SCO is releasing additional source code for reference use in an effort to improve industry standard Open Source tools and technologies. These technologies will be available to download in the next few weeks. Additionally, SCO has simplified its "Ancient" UNIX program and waived the $100 processing fee. Anyone will be able to log onto the SCO web site and download historically preserved UNIX code for educational and non-commercial use.
Putting aside the grammatical curiosity of how you historically preserve something, rather than preserving something historic, does this mean I can log in and look at old SYSV code, or is this something else entirely that I'm not getting?
When I first read "Hackers" in 1984 I remember you mentioning how much you enjoyed the coding process, just like everybody else profiled in the book. With all the hassles and politics you've faced in the past 10-15 years, is programming still as pleasant a pastime for you?
The eMate was indeed suposed to be a "Newton for education" -- read about it in this developer announcement (which is about the only place on Apple's site you can still find information on these wee beasties).
I think what hurt the most was the $800 price tag. Even today, that's too much money for most schools to even contemplate spending per kid. Much cheaper to soldier along with all those old Apple ][s or IBM PC/XTs.
Don't laugh - the last time I was at my old community college campus, they were still teaching Photoshop and QuarkXPress on the Mac IIci, a machine that was discontinued before Mosaic was even conceived.
Anyway, the eMate would have been a good solution to the getting-kids-to-use-computers-without-having-to-ca rry-around-a-$3000-PowerBook problem, if it had been a bit cheaper, and if Apple had been more focused on the platform (by the time the eMate was readily available, the Newton division was already in danger of being Steved, which it of course eventually was). Maybe now that Apple is back on steady ground, they might consider reentering the market for this type of machine, something small that can run a mini-Darwin OS, perhaps. Before the iBook was introduced, there were several wild speculations on how it would function (it would have a touch screen, it would fold in half like a writing tablet, it would have a hand-crank battery just like a military field radio, etc.). These sorts of things are unsuitable for a true laptop, but make more sense in something designed for all-day school use. It's also well-known that not only is Apple working on some sort of Palm-like device, but that Steve Jobs actually tried to convince 3Com to sell the Palm division to Apple. Put it all together, and hopefully the eMate will rise again.
Predictibly, there's lots of issues with the Mac OS. "You could emulate your own windows in the Mac, but it wouldn't be very Mac-like. You have to give them a software that's going to behave the way they expect...")
I hope they're planning to Aqua-ize the interface, or at least provide it as an option. The current preview is being ripped to shreds on all the Mac forums I read as ugly, nonintuitive, and just plain broken, especially in the design of the dialogs. Unfortunately, I doubt that submitting thousands of "it's not Mac-like enough" bugs to Bugzilla would necessarily help things.
In this press release, Apple says they're going to partner with another company to create what sounds like an intelligent agent to assist with customer support. Hmmm. I wonder if I can ask it how to set up DevFS under Darwin....
Seriously, though, the next few months will be very hard on a lot of Mac system admins, I suspect. Most of the ones I've had to deal with are people who got roped into doing it part time (since most places only have a few Macs, and even places that have a lot -- like certain government institutions -- still get by with one or two dedicated Mac techs, if that many). They know enough to install system software, but next to nothing about tuning a system, or knowing what needs updating and what should be left alone (or thrown away), and why having multiple copies of Acrobat Reader is not a good thing, especially when they're different versions.
People like myself, who saw the writing on the wall years ago, and who already had some Unix experience, will (hopefully) be in high demand as the complexity of the Mac OS goes up with OS X's release. But I fear many companies will balk at the thought of having to suddenly train and support their Mac staff. "But I thought they were easy to use!" Yeah, easy to use, but you still have to know how to administer them properly.
I suppose the benefit is that suddenly there will be a lot more people looking for Unix knowledge, and a lot more people trying to get it. I just hope Apple can find a way to support those of us who support them, by offering more training (the new AppleCare program is a start) or even...shudder...some kind of certification program, to separate the gurus from the weenies. Not that it's worked especially well with the MCSE...
Until the mid-90s, Microsoft was the technological Godhead. Everyone involved with computing or the network hated, used, exploited or feared it. That's no longer true.
Funny, I thought the real fear and loathing didn't start until Win95 hit the streets, mainly because Win3.x was acknowledged by all to be a lame-o DOS shell that failed to measure up to its primary competition at the time, the Mac OS. When 95 landed, there was lots of carping from the Mac crowd (anybody remember the Win95 = Mac89 and "Been there, done that" campaigns?) but the fact was that 95 was the first serious competition to the Mac.
Personally, before that I had used Windows only briefly; now, I'm being forced to add it to the list of systems I support at work (i.e. Mac OS and the rare Linux call). My personal distaste started well into the 90s (actually with Word 6 for the Mac, but that's another story) and has only grown since....
A SKU is a retail term for an individual type of some item for sale. Every different product carries an individual SKU number (where I used to work, everything had a six-digit number, but this varies from place to place). So, for instance, your local Electronics Boutique carries versions of Quake III:Arena for Mac, Windows, and Linux, but assigns each a different SKU number. Other companies might ship a hybrid Mac/Windows CD that carries only one SKU. (Which leads to such sales frequently being reported as Windows sales instead of Mac ones, but that's another story.)
My complaint was that the company guy seems to regard his products with a certain commoditized air, like soap or bulk goods, rather than works of art and imagination. Even referring to them as "titles" would have been an improvement in the message.
Then again, perhaps my retail years (all three of them) just turned me off to the whole SKU thing. Especially when price adjustments came out and we had to spend two hours going around the store and redoing all the hanging price tags...
Jeff Anderson will be devoting 100% of his time to ensuring that this strategic sku is a mjor success.
. . .
Rick Hall will become the producer of an exciting new sku, which will be the most powerful new UO release to date.
If I worked at Origin, I wouldn't refer to my company's games, especially games with such a quasi-religious following, as skus. It's this commodity approach to programming that gave us things like Office 2000, IIRC.
Oh well. To make up for it, here's my favorite line from the CNN story:
There was a full-scale test of the suspect software before flight, but some sensors were incorrectly wired, Young said. After the wiring was corrected, the test was not repeated.
Insert "D'oh!" here. (Or perhaps the sound of one hundred thousand people saying "whop.")
Seriously, has NASA's budget and time window really shrunk so far that they can't afford to utilize basic tenets of software testing and design? If so, Congress really needs to rethink the constand slicing and dicing of NASA's fundage. I've seen projects that were released without adequate testing (which I later had to support...grrrr....), but the consequences there were an increase in work time and client frustration, not the loss of over $100 million of spacecraft.
I should think it's already significant, since the underlying core of Mac OS X is Darwin, so the base OS will already have some security built-in to it. As long as Darwin remains open-sourced and based on BSD, it will inherit the same security enhancements and patches that the other BSDs enjoy (well, maybe not from OpenBSD as much).
It will still be up to the individual application developers to follow the path away from the security-through-obscurity paradigm, however. But it will all be worth it if it means we finally get ATi to fix its %@*&! drivers for the Rage family.....
"Thank you very much; I'll have a list of everybody I want to thank up at [insert URL] later tonight." And get off the stage.
Personally, I think that'd be a better example of Oscar interactivity than showing the sets backstage. Of course, whoever does this first needs to make sure their server can handle the/. effect of a billion Oscar watchers checking out their site.
...a certification my company , a beltway bandit, might consider. (For those outside the US, this is the term for a company that makes a living by sucking off the federal government's tit). My employer is a typical example; very MS-centric, very few opportunities for other platforms -- I'm the only Mac-specific tech in the enire place and I know the most about Linux...which isn't all that much...yet. Maybe since this one mentions the name "Compaq" they'll think it's more legitimate than the RHCE or LCP tests.
Too bad they won't pay for me to travel to Houston, but oh well.
Customers can also purchase a CD-ROM of Corel LINUX OS download version with the latest enhancements from Corel Customer Service for US $4.95 + $10 shipping and handling by calling 1-800-772-6735.
Ten dollars to ship a CD-ROM? I hope it comes with a printed manual, or something.
Also, it looks like the review link has been/.ed already. Does anybody hae a mirror?
If Motorola hadn't blown all that money on Iridium, would we now have G4 chips that could exceed 500 MHz? Or StarTacs that were credit-card size? Or embedded PowePCs that demolished all competitors?
I don't know enough about how Motorola's internal divisions work, but it seems that saving 5 billion in one sector means the others have more $$$ to play with.
Besides, we all know the NSA secretly bought out the system and is using it to read your email from space. The voices in my head tell me it must be so.:-]
Does this mean that it doesn't bother you to steal something a ton of music, a plain and obvious crime.
Ah, but the MP3s I found were all things I already owned in another format. (This was 1997 when encoding an MP3 on the fastest machine available to me at the time, a PowerBook 3400, was painfully slow, but I did have lan-speed internet access.) That's still legal.
Yet you have do a doubletake when another criminal is chased down and made to face his actions.
In my mind, Adam and his family are right, and Hotline Communications is wrong. Yes, he was naive, but I still think it's wrong.
Personally, I'd rather support a free, open-sourced cross-platform protocol than one from the company that (depending on how you look at it) screwed a young Adam Hinkley out of his own program.
Background info is available from this Salon article (the second of two parts; the first part gives an overview of Hotline). For the latest news in the case, try here or here.
Hotline is what got me much of my MP3 collection, but the company's actions caused me to think twice. Napster doesn't present such a moral quandry.
To pick at nits, the actual quote is "What's our Vector, Victor?"
(Oh how I love that movie. I pray nightly for Paramount to release a 20th anniversary DVD edition.)
To remain semi-on-topic: I support a couple of Mac Canvas users at my job (version 3.5 and 5 only, as NHLBI decided not to spring for the upgrade to 7). It's a fairly decent example of the genre, and bringing it to Linux represents a Good Thing.
Apple has paid a dear price for once discouraging game development on the Mac so that it would be viewed as a 'serious' business computer.
An image they're trying to change, though to what degree tends to vary depending on who you ask...
The cool thing is that since Mac OS is based on BSD, and since BSD can generally run Linux apps with a mild amount of tweaking, companies like Loki could see a big jump in their market share by porting to BSD/Mac OS X, with little effort. Theoretically.
I remember reading recently (on MacOSRumors; make of that what you will) that Apple was so pissed off at ATi for delays in the mobile Rage128 in the new PowerBooks that they're taking another look at companies like nVidia for OEM support.
IIRC Apple did rewrite parts of the RagePro driver library for the Mac, although I don't know if they're working on Linux versions as well. I'm guessing they're working very hard on BSD versions, though.
The G4 and even the newer iMacs make a quite decent Q3A platform thanks to the Rage128, but they still lag behind the latest PC video cards. Hopefully Apple will persuade developers to write the appropriate drivers for OS X so you can stick any AGP card in a G4 and have it work out of the box.
Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I getspecifications for the programming interfaces for the PJBor the USB protocol?
A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation.
I just saw this on cnet, talking about Sun's new API for XML support - so, since Java support in OS X is supposed to be much improved, how long before somebody creates a Java-based configurator tool for OS X? If I had better Java skills, I'd be working on one myself.
And if the JVM improves for Linux, how hard would it be to port such a tool? Not very, I'm guessing.
MS has committed to releasing Office for Mac OS X. I believe the initial versions are merely Carbonized, but in the future, assuming OS X survives, MS will have to replace it with a Cocoa-native port. That means Unix, and once that happens, how hard is it to make a Linux/BSD port?
Slashdot Mirror
Putting aside the grammatical curiosity of how you historically preserve something, rather than preserving something historic, does this mean I can log in and look at old SYSV code, or is this something else entirely that I'm not getting?
When I first read "Hackers" in 1984 I remember you mentioning how much you enjoyed the coding process, just like everybody else profiled in the book. With all the hassles and politics you've faced in the past 10-15 years, is programming still as pleasant a pastime for you?
I think what hurt the most was the $800 price tag. Even today, that's too much money for most schools to even contemplate spending per kid. Much cheaper to soldier along with all those old Apple ][s or IBM PC/XTs.
Don't laugh - the last time I was at my old community college campus, they were still teaching Photoshop and QuarkXPress on the Mac IIci, a machine that was discontinued before Mosaic was even conceived.
Anyway, the eMate would have been a good solution to the getting-kids-to-use-computers-without-having-to-ca rry-around-a-$3000-PowerBook problem, if it had been a bit cheaper, and if Apple had been more focused on the platform (by the time the eMate was readily available, the Newton division was already in danger of being Steved, which it of course eventually was). Maybe now that Apple is back on steady ground, they might consider reentering the market for this type of machine, something small that can run a mini-Darwin OS, perhaps. Before the iBook was introduced, there were several wild speculations on how it would function (it would have a touch screen, it would fold in half like a writing tablet, it would have a hand-crank battery just like a military field radio, etc.). These sorts of things are unsuitable for a true laptop, but make more sense in something designed for all-day school use. It's also well-known that not only is Apple working on some sort of Palm-like device, but that Steve Jobs actually tried to convince 3Com to sell the Palm division to Apple. Put it all together, and hopefully the eMate will rise again.
Only this time, it better not cost as much...
If anybody ever gets this part working, please apply for a job at Apple so you can fix their &$%#@! software DVD decoding....
In fairness, the recent updates to the system make it perform much better. But still.
I hope they're planning to Aqua-ize the interface, or at least provide it as an option. The current preview is being ripped to shreds on all the Mac forums I read as ugly, nonintuitive, and just plain broken, especially in the design of the dialogs. Unfortunately, I doubt that submitting thousands of "it's not Mac-like enough" bugs to Bugzilla would necessarily help things.
However, if work keeps progressing on Fizzilla or the Rhapsody Yellow Box ports...sweeeeet.
...before somebody converts it to MPEG?
Seriously, though, the next few months will be very hard on a lot of Mac system admins, I suspect. Most of the ones I've had to deal with are people who got roped into doing it part time (since most places only have a few Macs, and even places that have a lot -- like certain government institutions -- still get by with one or two dedicated Mac techs, if that many). They know enough to install system software, but next to nothing about tuning a system, or knowing what needs updating and what should be left alone (or thrown away), and why having multiple copies of Acrobat Reader is not a good thing, especially when they're different versions.
People like myself, who saw the writing on the wall years ago, and who already had some Unix experience, will (hopefully) be in high demand as the complexity of the Mac OS goes up with OS X's release. But I fear many companies will balk at the thought of having to suddenly train and support their Mac staff. "But I thought they were easy to use!" Yeah, easy to use, but you still have to know how to administer them properly.
I suppose the benefit is that suddenly there will be a lot more people looking for Unix knowledge, and a lot more people trying to get it. I just hope Apple can find a way to support those of us who support them, by offering more training (the new AppleCare program is a start) or even...shudder...some kind of certification program, to separate the gurus from the weenies. Not that it's worked especially well with the MCSE...
Funny, I thought the real fear and loathing didn't start until Win95 hit the streets, mainly because Win3.x was acknowledged by all to be a lame-o DOS shell that failed to measure up to its primary competition at the time, the Mac OS. When 95 landed, there was lots of carping from the Mac crowd (anybody remember the Win95 = Mac89 and "Been there, done that" campaigns?) but the fact was that 95 was the first serious competition to the Mac.
Personally, before that I had used Windows only briefly; now, I'm being forced to add it to the list of systems I support at work (i.e. Mac OS and the rare Linux call). My personal distaste started well into the 90s (actually with Word 6 for the Mac, but that's another story) and has only grown since....
My complaint was that the company guy seems to regard his products with a certain commoditized air, like soap or bulk goods, rather than works of art and imagination. Even referring to them as "titles" would have been an improvement in the message.
Then again, perhaps my retail years (all three of them) just turned me off to the whole SKU thing. Especially when price adjustments came out and we had to spend two hours going around the store and redoing all the hanging price tags...
Jeff Anderson will be devoting 100% of his time to ensuring that this strategic sku is a mjor success.
.
.
.
Rick Hall will become the producer of an exciting new sku, which will be the most powerful new UO release to date.
If I worked at Origin, I wouldn't refer to my company's games, especially games with such a quasi-religious following, as skus. It's this commodity approach to programming that gave us things like Office 2000, IIRC.
There was a full-scale test of the suspect software before flight, but some sensors were incorrectly wired, Young said. After the wiring was corrected, the test was not repeated.
Insert "D'oh!" here. (Or perhaps the sound of one hundred thousand people saying "whop.")
Seriously, has NASA's budget and time window really shrunk so far that they can't afford to utilize basic tenets of software testing and design? If so, Congress really needs to rethink the constand slicing and dicing of NASA's fundage. I've seen projects that were released without adequate testing (which I later had to support...grrrr....), but the consequences there were an increase in work time and client frustration, not the loss of over $100 million of spacecraft.
Remember: always mount a scratch monkey.
It will still be up to the individual application developers to follow the path away from the security-through-obscurity paradigm, however. But it will all be worth it if it means we finally get ATi to fix its %@*&! drivers for the Rage family.....
Personally, I think that'd be a better example of Oscar interactivity than showing the sets backstage. Of course, whoever does this first needs to make sure their server can handle the /. effect of a billion Oscar watchers checking out their site.
...a certification my company , a beltway bandit, might consider. (For those outside the US, this is the term for a company that makes a living by sucking off the federal government's tit). My employer is a typical example; very MS-centric, very few opportunities for other platforms -- I'm the only Mac-specific tech in the enire place and I know the most about Linux ...which isn't all that much ...yet. Maybe since this one mentions the name "Compaq" they'll think it's more legitimate than the RHCE or LCP tests.
Too bad they won't pay for me to travel to Houston, but oh well.
Customers can also purchase a CD-ROM of Corel LINUX OS download version with the latest enhancements from Corel Customer Service for US $4.95 + $10 shipping and handling by calling 1-800-772-6735.
Ten dollars to ship a CD-ROM? I hope it comes with a printed manual, or something.
Also, it looks like the review link has been /.ed already. Does anybody hae a mirror?
I don't know enough about how Motorola's internal divisions work, but it seems that saving 5 billion in one sector means the others have more $$$ to play with.
Besides, we all know the NSA secretly bought out the system and is using it to read your email from space. The voices in my head tell me it must be so. :-]
Ah, but the MP3s I found were all things I already owned in another format. (This was 1997 when encoding an MP3 on the fastest machine available to me at the time, a PowerBook 3400, was painfully slow, but I did have lan-speed internet access.) That's still legal.
Yet you have do a doubletake when another criminal is chased down and made to face his actions.
In my mind, Adam and his family are right, and Hotline Communications is wrong. Yes, he was naive, but I still think it's wrong.
Background info is available from this Salon article (the second of two parts; the first part gives an overview of Hotline). For the latest news in the case, try here or here.
Hotline is what got me much of my MP3 collection, but the company's actions caused me to think twice. Napster doesn't present such a moral quandry.
To pick at nits, the actual quote is "What's our Vector, Victor?"
(Oh how I love that movie. I pray nightly for Paramount to release a 20th anniversary DVD edition.)
To remain semi-on-topic: I support a couple of Mac Canvas users at my job (version 3.5 and 5 only, as NHLBI decided not to spring for the upgrade to 7). It's a fairly decent example of the genre, and bringing it to Linux represents a Good Thing.
"Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?"
An image they're trying to change, though to what degree tends to vary depending on who you ask...
The cool thing is that since Mac OS is based on BSD, and since BSD can generally run Linux apps with a mild amount of tweaking, companies like Loki could see a big jump in their market share by porting to BSD/Mac OS X, with little effort. Theoretically.
I remember reading recently (on MacOSRumors; make of that what you will) that Apple was so pissed off at ATi for delays in the mobile Rage128 in the new PowerBooks that they're taking another look at companies like nVidia for OEM support.
IIRC Apple did rewrite parts of the RagePro driver library for the Mac, although I don't know if they're working on Linux versions as well. I'm guessing they're working very hard on BSD versions, though.
The G4 and even the newer iMacs make a quite decent Q3A platform thanks to the Rage128, but they still lag behind the latest PC video cards. Hopefully Apple will persuade developers to write the appropriate drivers for OS X so you can stick any AGP card in a G4 and have it work out of the box.
hee-hee...boy, I hope this doesn't mean Connectix Virtual GameStation2 v1.0 will be full of bugs as well!
Q: I want to write a Linux driver for the PJB. Can I getspecifications for the programming interfaces for the PJBor the USB protocol?
A: Not at this time. We do recognize that Linux and Macintosh users would like support for the PJB, but our initial product launch has focused on the Windows implementation.
Boo!
And if the JVM improves for Linux, how hard would it be to port such a tool? Not very, I'm guessing.
MS has committed to releasing Office for Mac OS X. I believe the initial versions are merely Carbonized, but in the future, assuming OS X survives, MS will have to replace it with a Cocoa-native port. That means Unix, and once that happens, how hard is it to make a Linux/BSD port?