Yeah, Comcast won't plug on DTV, but you know what you get instead? DirectTV ads. Yes, they plug themselves. Primestar, TCI, Dish Network.... everybody does it. It's their service, they can do it if they want to. (The interesting bit is that if you happen to have cable and dish running side by side on the same channel, you'll notice that the cable company plugs and the dish company plugs occur in the same slot of time).
This is primarily geared for people like myself, who don't have cable or satellite service. Unlike most people, I don't want it or need it- but say I'm at a friend's house and we happen to be watching Doctor Who on BBC America. The DTV plug comes up and I realize, "hey! If *I* get DTV, I can watch Doctor Who!" It's incidental advertising, targeting not the actual person paying for the service, but those who aren't who happen to be "using" it anyway.
So from that standpoint, with AOL on the ISP end and Time Warner running the pipes, it seems to me that disavowing local ISPs to advertise makes perfect sense. Do you see Dish Network ads on DirectTV? Earthlink banner ads on the Stargate web site?
Yeah, it may suck- but the local companies still have the local stations and radio to advertise on.
I learned a long time back that just because a product has a higher version number does not mean that it is in any way better (compare stability and ram consumption of Photoshop 5 and 6, or Word 5 and 6 and you'll see what I mean immediatly). So some dingbat company is getting in bed with a record giant? Yes, it's definitely not a good thing by any stretch of the word, but there are alternatives, you know....
By the same token, we have a CD burner attached to one of the G3s at work... and a built-in drive on the G4. The software that comes with the MacOS for burning is useable for one purpose- making music CDs. It blows for everything else... and it doesn't play well with Toast, either. The solution? Simple- we keep using the burner on the G3, with Toast, which works beautifully. We haven't upgraded toast for a very, very long time... and it still does everything we need it to do and then some. Shit, the only thing it doesn't do is convert MP3s straight to CD audio on the fly.... but that's what the G4 and iTunes will do, and quite speedily, to boot.
Honestly, with a laptop and a pile of computers at work and at home, I've stopped caring about audio CDs- I still have them, but my collection has a thin film of dust on it. You can't beat the convenience of having two hundred albums on your hard drive, rather than having to shuffle a disk every five tracks....
Consider that companies like Microsoft and consortiums like the RIAA are on a rampage because, unlike smaller efforts, they can BUY the laws and legal prescedents they want to ensure their grip on the market.
So poop brown is a pretty good choice of colors for anything law-related.
Forget radio- twenty minutes of DJ, twenty minutes of loud ads, twenty minutes of the same music that got played in the last hour. As people grow more disatisfied with this kind of treatment, I'm sure we'll se a resurgance of NPR and College Radio. Much like a certain *other* monopoly, the RIAA has music in its pocket and as a consequence, with no one to really compete against, has let the quality slip to truly abysmal levels.
With Napster, people have realized that music doesn't have to suck. I ditched my radio shortly after my television, as Britney Spears, Smashmouth, Blink 182 and all sorts of other premanufactured drivel hit the waves and refused to go away. I'm never in the mood for this crap, and I don't like listening to it once an hour- MP3s give me *choice* and the ability to select my audio environment with extreme predjudice.
The RIAA is just like Microsoft in this respect- yes, CD sales are up... because thanks to Napster, people who would otherwise be out of the loop have now heard of the Swamp Terrorists, Birmingham 6, C-tec, Front 242, Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, Jethro Tull, and countless other bands and performers.... none of which are RIAA "A list" contrived acts. Thanks to Linux, people are beginning to realize that there's more to computers than Microsoft. The RIAA and M$ are both attacking thier percieved enemies all-out- the RIAA with lawsuit after lawsuit, and M$ with Internet Explorer, Office, and.Net.
The A-list of both groups is a mind-numbing pile of post-consumer waste masquerading as This is What You Want, and in both cases, it has been clearly proven that far, far superior alternatives exist. (Independant lables for music, Linux, Unix, BSD and Mac OS X for computers) Yet despite that proof, the hulking monstrosity of fecal matter continues to dominate both industries, simply because for every person that gives a shit (supports indie labels and doesn't run windows), there are fifty who are too ignorant to realize they should.
As long as they own the lawyers and advertising space, we're going to keep losing.
...but only because almost everything I like is either an impossible-to-get bootleg, an import, or - worst of all- out of print. So I used Napster to hunt down things that I quite literally would never be able to find otherwise. The radio does NOT play Clock DVA and SPK, thank you- nor will it.
I used to buy CDs by the ream- and was lucky if one, two, or maybe due to some freak chance, three songs on the disk were decent. Fifteen bucks for three tracks doesn't stack up in my mind- I used Napster as a screening process for content quality. It's amusing, the high percentage of albums that are composed largely of filler. Until this changes, I shall continue to thoroughly screen every album prior to purchase- had I bought the latest Fear Factory disk, for example, I would have been out fifteen bucks and sorely disappointed. (If you liked Demanufacture, well... odds are you'll hate Digimortal ) Ten minutes on Napster, pre-filtering, and I knew it was going to be a complete miss, and spent my money on the new Tool album instead.
I'm more than willing to pay for quality music. Too bad the RIAA is criminally unwilling to market it, or allow its exposure to an audience.
First the DDOS attacks- and probably other sorts of similar high-profile hits before then. Then the discovery that M$'s internal network had been compromised; and now in the past week, Themes.org was cracked and Sourceforge was messed with. Slashdot was compromised a few months ago as well (and the staff was very open about what went down and how it had been possible), and I'm sure there are many others that are escaping my attention at the moment.
Is it just me, or are these sorts of things on the rise- not only the frequency, but the profile of the target? How long until a *really* high profile, high volume portal or site such as Amazon, Ebay, or Yahoo gets 0wn3d?
It's geurilla warfare- a war without soldiers, ammunition or human casualties. The attackers cannot be easily found, and even when they are, prosecuting them is difficult, if not impossible (extradition treaties, diplomatics, etceteras). From what I've seen, all of the major targets have been hosted on US soil- I wouldn't be surprised if many of the attackers were overseas. Firewalls don't seem up to the task, and neither do many sysadmins.
What sort of tools exist to prevent this sort of thing (aside from simply using OpenBSD)? Any Gibsonian Black Ice? The TCP/IP equivalents of radar and surface-to-air missiles? Are any of them open sourced, and what is the state of their development?
Forget the new hardware- I still have a use for it. If I had a "spare" G4 that I wasn't using for photoshop or video editing, I'd be, like, happy. Or something. My 8500, 9500, iMac and powerbook are all running MacOS and they're staying there for awhile. But... I have an anceint, rancid 7100 that's just waiting to rust sitting under my TV.
If you have an x100 system, you have TWO whole options for an OS- MacOS (7.something - 9) and MKLinux. There's no Be, no *BSD, nothing else. If you've never used Linux before, MKL is easily the WORST place to start- it boots to a command line and has to be bootstrapped off of MacOS (meaning you can't boot into it natively) - this is DR3 I'm referring to, not whatever the current build is.
Yellow Dog Linux needs a big shiny merit badge for "most useless web site"- Debian, the BSDs, MKLinux, et al all have easy-to find sections that will tell me what hardware the distro runs on. YDL has no mention of anything, and a search by model numbers gets squat for hits. Going by the web site, it runs on flower power iMacs and powerbook G4s- the only model screen shots they display. Odds are if you have one of these, you're running MacOS- anyone who sets out to buy hardware that will end up as a linux box, from my experience, invariably goes intel. It's cheaper.
Linux, from everything I've heard and seen, runs quite well on older hardware- yet there's no mention of said hardware on the YDL page. Anywhere. MKLinux is ass (from a Mac user's perspective), LinuxPPC took a huge shit when I tried to drop it on my 8500, and the Debian installer is going nowhere unless you already know how to partition and format a disk from the command line, 'cuz from firsthand experience, there is NO help for the damned formatting utility.
I'm a Mac user. I like the idea of unix/linux and want to play around on hardware that's not mission critical- I've unsuccessfully grappled with three different distros and have been resoundly shocked by the horrendous quality of the format/install process. If the OSS community is trying to bring new users to Linux, well.... you guys are doing an amazingly piss poor job of it.
I'll stick with OS X for right now- I can run Apache and photoshop on the same machine without rebooting. AND the default install boots right into a pretty, albeit marginally useable UI. Linux, so far, can't compete in that respect.
While having a standard interface would most likely draw in base users and give programmers something to work with in terms of GUI-based apps such as word processors and web browsers, it really has nothing to do with games. Yeah, some graphics libraries may be necessary and you'll certainly need video card driver support, but beyond that, when was the last time you saw a game actually running *on* the desktop?
Games like Tribes don't need Gnome, or Motif, or OpenStep, or KDE or whatever as a prerequisite to run- they need the system kernel and system resources, and access to the hardware. And a way for the user to run the game. That's pretty much it. Remember all of those old DOS games you could still run on NT (without sound) or 9x with full features? Or the games that "required" Win9x but actually ran in DOS? Case in point that the UI is irrelevant- you could boot into DOS and still run Starcraft or Quake.
Digressing offtopic (to the review), I personally think that the general userbase isn't going to dick with linux until they can do the following:
1. Make it go. Easily. Linux sure as hell can't do this (Mac OS X, on the other hand, does)
2. Games, Internet, Word processing. In that order- linux has the internet thing down. Games are coming, and office suites are getting there.
3. Look at it and use it without grimacing. Face it- Mac OS took pretty to the next level with MacOS X, and Windows is tagging behind with XP and 2000. The existing window managers for linux, as fine as they may run and as pretty as you *may* be able to make them, look like complete ass in their base configuration. Apple dropped the ball on X by shifting to a new- and nasty- useability interface that put Pretty as a much higher priority than being useable, and Windows isn't going to go away for awhile. So if Linux wants users, the coders and OSS companies should start by being painless and pretty: who would you invite to the party- the 800 lb Gorilla or Liv Tyler?
With some effort, a Linux distro could arise that contains all of the power and presence of the 800 lb gorilla with the yumminess of Liv Tyler. But right now, it's big, and it's ugly.
Yes, I actually *read* the review. Remove the fact that this guy is running RedHat 7.x and it blends in indistinguishably from the other eight gazillion GamePro quality Yes-Man gushing outpourings of stickiness that need only the tiny little words "advertisement" at the bottom to complete the atmosphere.
It wasn't a review, it was a damned advertisement, disguised as a review- with a brag about hacking Nvidia drivers thrown in. Great- not even links for possible newbies to figure out how to enable the various video card functions for themselves. "Of course, installation was flawless", he says. Loads of detail there. I'm underwhelmed. No comments about network play, no details on how the game performs against players using the Windows version..... no MEAT to the article at all.
It's fluff, pure and simple- if you're hungry for serious information about how this game handles under linux, or under different distros, etceteras, well..... this article simply is NOT going to deliver what you're looking for in any capacity. Unless you're looking for self-rightous babble and a few screen shots, in which case you'll get plenty of both.
But hey, he answers the important question- it runs, and it runs well. And anyone who frequents gaming sites or who's played the windows version knows the game is a blast. So from that standpoint, kudos.
Or at least, along the major trucking arteries. In the area I grew up (north central PA), EVERY filling station had at least one Deisel pump, no less. You were shooting yourself in the face if you didn't have one. They're not nearly as common in the city, but they're around if you know where to look for them- the big freight haulers and busses run off of Deisel for exactly this reason- mileage. And it's relatively cheaper. (As in,even if it IS more expensive, the mileage difference evens out to the gas costing less per mile)
I've been using computers since I was six, and my useage has been constant since I was eighteen. For most of my life, it was the standard extened keyboard with a dozen F keys, a number pad and so forth. Then I bought an iMac, which made use of what was, essentially, an extended laptop keyboard- same set as a laptop with the number pad tacked on. It was tiny- took a bit of time to get used to.
Then I bought a powerbook 520, for writing. Same keyboard, less the number pad. A short while later I hooked into a Powerbook G3 (firewire)- which had much 'shallower' keys, and was is a real dream to use. Combine the small profile of laptop keyboards with the close proximity of the pointing device - in this case, a trackpad less than an inch below the spacebar- and your hand motions have completely minimized.
I'm in an environment that utilizes almost every known input method- a mix od laptop, standard and extended keyboards, a trackball, mice, and a WACOM tablet. With the sole exeption of the laptop, every single combination has induced a good deal of strain, with the MOST strain coming from - you guessed it- the standard extended keyboard and mouse setup that almost 95% of the computer using world uses.
I'm to the point where my laptop, while not the most powerful machine that I use, and by no means having the most disk space, is my primary system: it's the easiest to interface with, particularly when you consider the fact that an LCD is a lot easier on your eyes than a CRT, particularly when you're using your system in excess of three hours at a time.
Television is a waste of time- it requires no thought, no action, and fails on nearly every count to be mentally stimulating (excepting PBS and the BBC, but including BBCAmerica)- and to top it off, it tries to cram the thing I hate the most down my throat- ads.
The ads got to me, to the point of violence. It was interesting, when I was a kid, to tape an episode of Star Trek DS9 and come to the cold realization that out of that 60 minutes of time, less than 45 minutes of it was the program. Deduct credits and intro, and you're down to 42, if that. And probably less these days. That boiled down to three minutes of clutter and fifteen minutes of ads for beer, preparation H, and cadillacs.
I realized I was getting more out of books, computers, and talking to people that I ever managed to squeeze out of the accursed idiot box. The constant volume shifts between the incessant ads and the blase content were giving me headaches, and the pervasiveness of the marginally talented local news personalities with their overblown egos really started to get to me after I realized that nothing I'd seen on the news bore a direct affect on my day-to-day life. I haven't watched television in over a year- I've made a few exceptions for movies, mostly older films, but in general I've turned off, tuned out, peeled my ass off of the damned couch and done something with my life.
Turning on a television is a waste of energy. Watching the damned thing is a waste of your life- what's going to make for better memories- a brain full of Voyager and Buffy episodes or a brain full of conversation, creative work, and real experience that the television is never going to come close to giving you?
Kill the damned thing- it's completely opt-in, so you have no right to bitch about the fucking ads when you can turn it off and do something meaningful.
I caught the premier of the Lone Gunmen, whenever that was- it was the last time I watched TV outside of a bar. I laughed my ass off. The plot was so incredibly WEAK that it made an episode of the Golden Girls look like intense, nail-biting drama. I lost count of technical inaccuracies, fallacies and blatant lack of cluefulness before the second commercial break kicked in. The characters are supposedly the creme de la creme of geeks.... do you really think you could hit that audience with gross misuse of buzzwords and terminology? No.
Star Trek loses me hear as well- the show really should be billed as a fantasy, rather than science fiction. Warp Drive may be mathematically feasable, but the fact that you couldn't follow a tech-heavy episode without a manual- and the fact that they relied on some sort of jury-rigged fix to save them half the time (which was promptly forgotten the next episode or show- why hasn't Voyager simply found one of the damned Transwarp Conduits from mid-series TNG and rocketed back home? Or asked a big one of Q?) and explained it in terms that would enrage and offend a scientist totally turned me off. Or Neelix, which is many ways worse.
This brings me to the Saviour of watchable Sci-Fi- Red Dwarf. The show gets most of its science fact correct- the ship itself is a sound concept and one could dig up details on the math behind it if they felt like it. It doesn't over-rely on tech explanations to save the day, and the characters are pretty much idiots when it comes to tech anyway... it *is* a comedy, after all... anyone who's sick of network suck and hasn't heard of Dwarf would do themselves a favor to check it out. Or Doctor Who... or the Prisoner....
Quicktime isn't just a media player, it's a system-level extention that provides a staggering amount of functionality: graphical thumbnail previews, sound management, and video processing for ALL applications and games on the Mac. I can run Premier 1, 2,3, 4, or 5; After Effects 1,2,3, or 4, Media 100 software, Poser, Bryce, Lightwave..... all with Quicktime 1,2,3,4 or 5- and it doesn't MATTER which version of QT I have on my system (though why you'd want less than 3 is beyond me)- these applications don't care and will render to Sorenson, On/2. MotionJPEG or Media100 codecs without complaint. Try doing *THAT* on a Windows system- this is a case in point where "bundling", as it were, is not only a good thing, but a valid REASON to buy a Mac.
iTunes is a free download that works with all USB-Native Macs running 9.0.4 or higher- and it blows away absolutely every other MP3 player on the market. I have 2,777 songs in my playlist and the little wonder hasn't crashed or tanked on me once. I'm using it because it's stable, not because it's an Apple product- they just happened to be the first company to release a useable MP3 player for MacOS.
DiscBurner sucks, but fortunately for anyone with an existing copy of Toast, you'll be happy to know that Toast runs with the built-in Apple CD burners. You just have to hit the burn button before the OS notices the blank media you've inserted. The native burning utilities work great with iTunes, but suck for everything else- speed tanks really bad and it lacks the features of Toast. The built-in CDR drive on my G4 is an 8x- Toast burns at that speed, DiscBurner takes a shit and runs twice as long, at least. I'll give Apple this- they *HAVE* made the process of burning CDs into a transparent element of the OS, which is as it SHOULD be- a blank CD is akin to a floppy, zip, or a syquest these days.
Cyberdog died with OpenDoc, not because of MS pressure, but because CD depended on OD in order to work at all (try running it on MOS 8.5 or higher).... and OD was not exactly the best of ideas.
Truth be told, I've found that about the only things Apple puts on the installer that I never, EVER use are Netscape, Stickies, and the scrapbook. And I've seen a lot of other people use Stickies. The MacOS comes loaded with stuff you're likely going to use, be it for work or fun- whereas, by the same token, have you ever seen an install of Windows that *didn't* have Solitaire and Minesweeper? Sure, MacOS has a solitare sampler on some of the instal disks, but it doesn't go on by default, and you have to run the installer seperately. The iMacs come with games and the like preinstalled because they're consumer-oriented systems... like Windows. In that respect, the average user has enough Gee-whiz under the hood to keep him or her happily occupied for months, before they even really need to think about adding new applications.
So the PPC and the 68k were incompatable. Apple realized that they had to move onward and upward and the old 68k's weren't going to cut it, no way, no how. The PPC was what they needed, with the caveat that it was a totally different architecture. But the damned thing ran so much FASTER than the 68k that the second generation of PPC (603) was running 68k software *FASTER* than even the fastest Quadra could handle.
In this fashion, Apple was able to get a next generation processor to market, and maintain compatability with existing (and now horribly outdated) hardware.
A situation similar to this could easily be considered an act of war- particularly if the hackers or script-kiddies were targeting.gov sites as opposed to corps [who, given the technology and $ at their disposal, are asking for it if they leave their systems open].
Technically, if the compromised hardware, software, company, what have you is physically *inside* united states boundaries, then the attacker could be persecuted under US law, yes? Conversly, if some 1337 d00d in Jersey hacked a Russian site and pissed them off, he should likewise be subject to the same considerations.
Yeah, it's the internet, no physical boundaries and all that. Root my server and the only thing seperating you from a fractured skull is the distance factor- something governments don't have to worry about. Crackers do this kind of shit because they know they're not going to get caught- a few serious, well-founded PROVEN criminal cases may serve as a deterrent, or at least get the issue out in the open.
Before you break your arm patting your religion on the back, look into the origins of the dead guy on a stick and then bakc further, into the religions and societies that existed before and during the corruption of Constantine. Take a peek at their mythology and method of reasoning out the universe, and realize that your "god" is about as original and omnipotent as Windows for Workgroups is to Kernel 2.4.
I'm the center of my Universe. You're the center of yours- why you'd want to give that level of power and responsibility up to a corrupt, aeon-old second-hand deity is beyond me.
...but I suppose that since Apple effectively didn't exist to the slashdot crew until MOSX, it is to some people. This sort of journalistic bias is going to foster the wrong impression, which is the last thing Apple- or any company- really needs. Here's the deal:
MOS 8.5 shipped with the Appearance Manager and a "platinum theme" installed. There were three others in the mix, that were not included (and later leaked out) - "hi tech", "drawing board" and "gizmo", all of which are effectively complete, system-level replacements for Platinum.
Creating tools to edit the appearance manager and the appearance theme files is a Bad Thing- you aren't skinning the UI with the appearance manager, you're completely altering it. Apple doesn't support or promote anything beyond the Platinum theme for various reasons, chief among them the trademark "look and feel" of it and the fact that in many respects, the other Appearance Themes are more system intensive, crash-prone, and not as complete.
This does NOT include Kaleidescope [http://www.kaleidoscope.net/] , however- an add-on for MOS that enables you to skin your UI however you like. Kaleidescope pretty much sits on top of Platinum or whatever your theme is and rides side-saddle. It's a third party add-on that you should pay for [it's shareware], and was developed without hacking, altering, or hooking into the themes element of the Appearance Manager. As such, it's free from the Legal Hammer of Apple Legal.
If *anyone* had bothered to read the actual thingy on sourceforge, they would have noticed that this *is* a theme editor for MOS 8.5-9.1, and has nothing to do with X [with possible exception to Classic]. This has nothing to do with X, or Darwin- it has to do with hacking Pre-MOSX, closed source, classic architecture. Treat it accordingly.
Assume that everyone can see what everyone else is doing. Based on this, anyone desiring privacy: to be left alone, to persue ones own work or personal goals, to simply be OFF CAMERA, out of frame, or out of contact, would be suspect of Bad Things. Yeah, this is good. I draw my own special brew of erotica for fun- something my friends are totally cool with, as I'm oft asking for suggestions. Do I want some ultra-right-wing jackass seeing it and condemning me for being a pervert because he has the "right" to do so? Uhm... NO. Thank you. You probably think Orwell is an idealist, don't you?
Sure, you might strike out and get pissed if you're trying to find Britney or Smashmouth - or any of the other top forty BS. But Napster has a sustained user base of around seven thousand- this peaked at just over ten thousand back when the legal battle was getting hot and nasty.
Fortunately the "ruling" and the heat are coming from the people that control the crap on the radio- "music" I've never had a taste for. Napster is still a great place to find material from extinct and independant labels- music I would gladly support if I could actually *find* it.
Not by a long shot. I've used OSX Server, the public beta, and the shipping release. The last of these three is by far the coolest, but it's still missing damn near everything that makes the MacOS my platform of choice. And I'll be using Classic until X catches up, thank you.
X is lagging in a lot of areas- pop-up folders are smoked, the control strip is gone, the dock is a joke, and I'd love to have the *finder* as opposed to this piece of ass NeXT replacement. As has been pointed out in the Ars review, there is something a lot like this that has been available for the classic OS for a long time- and I used it for about a minute and a half. A few other Mac users that I know laughed it off and likewise refused to use it- and when OSX starts shipping preinstalled, well... it won't be shipping in my direction until the GUI gets marginally close to that of the Classic OS.
In so very many ways, OSX is really a step down or backwards- the UI "feels" too much like Windows and other, similar half-assed graphical frontends for my liking, despite the apple menu.
Let's see- would you rather pay for a cheap box that has half-assed USB support and a big, nasty-looking monitor, or would you rather pay an extra bit of cash for a solid, reliable hardware package that comes with an OS that supports USB, firewire, and, oh... comes with a CD burner?
The iMac has the BEST monitor clarity, refresh rate and gamma out of every monitor I have EVER used. My 17" KDS and 21" Trinitron look like ass by comparison (though the trinitron is close enough, it's stuck on a wintel machine... don't get me started on Windows gamma).
If the monitor really, REALLY bends your noodle, perhaps you need to reappraise what matters about the computing experience. I cranked out a three and a half minute, 640x480 demo tape that contained a lot of 3d and compositing elements on my rinky-dink 233mhz bondi iMac with 96 megs of RAM- while my roommate put his expensive-ass 21" monitor and 600$ video card to use playing halflife. Great use of time there, spanky.
If you like the hardware and hate the monitor, then drill a hole in the back of the case and hardware hack the danged thing- the iMac monitor connects to the mobo through a standard VGA jack on the inside of the case. You can put any danged monitor you like on the thing.
Um... you have only to look here - http://www.indymedia.org/ - to realize that/. is, in fact, less than useful when it comes to the reporting and publicizing of armed conflict or serious issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment and so forth. Indymedia is about the only useful news sites on the web- the only real issue is that their updates are less regular and a little more.... focused.
Odds are that if somepleace like Korea gets nuked, you'll get the news from Indymedia.org, and a lengthy diatribe about how much [company X. movie X, processor X] sucks/rules from the slashdot editors, who wouldn't even notice until the submission line became clogged with nothing else.
If you'd listed an email, I'd tell you directly- I'm thoroughly amazed to get a reply to one of my posts that isn't either a flame or a "Yeah!" - I really appreciate the history lesson, as XENIX information has proven very difficult to find. The economics and technology of the time, thanks to your perspective, makes the relative non-existance of XENIX easier to understand.
And you're right- most people don't want bash. Or a command prompt at all- though it would be nice to use the bar in Windows and the Explorer-wannabe window managers to execute bash commands. It's sad to see that Microsoft's vastly inferior UI is "the" UI experience for so many, when the MacOS does it so much better.... likewise the experience between DOS and the UNIX shells.
Okay, this is more tech than marketing, but I'd still like to see a straight answer. How, exactly, is.NET any different than, say, opening Telnet and running a remote session on a server? Aside from the fact that it seems more fractionalized and has a GUI, and potential users will have to pay money to use it, of course.
I can run Telnet on just about everything - from an Apple//c to an SGI, it's available for practically every platform and works exactly the same across the board. It is an established fact that for some weird reason, M$ products for the Macintosh are far superior to those for their own OS, and they support nothing else..NET seems like an attempt by M$ to recoup their most immediate loss- the web making operating systems irrelevant- by relying on it to tie the end user into the Microsoft feifdom even further. Stating that.NET services will be available for Linux while at the same time raining FUD down on the less educated about the same OS? Giving me a shot at bogging down OSX even further? What is the point of all this, and if Microsoft is betting the farm on it and everybody says "fuck off", what then?
Also, how do you intend to sell the idea of "subscription" software to people that have become progressively disatisfied as the version numbers creep upward? The only product I've used that seems to keep getting better is Internet Explorer- Outlook is still poorly designed, Word became useless [without a custom install and forty minutes of tweaking] after version 5, and... well, we all know the negative view of the Microsoft operating environments that most/. users have. Point of fact is that I have everything I need from Microsoft, and no plans at all to upgrade any of it because I have no money and what I have works very well..NET gives me no incentive to upgrade, and every possible reason to stick with older software - who thought of this, and who forgot to do the market research?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Comcast won't plug on DTV, but you know what you get instead? DirectTV ads. Yes, they plug themselves. Primestar, TCI, Dish Network.... everybody does it. It's their service, they can do it if they want to. (The interesting bit is that if you happen to have cable and dish running side by side on the same channel, you'll notice that the cable company plugs and the dish company plugs occur in the same slot of time).
This is primarily geared for people like myself, who don't have cable or satellite service. Unlike most people, I don't want it or need it- but say I'm at a friend's house and we happen to be watching Doctor Who on BBC America. The DTV plug comes up and I realize, "hey! If *I* get DTV, I can watch Doctor Who!" It's incidental advertising, targeting not the actual person paying for the service, but those who aren't who happen to be "using" it anyway.
So from that standpoint, with AOL on the ISP end and Time Warner running the pipes, it seems to me that disavowing local ISPs to advertise makes perfect sense. Do you see Dish Network ads on DirectTV? Earthlink banner ads on the Stargate web site?
Yeah, it may suck- but the local companies still have the local stations and radio to advertise on.
I learned a long time back that just because a product has a higher version number does not mean that it is in any way better (compare stability and ram consumption of Photoshop 5 and 6, or Word 5 and 6 and you'll see what I mean immediatly). So some dingbat company is getting in bed with a record giant? Yes, it's definitely not a good thing by any stretch of the word, but there are alternatives, you know....
By the same token, we have a CD burner attached to one of the G3s at work... and a built-in drive on the G4. The software that comes with the MacOS for burning is useable for one purpose- making music CDs. It blows for everything else... and it doesn't play well with Toast, either. The solution? Simple- we keep using the burner on the G3, with Toast, which works beautifully. We haven't upgraded toast for a very, very long time... and it still does everything we need it to do and then some. Shit, the only thing it doesn't do is convert MP3s straight to CD audio on the fly.... but that's what the G4 and iTunes will do, and quite speedily, to boot.
Honestly, with a laptop and a pile of computers at work and at home, I've stopped caring about audio CDs- I still have them, but my collection has a thin film of dust on it. You can't beat the convenience of having two hundred albums on your hard drive, rather than having to shuffle a disk every five tracks....
Consider that companies like Microsoft and consortiums like the RIAA are on a rampage because, unlike smaller efforts, they can BUY the laws and legal prescedents they want to ensure their grip on the market.
So poop brown is a pretty good choice of colors for anything law-related.
Forget radio- twenty minutes of DJ, twenty minutes of loud ads, twenty minutes of the same music that got played in the last hour. As people grow more disatisfied with this kind of treatment, I'm sure we'll se a resurgance of NPR and College Radio. Much like a certain *other* monopoly, the RIAA has music in its pocket and as a consequence, with no one to really compete against, has let the quality slip to truly abysmal levels.
.Net.
With Napster, people have realized that music doesn't have to suck. I ditched my radio shortly after my television, as Britney Spears, Smashmouth, Blink 182 and all sorts of other premanufactured drivel hit the waves and refused to go away. I'm never in the mood for this crap, and I don't like listening to it once an hour- MP3s give me *choice* and the ability to select my audio environment with extreme predjudice.
The RIAA is just like Microsoft in this respect- yes, CD sales are up... because thanks to Napster, people who would otherwise be out of the loop have now heard of the Swamp Terrorists, Birmingham 6, C-tec, Front 242, Front Line Assembly, Skinny Puppy, Jethro Tull, and countless other bands and performers.... none of which are RIAA "A list" contrived acts. Thanks to Linux, people are beginning to realize that there's more to computers than Microsoft. The RIAA and M$ are both attacking thier percieved enemies all-out- the RIAA with lawsuit after lawsuit, and M$ with Internet Explorer, Office, and
The A-list of both groups is a mind-numbing pile of post-consumer waste masquerading as This is What You Want, and in both cases, it has been clearly proven that far, far superior alternatives exist. (Independant lables for music, Linux, Unix, BSD and Mac OS X for computers) Yet despite that proof, the hulking monstrosity of fecal matter continues to dominate both industries, simply because for every person that gives a shit (supports indie labels and doesn't run windows), there are fifty who are too ignorant to realize they should.
As long as they own the lawyers and advertising space, we're going to keep losing.
...but only because almost everything I like is either an impossible-to-get bootleg, an import, or - worst of all- out of print. So I used Napster to hunt down things that I quite literally would never be able to find otherwise. The radio does NOT play Clock DVA and SPK, thank you- nor will it.
I used to buy CDs by the ream- and was lucky if one, two, or maybe due to some freak chance, three songs on the disk were decent. Fifteen bucks for three tracks doesn't stack up in my mind- I used Napster as a screening process for content quality. It's amusing, the high percentage of albums that are composed largely of filler. Until this changes, I shall continue to thoroughly screen every album prior to purchase- had I bought the latest Fear Factory disk, for example, I would have been out fifteen bucks and sorely disappointed. (If you liked Demanufacture, well... odds are you'll hate Digimortal ) Ten minutes on Napster, pre-filtering, and I knew it was going to be a complete miss, and spent my money on the new Tool album instead.
I'm more than willing to pay for quality music. Too bad the RIAA is criminally unwilling to market it, or allow its exposure to an audience.
First the DDOS attacks- and probably other sorts of similar high-profile hits before then. Then the discovery that M$'s internal network had been compromised; and now in the past week, Themes.org was cracked and Sourceforge was messed with. Slashdot was compromised a few months ago as well (and the staff was very open about what went down and how it had been possible), and I'm sure there are many others that are escaping my attention at the moment.
Is it just me, or are these sorts of things on the rise- not only the frequency, but the profile of the target? How long until a *really* high profile, high volume portal or site such as Amazon, Ebay, or Yahoo gets 0wn3d?
It's geurilla warfare- a war without soldiers, ammunition or human casualties. The attackers cannot be easily found, and even when they are, prosecuting them is difficult, if not impossible (extradition treaties, diplomatics, etceteras). From what I've seen, all of the major targets have been hosted on US soil- I wouldn't be surprised if many of the attackers were overseas. Firewalls don't seem up to the task, and neither do many sysadmins.
What sort of tools exist to prevent this sort of thing (aside from simply using OpenBSD)? Any Gibsonian Black Ice? The TCP/IP equivalents of radar and surface-to-air missiles? Are any of them open sourced, and what is the state of their development?
Forget the new hardware- I still have a use for it. If I had a "spare" G4 that I wasn't using for photoshop or video editing, I'd be, like, happy. Or something. My 8500, 9500, iMac and powerbook are all running MacOS and they're staying there for awhile. But... I have an anceint, rancid 7100 that's just waiting to rust sitting under my TV.
If you have an x100 system, you have TWO whole options for an OS- MacOS (7.something - 9) and MKLinux. There's no Be, no *BSD, nothing else. If you've never used Linux before, MKL is easily the WORST place to start- it boots to a command line and has to be bootstrapped off of MacOS (meaning you can't boot into it natively) - this is DR3 I'm referring to, not whatever the current build is.
Yellow Dog Linux needs a big shiny merit badge for "most useless web site"- Debian, the BSDs, MKLinux, et al all have easy-to find sections that will tell me what hardware the distro runs on. YDL has no mention of anything, and a search by model numbers gets squat for hits. Going by the web site, it runs on flower power iMacs and powerbook G4s- the only model screen shots they display. Odds are if you have one of these, you're running MacOS- anyone who sets out to buy hardware that will end up as a linux box, from my experience, invariably goes intel. It's cheaper.
Linux, from everything I've heard and seen, runs quite well on older hardware- yet there's no mention of said hardware on the YDL page. Anywhere. MKLinux is ass (from a Mac user's perspective), LinuxPPC took a huge shit when I tried to drop it on my 8500, and the Debian installer is going nowhere unless you already know how to partition and format a disk from the command line, 'cuz from firsthand experience, there is NO help for the damned formatting utility.
I'm a Mac user. I like the idea of unix/linux and want to play around on hardware that's not mission critical- I've unsuccessfully grappled with three different distros and have been resoundly shocked by the horrendous quality of the format/install process. If the OSS community is trying to bring new users to Linux, well.... you guys are doing an amazingly piss poor job of it.
I'll stick with OS X for right now- I can run Apache and photoshop on the same machine without rebooting. AND the default install boots right into a pretty, albeit marginally useable UI. Linux, so far, can't compete in that respect.
While having a standard interface would most likely draw in base users and give programmers something to work with in terms of GUI-based apps such as word processors and web browsers, it really has nothing to do with games. Yeah, some graphics libraries may be necessary and you'll certainly need video card driver support, but beyond that, when was the last time you saw a game actually running *on* the desktop?
Games like Tribes don't need Gnome, or Motif, or OpenStep, or KDE or whatever as a prerequisite to run- they need the system kernel and system resources, and access to the hardware. And a way for the user to run the game. That's pretty much it. Remember all of those old DOS games you could still run on NT (without sound) or 9x with full features? Or the games that "required" Win9x but actually ran in DOS? Case in point that the UI is irrelevant- you could boot into DOS and still run Starcraft or Quake.
Digressing offtopic (to the review), I personally think that the general userbase isn't going to dick with linux until they can do the following:
1. Make it go. Easily. Linux sure as hell can't do this (Mac OS X, on the other hand, does)
2. Games, Internet, Word processing. In that order- linux has the internet thing down. Games are coming, and office suites are getting there.
3. Look at it and use it without grimacing. Face it- Mac OS took pretty to the next level with MacOS X, and Windows is tagging behind with XP and 2000. The existing window managers for linux, as fine as they may run and as pretty as you *may* be able to make them, look like complete ass in their base configuration. Apple dropped the ball on X by shifting to a new- and nasty- useability interface that put Pretty as a much higher priority than being useable, and Windows isn't going to go away for awhile. So if Linux wants users, the coders and OSS companies should start by being painless and pretty: who would you invite to the party- the 800 lb Gorilla or Liv Tyler?
With some effort, a Linux distro could arise that contains all of the power and presence of the 800 lb gorilla with the yumminess of Liv Tyler. But right now, it's big, and it's ugly.
Yes, I actually *read* the review. Remove the fact that this guy is running RedHat 7.x and it blends in indistinguishably from the other eight gazillion GamePro quality Yes-Man gushing outpourings of stickiness that need only the tiny little words "advertisement" at the bottom to complete the atmosphere.
It wasn't a review, it was a damned advertisement, disguised as a review- with a brag about hacking Nvidia drivers thrown in. Great- not even links for possible newbies to figure out how to enable the various video card functions for themselves. "Of course, installation was flawless", he says. Loads of detail there. I'm underwhelmed. No comments about network play, no details on how the game performs against players using the Windows version..... no MEAT to the article at all.
It's fluff, pure and simple- if you're hungry for serious information about how this game handles under linux, or under different distros, etceteras, well..... this article simply is NOT going to deliver what you're looking for in any capacity. Unless you're looking for self-rightous babble and a few screen shots, in which case you'll get plenty of both.
But hey, he answers the important question- it runs, and it runs well. And anyone who frequents gaming sites or who's played the windows version knows the game is a blast. So from that standpoint, kudos.
Or at least, along the major trucking arteries. In the area I grew up (north central PA), EVERY filling station had at least one Deisel pump, no less. You were shooting yourself in the face if you didn't have one. They're not nearly as common in the city, but they're around if you know where to look for them- the big freight haulers and busses run off of Deisel for exactly this reason- mileage. And it's relatively cheaper. (As in,even if it IS more expensive, the mileage difference evens out to the gas costing less per mile)
I've been using computers since I was six, and my useage has been constant since I was eighteen. For most of my life, it was the standard extened keyboard with a dozen F keys, a number pad and so forth. Then I bought an iMac, which made use of what was, essentially, an extended laptop keyboard- same set as a laptop with the number pad tacked on. It was tiny- took a bit of time to get used to.
Then I bought a powerbook 520, for writing. Same keyboard, less the number pad. A short while later I hooked into a Powerbook G3 (firewire)- which had much 'shallower' keys, and was is a real dream to use. Combine the small profile of laptop keyboards with the close proximity of the pointing device - in this case, a trackpad less than an inch below the spacebar- and your hand motions have completely minimized.
I'm in an environment that utilizes almost every known input method- a mix od laptop, standard and extended keyboards, a trackball, mice, and a WACOM tablet. With the sole exeption of the laptop, every single combination has induced a good deal of strain, with the MOST strain coming from - you guessed it- the standard extended keyboard and mouse setup that almost 95% of the computer using world uses.
I'm to the point where my laptop, while not the most powerful machine that I use, and by no means having the most disk space, is my primary system: it's the easiest to interface with, particularly when you consider the fact that an LCD is a lot easier on your eyes than a CRT, particularly when you're using your system in excess of three hours at a time.
Television is a waste of time- it requires no thought, no action, and fails on nearly every count to be mentally stimulating (excepting PBS and the BBC, but including BBCAmerica)- and to top it off, it tries to cram the thing I hate the most down my throat- ads.
The ads got to me, to the point of violence. It was interesting, when I was a kid, to tape an episode of Star Trek DS9 and come to the cold realization that out of that 60 minutes of time, less than 45 minutes of it was the program. Deduct credits and intro, and you're down to 42, if that. And probably less these days. That boiled down to three minutes of clutter and fifteen minutes of ads for beer, preparation H, and cadillacs.
I realized I was getting more out of books, computers, and talking to people that I ever managed to squeeze out of the accursed idiot box. The constant volume shifts between the incessant ads and the blase content were giving me headaches, and the pervasiveness of the marginally talented local news personalities with their overblown egos really started to get to me after I realized that nothing I'd seen on the news bore a direct affect on my day-to-day life. I haven't watched television in over a year- I've made a few exceptions for movies, mostly older films, but in general I've turned off, tuned out, peeled my ass off of the damned couch and done something with my life.
Turning on a television is a waste of energy. Watching the damned thing is a waste of your life- what's going to make for better memories- a brain full of Voyager and Buffy episodes or a brain full of conversation, creative work, and real experience that the television is never going to come close to giving you?
Kill the damned thing- it's completely opt-in, so you have no right to bitch about the fucking ads when you can turn it off and do something meaningful.
And US TV does *not* (with very few exceptions).
I caught the premier of the Lone Gunmen, whenever that was- it was the last time I watched TV outside of a bar. I laughed my ass off. The plot was so incredibly WEAK that it made an episode of the Golden Girls look like intense, nail-biting drama. I lost count of technical inaccuracies, fallacies and blatant lack of cluefulness before the second commercial break kicked in. The characters are supposedly the creme de la creme of geeks.... do you really think you could hit that audience with gross misuse of buzzwords and terminology? No.
Star Trek loses me hear as well- the show really should be billed as a fantasy, rather than science fiction. Warp Drive may be mathematically feasable, but the fact that you couldn't follow a tech-heavy episode without a manual- and the fact that they relied on some sort of jury-rigged fix to save them half the time (which was promptly forgotten the next episode or show- why hasn't Voyager simply found one of the damned Transwarp Conduits from mid-series TNG and rocketed back home? Or asked a big one of Q?) and explained it in terms that would enrage and offend a scientist totally turned me off. Or Neelix, which is many ways worse.
This brings me to the Saviour of watchable Sci-Fi- Red Dwarf. The show gets most of its science fact correct- the ship itself is a sound concept and one could dig up details on the math behind it if they felt like it. It doesn't over-rely on tech explanations to save the day, and the characters are pretty much idiots when it comes to tech anyway... it *is* a comedy, after all... anyone who's sick of network suck and hasn't heard of Dwarf would do themselves a favor to check it out. Or Doctor Who... or the Prisoner....
Quicktime isn't just a media player, it's a system-level extention that provides a staggering amount of functionality: graphical thumbnail previews, sound management, and video processing for ALL applications and games on the Mac. I can run Premier 1, 2,3, 4, or 5; After Effects 1,2,3, or 4, Media 100 software, Poser, Bryce, Lightwave..... all with Quicktime 1,2,3,4 or 5- and it doesn't MATTER which version of QT I have on my system (though why you'd want less than 3 is beyond me)- these applications don't care and will render to Sorenson, On/2. MotionJPEG or Media100 codecs without complaint. Try doing *THAT* on a Windows system- this is a case in point where "bundling", as it were, is not only a good thing, but a valid REASON to buy a Mac.
iTunes is a free download that works with all USB-Native Macs running 9.0.4 or higher- and it blows away absolutely every other MP3 player on the market. I have 2,777 songs in my playlist and the little wonder hasn't crashed or tanked on me once. I'm using it because it's stable, not because it's an Apple product- they just happened to be the first company to release a useable MP3 player for MacOS.
DiscBurner sucks, but fortunately for anyone with an existing copy of Toast, you'll be happy to know that Toast runs with the built-in Apple CD burners. You just have to hit the burn button before the OS notices the blank media you've inserted. The native burning utilities work great with iTunes, but suck for everything else- speed tanks really bad and it lacks the features of Toast. The built-in CDR drive on my G4 is an 8x- Toast burns at that speed, DiscBurner takes a shit and runs twice as long, at least. I'll give Apple this- they *HAVE* made the process of burning CDs into a transparent element of the OS, which is as it SHOULD be- a blank CD is akin to a floppy, zip, or a syquest these days.
Cyberdog died with OpenDoc, not because of MS pressure, but because CD depended on OD in order to work at all (try running it on MOS 8.5 or higher).... and OD was not exactly the best of ideas.
Truth be told, I've found that about the only things Apple puts on the installer that I never, EVER use are Netscape, Stickies, and the scrapbook. And I've seen a lot of other people use Stickies. The MacOS comes loaded with stuff you're likely going to use, be it for work or fun- whereas, by the same token, have you ever seen an install of Windows that *didn't* have Solitaire and Minesweeper? Sure, MacOS has a solitare sampler on some of the instal disks, but it doesn't go on by default, and you have to run the installer seperately. The iMacs come with games and the like preinstalled because they're consumer-oriented systems... like Windows. In that respect, the average user has enough Gee-whiz under the hood to keep him or her happily occupied for months, before they even really need to think about adding new applications.
So the PPC and the 68k were incompatable. Apple realized that they had to move onward and upward and the old 68k's weren't going to cut it, no way, no how. The PPC was what they needed, with the caveat that it was a totally different architecture. But the damned thing ran so much FASTER than the 68k that the second generation of PPC (603) was running 68k software *FASTER* than even the fastest Quadra could handle.
In this fashion, Apple was able to get a next generation processor to market, and maintain compatability with existing (and now horribly outdated) hardware.
HOW is that a *MISTAKE* ?
A situation similar to this could easily be considered an act of war- particularly if the hackers or script-kiddies were targeting .gov sites as opposed to corps [who, given the technology and $ at their disposal, are asking for it if they leave their systems open].
Technically, if the compromised hardware, software, company, what have you is physically *inside* united states boundaries, then the attacker could be persecuted under US law, yes? Conversly, if some 1337 d00d in Jersey hacked a Russian site and pissed them off, he should likewise be subject to the same considerations.
Yeah, it's the internet, no physical boundaries and all that. Root my server and the only thing seperating you from a fractured skull is the distance factor- something governments don't have to worry about. Crackers do this kind of shit because they know they're not going to get caught- a few serious, well-founded PROVEN criminal cases may serve as a deterrent, or at least get the issue out in the open.
Before you break your arm patting your religion on the back, look into the origins of the dead guy on a stick and then bakc further, into the religions and societies that existed before and during the corruption of Constantine. Take a peek at their mythology and method of reasoning out the universe, and realize that your "god" is about as original and omnipotent as Windows for Workgroups is to Kernel 2.4.
I'm the center of my Universe. You're the center of yours- why you'd want to give that level of power and responsibility up to a corrupt, aeon-old second-hand deity is beyond me.
...but I suppose that since Apple effectively didn't exist to the slashdot crew until MOSX, it is to some people. This sort of journalistic bias is going to foster the wrong impression, which is the last thing Apple- or any company- really needs. Here's the deal:
MOS 8.5 shipped with the Appearance Manager and a "platinum theme" installed. There were three others in the mix, that were not included (and later leaked out) - "hi tech", "drawing board" and "gizmo", all of which are effectively complete, system-level replacements for Platinum.
Creating tools to edit the appearance manager and the appearance theme files is a Bad Thing- you aren't skinning the UI with the appearance manager, you're completely altering it. Apple doesn't support or promote anything beyond the Platinum theme for various reasons, chief among them the trademark "look and feel" of it and the fact that in many respects, the other Appearance Themes are more system intensive, crash-prone, and not as complete.
This does NOT include Kaleidescope [http://www.kaleidoscope.net/] , however- an add-on for MOS that enables you to skin your UI however you like. Kaleidescope pretty much sits on top of Platinum or whatever your theme is and rides side-saddle. It's a third party add-on that you should pay for [it's shareware], and was developed without hacking, altering, or hooking into the themes element of the Appearance Manager. As such, it's free from the Legal Hammer of Apple Legal.
If *anyone* had bothered to read the actual thingy on sourceforge, they would have noticed that this *is* a theme editor for MOS 8.5-9.1, and has nothing to do with X [with possible exception to Classic]. This has nothing to do with X, or Darwin- it has to do with hacking Pre-MOSX, closed source, classic architecture. Treat it accordingly.
Assume that everyone can see what everyone else is doing. Based on this, anyone desiring privacy: to be left alone, to persue ones own work or personal goals, to simply be OFF CAMERA, out of frame, or out of contact, would be suspect of Bad Things. Yeah, this is good. I draw my own special brew of erotica for fun- something my friends are totally cool with, as I'm oft asking for suggestions. Do I want some ultra-right-wing jackass seeing it and condemning me for being a pervert because he has the "right" to do so? Uhm... NO. Thank you. You probably think Orwell is an idealist, don't you?
Sure, you might strike out and get pissed if you're trying to find Britney or Smashmouth - or any of the other top forty BS. But Napster has a sustained user base of around seven thousand- this peaked at just over ten thousand back when the legal battle was getting hot and nasty.
Fortunately the "ruling" and the heat are coming from the people that control the crap on the radio- "music" I've never had a taste for. Napster is still a great place to find material from extinct and independant labels- music I would gladly support if I could actually *find* it.
Not by a long shot. I've used OSX Server, the public beta, and the shipping release. The last of these three is by far the coolest, but it's still missing damn near everything that makes the MacOS my platform of choice. And I'll be using Classic until X catches up, thank you.
X is lagging in a lot of areas- pop-up folders are smoked, the control strip is gone, the dock is a joke, and I'd love to have the *finder* as opposed to this piece of ass NeXT replacement. As has been pointed out in the Ars review, there is something a lot like this that has been available for the classic OS for a long time- and I used it for about a minute and a half. A few other Mac users that I know laughed it off and likewise refused to use it- and when OSX starts shipping preinstalled, well... it won't be shipping in my direction until the GUI gets marginally close to that of the Classic OS.
In so very many ways, OSX is really a step down or backwards- the UI "feels" too much like Windows and other, similar half-assed graphical frontends for my liking, despite the apple menu.
Let's see- would you rather pay for a cheap box that has half-assed USB support and a big, nasty-looking monitor, or would you rather pay an extra bit of cash for a solid, reliable hardware package that comes with an OS that supports USB, firewire, and, oh... comes with a CD burner?
The iMac has the BEST monitor clarity, refresh rate and gamma out of every monitor I have EVER used. My 17" KDS and 21" Trinitron look like ass by comparison (though the trinitron is close enough, it's stuck on a wintel machine... don't get me started on Windows gamma).
If the monitor really, REALLY bends your noodle, perhaps you need to reappraise what matters about the computing experience. I cranked out a three and a half minute, 640x480 demo tape that contained a lot of 3d and compositing elements on my rinky-dink 233mhz bondi iMac with 96 megs of RAM- while my roommate put his expensive-ass 21" monitor and 600$ video card to use playing halflife. Great use of time there, spanky.
If you like the hardware and hate the monitor, then drill a hole in the back of the case and hardware hack the danged thing- the iMac monitor connects to the mobo through a standard VGA jack on the inside of the case. You can put any danged monitor you like on the thing.
Um... you have only to look here - http://www.indymedia.org/ - to realize that /. is, in fact, less than useful when it comes to the reporting and publicizing of armed conflict or serious issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment and so forth. Indymedia is about the only useful news sites on the web- the only real issue is that their updates are less regular and a little more.... focused.
Odds are that if somepleace like Korea gets nuked, you'll get the news from Indymedia.org, and a lengthy diatribe about how much [company X. movie X, processor X] sucks/rules from the slashdot editors, who wouldn't even notice until the submission line became clogged with nothing else.
If you'd listed an email, I'd tell you directly- I'm thoroughly amazed to get a reply to one of my posts that isn't either a flame or a "Yeah!" - I really appreciate the history lesson, as XENIX information has proven very difficult to find. The economics and technology of the time, thanks to your perspective, makes the relative non-existance of XENIX easier to understand.
And you're right- most people don't want bash. Or a command prompt at all- though it would be nice to use the bar in Windows and the Explorer-wannabe window managers to execute bash commands. It's sad to see that Microsoft's vastly inferior UI is "the" UI experience for so many, when the MacOS does it so much better.... likewise the experience between DOS and the UNIX shells.
Okay, this is more tech than marketing, but I'd still like to see a straight answer. How, exactly, is .NET any different than, say, opening Telnet and running a remote session on a server? Aside from the fact that it seems more fractionalized and has a GUI, and potential users will have to pay money to use it, of course.
//c to an SGI, it's available for practically every platform and works exactly the same across the board. It is an established fact that for some weird reason, M$ products for the Macintosh are far superior to those for their own OS, and they support nothing else. .NET seems like an attempt by M$ to recoup their most immediate loss- the web making operating systems irrelevant- by relying on it to tie the end user into the Microsoft feifdom even further. Stating that .NET services will be available for Linux while at the same time raining FUD down on the less educated about the same OS? Giving me a shot at bogging down OSX even further? What is the point of all this, and if Microsoft is betting the farm on it and everybody says "fuck off", what then?
/. users have. Point of fact is that I have everything I need from Microsoft, and no plans at all to upgrade any of it because I have no money and what I have works very well. .NET gives me no incentive to upgrade, and every possible reason to stick with older software - who thought of this, and who forgot to do the market research?
I can run Telnet on just about everything - from an Apple
Also, how do you intend to sell the idea of "subscription" software to people that have become progressively disatisfied as the version numbers creep upward? The only product I've used that seems to keep getting better is Internet Explorer- Outlook is still poorly designed, Word became useless [without a custom install and forty minutes of tweaking] after version 5, and... well, we all know the negative view of the Microsoft operating environments that most