Intellivision was HUGE! It was the second major console to appear on the market (Atari 2600 being the first). It boasted way better graphics (16 colours and 8 sprites), a 16-bit processor, more memory, and the promise of a "keyboard component" which would turn the Intellivision Master Component into a full-blown home computer!
Intellivision first appeared in 1978, and by 1982 when the Keyboard Component never surfaced, Mattel Electronics faced legal trouble for misleading consumers, and released the "Entertainment Computer System" which did not deliver nearly what the original Keyboard Component promised.
By 1983 my brother and I had collected about 40 cartridges for this system. The controllers... well... you either loved 'em or you hated 'em. The controllers which appeared later on the Intellivision II were absolutely awful, but the original controllers were fine once you got used to them.
Apple's console - code-named Pippin, developed under the Amelio era... I think it sold briefly in Japan through toymaker Bandai called the "@world" or "@mark" or something like that.
It had a PowerPC 603 processor, I do believe, and ran a scaled down Mac OS. I never actually saw one.
iWorks?? That's an interesting name, but unlikely, because in my experience:
"Works" applications do everything 99% of users need them to, quickly and elegantly, but
"Office" applications contain hundreds of features users never use, perform slowly, and require the user to make several steps before they can accomplish what can be done with a single command in a "Works" application.
Releasing a "works" application is like dooming it to failure, because they're not marketable any more. Such a product would moer likely be called "iOffice".
Seriously... these days nobody uses "works" applications like ClarisWorks / AppleWorks / MS Works et al, because they lack the bells and whistles. As much as I personally love the productivity advantage of having a product like ClarisWorks not constantly hanging dumb dialog boxes in my face, it is simply not marketable these days. In Word I can't even seem to select text in that ends halfway into a word, have a third of my screen real estate taken up with dumb help stuff and another third taken up with pallettes.
I rarely use AppleWorks any more even thouh version 6 came with my iBook, because I have a pirate copy of Office X when I need to do anything advanced while I have TextEdit for doing the simple stuff. AppleWorks is also not as intuitive as ClarisWorks once was, because it seems to want the user to base everything they do on canned templates that never really seem to be what I want to do -- and with its toolbars it becoming more and more Office-like.
Oh well, the web site linked from this article is a nice read, because ClarisWorks was my key productivity app for many years and I have great respect for its developers. CW ran more responsively on my old LC475 (25 MHz 68LC040 with 8 megs of RAM) than Office X on my G4/350 with 768 megs of RAM. Go figger.
The only time i still use IE is for playing Go on Yahoo--the applet doesn't work quite right in Safari.
Interesting... because I play Euchre a lot on Yahoo these days, and the applet works perfectly in Safari - the only exception is that the opening window (which lets the user select a "table" comes up at slightly the wrong stize, but it is resize-able, even though no resize widget is drawn on the bottom right.
Personally if I ran a phone company, I would love it if my customers had no idea whether they were placing a long distance call or not.
I would be able to shift local calling areas at my own whim, and customers couldn't complain... much.
Still I wonder if this "11" digit dialing is somebody's big mistake. Cities across North America are adopting a 10-digit standard, with "1" still signifying long distance. I can see no benefit to adding a "1" to local calls, except praying on consumers' ignorance.
UNLESS it's like this: my cell phone allows me to dial local calls with or without a "1". If it is local I will not be charged LD. This makes sense because I may just want the call to get through, and I'll eat the charge if I must. I never understood why my land-line based Telco does not offer the same feature... I live in a city with 10-digit dialing, and sometimes I call a number within my area code without knowing whether it's long distance. I know I want to place the call anyway, charge or not, but if I add "1" before the number I get a recording "Not a long distance call bonehead, don't dial the '1'!" (Then I hang up, and dial again, with no 1... argh)
Maybe NYC is adopting a policy where "1" is optional on local calls, but required on LD. This certainly makes sense to me, and I would see that as an intelligent, forward-looking step, where a user unsure of toll charges will still only need to dial once.
Personally if I ran a phone company, I would love it if my customers had no idea whether they were placing a long distance call or not.
I would be able to shift local calling areas at my own whim, and customers couldn't complain... much.
Still I wonder if this "11" digit dialing is somebody's big mistake. Cities across North America are adopting a 10-digit standard, with "1" still signifying long distance. I can see no benefit to adding a "1" to local calls, except praying on consumers' ignorance.
UNLESS it's like this: my cell phone allows me to dial local calls with or without a "1". If it is local I will not be charged LD. This makes sense because I may just want the call to get through, and I'll eat the charge if I must. I never understood why my land-line based Telco does not offer the same feature... I live in a city with 10-digit dialing, and sometimes I call a number within my area code without knowing whether it's long distance. I know I want to place the call anyway, charge or not, but if I add "1" before the number I get a recording "Not a long distance call bonehead, don't dial the '1'!" (Then I hang up, and dial again, with no 1... argh)
Maybe NYC is adopting a policy where "1" is optional on local calls, but required on LD. This certainly makes sense to me, and I would see that as an intelligent, forward-looking step, where a user unsure of toll charges will still only need to dial once.
You know that, I know that, Microsoft knows that... but functional and marketable are two different concepts. If Ballmer can go to the head of, say, EMI and say "we've got a solution for you, we've never let you down before", then the record companies will eat that up. Sure it will be defeated, but it will become another Microsoft technology that they will probably make huge $ from in licencing fees.
Are you trying to suggest that you can't do an analog capture of DV? If you really want that kind of degradation, there's nothing stopping you from plugging the analog output of a DV VCR or camcorder right into that stinky old analog capture card. Is the mere presence of FireWire somehow preventing you from doing that?
To change the direction of an open-source software project to make a point is crap. The GNU-Darwin article linked here reads "wahhh, I don't like Apple's policy on xxx and yyy, so we're gonna piss them off in retaliation".
I'm not defending Apple, but the linked article is pretty ridiculous. After reading it I am relieved to find that GNU-Darwin (not Darwin) is irrelevant. I am relieved because the thought of hot-headed individuals such as this running a project of any consequence is scary.
Think about it: dropping support for specific hardware and APIs in response to a company's policies on DMCA etc. (as opposed to technical reasons) is almost Microsoftian.
As an embedded code developer your argument makes sense, however the products we're talking about here are used for 2 years and tossed. These days almost nobody will attempt to firmware-upgrade a cell phone that's over 2 years old, because it's probably falling apart, the battery is useless, the RF circuitry has half fried itself and the charger connector is corroded to rat shit.
Chipmakers make proprietary chips for these products which are designed to be as small as possible and optimized for the task at hand.
Don't worry about the fact that you can't do anything else with these chips, and development costs a fortune. They are the exclusive domain of the Nokias and Motorolas of the world, and we do not have a say in these matters.
Agreed. I like reading the discussion that ensues. Interestingly, I'm getting annoyed that every time a Mac OS X update gets posted on/. , somebody will whine about it, almost like clockwork.
C'mon!!! Is it that hard to just not read a story you're not interested in? Get a life.
Why did Apple distribute the old and buggy BIND version 8 with their OS when version 9 was already out at the time they released?
If Apple waited for every latest and greatest component to become available (and tested it) prior to releasing OS updates, they would never release anything.
This is particularly true of something like BIND, which is not enabled by default anyway!
I would be reluctant to forward messages directly from my personal mailbox to such an archive, in case the headers of my forward get left in their archive.
My email address would then exist in their archive, and could be wrongly identified by some developers as a spammer's address.
Or worse, my email address could be spidered so that I could be delivered more junk mail.
As has already been suggested, some assurances on this site are in order. I don't know who these people are or what they're going to do with my spam when I forward it to them. And the archive is not available to me yet.
Perhaps/. is a little premature in posting this. The concept is great, but until some content is available from their site, I wouldn't exactly call this a "launch".
>
phone needs to be told when to hand off, what to hand off too, and so on. Often the particular combination that will work for a user traveling on a certain road is unique to that road, and even the direction of travel. Each combination needs to be figured out, and then manually entered by an engineer.)
>Why isn't there an expert system of some kind to do this? It seems to me that there should be software solutions to most of these problems, including early diagnosis of cells with high dropped-calls and automatic solutions for software problems.
There are so many factors that software for this purpose is impractical. Cell sites will all differ with altitude, lay of the land, number of channels, number of nearby tall buildings -- radio propogation is part science, part voodoo.
The original post is extremely valuable in this thread, and very true: wireless carriers have cut back on network quality in the interest of their bottom line. When people want to buy a cel phone they don't want to know which network is going to work the best overall, they just want the smallest handset with the most bells and whistles.
It's interesting to note that Cingular (nee Cellular One) and AT&T are converting their services to GSM. T-Mobile and Nextel are already GSM.
Nextel is proprietary TDMA (iDEN TDMA), a Motorola-only system which is designed foremost as a two-way radio system rather than a cel phone network. They are not GSM, although like GSM phones, their newer handsets do use SIM cards.
The voice quality is higher, but it is still the older TDMA-derived system. People who use the CDMA services (Sprint, Verizon) seem to be the worst off, as the voice quality gets worse and worse in congested cells where in TDMA the quality stays the same but the ability to make and receive calls is limited.
CDMA will theoretically allow more simultaneous users than TDMA or GSM... but voice quality deteriorates and dropped calls increase as the site's capacity gets pushed. If a CDMA site is hardly being used at all, it will have the best sound quality (IMHO) of all of the technologies.
I think it's very telling that the two largest providers are converting their networks to GSM/TDMA and are totally eschewing CDMA.
CDMA equipment is necessarily more expensive because it is all based on Qualcomm technology, and every CDMA handset and infrastructure product has Qualcomm technology inside it which Qualcomm gets big money for. I don't believe there is any such royalty for GSM technology.
Don't get me wrong - I do not have an opinion as to whether CDMA or GSM is the best technology, but just don't be too quickly fooled into thinking that network performance is the only factor here - something tells me that dollars and cents play a major factor here.:)
You find the AT&T GSM network reliable because it is new and there is hardly anybody on it.
Wait 3-5 years and it will be overloaded too, as AT&T discovers that GSM doesn't provide any capacity advantage over TDMA, just more whiz-bangy features and nicer handsets.
Until then, enjoy... you are an island, and your phone will work great!:)
There are a two reasons why we can't switch our handsets between different networks.
The first: Different cel phone networks have different underlying technologies that make them work. In Canada we have TDMA (Rogers/AT&T), CDMA (Mobility/Telus/Sprint), GSM (Microcell/Fido) and iDEN TDMA (MIKE/Nextel). Each of these phones uses a different modulation scheme - it's kind of like when 56 K modems emerged and we had X2 and Flex.
Each technology has its pro's and cons, I'm not going to get into them here. Suffice it to say that the technologies are different enough that a CDMA phone for example cannot be made to work on a TDMA network.
The second reason is revenue protection. Even here in Canada, where, for example, CDMA technology is used by both Mobility and by Telus, phones are sold with "activation lock codes" - essentially built-in passwords unique to each handset, so that you can't get into your phone's programming and change the network that it connects to. This is because the phones are sold deeply discounted, and the only way the provider can recover that money is to lock you in to a contract, and ensure that the phones they cel will only generate airtime revenue on their own networks. You'd be a fool to think your cel phone, with its big bright display, li-ion battery, speaker phone, vibrate, digital and analog technology in both the 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz spectrum, all in a package so ultra-miniaturized that it's almost a choking hazard, only costs $38... but it has to be marked down that way because competition is so fierce between different providers' handsets.
My suggestion: when you first activate your phone, your provider may quickly step you through some fancy key combinations to program in your new phone number. If not, then before you have your phone disconnected, try to get your phone number changed the day before so that your provider will have to step you through reprogramming the phone. When they do, write down every code you are given. The lock code is on file with your provider and is specific to your handset's serial number (ESN). You can possibly use this later to reprogram your own phone.
I suppose the hosts of http://www.dataresourceconsulting.com don't have enough bandwidth to accomodate for all that unwanted traffic. Oh well, they are a profitable company, so no doubt they will invest in a better connection so that I will one day be able to view http://www.dataresourceconsulting.com.
Just to add to this: all Macs which have been made in the last couple of years (basically since the Ti PowerBook) have an autosensing ethernet port that discerns whether you are connected to a hub/switch or peer-to-peer. This is yet another quiet Apple innovation which has since appeared all over the place on NICs, switches, etc.
(OK, maybe it's just a great idea more than an innovation, but it's certainly worth mentioning.)
Mathematicians simply can't concentrate on the movement of the pieces, even given all the time they need, because it's too easy to get distracted by that wacky Russian folk music.
Slashdot Mirror
Intellivision was HUGE! It was the second major console to appear on the market (Atari 2600 being the first). It boasted way better graphics (16 colours and 8 sprites), a 16-bit processor, more memory, and the promise of a "keyboard component" which would turn the Intellivision Master Component into a full-blown home computer!
Intellivision first appeared in 1978, and by 1982 when the Keyboard Component never surfaced, Mattel Electronics faced legal trouble for misleading consumers, and released the "Entertainment Computer System" which did not deliver nearly what the original Keyboard Component promised.
So much info about this system is at the "Intellivision Lives" web site.
By 1983 my brother and I had collected about 40 cartridges for this system. The controllers... well... you either loved 'em or you hated 'em. The controllers which appeared later on the Intellivision II were absolutely awful, but the original controllers were fine once you got used to them.
Apple's console - code-named Pippin, developed under the Amelio era... I think it sold briefly in Japan through toymaker Bandai called the "@world" or "@mark" or something like that.
It had a PowerPC 603 processor, I do believe, and ran a scaled down Mac OS. I never actually saw one.
---
All Mac programs make use of hardware only available on the Mac, silly.
Office suites that come to mind:
MS Office
StarOffice
WordPerfect Office
OpenOffice
Ability Office
- "Works" applications do everything 99% of users need them to, quickly and elegantly, but
- "Office" applications contain hundreds of features users never use, perform slowly, and require the user to make several steps before they can accomplish what can be done with a single command in a "Works" application.
Releasing a "works" application is like dooming it to failure, because they're not marketable any more. Such a product would moer likely be called "iOffice". Seriously... these days nobody uses "works" applications like ClarisWorks / AppleWorks / MS Works et al, because they lack the bells and whistles. As much as I personally love the productivity advantage of having a product like ClarisWorks not constantly hanging dumb dialog boxes in my face, it is simply not marketable these days. In Word I can't even seem to select text in that ends halfway into a word, have a third of my screen real estate taken up with dumb help stuff and another third taken up with pallettes.I rarely use AppleWorks any more even thouh version 6 came with my iBook, because I have a pirate copy of Office X when I need to do anything advanced while I have TextEdit for doing the simple stuff. AppleWorks is also not as intuitive as ClarisWorks once was, because it seems to want the user to base everything they do on canned templates that never really seem to be what I want to do -- and with its toolbars it becoming more and more Office-like.
Oh well, the web site linked from this article is a nice read, because ClarisWorks was my key productivity app for many years and I have great respect for its developers. CW ran more responsively on my old LC475 (25 MHz 68LC040 with 8 megs of RAM) than Office X on my G4/350 with 768 megs of RAM. Go figger.
Interesting... because I play Euchre a lot on Yahoo these days, and the applet works perfectly in Safari - the only exception is that the opening window (which lets the user select a "table" comes up at slightly the wrong stize, but it is resize-able, even though no resize widget is drawn on the bottom right.
I would be able to shift local calling areas at my own whim, and customers couldn't complain
Still I wonder if this "11" digit dialing is somebody's big mistake. Cities across North America are adopting a 10-digit standard, with "1" still signifying long distance. I can see no benefit to adding a "1" to local calls, except praying on consumers' ignorance.
UNLESS it's like this: my cell phone allows me to dial local calls with or without a "1". If it is local I will not be charged LD. This makes sense because I may just want the call to get through, and I'll eat the charge if I must. I never understood why my land-line based Telco does not offer the same feature... I live in a city with 10-digit dialing, and sometimes I call a number within my area code without knowing whether it's long distance. I know I want to place the call anyway, charge or not, but if I add "1" before the number I get a recording "Not a long distance call bonehead, don't dial the '1'!" (Then I hang up, and dial again, with no 1... argh)
Maybe NYC is adopting a policy where "1" is optional on local calls, but required on LD. This certainly makes sense to me, and I would see that as an intelligent, forward-looking step, where a user unsure of toll charges will still only need to dial once.
I would be able to shift local calling areas at my own whim, and customers couldn't complain ... much.
Still I wonder if this "11" digit dialing is somebody's big mistake. Cities across North America are adopting a 10-digit standard, with "1" still signifying long distance. I can see no benefit to adding a "1" to local calls, except praying on consumers' ignorance.
UNLESS it's like this: my cell phone allows me to dial local calls with or without a "1". If it is local I will not be charged LD. This makes sense because I may just want the call to get through, and I'll eat the charge if I must. I never understood why my land-line based Telco does not offer the same feature... I live in a city with 10-digit dialing, and sometimes I call a number within my area code without knowing whether it's long distance. I know I want to place the call anyway, charge or not, but if I add "1" before the number I get a recording "Not a long distance call bonehead, don't dial the '1'!" (Then I hang up, and dial again, with no 1... argh)
Maybe NYC is adopting a policy where "1" is optional on local calls, but required on LD. This certainly makes sense to me, and I would see that as an intelligent, forward-looking step, where a user unsure of toll charges will still only need to dial once.
You know that, I know that, Microsoft knows that... but functional and marketable are two different concepts. If Ballmer can go to the head of, say, EMI and say "we've got a solution for you, we've never let you down before", then the record companies will eat that up. Sure it will be defeated, but it will become another Microsoft technology that they will probably make huge $ from in licencing fees.
And of course, it just won't work.
Are you trying to suggest that you can't do an analog capture of DV? If you really want that kind of degradation, there's nothing stopping you from plugging the analog output of a DV VCR or camcorder right into that stinky old analog capture card. Is the mere presence of FireWire somehow preventing you from doing that?
no problem at all on my iBook 500 with 384 MB of RAM, 10.2.3.
I'm not defending Apple, but the linked article is pretty ridiculous. After reading it I am relieved to find that GNU-Darwin (not Darwin) is irrelevant. I am relieved because the thought of hot-headed individuals such as this running a project of any consequence is scary.
Think about it: dropping support for specific hardware and APIs in response to a company's policies on DMCA etc. (as opposed to technical reasons) is almost Microsoftian.
At the very least it's quite lame.
As an embedded code developer your argument makes sense, however the products we're talking about here are used for 2 years and tossed. These days almost nobody will attempt to firmware-upgrade a cell phone that's over 2 years old, because it's probably falling apart, the battery is useless, the RF circuitry has half fried itself and the charger connector is corroded to rat shit.
Chipmakers make proprietary chips for these products which are designed to be as small as possible and optimized for the task at hand.
Don't worry about the fact that you can't do anything else with these chips, and development costs a fortune. They are the exclusive domain of the Nokias and Motorolas of the world, and we do not have a say in these matters.
C'mon!!! Is it that hard to just not read a story you're not interested in? Get a life.
As much as Slashdock is cool, it doesn't give you the ability to search Slashdot.
Wouldn't it be cool if... ...there was a Sherlock 3 Slashdot channel?
If Apple waited for every latest and greatest component to become available (and tested it) prior to releasing OS updates, they would never release anything.
This is particularly true of something like BIND, which is not enabled by default anyway!
I would be reluctant to forward messages directly from my personal mailbox to such an archive, in case the headers of my forward get left in their archive.
/. is a little premature in posting this. The concept is great, but until some content is available from their site, I wouldn't exactly call this a "launch".
My email address would then exist in their archive, and could be wrongly identified by some developers as a spammer's address.
Or worse, my email address could be spidered so that I could be delivered more junk mail.
As has already been suggested, some assurances on this site are in order. I don't know who these people are or what they're going to do with my spam when I forward it to them. And the archive is not available to me yet.
Perhaps
The original post is extremely valuable in this thread, and very true: wireless carriers have cut back on network quality in the interest of their bottom line. When people want to buy a cel phone they don't want to know which network is going to work the best overall, they just want the smallest handset with the most bells and whistles.
Don't get me wrong - I do not have an opinion as to whether CDMA or GSM is the best technology, but just don't be too quickly fooled into thinking that network performance is the only factor here - something tells me that dollars and cents play a major factor here. :)
You find the AT&T GSM network reliable because it is new and there is hardly anybody on it.
:)
Wait 3-5 years and it will be overloaded too, as AT&T discovers that GSM doesn't provide any capacity advantage over TDMA, just more whiz-bangy features and nicer handsets.
Until then, enjoy... you are an island, and your phone will work great!
The first: Different cel phone networks have different underlying technologies that make them work. In Canada we have TDMA (Rogers/AT&T), CDMA (Mobility/Telus/Sprint), GSM (Microcell/Fido) and iDEN TDMA (MIKE/Nextel). Each of these phones uses a different modulation scheme - it's kind of like when 56 K modems emerged and we had X2 and Flex.
Each technology has its pro's and cons, I'm not going to get into them here. Suffice it to say that the technologies are different enough that a CDMA phone for example cannot be made to work on a TDMA network.
The second reason is revenue protection. Even here in Canada, where, for example, CDMA technology is used by both Mobility and by Telus, phones are sold with "activation lock codes" - essentially built-in passwords unique to each handset, so that you can't get into your phone's programming and change the network that it connects to. This is because the phones are sold deeply discounted, and the only way the provider can recover that money is to lock you in to a contract, and ensure that the phones they cel will only generate airtime revenue on their own networks. You'd be a fool to think your cel phone, with its big bright display, li-ion battery, speaker phone, vibrate, digital and analog technology in both the 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz spectrum, all in a package so ultra-miniaturized that it's almost a choking hazard, only costs $38... but it has to be marked down that way because competition is so fierce between different providers' handsets.
My suggestion: when you first activate your phone, your provider may quickly step you through some fancy key combinations to program in your new phone number. If not, then before you have your phone disconnected, try to get your phone number changed the day before so that your provider will have to step you through reprogramming the phone. When they do, write down every code you are given. The lock code is on file with your provider and is specific to your handset's serial number (ESN). You can possibly use this later to reprogram your own phone.
Perhaps I should try again in about 5 seconds by clicking on http://www.dataresourceconsulting.com, and, if it still doesn't work, perhaps keep clicking on http://www.dataresourceconsulting.com until the page eventually loads, if it ever does.
I suppose the hosts of http://www.dataresourceconsulting.com don't have enough bandwidth to accomodate for all that unwanted traffic. Oh well, they are a profitable company, so no doubt they will invest in a better connection so that I will one day be able to view http://www.dataresourceconsulting.com.
Just to add to this: all Macs which have been made in the last couple of years (basically since the Ti PowerBook) have an autosensing ethernet port that discerns whether you are connected to a hub/switch or peer-to-peer. This is yet another quiet Apple innovation which has since appeared all over the place on NICs, switches, etc.
(OK, maybe it's just a great idea more than an innovation, but it's certainly worth mentioning.)
Mathematicians simply can't concentrate on the movement of the pieces, even given all the time they need, because it's too easy to get distracted by that wacky Russian folk music.