Now I guess the question is, "how much longer will Netpliance be in business?" - because at $299 + maybe only one or two months of "ongoing" monthly fees (haha!) it's a steal!
Once they bite the dust for real there won't be nobody to collect the money. Fuckedcompany.com doesn't have much mention of them yet...
This is be an excellent book. I started an ISP in 1994 with eight modems, two 386s, twenty Linux floppy disks and the first (yellow) edition of this book. I don't do much admin any more but I think I'll get it anyway just because it's a good read. Technical writing needs more literate authors like these guys (and the illustrations are good too).
I like to think of them as complementary products. By claiming the superiority of either you invite disappointment when you find yourself in a place serving only your second preference.
Beer is very much like sex - hardly any is all bad.
(My beer recommendation of the day: Chimay Blue Label, available at most premium markets. Just make sure to read the alcohol content off the label, and be careful. Also, in San Francisco, take yourself to Suppenkuche and try some Spaten Optimator. I don't know where else you can get it as it is usually a seaonal beer brewed for Lent. Same alcohol warning applies! Not to be taken in a Maas except by the very courageous.)
That's exactly right - and if you want another example to prove that point, look at the market share of PalmOS devices vs. Windows CE. The incredible amount of software available for the Palm is just like the Gameboy situation.
A small proportion of people want the coolest, fastest, most colorful gadget available. Most people want what satisfies their needs at the right price. Unfortunately for the first group, they aren't a big enough group to make devices like Windows CE a good proposition when you think about the proportionally higher R&D & production costs for their devices. (hence Philips dropping their Windows CE line) Fortunately, these devices are produced by engineers who mostly belong to that first group.
Of course the availability of software is also driven by the quality of the development tools. The Codewarrior IDE is excellent - you don't even need hardware to start work, the emulator is just as good as the real thing. The documentation from Palm is about the best I've seen for any platform. By contrast, Windows CE requires an add-on to VisualC++. In the early days you had to use assemblers and DOS to build for CE! And finding which Win32 API calls were actually present was largely a matter of guesswork. I wonder how manay developers were (like me) so disgusted by the Windows CE development environment that they switched to Palm and never looked back?
You're lucky enough to live in Canada, but if you were in the northern part of San Francisco you'd still have to...
Cause those IDIOTS at AT&T PROMISED I would get cartoon network, and then after it was connected said "oh sorry, about a year until we get it into your area."
How hard could it be to build one of these - why not an Open Source claw?
The basic need would be to generate keyscan codes, easily done with a PIC or similar. Getting a nice injection-moulded handrest would of course be harder, but I was just thinking of a row of five buttons at the top of the device (weapons), a space-bar like thing and maybe a horizontally-activated thumb button or two. With most games allowing reconfiguration you could just make it send static keycodes.
The next Gran Turismo will have a LOT to do with the success or failure of the PS2. The first GT was just awesome - I would rather play GT on a PS1 than Daytona in an arcade. GT2 was OK, but didn't live up to the expectations.
GT3 (or GT2000 as it is variously being called) will either disappoint literally millions, or sell millions. I don't think I'd much enjoy the pressure of having worked on that title... and to still have to wait months before it gets released.
Mr. Katz, you've always been against the mass stereotyping of geeks, such that I find it rude that you would do the same to real news outlets
You can say this if you like, but Katz has always been very much FOR the mass stereotyping of anyone reading Slashdot AS geeks. And he has claimed to speak for all of us "geeks" in almost every one of his pieces. I for one am sick of the label, and sick of my point of view being co-opted by this questionable "writer".
There always HAS been a series (16C84, 16F84) that can be reprogrammed, but there is an equivalent write-only device known as a One-Time-Programmable (or OTP) that is cheaper. That's the one you are likely to find in most consumer electronics devices because they are cheaper in quantity than the reprogrammable ones that would be useful to you or me.
Even in devices that may be flash upgradable, the PIC isn't likely to be the chip containing the flash where price is an issue to the designer.
OK, you say electric cars, but for aircraft the advantages that apply to cars would be even more attractive.
I've done a little electric aircraft RC modelling. They were almost as good as the "slimers" (various kinds of petrochemical fuels) but never quite, because the weight of the batteries always kept them from achieving the same power to weight ratios of otherly powered craft. Also they tend to have a run time of less than ten minutes, with performance rapidly dropping off towards the end. Until recently they were limited just to NiCd batteries, because of the high current draw required - LiIon and NiMH just couldn't dump the 80A that some of the big brushless motors like. Lightweight, high capacity batteries will make internal combustion models a thing of the past.
Extend that idea to passenger aircraft... For a start, it would make them much less flammable (remember KLM in 1973?), and if people were farsighted enough to get a solar infrastructure built for recharging, much, much cheaper.
Even possibly affordable enough for personal ownership. And of course very quiet, and almost pollution-free - not the sort of thing a neighbour would complain about at all.
You can't buy the Radeon AIW yet. You have to run your PC while watching TV. That may not be a problem while watching "Friends" but what about Aliens 2? I don't want to hear that fan humming when they're sneaking around in the pod room.
AND GeForce already beats it in 3D, with not even an announced product from ATI to come. I think it's good, but not the best solution.
You are uninformed. As a H1-B worker I can change jobs, it just requires a delay while the new employer handles the transfer of the visa. That takes a couple of months, maximum. I can ask for more money - in fact I just had a review and was given a good salary increase and extra stock on top of my already-generous grant. Extra holiday to go home and visit my family? Four weeks, not a problem.
You seem to be underestimating the demand for labor in the professions that qualify for this kind of visa - there are still nowhere near enough good employees available! I interview people every week (current and potential H1-B candidates as well as US citizens) and a lot of them aren't fit to maintain a Macintosh. It's not like we're not offering good money, stock, health plans, all kinds of other benefits - we get plenty of applicants, just not many quality applicants.
If the USA wants to maintain technical leadership, expansion is exactly what the H1-B program needs. The countries losing the professionals that qualify certainly wish they weren't all leaving for greener pa$ture$.
If an industry wants something, that means it's going to screw people over.
Knee-jerk, jealous leftist rubbish. I'm sorry if this is not the case where you work (if you ARE a H1-B worker) but at my company I've never seen employees treated so well. If people aren't happy they are NOT productive - and if they are unhappy enough they leave. It costs money to train new hires - screwing people over doesn't even make business sense.
The _only_ wire to use for mods like this is kynar-insulation 30 SWG wire-wrap stuff. Solders well, insulation doesn't melt off, and it's fine and strong. It bends into shape (and holds that shape) then glues down to a PCB easily when you want to neaten everything up. You can also get magic little strippers that nip off the insulation perfectly... but they're about $50 and only work for one specific wire size. If you don't buy the stripper, be careful, it's easy to nick the wire and make a weak point.
Ah, the lost art of wire-wrap. The last thing I did in wire-wrap was a PC ISA bus 16550 serial card.
If those 22" Cinema Display LCDs would work on a PC (without messing around - I know they _sort of_ work with some cards) I'd have one in a NY minute. Well, Fedex overnight anyway. It is the best 22" monitor available, and for the desktop maybe the best monitor period. And that's even compared it to the Sony GDM-F500 that I'm using to write this post.
Not even the 17" SGI comes close. Hell, even the Apple 15" flat screens are the best monitors available in that size range. I saw one at Fry's two nights ago and wanted it even though it's a lot smaller than what I have now. How much revenue are Apple losing out on because they didn't stick to the industry standard there?
No way do you "have to" get an Apple monitor with the Cube... it works just fine with a SVGA. The connectors on Macs have been SVGA standard for years now - the newer ones have the digital flat panel interface as well as SVGA.
The Cube is a good machine because it can stay on all the time and you never notice the fan, because there isn't one. Add the fact that the sound doesn't work (no driver yet outside of MacOS) and you have a totally silent machine. The full-size G4 is better value. An Athlon is better value still if your main OS will be Linux, but it is much more noisy too.
Not acting surprised, warning others. See the difference?
Part of the problem is that the "new world" machines can't use BootX and must use yaboot. The bigger part of the problem is that the dual-G4 machines and the cube are different enough so that the existing kernels can't boot - the symptom is messages about missing interrupts during boot from the distribution CD. The soution is to create a small boot partition and to install yaboot and an updated kernel on that partition, then to boot from it, in the same way that you can boot from floppies created by diskimg in DOS.
Full instructions for this process are on the linuxppc.com home page (that's different to linuxppc.org),
This fixes the first problem, having to use a boot partition. The other half of the fix is to use the ibook kernel rather than the default one - a little yaboot.conf editing is needed, but it can be done.
And that is why MacOS X breaks a LinuxPPC install on that kind of machine.
Be careful if you decide to install MacOS X on a Mac with LinuxPPC on it - I did NOT tell it to touch my partitions, but it did, causing the partitions to become inaccessible. I didn't try to find out what was wrong, just put Linux back and put X in the bottom of the drawer.
If you have another hard drive at all, that would be the safest place to try out MacOS X. I might install it again on a rainy day.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I guess the question is, "how much longer will Netpliance be in business?" - because at $299 + maybe only one or two months of "ongoing" monthly fees (haha!) it's a steal!
Once they bite the dust for real there won't be nobody to collect the money. Fuckedcompany.com doesn't have much mention of them yet...
This is be an excellent book. I started an ISP in 1994 with eight modems, two 386s, twenty Linux floppy disks and the first (yellow) edition of this book. I don't do much admin any more but I think I'll get it anyway just because it's a good read. Technical writing needs more literate authors like these guys (and the illustrations are good too).
Speaking of parody T-shirts and Ebay...
I like to think of them as complementary products. By claiming the superiority of either you invite disappointment when you find yourself in a place serving only your second preference.
Beer is very much like sex - hardly any is all bad.
(My beer recommendation of the day: Chimay Blue Label, available at most premium markets. Just make sure to read the alcohol content off the label, and be careful. Also, in San Francisco, take yourself to Suppenkuche and try some Spaten Optimator. I don't know where else you can get it as it is usually a seaonal beer brewed for Lent. Same alcohol warning applies! Not to be taken in a Maas except by the very courageous.)
That's exactly right - and if you want another example to prove that point, look at the market share of PalmOS devices vs. Windows CE. The incredible amount of software available for the Palm is just like the Gameboy situation.
A small proportion of people want the coolest, fastest, most colorful gadget available. Most people want what satisfies their needs at the right price. Unfortunately for the first group, they aren't a big enough group to make devices like Windows CE a good proposition when you think about the proportionally higher R&D & production costs for their devices. (hence Philips dropping their Windows CE line) Fortunately, these devices are produced by engineers who mostly belong to that first group.
Of course the availability of software is also driven by the quality of the development tools. The Codewarrior IDE is excellent - you don't even need hardware to start work, the emulator is just as good as the real thing. The documentation from Palm is about the best I've seen for any platform. By contrast, Windows CE requires an add-on to VisualC++. In the early days you had to use assemblers and DOS to build for CE! And finding which Win32 API calls were actually present was largely a matter of guesswork. I wonder how manay developers were (like me) so disgusted by the Windows CE development environment that they switched to Palm and never looked back?
Ah hell... I'll just get a sattelite dish..
You're lucky enough to live in Canada, but if you were in the northern part of San Francisco you'd still have to...
Cause those IDIOTS at AT&T PROMISED I would get cartoon network, and then after it was connected said "oh sorry, about a year until we get it into your area."
How hard could it be to build one of these - why not an Open Source claw?
The basic need would be to generate keyscan codes, easily done with a PIC or similar. Getting a nice injection-moulded handrest would of course be harder, but I was just thinking of a row of five buttons at the top of the device (weapons), a space-bar like thing and maybe a horizontally-activated thumb button or two. With most games allowing reconfiguration you could just make it send static keycodes.
Might take a week to do? Wish I had one free.
The next Gran Turismo will have a LOT to do with the success or failure of the PS2. The first GT was just awesome - I would rather play GT on a PS1 than Daytona in an arcade. GT2 was OK, but didn't live up to the expectations.
GT3 (or GT2000 as it is variously being called) will either disappoint literally millions, or sell millions. I don't think I'd much enjoy the pressure of having worked on that title... and to still have to wait months before it gets released.
Mr. Katz, you've always been against the mass stereotyping of geeks, such that I find it rude that you would do the same to real news outlets
You can say this if you like, but Katz has always been very much FOR the mass stereotyping of anyone reading Slashdot AS geeks. And he has claimed to speak for all of us "geeks" in almost every one of his pieces. I for one am sick of the label, and sick of my point of view being co-opted by this questionable "writer".
Not bad code - are you looking for a job? :-)
"Remember, it's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom."
Bill Hicks.
There always HAS been a series (16C84, 16F84) that can be reprogrammed, but there is an equivalent write-only device known as a One-Time-Programmable (or OTP) that is cheaper. That's the one you are likely to find in most consumer electronics devices because they are cheaper in quantity than the reprogrammable ones that would be useful to you or me.
Even in devices that may be flash upgradable, the PIC isn't likely to be the chip containing the flash where price is an issue to the designer.
Public acceptance of this may not be too bad.
:-)
Now, just imagine the disaster that the penis phone might have been.
OK, you say electric cars, but for aircraft the advantages that apply to cars would be even more attractive.
I've done a little electric aircraft RC modelling. They were almost as good as the "slimers" (various kinds of petrochemical fuels) but never quite, because the weight of the batteries always kept them from achieving the same power to weight ratios of otherly powered craft. Also they tend to have a run time of less than ten minutes, with performance rapidly dropping off towards the end. Until recently they were limited just to NiCd batteries, because of the high current draw required - LiIon and NiMH just couldn't dump the 80A that some of the big brushless motors like. Lightweight, high capacity batteries will make internal combustion models a thing of the past.
Extend that idea to passenger aircraft... For a start, it would make them much less flammable (remember KLM in 1973?), and if people were farsighted enough to get a solar infrastructure built for recharging, much, much cheaper.
Even possibly affordable enough for personal ownership. And of course very quiet, and almost pollution-free - not the sort of thing a neighbour would complain about at all.
You can't buy the Radeon AIW yet. You have to run your PC while watching TV. That may not be a problem while watching "Friends" but what about Aliens 2? I don't want to hear that fan humming when they're sneaking around in the pod room.
AND GeForce already beats it in 3D, with not even an announced product from ATI to come. I think it's good, but not the best solution.
The H-1B system has exhausted the entire world's supply of skilled professionals? Hardly!
You are uninformed. As a H1-B worker I can change jobs, it just requires a delay while the new employer handles the transfer of the visa. That takes a couple of months, maximum. I can ask for more money - in fact I just had a review and was given a good salary increase and extra stock on top of my already-generous grant. Extra holiday to go home and visit my family? Four weeks, not a problem.
You seem to be underestimating the demand for labor in the professions that qualify for this kind of visa - there are still nowhere near enough good employees available! I interview people every week (current and potential H1-B candidates as well as US citizens) and a lot of them aren't fit to maintain a Macintosh. It's not like we're not offering good money, stock, health plans, all kinds of other benefits - we get plenty of applicants, just not many quality applicants.
If the USA wants to maintain technical leadership, expansion is exactly what the H1-B program needs. The countries losing the professionals that qualify certainly wish they weren't all leaving for greener pa$ture$.
If an industry wants something, that means it's going to screw people over.
Knee-jerk, jealous leftist rubbish. I'm sorry if this is not the case where you work (if you ARE a H1-B worker) but at my company I've never seen employees treated so well. If people aren't happy they are NOT productive - and if they are unhappy enough they leave. It costs money to train new hires - screwing people over doesn't even make business sense.
I have a catalog whith these strippers ...
"C.K. Precision Wire Stripper" $39, cat no. 125-500
at www.jensentools.com.
The _only_ wire to use for mods like this is kynar-insulation 30 SWG wire-wrap stuff. Solders well, insulation doesn't melt off, and it's fine and strong. It bends into shape (and holds that shape) then glues down to a PCB easily when you want to neaten everything up. You can also get magic little strippers that nip off the insulation perfectly... but they're about $50 and only work for one specific wire size. If you don't buy the stripper, be careful, it's easy to nick the wire and make a weak point.
Ah, the lost art of wire-wrap. The last thing I did in wire-wrap was a PC ISA bus 16550 serial card.
If those 22" Cinema Display LCDs would work on a PC (without messing around - I know they _sort of_ work with some cards) I'd have one in a NY minute. Well, Fedex overnight anyway. It is the best 22" monitor available, and for the desktop maybe the best monitor period. And that's even compared it to the Sony GDM-F500 that I'm using to write this post.
Not even the 17" SGI comes close. Hell, even the Apple 15" flat screens are the best monitors available in that size range. I saw one at Fry's two nights ago and wanted it even though it's a lot smaller than what I have now. How much revenue are Apple losing out on because they didn't stick to the industry standard there?
No way do you "have to" get an Apple monitor with the Cube... it works just fine with a SVGA. The connectors on Macs have been SVGA standard for years now - the newer ones have the digital flat panel interface as well as SVGA.
The Cube is a good machine because it can stay on all the time and you never notice the fan, because there isn't one. Add the fact that the sound doesn't work (no driver yet outside of MacOS) and you have a totally silent machine. The full-size G4 is better value. An Athlon is better value still if your main OS will be Linux, but it is much more noisy too.
The link is too long.. go here first then to the link for the new world machines at the end of the page.
Not acting surprised, warning others. See the difference?
Part of the problem is that the "new world" machines can't use BootX and must use yaboot. The bigger part of the problem is that the dual-G4 machines and the cube are different enough so that the existing kernels can't boot - the symptom is messages about missing interrupts during boot from the distribution CD. The soution is to create a small boot partition and to install yaboot and an updated kernel on that partition, then to boot from it, in the same way that you can boot from floppies created by diskimg in DOS.
Full instructions for this process are on the linuxppc.com home page (that's different to linuxppc.org),
Booting on a New World Mac.
This fixes the first problem, having to use a boot partition. The other half of the fix is to use the ibook kernel rather than the default one - a little yaboot.conf editing is needed, but it can be done.
And that is why MacOS X breaks a LinuxPPC install on that kind of machine.
Be careful if you decide to install MacOS X on a Mac with LinuxPPC on it - I did NOT tell it to touch my partitions, but it did, causing the partitions to become inaccessible. I didn't try to find out what was wrong, just put Linux back and put X in the bottom of the drawer.
If you have another hard drive at all, that would be the safest place to try out MacOS X. I might install it again on a rainy day.
Journalism is the art of reworking three or four stories ad infinitum while ignoring the endless stream of new submissions.
/. topic.
This century, Microsoft will be a featured
This month, we feature CueCat
This week we'll cover X-box.
(and we promise not to miss even the most trivial of GPL violations. Hypocrites? No! _Our_ licenses are inviolable. CueCat wanted to be free.)