In many ways, users today do want computers that work the way TVs work today, but TVs have come a long way, too!
Today's TV users get all kinds of great features, including color images, CRTs that warm up in seconds instead of minutes, "big" screens, cable-delivered signals with great "reception" on hundreds of channels, stereo sound (or better), the ability to rent and watch movies (*ahem*), the ability to instantly watch whatever's on pay-per-view. Even just from a UI point of view, we now get (and expect!) wireless remote controls for everything, on-screen displays, and finally no more need to twist the channel selector knob violently to get past that annoying block of UHF stations that your antenna can't pull in!
I'm not going to make a list of all the "innovations" that have come from Apple, but I'll mention my favorite. Before the PowerBooks came out, portable PCs all had their keyboard at the front edge of the 'bottom' part of the case. The PowerBooks moved the keyboard to the back, creating a wrist rest area, much better in-flight ergonomics, and a better place to locate the pointing device (trackball in this case).
Was it revolutionary? No. Did Steve Jobs stand up and call it the coolest thing ever? No. But innovation comes in all kinds of sizes and shapes. Someone will always be innovating, and it's a good thing. Besides, if no one innovates, we'll be stuck forever with what we have now - eewww.
-Mark
Mirror/chrome contact lenses: here's a supplier
on
Bionic Eyes
·
· Score: 2
You can order mirrored contact lenses (prescription or non-prescription) from several theatrical F/X shops, including this one.
I used to want those, but now I've upped my sights (so to speak). Now I want tinted contact lenses that change into "sunglasses" in bright light, like those variable-tint "sun sensor" glasses. They'd basically be enhancing the degree to which your iris can vary the amount of light that gets into your eye -- that'd be a "bionic" device I'd happily pay for.
-Mark
Yes. Ask Akamai (they tried), or other CDNs...
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
·
· Score: 5, Informative
In order to keep up a snappy site, AdCritic had to deliver a HUGE amout of data. It's not so much that the needed to deliver it at 90 megabits per second all the time to each browser, but rather that each browser was likely to download several megabytes of data over the course of their visit to the site. And basically, moving a megabyte of data from hither to yon costs something.
They tried contracting with Akamai to have them deliver the videos for them but two things went wrong: first, many viewers didn't actually see an accelerated performance, due to cache faults on the Akamai servers. And second, and perhaps more importantly, AdCritic was delivering so much data that they were running up a bill in excess of $50,000 per month.
After several months, AdCritic refused to pay, and Akamai shut them off. They then tried to get another content delivery network (CDN) to carry them "for free" in exchange for promotional consideration, but it just wasn't worth it in the long run.
Without a CDN to power them, their site ran slowly most of the time, and ultimately the math didn't work out:
ad revenue < cost of data delivery = RIP.
I suspect that fundamentally, their business model was flawed from the start, but they had capital to burn, and so they did.
-Mark Kriegsman
Founder, Clearway Technologies (the first CDN company, now owned by Mirror Image Internet)
I led a small, innovative Internet software company for six years -- long enough for several of our older products to be superceded by newer, different, or competing ones, and to ultimately be retired.
In most cases, when we finally discontinued all support for a product, especially a potentially mission-critical server product, we made a fully-functional perpetually-licensed version of the software available for free to anyone who wanted it, and who acknowledged that there was no warranty or support.
Our logic was simple: once there was no more money for us to make with a product, if people found it useful (in its completely unsupported state), then at least we were doing something good for our customer community, and hopefully generating a little goodwill.
I think for some kinds of software, making "retired" products available (unsupported) for free has the potential to be good for everyone involved.
Centralized mass storage, distributed playback
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Presumably you can have multiple players on the same network, each playing back different content from the same centralized server.
The idea here, which I particularly like, is that you'd set up one "server" with stored copies of all your MP3s on it, and then put one of these and a pair of powered speakers in each room where you want music: the bedroom, the kitchen, the dungeon, etc. That way, you can play any music from any room in the house at any time without needing complete stored copies of the whole collection in each room.
Now all it needs is a built-in 802.11b wireless ethernet setup...
Credit for "Crouching Highlander, Hidden Matrix" actually goes to Deirdre Benson, who seemed to have nailed it just right as soon as she had seen the trailer. Props, girl!
Look at the image of the hand printed on the background of the keyboard -- the image shows a right hand on the left side of the keyboard.
As for 'straight guy'.. heh... I suppose I do prefer to have my arms straight while I'm typing. Beyond that, "What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows..." heh heh.
Judging from their picture of the keyboard here, they want you to put your LEFT hand on the RIGHT side of the keyboard (and presumably vice versa)! Call me an anatomical traditionalist, but that just doesn't seem that comfortable to me.
I started out with 'toggle blocks', and then graduated to Lego. After Lego I 'graduated' to Fischer Technik, and then to playing with electromechanical kits, then electronics (TTL stuff) and then to those computery things.
I think a lot of people naturally 'graduate' from one level of complexity and challenge to the next as they wish. (Like this random guy 'Pete'.)
"Lego level" is not somehow less important or less good than the "Fischer Technik (or Mechano) Level". People will seek out their own level of challenge; I'm finding myself thinking about all the people who buy CodeWarrior: Learning Edition (Mac, Win, no *nix yet) for fifty bucks. Had that existed at the time, I probably would have 'graduated' to that (instead of to programming FORTRAN in punch cards on an IBM 370/155.)
Every PCI PowerMac has a 68K (CISC) to PPC (RISC) dynamic recompilation emulator in it that it uses for executing 68K code. And MHz for MHz, the execution speed of the 68K code when dynamically recompiled as PPC code, is roughly comparable (plus or minus 50%?) to the speed of the original 68K code on a 68K processor.
The very first PowerMacs (NuBus based) used instruction-by-instruction emulation to run all the old 68K Mac code, including some parts of the OS that were still 68K.
The second generation PowerMacs (PCI based) included a new 68K emulator that did "dynamic recompilation" of chunks of code from 68K to PowerPC, and then executed the PPC code; this resulted in significantly faster overall system performance.
Connectix later sold a dynamic recompilation emulator ("Speed Doubler") for Nubus PowerMacs, that did, in fact, double the speed of those machines for many operations, mainly because so much of the OS and ROM on the first-gen PowerMacs was still 68K code.
I think that dynamic recompilation has a bright future; x86 may eventually be just another "virtual machine" language that gets dynamically recompiled to something faster/more compatible/etc at the last moment.
When every Time-Warner employee starts getting an AOL-sized portion of breakfast spam every morning, maybe they will be better motivated to improve AOL's anti-spam filters.
I can see it now... "MAKE MONEY FAST, ChrmnSteve78!"
Yep- Murray Hill doesn't exist. It's part of New Providence and part of Berkeley Heights, and even through I say I lived there, I was in BH for tax purposes, but in "Summit" as far as ZIP codes were concerned. I was referring to Governor Livingston Regional High School and Berkeley Heights.
As I just posted to a reply above, the "Gifted and Talented" programs *are* the 'special needs' programs for smart kids, and SHS has 'em, too. My friend's mom taught English at SHS for many years, and I know she refered to "the gifted program" more than once.
And I believe the "gifted" programs are all funded under the state "special ed." mandate.
The G & T program *is* the 'special needs' program for the "top 2%."
If your friends were in the G & T program, or if they were allowed to take high school algebra in 8th grade, then they already had been identified as having special needs (under the state mandate, anyway).
A good friend of mine 'finished' all the math and science her high school had to offer by her junior year. Her parents used the state 'special needs' mandate to force her local school district to send her to the local college for half of each day so she could continue learning math and science. (The 'local college' was a little school named Princeton...) Her parents had to fight for it with the local school, but they won.
Gifted And Talented programs, and similar 'accomodations' of various sorts, exist all over the state and it's no coincidence -- the schools *have* to make special accomodations for the special needs of these special kids.
I'm willing to admit that I may had some of this wrong now, but back in the 80s, that's the way it was.
I believe that the State of New Jersey mandates that the "bottom 2%" of public school students, AND the "top 2%" of public school students are ALL to be given Individual Education Plans (IEPs), and that they all be considered 'special needs students'. (When I was in the NJ public schools, they gave me an IEP and a variety of 'special needs' treatment, but they never told me which group I was in.) The New Jersey state policy is trying to say that extremely gifted kids are as likely to need special help getting through school as extremely 'slow' kids, and I happen to strongly agree.
Aside: Way back when, my high school had the highest aggregate SAT scores for any public school in NJ, to a large degree because it was in Murray Hill, NJ, home of AT&T Bell Labs (now Lucent). About half of the kids in town were raised by parents who were professional scientists and engineers.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, our little town of 13,000 also had the highest teen suicide rate in the nation. For a couple of years, the valedictorian of the graduating high school class never actually made it to graduation.
A 13-year-old is still just 13, no matter how good he is with computers; the school should have treated him as a 'special needs' student who had
done something wrong, not as an independent and emotionally mature adult, or as a criminal.
There are several products use the same language and object architecture as MetaCard. [See above link for list]
The product WinPlus, formerly Spinnaker Plus, has been discontinued by ObjectPlus Corporation. Oracle Media Objects (OMO), which was also based on the Plus technology, has also been discontinued. An early HyperCard workalike for Windows, Echelon's WindowCraft, was discontinued long ago largely because of the superiority of the Plus technology. Plus has in turn been surpassed by MetaCard.
MetaCard is also often compared with products like ToolBook, Director, Tcl/Tk, Perl, and Visual Basic because it can be used to develop the same kinds of products these other tools are used to develop.
For about ten years now I've been hearing different permutations of the rumor that AppleScript, HyperCard, and QuickTime will eventually all become the same thing. In the meantime, those looking for a Mac OS X solution might want to keep their eye on HyperSense. HyperSense is a Hypercard work-alike for NeXTStep (aka "OpenStep"), soon to be available for Mac OS X (aka "OpenStep":)
There are a number of reasons why after much digging I choose the Archos 6000 over any of the other 'jukebox' mp3 players. Briefly, they are:
It's "just a hard drive" when connected to a PC or Macintosh -- no proprietary software is needed to manage your collection. In addition, you can store and transport files other than MP3s, too -- documents, applications, whatever.
You can copy MP3s (and any other file) OFF of the drive, as well as onto it. Contrast this, for example, with the PJBox, which only lets you put files onto it (Yes, really.)
Good Mac support, including apparent interest from Archos in supporting playlists exported from "iTunes"
When writing threaded code the developers must take the responsibility for understanding the threading issues and creating thread-safe code. But the right tools can help you get there more quickly and sanely.
We've used Metrowerks CodeWarrior to develop and debug very heavily multithreaded applications on MacOS, NT, Solaris, and Linux for about five years now; the CodeWarrior tools seem very much 'up to the job' and thread-aware. As a nice plus, CodeWarrior runs on multiple platforms (including Mac OS X now), which is a nice plus for our development, which is all multiplatform.
We now use a diversity of compilers/IDEs/debuggers, but CodeWarrior is still a favorite, even if it's just because of the "Blood, Sweat, and Code" T-shirts.
1,000,000 hits per day == only about 12 hits per second average, no more than 50/sec peak.
For comparison, my PowerBook can do about 70/sec running WebSTAR on MacOS 9.
In other words, ANY server on the planet can handle that level of traffic -- for static pages. Beyond static pages, it has nothing to do with the server software, and everything to do with 'the other stuff' (DB, middleware, etc.)
Several execs at Apple told me that when Steve Jobs came back, he told them to take a new look at everything they were spending money on. The "perceived added value" of the bundled software simply wasn't responsible for enough incremental hardware sales to justify the basic financials of the bundling deals. Fundamentally, Apple is in business to sell hardware (hence 'no more clones', too).
Plus, the guys from NeXT (a software company) had a mild allergy to paying for and bundling software from other companies, and that hastened the termination of some of the preexisting bundling deals.
DataViz has been doing this for years. They have reverse engineered hundreds of file formats and they sell stand-alone and integrated document converter software. The Windows product is ConversionsPlus and the Mac version is called MacLinkPlus. I have found that the translators are easy to use and work extremely well.
Apple used to bundle MacLinkPlus with MacOS, so any Mac user could open any file from any program -- PC or Mac. (I used to annoy PC users by using my Mac PowerBook to translate files for them that they couldn't open, from programs that they didn't have and that weren't even available for the Mac, e.g., Lotus AmiPro. The stuff works.) Apple doesn't bundle it any more (?!) for their own inscrutable reasons.
There is no Linux version (yet) of DataViz's translator package, but they do offer translation packages for Palm users, so there's some indication that they're open to addressing "non-traditional" platforms if they see a market. I have hope.
Slashdot Mirror
Although it can be extremely crash-prone, if you can get a dual-processor implementation of this up and running, the results can be quite spectacular.
("Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!")
-Mark
Well, we already have Transmeta calling their OS Midori Linux -- a blatant reference to Fetish Diva Midori.
Geeks? Perverts? Who'da thought!?!
-Mark
In many ways, users today do want computers that work the way TVs work today, but TVs have come a long way, too!
Today's TV users get all kinds of great features, including color images, CRTs that warm up in seconds instead of minutes, "big" screens, cable-delivered signals with great "reception" on hundreds of channels, stereo sound (or better), the ability to rent and watch movies (*ahem*), the ability to instantly watch whatever's on pay-per-view. Even just from a UI point of view, we now get (and expect!) wireless remote controls for everything, on-screen displays, and finally no more need to twist the channel selector knob violently to get past that annoying block of UHF stations that your antenna can't pull in!
I'm not going to make a list of all the "innovations" that have come from Apple, but I'll mention my favorite. Before the PowerBooks came out, portable PCs all had their keyboard at the front edge of the 'bottom' part of the case. The PowerBooks moved the keyboard to the back, creating a wrist rest area, much better in-flight ergonomics, and a better place to locate the pointing device (trackball in this case).
Was it revolutionary? No. Did Steve Jobs stand up and call it the coolest thing ever? No. But innovation comes in all kinds of sizes and shapes. Someone will always be innovating, and it's a good thing. Besides, if no one innovates, we'll be stuck forever with what we have now - eewww.
-Mark
You can order mirrored contact lenses (prescription or non-prescription) from several theatrical F/X shops, including this one.
I used to want those, but now I've upped my sights (so to speak). Now I want tinted contact lenses that change into "sunglasses" in bright light, like those variable-tint "sun sensor" glasses. They'd basically be enhancing the degree to which your iris can vary the amount of light that gets into your eye -- that'd be a "bionic" device I'd happily pay for.
-Mark
They tried contracting with Akamai to have them deliver the videos for them but two things went wrong: first, many viewers didn't actually see an accelerated performance, due to cache faults on the Akamai servers. And second, and perhaps more importantly, AdCritic was delivering so much data that they were running up a bill in excess of $50,000 per month.
After several months, AdCritic refused to pay, and Akamai shut them off. They then tried to get another content delivery network (CDN) to carry them "for free" in exchange for promotional consideration, but it just wasn't worth it in the long run.
Without a CDN to power them, their site ran slowly most of the time, and ultimately the math didn't work out:
ad revenue < cost of data delivery = RIP.
I suspect that fundamentally, their business model was flawed from the start, but they had capital to burn, and so they did.
-Mark Kriegsman
Founder, Clearway Technologies (the first CDN company, now owned by Mirror Image Internet)
I led a small, innovative Internet software company for six years -- long enough for several of our older products to be superceded by newer, different, or competing ones, and to ultimately be retired.
In most cases, when we finally discontinued all support for a product, especially a potentially mission-critical server product, we made a fully-functional perpetually-licensed version of the software available for free to anyone who wanted it, and who acknowledged that there was no warranty or support.
Our logic was simple: once there was no more money for us to make with a product, if people found it useful (in its completely unsupported state), then at least we were doing something good for our customer community, and hopefully generating a little goodwill.
I think for some kinds of software, making "retired" products available (unsupported) for free has the potential to be good for everyone involved.
-Mark Kriegsman
'The other Cocoa' eventually found a new home and became known as Stagecast Creator.
-Mark
Presumably you can have multiple players on the same network, each playing back different content from the same centralized server.
The idea here, which I particularly like, is that you'd set up one "server" with stored copies of all your MP3s on it, and then put one of these and a pair of powered speakers in each room where you want music: the bedroom, the kitchen, the dungeon, etc. That way, you can play any music from any room in the house at any time without needing complete stored copies of the whole collection in each room.
Now all it needs is a built-in 802.11b wireless ethernet setup...
-Mark
Credit for "Crouching Highlander, Hidden Matrix" actually goes to Deirdre Benson, who seemed to have nailed it just right as soon as she had seen the trailer. Props, girl!
-Mark
Look at the image of the hand printed on the background of the keyboard -- the image shows a right hand on the left side of the keyboard.
As for 'straight guy'.. heh... I suppose I do prefer to have my arms straight while I'm typing. Beyond that, "What evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows..." heh heh.
Judging from their picture of the keyboard here, they want you to put your LEFT hand on the RIGHT side of the keyboard (and presumably vice versa)! Call me an anatomical traditionalist, but that just doesn't seem that comfortable to me.
-Mark
I started out with 'toggle blocks', and then graduated to Lego. After Lego I 'graduated' to Fischer Technik, and then to playing with electromechanical kits, then electronics (TTL stuff) and then to those computery things.
I think a lot of people naturally 'graduate' from one level of complexity and challenge to the next as they wish. (Like this random guy 'Pete'.)
"Lego level" is not somehow less important or less good than the "Fischer Technik (or Mechano) Level". People will seek out their own level of challenge; I'm finding myself thinking about all the people who buy CodeWarrior: Learning Edition (Mac, Win, no *nix yet) for fifty bucks. Had that existed at the time, I probably would have 'graduated' to that (instead of to programming FORTRAN in punch cards on an IBM 370/155.)
-Mark
/*EOF
Every PCI PowerMac has a 68K (CISC) to PPC (RISC) dynamic recompilation emulator in it that it uses for executing 68K code. And MHz for MHz, the execution speed of the 68K code when dynamically recompiled as PPC code, is roughly comparable (plus or minus 50%?) to the speed of the original 68K code on a 68K processor.
The very first PowerMacs (NuBus based) used instruction-by-instruction emulation to run all the old 68K Mac code, including some parts of the OS that were still 68K.
The second generation PowerMacs (PCI based) included a new 68K emulator that did "dynamic recompilation" of chunks of code from 68K to PowerPC, and then executed the PPC code; this resulted in significantly faster overall system performance.
Connectix later sold a dynamic recompilation emulator ("Speed Doubler") for Nubus PowerMacs, that did, in fact, double the speed of those machines for many operations, mainly because so much of the OS and ROM on the first-gen PowerMacs was still 68K code.
I think that dynamic recompilation has a bright future; x86 may eventually be just another "virtual machine" language that gets dynamically recompiled to something faster/more compatible/etc at the last moment.
-Mark
See Marathon Computer. They have a pretty wide range of rack-a-Mac equipment.
-Mark
When every Time-Warner employee starts getting an AOL-sized portion of breakfast spam every morning, maybe they will be better motivated to improve AOL's anti-spam filters.
I can see it now... "MAKE MONEY FAST, ChrmnSteve78!"
-Mark
Yep- Murray Hill doesn't exist. It's part of New Providence and part of Berkeley Heights, and even through I say I lived there, I was in BH for tax purposes, but in "Summit" as far as ZIP codes were concerned. I was referring to Governor Livingston Regional High School and Berkeley Heights.
As I just posted to a reply above, the "Gifted and Talented" programs *are* the 'special needs' programs for smart kids, and SHS has 'em, too. My friend's mom taught English at SHS for many years, and I know she refered to "the gifted program" more than once.
And I believe the "gifted" programs are all funded under the state "special ed." mandate.
-Mark
The G & T program *is* the 'special needs' program for the "top 2%."
If your friends were in the G & T program, or if they were allowed to take high school algebra in 8th grade, then they already had been identified as having special needs (under the state mandate, anyway).
A good friend of mine 'finished' all the math and science her high school had to offer by her junior year. Her parents used the state 'special needs' mandate to force her local school district to send her to the local college for half of each day so she could continue learning math and science. (The 'local college' was a little school named Princeton...) Her parents had to fight for it with the local school, but they won.
Gifted And Talented programs, and similar 'accomodations' of various sorts, exist all over the state and it's no coincidence -- the schools *have* to make special accomodations for the special needs of these special kids.
I'm willing to admit that I may had some of this wrong now, but back in the 80s, that's the way it was.
-Mark
Aside: Way back when, my high school had the highest aggregate SAT scores for any public school in NJ, to a large degree because it was in Murray Hill, NJ, home of AT&T Bell Labs (now Lucent). About half of the kids in town were raised by parents who were professional scientists and engineers.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, our little town of 13,000 also had the highest teen suicide rate in the nation. For a couple of years, the valedictorian of the graduating high school class never actually made it to graduation.
A 13-year-old is still just 13, no matter how good he is with computers; the school should have treated him as a 'special needs' student who had done something wrong, not as an independent and emotionally mature adult, or as a criminal.
-Mark, hoping the next kid makes it through OK
For about ten years now I've been hearing different permutations of the rumor that AppleScript, HyperCard, and QuickTime will eventually all become the same thing. In the meantime, those looking for a Mac OS X solution might want to keep their eye on HyperSense. HyperSense is a Hypercard work-alike for NeXTStep (aka "OpenStep"), soon to be available for Mac OS X (aka "OpenStep"
Ya gotta love a programming language where is actually valid code...
-Mark
Amusingly enough, her home page shows an anime picture of her.
I wonder if the good folks at Transmeta... nah, never mind.
-Mark
There's a discussion board about the Archos here. I've had mine for about two weeks, and I'm very happy with it.
-Mark
We've used Metrowerks CodeWarrior to develop and debug very heavily multithreaded applications on MacOS, NT, Solaris, and Linux for about five years now; the CodeWarrior tools seem very much 'up to the job' and thread-aware. As a nice plus, CodeWarrior runs on multiple platforms (including Mac OS X now), which is a nice plus for our development, which is all multiplatform.
We now use a diversity of compilers/IDEs/debuggers, but CodeWarrior is still a favorite, even if it's just because of the "Blood, Sweat, and Code" T-shirts.
For comparison, my PowerBook can do about 70/sec running WebSTAR on MacOS 9.
In other words, ANY server on the planet can handle that level of traffic -- for static pages. Beyond static pages, it has nothing to do with the server software, and everything to do with 'the other stuff' (DB, middleware, etc.)
-Mark Kriegsman
Clearway Technologies
Plus, the guys from NeXT (a software company) had a mild allergy to paying for and bundling software from other companies, and that hastened the termination of some of the preexisting bundling deals.
Apple used to bundle MacLinkPlus with MacOS, so any Mac user could open any file from any program -- PC or Mac. (I used to annoy PC users by using my Mac PowerBook to translate files for them that they couldn't open, from programs that they didn't have and that weren't even available for the Mac, e.g., Lotus AmiPro. The stuff works.) Apple doesn't bundle it any more (?!) for their own inscrutable reasons.
There is no Linux version (yet) of DataViz's translator package, but they do offer translation packages for Palm users, so there's some indication that they're open to addressing "non-traditional" platforms if they see a market. I have hope.