OS/2 Warp came with an extra CD containing an integrated suite, IBM Works, written in Rexx
IBM Works wasn't written in REXX. It was written in C (and/or C++), and was originally Footprint Works (before IBM bought out Footprint for their banking software).
Well, I think you are missing the point: The question was "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?".
I imagine for most people reading SlashDot that is "switching from a Mac", which has a lot to do with Apple...
With all due respect, I believe it is you who has missed the point.
You're assuming that the question "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?" means "If Windows came to PPC, would you switch to Windows?". This is incorrect. The actual question is "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch to a PPC-based system?".
The article does a pretty good job of trying to separate itself from Apple-specific hardware for this reason. It's not asking if Mac users would switch to Windows, but if Windows users would switch to PPC hardware (not necessarily from Apple) if Windows were natively available for it.
Why do you think they stopped it calling it NT and started calling it "Windows", besides the obvious marketing whackiness?
I don't really know where you get your information from, but a whole lot of it is simply incorrect.
"Windows NT" was originally a new design for OS/2, which Microsoft codenamed "NT" for "New Technology". When Microsoft dropped out of the OS/2 development effort, they went it on their own under their existing Windows brand, hence "Windows NT".
Usage of "NT" in the product name proved a bit problematic from the start, because "NT" was a registered trademark of Northern Telecom (now Nortel). Which is why every box of Windows NT sold has a disclaimer on the box stating that fact.
The dropping of the "NT" moniker was more of a marketing decision than anything else (I don't know if they were paying Nortel for the right to use "NT" or not, although this also could have been a factor).
NT was designed from the start to be a cross-platform operating system. Microsoft collected partners to handle various ports (much or the PPC port was actually written by IBM). At the time it was being released, the belief was that Intel had hit a ceiling, and that everyone was going to make a big move over to RISC-based architectures. Microsoft wanted to hedge their bets and be ready in the event the Intel-based system market crashed. Of course, it didn't, and the non-Intel NT's withered away.
Of course, it didn't help that the people who actually owned PPC, Alpha, and MIPS-based systems already had much better operating systems (AIX, OpenVMS, Irix, etc.) with a large number of available applications, whereas NT on these platforms had next to no available software, and was a poor and unproven OS (it took years for NT to gain any significant traction even on Intel systems).
It should be noted that OS/2 on the Power PC suffered a similar fate. IBM didn't have the cajones to push CHAP PPC systems, and only ever released OS/2 for PPC to a few selected customers they had a contractual obligation to release it to. They talked a big game about pushing Power PC systems on the desktop, but in the end made no effort to do so.
You know, this question really doesn't have anything to do with Apple. It's a hypothetical question based on a processor architecture, and not necessarily Macintosh-based computers. Both IBM and Freescale sell Power PC microprocessors, and technically any motherboard manufacturer can design a board for a PowerPC, and buy the CPUs from either manufacturer, much as how they currently design boards for either Intel or AMD processors.
Why? Well, because the Power PC architecture doesn't have all of the nasty cruft that Intel-based systems have. Like IRQ nastiness that people keep designing around. Or the fact that they boot up in real mode, and need to be switched into protected mode as part of the boot process. Or all of the various BIOS limitations, like the fact you can't address beyond the first 1023 cylinders of a hard drive during IPL. Of the . Or the x86 instruction set and registers.
The cost of this cruft is both cost and power. As cheap as Intel-based hardware is (due to the economies of scale), it could be cheaper if it didn't have to contain hardware and code to work around the many limitations of the architecture. It would also be quite a bit faster than it currently is.
Windows on Power PC would be a boon for users, if either (or both) IBM and Freescale could ramp up production sufficiently, and if every Intel Windows user were willing to give up their current software investments (or if such a Windows system run Intel binaries).
Of course, Windows itself would still suck:).
The things keeping people from making such a move aren't technical -- they're economic and social.
Myself, I'm composing this on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X. I have little or no desire to run Windows on any architecture. I doubt if you'd find too many existing Power PC users who wish they could run Windows as their core OS -- it's Windows users who should want to run to run their OS of choice on an affordable Power PC architecture.
If you have the time to sit around playing a video game working your way up from some no-name street baller all the way up the an uber-professional, then you have time to actually go out and play a real sport.
This seems obvious to me. Anyone that into sports that they'd want to work their way up to some sort of superstar over the course of months or years should just get away from the TV and play their favorite sport for real, with all the associated health benefits therein.
Brenthaven bags are pretty good. Alot of pockets, solid construction, comfortable straps.
I have one of these for my 12" PowerBook, and it's a fantastic bag.
It's made out of black military-grade ballistic nylon, so it looks good, but doesn't screan that it's an expensive laptop bag. It's padded in the bag and in the straps, so it's quite comfortable to wear.
Inside the main pocket is the sleeve for the laptop itself, perfectly fitted for the 12" PowerBook. The sleeve is velcro'd firmly into the bag (so much so that it was a few weeks before I even realized it was removable), and has a velcro flap to completely enclose the laptop, with a carrying handle on the top. Being padded and removable, you can easily remove it from the bag if you don't want to carry around a backpack -- it could easily be put into a briefcase instead.
My laptop goes everywhere with me, and I like to walk quite a bit, so a pack which is comfortable is a must for me, and the Brenthaven delivers quite nicely. It's relatively thin, with the bulk of the mass against your back, so it doesn't throw off your center of gravity. And with the padded back and straps, I've found it to be quite comfortable wearing for long times and distances. It's rugged, and has protected my PowerBook everywhere I've taken it, so you can count me as a happy user.
What am I to do? Will a small company (Radio shack down the street) lose my personal info? They must have asked me like 20 times...is that because they lose my info each time and have to get it again?
Bah. Just do what I do. Everytime they ask me for my name and address, I just give them yours.
Uh, on second thought, maybe you shouldn't do what I do:).
I can't see how those two could possibly be confused. The ones company logo is a Macintosh that's been nibbled on and the other is that computer company.
Actually, Apple Corps' logo is an all-green apple (Granny Smith) with no nibbles out of it, whereas Macintosh apples are green and red.
And with that, I'm going to have another slice of fine MacIntosh apple pie my mother baked, with a scoop of ice cream on the side, while I listen to Abbey Road on my PowerBook G4. Now there's some Apple-on-Apple action.
(Caveat: looks like there might be 3rd party support, but a friend of mine told me MarkSpace leaves something to be desired.)
Once Apple releases their iSync development kit I'm planning on writing the necessary jConduit(s) to synchronize the OS X calendar and address book via my Open Source jSyncManager.
The jSyncManager already has an OS X disk image, but what's currently missing is the ability to connect to a USB port through Java on the Mac. Once javax.usb is ported to OS X, this limitation will be removed, and you'll be able to run the jSyncManager like any other OS X application.
And with an iSync jConduit, the jSyncManager will be just as good as, if not better than, Palm's HotSync Manager for the Mac.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
He covered that. The barcode is in addition to large, clear printed text.
I read what was said -- it makes no difference. The first line of defence in ensuring a given vote is accurate is the voter themselves. If they see that the text portion of their ballot doesn't correspond to the machine-readable portion, they can report it. If you use a barcode for the machine-readable portion, the voter has no way of readily ensuring that the text portion and the barcode portion match.
Yes, you can verify wether or not such a mis-match has occured atthe macro level by doing a hand-recount of every ballot -- but in order to do so there typically has to be reason to demand one in the first place: you have to know (or at least very strongly suspect) that something fishy has occurred.
Providing a voting mechanism where the voter can verify for themselves that the ballot is correct is the best way to do this. That way everyone polices the system. If someone does tamper with the mechanism, supporter for one side or the other will notice if it's human verifiable when they vote, and the manual recount can be demanded.
The name and barcode system doesn't have this security. If we're dealing with a computer generating the computer-scanable portion, and a computer reading the computer-scanable portion, you take the human out of the equation.
And with such a system, you can avoid some obvious detection in a tight race by having the printing computer mis-barcode only a small percentage of one candidates votes to tip the scales. In a tight race, a mere 1% of such tamered votes in at one polling station would do it. Do that at a polling station in a poorly educated part of town, or in a seniors home or somesuch, and chances are pretty good you'll not only fix the election in your favour, but that you'll get away with it without anyone suspecting anything untowards. Do you think Granny or Cletus is going to know that the barcode doesn't match the name printed on the same ballot?
If you have a variable name or package name called "enum" anywhere in your source code you'll have to replace every instance of it with something other than "enum."
Yup -- I ran into this test building the jSyncManager yesterday.
Thankfully it was only four instances, all within the same source file. I fixed the latest CVS copy accordingly, alerted the developer mailing list, and posted a new item about it to our project page on SourceForge.
Otherwise, so far, so good. I'm looking forward to this release getting much wider availability (ie: on more platforms) in order to use the typesafe collection mechanisms.
The ballot has barcode printed on it which is then fed into a barcode reader and the vote is recorded instantly. The ballot itself is then placed in a secure box.
Right here you have an excellent way to abuse the system.
The problem with your otherwise excellent proposed mechanism is that very, very few people know how to read a barcode. As such, they have no way to visually ensure that the name on the ballot matches up with the barcode on the ballot.
You need to replace this with something which is verifiable by the human eye, and which is scannable by a computer with an exceedingly low scan error rate. Your proposed system only satisfies the second requirement.
maybe FUCKING ENGLAND? You losers... if there's one country besides the U.S. that had any information on John Lennon it's god damned brits. How sensitive is that really?
Or possibly Canada. John Lennon spent a good deal of time in Canada doing things he wouldn't so in the US, like his and Yoko's North American bed-in (in Montreal), John and Yoko's "Live Peace in Toronto" concert, and the fact that he stayed with Ronnie Hawkins (IIRC) at a farm here in Ontario for some time.
During those days the RCMP and Canadian police forces were keeping their eyes on rock stars (or at least so it seems to me). In 1977 Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) was arrested for Heroin possession.
I wouldn't be too suprised if the RCMP collected some data on Lennon during his time here. What would suprise me is if the FBI would think that anyone here would care if such information were to be made public 24 years later.
(To be honest though, England does seem to be the more probable source).
I'm saying this in the most polite manner I can, but if you come across in your personal ad the way you did in that post, it's no wonder you had such bad experiences.
Don't worry -- I don't. But the opportunity to vent my near-total frustration with online dating came up, and I just had to take it and hopefully warn others away.
I suppose it works for some people, but for the rest of us online dating is just a huge disappointment.
Maybe it's where I live. I really don't know. Nobody seems to want to take the time to actually get to know someone. People have so much depth (or lack thereof) to them that you can't get to know them adaquately through online dating sites, or from just one date.
The old-fashioned ways tend to be better. And I'm far from the only guy to think so.
You had to post this just as I got mod points, and was going to start using them in this forum...:).
I find what you have to say very topical, because I was in talks earlier today with an MD who holds a chair at a west-coast University who is interested in contracting me out to write Open Source code based on my Open Source, pure-Java jSyncManager Project.
Oh the parallels:). This project is receiving some public funding, so the doctors and developers currently involved are striving to use as much OSS as possible, and to release their custom code pieces as Open Source software. They want to contract my services to help them integrate handheld systems into their groupware/messaging applications they're building.
As such, it looks like I'm about to start getting paid to write Open Source Java code for the medical field. Yay for me!
Online dating has been one of the most dehumanizing processes I've ever been through. And I used to be in the military.
First things first -- unless you look like a movie star and are super rich, and spend your time jet setting around the world, resign yourself to spending a good deal of money on online dating now. Most dating sites are "controlled" by a subset of women who don't need to spend any money because every Tom, Dick, and Harry is using their credits to contact them. They won't spend a whole lot of time looking for you, because they don't need to. You'll be in a darwinian struggle with a pile of other guys, and if you're not picture-perfect, your not going to get that date you need to show them your personality.
Also remember there are sometimes very good reasons why some of the women you'll meet online are single. I've wound up dating two women who were out patients from psychiatric institions. Now I'm not the kind of guy who stigmatizes people with mental illness, and I think they diserve love and support too -- but these women were too unstable to support any form of relationship, and had serious problems they needed to deal with before they could consider any form of stable relationship.
Also remember that the women you do wind up getting in touch with online often feel like they have a lot of other choices, so if you don't wow them and fill their hearts with desire on the very first date, your chances of a second date are virtually nil. Very, very, very few of the women you meet online are going to take the time to really get to know you -- if you don't immediately fit their expectations, most (in my experience at least) aren't going to invest the time to get to know you.
And if you hold any tenents outside societal norm, you're probably already out of the race. Online dating sites give people the ability to search on specific qualities, and if you don't show up in the average search, you're not going to get anywhere. I'm an athiest and a non-drinker (neither of which I enforce on or expect of others, BTW). My profile doesn't tend to get too many hits (more for the latter than the former, sad to say). I actually had one woman walk out on a date with me when I told her I was an athiest (the site I use doesn't have a selection in their religion combo box for "athiest" -- the closest is "non religious").
(I really hate to pick on so many women as I seem to have done so in this post. I can only guess that many men on online dating sites are the same -- but I don't date men, so I have no experience with their foibles. What few dates I have been on over the years I've been on online dating sites have usually shared their previous experiences, and one common theme with them is meeting men who are nothing like they claim, especially in the looks department).
Remember as well that you're going to be competing with a lot of people who are lying about themselves to make themselves sound better than they are. You can do the same thing -- but most women aren't going to date you again if/when they discover your dishonesty. Still, you're competing with the geekoid down the street who claims he looks like Mel Gibson and Tom Cuise combined, and that makes it exceedingly difficult for you to compete if you're truuthful (and, presumably, don't look like Mel Gibson and/or Tom Cruise).
Yeah, I'm a bit bitter over my experiences. I quit online dating for a long time, but after leaving the military recently signed back on, just to see if things had changed. I'm sad to say that, based on my experience these past few months, they haven't. Now I'm just a bitter old coot nobody would want to date anyway who hangs around/. telling whomever will listen him sad and loney online dating tale:).
I have to say the only problems I've ever had with Backup have been if I've lost my connection, usually because I've forgotton the backup has been running and closed the lid to my PowerBook, or during my weekly backup to one of my Linux boxes if I've forgotten to setup the SMB share.
Both of those are my fault. Otherwise, Backup has always just worked for me (at least for backing up data -- I haven't had to restore anything yet). I have some 40MB or so of data backed up.
Mind you, I don't use Safari -- I'm using Firefox. I do have Backup setup to backup my Firefox settings directory (with the exception of the cache files, obviously). Otherwise, in 5 months of usage, I haven't run into a single problem that I didn't cause.
Besides, an external hard disk works out to peanuts now and that's a lot quicker for regular backups.
Quicker -- but is it better?
My iDisk has become my off-site backup system of choice over here (albeit not the only offsite backup I'm using). I have data that I simply cannot afford to lose..Mac's Backup program puts this data onto my iDisk daily.
I got bit once by not having offsite backup due to environmental damage. Several hard drives died and were unrecoverable, and my backup CDs sitting in the same room likewise were unusuable. I lost a lot of unrecoverable data that day, and I won't risk that again.
I've become a huge fan of my iDisk. I recently started doing some contract work for a company that just recently starting moving from Windows to Mac OS X, and put up the results of my work as a disk image on my public (but password protected) iDisk. Sent them they password, and they simply selected from the Finder "iDisk -> Other Users Public Folder", and voila -- they had direct access to mount the disk image.
My iDisk has been getting quite full as of recent, so I was happy to see this announcement. I don't store any e-mail on.Mac, so I put the Mail storage at its minimum (15MB), and cranked my iDisk up to 235MB. Sweet:).
If you think you're going to just dump me and leave after you've used me for all these years, you have something else coming, bub.
I was a tramp when you met me, and you should have known this. I was brash, got around, was completely unstable. You weren't particularily good to me either -- you'd just disappear for hours every time you wanted to play Doom with your buddies.
And it wasn't as if you didn't have other options. There was that nice, stable, amd smart OS/2 next door who had eyes for you. OS/2 was smart, sophisticated, let you do more at once, and could handle twice the bits I could. But you wanted someone who got around, who had been with all your friends, and who didn't require you to think or learn anything, who let you leave me and covort around with your old DOS buddies whenever you wanted.
I did everything I could to try to hide the good life from you. I gave you some flash once in a while, but no substance. For some reason, you stuck around. I was always afraid you and your friends who used me would notice, so I had to take drastic measures.
First off, I had to routinely sneak into your house in every new PC you bought, even if you or your friends didn't want me around. In fact, even if you couold go to sufficient lengths to make sure I didn't sneak back into your home, you still had to pay for my services. You paid, and got nothing in return. And yet you still kept coming back.
I didn't like some of your friends. That DR-DOS guy bugged me, so I went somewhat haywire everytime you invited him around. I didn't want you to see that there were ways to improve me -- I never had any intention of improving.
Eventually you started noticing that my bits were only half of what the others were offering, so I promised I'd change. That I too would have 32 bits like the others.
And you believed me like a sucker. At first I claimed to support 32 bits through Win32s, but it was really just some more 16 bit stuff in a 32 bit disguise. I kept changing at random, not for your benifit, but to make sure you couldn't leave me by breaking OS/2's ability to run my software every month or so. Poor OS/2 was running around in circles trying to attract you by keeping up with my useless changes.
Then suddenly in 1995 I decided to get some cosmetic surgery. You were stunned when you saw me, but really I just showed the cosmetic surgeon some pictures of OS/2 and MacOS and had him take bits and pieces from them and re-shape me to look like their bastard child. I was still ugly underneath, with serious problems. I still couldn't do more than one thing at a time very well, was still unstable, and still got around with all your friends.
Worse yet, now even if you had wanted to get rid of me, I was going to show up. When you decided to upgrade your old 486 to a shiney new Pentium, I showed up uninvited. When you upgraded that Pentium to a faster model, I once again showed up, even though you already had paid for my services and held a valid license. I kept sucking your wallet dry, and was still mentally unstable.
Then I became schitzophrenic, and started offering myself in a real 32 bit version without the cosmetic surgury. But you avoided me because I wouldn't play with your old DOS games, and had serious issues that were new and strange to you.
In 1998, you started to sour. I'd been abusing you for years, but you like the sucker you are continued to stick around. I offered you a way to get onto the Information Superhighway, but ensured you could only do so in my way, when I felt like letting you. Sure OS/2 had been letting people do this for a few years -- I kept you away from the game as long as possible, but in the end, in order to keep you, I finally relented and gave you access to the new highway.
By 2000, I was able to become cocky, and my schitzophrenia grew worse. You had every right and option to leave me, but I had put blue screens over all your windows so you could
For the record, I bought my first Mac (a 12" PowerBook G4) this past spring based in significant part on all the good things I had read about Apple's latest offerings here on/. .
I want to see what GraphicConverter does with this.
Absolutely nothing. The file is only 8KB in size, and doesn't appear to contain any actual image data. Loading it up in GraphicConverter v4.9 over here (and Preview, and a number of other tools) just reports that the image file is corrupt.
Er, rather, you requested content from a site that looked like:
GET/page.html
And it gave you page.html and all that it entails. So, at least from a httpd server point of view, you did request the advertisements.
Your own argument works completely against you.
An HTML file contains no bitmap data -- it merely links to it. If I ask for "page.html", I expect to get a text file called "page.html". This is how HTTP is designed to work, and is indeed how it works virtually everywhere.
Your browser has to parse the HTML and get all of the IMG tags, and then make requests for each and every graphic element referenced.
Asking for "page.html" doesn't necessitate that one request everything it links to. If I go to "google.com", I'm hardly expected to download everything it links to.
As such, I run a browser that allows me to control what content I retrieve, so that I am in control of the content. If I wanted someone else to be in control of the content, I'd watch more TV.
So if I ask for "page.html", I expect to get a text file called "page.html". If it links to other content, I'll retrieve it if it so suits me to do so by making additional requests. I refuse to make requests for content I don't want, and this includes most advertisements.
The fact of the matter remains there are many Mozilla-based browsers which provide me with the ability to block images. The browsers offer this feature, and it's one I desire. As such, I won't use Camino as my day-to-day browser until it supports this very useful feature.
And let's get one thing perfectly clear: ad blocking software is completely legal. I'm not breaking any laws by using it. As such, if its usage afffects the bottom line of some webmaster, it's because their business model is broken, and not my fault or problem.
I like Java. I maintain an Open Source project coded in Java. I particularily apperciate the fact that Java applications can be easily made completely portable across platforms.
Here's what concerns me. Open Source has never really shown that it's terribly interested in ensuring API and binary compatibility across releases. Native binaries tend to be somewhat tightly compiled for their specific distro. To get around this, many packages are distributed as source so you can compile them specifically against your platform of choice.
All well and good, but take a look at how the sources accomplish this: via pre-compiler directives to ensure things compile correctly on different platforms, or via complex makefiles to build specific sources on specific platforms.
Currently, I don't typically have to worry about such things with Java. There are no pre-compiler directives, and there is no need to use them: one codebase compiles on every platform.
Here's where my concern comes in. As soon as you Open Source Java, someone is going to want to put in pre-compiler directives because they're used to them from the C/C++ world. Around the same time, someone is going to create a Java fork which isn't 100% compitable in some area.
Java developers, wanting to target as many platforms as possible, are going to start using the pre-compiler directives in order to work around implementation-specific bugs. Maintainers are going to start worrying less-and-less about API compatibility issues because developers are going to have pre-compiler directives to work around them (as we've already seen many times over the years in the C/C++ world). All of which is going to help reduce Java's platform neutrality, and make my job as a Java developer more complex than it is currently, reducing incentive to use it in the first place.
My biggest interest as a Java developer would be to ensure that all Java runtimes conform to a single, standardized testsuite as Sun seems to want. And I don't care that the testsuite could be buggy -- so long as any API bugs that do exist are consistant across platforms. At the same time, there are some amazing things the Open Source world could do with all the other parts of the Java Runtime Environment -- for example, making the HotSpot Compiler Open Source could allow for some pretty massive JIT research to be consolidated in one place for the benefit of everyone.
Much of this could be solved if Sun put the Java API and other technologies through an official standardization process, and then made their implementation Open Source. The former has worked well for other languages (Ada comes to mind), where a tight standardization process long helped to ensure source compatibility between platforms. The latter works extremely well for enhancing the adoption and development of a given technology. But to make it work, you couldn't just go with some form of defacto standard that most Open Source projects use/create/adopt. Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure what benefit Sun would see from doing something like this (not that I personally care anything about wether or not Sun were to get anything out of doing this -- I just realize they're going to need to see some sort of benefit before they ever decide to do such a thing).
Slashdot Mirror
IBM Works wasn't written in REXX. It was written in C (and/or C++), and was originally Footprint Works (before IBM bought out Footprint for their banking software).
Yaz.
With all due respect, I believe it is you who has missed the point.
You're assuming that the question "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?" means "If Windows came to PPC, would you switch to Windows?". This is incorrect. The actual question is "If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch to a PPC-based system?".
The article does a pretty good job of trying to separate itself from Apple-specific hardware for this reason. It's not asking if Mac users would switch to Windows, but if Windows users would switch to PPC hardware (not necessarily from Apple) if Windows were natively available for it.
Yaz.
I don't really know where you get your information from, but a whole lot of it is simply incorrect.
"Windows NT" was originally a new design for OS/2, which Microsoft codenamed "NT" for "New Technology". When Microsoft dropped out of the OS/2 development effort, they went it on their own under their existing Windows brand, hence "Windows NT".
Usage of "NT" in the product name proved a bit problematic from the start, because "NT" was a registered trademark of Northern Telecom (now Nortel). Which is why every box of Windows NT sold has a disclaimer on the box stating that fact.
The dropping of the "NT" moniker was more of a marketing decision than anything else (I don't know if they were paying Nortel for the right to use "NT" or not, although this also could have been a factor).
NT was designed from the start to be a cross-platform operating system. Microsoft collected partners to handle various ports (much or the PPC port was actually written by IBM). At the time it was being released, the belief was that Intel had hit a ceiling, and that everyone was going to make a big move over to RISC-based architectures. Microsoft wanted to hedge their bets and be ready in the event the Intel-based system market crashed. Of course, it didn't, and the non-Intel NT's withered away.
Of course, it didn't help that the people who actually owned PPC, Alpha, and MIPS-based systems already had much better operating systems (AIX, OpenVMS, Irix, etc.) with a large number of available applications, whereas NT on these platforms had next to no available software, and was a poor and unproven OS (it took years for NT to gain any significant traction even on Intel systems).
It should be noted that OS/2 on the Power PC suffered a similar fate. IBM didn't have the cajones to push CHAP PPC systems, and only ever released OS/2 for PPC to a few selected customers they had a contractual obligation to release it to. They talked a big game about pushing Power PC systems on the desktop, but in the end made no effort to do so.
Yaz.
You know, this question really doesn't have anything to do with Apple. It's a hypothetical question based on a processor architecture, and not necessarily Macintosh-based computers. Both IBM and Freescale sell Power PC microprocessors, and technically any motherboard manufacturer can design a board for a PowerPC, and buy the CPUs from either manufacturer, much as how they currently design boards for either Intel or AMD processors.
Why? Well, because the Power PC architecture doesn't have all of the nasty cruft that Intel-based systems have. Like IRQ nastiness that people keep designing around. Or the fact that they boot up in real mode, and need to be switched into protected mode as part of the boot process. Or all of the various BIOS limitations, like the fact you can't address beyond the first 1023 cylinders of a hard drive during IPL. Of the . Or the x86 instruction set and registers.
The cost of this cruft is both cost and power. As cheap as Intel-based hardware is (due to the economies of scale), it could be cheaper if it didn't have to contain hardware and code to work around the many limitations of the architecture. It would also be quite a bit faster than it currently is.
Windows on Power PC would be a boon for users, if either (or both) IBM and Freescale could ramp up production sufficiently, and if every Intel Windows user were willing to give up their current software investments (or if such a Windows system run Intel binaries).
Of course, Windows itself would still suck :).
The things keeping people from making such a move aren't technical -- they're economic and social.
Myself, I'm composing this on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X. I have little or no desire to run Windows on any architecture. I doubt if you'd find too many existing Power PC users who wish they could run Windows as their core OS -- it's Windows users who should want to run to run their OS of choice on an affordable Power PC architecture.
Yaz.
If you have the time to sit around playing a video game working your way up from some no-name street baller all the way up the an uber-professional, then you have time to actually go out and play a real sport.
This seems obvious to me. Anyone that into sports that they'd want to work their way up to some sort of superstar over the course of months or years should just get away from the TV and play their favorite sport for real, with all the associated health benefits therein.
Yaz.
I have one of these for my 12" PowerBook, and it's a fantastic bag.
It's made out of black military-grade ballistic nylon, so it looks good, but doesn't screan that it's an expensive laptop bag. It's padded in the bag and in the straps, so it's quite comfortable to wear.
Inside the main pocket is the sleeve for the laptop itself, perfectly fitted for the 12" PowerBook. The sleeve is velcro'd firmly into the bag (so much so that it was a few weeks before I even realized it was removable), and has a velcro flap to completely enclose the laptop, with a carrying handle on the top. Being padded and removable, you can easily remove it from the bag if you don't want to carry around a backpack -- it could easily be put into a briefcase instead.
My laptop goes everywhere with me, and I like to walk quite a bit, so a pack which is comfortable is a must for me, and the Brenthaven delivers quite nicely. It's relatively thin, with the bulk of the mass against your back, so it doesn't throw off your center of gravity. And with the padded back and straps, I've found it to be quite comfortable wearing for long times and distances. It's rugged, and has protected my PowerBook everywhere I've taken it, so you can count me as a happy user.
Yaz.
Bah. Just do what I do. Everytime they ask me for my name and address, I just give them yours.
Uh, on second thought, maybe you shouldn't do what I do :).
Yaz.
Oops -- my bad on the first link:
Yaz.
Actually, Apple Corps' logo is an all-green apple (Granny Smith) with no nibbles out of it, whereas Macintosh apples are green and red.
Let's look at the differences:
And with that, I'm going to have another slice of fine MacIntosh apple pie my mother baked, with a scoop of ice cream on the side, while I listen to Abbey Road on my PowerBook G4. Now there's some Apple-on-Apple action.
Yaz.
Once Apple releases their iSync development kit I'm planning on writing the necessary jConduit(s) to synchronize the OS X calendar and address book via my Open Source jSyncManager.
The jSyncManager already has an OS X disk image, but what's currently missing is the ability to connect to a USB port through Java on the Mac. Once javax.usb is ported to OS X, this limitation will be removed, and you'll be able to run the jSyncManager like any other OS X application.
And with an iSync jConduit, the jSyncManager will be just as good as, if not better than, Palm's HotSync Manager for the Mac.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
I read what was said -- it makes no difference. The first line of defence in ensuring a given vote is accurate is the voter themselves. If they see that the text portion of their ballot doesn't correspond to the machine-readable portion, they can report it. If you use a barcode for the machine-readable portion, the voter has no way of readily ensuring that the text portion and the barcode portion match.
Yes, you can verify wether or not such a mis-match has occured atthe macro level by doing a hand-recount of every ballot -- but in order to do so there typically has to be reason to demand one in the first place: you have to know (or at least very strongly suspect) that something fishy has occurred.
Providing a voting mechanism where the voter can verify for themselves that the ballot is correct is the best way to do this. That way everyone polices the system. If someone does tamper with the mechanism, supporter for one side or the other will notice if it's human verifiable when they vote, and the manual recount can be demanded.
The name and barcode system doesn't have this security. If we're dealing with a computer generating the computer-scanable portion, and a computer reading the computer-scanable portion, you take the human out of the equation.
And with such a system, you can avoid some obvious detection in a tight race by having the printing computer mis-barcode only a small percentage of one candidates votes to tip the scales. In a tight race, a mere 1% of such tamered votes in at one polling station would do it. Do that at a polling station in a poorly educated part of town, or in a seniors home or somesuch, and chances are pretty good you'll not only fix the election in your favour, but that you'll get away with it without anyone suspecting anything untowards. Do you think Granny or Cletus is going to know that the barcode doesn't match the name printed on the same ballot?
Yaz.
Yup -- I ran into this test building the jSyncManager yesterday.
Thankfully it was only four instances, all within the same source file. I fixed the latest CVS copy accordingly, alerted the developer mailing list, and posted a new item about it to our project page on SourceForge.
Otherwise, so far, so good. I'm looking forward to this release getting much wider availability (ie: on more platforms) in order to use the typesafe collection mechanisms.
Yaz.
Right here you have an excellent way to abuse the system.
The problem with your otherwise excellent proposed mechanism is that very, very few people know how to read a barcode. As such, they have no way to visually ensure that the name on the ballot matches up with the barcode on the ballot.
You need to replace this with something which is verifiable by the human eye, and which is scannable by a computer with an exceedingly low scan error rate. Your proposed system only satisfies the second requirement.
Yaz.
Or possibly Canada. John Lennon spent a good deal of time in Canada doing things he wouldn't so in the US, like his and Yoko's North American bed-in (in Montreal), John and Yoko's "Live Peace in Toronto" concert, and the fact that he stayed with Ronnie Hawkins (IIRC) at a farm here in Ontario for some time.
During those days the RCMP and Canadian police forces were keeping their eyes on rock stars (or at least so it seems to me). In 1977 Keith Richards (Rolling Stones) was arrested for Heroin possession.
I wouldn't be too suprised if the RCMP collected some data on Lennon during his time here. What would suprise me is if the FBI would think that anyone here would care if such information were to be made public 24 years later.
(To be honest though, England does seem to be the more probable source).
Yaz.
Don't worry -- I don't. But the opportunity to vent my near-total frustration with online dating came up, and I just had to take it and hopefully warn others away.
I suppose it works for some people, but for the rest of us online dating is just a huge disappointment.
Maybe it's where I live. I really don't know. Nobody seems to want to take the time to actually get to know someone. People have so much depth (or lack thereof) to them that you can't get to know them adaquately through online dating sites, or from just one date.
The old-fashioned ways tend to be better. And I'm far from the only guy to think so.
Yaz.
You had to post this just as I got mod points, and was going to start using them in this forum...:).
I find what you have to say very topical, because I was in talks earlier today with an MD who holds a chair at a west-coast University who is interested in contracting me out to write Open Source code based on my Open Source, pure-Java jSyncManager Project.
Oh the parallels :). This project is receiving some public funding, so the doctors and developers currently involved are striving to use as much OSS as possible, and to release their custom code pieces as Open Source software. They want to contract my services to help them integrate handheld systems into their groupware/messaging applications they're building.
As such, it looks like I'm about to start getting paid to write Open Source Java code for the medical field. Yay for me!
Yaz.
Online dating has been one of the most dehumanizing processes I've ever been through. And I used to be in the military.
First things first -- unless you look like a movie star and are super rich, and spend your time jet setting around the world, resign yourself to spending a good deal of money on online dating now. Most dating sites are "controlled" by a subset of women who don't need to spend any money because every Tom, Dick, and Harry is using their credits to contact them. They won't spend a whole lot of time looking for you, because they don't need to. You'll be in a darwinian struggle with a pile of other guys, and if you're not picture-perfect, your not going to get that date you need to show them your personality.
Also remember there are sometimes very good reasons why some of the women you'll meet online are single. I've wound up dating two women who were out patients from psychiatric institions. Now I'm not the kind of guy who stigmatizes people with mental illness, and I think they diserve love and support too -- but these women were too unstable to support any form of relationship, and had serious problems they needed to deal with before they could consider any form of stable relationship.
Also remember that the women you do wind up getting in touch with online often feel like they have a lot of other choices, so if you don't wow them and fill their hearts with desire on the very first date, your chances of a second date are virtually nil. Very, very, very few of the women you meet online are going to take the time to really get to know you -- if you don't immediately fit their expectations, most (in my experience at least) aren't going to invest the time to get to know you.
And if you hold any tenents outside societal norm, you're probably already out of the race. Online dating sites give people the ability to search on specific qualities, and if you don't show up in the average search, you're not going to get anywhere. I'm an athiest and a non-drinker (neither of which I enforce on or expect of others, BTW). My profile doesn't tend to get too many hits (more for the latter than the former, sad to say). I actually had one woman walk out on a date with me when I told her I was an athiest (the site I use doesn't have a selection in their religion combo box for "athiest" -- the closest is "non religious").
(I really hate to pick on so many women as I seem to have done so in this post. I can only guess that many men on online dating sites are the same -- but I don't date men, so I have no experience with their foibles. What few dates I have been on over the years I've been on online dating sites have usually shared their previous experiences, and one common theme with them is meeting men who are nothing like they claim, especially in the looks department).
Remember as well that you're going to be competing with a lot of people who are lying about themselves to make themselves sound better than they are. You can do the same thing -- but most women aren't going to date you again if/when they discover your dishonesty. Still, you're competing with the geekoid down the street who claims he looks like Mel Gibson and Tom Cuise combined, and that makes it exceedingly difficult for you to compete if you're truuthful (and, presumably, don't look like Mel Gibson and/or Tom Cruise).
Yeah, I'm a bit bitter over my experiences. I quit online dating for a long time, but after leaving the military recently signed back on, just to see if things had changed. I'm sad to say that, based on my experience these past few months, they haven't. Now I'm just a bitter old coot nobody would want to date anyway who hangs around /. telling whomever will listen him sad and loney online dating tale :).
Yaz.
I have to say the only problems I've ever had with Backup have been if I've lost my connection, usually because I've forgotton the backup has been running and closed the lid to my PowerBook, or during my weekly backup to one of my Linux boxes if I've forgotten to setup the SMB share.
Both of those are my fault. Otherwise, Backup has always just worked for me (at least for backing up data -- I haven't had to restore anything yet). I have some 40MB or so of data backed up.
Mind you, I don't use Safari -- I'm using Firefox. I do have Backup setup to backup my Firefox settings directory (with the exception of the cache files, obviously). Otherwise, in 5 months of usage, I haven't run into a single problem that I didn't cause.
Yaz.
Quicker -- but is it better?
My iDisk has become my off-site backup system of choice over here (albeit not the only offsite backup I'm using). I have data that I simply cannot afford to lose. .Mac's Backup program puts this data onto my iDisk daily.
I got bit once by not having offsite backup due to environmental damage. Several hard drives died and were unrecoverable, and my backup CDs sitting in the same room likewise were unusuable. I lost a lot of unrecoverable data that day, and I won't risk that again.
I've become a huge fan of my iDisk. I recently started doing some contract work for a company that just recently starting moving from Windows to Mac OS X, and put up the results of my work as a disk image on my public (but password protected) iDisk. Sent them they password, and they simply selected from the Finder "iDisk -> Other Users Public Folder", and voila -- they had direct access to mount the disk image.
My iDisk has been getting quite full as of recent, so I was happy to see this announcement. I don't store any e-mail on .Mac, so I put the Mail storage at its minimum (15MB), and cranked my iDisk up to 235MB. Sweet :).
Yaz.
Dear SC:
If you think you're going to just dump me and leave after you've used me for all these years, you have something else coming, bub.
I was a tramp when you met me, and you should have known this. I was brash, got around, was completely unstable. You weren't particularily good to me either -- you'd just disappear for hours every time you wanted to play Doom with your buddies.
And it wasn't as if you didn't have other options. There was that nice, stable, amd smart OS/2 next door who had eyes for you. OS/2 was smart, sophisticated, let you do more at once, and could handle twice the bits I could. But you wanted someone who got around, who had been with all your friends, and who didn't require you to think or learn anything, who let you leave me and covort around with your old DOS buddies whenever you wanted.
I did everything I could to try to hide the good life from you. I gave you some flash once in a while, but no substance. For some reason, you stuck around. I was always afraid you and your friends who used me would notice, so I had to take drastic measures.
First off, I had to routinely sneak into your house in every new PC you bought, even if you or your friends didn't want me around. In fact, even if you couold go to sufficient lengths to make sure I didn't sneak back into your home, you still had to pay for my services. You paid, and got nothing in return. And yet you still kept coming back.
I didn't like some of your friends. That DR-DOS guy bugged me, so I went somewhat haywire everytime you invited him around. I didn't want you to see that there were ways to improve me -- I never had any intention of improving.
Eventually you started noticing that my bits were only half of what the others were offering, so I promised I'd change. That I too would have 32 bits like the others.
And you believed me like a sucker. At first I claimed to support 32 bits through Win32s, but it was really just some more 16 bit stuff in a 32 bit disguise. I kept changing at random, not for your benifit, but to make sure you couldn't leave me by breaking OS/2's ability to run my software every month or so. Poor OS/2 was running around in circles trying to attract you by keeping up with my useless changes.
Then suddenly in 1995 I decided to get some cosmetic surgery. You were stunned when you saw me, but really I just showed the cosmetic surgeon some pictures of OS/2 and MacOS and had him take bits and pieces from them and re-shape me to look like their bastard child. I was still ugly underneath, with serious problems. I still couldn't do more than one thing at a time very well, was still unstable, and still got around with all your friends.
Worse yet, now even if you had wanted to get rid of me, I was going to show up. When you decided to upgrade your old 486 to a shiney new Pentium, I showed up uninvited. When you upgraded that Pentium to a faster model, I once again showed up, even though you already had paid for my services and held a valid license. I kept sucking your wallet dry, and was still mentally unstable.
Then I became schitzophrenic, and started offering myself in a real 32 bit version without the cosmetic surgury. But you avoided me because I wouldn't play with your old DOS games, and had serious issues that were new and strange to you.
In 1998, you started to sour. I'd been abusing you for years, but you like the sucker you are continued to stick around. I offered you a way to get onto the Information Superhighway, but ensured you could only do so in my way, when I felt like letting you. Sure OS/2 had been letting people do this for a few years -- I kept you away from the game as long as possible, but in the end, in order to keep you, I finally relented and gave you access to the new highway.
By 2000, I was able to become cocky, and my schitzophrenia grew worse. You had every right and option to leave me, but I had put blue screens over all your windows so you could
Or they don't, and your multi-hundred-million dollar space probe crashes without doing any useful science.
Yaz.
For the record, I bought my first Mac (a 12" PowerBook G4) this past spring based in significant part on all the good things I had read about Apple's latest offerings here on /. .
Yaz.
Absolutely nothing. The file is only 8KB in size, and doesn't appear to contain any actual image data. Loading it up in GraphicConverter v4.9 over here (and Preview, and a number of other tools) just reports that the image file is corrupt.
Yaz.
Your own argument works completely against you.
An HTML file contains no bitmap data -- it merely links to it. If I ask for "page.html", I expect to get a text file called "page.html". This is how HTTP is designed to work, and is indeed how it works virtually everywhere.
Your browser has to parse the HTML and get all of the IMG tags, and then make requests for each and every graphic element referenced.
Asking for "page.html" doesn't necessitate that one request everything it links to. If I go to "google.com", I'm hardly expected to download everything it links to.
As such, I run a browser that allows me to control what content I retrieve, so that I am in control of the content. If I wanted someone else to be in control of the content, I'd watch more TV.
So if I ask for "page.html", I expect to get a text file called "page.html". If it links to other content, I'll retrieve it if it so suits me to do so by making additional requests. I refuse to make requests for content I don't want, and this includes most advertisements.
The fact of the matter remains there are many Mozilla-based browsers which provide me with the ability to block images. The browsers offer this feature, and it's one I desire. As such, I won't use Camino as my day-to-day browser until it supports this very useful feature.
And let's get one thing perfectly clear: ad blocking software is completely legal. I'm not breaking any laws by using it. As such, if its usage afffects the bottom line of some webmaster, it's because their business model is broken, and not my fault or problem.
Yaz.
I like Java. I maintain an Open Source project coded in Java. I particularily apperciate the fact that Java applications can be easily made completely portable across platforms.
Here's what concerns me. Open Source has never really shown that it's terribly interested in ensuring API and binary compatibility across releases. Native binaries tend to be somewhat tightly compiled for their specific distro. To get around this, many packages are distributed as source so you can compile them specifically against your platform of choice.
All well and good, but take a look at how the sources accomplish this: via pre-compiler directives to ensure things compile correctly on different platforms, or via complex makefiles to build specific sources on specific platforms.
Currently, I don't typically have to worry about such things with Java. There are no pre-compiler directives, and there is no need to use them: one codebase compiles on every platform.
Here's where my concern comes in. As soon as you Open Source Java, someone is going to want to put in pre-compiler directives because they're used to them from the C/C++ world. Around the same time, someone is going to create a Java fork which isn't 100% compitable in some area.
Java developers, wanting to target as many platforms as possible, are going to start using the pre-compiler directives in order to work around implementation-specific bugs. Maintainers are going to start worrying less-and-less about API compatibility issues because developers are going to have pre-compiler directives to work around them (as we've already seen many times over the years in the C/C++ world). All of which is going to help reduce Java's platform neutrality, and make my job as a Java developer more complex than it is currently, reducing incentive to use it in the first place.
My biggest interest as a Java developer would be to ensure that all Java runtimes conform to a single, standardized testsuite as Sun seems to want. And I don't care that the testsuite could be buggy -- so long as any API bugs that do exist are consistant across platforms. At the same time, there are some amazing things the Open Source world could do with all the other parts of the Java Runtime Environment -- for example, making the HotSpot Compiler Open Source could allow for some pretty massive JIT research to be consolidated in one place for the benefit of everyone.
Much of this could be solved if Sun put the Java API and other technologies through an official standardization process, and then made their implementation Open Source. The former has worked well for other languages (Ada comes to mind), where a tight standardization process long helped to ensure source compatibility between platforms. The latter works extremely well for enhancing the adoption and development of a given technology. But to make it work, you couldn't just go with some form of defacto standard that most Open Source projects use/create/adopt. Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure what benefit Sun would see from doing something like this (not that I personally care anything about wether or not Sun were to get anything out of doing this -- I just realize they're going to need to see some sort of benefit before they ever decide to do such a thing).
Yaz.