking, AFAIC) OS with loads of chrome on proprietary hardware.
People often forget that the only way (technically) to legally buy a copy of the MacOS is to have a Mac to run it on. And every Mac includes the MacOS, like it or not. Apple doesn't lose any sales up-front when a user buys Linux for their Mac, but they do lose the upgrade revenue stream. This obviously concerns them more than a little: Apple has made quite a bit of revenue off their more frequent MacOS upgrades since they started charging for them. It's quite profitable.
In the end, Apple has to decide whether Open Source is something to embrace fully or shy away from. They seem, in fits and starts, to be heading towards it - ultimately I think they'll open up more of the OS in an effort to wedge into as much software market share as possible. They may even plunge back into the clone market now that Apple has the ability to churn higher-performance designs quickly. One of the reasons they bailed out of cloning was that Apple took so long to design system in the old days that clone makers could easily beat them to market with the super high-performance systems that generate all the revenue. Power Computing did very nicely for a while on that model. Now Apple can ship the fastest systems as the CPUs are ready, and they make an increasing percentage of profit from software. The process is interesting to watch.
What is saving the Linux/PowerPC vendors right now is that a Mac is far from an ideal Linux platform - it's relatively expensive and non-expandable for the MIPS compared to a cheap PIII system that'll run the same OS. For the most part, Macs lose as a Linux platform, so Apple isn't losing too much software profit to the Linux vendors (remember, the upgrades cost money now!). If they were losing more, Apple would squash them like bugs.
- -Josh Turiel
So Intel is scaling back for now. No biggie. The 820 isn't going to be adopted that quickly, anyway - too much investment is out there in SDRAM for manufacturers and users to just leap to RDRAM. Eventually, that may make more sense but not yet. All this means is less inventory built up in the channel, and hopefully it means the slight bump they've had in BX availability will go away during the ramp-up.
- -Josh Turiel
If you think about it, Troy's an amazing specimen. Here's a fellow that's obviously a little touched, but smart as hell, living in the woods, selling scrap metal, and building the most sophisticated armor systems on the planet. The guy has built, regardless of his motive, some amazing stuff, and he at least has an appreciation of his "eccentricity", and he understands why some think it's funny. He's a little bitter about the $$$, but if you go bust the way he has, that's got to leave a mark.
The world needs more Troys out there.
- -Josh Turiel
E-Machines, unlike the other low-cost "name" vendors, uses standard MicroATX-compatible cases and components, a huge plus in their favor. At least spec-wise, these are decent, if not cutting-edge products for the money. If their quality control sucks, that's a separate issue... The other vendors in the sub-$1000 space are generally using custom-built mobos and cases which are certainly cheaper to build in high volume (it's good to have a board fab in-house), but fully upgrade-free. At least if you outgrow an E-Machines PC down the road you don't have to trash the whole thing - just buy a better motherboard for it (the E-One, obviously, is not included in this part of the discussion).
/.er, but it's OK for it's purpose. I hope they stick around, personally.
Whether E-Machines, the company, is worth a bucket of warm spit or not is another story. They're shaping up to be a classic Valley story: The small vendor who enters the market with a splash, shakes up the status quo, only to make execution mistakes and piss off the established vendors, who manage to grind the upstart into dust, aided by the upstart's own mistakes.
The thing is, an Ebox isn't too bad for the bucks (assuming it works when you plug it in). I know more than a few happy E-Machines customers at my company who have no idea that the winmodem in it blows or that DVD running on a Rage Pro for decoding is pushing the bounds of reason. And I'm not going to be the one to tell them. They just know it works, and that they could afford it easily. It ain't the machine for the average
Side note: Does anyone actually sign up for the ISP rebates? I've been advising people to not take them, and keep the freedom to use whatever ISP you want, especially with cable and DSL providers to choose from. Of course, using a high-speed connection also neatly sidesteps the winmodem problem...
- -Josh Turiel
Think about it: we design life forms today (spoil-resistant tomatoes, corn that produces natural insecticides, etc.). We've been tinkering with life through selective breeding for centuries - we had domesticated cattle, dogs, and horses generations ago and designed crops before scientists began to understand genetics and inheritence. Once we understood the science, it became less hit-or-miss in nature.
And once we started to understand the actual genetics behind things this century, the last 10-20 years or so have seen all sorts of directly "designed" life forms - they just started from an existing base and had the desired characteristics added. So we're already creating life. I'm not sure just how big a step this is, really. We're still designing a custom life form, just from smaller parts.
- -Josh Turiel
I tried to decide which one I prefer - here's my reasoning:
I think the web page version of Shatner features slightly better acting, and much, much better hair. But the meatware version has better sound quality than my PowerBook does (though it's close), and has gotten to hang out with Heather Locklear.
My vote: SimShatner. After all, even with better sound in the original, you'll only want to listen for so long - not to mention that one of these days, Heather's going to start aging. And she's held it off so long that it'll be catastrophic when it happens. There's just no room for another Dick Clark, female or not.
- -Josh Turiel