However, while everyone's going on about Intel and its Classmate, they seem to be missing one rather important point. The Classmate design is going great guns; it's selling as fast as it can be made. Not under that name, though. Under an even sillier name: "EEE".
The Asus EEE PC is a Classmate, make a bit less robust, with a CPU with some secondary cache swapped in - but underclocked by a third - to make it a bit less of a performance dog. And EEEs are selling like the proverbial hot cakes.
I'm all for awareness of global threats and so on, but this article is a paranoid rant, as far as I can see, without merit and pointless to read. The author merely seems to be promoting his own agenda and book.
There is an aphorism: "Jack of all trades, master of none."
Mandriva tries too hard to be all things to all men. You want KDE? You got it. Prefer GNOME? We do that, too. Want obscureWM? Yes, we include that. Want a smooth desktop? We offer that. Want everything and the kitchen sink? We can do that too.
It's too much, too widespread.
I don't want to spend lots of time tracking what is state of the art in Linux apps. I want someone who does that for a living, or as a passion, to choose the best of breed of each type of app and bung them on a CD for me. I don't want to have to select from hundreds of packages, lots of options. I want it quick, clean and simple. Then, if I want to explore alternatives, I want that, too.
By the same token, I run Linux because I've been using Unix for 20y. I trust it. So, I want a tried-and-tested packaging system, something Done Right from day 1, not some lash-up that later had online repositories added to it, then after that, some form of automatic dependency resolution. I want that to have been designed in from the start, as it is absolutely critical. I know RPM, I've used it for years. I grew to hate it over those years. Apt-get works and when I screw it up it's usually because I was fiddling.
I don't want lairy themes, colourful desktops and snazzy cartoon-themed icons. I don't want bally penguins everywhere. I want it sober, clean, smart and easy on the eyes. Most Linux desktops look like they were designed by colour teenage boys with hormone imbalances. I want my desktop to look muted & elegant.
I don't much care for KDE for the same sorts of reasons. It started well and around v1 I loved it and v2 was... all right, ish. Since then, it's bloated into a horrid ugly mess. I want my desktop to be simple, elegant and minimal. I do not want things to fade into view with stipple effects; I do not want a fake LCD font on the clock; I do not want a taskbar cluttered with resident programs I didn't ask for and don't use. I want as little as possible, no distractions, nothing getting in the way.
Mandrake started out as Red Hat with KDE. That was good. Simple, clean, focussed.
Since then, it's grown into a monster.
Ubuntu started out as Debian made easy for the desktop. Simple, one purpose, one app for one job.
And it *still is.*
The people who want to graft on 18 extra wheels and a windmill can go off and play with Kubuntu or something. If they want training wheels on it, they can play with Mepis or Mint or Freespire or something like that.
Ubuntu itself remains focussed, minimal and simple. That is the essence of beauty. Nothing more than what is absolutely required.
For one, your objections to the "about" box are/subjective,/ These things may not appeal/to you/ but that is/your/ personal taste; the points you raise are not universal rules, they are your take on it. The single one I personally feel has/any/ shred of validity whatsoever is the placement of the motto beneath the image rather than in or on it. I am not an artist, but I do magazine design and layout and am regularly published. My opinion is just as valid as yours.
What makes Etoile MAc-like is the class libraries and programming languages and interfaces. It could look like AmigaOS 1 or a Psion 3, that has no relevance to its Mac-like nature.
When a system is in early development, the aesthetics really are not particularly important.
I suggest you take your finely-honed sensibilities and apply them to a mature project which needs a facelift, like, say, KDE, which I find such a visual dog's dinner that it actually puts me right off using it. KDE is plug ugly and the previews of KDE4 are every bit as bad. There's a GUI which desperately needs some cleaning and prettifying.
As far as the compiler thing goes, OK, true, but then, they/did/ that once, when they went from DR3 to DR4, or DR4 to r5, I think - they moved from Metrowerks (if I remember correctly - if it wasn't Metrowerks it was another closed-source compiler) to the GCC toolchain & ELF. No binary backwards compatibility whatsoever. But there wasn't enough S/W for this to be a big problem; those people who/had/ apps just recompiled them. But they weren't likely to have to do that again, were they? It/is/ nearly 10y later and GCC and ELF are effectively unchallenged.
The vtable thing, I have to admit, I haven't the low-level knowledge to judge. I'm sure you're right.
But hey, it was never designed to be the replacement for Unix, now was it?
It's not a question of how many movies it can run in parallel or anything like that.
Have you ever actually/used/ BeOS?
It won't cost you anything. It was freed shortly before the company left the desktop PC marketplace. Try it. http://www.beosmaxfiles.org/
It is very common to see questions or criticisms of this type from people who don't know enought to judge. For instance, I ride recumbent bikes, and I have been asked/thousands/ of times - no exaggeration - why I do. The answer is, of course, because they're better than upright bikes. They are faster, easier, comfier, safer and more fun. But they are nonetheless criticized by those who have never ridden them.
I have both car and motorcycle driving licences. I believe and argue that car controls have a worse design than bike controls: they are less precise and less ergonomic. However, the counter-argument I get most often is that "hundreds of millions of people drive cars, so they must be fine." This is an illogical statement; the fact that something can be done, or is generally done one way, doesn't mean it can't be done a better way.
Modern systems based on multi-gigahertz processors with abundant memory and other resources can rival - not match, certainly not exceed, but come close to - the responsiveness of BeOS 5 on a 90MHz Pentium. That is true, but not relevant.
The questions that matter are: - how did BeOS do this? - are these techniques generally applicable? - can we bring such techniques to more established OSs?
But in your case, don't knock it until you've tried it. If you *have* tried it and still don't get it, why not?
Yes, I've considered the ant-trail example; I'm sure there are similar ones. I think the key difference is that it isn't/symbolic/ communication, as even the honeybee's waggle dance is.
My intent certainly wasn't to try to emphasize a difference between humans & other animals, because I don't think there really is a qualitative one, merely a quantitative. It's just a matter of degree.
Quite aside from the problems of spelling and so on, which you must realize casts your argument in a weaker light, you have errors of logic or reasoning in almost every paragraph.
You confuse the notions of probability and possibility, a child's error. The fact that something might be of very low probability does not mean it is impossible.
You make unsubstantiated assertions about the probability of an event about which you have no evidence. Or do you have a time machine (to visit the ancient past of Earth) and a starship (to observe other planets evolving or not evolving life, so that you can make a count and measure its probability?)
You apparently have a poor knowledge of prehistory, archaeology and palaeontology, for you blithely state that there is no fossil record of evolution, whereas in fact it is plentiful.
You state that because humans exert selective breeding, this is therefore evidence of selective breeding of us and life on Earth, though you have no evidence of any "breeder" doing the selection.
You claim that "intelligent design" is a scientific theory, when it is nothing of the kind. It is a *hypothesis*, which is to say, an idea unsupported by evidence; and what is more, it is *not* a hypothesis supported by science, it is one supported by religious faith. It is not a "valid scientific theory", because it is not valid, not scientific and not a theory.
In other words, you are a fine example of the classic "ID" proponent: a religious proselytizer selling a religious idea but trying to sneak it in by attempting - poorly - to disguise it as science.
Language: done. Various animals have abstract symbolic communication. Maybe not as rich as us, but it's there. Art: look at a bower bird sometime. Architecture: termites do pretty well. Tools, all sorts, animals do it.
But no other species can record its thoughts for others it has never met and never will to understand. That's what's enabled Homo sapiens sapiens to get further. All the rest is but standing on the shoulders of giants (to quote one of the smartest monkeys who ever lived).
The SAM was a late, yes, but it took a relatively long time to finish, with its jazzy 256-colour graphics and twin disk controllers and so on. It was a lovely machine - I bought one, new, full price - but it was too little, too late. It came out in the 16-bit era and even an ST was far more computer for the money.
Sinkers should have based the Speccy 128 on the Timex Sinclair 2068 - just like the 128, the 2068 had bank-switched extra RAM, but you could page out the ROM; it had the same sound chip; but it also had better graphics, with a 512*192 mono mode and a 256*192 mode without attribute clash. Not as fancy as the SAM, no, but the 2068 shipped in 1983 - the 128 didn't appear until 1985. A TS2068-based 128 would have been a much more substantial improvement on the original Speccy than was the 128. Part of the design concept of the 2068, in allowing the ROM to be paged out for a flat 64K of RAM and a display which could natively do 64 columns of 8-pixel characters or 85 columns of 6-pixel ones, was to run CP/M.
Sinclair and Investronica could have had this out by 1984 or so.
Then, though Sinclair would, I suspect, have hated the idea, an '85 QL which was Speccy-compatible. Use the 2068's video chip and bung in something Z80-compatible instead of the QL's 8049 "Intelligent Peripheral Controller". The idea wasn't new - look at the Commodore 128, with a 6510 and a Z80 & 3 incompatible modes of operation: C64 mode, CP/M mode and C128 mode.
A QL with a Z80 in it could have offered a backwards-compatible Speccy mode, a CP/M mode and its own native whizzy mode as a new and trendy 16-bit machine to compete with the ST and Amiga. Because clever and desirable as the end-stage 8-bits were, frankly, you were better off with a 16-bit machine.
But even aside from the QL pipedream - I reckon if they'd run with the 2068 idea, they'd have kept a lot of market share that went to Commodore and Acorn, and thus would have been in a much more powerful position by the late 80s - rather than getting bought out by Amstrad in '86.
If my notional 1984 superSpectrum had appeared, with say an optional disk interface and CP/M, by '87 or '88 they could have been shipping floppy-based "Spectrum Pros" with 256K of RAM and a library of credible business apps: Wordstar, dBase II, Supercalc &c. Maybe the whole QL fiasco would never have happened. If Sinclair had not rushed out the QL early and had instead waited until after the other, expensive 16-bitters shipped, I wonder what they could have done. Something remarkable, I'd bet.
I have both an MP3 player and an MP3-capable smartphone, but I can read at least 10 times faster than I can listen to speech. Flat out, I can read several thousand words per minute. I hate listening to people talk when I can read instead, unless it's an actual live conversation there and then.
Sounds like you don't know Mac OS very well. Pretty much all the stuff you cite - OpenOffice, Firefox, whatever - could have been run natively under OS X. You can even run many xNix apps from the Fink or OpenDarwin projects, tho' native OS X versions are usually much preferable.
Including running W2K under Virtual PC.
I see no need for what is effectively a triple-boot machine - OS X (with Classic, quadruple-boot), Linux/and/ Windows - when you could easily have made a simpler system by removing a whole OS from the equation.
There's not really much good reason for running Linux on a Mac - there are fewer drivers & proprietary apps in PPC form than x86 and OS X provides pretty much all the Unix goodness one could want.
The virtualisation idea isn't bad, but run W2K with up-to-date A/V and antispyware and so on, behind a hardware firewall, and it's pretty safe even today. Remove & replace all the MS internet apps and it's not bad at all.
If you know the history of MS, you already know that MS and its senior management are liars, cheats and thieves - it's documented and has been legally proved, in court.
Liars:
Bill gates told Paul Brainerd of Aldus to cancel Aldus' nearly-complete "Flintstone" wordprocessor for Windows because, Gates claimed, Word for Windows was about to ship. So Aldus threw away the code, wasted the effort and lost a powerful position in the market: first Windows WP, from the company that produced the excellent PageMaker DTP program. It hasn't been started yet. This is one major corporate CEO personally deceiving another, for personal and corporate gain.
Ask Aldus - but you can't. Its flagship products were bought out by Adobe and it went out of business.
Thieves:
MS stole the code of "DoubleSpace" (later renamed DriveSpace) from STAC's product Stacker. MS had been "evaluating" Stacker for inclusion in MS-DOS 6. Stac rejected the offered licensing terms; MS took the code anyway (MS-DOS 6.0). Stac sued, proved the code was copied, and won $200M. MS remove it (MS-DOS 6.21), rewrote the sections that were shown to be direct copies, renamed the product, and kept on going (MS-DOS 6.22).
Ask Stac - but you can't. It's gone out of business. With an admitted direct copy of its flagship product given away free with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 95, it went under.
Cheats:
MS compelled Central Point to license CP AntiVirus and CP Backup for inclusion in MS-DOS 6, under the sort of terms Stac rejected. (Do it, or we'll write our own versions anyway. No, you don't get any ongoing payment, but you can sell your version as a premium upgrade product.) Low one-off payment, all rights, no royalties, no comeback. It also knocked together an undelete utility, a defragmenter and a basic graphical file manager/program launcher based on IBM's DOSShell from PC DOS 4.0, thus giving away for free all Central Point's main products - Backup, Antivirus and PC Tools.
Ask Central Point how good the deal was for them. But you can't. They've gone under.
Cheats again:
MS hired the same team to write Video for Windows as Apple had used to write QuickTime's code for video playback in a window. The programmers did it the same way. Apple sued. Apple won.
Remember MS' $150M "investment" in Apple a few years back? No investment. That was another lie. It was punitive damages.
Cheats yet again:
MS wrote specific code into Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups to make it generate spurious errors if run on DR-DOS 6. Windows 3.1 actually worked fine on DR-DOS - better than on MS-DOS - but MS wanted to kill the competition, so it wrote routines to detect DR DOS, obfuscated the code and actively hid it in the Windows loader program, WIN.COM. DR sued and proved this in court. An acquaintance of mine, Geoff Chappel, was an expert witness, deconstructing and showing the code and the efforts to hide it.
DR went under. The product rights were sold to Caldera. Caldera continued to sue, and eventually won. But it was too late. Windows 95 included DOS, even though Caldera got it running just fine on DR-DOS in the labs, so you couldn't sell people DOS any more.
And cheats still!
You know what Caldera is doing now? It renamed itself SCO and is suing, well, anyone using Linux. E.g., IBM. Guess who funds this? Microsoft.
You could look at the petty, childish efforts to derail Sun's Java by adding proprietary incompatible extensions to the Windows Java Virtual Machine and then encouraging developers to use them (Visual J ). Then renaming the JVM to the MS VM, then dropping it altogether. This is not a company that cares about its customers. It cares about profits and killing the competition by any means possible, fair or foul, legal or illegal. It can afford to be sued, it can afford to buy off aggrieved competitors, and it's so big and so successful that it knows that the US government daren't touch it or
When someone doesn't understand one's point, repeating onesself, though natural, is unhelpful - it justs winds people up.
Where the real problems exist here
on
Verizon Can't Do Math
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, it's funny. Yes, it's scary.
No, it's not at all surprising.
This is the result of a whole generation of schoolkids who don't know how to do arithmetic. All they know how to do is work a calculator. These are not the same thing.
And it must be said that the customer here is really not very good at explaining the arithmetic. I understand that he is impatient, angry, resigned, but what he mostly does is repeat himself. He does not explain himself well at all.
The ROAD website has been there for ages. Certainly it was there in February last year - it's archived in the Wayback Machine from then. The screen images look like mockups to me and I doubt they have any real working hardware.
Which is a shame, because it looks like a great device in some ways & I'd rather like one.
I'm sure you're right, on both counts. I do know about how much they have erased. It's very sad but with the volume of stuff they produce one can see why they do it!
WIBNI they released everything they could that's left, though? At some point?
I checked. I thought it might be a typo for "80,000" or something.
But no. It's correct. "Nearly 80". For fifty years. That's one and a half per year, roughly. Not exactly a huge amount, is it?
OK, so, good step, could have interesting results. Not my personal thing but I'm sure it will appeal to lots of film students and home editor/directors and all sorts.
But it's hardly an overwhelming archive of the millions of hours the Beeb must have stored up, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
This is bang on. Somebody mod that comment up!
However, while everyone's going on about Intel and its Classmate, they seem to be missing one rather important point. The Classmate design is going great guns; it's selling as fast as it can be made. Not under that name, though. Under an even sillier name: "EEE".
The Asus EEE PC is a Classmate, make a bit less robust, with a CPU with some secondary cache swapped in - but underclocked by a third - to make it a bit less of a performance dog. And EEEs are selling like the proverbial hot cakes.
No, we're just omniscient.
I'm all for awareness of global threats and so on, but this article is a paranoid rant, as far as I can see, without merit and pointless to read. The author merely seems to be promoting his own agenda and book.
There is an aphorism: "Jack of all trades, master of none."
Mandriva tries too hard to be all things to all men. You want KDE? You got it. Prefer GNOME? We do that, too. Want obscureWM? Yes, we include that. Want a smooth desktop? We offer that. Want everything and the kitchen sink? We can do that too.
It's too much, too widespread.
I don't want to spend lots of time tracking what is state of the art in Linux apps. I want someone who does that for a living, or as a passion, to choose the best of breed of each type of app and bung them on a CD for me. I don't want to have to select from hundreds of packages, lots of options. I want it quick, clean and simple. Then, if I want to explore alternatives, I want that, too.
By the same token, I run Linux because I've been using Unix for 20y. I trust it. So, I want a tried-and-tested packaging system, something Done Right from day 1, not some lash-up that later had online repositories added to it, then after that, some form of automatic dependency resolution. I want that to have been designed in from the start, as it is absolutely critical. I know RPM, I've used it for years. I grew to hate it over those years. Apt-get works and when I screw it up it's usually because I was fiddling.
I don't want lairy themes, colourful desktops and snazzy cartoon-themed icons. I don't want bally penguins everywhere. I want it sober, clean, smart and easy on the eyes. Most Linux desktops look like they were designed by colour teenage boys with hormone imbalances. I want my desktop to look muted & elegant.
I don't much care for KDE for the same sorts of reasons. It started well and around v1 I loved it and v2 was... all right, ish. Since then, it's bloated into a horrid ugly mess. I want my desktop to be simple, elegant and minimal. I do not want things to fade into view with stipple effects; I do not want a fake LCD font on the clock; I do not want a taskbar cluttered with resident programs I didn't ask for and don't use. I want as little as possible, no distractions, nothing getting in the way.
Mandrake started out as Red Hat with KDE. That was good. Simple, clean, focussed.
Since then, it's grown into a monster.
Ubuntu started out as Debian made easy for the desktop. Simple, one purpose, one app for one job.
And it *still is.*
The people who want to graft on 18 extra wheels and a windmill can go off and play with Kubuntu or something. If they want training wheels on it, they can play with Mepis or Mint or Freespire or something like that.
Ubuntu itself remains focussed, minimal and simple. That is the essence of beauty. Nothing more than what is absolutely required.
You have a wildly erroneous idea of how much professional journalists earn. (... Writes a (part-time) professional journalist.)
I think your priorities are all to cock.
/subjective,/ These things may not appeal /to you/ but that is /your/ personal taste; the points you raise are not universal rules, they are your take on it. The single one I personally feel has /any/ shred of validity whatsoever is the placement of the motto beneath the image rather than in or on it. I am not an artist, but I do magazine design and layout and am regularly published. My opinion is just as valid as yours.
For one, your objections to the "about" box are
What makes Etoile MAc-like is the class libraries and programming languages and interfaces. It could look like AmigaOS 1 or a Psion 3, that has no relevance to its Mac-like nature.
When a system is in early development, the aesthetics really are not particularly important.
I suggest you take your finely-honed sensibilities and apply them to a mature project which needs a facelift, like, say, KDE, which I find such a visual dog's dinner that it actually puts me right off using it. KDE is plug ugly and the previews of KDE4 are every bit as bad. There's a GUI which desperately needs some cleaning and prettifying.
Thanks for that!
/did/ that once, when they went from DR3 to DR4, or DR4 to r5, I think - they moved from Metrowerks (if I remember correctly - if it wasn't Metrowerks it was another closed-source compiler) to the GCC toolchain & ELF. No binary backwards compatibility whatsoever. But there wasn't enough S/W for this to be a big problem; those people who /had/ apps just recompiled them. But they weren't likely to have to do that again, were they? It /is/ nearly 10y later and GCC and ELF are effectively unchallenged.
As far as the compiler thing goes, OK, true, but then, they
The vtable thing, I have to admit, I haven't the low-level knowledge to judge. I'm sure you're right.
But hey, it was never designed to be the replacement for Unix, now was it?
Such as?
It's not a question of how many movies it can run in parallel or anything like that.
/used/ BeOS?
/thousands/ of times - no exaggeration - why I do. The answer is, of course, because they're better than upright bikes. They are faster, easier, comfier, safer and more fun. But they are nonetheless criticized by those who have never ridden them.
Have you ever actually
It won't cost you anything. It was freed shortly before the company left the desktop PC marketplace. Try it.
http://www.beosmaxfiles.org/
It is very common to see questions or criticisms of this type from people who don't know enought to judge. For instance, I ride recumbent bikes, and I have been asked
I have both car and motorcycle driving licences. I believe and argue that car controls have a worse design than bike controls: they are less precise and less ergonomic. However, the counter-argument I get most often is that "hundreds of millions of people drive cars, so they must be fine." This is an illogical statement; the fact that something can be done, or is generally done one way, doesn't mean it can't be done a better way.
Modern systems based on multi-gigahertz processors with abundant memory and other resources can rival - not match, certainly not exceed, but come close to - the responsiveness of BeOS 5 on a 90MHz Pentium. That is true, but not relevant.
The questions that matter are:
- how did BeOS do this?
- are these techniques generally applicable?
- can we bring such techniques to more established OSs?
But in your case, don't knock it until you've tried it. If you *have* tried it and still don't get it, why not?
Yes, I've considered the ant-trail example; I'm sure there are similar ones. I think the key difference is that it isn't /symbolic/ communication, as even the honeybee's waggle dance is.
My intent certainly wasn't to try to emphasize a difference between humans & other animals, because I don't think there really is a qualitative one, merely a quantitative. It's just a matter of degree.
I think you need to work on your syllogisms.
Here's an example, one about 3000 years old:
True:
Socrates is a man
All men are mortal
Therefore Socrates is mortal
False:
Socrates is a man
All fisherman are men
Therefore, Socrates is a fisherman
Quite aside from the problems of spelling and so on, which you must realize casts your argument in a weaker light, you have errors of logic or reasoning in almost every paragraph.
You confuse the notions of probability and possibility, a child's error. The fact that something might be of very low probability does not mean it is impossible.
You make unsubstantiated assertions about the probability of an event about which you have no evidence. Or do you have a time machine (to visit the ancient past of Earth) and a starship (to observe other planets evolving or not evolving life, so that you can make a count and measure its probability?)
You apparently have a poor knowledge of prehistory, archaeology and palaeontology, for you blithely state that there is no fossil record of evolution, whereas in fact it is plentiful.
You state that because humans exert selective breeding, this is therefore evidence of selective breeding of us and life on Earth, though you have no evidence of any "breeder" doing the selection.
You claim that "intelligent design" is a scientific theory, when it is nothing of the kind. It is a *hypothesis*, which is to say, an idea unsupported by evidence; and what is more, it is *not* a hypothesis supported by science, it is one supported by religious faith. It is not a "valid scientific theory", because it is not valid, not scientific and not a theory.
In other words, you are a fine example of the classic "ID" proponent: a religious proselytizer selling a religious idea but trying to sneak it in by attempting - poorly - to disguise it as science.
Writing.
Language: done. Various animals have abstract symbolic communication. Maybe not as rich as us, but it's there. Art: look at a bower bird sometime. Architecture: termites do pretty well. Tools, all sorts, animals do it.
But no other species can record its thoughts for others it has never met and never will to understand. That's what's enabled Homo sapiens sapiens to get further. All the rest is but standing on the shoulders of giants (to quote one of the smartest monkeys who ever lived).
The SAM was a late, yes, but it took a relatively long time to finish, with its jazzy 256-colour graphics and twin disk controllers and so on. It was a lovely machine - I bought one, new, full price - but it was too little, too late. It came out in the 16-bit era and even an ST was far more computer for the money.
Sinkers should have based the Speccy 128 on the Timex Sinclair 2068 - just like the 128, the 2068 had bank-switched extra RAM, but you could page out the ROM; it had the same sound chip; but it also had better graphics, with a 512*192 mono mode and a 256*192 mode without attribute clash. Not as fancy as the SAM, no, but the 2068 shipped in 1983 - the 128 didn't appear until 1985. A TS2068-based 128 would have been a much more substantial improvement on the original Speccy than was the 128. Part of the design concept of the 2068, in allowing the ROM to be paged out for a flat 64K of RAM and a display which could natively do 64 columns of 8-pixel characters or 85 columns of 6-pixel ones, was to run CP/M.
Sinclair and Investronica could have had this out by 1984 or so.
Then, though Sinclair would, I suspect, have hated the idea, an '85 QL which was Speccy-compatible. Use the 2068's video chip and bung in something Z80-compatible instead of the QL's 8049 "Intelligent Peripheral Controller". The idea wasn't new - look at the Commodore 128, with a 6510 and a Z80 & 3 incompatible modes of operation: C64 mode, CP/M mode and C128 mode.
A QL with a Z80 in it could have offered a backwards-compatible Speccy mode, a CP/M mode and its own native whizzy mode as a new and trendy 16-bit machine to compete with the ST and Amiga. Because clever and desirable as the end-stage 8-bits were, frankly, you were better off with a 16-bit machine.
But even aside from the QL pipedream - I reckon if they'd run with the 2068 idea, they'd have kept a lot of market share that went to Commodore and Acorn, and thus would have been in a much more powerful position by the late 80s - rather than getting bought out by Amstrad in '86.
If my notional 1984 superSpectrum had appeared, with say an optional disk interface and CP/M, by '87 or '88 they could have been shipping floppy-based "Spectrum Pros" with 256K of RAM and a library of credible business apps: Wordstar, dBase II, Supercalc &c. Maybe the whole QL fiasco would never have happened. If Sinclair had not rushed out the QL early and had instead waited until after the other, expensive 16-bitters shipped, I wonder what they could have done. Something remarkable, I'd bet.
Absolutely, yes.
I have both an MP3 player and an MP3-capable smartphone, but I can read at least 10 times faster than I can listen to speech. Flat out, I can read several thousand words per minute. I hate listening to people talk when I can read instead, unless it's an actual live conversation there and then.
So it's a bit like the Bang & Olufsen "Serene" mobile, then?
Icky flash-driven official site or a review.
I think you're probably right there!
Sounds like you don't know Mac OS very well. Pretty much all the stuff you cite - OpenOffice, Firefox, whatever - could have been run natively under OS X. You can even run many xNix apps from the Fink or OpenDarwin projects, tho' native OS X versions are usually much preferable.
/and/ Windows - when you could easily have made a simpler system by removing a whole OS from the equation.
Including running W2K under Virtual PC.
I see no need for what is effectively a triple-boot machine - OS X (with Classic, quadruple-boot), Linux
There's not really much good reason for running Linux on a Mac - there are fewer drivers & proprietary apps in PPC form than x86 and OS X provides pretty much all the Unix goodness one could want.
The virtualisation idea isn't bad, but run W2K with up-to-date A/V and antispyware and so on, behind a hardware firewall, and it's pretty safe even today. Remove & replace all the MS internet apps and it's not bad at all.
If you know the history of MS, you already know that MS and its senior management are liars, cheats and thieves - it's documented and has been legally proved, in court.
Liars:
Bill gates told Paul Brainerd of Aldus to cancel Aldus' nearly-complete "Flintstone" wordprocessor for Windows because, Gates claimed, Word for Windows was about to ship. So Aldus threw away the code, wasted the effort and lost a powerful position in the market: first Windows WP, from the company that produced the excellent PageMaker DTP program. It hasn't been started yet. This is one major corporate CEO personally deceiving another, for personal and corporate gain.
Ask Aldus - but you can't. Its flagship products were bought out by Adobe and it went out of business.
Thieves:
MS stole the code of "DoubleSpace" (later renamed DriveSpace) from STAC's product Stacker. MS had been "evaluating" Stacker for inclusion in MS-DOS 6. Stac rejected the offered licensing terms; MS took the code anyway (MS-DOS 6.0). Stac sued, proved the code was copied, and won $200M. MS remove it (MS-DOS 6.21), rewrote the sections that were shown to be direct copies, renamed the product, and kept on going (MS-DOS 6.22).
Ask Stac - but you can't. It's gone out of business. With an admitted direct copy of its flagship product given away free with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 95, it went under.
Cheats:
MS compelled Central Point to license CP AntiVirus and CP Backup for inclusion in MS-DOS 6, under the sort of terms Stac rejected. (Do it, or we'll write our own versions anyway. No, you don't get any ongoing payment, but you can sell your version as a premium upgrade product.) Low one-off payment, all rights, no royalties, no comeback. It also knocked together an undelete utility, a defragmenter and a basic graphical file manager/program launcher based on IBM's DOSShell from PC DOS 4.0, thus giving away for free all Central Point's main products - Backup, Antivirus and PC Tools.
Ask Central Point how good the deal was for them. But you can't. They've gone under.
Cheats again:
MS hired the same team to write Video for Windows as Apple had used to write QuickTime's code for video playback in a window. The programmers did it the same way. Apple sued. Apple won.
Remember MS' $150M "investment" in Apple a few years back? No investment. That was another lie. It was punitive damages.
Cheats yet again:
MS wrote specific code into Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups to make it generate spurious errors if run on DR-DOS 6. Windows 3.1 actually worked fine on DR-DOS - better than on MS-DOS - but MS wanted to kill the competition, so it wrote routines to detect DR DOS, obfuscated the code and actively hid it in the Windows loader program, WIN.COM. DR sued and proved this in court. An acquaintance of mine, Geoff Chappel, was an expert witness, deconstructing and showing the code and the efforts to hide it.
DR went under. The product rights were sold to Caldera. Caldera continued to sue, and eventually won. But it was too late. Windows 95 included DOS, even though Caldera got it running just fine on DR-DOS in the labs, so you couldn't sell people DOS any more.
And cheats still!
You know what Caldera is doing now? It renamed itself SCO and is suing, well, anyone using Linux. E.g., IBM. Guess who funds this? Microsoft.
You could look at the petty, childish efforts to derail Sun's Java by adding proprietary incompatible extensions to the Windows Java Virtual Machine and then encouraging developers to use them (Visual J ). Then renaming the JVM to the MS VM, then dropping it altogether. This is not a company that cares about its customers. It cares about profits and killing the competition by any means possible, fair or foul, legal or illegal. It can afford to be sued, it can afford to buy off aggrieved competitors, and it's so big and so successful that it knows that the US government daren't touch it or
Yup. Amongst other things.
When someone doesn't understand one's point, repeating onesself, though natural, is unhelpful - it justs winds people up.
Yes, it's funny. Yes, it's scary.
No, it's not at all surprising.
This is the result of a whole generation of schoolkids who don't know how to do arithmetic. All they know how to do is work a calculator. These are not the same thing.
And it must be said that the customer here is really not very good at explaining the arithmetic. I understand that he is impatient, angry, resigned, but what he mostly does is repeat himself. He does not explain himself well at all.
The ROAD website has been there for ages. Certainly it was there in February last year - it's archived in the Wayback Machine from then. The screen images look like mockups to me and I doubt they have any real working hardware.
Which is a shame, because it looks like a great device in some ways & I'd rather like one.
Sticking with Entourage may be a problem, though.
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You might want to look at or evaluate these:
Crm4Mc 2.0
http://www.ibizzi.com/
DayChaser : Econ Technologies
http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/DayCha
DayLite : Marketcircle
http://www.marketcircle.com/
ecOrganizer
http://www.ecorganizer.com/
intuiware : HotPlan
http://www.intuiware.com/
Now Software : Now up to date
http://www.nowsoftware.com/
Organizer software by CSoftLabs
http://www.csoftlab.com/
Pure Mac : Personal Information Managers
http://www.pure-mac.com/pims.html
RadicalBreeze.com - Formation
http://www.radicalbreeze.com/formation/index.shtm
SOHO Organizer
http://www.chronosnet.com/Products/sohoorganizer.
OD4Contact
http://objective-decision.com/en/
I'm sure you're right, on both counts. I do know about how much they have erased. It's very sad but with the volume of stuff they produce one can see why they do it!
WIBNI they released everything they could that's left, though? At some point?
I checked. I thought it might be a typo for "80,000" or something.
But no. It's correct. "Nearly 80". For fifty years. That's one and a half per year, roughly. Not exactly a huge amount, is it?
OK, so, good step, could have interesting results. Not my personal thing but I'm sure it will appeal to lots of film students and home editor/directors and all sorts.
But it's hardly an overwhelming archive of the millions of hours the Beeb must have stored up, is it?