Raytheon in Marlborough Mass. is a closed facility.
The prototype was considered a failure.
It was disassembled several years ago.
The architecture Raytheon was using had long ago been proven inefficient in professionial transportation engineering circles.
This was to be one of those swords-to-plowshares "Peace Dividend" stories. Instead it was remarkably similar to when Boeing Vertol stopped making helicopters and attempted to build LRVs (ask Boston's MBTA what they're like and about the court settlement.)
Unfortunately this poster is absolutely classic of so many of the alternative transportation folks: Short on details, wrong on facts, and prone to handwaving aside problems - the exact same problems that hamper existing systems. With supporters like this no wonder the field hasn't progressed markedly in 30 years.
Ironically half of the reporters recieving this email couldn't read it as their Outlook SP2 had declared the attachment potentially unsafe (unlike the official MS formats riddled with problems) and so wouldn't release it to them. The other half of the reporters found their copies already infected when Outlook promptly ran them and began sending out more infected copies to everyone in their address books.
Luckly a kind 14 year old took pity, broke into one of their Hotmail accounts and resent a plain text version to eveyone.
Because its venal or stupid-which do you believe?
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Borland Backs Down
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· Score: 3
... a mistake as to which license gets associated with which product.
Riiight - I was out of the room, the dog ate it, I was putting *back* the cookies, etc.
Folks don't believe the statement 'cause its not believable. License's legal wording doesn't just get thrown together by some minor "administrative assistant" and then sent out. It's reviewed, several times, at different levels. This is the legally binding contract the company has to honor - trust me it gets read, discussed, debated. Borland knew what it was doing.
Furthermore the line that these were items meant for their enterprise licenses is also a load of hooey. Some of those provisos are ones NOBODY sensible would sign off on, PARTICULARLY large corporations with their own lawyers reading this stuff and looking to protect the companies privacy. The only way those points would ever show up in a big contract would be as negotiating points that can be used to make Borland look reasonable on other more legitimate terms ("We dropped the X and the Y for you folks, at least let us keep the Z!")
Frankly the "Open Letter" is an exercise in damage control and deceit.
It was an accident all right - that it caused so much furor and now they're trying to make excuses and distance themselves. I'm sure the next few licenses they'll be treading softly but I've no doubt we've seen the goals of at least some folks within Borland. If they remember the spanking will have to be seen but I for one wouldn't commit to Borland products without a great deal of unease.
Finally, and on the VERY off possibility this was an honest mistake then what kind of organization lets something this important "slip through"? Are they venal or profoundly badly run - gee which would I prefer my tool developer be?
If you want to do geeky stuff then get a job doing that for your locality, don't go sit in city council or whatever and try to dictate administrivia. If you want to get involved in broad range of local issues then run for office.
Every place gets it's fair number of single-issue candidates every season. Some are anti-abortion, some are obsessed with more money for the schools, or getting better playing fields for sports, or are gun nuts, whatever. You - apparently your big theme is Open Source and expanded IS.
Guess what: Most folks don't want to see bozos like that in office.
You can't pick and choose what will be local issues. Sure you can sit on or even possibly chair committees (though rookies don't often do that) but at best you'll spend 5% of your time and energy on a pet project; the rest of the time it'll just keeping the wheels of goverment turning.
Water & sewage, roads and schools, contracts and insurance, negotiating with unions and filling out paperwork for other layers of government. These are all your responsibilities and unless you're willing to commit yourself to fulfilling all of these then you're absolutely the wrong person for the position.
Sure it's nice to daydream "If I were King" but you won't be: You'll be an elected official working within an established system. Try to tell the local civil service IS employees what to do and they'll smile, give to 30 minutes of their time then dismiss you as a gadfly, though perhaps as a useful gadfly in the future.
Do yourself and your constituents a favor: Decide if you really want to be an elected official or if you want to play with computers.
You can't be bothered to write something in an intelligible format yet you end the whole mess with a question mark?
Put some minimal effort into making your posting legible (hint: shift key) and then maybe someone else will invest their time in responding to its content.
Yes, if it's appropriate in context. I wouldn't use it speaking to gradeschoolers, non-native anglophones or shouting at buddies over the blaring music in a bar but in an extended conversation with reasonably literate folks of whom I can expect a broad vocabularly I've used "extant" with some regularity.
I expect it's usage (along with any other English words not in the core 3,000 or so) is heavily dependant on the types of conversations you hold and the backgrounds of those involved.
My dream-for-the-future? Components attached by cables.
Instead of the all-in-one box of today the parts would all be sold separately and connect using standard cables. The "PC" would just be a case with the CPU and RAM. The graphics card would be it's own box, the hard drives their own boxes, the same for DVD/CDs. All would require a single cable providing a super highspeed bus with data, clock, and electrical supply. Think PCI-X meets Firewire. Breakout boxes would be handle external connects like network, speakers, keyboards and mice (or their wireless boxes at least.)
Why would I like this? One lots of folks are scared of ever opening up their PC - this would just be simple foolproof cables. Second would be the ability to reconfigure a system on the fly - need more drivespace plug it in, unplug it and carry it there, upgrade the video with another box, CPU the same way. This would also move prodicts to the audio-components model where one assembles the various parts that best suit one's needs and not the pick-a-vendor-now-pick-one-of-four-models that most folks use today (yes I know that/.'ers aren't supposed to do that - I'm talking 99% population.)
This deconstruction would also allow folks to put the parts they need where they need them. CPU, hard drives, etc. can all go in the drawer or on on the floor. However I want my DVD/CD on my desk at hand. Should next week I stop coding and instead do some gaming then I unplug my trusty 2D card box and hook in a new fast 3D one - total time for switchout 1 minute and one unplug, a plug, and that's it.
Hey! I went looking only last month for a Gopher that could run on an old MacOS or Win9x/2k box only to find none still extant. Now there's a whole new release:)
Folks are starting to use chat clients to send files to eachother.
Chat is moving from text to audio or audio/video.
All of these features have been around for quite awhile, integrated and not. However they're now getting rolled into all-in-one applications that are popular. Also a critical number of folks have fast connections and are now comfortable going to the computer to send/recieve/interact.
Big news? No. Entirely forseeable evolution is more like it.
Things like IRC already enables a lot a lot of these features, and so do the various video-whackoff online applications and big-scale internet telephony has been the promised for a few years now. But those are all small potatos compared to the market penetration of AOL IM / ICQ / MS Communicator / Yahoo Messenger. With these now offering these feature traffic is going up, up in a big way.
No need to download a specialized program, install it, and figure out which of your friends has the same or compatible ones. The big IM programs are pretty much ubiquitious in the mass market, heck they come pre-installed on many new computers. Co-workers, classmates, relatives, friends across the street or in distant parts of the world are going to be likely to have the software, all installed automagically as they upgrade their tried-'n-true chat programs.
So we're now back to the issue of cross-communication: How to get the AOLians to talk to the MSNers with the ICQites with the Yahoolies. A solution has been promised for text messages but now after all these years it's arriving just in time to be irrelevant, perhaps simply being the building block for a more versitile system.
So what are the big technical hurdles? Again, three:
Directory Services: How to find and connect to folks.
Interoperability: How to negotiate settings & protocols between various clients.
Traffic Management: What to do with all of these packets streaming from the previously almost-all downloading users who now want to send streams of highspeed data upstream, LOTS of it (think teenagers on the phone!.)
So why is this an issue for NetworkWorld and not Teenbeat? Because directory services means some sort of servers, interoperability means protocols and that surging volume of low-latency traffic going upstream is going to upset the pricing and service model most broadband is built on.
Again, none of this is new, it's just the matter of scale. Currently in most environments the 5% of folks who are considered "Top Talkers" account for over 50% of all traffic. What happens when half of the users become "Top Talkers"?
If you're selling webcams and mikes and soundcards and sticky applications that folks spend hours on and want lots of services from then it's all golden. However if you're an exec in the already shaky ISP market this is like seeing the first few seconds of an avalanche and knowing those that the avalanch has effectively started...
Re:I resent the underlying sexism of your comment.
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The Ultimate S.U.V.
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· Score: 1
Sigh. It's a slow day and I'm procrastinating.
I'm an out gay man, have been so since 17. I've been with my sweetie going on 6 years, we're quite happy thank you. I started working young and am very good at bringing strong communication, personal interaction skills and management strengths to my highly technical profession. As a result I earn a very good wage and am privileged to take off long periods of time between contracts.
In my "intermission" periods (the year or so between jobs when I'm not working 60+ hours a week) I enjoy the company of an eclectic circle of friends & family. Due to my open schedule I tend spend a lot of time with other non-traditionally employed folks including a number of artists, writers, academics and other such colorful individuals. My father is a very well known professor, my mother a semi-retired nurse and it is they who reside in Wellesley and where I visit regularly.
I travel a fair bit, both to visit friends in various cities and to attend events of interest. I'm a respected member of the leather community as well as being fairly prominent in the bear community. I do some pro bono work for a Boston gay youth organization and keep myself entertained playing support person to any number of buddies computers.
For hobbies I enjoy reading, mostly sf, history and about civil engineering. I'm a bit of a foodie and get to enjoy the many opportunities for great eating that Montreal, Boston, and other places I visit offer. I'm the one folks call when it's 2am and they want to know the best pastry place in a strange city. I also enjoy dancing, hanging out at a few of the bars in du Gai Village, attending various leather & bear events around NA. Finally I seem to be the friend most of mine like to introduce to their parents when they visit: Apparently I'm interesting yet respectable enough to be reassuring (and discreet enough not to let them know their child's peccadilloes.)
Gee, looks like your flamage was as off-base as the first one's. Hole - you crawl to - byebye.
plonk
Re:I resent the underlying sexism of your comment.
on
The Ultimate S.U.V.
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· Score: 1
Wow - you are so off base it's actually impressive.
I live in Montreal, where we likely see more snow then any place you've ever lived.
I spend about 1/3 of my time living in Wellesley Massachusetts, among the wealthiest locales in the US so I'm well familier with the money & SUV demographic.
The accident rate for SUVs in general is quite high, and adjusted for miles soccer moms are quite dangerous.
I welcome you to visit the local upscale grocery stores and witness the regular accidents in the demographic. Or the movie megaplax I was at last night when three yuppie & spawn laden SUVs managed to collide in the middle of the lot after none would give way while trying to leave after seeing Harry Potter.
Also I'm 35 years old, not quite the brash young man you seem to assume I am.
I'm not at all anti-woman, indeed I'm a rather strong feminist. However in presenting a character study, particularly of the stereotype I used the various feminine items are useful. I wasn't aware that latte was a womans-thing though.
Oh, by the way, looking out of the home office window in Wellesley of the 4 mansions in sight three have SUVs. The fourth has a high end Jag and a large Cadillac. None go farther the the local elementary schools though the neighbor directly across the street did take their loaded minivan (likely parked in the sunken double garage and not hence visible) to Vermont last summer.
So, to make my own study of you you're a whiny humorless boor who likes to make himself feel better about your sad little life by attacking others on specious evidence. you likely alienate everyone around by attempting to psychoanylyze them based on criteria developed in your freshman psych class. You get off on calling other's non-PC and are probably regularly embarassed when they turn out to be folks far more wise and tolerant of your gaffes then you are of their purported failings.
In short - crawl away.
I see no need to follow up with you. Click.
Soon to be seen in a grocery-store parking lot...
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The Ultimate S.U.V.
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· Score: 2, Flamebait
Soon to be seen in a grocery-store parking lot near you driven by a harried woman with 3 kids, one of whom is screaming, the other watching a DVD, the third throwing items out the window while Mom attempts to talk on her cellphone, drink her double non-fat latte, fish a hairbrush out of her purse, and tune in the weather report as she weaves about like a drunken sailor and flatten two lost seniors, their grocery carriage, and a half dozen sub-compacts.
The vehicle of course will never see anything rougher then the family's paved mini-mansion driveway where it will of course be painted to contrast nicely with the house and gardens and show up the pricy but effete Mercades-Benz SUV the Joneses across the street dared buy.
OSX is the first Apple technology that I have actively wanted to own. It is just a shame that it didn't come out as Rhapsody's vision, I would have bought it for my PC years ago and Windows would far less of a stranglehold on the market.
There were valid reasons for Rhapsody getting canned.
First off it offered almost no migration path. Sure the MacOS virtual environment was listed but this was considered a hollow promise unikely to succeed. Furthermore it was off on it's own - no interaction with the rest of the system, an abandoned stepchild.
Second there was no way to port old code to the new platform. Everything would have to be rewritten, from scratch, using the Next frameworks. While Next's stuff was widely admired companies had millions of dollars invested in their existing code bases plus almost no one familier with the Next material.
So, faced with rewriting everything for a new OS on a platform that at the time had been steadily declining (this was pre-iMac) or having their exisiting code relegated to some lame-ass virtulaiziation environment while at the same time WinNT was requiring a ramp up and going great guns... Sorry no way Apple.
Even the promise of cross-platform support couldn't change that. Everyone is and was well familier with the "It ain't done 'till 123 won't run" strategies of MS and suspected that even if a decent Rhapsody layer were shipped for Wintel it wouldn't be long before some Windows revision broke it, leaving Apple & MS in an arms war Apple couldn't win.
Today Apple is suffering with the wins and losses of it's revised strategy with the Carbon campatibility layer. It's enabled lots of products to move over quickly but they're not really native and so aren't able to take full advantage of the new OS nor show it off to it's full potential. I expect next year once Apple's got Carbon tweaked to the point it's widely usable they'll then start pushing devopers to begin making the transition to Cocoa, likely by pushing lots of the services and features Cocoa has and which won't be made accessable to Carbon. Apple has already made more availiable to Carbon then they had planned but I expect we won't see much more - Apple wants that pressure.
How many companies retain their CEO, President, CTO, have their development teams made primary and and their product become the central one at a company after being bought out? Next bought Apple, for negative $400 million - not a typo.
I think it was a good thing: Copeland was a disaster, Gershwin a pipe dream, Apple was unable to do what needed to be done, unable to reign in their development teams nor drop their committment to 100% backwards compatibilty, and frankly the move seems to have been good for BOTH OS's. But look whose running the show - it's the Next folks.
For those confused by what's what this might help bring folks up to speed (and keep the discussion coherent):
NeXT: The next business founded by Steve Jobs after being pushed out of Apple (to sell the next generation of computers.)
NeXTSTEP: The black cube then slab with object-oriented OS based on Unix sold by NeXT Computer.
OpenStep: The NeXT OS ported to 5 different architectures and sold as a stand-alone product.
Objective-C: The language OpenStep is written in. An object oriented extension of C considered by many to be cleaner then C++.
GNUstep: The reimplementation of OpenStep by gnu-folks.
Rhapsody: OpenStep after Next buys Apple for -$400 million. Reworked to be their next OS. To run on Macs and under Wintel. Dropped after developers refuse support.
MacOS X: Shipped version of next-gen MacOS. OpenStep-derived kernel & Cocoa layer along with legacy MacOS compatabilty & virtualization evironments. Publically PPC only.
MacOS X Server: Same thing, different focus on services.
Cocoa: The layer in MacOS X that along with the kernel is still closely OpenStep.
Darwin: The Open Source PPC & x86 core of MacOS X - doesn't include Cocoa.
Simply GNUstep: GNUstep coupled with a Linux distribution.
Re:Not crappy at all: You're looking at it wrong
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2
You're right. I just desparately [sic] want to switch away from x86 to PowerPC, but so far I can't justify do that with any of Apple's current machines - I was hoping for more.
Have you looked over Apple's entire lineup? They've got some very nice hardware in there.
No, none of it is aimed at the assemble-it-yourself crowd that frequents/. but the tower boxes have a decent processor(s) which though admittedly overdue for a refresh are still plenty fast, the cases open sweeter then anything else I've ever seen, and you can plug in almost any standard hardware and expect it to work (not just Mac-labeled stuff.) Apple now uses both ATI & Nvidia, includes Giga-Ethernet in it's boxes, slots for 802.11b networking with built-in antennas, Firewire/iLink/1394, etc.
Is it stuff you couldn't assemble yourself on an x86 - no. Is it cutting-edge by x86 hardware terms? No. Does it work damn fast, reliably, and get full support from it's Unix OS (MacOS X) - yes. Frankly as a user and administrator of both platforms I've never seen a performance gap - a good Mac has for the past few years been plenty fast enough compared to a good PC in the same range and to me that's the metric that matters, not some paper bragging spec.
However I gotta ask: Why do you care about the PPC? Is there some intrinsic fascination it holds for you or are you just trying to be post-x86. Unless you get off on porting or writing low-level stuff I can't see that as criteria for going to a Mac. Heck, you can run all of the low-level MacOS X (Darwin) code on x86 as it is for free right now. MacOS X proper does offer some neat stuff like Cocoa & Quartz and parity for Java but none of those are particularly processor-relevant.
Not crappy at all: You're looking at it wrong
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 2
Looks like Apple will be lucky to retain market share until they start thinking about THE SPECS of their machines (and not how cute they look).
C O N S U M E R PC. Repeat after me: consumer PC.
The iMacs aren't sold to the techie crowd (like fancies itself here on/.) It's market is folks who want to buy a good PC at a good price, aren't ever planning to crack it open to mess with the insides (like 90% of home PCs are never opened) and don't want something in their living space that looks like a 1950's Singer Sewing Machine in it's case. Oh yeah, and the integration & ease of use Apple's been honing for years are also big pluses.
Do these folks care about specs? No. They care does-it-browse-the-web, can-I-get-online-easily, can-I-read-my-email, does-it-have-MS-Office, will-it-connect-to-my-shiny-new-digital-camera, etc. The closest they'll ever come to caring about a spec is "is it fast enough"; this meaning to feel snappy and keep up with their typing.
Besides which this is some pretty darn kewl hardware on it's own. Silent. Small. Great image. Fast enough. Giga networking. Lotsa ports. The Superdrive is a good deal, particularly when you note the integration into the system. MacOS X which is now the bestselling unix and darn kewl on it's own. No, the iMac isn't an open-the-case-plug-in-parts box, but for what it is it is a pretty kewl box.
I don't think the price difference has evaporated. Let's look at the "entry-level" iMac, a $1300 machine. For around $1300, you get very nice laptops with 14"-15" screens.
Really? You can find a quality in-production/non-EOL'd laptop from a major manufacturer offering the same or better features of the new iMacs for US$1,300? I'm sure it's out there but it'll be tough to match, particularly when one starts counting in the hardware/OS integration Apple offers.
Besides, if you want a cheap laptop check out Apple's iBook line - very impressive at low prices.
Re:Biggest reason desktops will still: the display
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 5, Informative
The iMac looks nice, but a 15" 1024x768 screen won't cut it. Home users are okay at that, but professional mac users aren't going to work at that sort of extremely limited screen resolution.
Which is why the iMac line is the consumer one (doi!)
Apple has 4 main lines:
iMac - Intro/consumer line. All-in-one design with quality components & limited expandability ('cause most home folks never change anything and lots was built in anyway) at a low price.
Tower models - really the professional desktop line which does cross over into home users with specific needs. Opens easy, slots for cards, customizable.
iBook - Laptops for the masses at a great price/product point. Lotsa built-in goodies in a durable case with long batter life.
PowerBook - Take-no-prisoners complete desktop replacement offering performance and features at a high but competitive price.
As for Mac's vs x86 boxes - the prices aren't all that far off. Yes one can throw together a Frankenstein PC at lower cost but for a warranteed product from a major manufacturer with quality components (and Apple does use quality displays & such) with the OS included they're generally a good deal, certainly when one considers the integration.
No, they're not to everyone's taste but MacOS X is a great unix and coupled with this hardware it's damn enticing. Besides - it's getting more unix out to more folks then anyone else ever has.
FINALLY the iPhoto is going to ship! This has been a big bone of contention between Apple and Adobe but I for one can't wait.
My father got a Canon Elph S100 last year (and gave me a S110 this year so I'd stop borrowing his) and he's been struggling with photo tools. He's a bright guy, indeed did a lot of the originial stuff on computers in business etc. but tossing him into Adobe Photoshop, even Adobe Photoshop Elements is just sooo wrong.
iPhoto from all rumors is what he needs - something to lay the photos out, fix them up a bit (Extensis Intellihance is great for him, hope iPhoto supports Adobe plugins), then put together some galleries to post or send to relatives. Heck, on my todo list for today is pull a bunch of pix off of his hard drive (6 ~10MB.psd's no less) then arrange them on a single-page montage for him.
Cable-modems & remote control software aside a good sturdy photo management tool with Apple's simple & intuitive design (yes not to *everyone* but if you use their stuff regularly it does have an enormous amount of internal consistancy) will do well. Heck I've started thinking of advertising my services at some high rate to folks who got digital cameras last year or this and are stuck trying to get them to work, print out decent shots, post them online.
Apple, if the iPhoto is anything like iTunes & iMovie then hurrah - you've just sold my Dad a new iMac if I have to go get it for him myself.
Y'know, if you really cared you could send me an email and ask why I filter AC's, offer to show me why it's somehow "wrong", discuss it like an adult. That might prove to be a lot more effective then just having a public hissy fit about it.
My email address is on the top of this message - use it if you're really interested.
Actually I'd really like this if it were managed and could do QoS.
I've never been fond of leaving open ports around (security issues) and these things just spread the lovin' a bit too much. It wouldn't be such a problem if my Coms folks could turn off officially unused ports, identify what is plugged into each used port, collect traffic rates, etc. Heck it'd be great if the HelpDesk folks could remote the box and see if something is plugged into #3 and what speed is it, is it showing green.
I'd also be worried about the day everything bursty goes at once and that too-kewl VOIP gets starved. I really don't care if the printer gets stuck at some low packet rate but I do care about other types and some built-in QoS support (even if depending on 3Com hardware at the other end) would be useful.
Honestly I'm glad that Apple didn't put elaborate protections all over their update. As we've seen time & time again these heavy-handed mechanisms just get in the way of the legitimate users, invariably bollix up some percentage of systems and don't deter determined pirates.
So was Apple stupid? No. Customer-service oriented? Yes. Ease-of-use oriented? Yes. Transparency-of-upgrade-process? Yes. Safe-and-reliable-installer prioritized? Yes.
Heck, I'd think the/. crowd would be thrilled there isn't some elaborate product activation scheme or big encrypted block of material. Yeah, it's easy to defeat and steal the product. On the other hand if one's determined it's trivial enough to copy a buddies CD or download the original.
Hey - Apple ENCOURAGED folks to pass along their update! They didn't do what so many other vendors do and require proof of purchase. They didn't charge some outrageous rate. They didn't even go the MS route and call it a new OS. They even stated they'd have made it free for download if it wasn't so honking big.
All Apple did was ask (ok, in a heavy-handed legal fashion but that's how the legal system works) a website to take down directions for circumventing their security mechanism. I've no doubt numerous other companies send out reams of the same boilerplate every day asking folks to stop posting how to crack their demos or post their passwords.
And here we have folks bustin' on 'em.
So - what SHOULD they have done? Would folks REALLY prefer encrypted material doing who-knows-what after some onerous registration process and limited distribution? Crow all you want that Apple "gave away" their product, they went about their technology in a far more responsible way then many others. Think about that the next time you install an MS/Sun/Irix/IBM/HP/Compaq/Unisys/etc. OS.
Slashdot Mirror
- Raytheon in Marlborough Mass. is a closed facility.
- The prototype was considered a failure.
- It was disassembled several years ago.
- The architecture Raytheon was using had long ago been proven inefficient in professionial transportation engineering circles.
- This was to be one of those swords-to-plowshares "Peace Dividend" stories. Instead it was remarkably similar to when Boeing Vertol stopped making helicopters and attempted to build LRVs (ask Boston's MBTA what they're like and about the court settlement.)
Unfortunately this poster is absolutely classic of so many of the alternative transportation folks: Short on details, wrong on facts, and prone to handwaving aside problems - the exact same problems that hamper existing systems. With supporters like this no wonder the field hasn't progressed markedly in 30 years.Guess some antisocial weenie thinks he's clever for anonymously whacking someone, color me unimpressed.
Luckly a kind 14 year old took pity, broke into one of their Hotmail accounts and resent a plain text version to eveyone.
Riiight - I was out of the room, the dog ate it, I was putting *back* the cookies, etc.
Folks don't believe the statement 'cause its not believable. License's legal wording doesn't just get thrown together by some minor "administrative assistant" and then sent out. It's reviewed, several times, at different levels. This is the legally binding contract the company has to honor - trust me it gets read, discussed, debated. Borland knew what it was doing.
Furthermore the line that these were items meant for their enterprise licenses is also a load of hooey. Some of those provisos are ones NOBODY sensible would sign off on, PARTICULARLY large corporations with their own lawyers reading this stuff and looking to protect the companies privacy. The only way those points would ever show up in a big contract would be as negotiating points that can be used to make Borland look reasonable on other more legitimate terms ("We dropped the X and the Y for you folks, at least let us keep the Z!")
Frankly the "Open Letter" is an exercise in damage control and deceit.
It was an accident all right - that it caused so much furor and now they're trying to make excuses and distance themselves. I'm sure the next few licenses they'll be treading softly but I've no doubt we've seen the goals of at least some folks within Borland. If they remember the spanking will have to be seen but I for one wouldn't commit to Borland products without a great deal of unease.
Finally, and on the VERY off possibility this was an honest mistake then what kind of organization lets something this important "slip through"? Are they venal or profoundly badly run - gee which would I prefer my tool developer be?
If you want to do geeky stuff then get a job doing that for your locality, don't go sit in city council or whatever and try to dictate administrivia. If you want to get involved in broad range of local issues then run for office.
Every place gets it's fair number of single-issue candidates every season. Some are anti-abortion, some are obsessed with more money for the schools, or getting better playing fields for sports, or are gun nuts, whatever. You - apparently your big theme is Open Source and expanded IS.
Guess what: Most folks don't want to see bozos like that in office.
You can't pick and choose what will be local issues. Sure you can sit on or even possibly chair committees (though rookies don't often do that) but at best you'll spend 5% of your time and energy on a pet project; the rest of the time it'll just keeping the wheels of goverment turning.
Water & sewage, roads and schools, contracts and insurance, negotiating with unions and filling out paperwork for other layers of government. These are all your responsibilities and unless you're willing to commit yourself to fulfilling all of these then you're absolutely the wrong person for the position.
Sure it's nice to daydream "If I were King" but you won't be: You'll be an elected official working within an established system. Try to tell the local civil service IS employees what to do and they'll smile, give to 30 minutes of their time then dismiss you as a gadfly, though perhaps as a useful gadfly in the future.
Do yourself and your constituents a favor: Decide if you really want to be an elected official or if you want to play with computers.
Put some minimal effort into making your posting legible (hint: shift key) and then maybe someone else will invest their time in responding to its content.
Yes, if it's appropriate in context. I wouldn't use it speaking to gradeschoolers, non-native anglophones or shouting at buddies over the blaring music in a bar but in an extended conversation with reasonably literate folks of whom I can expect a broad vocabularly I've used "extant" with some regularity.
I expect it's usage (along with any other English words not in the core 3,000 or so) is heavily dependant on the types of conversations you hold and the backgrounds of those involved.
Instead of the all-in-one box of today the parts would all be sold separately and connect using standard cables. The "PC" would just be a case with the CPU and RAM. The graphics card would be it's own box, the hard drives their own boxes, the same for DVD/CDs. All would require a single cable providing a super highspeed bus with data, clock, and electrical supply. Think PCI-X meets Firewire. Breakout boxes would be handle external connects like network, speakers, keyboards and mice (or their wireless boxes at least.)
Why would I like this? One lots of folks are scared of ever opening up their PC - this would just be simple foolproof cables. Second would be the ability to reconfigure a system on the fly - need more drivespace plug it in, unplug it and carry it there, upgrade the video with another box, CPU the same way. This would also move prodicts to the audio-components model where one assembles the various parts that best suit one's needs and not the pick-a-vendor-now-pick-one-of-four-models that most folks use today (yes I know that /.'ers aren't supposed to do that - I'm talking 99% population.)
This deconstruction would also allow folks to put the parts they need where they need them. CPU, hard drives, etc. can all go in the drawer or on on the floor. However I want my DVD/CD on my desk at hand. Should next week I stop coding and instead do some gaming then I unplug my trusty 2D card box and hook in a new fast 3D one - total time for switchout 1 minute and one unplug, a plug, and that's it.
Anyway, check out gopher://gopher.quux.org:70/h0/3.0.0.html for the news properly gophered.
Now I want a good TurboGopher 3D client rereleased :)
- Online chat in it's various forms is popular.
- Folks are starting to use chat clients to send files to eachother.
- Chat is moving from text to audio or audio/video.
All of these features have been around for quite awhile, integrated and not. However they're now getting rolled into all-in-one applications that are popular. Also a critical number of folks have fast connections and are now comfortable going to the computer to send/recieve/interact.Big news? No. Entirely forseeable evolution is more like it.
Things like IRC already enables a lot a lot of these features, and so do the various video-whackoff online applications and big-scale internet telephony has been the promised for a few years now. But those are all small potatos compared to the market penetration of AOL IM / ICQ / MS Communicator / Yahoo Messenger. With these now offering these feature traffic is going up, up in a big way.
No need to download a specialized program, install it, and figure out which of your friends has the same or compatible ones. The big IM programs are pretty much ubiquitious in the mass market, heck they come pre-installed on many new computers. Co-workers, classmates, relatives, friends across the street or in distant parts of the world are going to be likely to have the software, all installed automagically as they upgrade their tried-'n-true chat programs.
So we're now back to the issue of cross-communication: How to get the AOLians to talk to the MSNers with the ICQites with the Yahoolies. A solution has been promised for text messages but now after all these years it's arriving just in time to be irrelevant, perhaps simply being the building block for a more versitile system.
So what are the big technical hurdles? Again, three:
- Directory Services: How to find and connect to folks.
- Interoperability: How to negotiate settings & protocols between various clients.
- Traffic Management: What to do with all of these packets streaming from the previously almost-all downloading users who now want to send streams of highspeed data upstream, LOTS of it (think teenagers on the phone!.)
So why is this an issue for NetworkWorld and not Teenbeat? Because directory services means some sort of servers, interoperability means protocols and that surging volume of low-latency traffic going upstream is going to upset the pricing and service model most broadband is built on.Again, none of this is new, it's just the matter of scale. Currently in most environments the 5% of folks who are considered "Top Talkers" account for over 50% of all traffic. What happens when half of the users become "Top Talkers"?
If you're selling webcams and mikes and soundcards and sticky applications that folks spend hours on and want lots of services from then it's all golden. However if you're an exec in the already shaky ISP market this is like seeing the first few seconds of an avalanche and knowing those that the avalanch has effectively started...
I'm an out gay man, have been so since 17. I've been with my sweetie going on 6 years, we're quite happy thank you. I started working young and am very good at bringing strong communication, personal interaction skills and management strengths to my highly technical profession. As a result I earn a very good wage and am privileged to take off long periods of time between contracts.
In my "intermission" periods (the year or so between jobs when I'm not working 60+ hours a week) I enjoy the company of an eclectic circle of friends & family. Due to my open schedule I tend spend a lot of time with other non-traditionally employed folks including a number of artists, writers, academics and other such colorful individuals. My father is a very well known professor, my mother a semi-retired nurse and it is they who reside in Wellesley and where I visit regularly.
I travel a fair bit, both to visit friends in various cities and to attend events of interest. I'm a respected member of the leather community as well as being fairly prominent in the bear community. I do some pro bono work for a Boston gay youth organization and keep myself entertained playing support person to any number of buddies computers.
For hobbies I enjoy reading, mostly sf, history and about civil engineering. I'm a bit of a foodie and get to enjoy the many opportunities for great eating that Montreal, Boston, and other places I visit offer. I'm the one folks call when it's 2am and they want to know the best pastry place in a strange city. I also enjoy dancing, hanging out at a few of the bars in du Gai Village, attending various leather & bear events around NA. Finally I seem to be the friend most of mine like to introduce to their parents when they visit: Apparently I'm interesting yet respectable enough to be reassuring (and discreet enough not to let them know their child's peccadilloes.)
Gee, looks like your flamage was as off-base as the first one's. Hole - you crawl to - byebye.
plonk
I live in Montreal, where we likely see more snow then any place you've ever lived.
I spend about 1/3 of my time living in Wellesley Massachusetts, among the wealthiest locales in the US so I'm well familier with the money & SUV demographic.
The accident rate for SUVs in general is quite high, and adjusted for miles soccer moms are quite dangerous.
I welcome you to visit the local upscale grocery stores and witness the regular accidents in the demographic. Or the movie megaplax I was at last night when three yuppie & spawn laden SUVs managed to collide in the middle of the lot after none would give way while trying to leave after seeing Harry Potter.
Also I'm 35 years old, not quite the brash young man you seem to assume I am.
I'm not at all anti-woman, indeed I'm a rather strong feminist. However in presenting a character study, particularly of the stereotype I used the various feminine items are useful. I wasn't aware that latte was a womans-thing though.
Oh, by the way, looking out of the home office window in Wellesley of the 4 mansions in sight three have SUVs. The fourth has a high end Jag and a large Cadillac. None go farther the the local elementary schools though the neighbor directly across the street did take their loaded minivan (likely parked in the sunken double garage and not hence visible) to Vermont last summer.
So, to make my own study of you you're a whiny humorless boor who likes to make himself feel better about your sad little life by attacking others on specious evidence. you likely alienate everyone around by attempting to psychoanylyze them based on criteria developed in your freshman psych class. You get off on calling other's non-PC and are probably regularly embarassed when they turn out to be folks far more wise and tolerant of your gaffes then you are of their purported failings.
In short - crawl away.
I see no need to follow up with you. Click.
The vehicle of course will never see anything rougher then the family's paved mini-mansion driveway where it will of course be painted to contrast nicely with the house and gardens and show up the pricy but effete Mercades-Benz SUV the Joneses across the street dared buy.
There were valid reasons for Rhapsody getting canned.
First off it offered almost no migration path. Sure the MacOS virtual environment was listed but this was considered a hollow promise unikely to succeed. Furthermore it was off on it's own - no interaction with the rest of the system, an abandoned stepchild.
Second there was no way to port old code to the new platform. Everything would have to be rewritten, from scratch, using the Next frameworks. While Next's stuff was widely admired companies had millions of dollars invested in their existing code bases plus almost no one familier with the Next material.
So, faced with rewriting everything for a new OS on a platform that at the time had been steadily declining (this was pre-iMac) or having their exisiting code relegated to some lame-ass virtulaiziation environment while at the same time WinNT was requiring a ramp up and going great guns... Sorry no way Apple.
Even the promise of cross-platform support couldn't change that. Everyone is and was well familier with the "It ain't done 'till 123 won't run" strategies of MS and suspected that even if a decent Rhapsody layer were shipped for Wintel it wouldn't be long before some Windows revision broke it, leaving Apple & MS in an arms war Apple couldn't win.
Today Apple is suffering with the wins and losses of it's revised strategy with the Carbon campatibility layer. It's enabled lots of products to move over quickly but they're not really native and so aren't able to take full advantage of the new OS nor show it off to it's full potential. I expect next year once Apple's got Carbon tweaked to the point it's widely usable they'll then start pushing devopers to begin making the transition to Cocoa, likely by pushing lots of the services and features Cocoa has and which won't be made accessable to Carbon. Apple has already made more availiable to Carbon then they had planned but I expect we won't see much more - Apple wants that pressure.
How many companies retain their CEO, President, CTO, have their development teams made primary and and their product become the central one at a company after being bought out? Next bought Apple, for negative $400 million - not a typo.
I think it was a good thing: Copeland was a disaster, Gershwin a pipe dream, Apple was unable to do what needed to be done, unable to reign in their development teams nor drop their committment to 100% backwards compatibilty, and frankly the move seems to have been good for BOTH OS's. But look whose running the show - it's the Next folks.
Have you looked over Apple's entire lineup? They've got some very nice hardware in there.
No, none of it is aimed at the assemble-it-yourself crowd that frequents /. but the tower boxes have a decent processor(s) which though admittedly overdue for a refresh are still plenty fast, the cases open sweeter then anything else I've ever seen, and you can plug in almost any standard hardware and expect it to work (not just Mac-labeled stuff.) Apple now uses both ATI & Nvidia, includes Giga-Ethernet in it's boxes, slots for 802.11b networking with built-in antennas, Firewire/iLink/1394, etc.
Is it stuff you couldn't assemble yourself on an x86 - no. Is it cutting-edge by x86 hardware terms? No. Does it work damn fast, reliably, and get full support from it's Unix OS (MacOS X) - yes. Frankly as a user and administrator of both platforms I've never seen a performance gap - a good Mac has for the past few years been plenty fast enough compared to a good PC in the same range and to me that's the metric that matters, not some paper bragging spec.
However I gotta ask: Why do you care about the PPC? Is there some intrinsic fascination it holds for you or are you just trying to be post-x86. Unless you get off on porting or writing low-level stuff I can't see that as criteria for going to a Mac. Heck, you can run all of the low-level MacOS X (Darwin) code on x86 as it is for free right now. MacOS X proper does offer some neat stuff like Cocoa & Quartz and parity for Java but none of those are particularly processor-relevant.
C O N S U M E R PC. Repeat after me: consumer PC.
The iMacs aren't sold to the techie crowd (like fancies itself here on /.) It's market is folks who want to buy a good PC at a good price, aren't ever planning to crack it open to mess with the insides (like 90% of home PCs are never opened) and don't want something in their living space that looks like a 1950's Singer Sewing Machine in it's case. Oh yeah, and the integration & ease of use Apple's been honing for years are also big pluses.
Do these folks care about specs? No. They care does-it-browse-the-web, can-I-get-online-easily, can-I-read-my-email, does-it-have-MS-Office, will-it-connect-to-my-shiny-new-digital-camera, etc. The closest they'll ever come to caring about a spec is "is it fast enough"; this meaning to feel snappy and keep up with their typing.
Besides which this is some pretty darn kewl hardware on it's own. Silent. Small. Great image. Fast enough. Giga networking. Lotsa ports. The Superdrive is a good deal, particularly when you note the integration into the system. MacOS X which is now the bestselling unix and darn kewl on it's own. No, the iMac isn't an open-the-case-plug-in-parts box, but for what it is it is a pretty kewl box.
Yes, and books that aren't written using 10,00-feature word processors aren't worth reading either...
Really? You can find a quality in-production/non-EOL'd laptop from a major manufacturer offering the same or better features of the new iMacs for US$1,300? I'm sure it's out there but it'll be tough to match, particularly when one starts counting in the hardware/OS integration Apple offers.
Besides, if you want a cheap laptop check out Apple's iBook line - very impressive at low prices.
Which is why the iMac line is the consumer one (doi!)
Apple has 4 main lines:
- iMac - Intro/consumer line. All-in-one design with quality components & limited expandability ('cause most home folks never change anything and lots was built in anyway) at a low price.
- Tower models - really the professional desktop line which does cross over into home users with specific needs. Opens easy, slots for cards, customizable.
- iBook - Laptops for the masses at a great price/product point. Lotsa built-in goodies in a durable case with long batter life.
- PowerBook - Take-no-prisoners complete desktop replacement offering performance and features at a high but competitive price.
As for Mac's vs x86 boxes - the prices aren't all that far off. Yes one can throw together a Frankenstein PC at lower cost but for a warranteed product from a major manufacturer with quality components (and Apple does use quality displays & such) with the OS included they're generally a good deal, certainly when one considers the integration.No, they're not to everyone's taste but MacOS X is a great unix and coupled with this hardware it's damn enticing. Besides - it's getting more unix out to more folks then anyone else ever has.
My father got a Canon Elph S100 last year (and gave me a S110 this year so I'd stop borrowing his) and he's been struggling with photo tools. He's a bright guy, indeed did a lot of the originial stuff on computers in business etc. but tossing him into Adobe Photoshop, even Adobe Photoshop Elements is just sooo wrong.
iPhoto from all rumors is what he needs - something to lay the photos out, fix them up a bit (Extensis Intellihance is great for him, hope iPhoto supports Adobe plugins), then put together some galleries to post or send to relatives. Heck, on my todo list for today is pull a bunch of pix off of his hard drive (6 ~10MB .psd's no less) then arrange them on a single-page montage for him.
Cable-modems & remote control software aside a good sturdy photo management tool with Apple's simple & intuitive design (yes not to *everyone* but if you use their stuff regularly it does have an enormous amount of internal consistancy) will do well. Heck I've started thinking of advertising my services at some high rate to folks who got digital cameras last year or this and are stuck trying to get them to work, print out decent shots, post them online.
Apple, if the iPhoto is anything like iTunes & iMovie then hurrah - you've just sold my Dad a new iMac if I have to go get it for him myself.
My email address is on the top of this message - use it if you're really interested.
I've never been fond of leaving open ports around (security issues) and these things just spread the lovin' a bit too much. It wouldn't be such a problem if my Coms folks could turn off officially unused ports, identify what is plugged into each used port, collect traffic rates, etc. Heck it'd be great if the HelpDesk folks could remote the box and see if something is plugged into #3 and what speed is it, is it showing green.
I'd also be worried about the day everything bursty goes at once and that too-kewl VOIP gets starved. I really don't care if the printer gets stuck at some low packet rate but I do care about other types and some built-in QoS support (even if depending on 3Com hardware at the other end) would be useful.
Mebbe in Rev. B.
So was Apple stupid? No. Customer-service oriented? Yes. Ease-of-use oriented? Yes. Transparency-of-upgrade-process? Yes. Safe-and-reliable-installer prioritized? Yes.
Heck, I'd think the /. crowd would be thrilled there isn't some elaborate product activation scheme or big encrypted block of material. Yeah, it's easy to defeat and steal the product. On the other hand if one's determined it's trivial enough to copy a buddies CD or download the original.
Hey - Apple ENCOURAGED folks to pass along their update! They didn't do what so many other vendors do and require proof of purchase. They didn't charge some outrageous rate. They didn't even go the MS route and call it a new OS. They even stated they'd have made it free for download if it wasn't so honking big.
All Apple did was ask (ok, in a heavy-handed legal fashion but that's how the legal system works) a website to take down directions for circumventing their security mechanism. I've no doubt numerous other companies send out reams of the same boilerplate every day asking folks to stop posting how to crack their demos or post their passwords.
And here we have folks bustin' on 'em.
So - what SHOULD they have done? Would folks REALLY prefer encrypted material doing who-knows-what after some onerous registration process and limited distribution? Crow all you want that Apple "gave away" their product, they went about their technology in a far more responsible way then many others. Think about that the next time you install an MS/Sun/Irix/IBM/HP/Compaq/Unisys/etc. OS.