Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
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Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
Probably less than you might think. While our parents were doing boring crap such as wordprocessing on their drab IBM PC, we were hacking away on our Sinclairs, Commodores, Ataris, Amigas, Dragons, Tandys, Amstrads, Acorns, etc.
Quick generation check: what will happen with the screen if I'll type POKE 53280, 0 on a commodore-64?;-)
You are so wrong about that. What Bill Gates (or at least Microsoft) did was to give computing to the masses. The PC revolution was completely Microsoft driven. They made stuff simple.
Sorry, but I doubt you can back it up with any real historical knowledge. Microsoft entered the PC revolution because IBM was seeking contact with Gary Kildall of the CP/M fame. IBM wanted to run CP/M on their computers and asked Bill Gates to arrange a meeting of the IBM representatives with Kildall. Instead, Gates offered them his own deal.
History of the PC would look quite similar without Bill Gates. We would have CP/M-86 instead of MS-DOS and GEM Desktop instead of MS Windows. There would be no actualy difference for anybodys Grandma.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 5, Informative
Not really. Bill's first pushes into computers were totally in the 'hack' world. He later graduated from that to business. Their BASIC interpreter was written totally by hand. They didn't have a computer. They took it to IBM and sweating bullets they put it in the computer and it ran. Can you imagine demo'ing a software product to the 900 pound IBM gorilla, but never actually getting a chance to run it first?
Sorry, you are inaccurate in few important points. First of all, their "hacking" deal was not with IBM, it was with MITS, a small company in Albuquerque, the first to manufacture a microchip-based personal computer, the Altair with the 8080 CPU. It was featured as a cover girl, oops, cover story of Popular Electronics in 1974. That's how Bill Gates and Paul Allen got into the PC business. And they actually have had a computer - they had a 8080 emulator working on their university DEC machine. They didn't have actual Altair, because no one had it those days - the cover photo was a mock, MITS was just testing the water with a vaporware announcement (things haven't improved that much since the good ole 1974!).
Nevertheless, squeezing a BASIC interpreter into the tiny 4K memory of the Altair was indeed a piece of fine hacking - even if the credit goes actually to Paul Allen rather than Bill himself.
Why it's so easy for us to accept the typical cracker/hacker defense ("I am just exposing vulnerabilities in this computer system or data encryption scheme") and reject similar defense of a virus writer ("I am just teaching computer users to handle binary attachments with care")?
Not to troll, but could someone tell me why I should use the Amiga as opposed to another platform, such as the Macintosh?
Well, if you'd ask the same question around 1990, the answer would be pretty straightforward. Amiga OS was a superb blend of CLI and GUI. In early 1990's, there were already many better solutions of both the GUI and the CLI, but the quality of the blend itself was unmatched until MacOS X. And even in MacOS X this blend is not always as good as in Amiga (for example, it was much easier to tweak the startup sequence of your system using purely GUI tools). Also, until the mid 1990's Amiga was a much better gaming platform than a Mac.
Now that right there is not really a smart sentance. you started out ok. but the last half just is non-sense. You are telling me that Apple has no inentions of becoming the number 1 computer company in the world?
Exactly, just as Subaru has no intention of becoming the number 1 car maker in the world. You can either try to mass-market your product with low profit margin (and it's very difficult to attain profitability with this kind of strategy on the tight PC market) or try to run a kind of computer boutique - sell in relatively low volume, but with very high profit margin. Since return of Steve Jobs, Apple obviously embraced the latter strategy (that's why there are no clones and there are interesting experiments with "luxury" computers, like the G4 Cube, the 20" iMac or the Big Al powerbook).
Your solution is to only support the minority because minority operating systems don't get viruses? Let's pretend Macintosh became 90% of the desktop market and Windows became 10%, just like that.
Let's suppose that that in a certain area there is a pattern of carjacking - sedans are more often assaulted than wagons (I'm making this up right now, but actually patterns like this are often quite significant). If someone asks me for advice, my advice is "buy a wagon". I won't enter theoretical ramblings that "in theory, there is nothing inherent in sedans that makes them more dangerous, it's just a coincidence, let's suppose it's the other way around, see? then it would be the other way around". Here we have exactly the same case - okay, maybe the lack of viruses it's not a virtue of the MacOS itself (although I could argue on that - for a start, Mail.app does not treat attachments the way the default Windows mail client does). But even if it's not - it's still a good advice for a customer, avoid the platform (a vehicle etc.) that attracts bad guys. When the situation changes, change your advice. Although it's highly unlikely in this case, Macs will never get 90% and Apple has no intention of doing so.
You are generally right, but just think that in early January 1999 you bought yourself a beige PowerMac G3. Next week Apple introduced the blue&white G3. Should you wait just a week longer, you'd end up with a much better machine, Panther-compatible. Sometimes the next model in the product line is just a minor upgrade. There is no reason to kick yourself if you bought an iBook 800 in late 2002. Its replacement was essentially the same machine with CPU speed bumped up by 100 MHz. But sometimes the next model is actually a quantum leap in performance. If you bought an iBook 600 in early 2002, it was a bad deal - if you'd wait just a week, you could get a machine with better graphics chip (thus supported by Quartz Extreme, and therefore getting all the nice bells & whistles like the Expose). The art of Mac shopping is the art of predicting those quantum leaps - and avoiding getting stuck on the wrong side. I guess such a quantum leap is imminent in the professional portable range (it already happened with the iBooks).
My general advice - Apple professional portable range was not updated since last September. This means some update is imminent for next few months. Buying the Big Al now, you will pay the premium price for a '2003 machine. So if you can wait - wait. With Apple being the master of stealth in computer industry, no one can really guess when the new powerbooks will be released - and how good the upgrade will be. But right now, the gap between the hig-end Apple portables and the low-end Apple desktops is way too big. Especially for a company that actually relies on portable products.
You're off base their, Trurul; I suggest that you brush up on your political theory before making irresponsible populist statements. The electoral college is a functional, positive mechanism designed by the framers of our Constitution in order to both check potential tyranny of the majority as well as to give individual states an opportunity to shape the collective political destiny of the nation.
Sir, with all due respect, across the pond there are some democratic countries that elect their presidents in direct vote. There are many reasons to dislike those pesky French, but they can hardly be called a tyranny. The framers of the US Constitution were framing it in a different era, where only a small faction of adult citizens was eligible to vote etc. etc. What was good in the late 1700's might not be that good in the early 2000's.
The electoral college provides smaller states with representation, which they would be lacking if we were to switch solely to the popular vote. Please realize that without the electoral college, presidential candidates would only need to concentrate on the most populous states (CA, NY, Texas Florida...), and all of the smaller states would be ignored.
And that's exatly the way it is today. California has 54 votes. Montana has 3 votes. The candidates indeed concentrate on the most populous states (that's why there was so much fuss about the Florida counting; should the same situation happen in Montana, nobody would ever care).
No. It's the government elected by Electoral College, an obsolete instutution that hardly any democratic country uses these days. You - the voters - have elected Al Gore, who won the popular vote, but he was turned down by the electors. First such occurence since 1888 and a MAJOR signal that America needs a significant upgrade of its voting system. Electoral College is sooo last century... no, not even that, it's actually sooo last century before the last century!
Well, as for me, when I was facing the typical "Xbox or PS2?" dilemma, backwards compatibility was the key factor determining my choice. I have a fairly large library of PSX games and I enjoy playing them on my new PS2 console. Without ensuring the PSX compatibility, Sony could lose me as a customer (should I have to move to entirely new machine... I might move to an entirely different machine). Microsoft worked really hard to promote Xbox as a viable platform - and they succeeded. Uncompatible Xbox 2 would equal to jettisoning all that work and starting again from scratch. I can't believe they would do this!
In the end, the PC's open architecture that led it to be the computer platform of choice. The C64, Amiga, Atari ST were all great gaming platforms but just couldn't keep up with the ever upgrading of the PC.
How would you explain the success of the consoles, then? They are usually as closed as can be; the upgradability potential of a Sony Playstation nowhere matches the potential of said Amiga. Commodore and Atari failed because of their incredibly foolish marketing, but not because "open" is better than "closed" in gaming industry. On the contrary, open architecture is interesting for an engineer or at least a hardware geek, who simply likes to tweak his system - but for a gamer it's just a pain in the ass (the drivers! the compatibility issues! the crashes! the horror! the horror!). For a gamer the best solution is: buy a relatively cheap console this year... and just throw it away (or hand it down to a younger cousin) two years later, replacing it wit the newer model. And don't waste your mind on any technical issue ("how the heck should I know what version firmware is it?"), just keep on fraggin'.
You don't know that, actually. After all, this commercial is not a verbatim adaptation of the Orwell's novel. It's a free fantasy around this theme created by an artist of no lesser magnitude - Ridley Scott himself (how come people call themselves nerds and omit an excellent oportunity for a "Blade Runner" reference?). Actually, you don't know who the guy on the screen is and who are the bald-headed (real life London skinheads were employed as extras) people listening to his speech. Some viewers describe them as "prisoners", some others as "storm troopers". The script refered to them as "drones", which only adds to ambiguity. The speech of the "guy on the screen" (who might or might not be the orwellian Big Brother) is also rather puzzling:
My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth! We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail!
It's not written by Orwell. It's written by the guy who gave us "Alien" and "Blade Runner". And like these movies - it's seems simple by face value, but... is Deckard a replicant or not?;-)
what would Oliver Cromwell make of modern Britain?
Ban everything. Just because the puritans were against monarchy, don't think they were some sort of pro-freedom liberals. They even banned theatre. Name ten favorite pleasures of your life - probably all ten of them would be prohibited if Oliver Cromwell could have his way in modern Britain. Yes, this one too.
How cute, they still have a monarch. How very 18th century of them.:-)
I notice the smiley, but still it's just not true. Some of the most modern states of the world - Japan, Britain or almost entire Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Norway) - are monarchies. At the same time, some of the most backwarded states that are not even in the 18th century by our standards, like the African or Middle-Eastern failed states are republics. So are the banana republics in Central America. When you see what kind of a person can get elected as a president, monarchy no longer sounds as such a bad idea.
In Europe, there's nothing strange in being a knight and a robber at the same time - the castles of the Raubrittern (robber knights) are actually a tourist attraction of the Rhine valley. If you want to try to convince Her Majesty to change Her mind, you have to prove that Bill Gates is a coward - but if you'll just say "Your Majesty, this man is a criminal!", the response would be "so fscking what, my dear subject?".
Well, Cocoa is really just a newer release of OpenStep, so the guts of it aren't anything altogether new or super secret. Actually it looks like the Zaurus thing is mostly a port of GNUstep, so it's not even entirely new stuff.
However, Cocoa is only one of the APIs running in MacOS X. Another quite important one is Carbon, very popular among commercial developers, as it is a path of least resistance leading from MacOS 9 to MacOS X (even if it's actually a nasty kludge, not a piece of art like Cocoa). So if you hope that GNUStep can somehow provide you native Linux ports of Microsoft Office, Photoshop or Warcraft III - it's not the way, as they are all Carbon.
As a teenager I remember I had an early walkman. I can't recall now the make of it, but it was huge and it had cassette-loading slot, like a car stereo. The funniest thing about it was that it had built-in signal splitter to share the music with your, um, significant other and a built-in microphone - not for recording, as it was unable to record anything, but just for listening to the ambient sound. Obviously, whoever designed this device, considered the whole idea of using a walkman in solitud with no vocal contact with the outside world too freaky. In fact, I think he was partially right - I bought a signal splitter for my iPod so we can sometimes listen together, but I really miss something like a built-in mike for the ambient sound. Now when I see somene looks at me and his jaw is moving, I have to remove the earphones with "whaddidyasay?". Would be nicer (or at least geekier) just to push a button or something.
Well, then they changed it. Waaaay back in 1984, it was AppleTalk, complete with its own cabling system and connectors. At some point, it got renamed to LocalTalk. At some much later point, it was renamed back to AppleTalk and prepended to Filing Protocol. They probably dropped the "Talk" relatively recently because it didn't add anything to the name.
They dropped it when they actually dropped the "talk" element. AppleTalk was more than file sharing and a cabling system - it was actually a whole networking protocol. It's a product of the "we are Apple, so we will reinvent the wheel rather than use a mere industry standard" era. First they dropped the proprietary cabling system, but they were still running AppleTalk on typical Ethernet networks - thus EtherTalk was born. Then they gave up the proprietary network protocol but still keep the filing protocol running on regular TCP/IP. That's AppleShare over TCP/IP. About 1999-2000 many local admins finally pulled the plug on AppleTalk (always a major pain-in-the-ass if your network consisted of more than a few units), but continued using AppleShare.
This strikes me as being a solution in need of a problem. Most people would agree it's far better to hire somebody to install the right server solution than to buy special hardware/software for the sole purpose of making it easier for yourself to do it.
Most people would refuse to answer this question without in-depth knowledge of a particular situation. At least most of the reasonable ones. It's not that diffucult to imagine a small company with a small network, say - an independent design or advertising studio or an editorial office of a local newspaper - that ALREADY has a Mac network and one guy, who generally services all the dozen-or-so Macs in this network. It might be _more_ feasible to purchase XServe + MacOS X Server and give it to this guy to set up rather than hire an external networking consultant. Obviously, it's not a solution for everyone and I think in many cases indeed it would be cheaper to get someone just to put Linux on any given beige-box; but that's what Apple succesfully does since Steve's return - profitable exploration of niches.
...well, from carbon and sulfur you can, obviously, make carbon disulfide, an agent used quite commonly in textile industry. Among the side effects, it causes impotence in the worst possible scenario - you just cannot get it up. The army could use it as a non-lethal weapon to weaken the enemy's morale (just imagine the panic THIS sort of weapon would cause in Baghdad)!.
, a G4 card in it, and a huge IDE system (with RAID or without) AND running Mac OS X Server.
I think Apple missed the boat not supporting these Macs with OS X. They make great little OS X workhorses.
I don't think so, especially when it comes to the MacOS X Server. Remember that the 90-days "up and running" support is included in this package. PowerMacs of the 9xxx series are unable to run MacOS X without a third-party G3 upgrade card. So now Apple would have to test and support their system not on the Apple-branded hardware. They could probably do this - but this would be obviously a more expensive solution for them; especially now, when many third-party manufacturers of these cards simply no longer exist. And the whole gain would be at least questionable. These machines were running on a 33-50 MHz system bus. They have ridicolous limitations on the harddrive size (first partition must be smaller than 8 GB). Their extremely obsolete graphics cards cannot run Quartz Extreme (yes, I know, it's not that important on a server - but then again, if all you need is a headless server, why don't you just put Linux on it?). The G3 daughterboard cards generally had many compatibility and stability issues, making them a bad choice for a server and at best a stop-gap choice for workstations. I think that "running MacOS X Server on a G3-upgraded 9600" is just an even-more-geeky kind of "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these". Funny thing to think of to kill spare time, but nothing of practical value.
Isn't USB 2.0 faster than first-generation firewire? I think USB 2.0 runs at 480mbps and firewire runs at 400mbps.
That's the theoretical maximum output, never actually matched in real life. Real life benchmarks usually display much better performance of Firewire 400 over USB 2.0. There is a FAQ on USB that sums up the difference as follows: USB and 1394 are complimentary technologies. 1394 is for devices where high performance is a priority and price is not, while USB is for devices where price is a priority and high performance is not.
I'm not sure if this qualifies as a genuine Duke game, but my favorite was always Shadow Warrior. Based on the same engine, created by the same designers, with the same gross kind of humor that I shamefully ejoy. However, in the "reality" of some weird Jackie Chan movie, this kind of humor seems just more appropriate than in the pseudo-sf scenery of "Duke Nuke'm".
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Probably less than you might think. While our parents were doing boring crap such as wordprocessing on their drab IBM PC, we were hacking away on our Sinclairs, Commodores, Ataris, Amigas, Dragons, Tandys, Amstrads, Acorns, etc.
;-)
Quick generation check: what will happen with the screen if I'll type POKE 53280, 0 on a commodore-64?
You are so wrong about that. What Bill Gates (or at least Microsoft) did was to give computing to the masses. The PC revolution was completely Microsoft driven. They made stuff simple.
Sorry, but I doubt you can back it up with any real historical knowledge. Microsoft entered the PC revolution because IBM was seeking contact with Gary Kildall of the CP/M fame. IBM wanted to run CP/M on their computers and asked Bill Gates to arrange a meeting of the IBM representatives with Kildall. Instead, Gates offered them his own deal.
History of the PC would look quite similar without Bill Gates. We would have CP/M-86 instead of MS-DOS and GEM Desktop instead of MS Windows. There would be no actualy difference for anybodys Grandma.
Not really. Bill's first pushes into computers were totally in the 'hack' world. He later graduated from that to business. Their BASIC interpreter was written totally by hand. They didn't have a computer. They took it to IBM and sweating bullets they put it in the computer and it ran. Can you imagine demo'ing a software product to the 900 pound IBM gorilla, but never actually getting a chance to run it first?
Sorry, you are inaccurate in few important points. First of all, their "hacking" deal was not with IBM, it was with MITS, a small company in Albuquerque, the first to manufacture a microchip-based personal computer, the Altair with the 8080 CPU. It was featured as a cover girl, oops, cover story of Popular Electronics in 1974. That's how Bill Gates and Paul Allen got into the PC business. And they actually have had a computer - they had a 8080 emulator working on their university DEC machine. They didn't have actual Altair, because no one had it those days - the cover photo was a mock, MITS was just testing the water with a vaporware announcement (things haven't improved that much since the good ole 1974!).
Nevertheless, squeezing a BASIC interpreter into the tiny 4K memory of the Altair was indeed a piece of fine hacking - even if the credit goes actually to Paul Allen rather than Bill himself.
Why it's so easy for us to accept the typical cracker/hacker defense ("I am just exposing vulnerabilities in this computer system or data encryption scheme") and reject similar defense of a virus writer ("I am just teaching computer users to handle binary attachments with care")?
Not to troll, but could someone tell me why I should use the Amiga as opposed to another platform, such as the Macintosh?
Well, if you'd ask the same question around 1990, the answer would be pretty straightforward. Amiga OS was a superb blend of CLI and GUI. In early 1990's, there were already many better solutions of both the GUI and the CLI, but the quality of the blend itself was unmatched until MacOS X. And even in MacOS X this blend is not always as good as in Amiga (for example, it was much easier to tweak the startup sequence of your system using purely GUI tools). Also, until the mid 1990's Amiga was a much better gaming platform than a Mac.
Now that right there is not really a smart sentance. you started out ok. but the last half just is non-sense. You are telling me that Apple has no inentions of becoming the number 1 computer company in the world?
Exactly, just as Subaru has no intention of becoming the number 1 car maker in the world. You can either try to mass-market your product with low profit margin (and it's very difficult to attain profitability with this kind of strategy on the tight PC market) or try to run a kind of computer boutique - sell in relatively low volume, but with very high profit margin. Since return of Steve Jobs, Apple obviously embraced the latter strategy (that's why there are no clones and there are interesting experiments with "luxury" computers, like the G4 Cube, the 20" iMac or the Big Al powerbook).
Your solution is to only support the minority because minority operating systems don't get viruses? Let's pretend Macintosh became 90% of the desktop market and Windows became 10%, just like that.
Let's suppose that that in a certain area there is a pattern of carjacking - sedans are more often assaulted than wagons (I'm making this up right now, but actually patterns like this are often quite significant). If someone asks me for advice, my advice is "buy a wagon". I won't enter theoretical ramblings that "in theory, there is nothing inherent in sedans that makes them more dangerous, it's just a coincidence, let's suppose it's the other way around, see? then it would be the other way around". Here we have exactly the same case - okay, maybe the lack of viruses it's not a virtue of the MacOS itself (although I could argue on that - for a start, Mail.app does not treat attachments the way the default Windows mail client does). But even if it's not - it's still a good advice for a customer, avoid the platform (a vehicle etc.) that attracts bad guys. When the situation changes, change your advice. Although it's highly unlikely in this case, Macs will never get 90% and Apple has no intention of doing so.
You are generally right, but just think that in early January 1999 you bought yourself a beige PowerMac G3. Next week Apple introduced the blue&white G3. Should you wait just a week longer, you'd end up with a much better machine, Panther-compatible. Sometimes the next model in the product line is just a minor upgrade. There is no reason to kick yourself if you bought an iBook 800 in late 2002. Its replacement was essentially the same machine with CPU speed bumped up by 100 MHz. But sometimes the next model is actually a quantum leap in performance. If you bought an iBook 600 in early 2002, it was a bad deal - if you'd wait just a week, you could get a machine with better graphics chip (thus supported by Quartz Extreme, and therefore getting all the nice bells & whistles like the Expose). The art of Mac shopping is the art of predicting those quantum leaps - and avoiding getting stuck on the wrong side. I guess such a quantum leap is imminent in the professional portable range (it already happened with the iBooks).
My general advice - Apple professional portable range was not updated since last September. This means some update is imminent for next few months. Buying the Big Al now, you will pay the premium price for a '2003 machine. So if you can wait - wait. With Apple being the master of stealth in computer industry, no one can really guess when the new powerbooks will be released - and how good the upgrade will be. But right now, the gap between the hig-end Apple portables and the low-end Apple desktops is way too big. Especially for a company that actually relies on portable products.
You're off base their, Trurul; I suggest that you brush up on your political theory before making irresponsible populist statements. The electoral college is a functional, positive mechanism designed by the framers of our Constitution in order to both check potential tyranny of the majority as well as to give individual states an opportunity to shape the collective political destiny of the nation.
Sir, with all due respect, across the pond there are some democratic countries that elect their presidents in direct vote. There are many reasons to dislike those pesky French, but they can hardly be called a tyranny. The framers of the US Constitution were framing it in a different era, where only a small faction of adult citizens was eligible to vote etc. etc. What was good in the late 1700's might not be that good in the early 2000's.
The electoral college provides smaller states with representation, which they would be lacking if we were to switch solely to the popular vote. Please realize that without the electoral college, presidential candidates would only need to concentrate on the most populous states (CA, NY, Texas Florida...), and all of the smaller states would be ignored.
And that's exatly the way it is today. California has 54 votes. Montana has 3 votes. The candidates indeed concentrate on the most populous states (that's why there was so much fuss about the Florida counting; should the same situation happen in Montana, nobody would ever care).
Is that the same government we have elected?
No. It's the government elected by Electoral College, an obsolete instutution that hardly any democratic country uses these days. You - the voters - have elected Al Gore, who won the popular vote, but he was turned down by the electors. First such occurence since 1888 and a MAJOR signal that America needs a significant upgrade of its voting system. Electoral College is sooo last century... no, not even that, it's actually sooo last century before the last century!
Well, as for me, when I was facing the typical "Xbox or PS2?" dilemma, backwards compatibility was the key factor determining my choice. I have a fairly large library of PSX games and I enjoy playing them on my new PS2 console. Without ensuring the PSX compatibility, Sony could lose me as a customer (should I have to move to entirely new machine... I might move to an entirely different machine). Microsoft worked really hard to promote Xbox as a viable platform - and they succeeded. Uncompatible Xbox 2 would equal to jettisoning all that work and starting again from scratch. I can't believe they would do this!
In the end, the PC's open architecture that led it to be the computer platform of choice. The C64, Amiga, Atari ST were all great gaming platforms but just couldn't keep up with the ever upgrading of the PC.
How would you explain the success of the consoles, then? They are usually as closed as can be; the upgradability potential of a Sony Playstation nowhere matches the potential of said Amiga. Commodore and Atari failed because of their incredibly foolish marketing, but not because "open" is better than "closed" in gaming industry. On the contrary, open architecture is interesting for an engineer or at least a hardware geek, who simply likes to tweak his system - but for a gamer it's just a pain in the ass (the drivers! the compatibility issues! the crashes! the horror! the horror!). For a gamer the best solution is: buy a relatively cheap console this year... and just throw it away (or hand it down to a younger cousin) two years later, replacing it wit the newer model. And don't waste your mind on any technical issue ("how the heck should I know what version firmware is it?"), just keep on fraggin'.
You don't know that, actually. After all, this commercial is not a verbatim adaptation of the Orwell's novel. It's a free fantasy around this theme created by an artist of no lesser magnitude - Ridley Scott himself (how come people call themselves nerds and omit an excellent oportunity for a "Blade Runner" reference?). Actually, you don't know who the guy on the screen is and who are the bald-headed (real life London skinheads were employed as extras) people listening to his speech. Some viewers describe them as "prisoners", some others as "storm troopers". The script refered to them as "drones", which only adds to ambiguity. The speech of the "guy on the screen" (who might or might not be the orwellian Big Brother) is also rather puzzling:
;-)
My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth! We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail!
It's not written by Orwell. It's written by the guy who gave us "Alien" and "Blade Runner". And like these movies - it's seems simple by face value, but... is Deckard a replicant or not?
what would Oliver Cromwell make of modern Britain?
Ban everything. Just because the puritans were against monarchy, don't think they were some sort of pro-freedom liberals. They even banned theatre. Name ten favorite pleasures of your life - probably all ten of them would be prohibited if Oliver Cromwell could have his way in modern Britain. Yes, this one too.
How cute, they still have a monarch. How very 18th century of them. :-)
I notice the smiley, but still it's just not true. Some of the most modern states of the world - Japan, Britain or almost entire Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Norway) - are monarchies. At the same time, some of the most backwarded states that are not even in the 18th century by our standards, like the African or Middle-Eastern failed states are republics. So are the banana republics in Central America. When you see what kind of a person can get elected as a president, monarchy no longer sounds as such a bad idea.
In Europe, there's nothing strange in being a knight and a robber at the same time - the castles of the Raubrittern (robber knights) are actually a tourist attraction of the Rhine valley. If you want to try to convince Her Majesty to change Her mind, you have to prove that Bill Gates is a coward - but if you'll just say "Your Majesty, this man is a criminal!", the response would be "so fscking what, my dear subject?".
Well, Cocoa is really just a newer release of OpenStep, so the guts of it aren't anything altogether new or super secret. Actually it looks like the Zaurus thing is mostly a port of GNUstep, so it's not even entirely new stuff.
However, Cocoa is only one of the APIs running in MacOS X. Another quite important one is Carbon, very popular among commercial developers, as it is a path of least resistance leading from MacOS 9 to MacOS X (even if it's actually a nasty kludge, not a piece of art like Cocoa). So if you hope that GNUStep can somehow provide you native Linux ports of Microsoft Office, Photoshop or Warcraft III - it's not the way, as they are all Carbon.
As a teenager I remember I had an early walkman. I can't recall now the make of it, but it was huge and it had cassette-loading slot, like a car stereo. The funniest thing about it was that it had built-in signal splitter to share the music with your, um, significant other and a built-in microphone - not for recording, as it was unable to record anything, but just for listening to the ambient sound. Obviously, whoever designed this device, considered the whole idea of using a walkman in solitud with no vocal contact with the outside world too freaky. In fact, I think he was partially right - I bought a signal splitter for my iPod so we can sometimes listen together, but I really miss something like a built-in mike for the ambient sound. Now when I see somene looks at me and his jaw is moving, I have to remove the earphones with "whaddidyasay?". Would be nicer (or at least geekier) just to push a button or something.
Well, then they changed it. Waaaay back in 1984, it was AppleTalk, complete with its own cabling system and connectors. At some point, it got renamed to LocalTalk. At some much later point, it was renamed back to AppleTalk and prepended to Filing Protocol. They probably dropped the "Talk" relatively recently because it didn't add anything to the name.
They dropped it when they actually dropped the "talk" element. AppleTalk was more than file sharing and a cabling system - it was actually a whole networking protocol. It's a product of the "we are Apple, so we will reinvent the wheel rather than use a mere industry standard" era. First they dropped the proprietary cabling system, but they were still running AppleTalk on typical Ethernet networks - thus EtherTalk was born. Then they gave up the proprietary network protocol but still keep the filing protocol running on regular TCP/IP. That's AppleShare over TCP/IP. About 1999-2000 many local admins finally pulled the plug on AppleTalk (always a major pain-in-the-ass if your network consisted of more than a few units), but continued using AppleShare.
This strikes me as being a solution in need of a problem. Most people would agree it's far better to hire somebody to install the right server solution than to buy special hardware/software for the sole purpose of making it easier for yourself to do it.
Most people would refuse to answer this question without in-depth knowledge of a particular situation. At least most of the reasonable ones. It's not that diffucult to imagine a small company with a small network, say - an independent design or advertising studio or an editorial office of a local newspaper - that ALREADY has a Mac network and one guy, who generally services all the dozen-or-so Macs in this network. It might be _more_ feasible to purchase XServe + MacOS X Server and give it to this guy to set up rather than hire an external networking consultant. Obviously, it's not a solution for everyone and I think in many cases indeed it would be cheaper to get someone just to put Linux on any given beige-box; but that's what Apple succesfully does since Steve's return - profitable exploration of niches.
...well, from carbon and sulfur you can, obviously, make carbon disulfide, an agent used quite commonly in textile industry. Among the side effects, it causes impotence in the worst possible scenario - you just cannot get it up. The army could use it as a non-lethal weapon to weaken the enemy's morale (just imagine the panic THIS sort of weapon would cause in Baghdad)!.
, a G4 card in it, and a huge IDE system (with RAID or without) AND running Mac OS X Server. I think Apple missed the boat not supporting these Macs with OS X. They make great little OS X workhorses.
I don't think so, especially when it comes to the MacOS X Server. Remember that the 90-days "up and running" support is included in this package. PowerMacs of the 9xxx series are unable to run MacOS X without a third-party G3 upgrade card. So now Apple would have to test and support their system not on the Apple-branded hardware. They could probably do this - but this would be obviously a more expensive solution for them; especially now, when many third-party manufacturers of these cards simply no longer exist. And the whole gain would be at least questionable. These machines were running on a 33-50 MHz system bus. They have ridicolous limitations on the harddrive size (first partition must be smaller than 8 GB). Their extremely obsolete graphics cards cannot run Quartz Extreme (yes, I know, it's not that important on a server - but then again, if all you need is a headless server, why don't you just put Linux on it?). The G3 daughterboard cards generally had many compatibility and stability issues, making them a bad choice for a server and at best a stop-gap choice for workstations. I think that "running MacOS X Server on a G3-upgraded 9600" is just an even-more-geeky kind of "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these". Funny thing to think of to kill spare time, but nothing of practical value.
Isn't USB 2.0 faster than first-generation firewire? I think USB 2.0 runs at 480mbps and firewire runs at 400mbps.
That's the theoretical maximum output, never actually matched in real life. Real life benchmarks usually display much better performance of Firewire 400 over USB 2.0. There is a FAQ on USB that sums up the difference as follows: USB and 1394 are complimentary technologies. 1394 is for devices where high performance is a priority and price is not, while USB is for devices where price is a priority and high performance is not.
I never really liked any of the Duke games.
I'm not sure if this qualifies as a genuine Duke game, but my favorite was always Shadow Warrior. Based on the same engine, created by the same designers, with the same gross kind of humor that I shamefully ejoy. However, in the "reality" of some weird Jackie Chan movie, this kind of humor seems just more appropriate than in the pseudo-sf scenery of "Duke Nuke'm".