> I would like transparent, administrator controlled, versioning.
Amen.
There are only two filesystem features I care about that FAT32 doesn't have.
One is symbolic links, which ext2 has had for, approximately, the entire history of the filesystem. (I wouldn't be surprised if the original extfs had it, maybe even minixfs too, but I wasn't using Linux yet back then.)
The other is automatic versioning. I've seen a rudimentary form of this in action on VMS, and even with the limited features of that implementation it's cooler than liquid helium, no fooling. If it were actually done *right*, to where the system administrator could do things like set the number of versions to keep for entire subdirectory trees (e.g., don't keep multiple versions in/var/log, but keep up to six versions in/etc, keep up to 50 versions in/home, and so on),
I suppose journaling is also worthwhile, but it's nowhere near as cool as automatic versioning.
As far as all that stuff about optimally storing small files, in an era when the price difference between a 100GB drive and a 300GB drive is less than the cost of shipping, does anyone actually care, anyone *other* than the guys writing filesystem code? I mean, it sure doesn't *hurt* anything if small files are stored efficiently, but that's not going to be the factor that makes up my mind as to which filesystem I want to use, I can tell you that for free.
Versioning, on the other hand... I would give up any number of other features to gain versioning. I would *certainly* be willing to give up journaling to gain versioning (so, if there were a non-journaling filesystem that did automatic versioning, yeah, I'd use it). I'd give up hard links in a heartbeat. I *might* give up symbolic links for versioning, though that's a tough call, because symlinks are also incredibly useful.
I might potentially be tempted to vote for Palin, if she weren't running on the same ticket as John McCain...
I *would* have voted for Quayle, *despite* the fact that he was running on the same ticket with George Bush, but I wasn't of legal voting age yet at the time. I wanted to vote for Quayle, though. I still would, if there were any possibility he could get a major-party nomination. Anybody whose enemies can't come up with any worse dirt than "he misspelled potato once and therefore must be stupid" is someone I wouldn't mind having in office, seriously.
I've got issues with McCain, though. There's something very much not right about a man who claims to be a conservative and a Republican but has McCain's voting record. That's, in a word, dishonest. Smells like rotten politics.
Then again, the other choice is Obama, who is pretty obviously dedicated to telling people whatever he thinks they want to hear, and that too is a strong sign of politics gone wrong.
*sigh*. The best hope is that the House and Senate will wind up with opposite-party majorities (i.e., one party controls the House majority and the other party gets the Senate majority). Then at least they won't do too much harm for the next couple of years.
Umm, what year are you in? Modern browsers display the contents of the title element on hover, and the contents of the alt element if the image is unavailable. Since, like, 1999 or so. I think the last browser I used that displayed the alt attribute on hover was Navigator 4.08.
No, you're right, "past its prime" is wrong. Firewire is just as healthy as it ever was.
The real issue is that it never became anything like as popular as its advocates wanted it to be. Sure, 80% of all computers sold in the last half-decade have 1394 ports. On the other hand, something like 0.00013% of them have ever been *used*. Even in the Mac world, where USB is the *only* other choice, there are thousands of USB peripherals sold for every one Firewire peripheral. In the PC world, there are more peripheral devices sold with their own special-purpose *expansion card* than there are 1394 peripherals, and devices that use standard serial and parallel ports are several orders of magnitude more common. USB is significantly more common than that these days, and PS/2 has them all beat by about two orders of magnitude if you count the keyboards and mice that come with pretty much every desktop PC sold. Almost every desktop computer has a port for 1394, mainly because it costs virtually nothing to include on the motherboard, since the same southbridge chipset that does USB and stuff also does 1394 as well.
Firewire thrives in certain niches, e.g., high-end digital video stuff. And that's fine. And it's not going away. The controllers cost so little to make, add-on cards for it would remain available for decades even if *all* motherboard makers for some reason decided to leave it off *all* of their new products from now on starting tomorrow, which isn't going to happen. (Even Apple isn't removing it from all models, at least not right now.) Firewire isn't going away. People who use it will continue to use it.
But it never caught on with ordinary consumers, and it has become clear (several years ago, I would have said) that it isn't *going* to catch on with ordinary consumers. Ever. That's why the new MacBook doesn't need it.
> 15 minutes and a minute and a half are two different things
This is true, but perhaps not in the way that you think. The psychology of passing time is interesting...
Fifteen minutes is long enough that you see the ETA on the progress widget and resign yourself to the fact that it's going to be a minute. If you have any sense at all, you know you can't stand to just sit there and wait that long, so you realize the need to do something else while you wait. Twenty minutes later when you finish up that email message or whatever that you were working on (*cough* slashdot *cough*), you glance down at your task list and see that it's finished and go, "Oh, already?" If you were at all engaged in the thing you were doing ad interim, the fifteen minutes barely feels like five, if that.
A minute and a half, on the other hand, is so tantalizingly short that many people will attempt to sit there and stare at the progress bar and wait it out. Bad idea. That gets *real* old in a minute and a half. When you're actively waiting for something to happen, not doing anything else except just waiting, your mind stretches out your perception of time. Even twenty seconds *feels* like several minutes. A minute and a half of waiting like that, well, it feels like a much longer time than it is.
If you ever work fast food, even for a few months as a stand-in when you're between real jobs, you'll find out just how unwilling people are to wait for a minute and a half. People *believe* they wait for five and ten minutes in the drive-through all the time, because it *feels* that way, but if you use a stopwatch and keep track, you'll discover that the average time from the speaker to getting the food handed through the window (any major fast food chain, weekdays before 5pm, when they staff the place with the best workers they have and watch them more closely than in the evenings and weekends) is *significantly* less than a minute and a half. *Way* less. But it feels like more, much more. Our rule one place where I worked was that if it was likely to take more than thirty seconds to fill a given order (which generally meant they were waiting for something to deep fry for them because we ran out) we asked them to pull into a parking space so we could get the rest of the line moving. The people who pulled into the parking space got the food brought out to their car with an apology and coupons.
Bear in mind, thirty seconds was the time we didn't like to go past even on large orders. Average was more like twenty, and simple orders faster than that. And we were not an unusual or special restaurant ("store" in industry parlance, but it just means restaurant). We never got the "A" rating for service from the corporation, for example, and that's when we knew they were coming and were staffed extra well. We tried for "B" and didn't always get it.
And yes, if the line is backed up past the speaker, you could wait longer than the thirty seconds altogether, because of the time it took to even get to that point (the speaker), which was where we started timing. But even there, a minute and a half would have been completely out of the ordinary. There wasn't physically enough space for the line to contain more than twice the number of cars as from the speaker to the second window, or they'd be backed up into the street.
So anyway, as I was saying before I got so long-winded, people don't like to wait for a minute and a half.
> Firewire provides much faster transfer speeds than USB 2.0
Yeah, and LS120 disks could hold more information than normal floppy disks, and Betamax was better than VHS, and LaserDisc was six kinds of awesome (or so I'm told), and so on and so forth, but yet, somehow, they never really caught on, and continuing to support them on low-end consumer-oriented computers like the MacBook would be totally pointless.
Firewire in theory provides much faster transfer speeds than USB 2.0, on paper, but in practice if you go to any normal store and buy hardware, it's generally going to support USB and not Firewire.
> Firewire makes a huge difference when you're working with > audio/video editing, or working with lots of hi-def images > or other large files. i would not have thought that Apple > would discard a technology that is so vital to their > traditional customer base.
People who work with that stuff are supposed to shell out for a higher-end system anyway, such as a PowerMac or whatever they're calling it these days. Not to mention.Mac and the Creative Suite and third-party macro software and a multi-button mouse and a high-end auxilliary pointing device, preferably the kind that comes with a stylus.
Any hardware that actually *needs* Firewire's capabilities (e.g., high-end digital video cameras) costs more than the computer anyhow. Using it with the lowest-end computer Apple sells would be... well, I'll just call it "a sufficiently unusual requirement that it wouldn't make much sense for Apple to plan their product releases around it" and leave it at that.
I remember when Firewire was supposed to be the next really big type of port, that all the new peripheral devices would use. At about the same time, USB was supposed to totally replace all the *other* ports on our PCs: serial, parallel, PS/2, you name it, USB was supposed to take over completely, and Firewire was supposed to take over for, umm, whatever USB didn't do. Nobody was quite sure what it was that USB wouldn't do and Firewire would, but wherever USB was inadequate, Firewire was supposed to be the thing.
Heh, heh, heh. That was, what, 1998?
Ten years on, USB has taken the place of exactly one thing: floppy disks. Umm, okay, floppy disks and ADB. This is a Mac-related article after all, so I should acknowledge that. But nobody outside the Mac world ever used ADB in the first place, and as for Mac users, they have to use whatever peripheral interface Apple tells them to use, because their other choice is to switch to PCs. If Apple says the only external ports on the new models will be SCSI, well, then all the new peripherals that support Mac will come with SCSI support, and that's just how it'll be.
As for Firewire, virtually nothing requires it (absolutely nothing that's even vaguely common, among Mac users or otherwise), and for that matter I personally have yet to actually see with my eyes a device that even *uses* Firewire. From my readings on the internet I believe a handful of manufacturers make devices that support both Firewire and USB, but apparently they're not particularly common, and nearly everyone who *does* get them just plugs them into USB ports, because those are conveniently located on the front of the case on most computers, and the 1394, if it even exists, is around back. Macs have all had Firewire ports since the original iMac, but, again, everybody just uses USB.
So after a decade, a veritable eternity in computer time, we're *still* waiting for Firewire to catch on in any significant way. Yeah, good luck with that. On a related note, back in the 80s, we were all promised a paperless society. Anyone remember that? It was going to be *the* thing. Well, we're still waiting. Where's my paperless office, huh? I want my paperless office and a flying car!
I think someone should try an independent verification study on this one and see if maybe they missed something out of their experimental procedure or controls or whatnot.
I suppose old geezers who grew up in the days of radio (you know, the same people who still talk about "listening" to the television because "listen" is the verb they grew up with for tuning into broadcasts) dream in audio only? *That* could be interesting...
We didn't get a color television until I was in high school, but I don't recall ever dreaming in black and white. I do recall dreaming in 3D and, in some cases, in the abstract (with no visual imagery at all). This is, of course, purely anecdotal. But I have my doubts about the headline.
> I know. My point was that we can tell tell that there's something > odd about the modern warming, based ONLY on the modern data.
That, frankly, is preposterous. How can you define what constitutes "odd", if you don't know what's normal first? We can't compare the modern era to other time periods because we haven't got any data. We have very little idea what's unusual, because we have very little idea what's usual.
> Specifically, we can measure the various sources of warming and cooling (solar irradiance, > volcanism, industrial sulfate aerosols and particulates, natural and manmade greenhouse gases, etc.)
Only the ones we know about and think we maybe understand. We know something like 0.0001% of what there is to know about climate, so any conclusions we make are almost certainly either wrong, or perhaps accidentally right for the wrong reasons being based on invalid reasoning. We don't actually actually know what's going on.
Who's going to be making the purchase decision on this turkey? Power users? Clueless end users? Developers? MBAs?
Generally speaking, the more technical a person's mindset is, the less stock he'll put in the version numbers.
If you're selling to developers and high-end power users, you can call it version 0.1, and they'll probably just think you're cool. But selling to technical types is a double-edged sword, because you've got to give them technical information about what it does and why its features and capabilities are superior to other products that do the same thing, or they won't be interested. Also, if they do buy it, they will keep wanting you to make the product more customizable, so they can reconfigure it to meet their needs better.
If you're selling to people with an MBA and no technical knowledge, on the other hand, the version number *does* matter. It's not the most important consideration, but it matters.
I never knew that about myself. I must be one of the most extreme radicals I've ever met. Nevermind what I _believe_, nevermind that I'd have voted for Dan Quayle for President if he ever got the nomination, I must be a liberal, because my room and desk are extremely messy!
Either that, or there's a sociologist somewhere with entirely too much time on his hands.
It's not an emulator as such, but there were significant (albeit subtle) differences in the implementation from DOS 6.22 to the "DOS" that was built into Windows 9x/Me. From the compatibility problems that I encountered at the time, I became absolutely convinced that the "DOS" built into Windows 95 was not a minor revision of DOS 6, but a major rewrite, done by a different team than had developed DOS in the first place. It's not difficult to find DOS-based software that will run under almost any version of DOS but will not run, or will not run correctly, under the "DOS" that comes in Windows 95, even if the GUI is not loaded (i.e., if the system is booted in "MS-DOS mode").
Combine that with the running-in-a-window thing, and it's easy to see where people got the idea that emulation was involved.
> There were two versions of Windows before Windows 3, that's why they called it Windows 3
Theoretically, yes, but Windows 1 and Windows 2 made no significant impact on the field of computing. In terms of technical pioneering, they didn't do anything IBM and Quarterdeck hadn't done already, and in terms of market share they were only ever installed on a tiny percentage of computers. Windows 3 is the first release that actually matters.
I can't imagine actually counting Windows 1 and Windows 2, though. I mean, seriously, BeOS, or RISC OS for that matter, was more widely distributed than Windows 1 and Windows 2 combined.
> Balloon Help is just about the most annoying feature ever to be introduced to the computing world.
Eh. It's not significantly worse than notification popups in Windows XP, particularly that stupid wizard that comes up every few hours and/or twice after every restart, whichever is more often, and wants to delete all your desktop icons. And it's got *nothing* on the Flash plugin.
Re:There is mounting evidence...
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The Quietest Sun
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> I believe this will be one of the coldest winters in the past 10 years.
Sounds good to me. I'm tired of these wussy winters we've been having lately, all slush and ice and rain. I could go for some real snow for a change. I want the ground to squeak under my feet!
> This evidence also suggests that Earth is trending towards cooling overall.
Long-term there's been an overall warming trend for the whole period of time we have data for. (I'm talking about collected data, not conjecture based on extrapolation and guesswork.) It's up and down, but the general trend has been up.
However, it is generally believed that the period when the data started being collected (better known as the age of exploration) was right smack dab in the middle of an unusually cold period, called the "Little Ice Age".
The truth is that we don't have data for a long enough period to allow us to meaningfully extrapolate to any significant extent. It's very hard to tell what's a short-term anomaly and what's a trend, because we've only got a few hundred years of data, and most of that is limited in scope to the northern half of the western world.
Logic suggests that the warming trend we've been seeing since the middle ages cannot have been going on for all of history. If that were the case, Alexander wouldn't have needed to tear down mainland Tyre and build a causeway to the island; he could have just marched his troops right on out across the Mediterranean Ice Shelf. And this business about Phoenicia being a naval power, that would make no sense at all. So we know that at some point in the past it was getting colder, not warmer, and then in the middle ages it reached a low point (probably somewhere around the time that the Golden Horn froze) and turned around. We assume that it's done that repeatedly, but we don't know how often or for how long, because we don't have weather data for anything outside the current cycle.
It doesn't get fewer searches. It gets less *traffic*.
Well, duh. Yahoo is serving out (carefully HTML-formatted) lists of URLs. YouTube is serving out videos. Which one do you suppose is generating more bytes of traffic?
> Just because Google can search "outside of it's internal scope" (however that may be defined) > doesn't make it any different or doesn't make Youtube any less of a search engine.
In the technical computer-science jargon sense, the Yahoo web search, the Google web search, and the YouTube internal search all operate because, under the hood, there's a "search engine".
But that is not what people generally mean when they compare and rank "search engines". Generally when we say "search engines" we're usually talking about web sites that exist for the purpose of allowing people to search the web at large. This is technically a narrower and different meaning for the phrase "search engine", but it's the only one most people know, especially outside of the field of information technology. And YouTube isn't one.
You're conflating two different meanings of the phrase "search engine".
YouTube employs a special-purpose internal search-engine that greps through its database of YouTube videos to return results that are YouTube videos, exclusively. In other words, YouTube is only a search engine in the most general sense, the sense in which Lexis Nexis and Ebsco and Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia and Novelist and Gale and SIRS and Perlmonks are also search engines. This is NOT what people usually mean when they compare and rank "search engines".
Yahoo (err, actually, the Yahoo! service that people generally mean when they say Yahoo in this context) is a general-purpose web search engine, which is what people usually mean when they talk about and rank "search engines". It also employs a search engine (in the above technical sense) internally, to grep through its database of URLs. But the results it returns are not internal proprietary exclusive content stored at Yahoo. The results from Yahoo are of the same type as the results from the main Google web search, i.e., they are links to external content made available by other publishers all over the world.
That was my first thought, too. YouTube has a search feature, but it isn't what we generally think of when we say search engine". Usually when we talk about search engines we mean general-purpose web search engines, which index and search other sites. To my knowledge, YouTube does not compete in that space.
Slashdot Mirror
> I would like transparent, administrator controlled, versioning.
/var/log, but keep up to six versions in /etc, keep up to 50 versions in /home, and so on),
Amen.
There are only two filesystem features I care about that FAT32 doesn't have.
One is symbolic links, which ext2 has had for, approximately, the entire history of the filesystem. (I wouldn't be surprised if the original extfs had it, maybe even minixfs too, but I wasn't using Linux yet back then.)
The other is automatic versioning. I've seen a rudimentary form of this in action on VMS, and even with the limited features of that implementation it's cooler than liquid helium, no fooling. If it were actually done *right*, to where the system administrator could do things like set the number of versions to keep for entire subdirectory trees (e.g., don't keep multiple versions in
I suppose journaling is also worthwhile, but it's nowhere near as cool as automatic versioning.
As far as all that stuff about optimally storing small files, in an era when the price difference between a 100GB drive and a 300GB drive is less than the cost of shipping, does anyone actually care, anyone *other* than the guys writing filesystem code? I mean, it sure doesn't *hurt* anything if small files are stored efficiently, but that's not going to be the factor that makes up my mind as to which filesystem I want to use, I can tell you that for free.
Versioning, on the other hand... I would give up any number of other features to gain versioning. I would *certainly* be willing to give up journaling to gain versioning (so, if there were a non-journaling filesystem that did automatic versioning, yeah, I'd use it). I'd give up hard links in a heartbeat. I *might* give up symbolic links for versioning, though that's a tough call, because symlinks are also incredibly useful.
I might potentially be tempted to vote for Palin, if she weren't running on the same ticket as John McCain...
I *would* have voted for Quayle, *despite* the fact that he was running on the same ticket with George Bush, but I wasn't of legal voting age yet at the time. I wanted to vote for Quayle, though. I still would, if there were any possibility he could get a major-party nomination. Anybody whose enemies can't come up with any worse dirt than "he misspelled potato once and therefore must be stupid" is someone I wouldn't mind having in office, seriously.
I've got issues with McCain, though. There's something very much not right about a man who claims to be a conservative and a Republican but has McCain's voting record. That's, in a word, dishonest. Smells like rotten politics.
Then again, the other choice is Obama, who is pretty obviously dedicated to telling people whatever he thinks they want to hear, and that too is a strong sign of politics gone wrong.
*sigh*. The best hope is that the House and Senate will wind up with opposite-party majorities (i.e., one party controls the House majority and the other party gets the Senate majority). Then at least they won't do too much harm for the next couple of years.
Umm, what year are you in? Modern browsers display the contents of the title element on hover, and the contents of the alt element if the image is unavailable. Since, like, 1999 or so. I think the last browser I used that displayed the alt attribute on hover was Navigator 4.08.
> Firewire isn't past its prime.
No, you're right, "past its prime" is wrong. Firewire is just as healthy as it ever was.
The real issue is that it never became anything like as popular as its advocates wanted it to be. Sure, 80% of all computers sold in the last half-decade have 1394 ports. On the other hand, something like 0.00013% of them have ever been *used*. Even in the Mac world, where USB is the *only* other choice, there are thousands of USB peripherals sold for every one Firewire peripheral. In the PC world, there are more peripheral devices sold with their own special-purpose *expansion card* than there are 1394 peripherals, and devices that use standard serial and parallel ports are several orders of magnitude more common. USB is significantly more common than that these days, and PS/2 has them all beat by about two orders of magnitude if you count the keyboards and mice that come with pretty much every desktop PC sold. Almost every desktop computer has a port for 1394, mainly because it costs virtually nothing to include on the motherboard, since the same southbridge chipset that does USB and stuff also does 1394 as well.
Firewire thrives in certain niches, e.g., high-end digital video stuff. And that's fine. And it's not going away. The controllers cost so little to make, add-on cards for it would remain available for decades even if *all* motherboard makers for some reason decided to leave it off *all* of their new products from now on starting tomorrow, which isn't going to happen. (Even Apple isn't removing it from all models, at least not right now.) Firewire isn't going away. People who use it will continue to use it.
But it never caught on with ordinary consumers, and it has become clear (several years ago, I would have said) that it isn't *going* to catch on with ordinary consumers. Ever. That's why the new MacBook doesn't need it.
> 15 minutes and a minute and a half are two different things
This is true, but perhaps not in the way that you think. The psychology of passing time is interesting...
Fifteen minutes is long enough that you see the ETA on the progress widget and resign yourself to the fact that it's going to be a minute. If you have any sense at all, you know you can't stand to just sit there and wait that long, so you realize the need to do something else while you wait. Twenty minutes later when you finish up that email message or whatever that you were working on (*cough* slashdot *cough*), you glance down at your task list and see that it's finished and go, "Oh, already?" If you were at all engaged in the thing you were doing ad interim, the fifteen minutes barely feels like five, if that.
A minute and a half, on the other hand, is so tantalizingly short that many people will attempt to sit there and stare at the progress bar and wait it out. Bad idea. That gets *real* old in a minute and a half. When you're actively waiting for something to happen, not doing anything else except just waiting, your mind stretches out your perception of time. Even twenty seconds *feels* like several minutes. A minute and a half of waiting like that, well, it feels like a much longer time than it is.
If you ever work fast food, even for a few months as a stand-in when you're between real jobs, you'll find out just how unwilling people are to wait for a minute and a half. People *believe* they wait for five and ten minutes in the drive-through all the time, because it *feels* that way, but if you use a stopwatch and keep track, you'll discover that the average time from the speaker to getting the food handed through the window (any major fast food chain, weekdays before 5pm, when they staff the place with the best workers they have and watch them more closely than in the evenings and weekends) is *significantly* less than a minute and a half. *Way* less. But it feels like more, much more. Our rule one place where I worked was that if it was likely to take more than thirty seconds to fill a given order (which generally meant they were waiting for something to deep fry for them because we ran out) we asked them to pull into a parking space so we could get the rest of the line moving. The people who pulled into the parking space got the food brought out to their car with an apology and coupons.
Bear in mind, thirty seconds was the time we didn't like to go past even on large orders. Average was more like twenty, and simple orders faster than that. And we were not an unusual or special restaurant ("store" in industry parlance, but it just means restaurant). We never got the "A" rating for service from the corporation, for example, and that's when we knew they were coming and were staffed extra well. We tried for "B" and didn't always get it.
And yes, if the line is backed up past the speaker, you could wait longer than the thirty seconds altogether, because of the time it took to even get to that point (the speaker), which was where we started timing. But even there, a minute and a half would have been completely out of the ordinary. There wasn't physically enough space for the line to contain more than twice the number of cars as from the speaker to the second window, or they'd be backed up into the street.
So anyway, as I was saying before I got so long-winded, people don't like to wait for a minute and a half.
> Firewire 3 (1394c) provides speeds of up to 3200mbps, over standard ethernet cables no less
At that point, why not just *use* ethernet?
(I of course mean gigabit ethernet or 10-gigabit ethernet, not the old slow kind.)
> Firewire provides much faster transfer speeds than USB 2.0
.Mac and the Creative Suite and third-party macro software and a multi-button mouse and a high-end auxilliary pointing device, preferably the kind that comes with a stylus.
Yeah, and LS120 disks could hold more information than normal floppy disks, and Betamax was better than VHS, and LaserDisc was six kinds of awesome (or so I'm told), and so on and so forth, but yet, somehow, they never really caught on, and continuing to support them on low-end consumer-oriented computers like the MacBook would be totally pointless.
Firewire in theory provides much faster transfer speeds than USB 2.0, on paper, but in practice if you go to any normal store and buy hardware, it's generally going to support USB and not Firewire.
> Firewire makes a huge difference when you're working with
> audio/video editing, or working with lots of hi-def images
> or other large files. i would not have thought that Apple
> would discard a technology that is so vital to their
> traditional customer base.
People who work with that stuff are supposed to shell out for a higher-end system anyway, such as a PowerMac or whatever they're calling it these days. Not to mention
Any hardware that actually *needs* Firewire's capabilities (e.g., high-end digital video cameras) costs more than the computer anyhow. Using it with the lowest-end computer Apple sells would be... well, I'll just call it "a sufficiently unusual requirement that it wouldn't make much sense for Apple to plan their product releases around it" and leave it at that.
Maybe he likes to pop them like balloons.
I remember when Firewire was supposed to be the next really big type of port, that all the new peripheral devices would use. At about the same time, USB was supposed to totally replace all the *other* ports on our PCs: serial, parallel, PS/2, you name it, USB was supposed to take over completely, and Firewire was supposed to take over for, umm, whatever USB didn't do. Nobody was quite sure what it was that USB wouldn't do and Firewire would, but wherever USB was inadequate, Firewire was supposed to be the thing.
Heh, heh, heh. That was, what, 1998?
Ten years on, USB has taken the place of exactly one thing: floppy disks. Umm, okay, floppy disks and ADB. This is a Mac-related article after all, so I should acknowledge that. But nobody outside the Mac world ever used ADB in the first place, and as for Mac users, they have to use whatever peripheral interface Apple tells them to use, because their other choice is to switch to PCs. If Apple says the only external ports on the new models will be SCSI, well, then all the new peripherals that support Mac will come with SCSI support, and that's just how it'll be.
As for Firewire, virtually nothing requires it (absolutely nothing that's even vaguely common, among Mac users or otherwise), and for that matter I personally have yet to actually see with my eyes a device that even *uses* Firewire. From my readings on the internet I believe a handful of manufacturers make devices that support both Firewire and USB, but apparently they're not particularly common, and nearly everyone who *does* get them just plugs them into USB ports, because those are conveniently located on the front of the case on most computers, and the 1394, if it even exists, is around back. Macs have all had Firewire ports since the original iMac, but, again, everybody just uses USB.
So after a decade, a veritable eternity in computer time, we're *still* waiting for Firewire to catch on in any significant way. Yeah, good luck with that. On a related note, back in the 80s, we were all promised a paperless society. Anyone remember that? It was going to be *the* thing. Well, we're still waiting. Where's my paperless office, huh? I want my paperless office and a flying car!
I think someone should try an independent verification study on this one and see if maybe they missed something out of their experimental procedure or controls or whatnot.
I suppose old geezers who grew up in the days of radio (you know, the same people who still talk about "listening" to the television because "listen" is the verb they grew up with for tuning into broadcasts) dream in audio only? *That* could be interesting...
We didn't get a color television until I was in high school, but I don't recall ever dreaming in black and white. I do recall dreaming in 3D and, in some cases, in the abstract (with no visual imagery at all). This is, of course, purely anecdotal. But I have my doubts about the headline.
Good. I could use a good winter. I'm tired of summer.
> I know. My point was that we can tell tell that there's something
> odd about the modern warming, based ONLY on the modern data.
That, frankly, is preposterous. How can you define what constitutes "odd", if you don't know what's normal first? We can't compare the modern era to other time periods because we haven't got any data. We have very little idea what's unusual, because we have very little idea what's usual.
> Specifically, we can measure the various sources of warming and cooling (solar irradiance,
> volcanism, industrial sulfate aerosols and particulates, natural and manmade greenhouse gases, etc.)
Only the ones we know about and think we maybe understand. We know something like 0.0001% of what there is to know about climate, so any conclusions we make are almost certainly either wrong, or perhaps accidentally right for the wrong reasons being based on invalid reasoning. We don't actually actually know what's going on.
Who's going to be making the purchase decision on this turkey? Power users? Clueless end users? Developers? MBAs?
Generally speaking, the more technical a person's mindset is, the less stock he'll put in the version numbers.
If you're selling to developers and high-end power users, you can call it version 0.1, and they'll probably just think you're cool. But selling to technical types is a double-edged sword, because you've got to give them technical information about what it does and why its features and capabilities are superior to other products that do the same thing, or they won't be interested. Also, if they do buy it, they will keep wanting you to make the product more customizable, so they can reconfigure it to meet their needs better.
If you're selling to people with an MBA and no technical knowledge, on the other hand, the version number *does* matter. It's not the most important consideration, but it matters.
> the computer translated the signal into a jolt of electricity to the arm muscle
Ah, so these are actually *cyborg* monkeys now.
I never knew that about myself. I must be one of the most extreme radicals I've ever met. Nevermind what I _believe_, nevermind that I'd have voted for Dan Quayle for President if he ever got the nomination, I must be a liberal, because my room and desk are extremely messy!
Either that, or there's a sociologist somewhere with entirely too much time on his hands.
Suckage is irrelevant. Windows 95 was a veritable vacuum pump.
But Windows 1 and Windows 2 are, frankly, footnotes. Not only did nobody use them, nobody even *heard* about them at the time.
It's not an emulator as such, but there were significant (albeit subtle) differences in the implementation from DOS 6.22 to the "DOS" that was built into Windows 9x/Me. From the compatibility problems that I encountered at the time, I became absolutely convinced that the "DOS" built into Windows 95 was not a minor revision of DOS 6, but a major rewrite, done by a different team than had developed DOS in the first place. It's not difficult to find DOS-based software that will run under almost any version of DOS but will not run, or will not run correctly, under the "DOS" that comes in Windows 95, even if the GUI is not loaded (i.e., if the system is booted in "MS-DOS mode").
Combine that with the running-in-a-window thing, and it's easy to see where people got the idea that emulation was involved.
> There were two versions of Windows before Windows 3, that's why they called it Windows 3
Theoretically, yes, but Windows 1 and Windows 2 made no significant impact on the field of computing. In terms of technical pioneering, they didn't do anything IBM and Quarterdeck hadn't done already, and in terms of market share they were only ever installed on a tiny percentage of computers. Windows 3 is the first release that actually matters.
I can't imagine actually counting Windows 1 and Windows 2, though. I mean, seriously, BeOS, or RISC OS for that matter, was more widely distributed than Windows 1 and Windows 2 combined.
> Balloon Help is just about the most annoying feature ever to be introduced to the computing world.
Eh. It's not significantly worse than notification popups in Windows XP, particularly that stupid wizard that comes up every few hours and/or twice after every restart, whichever is more often, and wants to delete all your desktop icons. And it's got *nothing* on the Flash plugin.
> I believe this will be one of the coldest winters in the past 10 years.
Sounds good to me. I'm tired of these wussy winters we've been having lately, all slush and ice and rain. I could go for some real snow for a change. I want the ground to squeak under my feet!
> This evidence also suggests that Earth is trending towards cooling overall.
Long-term there's been an overall warming trend for the whole period of time we have data for. (I'm talking about collected data, not conjecture based on extrapolation and guesswork.) It's up and down, but the general trend has been up.
However, it is generally believed that the period when the data started being collected (better known as the age of exploration) was right smack dab in the middle of an unusually cold period, called the "Little Ice Age".
The truth is that we don't have data for a long enough period to allow us to meaningfully extrapolate to any significant extent. It's very hard to tell what's a short-term anomaly and what's a trend, because we've only got a few hundred years of data, and most of that is limited in scope to the northern half of the western world.
Logic suggests that the warming trend we've been seeing since the middle ages cannot have been going on for all of history. If that were the case, Alexander wouldn't have needed to tear down mainland Tyre and build a causeway to the island; he could have just marched his troops right on out across the Mediterranean Ice Shelf. And this business about Phoenicia being a naval power, that would make no sense at all. So we know that at some point in the past it was getting colder, not warmer, and then in the middle ages it reached a low point (probably somewhere around the time that the Golden Horn froze) and turned around. We assume that it's done that repeatedly, but we don't know how often or for how long, because we don't have weather data for anything outside the current cycle.
It doesn't get fewer searches. It gets less *traffic*.
Well, duh. Yahoo is serving out (carefully HTML-formatted) lists of URLs. YouTube is serving out videos. Which one do you suppose is generating more bytes of traffic?
> Just because Google can search "outside of it's internal scope" (however that may be defined)
> doesn't make it any different or doesn't make Youtube any less of a search engine.
In the technical computer-science jargon sense, the Yahoo web search, the Google web search, and the YouTube internal search all operate because, under the hood, there's a "search engine".
But that is not what people generally mean when they compare and rank "search engines". Generally when we say "search engines" we're usually talking about web sites that exist for the purpose of allowing people to search the web at large. This is technically a narrower and different meaning for the phrase "search engine", but it's the only one most people know, especially outside of the field of information technology. And YouTube isn't one.
You're conflating two different meanings of the phrase "search engine".
YouTube employs a special-purpose internal search-engine that greps through its database of YouTube videos to return results that are YouTube videos, exclusively. In other words, YouTube is only a search engine in the most general sense, the sense in which Lexis Nexis and Ebsco and Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia and Novelist and Gale and SIRS and Perlmonks are also search engines. This is NOT what people usually mean when they compare and rank "search engines".
Yahoo (err, actually, the Yahoo! service that people generally mean when they say Yahoo in this context) is a general-purpose web search engine, which is what people usually mean when they talk about and rank "search engines". It also employs a search engine (in the above technical sense) internally, to grep through its database of URLs. But the results it returns are not internal proprietary exclusive content stored at Yahoo. The results from Yahoo are of the same type as the results from the main Google web search, i.e., they are links to external content made available by other publishers all over the world.
That was my first thought, too. YouTube has a search feature, but it isn't what we generally think of when we say search engine". Usually when we talk about search engines we mean general-purpose web search engines, which index and search other sites. To my knowledge, YouTube does not compete in that space.