informing you that you do not own the music, but merely have a limited licence to listen to it
But isn't this how most music is currently? Not that you have a EULA, but the copyright holder usually only gives you a limited use license to listen to the music, you at no point actually own the music. Not exactly a M$ specific thing, well at least the license part, the BSOD of course is copyrighted by M$ and it's one they protect (and exercise) rigorously;)
/.Pod - slashdots any computer that you hook up to it. Keeps on wanting to be "beowoulf clustered" with iPods of the opposite gender (but of course is lucky to even get them to acknowledge it).
K&RPod - Trse UsrIntFace, very flexible though
GPLPod - If you sing along, you must record your singing and distribute the original song along with your singing.
M$Pod/SonyPod/RIAAPod - You hate it because you have to.
CaseModPod - iPod with glear plastic case, neon kit, chipped cpu w/water cooling
Beware the Madonna iPod, every time you turn around it will shed its outer cover. Plus instead of a blank pause, it will insist on playing "Material Girl" and/or "Like A Virgin" between all your tracks.
Actually NT was supposed to be OS/2 2. MS however cancelled those plans when Windows 3.0 became a huge success. Instead they decided to make NT more of a "windows". IBM then went on and release OS/2 2 by itself.
Actually I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be 3. 2 was already in the works and NT/OS2v3 was supposed to be the future (multi platform etc). 2 was simply the 32bit port.
Speaking of versions that never were, are you old enough to remember that Windows was originally supposed to be DOS4?
Well, many of the comments they make certainly do have a ring of truth to them. Many of the better/best quality analog recordings are superiour to cd's as far as the quality of the sound. Note that things like scratches and hiss often times take a back seat to fidelity when one is judging "quality" (to a point obviously). Similar issue for tubes vs transistors. There is no denying that tubes sound "different", now whether this translates into "better" can be subjective, but hey, if it sounds "better" to you (tubes/transistors/digital/analog), then it is "better" regardless of what anyone else says.
One note on cd's. Remember that one of the biggest selling points of cd's was not their _absolute_ quality, but the "average" quality. In other words, someone with a cheap cd player and a cd from Walmart could achieve a level of sound quality that was very good. Vs the huge disparity in analog stuff, both recordings and equipment. So you have a situation where the most common 90% of cd's sound as good as the upper 10% of analog.
However it sucked so bad that IBM ended up dumping thousands of perfectly good PPC workstations into a river somewhere.
I believe you are referring to the PREP and CHRP machines? Those didn't get chucked due to OS/2, the entire MacOS/AIX/OS2 thing just bascially disintergrated.
Right, that's why I said that OS/2 was piggybacking on the portablility of NT. M$ didn't really just run away, it was really more of an API thing (vs microkernel) and they had a spat, and then irreconcilable differences.
This does make sense, IBM hasn't really marketed OS/2 for quite some time, so it's conceivable that they would discontinue selling and supporting it...
Yes, everyone knew this was coming. They haven't marketed it because they've been wanting to shelve it for a long time now. However some of their larger accounts still used it and supporting it kept these accounts in the IBM fold. I bet many of these accounts are now hitting their upgrade cycles so the time was right.
Sound familiar?
Microsoft [microsoft.com] has done this too with their previous versions of Windows (Read: Not their money makers)
First of all, why say "sound familiar" and tag it with a M$ reference? Is dropping a non performing product something unique to M$ or something inherintly evil? Plus, other than Windows for Pen Computing, which other versions of windows have they dropped. You're not referring to things like Windows/286 and Windows for Workgroups are you? Do you expect them to support them forever?
OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
Well yes and no. Don't forget that NT was originally supposed to be OS/2 3 and that it was going to gain hardware portability by piggy backing on NT's.
In addition to the $70-$80 monthly subscription fee, Ricochet customers were required to purchase a $250 modem. When it went belly up, Ricochet claimed only 51,000 subscribers in 17 cities and had burned through $1.4 billion in just two years.
Lets see, that'd be ~$22MB over those two years to cover $1.4GB, ouch. Where are these investors, I think I have some great business ideas;)
Man o man, that was one of the dumbest reviews I've read in a long time (maybe ever). Is he 15 years old or something. Here are my takes on his takes, warning, there may be some spoilers (don't know since I haven't written them yet):
This is a bit like using a Jedi Knight and her light saber to get at a can of soup
What the hell is he talking about. How lame of an analogy can you have, Jedi's? Then he has an entire paragraph about this and it makes no sense at all.
"Are you or are you not made of sub-atomic particles?" (of course -- everything is made of subatomic particles, usually organized in the form of atoms, duh)
Unless of course they are entities that exist entirely in your head. And even if one was thinking hologram, and even holograms are made of subatomic particles, that misses the point entirely.
Comparisons with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey are as inevitable as they are inaccurate. Both films are set in space. And both films have a slow pace, driven largely by beautifully shot scenes of some space-scape. But that's the extent of the similarity.
What, the docking sequence was not similar enough for you, man, it looks like he replicated some frames verbatim not to mention the "addition" of the "no sounds in space" effect. Hell I expected the Blue Danube to start playing (and no, I had not heard previous to watching the film about any homages to Kubrick).
The science fiction conceit of this super-powerful planet never goes anywhere.
Why should it? The planet was a device, something that drove plot points. Just like the monoliths in 2001. You are never explicitly told what they are or what they're doing, and they don't really factor in the actual film, though they are obviously central to the film. He talks about 2001 like a artsy fartsy film student, and then totally misses these points.
Which brings me to the next issue, his overuse of the word conceit. Talk about pot/kettle/black. But then again I have to remind myself that he did pull the Jedi thing early in the review.
in the highly-regarded sex, lies, and videotape (yes, the title is all in lowercase -- never seen a satisfactory explanation for that little bit of conceit either)
Maybe he just liked the way it looked, who cares? Once again with the coneit word. Is this guy an old roommate of Soderburghs that never made it big?
A "trick" ending that is broadcast throughout the movie.
Maybe the problem is that the author of the review thought it was supposed to be a "trick" ending. A "trick" ending is one in which nothing or little in the story leads one to expect the ending that occured. That was hardly the case here. One could imagine a few different endings, but the one that happened was definitely one of them. And it had nothing to do with telescoping, it was just natural story progression. A trick ending would have been "George Clooney goes back to earth and marries a 18yo white trash chick and develops a beer gut" or "a spaceship full of space marines show up with Sigourney Weaver to flesh out any "bugs"". In this case the ending brings up the question (though admittadly other movies have done the same) of "what is really real" and which reality _should_ we accept (yes, similar to "The Matrix"), which is completely consitant with the story.
Sorry for the verbosity (though coming in as late as I am, I doubt that many will end up suffering through this), but this kind of drivel is very disappointing. Hell my submission about the interview with Sun's Scott McNealy gets punted (and he actually has some very interesting things to say about their Linux strategy, god forbid an "on topic" article) and crap like this makes it in. Oh well, "if ya don't like it start yer own damn site" I guess.
IBM dosen't actually make the x86 based machines themselves, they just have other manufacture them, but even still, the pc market is easy because it doesn't require the huge R&D spending that the workstation/server market does. Power4/3/RS3/PPC et al are architecturally similar and for the most part support the same ISA (I know they are not exactly the same, but they are very close). IBM uses them interchangably in their RS/6000 and AS/400 lines. The Z series they've had for a gazillion years (well not the Z series itself, but the whole mainframe line from back in the 360 days). So IBM itself only supports three major architectures x86, Power/PPC, and Z. HP doesn't have the benefit of having an architecture like the mainframes that are huge cash cows and have been since the dawn of (computing) time. If they did support Alpha, it would compete directly with 2 of their existing architectures (Itanium and PARISC). IBM, for the most part, doesn't have that problem, all three major architectures are geared towards very different markets (again, for the most part).
But anyway, my comment was about HP specifically. Keep in mind that even with the triple merger (HP/Compaq/DEC) HP is still a "smaller" company (revenue, market cap, etc), so comparing them with just about anyone else is not an apples/apples (no pun intended) comparison.
It would be nice to have a "real" comparison of the two architectures. I'm talking about leveling the playing field by using the same video card/drives/etc since Macs share these things now with pcs. At those price levels (high end to high end), someone wouldn't think twice about spending another $100 for a faster video card or hd.
Also, the use of some more "real world" benchmarks, actually, not using benchmarks. Load up a 12MB image and do some manipulation, do some real 3d modeling, manipulate a real video file, etc. I'm sure that the pc would still win out, but at least we'd have a much better idea of what the two systems are capable of vs a couple of mentions of "the Mac".
Intel bought the technology, so if their new 64-bit processor (which shatters compatibility anyhow) doesn't perform well enough, they could just start making Alphas and call them their own.
I thought that Intel bought the manufacturing arm and licensed some patented technologies (whatever DEC sued Intel over to begin with) and the right to manufacture Alphas, but not the whole intellectual rights to the Alpha architecture itself (which Compaq got)? So while Intel could certainly churn out Alphas, they could only churn out existing versions and not create new ones?
Or perhaps some other party might pick up the torch. Sun would be a good candidate, since they're in a tight competition with IBM, and the Alpha seems to be the only thing to top IBM's Power3 (and is doing so with half the number of processors!!!).
Egads, Sun would never abandon Sparc. They have spent billions on just simply developing the name in the marketplace, and to suddenly switch gears and drop Sparc to sell Alpha would be suicide. Most people who purchase Sun don't do it because their stuff is faster than anyone elses (because in general they are not), they buy it for the stability of the hardware and OS. Sun has been able to thrive even they've always been in the role of the lessor performer. Note that there aren't too many Sun's in the Top500, Sun just isn't that interested in that market.
Come on HP. The Alpha has just as loyal a following as Apple... It's a big mistake not to start improving it and seeing what it can really do for you.
No, it's a big mistake to try to sell computers using three different architectures (four if you count the overlap between PA-RISC and Itanium). It makes no sense at all to keep Alpha around (as much as I like Alpha). They've already bought into Itanium and PARISC still has legs while they wait for Itanium to mature. Now they can surely integrate more concepts from Alpha into future chips, but Alpha as an independent entity has no useful purpose in the HP landscape.
Maybe Transmeta will buy the rights and finally get a little oomph into those chips of theirs.
As for the possibilities of getting ISO900x without erally doing squat, you are, sadly, right
Well I wasn't really trying to say that ISO9000 was worthless, just that last point. That a company that claims ISO9000 certification doesn't necessarily imply that the company has it's act together any more than anyone else. Just that they met the requirements to get it. It's just like any other type of certification, there are those who's goal is the certification, not what the certification's goal is. I wouldn't call myself "hostile" towards it, just not starry eyed that some (esp managers) get.
No, it's because we were able to produce plenty of examples of prior art, something the united states and others couldn't.
Ah yes, Canada was able to prove that they already had large genetically engineered vermin. You just have to figure out a way of keeping them from wanting to secede;)
Well I wouldn't want him to "act", but I would appreciate a bit more substance. It is possible to be not too flourishy without coming across as terse. But I think the real issue is one of "meduim", in that after I reread the comments but actually pictured the words coming out of his mouth vs on the screen, they made a lot more sense. Esp considering that even a one line sentence would take him several minutes to say...
Thanks for the info. One of these days I'll have to put the BeBox back together and load a newer version (The last one I saw was still pre 1.0) and see how it looks.
Well yes of course I'd expect software 1000 years from now to be vastly different as I'd expect computers 1000 years from now to be vastly different, that's not the issue. I contend that 50years in computer time is an eternity and the lack of advances in software development more market driven vs technology driven (as opposed to bridges, well at least more so than bridges). The problem is that the market is expanding and developers mainly react to this expansion. We also have a problem in that most development is centered around a very small set of development tools/environments (Windows/Visual Studio being the largest) and developers can only go as fast as the tools they have, and visual studio really is going nowhere fast (I've been using M$ stuff since MSC v3 and MSPascal v2 and still use to today)
Slashdot Mirror
informing you that you do not own the music, but merely have a limited licence to listen to it
;)
But isn't this how most music is currently? Not that you have a EULA, but the copyright holder usually only gives you a limited use license to listen to the music, you at no point actually own the music. Not exactly a M$ specific thing, well at least the license part, the BSOD of course is copyrighted by M$ and it's one they protect (and exercise) rigorously
/.Pod - slashdots any computer that you hook up to it. Keeps on wanting to be "beowoulf clustered" with iPods of the opposite gender (but of course is lucky to even get them to acknowledge it).
K&RPod - Trse UsrIntFace, very flexible though
GPLPod - If you sing along, you must record your singing and distribute the original song along with your singing.
M$Pod/SonyPod/RIAAPod - You hate it because you have to.
CaseModPod - iPod with glear plastic case, neon kit, chipped cpu w/water cooling
Beware the Madonna iPod, every time you turn around it will shed its outer cover. Plus instead of a blank pause, it will insist on playing "Material Girl" and/or "Like A Virgin" between all your tracks.
The Cowboy Neal autographed iPod (really just a big X marked in crayon).
Actually NT was supposed to be OS/2 2. MS however cancelled those plans when Windows 3.0 became a huge success. Instead they decided to make NT more of a "windows". IBM then went on and release OS/2 2 by itself.
Actually I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be 3. 2 was already in the works and NT/OS2v3 was supposed to be the future (multi platform etc). 2 was simply the 32bit port.
Speaking of versions that never were, are you old enough to remember that Windows was originally supposed to be DOS4?
Well, many of the comments they make certainly do have a ring of truth to them. Many of the better/best quality analog recordings are superiour to cd's as far as the quality of the sound. Note that things like scratches and hiss often times take a back seat to fidelity when one is judging "quality" (to a point obviously). Similar issue for tubes vs transistors. There is no denying that tubes sound "different", now whether this translates into "better" can be subjective, but hey, if it sounds "better" to you (tubes/transistors/digital/analog), then it is "better" regardless of what anyone else says.
One note on cd's. Remember that one of the biggest selling points of cd's was not their _absolute_ quality, but the "average" quality. In other words, someone with a cheap cd player and a cd from Walmart could achieve a level of sound quality that was very good. Vs the huge disparity in analog stuff, both recordings and equipment. So you have a situation where the most common 90% of cd's sound as good as the upper 10% of analog.
However it sucked so bad that IBM ended up dumping thousands of perfectly good PPC workstations into a river somewhere.
I believe you are referring to the PREP and CHRP machines? Those didn't get chucked due to OS/2, the entire MacOS/AIX/OS2 thing just bascially disintergrated.
This only means NT was portable and OS/2 wasn't
Right, that's why I said that OS/2 was piggybacking on the portablility of NT. M$ didn't really just run away, it was really more of an API thing (vs microkernel) and they had a spat, and then irreconcilable differences.
This does make sense, IBM hasn't really marketed OS/2 for quite some time, so it's conceivable that they would discontinue selling and supporting it...
Yes, everyone knew this was coming. They haven't marketed it because they've been wanting to shelve it for a long time now. However some of their larger accounts still used it and supporting it kept these accounts in the IBM fold. I bet many of these accounts are now hitting their upgrade cycles so the time was right.
Sound familiar? Microsoft [microsoft.com] has done this too with their previous versions of Windows (Read: Not their money makers)
First of all, why say "sound familiar" and tag it with a M$ reference? Is dropping a non performing product something unique to M$ or something inherintly evil? Plus, other than Windows for Pen Computing, which other versions of windows have they dropped. You're not referring to things like Windows/286 and Windows for Workgroups are you? Do you expect them to support them forever?
OS/2 was also hopelessly tied to the i386 architecture
Well yes and no. Don't forget that NT was originally supposed to be OS/2 3 and that it was going to gain hardware portability by piggy backing on NT's.
In addition to the $70-$80 monthly subscription fee, Ricochet customers were required to purchase a $250 modem. When it went belly up, Ricochet claimed only 51,000 subscribers in 17 cities and had burned through $1.4 billion in just two years.
;)
Lets see, that'd be ~$22MB over those two years to cover $1.4GB, ouch. Where are these investors, I think I have some great business ideas
To be considered truely "intelligent" a computer must:
..." post.
1. Make a "first post" posting 15 minutes after the article goes up.
2. Be the fourth person to enter a "In Soviet Russia
3. Be labeled a karma whore.
4. Whine about the masiv tipe ohs in artaculs.
5. Hate M$, Sony, MPAA because thats one of the three laws right?
He was getting tired of having to redistribute the source code for all the girls (not like anyone could understand the source anyway ;)
you've been warned
Man o man, that was one of the dumbest reviews I've read in a long time (maybe ever). Is he 15 years old or something. Here are my takes on his takes, warning, there may be some spoilers (don't know since I haven't written them yet):
This is a bit like using a Jedi Knight and her light saber to get at a can of soup
What the hell is he talking about. How lame of an analogy can you have, Jedi's? Then he has an entire paragraph about this and it makes no sense at all.
"Are you or are you not made of sub-atomic particles?" (of course -- everything is made of subatomic particles, usually organized in the form of atoms, duh)
Unless of course they are entities that exist entirely in your head. And even if one was thinking hologram, and even holograms are made of subatomic particles, that misses the point entirely.
Comparisons with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey are as inevitable as they are inaccurate. Both films are set in space. And both films have a slow pace, driven largely by beautifully shot scenes of some space-scape. But that's the extent of the similarity.
What, the docking sequence was not similar enough for you, man, it looks like he replicated some frames verbatim not to mention the "addition" of the "no sounds in space" effect. Hell I expected the Blue Danube to start playing (and no, I had not heard previous to watching the film about any homages to Kubrick).
The science fiction conceit of this super-powerful planet never goes anywhere.
Why should it? The planet was a device, something that drove plot points. Just like the monoliths in 2001. You are never explicitly told what they are or what they're doing, and they don't really factor in the actual film, though they are obviously central to the film. He talks about 2001 like a artsy fartsy film student, and then totally misses these points.
Which brings me to the next issue, his overuse of the word conceit. Talk about pot/kettle/black. But then again I have to remind myself that he did pull the Jedi thing early in the review.
in the highly-regarded sex, lies, and videotape (yes, the title is all in lowercase -- never seen a satisfactory explanation for that little bit of conceit either)
Maybe he just liked the way it looked, who cares? Once again with the coneit word. Is this guy an old roommate of Soderburghs that never made it big?
A "trick" ending that is broadcast throughout the movie.
Maybe the problem is that the author of the review thought it was supposed to be a "trick" ending. A "trick" ending is one in which nothing or little in the story leads one to expect the ending that occured. That was hardly the case here. One could imagine a few different endings, but the one that happened was definitely one of them. And it had nothing to do with telescoping, it was just natural story progression. A trick ending would have been "George Clooney goes back to earth and marries a 18yo white trash chick and develops a beer gut" or "a spaceship full of space marines show up with Sigourney Weaver to flesh out any "bugs"". In this case the ending brings up the question (though admittadly other movies have done the same) of "what is really real" and which reality _should_ we accept (yes, similar to "The Matrix"), which is completely consitant with the story.
Sorry for the verbosity (though coming in as late as I am, I doubt that many will end up suffering through this), but this kind of drivel is very disappointing. Hell my submission about the interview with Sun's Scott McNealy gets punted (and he actually has some very interesting things to say about their Linux strategy, god forbid an "on topic" article) and crap like this makes it in. Oh well, "if ya don't like it start yer own damn site" I guess.
IBM dosen't actually make the x86 based machines themselves, they just have other manufacture them, but even still, the pc market is easy because it doesn't require the huge R&D spending that the workstation/server market does. Power4/3/RS3/PPC et al are architecturally similar and for the most part support the same ISA (I know they are not exactly the same, but they are very close). IBM uses them interchangably in their RS/6000 and AS/400 lines. The Z series they've had for a gazillion years (well not the Z series itself, but the whole mainframe line from back in the 360 days). So IBM itself only supports three major architectures x86, Power/PPC, and Z. HP doesn't have the benefit of having an architecture like the mainframes that are huge cash cows and have been since the dawn of (computing) time. If they did support Alpha, it would compete directly with 2 of their existing architectures (Itanium and PARISC). IBM, for the most part, doesn't have that problem, all three major architectures are geared towards very different markets (again, for the most part).
But anyway, my comment was about HP specifically. Keep in mind that even with the triple merger (HP/Compaq/DEC) HP is still a "smaller" company (revenue, market cap, etc), so comparing them with just about anyone else is not an apples/apples (no pun intended) comparison.
It would be nice to have a "real" comparison of the two architectures. I'm talking about leveling the playing field by using the same video card/drives/etc since Macs share these things now with pcs. At those price levels (high end to high end), someone wouldn't think twice about spending another $100 for a faster video card or hd.
Also, the use of some more "real world" benchmarks, actually, not using benchmarks. Load up a 12MB image and do some manipulation, do some real 3d modeling, manipulate a real video file, etc. I'm sure that the pc would still win out, but at least we'd have a much better idea of what the two systems are capable of vs a couple of mentions of "the Mac".
Intel bought the technology, so if their new 64-bit processor (which shatters compatibility anyhow) doesn't perform well enough, they could just start making Alphas and call them their own.
I thought that Intel bought the manufacturing arm and licensed some patented technologies (whatever DEC sued Intel over to begin with) and the right to manufacture Alphas, but not the whole intellectual rights to the Alpha architecture itself (which Compaq got)? So while Intel could certainly churn out Alphas, they could only churn out existing versions and not create new ones?
Or perhaps some other party might pick up the torch. Sun would be a good candidate, since they're in a tight competition with IBM, and the Alpha seems to be the only thing to top IBM's Power3 (and is doing so with half the number of processors!!!).
Egads, Sun would never abandon Sparc. They have spent billions on just simply developing the name in the marketplace, and to suddenly switch gears and drop Sparc to sell Alpha would be suicide. Most people who purchase Sun don't do it because their stuff is faster than anyone elses (because in general they are not), they buy it for the stability of the hardware and OS. Sun has been able to thrive even they've always been in the role of the lessor performer. Note that there aren't too many Sun's in the Top500, Sun just isn't that interested in that market.
Come on HP. The Alpha has just as loyal a following as Apple... It's a big mistake not to start improving it and seeing what it can really do for you.
No, it's a big mistake to try to sell computers using three different architectures (four if you count the overlap between PA-RISC and Itanium). It makes no sense at all to keep Alpha around (as much as I like Alpha). They've already bought into Itanium and PARISC still has legs while they wait for Itanium to mature. Now they can surely integrate more concepts from Alpha into future chips, but Alpha as an independent entity has no useful purpose in the HP landscape.
Maybe Transmeta will buy the rights and finally get a little oomph into those chips of theirs.
As for the possibilities of getting ISO900x without erally doing squat, you are, sadly, right
Well I wasn't really trying to say that ISO9000 was worthless, just that last point. That a company that claims ISO9000 certification doesn't necessarily imply that the company has it's act together any more than anyone else. Just that they met the requirements to get it. It's just like any other type of certification, there are those who's goal is the certification, not what the certification's goal is. I wouldn't call myself "hostile" towards it, just not starry eyed that some (esp managers) get.
No, it's because we were able to produce plenty of examples of prior art, something the united states and others couldn't.
;)
Ah yes, Canada was able to prove that they already had large genetically engineered vermin. You just have to figure out a way of keeping them from wanting to secede
So there is at least one place where higher life forms cannot be patented
Mainly because there are no higher forms of life there.
Sorry, had to say it, but I actually love Canada.
Well I wouldn't want him to "act", but I would appreciate a bit more substance. It is possible to be not too flourishy without coming across as terse. But I think the real issue is one of "meduim", in that after I reread the comments but actually pictured the words coming out of his mouth vs on the screen, they made a lot more sense. Esp considering that even a one line sentence would take him several minutes to say ...
......... full. I .... merely .... sought to ..... make ...... an impression.
"her lips were
Thanks for helping me see that better.
Thanks for the info. One of these days I'll have to put the BeBox back together and load a newer version (The last one I saw was still pre 1.0) and see how it looks.
You insensitive clod, I lost my pimples (well most of them anyway) years ago ;)
Well yes of course I'd expect software 1000 years from now to be vastly different as I'd expect computers 1000 years from now to be vastly different, that's not the issue. I contend that 50years in computer time is an eternity and the lack of advances in software development more market driven vs technology driven (as opposed to bridges, well at least more so than bridges). The problem is that the market is expanding and developers mainly react to this expansion. We also have a problem in that most development is centered around a very small set of development tools/environments (Windows/Visual Studio being the largest) and developers can only go as fast as the tools they have, and visual studio really is going nowhere fast (I've been using M$ stuff since MSC v3 and MSPascal v2 and still use to today)