When you say "new home", do you mean just recently built or do you mean it's a new home to you but it's actually 85 years old on a farm somewhere? If you just had a new home constructed and didn't bother to have the contractor run cabling for telephones (and even ethernet, cable TV, etc.) before the drywall went in you're nuts.
A new home as in: we're the first people to live in the building:).
(Not as in, however, just built -- this house used to be the model home, so it was actually constructed a few years ago, but without most of the interior walls. It had to have some major reconstruction ddone inside by the builder just prior to our moving in to make it livable).
As it is, there is roughed in wiring put in by the builder to each of the bedrooms, plus the kitchen and living room. The problem is that it was a bit of a shoddy job, and none of the interior wiring going through the walls had any form of connectivity to the phone system outside the walls. And it hasn't helped that in the basement there are a dozen wires of different sorts that aren't connected to anything that are just hanging down into nothingness (a product of being the model home -- it had an alarm system wired into it that was removed prior to taking posession, as well as some exterior lights and such that were removed, plus roughed-in central vac control wires and such), making it extremely difficult to isolate which wire is supposed to go where.
As it happens, the builders telephone guy was here this morning, and between the two of us we were able to narrow down the possibilities and finally identify the roughed-in telephone cable that was intended to provide service to the upper floor. Unfortunately, for the upper floor they just ran a single continuous loop. Additionally, they wired in the wrong pairs as ring and tip (the jacks are standard 4-wire, but the cabling itself is 6-wire CAT3, each of course having a different colour scheme).
Thankfully I've been able to fix this, and today all of the upper floor bedrooms now have proper, working telephone service.
To use VOIP, you have networks, hubs, routers, wireless cards, firewalls, switches, and enough power bricks to saturate two 6-plug power strips so that you end up with something that must be tweaked to operate smoothly at all, in order to get something with the range of a cordless telephone. (Wifi uses the exact same frequencies as a cordless telephone - it's essentially a fancy cordless telephone modem)
You'd have to install a whole pile of even more expensive equipment if your phone company wasn't providing all of the necessary switches and other hardware leading up to your home.
I just moved into a new home less than two weeks ago. The house didn't have any telephone service coming into it, so I had to order it from the local telephone company (Bell Canada). Unfortunately, for new homes they'll only setup your service from the curb to an outside wall of your home. You have to do the rest (or pay them quite a bit to have them do it).
Between the cabling, the phone line, the basic 1x9 phone distribution panel, the wall box to contain it, and various bits and pieces of necessary hardware, it's cost nearly $200 CDN in parts. And none of these components has any processing capability -- it's all simple electronics.
Sure it's easy to think of POTS as being easier than VOIP, but that's typically because the telephone company or someone else has done all the work for you, giving you a wall jack as your interface. If the phone company did nothing but give you a cable with access to their network, you'd have to invest a pile of money into the necesary equipment to make that useful.
VOIP may be in the same boat one day. One of my previous employers went all VOIP for a new office of about 2000 employees, and setup a seperate network just for handling the telephone traffic. For those of us using the system, it was as easy as plugging the phone into the jack marked "phone" -- no different than with a POTS phone in any home (but mine. As it happens, the builder appears to have screwed up much of the phone cabling theey roughed in internally, as thus far only 1 in 5 is actually working:P).
Probably never. Why would they make a competing unix platform more apple-like? They have a ton of unix geeks buying macs now.
Yup, and I'm one of them;).
However, the original poster wasn't asking Apple to write a Window Manager or anything -- they just want iTunes for Linux.
Why would Apple want to do this? Probably because the iPod and iTunes Music Store are two of their biggest money makers, and extending their reach would only serve to increase those profits.
Unfortunately, I can't see them actually doing this. But hey, as someone who has both Linux machines and a PowerBook G4, one can hope:).
Just feel lucky you can even order one. Here in Canada Apple updated their website to announce the AirPort Express, with the addded disclaimer that it's availability is subject to regulatory approval here in Canada.
I'm already running an AirPort Extreme base station, but the added ability to stream digital music to my home theatre system and the ability to have a portable wireless base station I can take with me while travelling makes the AirPort Express a pretty useful looking piece of kit.
Easy solution to that. The game makers can distrubute dedicated server software for the game for windows and linux. You can now set up or rent your very own dedicated server. On top of that they can still allow clients to double as servers.
Except that there aren't too many console games out there which prrovide such a service. The servers for PSS2 games such as Amplitude, SOCOM, and SSX 3 don't have publically available server software. What's worse, even if they did it wouldn't necessaily do you a whole lot of good: the games have the domain name of the server to connect to hard-coded into them, with no facility to allow you to specify a different server to connect to.
What you've basically proposed is the use of non-dedicated servers for such games -- the same thing I'm arguing for:).
The big problem I have with dedicated servers is this: are the game development companies goin to still be running them years from now? 5? 10?
Probably not. However, what if I and a friend enjoy that game and want to continue playing online against each other past the date when the vendor decides to take their servers offline for a given game? We'd be SOL.
The big advantage of being able to run your own servers in such games is that you don't have to worry about such obscelesence. If five years from now I want to play Doom against my brother across town, we can do so. But if we want to play Amplitude or SSX 3? Probably not.
As for the mouse, IBM has the "TrackPoint Mouse" prototype, which has a trackpoint device instead of a wheel.
It wasn't jusst a prototype -- IBM acctually sold these mice for a few years.. I've had one on my primary desktop for quite some time -- it's by far my favorite mouse.
Unfortunately, it apparently didn't seel all that great. IBM did a redesign on it that used a big plastic button instead of the trackpoint. I can't say I liked it a whole lot -- I've stuck with my ~5yo original TrackPoint Mouse. It's vastly more flexible than scroll mice IMO.
The jSyncManager core software may be free (as in both beer and speech), but it's really just an enabler technology. Sure it has the necessary protocol stack and such for performing data synchronizations, but the real value is in being able to connect it to your applications, databases, networks, and overall dataflow.
That part isn't free. Current users typically have to develop such plug-in connectors (we call them "jConduits") themselves.
My idea is to sell these integration services. Stand-alone, you can run the jSyncManager, but other than for the backup/restoration of data, and some basic functionality (installing PRC's and PDB's, syncing e-mail with a POP/SMTP server pair, dumping standard application records as text, and downloading photographs) the free part doesn't do a whole lot on its own.
As with many Open Source projects, the idea isn't to make money offf the core software, but off the necessary dupport and servicess required to actually make use of it.
It seems to me the real barrier is going to be that this is functionality people expect their *hardware vendor* to provide; so to turn it into a profitable business you need to do OEM licensing instead of GPL and target manufacturers of PalmOS devices.
This is something I've tentatively looked into. It is certainly going to require further investigation.
Currently our primary users are corporate environments that neeed synchronization services and support on non-Windows platforms. PalmSource does a fine job of providing synchronization software for Windows and MacOS, but that's it. If you want to run a large synchronization service from a Linux, Unix, OS/2, or other system, you're SOL.
Corporate users of the jSyncManager are those who need to be able to run it on their platform of choice, and to be able to change that underlying hardware/OS platform without needing to change their synchronization software, or any of the custom connector (jConduit) work they've done. Being pure Java, the jSyncManager is a natural at this -- if your organization is running Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, and Windows, you can run the jSyncManager on al of them, completely unchanged. jConduit plug-in development can be done completely in pure Java, making it easy to do and completely portable.
Bundling with a hardware vendor would be a dream, but I'm not going to hold me breath on that one.
You picked a good time to ask -- I just spent the last few hours putting out a new alpha release of the jSyncManager (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) up on our project site at SourceForge (http://sf.jsyncmanager.org).
(The jSyncManager is a pure-Java data synchronization solution for PalmOS based handhelds that is completely platform-neutral, with an open API, easy extensibility, and its own jConduit plug-in architecture).
I started this project back in 1997, writing the jSerial API, and latest the jSyncManager itself. It saw its first release (free, but under a closed-source license) in May 1999. It's gone through several iterations (including an IBM released version called ManplatoSync for Java), finally being released under an Open Source license in September 2002.
I not only work on it daily still, but I'm in the process of setting up a software service/integration/development company around it.
My biggest challenges include trying to involve other developers in the project -- we have a small core, and users do occassionally submit patches, but attracting Open Source developers that actually make any contributions can be a real hassle. If your experience turns out to be like mine, you'll have lots of good intentioned people offer to help out, but will have a very difficult time finding people who will actually do any work, or make contributions without prodding. It can take a while to find developers who are real gems (although when you do, you'll invariably find yourself making some good friends and contacts -- your core developers are your biggest asset).
Some suggestions:
Don't skimp on documentation. Good user and developer documentation can make or break your project. Complex projects that other developers can't easily get into because of poor API and developer documentation can slow development and developer acceptance of your project. Likewise, poor end-user documentation can likewise stymie uptake.
Setup a discussion mailing list/online forum and post into it whenever you make an updatee or new release. When starting a new project, users are often leery of empty forums devoid of activity. So be sure when you start your project to generate your own activity until you attract users. Some users base their perceptions of the activity of a project on its public user community, so list/forum traffic is good.
Release early, release often. Plan your "final" releases, then release various alpha/beta releases whenever you add something new. In this way, your project will be percieved as active by potential users. Daily updates to your CVS repository won't really matter if your last file release was three years ago -- not every user wants to get code from CVS.
As for licensing, I chose to release the API under the LGPL to allow developers to choose their own licensing for any plug-ins they develop that use the API, and the GPL for our applications and the core plug-ins that we've developed. In this way we can ensure that our applications and plug-ins can't be integrated into a closed-source project, and can't be modified and released as closed source by third parties, but they can develop closed-source applications that call our library (although any changes to the library sources must be released as Open Source). So far users appear to be very happy with this arrangement.
This spam filtering feature seems pretty similar to the one found in Mozilla Mail. Infact I'd be willing to bet that its just another bayesian e-mail filter with maybe a few extra bells and whistles.
Actually, if you read the article it specifically states that Mail's spam filtering is not like Mozilla Mails. You use it in much the same manner, butt the underlying technology is completely different.
I carry a similar train of thought. I fuck with shit all day at work (as a net/sys admin drone) and when I come home, I certainly don't want to fuck with more stuff.
Just this very day I ordered my first Mac -- one of the 12" PowerBooks. I've owned a lot of systems in my lifetime, but this is the first from Apple.
I have to say that I concur somewhat with your assessment. When I recently decided I needed a laptop (to go alongside my 5 desktop systems:) ), I wanted something that was going to be powerful, have lots of cool media capabilities my other systems don't have (one OS/2 box and 4 Linux boxes), and which required an absolute minimum of maintenance. Sure my OS/2 and Linux desktops work great for all of the development work I do and servers I run at home, but that simply isn't an issue for me on a laptop. If I'm on the road, I don;t want to have to twiddle with the laptop much -- I want to be able to do work on it, access the 'net, and be entertained. And having the power of FreeBSD underneath doesn't hurt -- I'll be able to easily integrate the system into my network, and can use it to run my Linux apps remotely through X.
I'm looking forward to it arriving -- it looks to be one well-built system with lots of toys (of course, i ordered the AirPort Extreme base station and a 15GB iPod to go with it, along with one of the backpack cases:) ).
To explain mysef, relatively new programming languages are all just context-free grammars, and computers are just exceedingly complex Turing machines.
I have yet to find a home PC with infinite memory. Maybe if there were such a thing, one could get Windows to run somewhat decently well:).
You can't really call a computer a Turing machine, as there are more bounds on a computer than there are on a Turing machine. The Turing machine is, however, very useful as a mathematical construct for determining what computers can and cannot do, and is something every Computer Science student needs to have in their mental toolkit.
This whole confusion surrounding the differences between Computer Science and Programming is one reason why I don't tell people I'm a programmer, but instead a Computer Scientist (who sometimes happens to do programming on the side to pay the bills). Programmers are a dime a dozen, and there are a whole lot of them out there who may know syntax, but have no idea how to write good code, and I don't want to be associated with them:).
Oh, and I'm an Ontarian, and I've never heard the anthem played at a movie theatre. And I'm pretty sure I've been to a "first showing of the day" (specifically, the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode I).
The playing of the national anthem in movie theatres died out in Ontario sometime in the early-mid 80's. When I went to see the original Star Wars they played it. I guess you're just too young to remember;).
My Open Source Project, the jSyncManager Project (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) could certainly use more help and attention. It's a pure Java solution for synchronizing PalmOS based handhelds with applications and databases. It has a completely object-oriented protocol stack, and only requires jUSB or the Java Communications API to communicate, making it completely platform-neutral. It doesn't need to be ported between platforms ala pilot-link, nor does it rely on the Windows HotSync Manager like most other PalmOS-based Java sync solutions, so it will run the same on Linux, OS/2, Windows, MacOS, *BSD, and anything else that can run Java.
We've been doing pretty well attracting users, particularily in the corporate space because the applications and APIs are mature (the project will be celebrating 5 years since its initial 1.0 release this May), stable, and allow easy development in Java.
But getting people to contribute code has been a real hassle, as has been trying to get developers of other Java-based Open Source applications to use our code and specs (like our jConduit plug-in spec for creating your own pure Java conduit plug-ins) -- even in cases where it makes perfect sense to do so (like for JPluck -- a pure Java toolkit for Plucker, which while being pure, cross-platform Java in the toolkit itself, provides only a native Windows conduit for synchroniation).
The project is at the state right now where we have tons of potential users who would like to se more plug-ins, but a complete dearth of willing Open Source developers to actually write them. Sure, now and then some user/developer might supply a patch to fix something minor, but it's exceedingly rare than anyone ever volunteers to develop something new (and when they do, it's rarer still that they actually follow through).
Sorry for the rant -- but the project has long been close to my heart, people who have seen and used it rank it quite highly, and we have lots of willing users -- we're just lacking the developers. It makes me understand why some other OS project administrators (like the LRP guys) can be willing to throw in the towel. Everyone wants new features, but finding the willing developers who will actually put any real time into development can be exceedingly frustrating.
If someone buys a stock they expect the price to rise, so what have WE forgotten that could be good news for SCO investors? The principle of 'many eyes' has been used by the Open Source movement before.
There is a big difference between the Open Source development model and people buying stock.
In the Open Source development model, the question the individual usually asks is: "how can I contribute to improve the project"?
When buying stock these days, what most people ask is "how can I take advantage of a situation to my own benifit"?
The first is a collabrative, community effort, wheras the latter is personal greed. There's nothing wrong with reasonable personal greed, and I'm sure many of the investors concerned are pretty reasonable people. They're speculating that all of the buzz surrounding SCO will cause the stock price to rise (or, if they're dealing in options, may be buying in at last years low price and selling at todays inflated price at a profit).
Investors are not necessarily stating that they believe in the company or its products, or that they think the company has a future. Individuals and organizations that deal in day trading and other short-term investment strategies speculate purely on wether or not they'll be able to sell at a profit.
Also remember that for every smart investor, there are probably two dumb ones out there buying up stocks they think they'll flip for a quick profit, but who wind up falling flat on their faces. After all, when companies start to tank and their stocks start selling at a fraction of their previous value, someone is buying them up (otherwise the sellers couldn't sell). There have been a whole lot of people in the history of stock trading who have would up with completely worthless shares when a company went completely under.
You shouldn't assume the stock buyers know something we don't when it comes to SCO. They probably just know that SCO being in the news is pushing their share prices up somewhat, and that if SCO wins even a minor battle (say, they win some evidetiary motion against IBM) the stock price could go up, and they could sell it for a quick profit -- even if SCO eventually loses the war.
Of course, there could be another reason for buying up SCO stock -- if the Linux community (or those friendly to it) could get ahold of a majority of shares they could turf Mr. McBride and stop the insanity:).
(And that's something that shouldn't be completely discounted -- a major SCO customer (like, say, McDonalds) could in theory be quietly buying up SCO stock to force a change in the executive. That could benifit such a buyer if they're one that has an interest in using Linux in their enterprise either now or in the future).
For those who want to avoid hitting a Microsoft website, here's my summary of MS's "claims", and my own interpretation of them:
Lower Windows Staffing Costs Provide a TCO Advantage over Linux
...which is just a fancy way of saying "Windows admins with no more paper behind them than an MCSE will work for low pay".
WinTel Server 10 Times Less Expensive to Operate than Linux Mainframe
A set of PC servers costing less than a mainframe? <sarcasm> Say it isn't so! </sarcasm>
What's next? "Honda 10 times less expensive than Porche"?
Microsoft.NET Development Platform Delivers 25% Lower Development & Support Costs Then J2EE/Linux
I'll let the following paragraph from the study speak for itself for a moment:
The J2EE application server and Unix-based database software used in the Linux development and
deployment stack drive up product costs and development complexity relative to the comparable
Microsoft products.
In other words -- it isn't Linux that is driving the added costs, but the cost of the commercial database and application server applications they decided to investigate:
However, the key cost factor in the study's
Linux cases was the J2EE environment, not the operating system.
This study also doesn't address the impact of needing to retrain existing staff with Unix/J2EE experience over to Windows/.NET:
Despite Microsoft's economic advantages over J2EE/Linux for the applications studied, the study also indicates
that many organizations will adopt Linux instead of Microsoft's alternative. The interviewees using Linux, in
general, saw migration from Unix/RISC to Linux/Intel as their best opportunity to reduce costs while retaining
their investments in Unix skills.
A few other interesting points on this study:
The Linux costs include purchasing RedHat Enterprise Linux AS for two servers, instead of just getting one of the off-the-shelf Linux distros for $0.
Included Oracle Database Enterprise Edition with a perpetual processor license for Linux, and SQL Server Enterprise Edition for the Windows boxes,
The cost of the development team for Linux was calculated for one year, wheras the development team on the Windows side was only calculated for nine months
For the medium sized business, they started with MySQL for free, but decided to add in the cost of Oracle, presuming that the medium organization would just "decide" up switch after three years.
The study only looks at the up-front costs, and doesn't look long-term (like in 2 - 3 year when Microsoft forces you to upgrade all your servers, at your cost, to their latest and greatest version, and all of the setup/support hassles that causes).
I'll stop there. Obviously, Microsoft is once again revving their FUD machine into high gear. Is anyone truly suprised? Will anyone truly be sucked in by it?
Okay, where can I get some blue and red 3D glasses in this day and age?
The August 1998 issue of National Geographic came with two pairs, ironically enough to view stereo images as taken by NASA's last successful Mars lander, Pathfinder.
That's what I used to view the current images. So if you know someone with a National Geographic collection dating back that far you can borrow them, or if you're really keen you can head down to your local library, find the issue in question (hopefully with at least one pair of the glasses still inside), take it to an available library internet terminal, bring up the page in question, and view away.
Okay -- looking at the link, that box is ugly -- but it doesn't compare to the original GalRiv 1.0 box art.
The GalCiv 1.0 box art looked like a 10-year-old who was playing with MS paint drew it on a 16-colour EGA monitor. At least that box shot looks like it was professionally done. The original GalCiv for OS/2 box would have been laughable if it were featured on a $2 Shareware disk in a bargin bin.
The game itself was (and remains) amazing -- but that first box was terrible. GalCiv 2's box was vastly better (an improvement that occurred after GalCiv 1's publisher screwed Stardock's founder and GalCiv 1.0 developer out of his royalties, at which point StarDock dumped them and became their own publisher).
I really wish I could find a box-art shot of this abomination on the 'net, but unfortunately it was released at a time when most people didn't have colour scanners readily available to them. Ptth.
I can't say that I've seen that box ever. But to describe the GalCiv 1.0 box, in the bottom left corner it has a blurry picture of what I guess is supposed to be earth, on a black "space" background. Floating above and to the right of it is a really bad 3-colour picture of a wooden sea-going ship (why? Who the hell knows:P). To the right of it is a blue oval, and on the right-hand side of the box is what looks like a satellite. In the top-left corner is a box with a headshot of an alien. Scattered in the background are some asterix's (supposed to be stars), and some circles representing planets and moons (many of which are just solid-coloured, but one or two of which have a really bad gradient shading).
Now picture in your head what I just described, and then picture it as looking worse than what you've just imagined, and you'll get the picture:).
(I do have the box here, but unforturately I don't have a scanner nor a digital camera with which to use to put it online somewhere for everyone to get a chuckle over).
Congratulations -- you've completely missed the point!
I'm not stating that OS/2 was a superior gaming platform to Windows -- simply a superior multitasker. Galactic Civilizations using threading pretty heavily to allow the computer AI's to take their turns in the background while the player is making their moves. It was this use of threading that Windows couldn't handle anywhere near as well as OS/2 (and generally still can't, although it has improved quite a bit since the GalCiv 1.0 days).
My posting was in the context of one game, not of all games in general. Until relatively recently, Windows simply didn't have the capacity to handle a port of Galactic Civilizations. Now that it can, Windows players get to discover a game that OS/2 users were playing back in the mid 90's (albeit with better graphics and sound to take advantage of hardware advances during this time).
One problem -- GalCiv isn't particularily new or unique. It's been around for a decade now. In fact, the most recent Galactic Civilizations that you're playing is actually the fourth release in the series.
The original release was made in 1993 by StarDock Systems, and was published by Advanced Idea Machines. It was released for OS/2 2.1, and took off in a big way. Many people switched to OS/2 just for this game. It had the dubious honour, however, of having the ugliest box art ever!. It came in 4 diskettes, with a "Shipyards" expansion released later.
Then in 1995, StarDock produced "Galactic Civilizations 2", again for OS/2. They dumped AIM and became their own publishers -- resulting in vastly better box art:).
1998 saw the last GalCiv release for IBM's OS/2 platform -- Galactic Civilizations Gold. Bigger galaxy sizes, an even better AI, and new game elements made it a big hit, but by the time of its release IBM's OS/2 was eclipsed by the vastly inferiour Windows 95 and Windows 98, and the market just wasn't there for it.
I've been playing Galactic Civilizations for more than 10 years -- I was a registered beta tester for the original v1.0 release way back in 1993. It is a fantastic game, and it's designer, Brad Wardell, knows a thing or two about video game AI (when GalCiv 1 was released in 1993, nobody had seen anything like it in the AI department).
The only sad thing is that it's taken 10 years for Windows gamers to realize how amazing this series is. Early on in GalCiv's lifetime, it's developer, Mr. Wardell, was quoted as saying that the game couldn't be ported to the then-current DOS and Windows platforms, because neither had suitable multithreading to support the games design. It's kinda sad that it's taken more than 10 years for Windows to finally catch up to what OS/2 could do in 1993.
Slashdot Mirror
A new home as in: we're the first people to live in the building :).
(Not as in, however, just built -- this house used to be the model home, so it was actually constructed a few years ago, but without most of the interior walls. It had to have some major reconstruction ddone inside by the builder just prior to our moving in to make it livable).
As it is, there is roughed in wiring put in by the builder to each of the bedrooms, plus the kitchen and living room. The problem is that it was a bit of a shoddy job, and none of the interior wiring going through the walls had any form of connectivity to the phone system outside the walls. And it hasn't helped that in the basement there are a dozen wires of different sorts that aren't connected to anything that are just hanging down into nothingness (a product of being the model home -- it had an alarm system wired into it that was removed prior to taking posession, as well as some exterior lights and such that were removed, plus roughed-in central vac control wires and such), making it extremely difficult to isolate which wire is supposed to go where.
As it happens, the builders telephone guy was here this morning, and between the two of us we were able to narrow down the possibilities and finally identify the roughed-in telephone cable that was intended to provide service to the upper floor. Unfortunately, for the upper floor they just ran a single continuous loop. Additionally, they wired in the wrong pairs as ring and tip (the jacks are standard 4-wire, but the cabling itself is 6-wire CAT3, each of course having a different colour scheme).
Thankfully I've been able to fix this, and today all of the upper floor bedrooms now have proper, working telephone service.
Yaz.
You'd have to install a whole pile of even more expensive equipment if your phone company wasn't providing all of the necessary switches and other hardware leading up to your home.
I just moved into a new home less than two weeks ago. The house didn't have any telephone service coming into it, so I had to order it from the local telephone company (Bell Canada). Unfortunately, for new homes they'll only setup your service from the curb to an outside wall of your home. You have to do the rest (or pay them quite a bit to have them do it).
Between the cabling, the phone line, the basic 1x9 phone distribution panel, the wall box to contain it, and various bits and pieces of necessary hardware, it's cost nearly $200 CDN in parts. And none of these components has any processing capability -- it's all simple electronics.
Sure it's easy to think of POTS as being easier than VOIP, but that's typically because the telephone company or someone else has done all the work for you, giving you a wall jack as your interface. If the phone company did nothing but give you a cable with access to their network, you'd have to invest a pile of money into the necesary equipment to make that useful.
VOIP may be in the same boat one day. One of my previous employers went all VOIP for a new office of about 2000 employees, and setup a seperate network just for handling the telephone traffic. For those of us using the system, it was as easy as plugging the phone into the jack marked "phone" -- no different than with a POTS phone in any home (but mine. As it happens, the builder appears to have screwed up much of the phone cabling theey roughed in internally, as thus far only 1 in 5 is actually working :P).
Brad BARCLAY
Yup, and I'm one of them ;).
However, the original poster wasn't asking Apple to write a Window Manager or anything -- they just want iTunes for Linux.
Why would Apple want to do this? Probably because the iPod and iTunes Music Store are two of their biggest money makers, and extending their reach would only serve to increase those profits.
Unfortunately, I can't see them actually doing this. But hey, as someone who has both Linux machines and a PowerBook G4, one can hope :).
Brad BARCLAY
Just feel lucky you can even order one. Here in Canada Apple updated their website to announce the AirPort Express, with the addded disclaimer that it's availability is subject to regulatory approval here in Canada.
http://www.apple.com/ca/airportexpress/
I'm already running an AirPort Extreme base station, but the added ability to stream digital music to my home theatre system and the ability to have a portable wireless base station I can take with me while travelling makes the AirPort Express a pretty useful looking piece of kit.
Yaz.
Except that there aren't too many console games out there which prrovide such a service. The servers for PSS2 games such as Amplitude, SOCOM, and SSX 3 don't have publically available server software. What's worse, even if they did it wouldn't necessaily do you a whole lot of good: the games have the domain name of the server to connect to hard-coded into them, with no facility to allow you to specify a different server to connect to.
What you've basically proposed is the use of non-dedicated servers for such games -- the same thing I'm arguing for :).
Yaz.
The big problem I have with dedicated servers is this: are the game development companies goin to still be running them years from now? 5? 10?
Probably not. However, what if I and a friend enjoy that game and want to continue playing online against each other past the date when the vendor decides to take their servers offline for a given game? We'd be SOL.
The big advantage of being able to run your own servers in such games is that you don't have to worry about such obscelesence. If five years from now I want to play Doom against my brother across town, we can do so. But if we want to play Amplitude or SSX 3? Probably not.
Yaz.
It wasn't jusst a prototype -- IBM acctually sold these mice for a few years.. I've had one on my primary desktop for quite some time -- it's by far my favorite mouse.
Unfortunately, it apparently didn't seel all that great. IBM did a redesign on it that used a big plastic button instead of the trackpoint. I can't say I liked it a whole lot -- I've stuck with my ~5yo original TrackPoint Mouse. It's vastly more flexible than scroll mice IMO.
Yaz.
The jSyncManager core software may be free (as in both beer and speech), but it's really just an enabler technology. Sure it has the necessary protocol stack and such for performing data synchronizations, but the real value is in being able to connect it to your applications, databases, networks, and overall dataflow.
That part isn't free. Current users typically have to develop such plug-in connectors (we call them "jConduits") themselves.
My idea is to sell these integration services. Stand-alone, you can run the jSyncManager, but other than for the backup/restoration of data, and some basic functionality (installing PRC's and PDB's, syncing e-mail with a POP/SMTP server pair, dumping standard application records as text, and downloading photographs) the free part doesn't do a whole lot on its own.
As with many Open Source projects, the idea isn't to make money offf the core software, but off the necessary dupport and servicess required to actually make use of it.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Amdinistrator,
The jSyncManager Project
This is something I've tentatively looked into. It is certainly going to require further investigation.
Currently our primary users are corporate environments that neeed synchronization services and support on non-Windows platforms. PalmSource does a fine job of providing synchronization software for Windows and MacOS, but that's it. If you want to run a large synchronization service from a Linux, Unix, OS/2, or other system, you're SOL.
Corporate users of the jSyncManager are those who need to be able to run it on their platform of choice, and to be able to change that underlying hardware/OS platform without needing to change their synchronization software, or any of the custom connector (jConduit) work they've done. Being pure Java, the jSyncManager is a natural at this -- if your organization is running Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, and Windows, you can run the jSyncManager on al of them, completely unchanged. jConduit plug-in development can be done completely in pure Java, making it easy to do and completely portable.
Bundling with a hardware vendor would be a dream, but I'm not going to hold me breath on that one.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project
Well, the X support available from Apple for Mac OS X is based on XFree86, so I'd imagine he could switch to bragging about that instead :).
Brad BARCLAY
You picked a good time to ask -- I just spent the last few hours putting out a new alpha release of the jSyncManager (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) up on our project site at SourceForge (http://sf.jsyncmanager.org).
(The jSyncManager is a pure-Java data synchronization solution for PalmOS based handhelds that is completely platform-neutral, with an open API, easy extensibility, and its own jConduit plug-in architecture).
I started this project back in 1997, writing the jSerial API, and latest the jSyncManager itself. It saw its first release (free, but under a closed-source license) in May 1999. It's gone through several iterations (including an IBM released version called ManplatoSync for Java), finally being released under an Open Source license in September 2002.
I not only work on it daily still, but I'm in the process of setting up a software service/integration/development company around it.
My biggest challenges include trying to involve other developers in the project -- we have a small core, and users do occassionally submit patches, but attracting Open Source developers that actually make any contributions can be a real hassle. If your experience turns out to be like mine, you'll have lots of good intentioned people offer to help out, but will have a very difficult time finding people who will actually do any work, or make contributions without prodding. It can take a while to find developers who are real gems (although when you do, you'll invariably find yourself making some good friends and contacts -- your core developers are your biggest asset).
Some suggestions:
As for licensing, I chose to release the API under the LGPL to allow developers to choose their own licensing for any plug-ins they develop that use the API, and the GPL for our applications and the core plug-ins that we've developed. In this way we can ensure that our applications and plug-ins can't be integrated into a closed-source project, and can't be modified and released as closed source by third parties, but they can develop closed-source applications that call our library (although any changes to the library sources must be released as Open Source). So far users appear to be very happy with this arrangement.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Projet Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
Actually, if you read the article it specifically states that Mail's spam filtering is not like Mozilla Mails. You use it in much the same manner, butt the underlying technology is completely different.
Yaz.
Just this very day I ordered my first Mac -- one of the 12" PowerBooks. I've owned a lot of systems in my lifetime, but this is the first from Apple.
I have to say that I concur somewhat with your assessment. When I recently decided I needed a laptop (to go alongside my 5 desktop systems :) ), I wanted something that was going to be powerful, have lots of cool media capabilities my other systems don't have (one OS/2 box and 4 Linux boxes), and which required an absolute minimum of maintenance. Sure my OS/2 and Linux desktops work great for all of the development work I do and servers I run at home, but that simply isn't an issue for me on a laptop. If I'm on the road, I don;t want to have to twiddle with the laptop much -- I want to be able to do work on it, access the 'net, and be entertained. And having the power of FreeBSD underneath doesn't hurt -- I'll be able to easily integrate the system into my network, and can use it to run my Linux apps remotely through X.
I'm looking forward to it arriving -- it looks to be one well-built system with lots of toys (of course, i ordered the AirPort Extreme base station and a 15GB iPod to go with it, along with one of the backpack cases :) ).
Yaz.
I have yet to find a home PC with infinite memory. Maybe if there were such a thing, one could get Windows to run somewhat decently well :).
You can't really call a computer a Turing machine, as there are more bounds on a computer than there are on a Turing machine. The Turing machine is, however, very useful as a mathematical construct for determining what computers can and cannot do, and is something every Computer Science student needs to have in their mental toolkit.
This whole confusion surrounding the differences between Computer Science and Programming is one reason why I don't tell people I'm a programmer, but instead a Computer Scientist (who sometimes happens to do programming on the side to pay the bills). Programmers are a dime a dozen, and there are a whole lot of them out there who may know syntax, but have no idea how to write good code, and I don't want to be associated with them :).
Yaz.
Oh, and I'm an Ontarian, and I've never heard the anthem played at a movie theatre. And I'm pretty sure I've been to a "first showing of the day" (specifically, the midnight premiere of Star Wars Episode I).
The playing of the national anthem in movie theatres died out in Ontario sometime in the early-mid 80's. When I went to see the original Star Wars they played it. I guess you're just too young to remember ;).
Yaz.
My Open Source Project, the jSyncManager Project (http://www.jsyncmanager.org) could certainly use more help and attention. It's a pure Java solution for synchronizing PalmOS based handhelds with applications and databases. It has a completely object-oriented protocol stack, and only requires jUSB or the Java Communications API to communicate, making it completely platform-neutral. It doesn't need to be ported between platforms ala pilot-link, nor does it rely on the Windows HotSync Manager like most other PalmOS-based Java sync solutions, so it will run the same on Linux, OS/2, Windows, MacOS, *BSD, and anything else that can run Java.
We've been doing pretty well attracting users, particularily in the corporate space because the applications and APIs are mature (the project will be celebrating 5 years since its initial 1.0 release this May), stable, and allow easy development in Java.
But getting people to contribute code has been a real hassle, as has been trying to get developers of other Java-based Open Source applications to use our code and specs (like our jConduit plug-in spec for creating your own pure Java conduit plug-ins) -- even in cases where it makes perfect sense to do so (like for JPluck -- a pure Java toolkit for Plucker, which while being pure, cross-platform Java in the toolkit itself, provides only a native Windows conduit for synchroniation).
The project is at the state right now where we have tons of potential users who would like to se more plug-ins, but a complete dearth of willing Open Source developers to actually write them. Sure, now and then some user/developer might supply a patch to fix something minor, but it's exceedingly rare than anyone ever volunteers to develop something new (and when they do, it's rarer still that they actually follow through).
Sorry for the rant -- but the project has long been close to my heart, people who have seen and used it rank it quite highly, and we have lots of willing users -- we're just lacking the developers. It makes me understand why some other OS project administrators (like the LRP guys) can be willing to throw in the towel. Everyone wants new features, but finding the willing developers who will actually put any real time into development can be exceedingly frustrating.
Yaz.
There is a big difference between the Open Source development model and people buying stock.
In the Open Source development model, the question the individual usually asks is: "how can I contribute to improve the project"?
When buying stock these days, what most people ask is "how can I take advantage of a situation to my own benifit"?
The first is a collabrative, community effort, wheras the latter is personal greed. There's nothing wrong with reasonable personal greed, and I'm sure many of the investors concerned are pretty reasonable people. They're speculating that all of the buzz surrounding SCO will cause the stock price to rise (or, if they're dealing in options, may be buying in at last years low price and selling at todays inflated price at a profit).
Investors are not necessarily stating that they believe in the company or its products, or that they think the company has a future. Individuals and organizations that deal in day trading and other short-term investment strategies speculate purely on wether or not they'll be able to sell at a profit.
Also remember that for every smart investor, there are probably two dumb ones out there buying up stocks they think they'll flip for a quick profit, but who wind up falling flat on their faces. After all, when companies start to tank and their stocks start selling at a fraction of their previous value, someone is buying them up (otherwise the sellers couldn't sell). There have been a whole lot of people in the history of stock trading who have would up with completely worthless shares when a company went completely under.
You shouldn't assume the stock buyers know something we don't when it comes to SCO. They probably just know that SCO being in the news is pushing their share prices up somewhat, and that if SCO wins even a minor battle (say, they win some evidetiary motion against IBM) the stock price could go up, and they could sell it for a quick profit -- even if SCO eventually loses the war.
Of course, there could be another reason for buying up SCO stock -- if the Linux community (or those friendly to it) could get ahold of a majority of shares they could turf Mr. McBride and stop the insanity :).
(And that's something that shouldn't be completely discounted -- a major SCO customer (like, say, McDonalds) could in theory be quietly buying up SCO stock to force a change in the executive. That could benifit such a buyer if they're one that has an interest in using Linux in their enterprise either now or in the future).
Yaz.
For those who want to avoid hitting a Microsoft website, here's my summary of MS's "claims", and my own interpretation of them:
...which is just a fancy way of saying "Windows admins with no more paper behind them than an MCSE will work for low pay".
A set of PC servers costing less than a mainframe? <sarcasm> Say it isn't so! </sarcasm>
What's next? "Honda 10 times less expensive than Porche"?
I'll let the following paragraph from the study speak for itself for a moment:
In other words -- it isn't Linux that is driving the added costs, but the cost of the commercial database and application server applications they decided to investigate:
This study also doesn't address the impact of needing to retrain existing staff with Unix/J2EE experience over to Windows/.NET:
A few other interesting points on this study:
I'll stop there. Obviously, Microsoft is once again revving their FUD machine into high gear. Is anyone truly suprised? Will anyone truly be sucked in by it?
Yaz.
The August 1998 issue of National Geographic came with two pairs, ironically enough to view stereo images as taken by NASA's last successful Mars lander, Pathfinder.
That's what I used to view the current images. So if you know someone with a National Geographic collection dating back that far you can borrow them, or if you're really keen you can head down to your local library, find the issue in question (hopefully with at least one pair of the glasses still inside), take it to an available library internet terminal, bring up the page in question, and view away.
Yaz.
Okay -- looking at the link, that box is ugly -- but it doesn't compare to the original GalRiv 1.0 box art.
The GalCiv 1.0 box art looked like a 10-year-old who was playing with MS paint drew it on a 16-colour EGA monitor. At least that box shot looks like it was professionally done. The original GalCiv for OS/2 box would have been laughable if it were featured on a $2 Shareware disk in a bargin bin.
The game itself was (and remains) amazing -- but that first box was terrible. GalCiv 2's box was vastly better (an improvement that occurred after GalCiv 1's publisher screwed Stardock's founder and GalCiv 1.0 developer out of his royalties, at which point StarDock dumped them and became their own publisher).
I really wish I could find a box-art shot of this abomination on the 'net, but unfortunately it was released at a time when most people didn't have colour scanners readily available to them. Ptth.
Yaz.
I can't say that I've seen that box ever. But to describe the GalCiv 1.0 box, in the bottom left corner it has a blurry picture of what I guess is supposed to be earth, on a black "space" background. Floating above and to the right of it is a really bad 3-colour picture of a wooden sea-going ship (why? Who the hell knows :P). To the right of it is a blue oval, and on the right-hand side of the box is what looks like a satellite. In the top-left corner is a box with a headshot of an alien. Scattered in the background are some asterix's (supposed to be stars), and some circles representing planets and moons (many of which are just solid-coloured, but one or two of which have a really bad gradient shading).
Now picture in your head what I just described, and then picture it as looking worse than what you've just imagined, and you'll get the picture :).
(I do have the box here, but unforturately I don't have a scanner nor a digital camera with which to use to put it online somewhere for everyone to get a chuckle over).
Yaz.
Congratulations -- you've completely missed the point!
I'm not stating that OS/2 was a superior gaming platform to Windows -- simply a superior multitasker. Galactic Civilizations using threading pretty heavily to allow the computer AI's to take their turns in the background while the player is making their moves. It was this use of threading that Windows couldn't handle anywhere near as well as OS/2 (and generally still can't, although it has improved quite a bit since the GalCiv 1.0 days).
My posting was in the context of one game, not of all games in general. Until relatively recently, Windows simply didn't have the capacity to handle a port of Galactic Civilizations. Now that it can, Windows players get to discover a game that OS/2 users were playing back in the mid 90's (albeit with better graphics and sound to take advantage of hardware advances during this time).
Yaz.
One problem -- GalCiv isn't particularily new or unique. It's been around for a decade now. In fact, the most recent Galactic Civilizations that you're playing is actually the fourth release in the series.
The original release was made in 1993 by StarDock Systems, and was published by Advanced Idea Machines. It was released for OS/2 2.1, and took off in a big way. Many people switched to OS/2 just for this game. It had the dubious honour, however, of having the ugliest box art ever! . It came in 4 diskettes, with a "Shipyards" expansion released later.
Then in 1995, StarDock produced "Galactic Civilizations 2", again for OS/2. They dumped AIM and became their own publishers -- resulting in vastly better box art :).
1998 saw the last GalCiv release for IBM's OS/2 platform -- Galactic Civilizations Gold. Bigger galaxy sizes, an even better AI, and new game elements made it a big hit, but by the time of its release IBM's OS/2 was eclipsed by the vastly inferiour Windows 95 and Windows 98, and the market just wasn't there for it.
I've been playing Galactic Civilizations for more than 10 years -- I was a registered beta tester for the original v1.0 release way back in 1993. It is a fantastic game, and it's designer, Brad Wardell, knows a thing or two about video game AI (when GalCiv 1 was released in 1993, nobody had seen anything like it in the AI department).
The only sad thing is that it's taken 10 years for Windows gamers to realize how amazing this series is. Early on in GalCiv's lifetime, it's developer, Mr. Wardell, was quoted as saying that the game couldn't be ported to the then-current DOS and Windows platforms, because neither had suitable multithreading to support the games design. It's kinda sad that it's taken more than 10 years for Windows to finally catch up to what OS/2 could do in 1993.
Yaz.
I'd like to add to that January 1st, 2032, which is when the date structure in older Macs and PalmOS devices will overflow.
Yaz.
Okay -- I did the math, and 2^29 seconds since January 1st 1970 would have been up on January 4th, 1987.
2^30 seconds since the epoch puts us into January 9th, 2004.
Yaz.