That's an old-new-economy model. In order to succeed in the new-new-economy model companies will need to proactively seek out and deliver goods to consumers, collecting money later. Only yesterday the Fedex man delivered a Christmas tree, a waffle iron, 100 unopened wax packs of baseball cards (may contain valuable rookie cards!) and a nordic skiing machine. The week before I got a Honda Civic, a Tivo and two different steak knife sets.
Yes, and it's damn ugly - Terminus showed that. Terminus deserved much more success than it had, but among Windows and Mac users used to polish (you got all 3 platforms in one box) it must have looked like superior shareware rather than a prime-time new release.
I don't know why they didn't take a little more trouble with fonts but eye candy counts in computer games - look at Abrash's comments regarding lens flare in yesteday's article about the X-box. Gamers want stuff to look cool... and while Xterm fonts are not as jarring in a space sim as they might be in Mario Carts, they still look wrong in a game.
Windows, for all its faults, is the result of many years of focus groups and refinement. There is a lot to be learned from Windows. I don't believe that Linux developers should just wrap the Win32 API to port, but I don't believe in looking different just to look different than windows either. KDevelop is an example - it looks good, but so many little things are wrong that I can't use it. MS Dev Studio is GREAT. Trouble is, KDevelop only copies it some of the way. Multiple document windows are one big feature missing.
If you look at all the various systems around, like Windows, X, Mac, you see them all converging to a sort of standard. Even BeOS, starting from scratch, didn't come up with anything substantially different. Try and change it much (MacOS X dock, fr'example) and people complain. It may be that there is a Right Way to do a GUI and that all these systems are converging on it.
What is even more important is that the systems named, with the possible exception of vanilla X, all have common interfaces. This is why the split between KDE and Gnome is so tragic. To become adopted by large numbers of people systems need all their applications to work in the same way. It's OK allowing text editors like emacs to have their own command keys, because nobody is going to change a devoted emacs user, but at least applications should try to duplicate functions on familiar standards - like standardizing in crtl-X for cut and ctrl-V for paste. Right now some of my linux apps use crtl-X and some like alt-X and some like something else. This is bad.
Apple's holy User Interface Guidelines established a common interface standard that might not have been the best in every single situation but allowed people to learn how to efficiently drive one application, and therefore know all the rest too. Great stuff! Linux needs that. But how would this be done, since nobody controls Linux?
This, more than any other single thing, would remove a large barrier to adoption by cutting down on the retraining or loss of productivity experienced when leaving one familiar system for another.
(And if any demented freak should work out a way to wrap MFC and port that to Linux... well, I won't have to hunt them down, the market will ignore them.)
-1 Flamebait to you CmdrTaco, for posting this story. We know what happens whenever anyone mentions Rambus.
In online shopping today I noticed that Anandtech now has a Rambus system in their dream configuration. He says that Rambus and SDRAM are approaching price parity, mostly because the price of SDRAM has been going up. Is Rambus' plan succeeding?
It is probably essential for them to take on all possible adversaries in these legal battles.
Did you ever do it on the display computers in a big department store? That was even more fun. I never used the bell... just a PRINT with something like
"YOU COULD BUY ME HERE, BUT WHY PAY $300 MORE?"
The message always lasted longer if it didn't catch the attention of the sales staff.
Silly buggers. If they hadn't posted cease-and-desists, then this story probably wouldn't have made it to/., and I wouldn't have just spent five minutes archiving safely away all the CueCat hacking pages and code archives.
If you buy a book online, like at Amazon, you have 30 days to return it for full credit. Of course if you just find the book mediocre you might not bother to do that, because it involves a trip to the post office, repackaging, etc.
If delivery is electronic, you have nothing to return, you just delete it.
Who is to say that the 30% of people (or at least some part of that number) that King says didn't pay, just didn't like his book - and with the ease of "returning" in this form of delivery, did just that?
Hate Microsoft all you like. Don't deny them the same legal process anyone else is entitled to - no matter what you think you might know about what they did or how they did it.
And then if they wind up broken-up or subject to some other remedy, justice is seen to be done and they have nothing left to complain about. It should be obvious that this court case has been about PR as much as law. ("Freedom to Innovate" etc...)
Sure the lawyers get rich, but when hasn't this been the case?
An Altivec GCC is available from here. It works, but you may need to put your own headers in place in some instances. You have to sign up for a mailing list to get access to the archives.
but - don't bother buying a G4 just for Linux. I have a G4 Cube at 450MHz. Although the system is good, reasonable video, silent except for the hard disk, the much-hyped G4 is at most 60% of the speed of my 800MHz Athlon, and of course cost more. Also, unless someone knows of a driver, the cool speakers it comes with don't work except under MacOS. Great keyboard though.
Apple's much-quoted benchmarks may be true for Photoshop, but not for compiling a kernel.
If you like science fiction at all, buy this book! The worst kind of science fiction goes on for ever about the intricate details of amazing future technology. The best kind takes it for granted and gets on with the characters and the story, and this is one of the best kind. A good and accurate review of one of my all-time favorites.
Are the athletes required to sign any legal agreement waiving their rights to speak about the experience? If not, why not just tell the IOC to go to hell?
As a former functionary of Franco's fascist Spanish government, J. A. Samaranch might feel like shooting dissenters, but that's not allowed any more.
Sony GDM-F500R... 100% flat 21" BNC AND D-sub-15 inputs. Just what the doctor ordered to avoid those cheap nasty KVMs. Of course I have the USB KVM to switch between the PowerPC, the Thinkpad, the TV tuner and the Athlon...
"If you have the means I highly recommend you pick one up" - F. Bueller.
Yeah, Kdevelop 1.0 didn't impress me, and the 2.0 candidate is a buggy mess right now. I'm writing embedded C, and the C++ browser is not useful.
I guess what would be really good is an open source Visual Slickedit... I'll take another look when they say it's done.
(Besides that, I don't like KDE or GNOME - plain X, with icewm for me)
This is great - but what would be even better is a MS Visual C++ killer for the Linux desktop. The article looks very promising, and I hope they do it right. A truly awesome IDE is more important (and contributes more to programmer productivity, and programmer enjoyment) than just about anything else.
I'm very happy to see them basing some of their product on Qt - in my (brief) exerience it's great.
I've been looking at all the Linux IDEs over the past week and they all have their problems. A lot just aren't available for PowerPC. Most are ugly, clumsy, or are simply a poor wrapper around GCC/GDB. The biggest problem is that integration of the debugger justs isn't as good as DevStudios. Maybe the best of all the ones I have used is Code Crusader/Code Medic - but at best it's 75% of what Microsoft offers.
The lack of a great IDE is a significant disincentive for people to switch platforms. Sure, we can all do makefiles and command-line gdb, but I don't know many professional programmers who don't acknowledge DevStudio as one of the best environments they have ever worked in... and once you've had the best it's hard to give it up, even if you do prefer X-windows to MS-windows.
No - unfortunately in this business, pioneers often aren't rewarded at all. 3dfx were lucky to get as much as they did! Nvidia prove that there are two kinds of technology companies, the quick and the dead.
When the Voodoo II was current I was using a Matrox Millennium II with a Voodoo II - best of both worlds. The Matrox was an uncompromising professional card, laid out by engineers who understood analog and how to produce a sharp, sharp signal. The Voodoo was the best 3d around, of course.
Today you get all in one cards, but a lot of them are still not as good as the Matrox was. It's trial and (expensive) error to get one that's as satisfying in a text editor as it is in Tomb Raider. Anyone care to name a combined card, maybe a GeForce II or Radeon, that is as sharp as it should be in the highest resolutions?
The problem goes away when LCD monitors become affordable in 21/22" sizes, but I think that's at least a year away .
WAP is documented. Download Phone.com or Nokia's SDK and try out what you want to do. Now is that so hard?
WAP does not specify a speed. WAP works on 2.5 & 3G devices. Packet, Circuit and SMS networks. And probably a couple of others I have forgotten.
When WAP (and its predecessor, HDML) came out 9600 WAS the limit. It made sense to trim the fat out of HTML. Now that it's not so important you see the adoption of xHTML and TCP, as we saw in last week's/. story. The technology adapts as the hardware becomes more capable.
It's plain that you don't like WAP, but equally plain that you don't have any good reason. If you thought through the state of mobile devices at the time WAP was introduced you would realize that it made a lot of sense at the time.
It is important to realize that WAP does not specify screen size or color capability, data rate, memory capacity, number of buttons or anything else. What you think of as WAP is just one example of a WAP device.
Here's your basic problem - you're thinking backwards.
If a web site is accepting advertising it is a business. That web site sells advertising to other businesses - one of them sells computers. The web site selling the advertising does something one of its customers doesn't like. It loses the customer. That's how business works. Lets say I'm doing business with Patrick Naughton, and I don't like something he did. Even though it's nothing to do with the business, I have the right to terminate the relationship.
Your problem is that you don't understand that a web site accepting advertising is a business. It's not a crusading voice of freedom. There is no obligation for anyone to buy advertising from that business.
In response to your question about Ford - that's a choice for Ford to make. Time magazine is a business too, selling advertising. Ford would not be at fault if for any reason they chose to buy advertising elsewhere. If Time chose to change editorial policy to make Ford happy and therefore attract their business, that would be their failing, and show a lack of journalistic integrity.
It's not evil to choose what product your business buys in order to advertise. It is evil to present something as "journalism" if your content is distorted to make your customers (the advertisers) happy. Understand now?
The cube is great. Silent, powerful linuxppc machine.
iMac almost certainly saved Apple.
Newton was good, but would never have been a commercial success at the price they asked.
Sell out Apple to Microsoft? Hardly. Secure the future of development of the world's most popular application software while gaining needed investment $$$.
And you didn't mention, but I will - the new keyboard shipping with the G4s is one of the best I have ever used, and is just as happy on a PC editing visual studio as it is under MacOS or linuxppc.
I could go on... arguments involving Macs are never worthwhile.
I don't see how this is a big deal at all. First, MO is kind of marginal in it's usefulness. Expensive media, slow data rates, drivers required. We all burn CDs now don't we? What's so compelling about 1.3G MO drives if DVD-RAM is around the corner?
If anything the use of large media is in decline, with the advent of online drive websites, faster internet access and even home LANs becoming more common. I burn CDs to share photos. For backing up data I slot in another hard drive, or copy it over the net to somewhere else.
This probably doesn't pose a big threat to our freedom to copy anything at all, just a threat to the appeal of these MO drives.
For some inflight entertainment, send the following email to the terminal of someone a few seats away from you:
"If you don't get the back out of your seat out of my face RIGHT NOW, I am going to squeeze my ranch dressing down the back of your neck. You have been warned."
Obviously. The point is not that it should. The point is that if it was produced with the same regard for memory footprint as an embedded system then it would need nothing like 128M. Or even 32M.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an old-new-economy model. In order to succeed in the new-new-economy model companies will need to proactively seek out and deliver goods to consumers, collecting money later. Only yesterday the Fedex man delivered a Christmas tree, a waffle iron, 100 unopened wax packs of baseball cards (may contain valuable rookie cards!) and a nordic skiing machine. The week before I got a Honda Civic, a Tivo and two different steak knife sets.
I hope all this stuff won't cost too much.
Yes, and it's damn ugly - Terminus showed that. Terminus deserved much more success than it had, but among Windows and Mac users used to polish (you got all 3 platforms in one box) it must have looked like superior shareware rather than a prime-time new release.
I don't know why they didn't take a little more trouble with fonts but eye candy counts in computer games - look at Abrash's comments regarding lens flare in yesteday's article about the X-box. Gamers want stuff to look cool... and while Xterm fonts are not as jarring in a space sim as they might be in Mario Carts, they still look wrong in a game.
Windows, for all its faults, is the result of many years of focus groups and refinement. There is a lot to be learned from Windows. I don't believe that Linux developers should just wrap the Win32 API to port, but I don't believe in looking different just to look different than windows either. KDevelop is an example - it looks good, but so many little things are wrong that I can't use it. MS Dev Studio is GREAT. Trouble is, KDevelop only copies it some of the way. Multiple document windows are one big feature missing.
If you look at all the various systems around, like Windows, X, Mac, you see them all converging to a sort of standard. Even BeOS, starting from scratch, didn't come up with anything substantially different. Try and change it much (MacOS X dock, fr'example) and people complain. It may be that there is a Right Way to do a GUI and that all these systems are converging on it.
What is even more important is that the systems named, with the possible exception of vanilla X, all have common interfaces. This is why the split between KDE and Gnome is so tragic. To become adopted by large numbers of people systems need all their applications to work in the same way. It's OK allowing text editors like emacs to have their own command keys, because nobody is going to change a devoted emacs user, but at least applications should try to duplicate functions on familiar standards - like standardizing in crtl-X for cut and ctrl-V for paste. Right now some of my linux apps use crtl-X and some like alt-X and some like something else. This is bad.
Apple's holy User Interface Guidelines established a common interface standard that might not have been the best in every single situation but allowed people to learn how to efficiently drive one application, and therefore know all the rest too. Great stuff! Linux needs that. But how would this be done, since nobody controls Linux?
This, more than any other single thing, would remove a large barrier to adoption by cutting down on the retraining or loss of productivity experienced when leaving one familiar system for another.
(And if any demented freak should work out a way to wrap MFC and port that to Linux... well, I won't have to hunt them down, the market will ignore them.)
Yes - I ordered the 649D system. :-)
-1 Flamebait to you CmdrTaco, for posting this story. We know what happens whenever anyone mentions Rambus.
In online shopping today I noticed that Anandtech now has a Rambus system in their dream configuration. He says that Rambus and SDRAM are approaching price parity, mostly because the price of SDRAM has been going up. Is Rambus' plan succeeding?
It is probably essential for them to take on all possible adversaries in these legal battles.
Did you ever do it on the display computers in a big department store? That was even more fun. I never used the bell... just a PRINT with something like
"YOU COULD BUY ME HERE, BUT WHY PAY $300 MORE?"
The message always lasted longer if it didn't catch the attention of the sales staff.
Silly buggers. If they hadn't posted cease-and-desists, then this story probably wouldn't have made it to /., and I wouldn't have just spent five minutes archiving safely away all the CueCat hacking pages and code archives.
Didn't anyone learn ANYTHING from DeCSS?
One other thing about George Lucas... everyone loves to say how rich he is, but Andrew Lloyd Webber makes him look like a beggar.
Well, it would REALLY spoil the surprise (and maybe even stop people seeing the film) if it was known that in part 2, Jar-Jar goes into Jedi training.
"Meesa no try! Meesa do!"
Wouldn't be much of a change. I've never seen a politician that wasn't a karma whore.
If you buy a book online, like at Amazon, you have 30 days to return it for full credit. Of course if you just find the book mediocre you might not bother to do that, because it involves a trip to the post office, repackaging, etc.
If delivery is electronic, you have nothing to return, you just delete it.
Who is to say that the 30% of people (or at least some part of that number) that King says didn't pay, just didn't like his book - and with the ease of "returning" in this form of delivery, did just that?
Hate Microsoft all you like. Don't deny them the same legal process anyone else is entitled to - no matter what you think you might know about what they did or how they did it.
And then if they wind up broken-up or subject to some other remedy, justice is seen to be done and they have nothing left to complain about. It should be obvious that this court case has been about PR as much as law. ("Freedom to Innovate" etc...)
Sure the lawyers get rich, but when hasn't this been the case?
An Altivec GCC is available from here. It works, but you may need to put your own headers in place in some instances. You have to sign up for a mailing list to get access to the archives.
but - don't bother buying a G4 just for Linux. I have a G4 Cube at 450MHz. Although the system is good, reasonable video, silent except for the hard disk, the much-hyped G4 is at most 60% of the speed of my 800MHz Athlon, and of course cost more. Also, unless someone knows of a driver, the cool speakers it comes with don't work except under MacOS. Great keyboard though.
Apple's much-quoted benchmarks may be true for Photoshop, but not for compiling a kernel.
If you like science fiction at all, buy this book! The worst kind of science fiction goes on for ever about the intricate details of amazing future technology. The best kind takes it for granted and gets on with the characters and the story, and this is one of the best kind. A good and accurate review of one of my all-time favorites.
Are the athletes required to sign any legal agreement waiving their rights to speak about the experience? If not, why not just tell the IOC to go to hell?
As a former functionary of Franco's fascist Spanish government, J. A. Samaranch might feel like shooting dissenters, but that's not allowed any more.
Sony GDM-F500R... 100% flat 21" BNC AND D-sub-15 inputs. Just what the doctor ordered to avoid those cheap nasty KVMs. Of course I have the USB KVM to switch between the PowerPC, the Thinkpad, the TV tuner and the Athlon...
"If you have the means I highly recommend you pick one up" - F. Bueller.
Yeah, Kdevelop 1.0 didn't impress me, and the 2.0 candidate is a buggy mess right now. I'm writing embedded C, and the C++ browser is not useful.
I guess what would be really good is an open source Visual Slickedit... I'll take another look when they say it's done.
(Besides that, I don't like KDE or GNOME - plain X, with icewm for me)
This is great - but what would be even better is a MS Visual C++ killer for the Linux desktop. The article looks very promising, and I hope they do it right. A truly awesome IDE is more important (and contributes more to programmer productivity, and programmer enjoyment) than just about anything else.
I'm very happy to see them basing some of their product on Qt - in my (brief) exerience it's great.
I've been looking at all the Linux IDEs over the past week and they all have their problems. A lot just aren't available for PowerPC. Most are ugly, clumsy, or are simply a poor wrapper around GCC/GDB. The biggest problem is that integration of the debugger justs isn't as good as DevStudios. Maybe the best of all the ones I have used is Code Crusader/Code Medic - but at best it's 75% of what Microsoft offers.
The lack of a great IDE is a significant disincentive for people to switch platforms. Sure, we can all do makefiles and command-line gdb, but I don't know many professional programmers who don't acknowledge DevStudio as one of the best environments they have ever worked in... and once you've had the best it's hard to give it up, even if you do prefer X-windows to MS-windows.
No - unfortunately in this business, pioneers often aren't rewarded at all. 3dfx were lucky to get as much as they did! Nvidia prove that there are two kinds of technology companies, the quick and the dead.
When the Voodoo II was current I was using a Matrox Millennium II with a Voodoo II - best of both worlds. The Matrox was an uncompromising professional card, laid out by engineers who understood analog and how to produce a sharp, sharp signal. The Voodoo was the best 3d around, of course.
Today you get all in one cards, but a lot of them are still not as good as the Matrox was. It's trial and (expensive) error to get one that's as satisfying in a text editor as it is in Tomb Raider. Anyone care to name a combined card, maybe a GeForce II or Radeon, that is as sharp as it should be in the highest resolutions?
The problem goes away when LCD monitors become affordable in 21/22" sizes, but I think that's at least a year away .
WAP does not specify a speed. WAP works on 2.5 & 3G devices. Packet, Circuit and SMS networks. And probably a couple of others I have forgotten.
When WAP (and its predecessor, HDML) came out 9600 WAS the limit. It made sense to trim the fat out of HTML. Now that it's not so important you see the adoption of xHTML and TCP, as we saw in last week's
It's plain that you don't like WAP, but equally plain that you don't have any good reason. If you thought through the state of mobile devices at the time WAP was introduced you would realize that it made a lot of sense at the time.
It is important to realize that WAP does not specify screen size or color capability, data rate, memory capacity, number of buttons or anything else. What you think of as WAP is just one example of a WAP device.
Here's your basic problem - you're thinking backwards.
If a web site is accepting advertising it is a business. That web site sells advertising to other businesses - one of them sells computers. The web site selling the advertising does something one of its customers doesn't like. It loses the customer. That's how business works. Lets say I'm doing business with Patrick Naughton, and I don't like something he did. Even though it's nothing to do with the business, I have the right to terminate the relationship.
Your problem is that you don't understand that a web site accepting advertising is a business. It's not a crusading voice of freedom. There is no obligation for anyone to buy advertising from that business.
In response to your question about Ford - that's a choice for Ford to make. Time magazine is a business too, selling advertising. Ford would not be at fault if for any reason they chose to buy advertising elsewhere. If Time chose to change editorial policy to make Ford happy and therefore attract their business, that would be their failing, and show a lack of journalistic integrity.
It's not evil to choose what product your business buys in order to advertise. It is evil to present something as "journalism" if your content is distorted to make your customers (the advertisers) happy. Understand now?
Half of the things you complain about are good.
The cube is great. Silent, powerful linuxppc machine.
iMac almost certainly saved Apple.
Newton was good, but would never have been a commercial success at the price they asked.
Sell out Apple to Microsoft? Hardly. Secure the future of development of the world's most popular application software while gaining needed investment $$$.
And you didn't mention, but I will - the new keyboard shipping with the G4s is one of the best I have ever used, and is just as happy on a PC editing visual studio as it is under MacOS or linuxppc.
I could go on... arguments involving Macs are never worthwhile.
I don't see how this is a big deal at all. First, MO is kind of marginal in it's usefulness. Expensive media, slow data rates, drivers required. We all burn CDs now don't we? What's so compelling about 1.3G MO drives if DVD-RAM is around the corner?
If anything the use of large media is in decline, with the advent of online drive websites, faster internet access and even home LANs becoming more common. I burn CDs to share photos. For backing up data I slot in another hard drive, or copy it over the net to somewhere else.
This probably doesn't pose a big threat to our freedom to copy anything at all, just a threat to the appeal of these MO drives.
For some inflight entertainment, send the following email to the terminal of someone a few seats away from you:
"If you don't get the back out of your seat out of my face RIGHT NOW, I am going to squeeze my ranch dressing down the back of your neck. You have been warned."
Obviously. The point is not that it should. The point is that if it was produced with the same regard for memory footprint as an embedded system then it would need nothing like 128M. Or even 32M.