Long Battery Life Low Weight and new Form Factors Rid of noisy fans
That is exactly right. With all of the faux battles between chip manufacturers and video card makers resulting in 15% clock rate improvements here and there, the irrelevancy of it all is often difficult to see. An 800 MHz Athlon with some nutty next gen 3DFX chipset is completely pointless when what people really want are low power consumption devices that don't fit the clunky desktop model.
There have been a number of people focusing on developing low power CPUs that do what people want, but they've been mostly ignored because web geeks like to hear about overclocked processors that need to be dunked in liquid nitrogen. Crusoe could potentially take over the world, as the big PC chipmakers aren't even in the same universe.
First, DOOM was not a baby step up on Wolfenstein 3D. If anything, Wolfenstein was a graphical toy, a prototype of what was to come. DOOM was a monster, a game for the ages. There had been 3D games in a Wolfenstein vein before Wolfenstein (examples: Xybots, MIDI-Maze), but DOOM was something else entirely.
Second, DOOM was certainly the major influence on Marathon. Heck, even Jason Jones has admitted this. He said that he was working on something more in a Wolfenstein vein until he saw the DOOM beta, and then he went in that direction.
The important thing to realize here is that the PC was flooded with Doomalikes that have been forgotten. There was everything from DOOM-like RPGs (e.g. Strife) to DOOM-like games in which you flew instead of walked (e.g. Radix: Beyond the Void), and DOOM-like games with ground-based vehicles. On the Mac, there weren't *any*. Heck, there weren't even any shareware Wolfenstein 3D clones for the Mac until *after* DOOM was already available. So among Mac gamers there's a tendency to deify Marathon, even to the point where some people try to claim that it would have existed as is even if DOOM never existed (and some even try to say that DOOM is a knock-off of Marathon). That's not to say Marathon isn't a decent and playable DOOM-style game, but that you can't get a clear view of history through severely Mac-tinted glasses.
First, DOOM was not a baby step up on Wolfenstein 3D. If anything, Wolfenstein was a graphical toy, a prototype of what was to come. DOOM was a monster, a game for the ages. There had been 3D games in a Wolfenstein vein before Wolfenstein (examples: Xybots, MIDI-Maze), but DOOM was something else entirely.
Second, DOOM was certainly the major influence on Marathon. Heck, even Jason Jones has admitted this. He said that he was working on something more in a Wolfenstein vein until he saw the DOOM beta, and then he went in that direction.
The important thing to realize here is that the PC was flooded with Doomalikes that have been forgotten. There was everything from DOOM-like RPGs (e.g. Strife) to DOOM-like games in which you flew instead of walked (e.g. Radix: Beyond the Void), and DOOM-like games with ground-based vehicles. On the Mac, there weren't *any*. Heck, there weren't even any shareware Wolfenstein 3D clones for the Mac until *after* DOOM was already available. So among Mac gamers there's a tendency to deify Marathon, even to the point where some people try to claim that it would have existed as is even if DOOM never existed (and some even try to say that DOOM is a knock-off of Marathon). That's not to say Marathon isn't a decent and playable DOOM-style game.
Mac gamers knew about DOOM. We just prefered Marathon.
Shrug. I've played both. I think that both are good games, but it's very obvious that DOOM spawned Marathon (i.e. Bungie wouldn't have written Marathon had they not seen DOOM). So it's peculiar to see Maccies trashing DOOM so much; it ends up looking like sour grapes. But we Linux types are used to that:)
Funny thing about Marathon: Mac owners claim it to be the greatest first-person-shooter of all time, and PC owners never heard of it. The thing to realize here is that for a relatively long time, DOOM wasn't available for the Mac, so Marathon filled the bill. Now that's not to say Marathon is one of the bad children of DOOM, because it's an okay game. But this is why you only see Mac folks raving about the game:)
I really laughed at the Simpsons when it first started, and man do those early episodes seems slow and kinda dumb now. I watched it consistently for years. Good stuff. I have to admit, though, that I started getting tired of the humor being based almost entirely on pop-culture references. One wonders if the Simpsons will make any sense at all a hundred years from now.
When I was in college, not too long ago, but before the web was big, I had a computer in my room. Before college I was an obsessive hacker, writing all sorts code all the time. And after college I did the same thing. But when I was in college, I always felt like there was so much to do, so many things to try, so many practical jokes to pull, so many people to run into, that I hardly ever turned on that computer except to do classwork.
The thing is, you can spend the rest of your life at some boring job surfing the web and diddling through email for a few hours a day. Or you can do the same thing while hiding from the wife and kid at home, saying that you're working on something important. But why someone in college would want to be glued to a monitor is beyond me.
I have to wonder if Loki is actually making any money at this. Everyone I know who runs Linux--only a handful of people, relatively--dual boots Windows 95/98 in order to run games. People who spend a lot of money on games can't stand waiting months or a year for the big name games that are in stores now. And since most Linux users got Windows when they bought a computer, there's no reason not to use it as a game platform (other than paranoid idealism).
I am sure you are trying to make a point here, but I'll be damned if i can find it. Basically you are saying that linux is crap, but it's good since that is the way it should be?
Linux is a lifeline into almost thirty years of UNIX tool development. This is a wonderful thing for developers, because we don't have to keep re-learning a new set of tools every few years. But that doesn't mean that Linux is the ultimate operating system outside of that context. That's something that Linux advocates often forget.
All usual advocacy nonsense aside, there are two reasons to use Linux.
It is more stable than other easily available options like Windows 98/NT.
It provides access to, and a healthy environment for, a large pool of standard tools: gcc, Perl, Python, awk, Emacs, etc.
The first is what we usually hear about, but the second item is just as important. If you were using UNIX on the job or at school in 1988, then you'll be pretty much at home in 2000, because everything is generall the same. I used UNIX on a Sun workstation for software development in 1991, and all of that experience carried over when I started using Linux at home and at work in 1999. Nothing much has changed. It's good to be able to keep that knowledge over a long period of time and not have to relearn in every few years.
In that light, the line between Linux and the Hurd is pretty irrelvant. We already have a working key that lets us access the tools we want, so it doesn't matter what kernel is beneath them. There's no reason to run over to or even follow the development of the Hurd.
That's not to say that Linux is the ultimate OS, because it isn't. It's a total piece of junk in many ways, but that's what you expect with UNIX, and that's where Linux descended from. There are great opportunities for operating systems with much different philsophies. Look at the OS in the Palm, for example. It's not an OS in the geeky computer user sense, but it does exactly what it needs to do, is extraordinarily useful, and people like it. Hurd is too close to the UNIX/Linux style for anyone to care.
This is a development environment. It does NOT mean that:
1. You will have access to Nintendo's technical documentation or examples. 2. Anything you develop will be approved by Nintendo.
If you do manage to get hardware docs and hack a game together, you really can't do anything with it except try to find a publisher or distribute it to other people who have hacked hardware. Note that Cygnus is in the development tool business, and they've done custom gcc ports for other platforms as well, including the PlayStation. This has nothing at all to do with enabling home programmers to write games for closed hardware.
I think I have fairly good and typical tastes in comics. I laughed at Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, the first year of Robotman, 1970s-era Doonesbury, Dilbert, The Far Side. When I read the funnies I just gloss over relics like Beetle Bailey and Blondie, which are government sponsored projects to get kids familiar with old and corny jokes so they don't laugh at them when they're older, making the US look stupid.User Friendly, and some similar comics like Penny Arcade, are in the same vein as Beetle Bailey and Blondie in that they go for the obvious dumb vaudeville jokes, except that this time around they have a geeky slant. But just beeing geeky doesn't make them funny.
Do we really know that no problems occured?
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 2
If you actually read any of the Y2K stuff written by knowledgeable people and not just blind journalists, you'd say that most of them agreed that January 1, 2000 wouldn't make most Y2K problems come to light. For example, the United States imports a *huge* amount of stuff from countries like China, Mexico, and Colombia. At least 50% of the contents of any Wal-Mart comes from China. Most coffee and much fruit comes from South America. Now if a junk appliance factory in China or Korea bought some old computer system in the seventies to keep track of shipping and inventory, and they were bitten by a Y2K bug, how long before anyone realized it? No lights would go out, nothing would explode, but shipments of merchandise slated for a month or more down the road might be delayed. That's the kind of bug that was expected by everyone except crazed media types.
Hmmm...this is a good opportunity to bring up something that's been nagging me for a few months now. Jon Katz tries really hard to be subversive and underground and never misses an opportunity to demonstrate how some subculture will triumph over the corporate masses. He rah-rahs Linux, never misses a swipe as Microsoft, immortalizes lifeless geeks and DVD crackers...well, you get the idea.
What's odd in that light, though, is that he repeatedly talks about mass market, mass culture films as if they're some sort of inside secret that he's privy too. He tried to pin down The Matrix as some sort of little known art film that only hardcore geeks would seek out, for example. And while I enjoy film criticism, it doesn't work when coming from Mr. Katz. It's like listening to a zen buddhist go on about the joys of Wal-Mart.
He's just another media fraud that doesn't know a thing
Actually, I think he did a good job of being well-rounded in this case, and was spot on with every item listed. Even rabid slashdotters shouldn't be upset with him: he trashed Microsoft twice, gave good mention to two underdogs (Linux and Apple), and spit on the grave of DIVX. Are you upset just because his comments about Linux we somewhat reserved? You shouldn't be; Linux is still getting to where it needs to be.
While I think the UI point is a good one, I think it's going to be tougher than it looks. User interfaces--and the whole "desktop" concept--are in transition.
The WIMP metaphor was originally meant to simplify, but now the average MacOS, Windows, or KDE user is presented with all sorts of gadgetry and hidden options and fluff to simplify certain peripheral tasks, like keeping track of which application is frontmost, organizing files, setting system options, customizing the look of things, etc. People are flocking to game consoles, the Palm Pilot, and closed web surfing boxes.
Linux GUIs are in a funny spot. Except for KDE, which is duplicating all of Microsoft's user interface design mistakes, Linux window managers and desktops are stuck in the 1980s somewhere, without even a standard keyboard shortcut for something as simple as cut and paste. And now much effort is being put into trying to catch up to the Microsoft/Apple level, which is hardly a worthy goal at all.
With all of the open source developers out there, with all of the mind power going into writing code for Linux, I would expect there to at least one Alan Kay or at least one Jef Raskin, someone willing to invent the future. Instead, this great mass of combined effort is going toward recreating the flawed work of a few accidental empires.
I think Palm is becoming too simple. Palm made a virtue out of necessity -- they are using at least three-year-old technology without any major changes
They have a device that's extremely useful, and people are flocking to it. The attitude of "old technology"--or indeed, any technology, is out of place here. There's a PC subculture that's very into keeping up with the latest video cards and processor speeds, even at the expense of relvancy. Some people want to upgrade to the current ultimate video card even if the drivers are flaky. Some people feel they need to upgrade from a 500MHz Pentium to a 700MHz Athlon even though they're only doing word processing and web browsing (i.e. applications that fly on 200 MHz machines).
If you get right down to it, the Palm is using a processor who's design cycle was underway in 1979. Thinking that it somehow became obsolete in the last year or two is misguided. It was obsolete a dozen years ago. And guess what? It doesn't matter.
There was the usual nonsense, like confusing crackers and hackers and getting crack attempts and viruses all mixed-up. But otherwise, a few things really jumped out at me:
* Global Hell came across as extremely juvenile. * The so-called leader of GH (Patrick something) was just a typical angst ridden teen. He couldn't elucidate his purpose or ideals; his philosophy pretty much broke down to "All the corporations of the world are trying to opress me in some unexplainable way, and, oh yeah, I'm really bored." * The world "brilliant" was used several times in relation to crackers, as if they're working on things that require a PhD and sophisticated programming ability. I'd hardly put exploiting security holes into that category.
In the case of Linux/UNIX, OS == kernel + utilities. Saying otherwise is like saying that the GUI isn't part of Windows 98. In a strict academic sense, yes, the Linux kernel could exist in a vaccuum, but let's just see you *use* it for anything.
And of course any new processor from either Intel or AMD is going to be sucking up more electrical power than the last one. Is it really responsible to keep pushing people toward higher and higher power consumption just to get some trivial extra speed that isn't even apparent (i.e. most applications stopped seeming faster around 133MHz, games and rendering packages excepted). Look at 3dfx's recent announcements. Their next generation graphics card uses so much wattage that it needs to be hooked to a hard drive power connector because the power on the bus isn't enough. And the generation after that needs to plug directly into the wall (no joke; this was mentioned in recent a 3dfx press release). This is beyond stupid.
That's true to some extent, but not entirely. If I want to search for a paper on generational garbage collection, then it's straightforward. But searching for many things in a less geeky realm is a disaster. Some reasons include:
1. Commercial sites are filling their sites with irrelevant keywords in attempts to get hits for advertisers. How many porn sites have hidden text like "Natalie Portman nude!" or references to JFK Jr. or Princess Diana?
2. Many commercial sites are filled with empty marketing phrases that don't help narrow a search.
3. There are countless failed businesses from 1997 that still have live sites. I run into this all the time.
I thought this sounded like a good idea, but I visited the site and left with mixed feelings. At least as damaging as FUD is an "I can counter any FUD with a reasonable argument that shows you're wrong" attitude that ends up labeling criticisms of The One True Way as FUD. I think the person or persons behind this site went over the top in this regard with comments like:
1.1 Fact: Open source software tends to be much better than proprietary software
which is hardly a fact at all. This so-called fact is easily counterable by any user of Photoshop, Visual Basic, Adobe Illustrator, Director, or one of thousands of proprietary games or edutainment programs. The usual exchange goes something like:
Linux Guy: You shouldn't use Photoshop! You should use The Gimp!
Person Who Uses Windows Because That's What He Has At Work: I like Photoshop, but if something is better then I'd be interested in seeing it. I can't guarantee my shop will switch over to it, though.
[time passes]
PWUWBTWHHAW: Well, it's a good start, but it doesn't have lots of the features of Photoshop that I've come to rely on. It also feels, I don't know, a bit crusty 'round the edges. Very 1988 Macintosh.
Linux Guy: But it's Open Source! It will get better! You can make feature requests, blah, blah, blah.
PWUWBTWHHAW: [slowly backing away] Um, okay, I believe you...
Slashdot Mirror
Long Battery Life
Low Weight and new Form Factors
Rid of noisy fans
That is exactly right. With all of the faux battles between chip manufacturers and video card makers resulting in 15% clock rate improvements here and there, the irrelevancy of it all is often difficult to see. An 800 MHz Athlon with some nutty next gen 3DFX chipset is completely pointless when what people really want are low power consumption devices that don't fit the clunky desktop model.
There have been a number of people focusing on developing low power CPUs that do what people want, but they've been mostly ignored because web geeks like to hear about overclocked processors that need to be dunked in liquid nitrogen. Crusoe could potentially take over the world, as the big PC chipmakers aren't even in the same universe.
If internet voting is going to be anything like the deja.com polls, then whoever looks the best in a tight sports bra will win.
You're rewriting history.
First, DOOM was not a baby step up on Wolfenstein 3D. If anything, Wolfenstein was a graphical toy, a prototype of what was to come. DOOM was a monster, a game for the ages. There had been 3D games in a Wolfenstein vein before Wolfenstein (examples: Xybots, MIDI-Maze), but DOOM was something else entirely.
Second, DOOM was certainly the major influence on Marathon. Heck, even Jason Jones has admitted this. He said that he was working on something more in a Wolfenstein vein until he saw the DOOM beta, and then he went in that direction.
The important thing to realize here is that the PC was flooded with Doomalikes that have been forgotten. There was everything from DOOM-like RPGs (e.g. Strife) to DOOM-like games in which you flew instead of walked (e.g. Radix: Beyond the Void), and DOOM-like games with ground-based vehicles. On the Mac, there weren't *any*. Heck, there weren't even any shareware Wolfenstein 3D clones for the Mac until *after* DOOM was already available. So among Mac gamers there's a tendency to deify Marathon, even to the point where some people try to claim that it would have existed as is even if DOOM never existed (and some even try to say that DOOM is a knock-off of Marathon). That's not to say Marathon isn't a decent and playable DOOM-style game, but that you can't get a clear view of history through severely Mac-tinted glasses.
You're rewriting history.
First, DOOM was not a baby step up on Wolfenstein 3D. If anything, Wolfenstein was a graphical toy, a prototype of what was to come. DOOM was a monster, a game for the ages. There had been 3D games in a Wolfenstein vein before Wolfenstein (examples: Xybots, MIDI-Maze), but DOOM was something else entirely.
Second, DOOM was certainly the major influence on Marathon. Heck, even Jason Jones has admitted this. He said that he was working on something more in a Wolfenstein vein until he saw the DOOM beta, and then he went in that direction.
The important thing to realize here is that the PC was flooded with Doomalikes that have been forgotten. There was everything from DOOM-like RPGs (e.g. Strife) to DOOM-like games in which you flew instead of walked (e.g. Radix: Beyond the Void), and DOOM-like games with ground-based vehicles. On the Mac, there weren't *any*. Heck, there weren't even any shareware Wolfenstein 3D clones for the Mac until *after* DOOM was already available. So among Mac gamers there's a tendency to deify Marathon, even to the point where some people try to claim that it would have existed as is even if DOOM never existed (and some even try to say that DOOM is a knock-off of Marathon). That's not to say Marathon isn't a decent and playable DOOM-style game.
Mac gamers knew about DOOM. We just prefered Marathon.
:)
Shrug. I've played both. I think that both are good games, but it's very obvious that DOOM spawned Marathon (i.e. Bungie wouldn't have written Marathon had they not seen DOOM). So it's peculiar to see Maccies trashing DOOM so much; it ends up looking like sour grapes. But we Linux types are used to that
Funny thing about Marathon: Mac owners claim it to be the greatest first-person-shooter of all time, and PC owners never heard of it. The thing to realize here is that for a relatively long time, DOOM wasn't available for the Mac, so Marathon filled the bill. Now that's not to say Marathon is one of the bad children of DOOM, because it's an okay game. But this is why you only see Mac folks raving about the game :)
I really laughed at the Simpsons when it first started, and man do those early episodes seems slow and kinda dumb now. I watched it consistently for years. Good stuff. I have to admit, though, that I started getting tired of the humor being based almost entirely on pop-culture references. One wonders if the Simpsons will make any sense at all a hundred years from now.
When I was in college, not too long ago, but before the web was big, I had a computer in my room. Before college I was an obsessive hacker, writing all sorts code all the time. And after college I did the same thing. But when I was in college, I always felt like there was so much to do, so many things to try, so many practical jokes to pull, so many people to run into, that I hardly ever turned on that computer except to do classwork.
The thing is, you can spend the rest of your life at some boring job surfing the web and diddling through email for a few hours a day. Or you can do the same thing while hiding from the wife and kid at home, saying that you're working on something important. But why someone in college would want to be glued to a monitor is beyond me.
I have to wonder if Loki is actually making any money at this. Everyone I know who runs Linux--only a handful of people, relatively--dual boots Windows 95/98 in order to run games. People who spend a lot of money on games can't stand waiting months or a year for the big name games that are in stores now. And since most Linux users got Windows when they bought a computer, there's no reason not to use it as a game platform (other than paranoid idealism).
I am sure you are trying to make a point here, but I'll be damned if i can find it. Basically you are saying that linux is crap, but it's good since that is the way it should be?
Linux is a lifeline into almost thirty years of UNIX tool development. This is a wonderful thing for developers, because we don't have to keep re-learning a new set of tools every few years. But that doesn't mean that Linux is the ultimate operating system outside of that context. That's something that Linux advocates often forget.
It is more stable than other easily available options like Windows 98/NT.
It provides access to, and a healthy environment for, a large pool of standard tools: gcc, Perl, Python, awk, Emacs, etc.
The first is what we usually hear about, but the second item is just as important. If you were using UNIX on the job or at school in 1988, then you'll be pretty much at home in 2000, because everything is generall the same. I used UNIX on a Sun workstation for software development in 1991, and all of that experience carried over when I started using Linux at home and at work in 1999. Nothing much has changed. It's good to be able to keep that knowledge over a long period of time and not have to relearn in every few years.
In that light, the line between Linux and the Hurd is pretty irrelvant. We already have a working key that lets us access the tools we want, so it doesn't matter what kernel is beneath them. There's no reason to run over to or even follow the development of the Hurd.
That's not to say that Linux is the ultimate OS, because it isn't. It's a total piece of junk in many ways, but that's what you expect with UNIX, and that's where Linux descended from. There are great opportunities for operating systems with much different philsophies. Look at the OS in the Palm, for example. It's not an OS in the geeky computer user sense, but it does exactly what it needs to do, is extraordinarily useful, and people like it. Hurd is too close to the UNIX/Linux style for anyone to care.
This is a development environment. It does NOT mean that:
1. You will have access to Nintendo's technical documentation or examples.
2. Anything you develop will be approved by Nintendo.
If you do manage to get hardware docs and hack a game together, you really can't do anything with it except try to find a publisher or distribute it to other people who have hacked hardware. Note that Cygnus is in the development tool business, and they've done custom gcc ports for other platforms as well, including the PlayStation. This has nothing at all to do with enabling home programmers to write games for closed hardware.
I think I have fairly good and typical tastes in comics. I laughed at Bloom County, Calvin & Hobbes, the first year of Robotman, 1970s-era Doonesbury, Dilbert, The Far Side. When I read the funnies I just gloss over relics like Beetle Bailey and Blondie, which are government sponsored projects to get kids familiar with old and corny jokes so they don't laugh at them when they're older, making the US look stupid.User Friendly, and some similar comics like Penny Arcade, are in the same vein as Beetle Bailey and Blondie in that they go for the obvious dumb vaudeville jokes, except that this time around they have a geeky slant. But just beeing geeky doesn't make them funny.
If you actually read any of the Y2K stuff written by knowledgeable people and not just blind journalists, you'd say that most of them agreed that January 1, 2000 wouldn't make most Y2K problems come to light. For example, the United States imports a *huge* amount of stuff from countries like China, Mexico, and Colombia. At least 50% of the contents of any Wal-Mart comes from China. Most coffee and much fruit comes from South America. Now if a junk appliance factory in China or Korea bought some old computer system in the seventies to keep track of shipping and inventory, and they were bitten by a Y2K bug, how long before anyone realized it? No lights would go out, nothing would explode, but shipments of merchandise slated for a month or more down the road might be delayed. That's the kind of bug that was expected by everyone except crazed media types.
Hmmm...this is a good opportunity to bring up something that's been nagging me for a few months now. Jon Katz tries really hard to be subversive and underground and never misses an opportunity to demonstrate how some subculture will triumph over the corporate masses. He rah-rahs Linux, never misses a swipe as Microsoft, immortalizes lifeless geeks and DVD crackers...well, you get the idea.
What's odd in that light, though, is that he repeatedly talks about mass market, mass culture films as if they're some sort of inside secret that he's privy too. He tried to pin down The Matrix as some sort of little known art film that only hardcore geeks would seek out, for example. And while I enjoy film criticism, it doesn't work when coming from Mr. Katz. It's like listening to a zen buddhist go on about the joys of Wal-Mart.
He's just another media fraud that doesn't know a thing
Actually, I think he did a good job of being well-rounded in this case, and was spot on with every item listed. Even rabid slashdotters shouldn't be upset with him: he trashed Microsoft twice, gave good mention to two underdogs (Linux and Apple), and spit on the grave of DIVX. Are you upset just because his comments about Linux we somewhat reserved? You shouldn't be; Linux is still getting to where it needs to be.
While I think the UI point is a good one, I think it's going to be tougher than it looks. User interfaces--and the whole "desktop" concept--are in transition.
The WIMP metaphor was originally meant to simplify, but now the average MacOS, Windows, or KDE user is presented with all sorts of gadgetry and hidden options and fluff to simplify certain peripheral tasks, like keeping track of which application is frontmost, organizing files, setting system options, customizing the look of things, etc. People are flocking to game consoles, the Palm Pilot, and closed web surfing boxes.
Linux GUIs are in a funny spot. Except for KDE, which is duplicating all of Microsoft's user interface design mistakes, Linux window managers and desktops are stuck in the 1980s somewhere, without even a standard keyboard shortcut for something as simple as cut and paste. And now much effort is being put into trying to catch up to the Microsoft/Apple level, which is hardly a worthy goal at all.
With all of the open source developers out there, with all of the mind power going into writing code for Linux, I would expect there to at least one Alan Kay or at least one Jef Raskin, someone willing to invent the future. Instead, this great mass of combined effort is going toward recreating the flawed work of a few accidental empires.
I think Palm is becoming too simple. Palm made a virtue out of necessity -- they are using at least three-year-old technology without any major changes
They have a device that's extremely useful, and people are flocking to it. The attitude of "old technology"--or indeed, any technology, is out of place here. There's a PC subculture that's very into keeping up with the latest video cards and processor speeds, even at the expense of relvancy. Some people want to upgrade to the current ultimate video card even if the drivers are flaky. Some people feel they need to upgrade from a 500MHz Pentium to a 700MHz Athlon even though they're only doing word processing and web browsing (i.e. applications that fly on 200 MHz machines).
If you get right down to it, the Palm is using a processor who's design cycle was underway in 1979. Thinking that it somehow became obsolete in the last year or two is misguided. It was obsolete a dozen years ago. And guess what? It doesn't matter.
Actually, the "brilliant" comment was from one member of GH to another.
There was the usual nonsense, like confusing crackers and hackers and getting crack attempts and viruses all mixed-up. But otherwise, a few things really jumped out at me:
* Global Hell came across as extremely juvenile.
* The so-called leader of GH (Patrick something) was just a typical angst ridden teen. He couldn't elucidate his purpose or ideals; his philosophy pretty much broke down to "All the corporations of the world are trying to opress me in some unexplainable way, and, oh yeah, I'm really bored."
* The world "brilliant" was used several times in relation to crackers, as if they're working on things that require a PhD and sophisticated programming ability. I'd hardly put exploiting security holes into that category.
Interesting overall.
In the case of Linux/UNIX, OS == kernel + utilities. Saying otherwise is like saying that the GUI isn't part of Windows 98. In a strict academic sense, yes, the Linux kernel could exist in a vaccuum, but let's just see you *use* it for anything.
And of course any new processor from either Intel or AMD is going to be sucking up more electrical power than the last one. Is it really responsible to keep pushing people toward higher and higher power consumption just to get some trivial extra speed that isn't even apparent (i.e. most applications stopped seeming faster around 133MHz, games and rendering packages excepted). Look at 3dfx's recent announcements. Their next generation graphics card uses so much wattage that it needs to be hooked to a hard drive power connector because the power on the bus isn't enough. And the generation after that needs to plug directly into the wall (no joke; this was mentioned in recent a 3dfx press release). This is beyond stupid.
But he *is* the original developer of what became the Linux OS. What's wrong with that?
That's true to some extent, but not entirely. If I want to search for a paper on generational garbage collection, then it's straightforward. But searching for many things in a less geeky realm is a disaster. Some reasons include:
1. Commercial sites are filling their sites with irrelevant keywords in attempts to get hits for advertisers. How many porn sites have hidden text like "Natalie Portman nude!" or references to JFK Jr. or Princess Diana?
2. Many commercial sites are filled with empty marketing phrases that don't help narrow a search.
3. There are countless failed businesses from 1997 that still have live sites. I run into this all the time.
I thought this sounded like a good idea, but I visited the site and left with mixed feelings. At least as damaging as FUD is an "I can counter any FUD with a reasonable argument that shows you're wrong" attitude that ends up labeling criticisms of The One True Way as FUD. I think the person or persons behind this site went over the top in this regard with comments like:
1.1 Fact: Open source software tends to be much better than proprietary software
which is hardly a fact at all. This so-called fact is easily counterable by any user of Photoshop, Visual Basic, Adobe Illustrator, Director, or one of thousands of proprietary games or edutainment programs. The usual exchange goes something like:
Linux Guy: You shouldn't use Photoshop! You should use The Gimp!
Person Who Uses Windows Because That's What He Has At Work: I like Photoshop, but if something is better then I'd be interested in seeing it. I can't guarantee my shop will switch over to it, though.
[time passes]
PWUWBTWHHAW: Well, it's a good start, but it doesn't have lots of the features of Photoshop that I've come to rely on. It also feels, I don't know, a bit crusty 'round the edges. Very 1988 Macintosh.
Linux Guy: But it's Open Source! It will get better! You can make feature requests, blah, blah, blah.
PWUWBTWHHAW: [slowly backing away] Um, okay, I believe you...