I hacked my own together with a USB key containing an encrypted keychain and encrypted copies of my SSH key files. (Granted, I have no idea if a PC equivalent exists - my office lives in Mac-and-Unix-Land.) The keychain is backed up to another secure location every time I add or change a password, because the passwords I use look like what you get when you fall asleep on the keyboard. The USB key comes with me when I leave the computer, and the keychain get's locked automatically after 10 minutes in case I forget.
Not perfect, but it's better than post-it notes, and it does implement its own version of the "something you have and something you know" philosophy.
Here's the scenario as I see it with a one-button mouse. I can either:
Not use context-sensitive menus. This is a loss of functionality.
-or-
Incorporate modifier keys into the clicking process, as Apple has done. Personally, I think that this is by definition more complicated. It's also a process you basically have to be taught by someone else, while the right mouse button is there, it's obvious, and you can expect most users to eventually discover its use by clicking it out of curiosity.
So what I guess is so hard for me to grasp about this idea is that the arguments for a one-button mouse are usually completely backwards and sound more like rationalisations for a decision already made than true arguments for a one-button mouse.
(And, for the record, I say this as a devoted Mac user who liked the single-button mouse on vintage Macs and Apples.)
Historically, Macs had only one mouse button because desktop computers only used one mouse button at the time, and Apple had a thing for simplifying anything they could reasonably.
But Macs have supported right-clicks for the better part of a decade now, and you can control click, and the right mouse button is suddenly useful. As are scroll-wheel mice. Given that, I don't think you can claim that Macs get along just fine without two (or three) mouse buttons. So why don't Apple computers ship with them?
I'm sure you can make lots of vague hand-wavy excuses based on human-computer interaction theory and research, but the HCI arguments against the splat-click that Apple gives us as a replacement are far far stronger. And you can't really give strict adherence to HCI standards as a serious reason when you're talking about Apple's reasons for doing things anymore - a Google search will turn up scads of pages listing all sorts of UI blunders in OS X.
I think the real reason why Apple uses one-button mice is because Apple, especially now that Steve Jobs is at the wheel, is obsessed with visual appeal. From a design standpoint, a one-button mouse is almost naturally sexier to look at. The standard Apple mouse looks like something that raver kids would suck on, while I have never seen a three-button mouse that gets any better than wavering between unappealing and ugly.
The Apple mouse has become simply another great example of the 'function follows form' attitude that Apple has taken in recent years.
Funny!? It's _true_. After my Mom started using a computer, it literally took her a year to get the left-click right-click thing down. She knew what I meant when I said left click or right click, but she would forget which did which, and still generally has to be told to give the right mouse button a shot when she's trying to figure out how to manipulate things in certain ways.
The thing is, I don't believe that talking to a computer takes less effort, nor do I think that it is a more direct connection to my thoughts. (Moving an arm and saying a word are both just ways of flapping meat in my book.) Every time I attempt to tell someone what to do with a computer, it takes a lot of verbage to make myself clear - things as simple as, "click the close button on this tab", which were a quick swoom-and-click with a mouse, take a lot of words to say.
I think there's an impusle to think of "don't have t o move your arms to do it" as the same thing as "takes less effort." Meh. I have an office job now, and worked in a factory a couple years ago. I may be pretty sedentary in the office job, but it's a lot more work.
There hasn't been much new stuff that I've seen. There are a few updates to old ideas (optical mice, for example), and a few reassignments of old devices to new uses - scroll-wheels on mice should be familiar to anyone who has played Arkanoid. There have been a lot of old ideas that have just recently become refined and/or cheap enough to reach the consumer market, such as touchscreens and tablets.
But I haven't seen anything truly new - and no, 3D mice don't count.
I think the issue is that there are no new problems that demand new solutions. The keyboard came about when we found a need to control mechanical writing machines. The mouse came about when someone figured out that we need to have a way to "pick" widets on a graphical display.
Voice recognition is neat, but I don't honestly consider it a viable option for how I will communicate with my computer day-to-day. Honestly, even if we redesign computer interfaces to be more easily controlled by voice, a day of listening to the guy sitting next to me in the office say, "delete file. . . run Word. . . open foo-proposal-dot-doc" would drive me insane, and anybody who even thinks about using voice recognition to control their computer on an airplane is going out the nearest emergency exit as soon as we hit cruising altitude. And a keyboard is still going to be the main device for programmers unless magic happens and everyone agrees that AppleScript really isn't such a shitty language after all.
With all that in mind, I think that the only way anything new is going to happen is if someone is actively trying to come up with an entirely new form of user interface. It's going to come out of some obsucre research group in a big company the way the mouse and GUI did, or it's going to be a natural offshoot of some genius professor's pet project. Either way, I doubt it's going to be something anybody is working towards with state-of-the-art computers and interfaces in mind, because the fact of the matter is that the keyboard and mouse (or stylus - which (barring handwriting recognition) is the same thing anyway) are the best we have right now.
That said, the thing I would really like to have is a decent system for tracking where I'm looking that will work with anyone who sits down at the computer, no matter what their posture. With that in place, I want to replace all of the old window focusing schemes with "focus follows eyes." I'd still want to use the mouse for selecting text boxes and clicking on things, though.
In talking to PC users about this, I think what it comes down to is that a lot of PC users primarily stick with PCs because they are familiar with it. They don't Macs because they are unfamiliar, do things differently, and the people wear too damn many black turtlenecks. (Well, honestly, I see nothing wrong with this last reason.) More than that, they see the Mac as a toy.
But when it comes down to it, most PC users I have met who talk about how silly Apple computers are either haven't really even used a Mac, or have only used it for a few days or a week. Most of them don't seem to even realize that Mac OS supports multi-button mice and scroll wheels. Oftentimes, the criticisms aren't researched (I know this because they are wrong). Other times, the criticisms seem to be based on the idea that everyone should have a l33t0 gaming machine or a weather modeling workstation. I am always amused by people who complain about the lack of games available for OS X when the only two games they own are The Sims and Civ3
I suppose it's popular among Mac users to offer a complete psychological breakdown as to why PC users like to rip on Macs so much, but I won't bother. I'll just say that it seems that while I have met a few people who have seriously considered and tried both and ended up choosing Windows because they just prefer the platform (people who need to play Half-Life 2 aside), it was definitely just a few of them.
On the other hand, I know it's not too uncommon for PC users to wonder at how devoted Mac users are to their platform - a column on it shows up in some PC magazine a couple times every year. Here's a hint: it has absolutely nothing to do with SPEC benchmarks, application support, shooting demons with shotguns, or even aesthetics.
Of course, I could be wrong too; each of these cases has to be looked at individually.
Exactly. And the fact of the matter is, these arguments look great on paper, which is why they are repeated so often in the open source community. But I have seen very very few companies to which they apply very well.
I'm pretty sure the basic reason for this is that the cultures of the FOSS community and the general corporate community are completely incompatible. FOSS is a group of people who, overall, like to cooperate and enjoy having liberties.
My experience has been that in the business world, you're lucky if you can find a job where you can be particularly open and friendly with your office-mates, let alone your business competitors. Mostly, your enemies are lobbing streams of bombs in your general direcion, your partners are trying to stab you in the back, and your friends are precious treasures that are generally blown up or stabbed all too soon.
If it's so overpriced, I would love to see an example of one that is reasonably priced.
Or is your definition of overpriced, "Anything that doesn't have a big blue Dell or a big green e on the case." 'Cause neither of them sell anything in this form factor, so they're not really very good references for comparison.
And no, it includes neither a keyboard, nor a monitor. It does come with a little stand so you can turn it on its side, though.
This is not "public domain". . . The only stipulation is that anyone you sell the product to, must be allowed access to the source code as well. This does not mean they can re-sell or give away the app
Pardon my sloppy use of language on "public domain," but I think you know what I mean. As for re-selling or giving away apps, let's hope that they can considering that this kind of activity is so incredibly common in the FOSS community, including with GPL software. XEmacs and MacGimp, for example.
You need to decide what your company is in business for. Is it to sell product X, or to sell software that you used to help you sell/make product X?
We sell product X, but we also provide (gratis) support applications with product X that make it easier to use, speed up workflow with it, etc. Although they are provided free of charge, they are most certainly features of the product, even if they aren't the part that we actually charge for. Given that, we have a vested interest in not taking any advantages our solution might have over a competing product and giving them away to our competitors for free.
This is not very uncommon, either. Consider all the crap that you get for free from workstation vendors (I have stacks of CDs full of this kind of stuff from Silicon Graphics in my basement) or Windows Media Player. They are totally free of charge for customers (and, in WMP's case, customers of a certain corporation that they desperately need to keep in business), but neither company is going to be making it easy for competitors to port these perks to their platforms. It's the same thing.
This might mean they're sharing their software with their competitors, but in the end it benefits them both, because they're both working more efficiently, and not wasting as much time and money on something that's not part of their core business.
(Above is moot at this point, but I'll step into the general case for this one point.) This argument hinges entirely on having everybody contribute and nobody just leech off the system in order to gain a free competetive advantage. I gotta say, I like the idea. I want to live in a world full of pink bunnies and lollipops, too.
I've looked at this, and the one serious problem that my employer has with using OSS is the GPL.
The simple fact is, at least with the nature of our particular business, any internal app has the potential to become a product that we sell at some point in the future. With this in mind, the GPL simply doesn't work. The bosses worry that if any of the tools that support our product become public domain, they can be snatched up by our competitors, thus erasing advantages our solution has over the others.
For a very few things that we know have zero (or near-zero) chance of ever becoming part of a product that we sell, we do use Free Software components liberally, and we definitely get our (lack of, I guess) money's worth out of OpenOffice.org. But other than that, we're forced to write our own libraries or buy software for a lot of components.
Assuming your wife is after a Mac for the two main reasons why people buy Macs (the OS, and it just works), you're not going to find a PC on the market that compares to the Mac Mini. You can certainly find PC's the same size - just check out the Mini-ITX platform.
However, a preliminary look-through suggests that in this size range, you're going to get more bang for your buck with the Mac Mini. (I'm assuming, that, like most other Mac-disparaging PC users, you're a Megahertz Weenie.)
A good example of what I can find at CappuccinoPC.com is a 1ghz Celeron with only 128MB RAM, a 20GB HD, a CD-ROM drive (as in, no DVD, no burning), and a crap graphics card. For a price tag of $580. To get it to something comparable to the Mac Mini, you're going to have to upgrade to a 1.26ghz PIII ($155), 256MB RAM ($55), a 40GB HD($30), a CD-RW/DVD combo ($60, $70 for slot loading), and add Windows XP ($119 for Home, $159 for Pro). Meaning that a comparable PC in the same form factor will cost you $920 - $970. And you're still stuck with a crap graphics card. I'm not sure if you get a sound card. On top of all that, 256MB RAM is the most you can get, and all the other upgrades (wireless, bluetooth, etc.) are more expensive than the same upgrades for the Mac Mini.
A) I am making this post from a TiBook running Debian. Debian has one of the best PPC ports out there. I think the Mini will most likely run Debian very nicely.
B) Everyone is sick of the stupid clock speed per dollar argument. It's lame. Quit assuming that everyone out there cares about raw CPU power first and foremost, or shut up.
I just want them to define impurity. The only definition I can think of for impurity is, "the stuff that makes wine different from sparkling grape juice."
I have a pair, and this is the only explanation that makes sense to me. I imagine that the effect would also happen on a whole range of rounded magnets of this type, but with the length of the "buzz" varying - the stretched football shape is probably just one of the more effective ones.
If you try to isolate the system by throwing them up in the air so they pull together and strike each other while airborne, they will generally buzz for quite a long time - generally, it stops because the motion was dampened by your hand (or whatever else they land on) rather than coming to a stop on its own.
The whole effect is made even more fun because if you throw them in the air, they will spin around each other like a cat in zero gravity.
I think it's that they point out how to compile stuff for X11. (i.e., when you install XCode, you have to remember to click the checkbox that says, "Install X11 libraries" or whatever)
Not that a bulletin on the existence of a clearly-visible checkbox is news, either.
Really, the most interesting and useful thing in this article for me was the screenshot of XGalaga. I didn't know this game existed. I like Galaga, so I'm going to hunt it down this afternoon so I can install it on my (already incredibly functional) X11 for OS X intall.
You can get much cheaper brains for your robots, if that's what you're after. If you're looking for a full-scale computer rather than an embedded board, the Cappuccino PC's are nice. There are also lots of mini-ITX boards out there.
(I'm assuming that your robot doesn't need to be running Mac OS X.)
But personally, I'd go for an embedded board that is built for low power consumption or an eviscerated laptop. A robot that has to spend most the day sitting in the corner with his butt plugged into a wall socket because he can't keep his batteries charged isn't a very fun robot.
The formatting stuff is is an example of XML being so hyped that it is starting to become a solution in need of a problem.
As for languages that allow you to metaprogram the language in order to extend it, FORTH has been doing this for four decades, and LISP has been doing it for at least four decades, too.
And they both do it in a way that is a lot more intuitive and readable than any XML implementation I can imagine.
I think that the Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, 3DO, and Jaguar have all shown fairly solidly that being the first to market is not the way to win the market in the video games industry. In fact, it would appear that it's a pretty well-established way to not win the market.
What'd you expect from a language that is pseudodynamically typed, uses a redirectable message passing architecture for calling object methods, and allows for addition of new methods to existing objects (that's objects, not just classes) at run-time?
Face it, every language feature comes at a price. C's speed at run-time comes at the price of development speed. ObjC's dynamic features come at the cost of run-time speed.
For most applications, the speed difference is barely even noticeable, so unless you're talking about the relative merits of C, C++, and ObjC for writing a process scheduler or a scientific library or an embedded app or something, I fail to see why the speed argument matters in this case. It's basically saying, "I'll spend potentially an extra few hours or days developing my app to shave a few milliseconds off the program's execution time and a few bytes off its memory consumption."
But personally, I don't think that's a good trade, so I'm going to stick with my ObjC and perl and bash scripts and such.
Slashdot Mirror
I hacked my own together with a USB key containing an encrypted keychain and encrypted copies of my SSH key files. (Granted, I have no idea if a PC equivalent exists - my office lives in Mac-and-Unix-Land.) The keychain is backed up to another secure location every time I add or change a password, because the passwords I use look like what you get when you fall asleep on the keyboard. The USB key comes with me when I leave the computer, and the keychain get's locked automatically after 10 minutes in case I forget.
Not perfect, but it's better than post-it notes, and it does implement its own version of the "something you have and something you know" philosophy.
I see someone has been playing Blue Chairs recently.
Here's the scenario as I see it with a one-button mouse. I can either:
Not use context-sensitive menus. This is a loss of functionality.
-or-
Incorporate modifier keys into the clicking process, as Apple has done. Personally, I think that this is by definition more complicated. It's also a process you basically have to be taught by someone else, while the right mouse button is there, it's obvious, and you can expect most users to eventually discover its use by clicking it out of curiosity.
So what I guess is so hard for me to grasp about this idea is that the arguments for a one-button mouse are usually completely backwards and sound more like rationalisations for a decision already made than true arguments for a one-button mouse.
(And, for the record, I say this as a devoted Mac user who liked the single-button mouse on vintage Macs and Apples.)
Historically, Macs had only one mouse button because desktop computers only used one mouse button at the time, and Apple had a thing for simplifying anything they could reasonably.
But Macs have supported right-clicks for the better part of a decade now, and you can control click, and the right mouse button is suddenly useful. As are scroll-wheel mice. Given that, I don't think you can claim that Macs get along just fine without two (or three) mouse buttons. So why don't Apple computers ship with them?
I'm sure you can make lots of vague hand-wavy excuses based on human-computer interaction theory and research, but the HCI arguments against the splat-click that Apple gives us as a replacement are far far stronger. And you can't really give strict adherence to HCI standards as a serious reason when you're talking about Apple's reasons for doing things anymore - a Google search will turn up scads of pages listing all sorts of UI blunders in OS X.
I think the real reason why Apple uses one-button mice is because Apple, especially now that Steve Jobs is at the wheel, is obsessed with visual appeal. From a design standpoint, a one-button mouse is almost naturally sexier to look at. The standard Apple mouse looks like something that raver kids would suck on, while I have never seen a three-button mouse that gets any better than wavering between unappealing and ugly.
The Apple mouse has become simply another great example of the 'function follows form' attitude that Apple has taken in recent years.
Funny!? It's _true_. After my Mom started using a computer, it literally took her a year to get the left-click right-click thing down. She knew what I meant when I said left click or right click, but she would forget which did which, and still generally has to be told to give the right mouse button a shot when she's trying to figure out how to manipulate things in certain ways.
The thing is, I don't believe that talking to a computer takes less effort, nor do I think that it is a more direct connection to my thoughts. (Moving an arm and saying a word are both just ways of flapping meat in my book.) Every time I attempt to tell someone what to do with a computer, it takes a lot of verbage to make myself clear - things as simple as, "click the close button on this tab", which were a quick swoom-and-click with a mouse, take a lot of words to say.
I think there's an impusle to think of "don't have t o move your arms to do it" as the same thing as "takes less effort." Meh. I have an office job now, and worked in a factory a couple years ago. I may be pretty sedentary in the office job, but it's a lot more work.
There hasn't been much new stuff that I've seen. There are a few updates to old ideas (optical mice, for example), and a few reassignments of old devices to new uses - scroll-wheels on mice should be familiar to anyone who has played Arkanoid. There have been a lot of old ideas that have just recently become refined and/or cheap enough to reach the consumer market, such as touchscreens and tablets.
But I haven't seen anything truly new - and no, 3D mice don't count.
I think the issue is that there are no new problems that demand new solutions. The keyboard came about when we found a need to control mechanical writing machines. The mouse came about when someone figured out that we need to have a way to "pick" widets on a graphical display.
Voice recognition is neat, but I don't honestly consider it a viable option for how I will communicate with my computer day-to-day. Honestly, even if we redesign computer interfaces to be more easily controlled by voice, a day of listening to the guy sitting next to me in the office say, "delete file. . . run Word. . . open foo-proposal-dot-doc" would drive me insane, and anybody who even thinks about using voice recognition to control their computer on an airplane is going out the nearest emergency exit as soon as we hit cruising altitude. And a keyboard is still going to be the main device for programmers unless magic happens and everyone agrees that AppleScript really isn't such a shitty language after all.
With all that in mind, I think that the only way anything new is going to happen is if someone is actively trying to come up with an entirely new form of user interface. It's going to come out of some obsucre research group in a big company the way the mouse and GUI did, or it's going to be a natural offshoot of some genius professor's pet project. Either way, I doubt it's going to be something anybody is working towards with state-of-the-art computers and interfaces in mind, because the fact of the matter is that the keyboard and mouse (or stylus - which (barring handwriting recognition) is the same thing anyway) are the best we have right now.
That said, the thing I would really like to have is a decent system for tracking where I'm looking that will work with anyone who sits down at the computer, no matter what their posture. With that in place, I want to replace all of the old window focusing schemes with "focus follows eyes." I'd still want to use the mouse for selecting text boxes and clicking on things, though.
Are you sure you want to continue doing what you are doing?
No =D
In talking to PC users about this, I think what it comes down to is that a lot of PC users primarily stick with PCs because they are familiar with it. They don't Macs because they are unfamiliar, do things differently, and the people wear too damn many black turtlenecks. (Well, honestly, I see nothing wrong with this last reason.) More than that, they see the Mac as a toy.
But when it comes down to it, most PC users I have met who talk about how silly Apple computers are either haven't really even used a Mac, or have only used it for a few days or a week. Most of them don't seem to even realize that Mac OS supports multi-button mice and scroll wheels. Oftentimes, the criticisms aren't researched (I know this because they are wrong). Other times, the criticisms seem to be based on the idea that everyone should have a l33t0 gaming machine or a weather modeling workstation. I am always amused by people who complain about the lack of games available for OS X when the only two games they own are The Sims and Civ3
I suppose it's popular among Mac users to offer a complete psychological breakdown as to why PC users like to rip on Macs so much, but I won't bother. I'll just say that it seems that while I have met a few people who have seriously considered and tried both and ended up choosing Windows because they just prefer the platform (people who need to play Half-Life 2 aside), it was definitely just a few of them.
On the other hand, I know it's not too uncommon for PC users to wonder at how devoted Mac users are to their platform - a column on it shows up in some PC magazine a couple times every year. Here's a hint: it has absolutely nothing to do with SPEC benchmarks, application support, shooting demons with shotguns, or even aesthetics.
Of course, I could be wrong too; each of these cases has to be looked at individually.
Exactly. And the fact of the matter is, these arguments look great on paper, which is why they are repeated so often in the open source community. But I have seen very very few companies to which they apply very well.
I'm pretty sure the basic reason for this is that the cultures of the FOSS community and the general corporate community are completely incompatible. FOSS is a group of people who, overall, like to cooperate and enjoy having liberties.
My experience has been that in the business world, you're lucky if you can find a job where you can be particularly open and friendly with your office-mates, let alone your business competitors. Mostly, your enemies are lobbing streams of bombs in your general direcion, your partners are trying to stab you in the back, and your friends are precious treasures that are generally blown up or stabbed all too soon.
If it's so overpriced, I would love to see an example of one that is reasonably priced.
Or is your definition of overpriced, "Anything that doesn't have a big blue Dell or a big green e on the case." 'Cause neither of them sell anything in this form factor, so they're not really very good references for comparison.
And no, it includes neither a keyboard, nor a monitor. It does come with a little stand so you can turn it on its side, though.
This is not "public domain". . . The only stipulation is that anyone you sell the product to, must be allowed access to the source code as well. This does not mean they can re-sell or give away the app
Pardon my sloppy use of language on "public domain," but I think you know what I mean. As for re-selling or giving away apps, let's hope that they can considering that this kind of activity is so incredibly common in the FOSS community, including with GPL software. XEmacs and MacGimp, for example.
You need to decide what your company is in business for. Is it to sell product X, or to sell software that you used to help you sell/make product X?
We sell product X, but we also provide (gratis) support applications with product X that make it easier to use, speed up workflow with it, etc. Although they are provided free of charge, they are most certainly features of the product, even if they aren't the part that we actually charge for. Given that, we have a vested interest in not taking any advantages our solution might have over a competing product and giving them away to our competitors for free.
This is not very uncommon, either. Consider all the crap that you get for free from workstation vendors (I have stacks of CDs full of this kind of stuff from Silicon Graphics in my basement) or Windows Media Player. They are totally free of charge for customers (and, in WMP's case, customers of a certain corporation that they desperately need to keep in business), but neither company is going to be making it easy for competitors to port these perks to their platforms. It's the same thing.
This might mean they're sharing their software with their competitors, but in the end it benefits them both, because they're both working more efficiently, and not wasting as much time and money on something that's not part of their core business.
(Above is moot at this point, but I'll step into the general case for this one point.) This argument hinges entirely on having everybody contribute and nobody just leech off the system in order to gain a free competetive advantage. I gotta say, I like the idea. I want to live in a world full of pink bunnies and lollipops, too.
I've looked at this, and the one serious problem that my employer has with using OSS is the GPL.
The simple fact is, at least with the nature of our particular business, any internal app has the potential to become a product that we sell at some point in the future. With this in mind, the GPL simply doesn't work. The bosses worry that if any of the tools that support our product become public domain, they can be snatched up by our competitors, thus erasing advantages our solution has over the others.
For a very few things that we know have zero (or near-zero) chance of ever becoming part of a product that we sell, we do use Free Software components liberally, and we definitely get our (lack of, I guess) money's worth out of OpenOffice.org. But other than that, we're forced to write our own libraries or buy software for a lot of components.
Assuming your wife is after a Mac for the two main reasons why people buy Macs (the OS, and it just works), you're not going to find a PC on the market that compares to the Mac Mini. You can certainly find PC's the same size - just check out the Mini-ITX platform.
However, a preliminary look-through suggests that in this size range, you're going to get more bang for your buck with the Mac Mini. (I'm assuming, that, like most other Mac-disparaging PC users, you're a Megahertz Weenie.)
A good example of what I can find at CappuccinoPC.com is a 1ghz Celeron with only 128MB RAM, a 20GB HD, a CD-ROM drive (as in, no DVD, no burning), and a crap graphics card. For a price tag of $580.
To get it to something comparable to the Mac Mini, you're going to have to upgrade to a 1.26ghz PIII ($155), 256MB RAM ($55), a 40GB HD($30), a CD-RW/DVD combo ($60, $70 for slot loading), and add Windows XP ($119 for Home, $159 for Pro). Meaning that a comparable PC in the same form factor will cost you $920 - $970. And you're still stuck with a crap graphics card. I'm not sure if you get a sound card. On top of all that, 256MB RAM is the most you can get, and all the other upgrades (wireless, bluetooth, etc.) are more expensive than the same upgrades for the Mac Mini.
A) I am making this post from a TiBook running Debian. Debian has one of the best PPC ports out there. I think the Mini will most likely run Debian very nicely.
B) Everyone is sick of the stupid clock speed per dollar argument. It's lame. Quit assuming that everyone out there cares about raw CPU power first and foremost, or shut up.
I just want them to define impurity. The only definition I can think of for impurity is, "the stuff that makes wine different from sparkling grape juice."
I'm still more amazed by the high-end USB and FireWire cables that companies like Monster are selling.
What part of DIGITAL don't people understand?
I have a pair, and this is the only explanation that makes sense to me. I imagine that the effect would also happen on a whole range of rounded magnets of this type, but with the length of the "buzz" varying - the stretched football shape is probably just one of the more effective ones.
If you try to isolate the system by throwing them up in the air so they pull together and strike each other while airborne, they will generally buzz for quite a long time - generally, it stops because the motion was dampened by your hand (or whatever else they land on) rather than coming to a stop on its own.
The whole effect is made even more fun because if you throw them in the air, they will spin around each other like a cat in zero gravity.
I think it's that they point out how to compile stuff for X11. (i.e., when you install XCode, you have to remember to click the checkbox that says, "Install X11 libraries" or whatever)
Not that a bulletin on the existence of a clearly-visible checkbox is news, either.
Really, the most interesting and useful thing in this article for me was the screenshot of XGalaga. I didn't know this game existed. I like Galaga, so I'm going to hunt it down this afternoon so I can install it on my (already incredibly functional) X11 for OS X intall.
Turbo-Grafx 16 came out a long time before the Genesis, and was an 8-bit system. Only the graphics hardware was 16-bit.
You can get much cheaper brains for your robots, if that's what you're after. If you're looking for a full-scale computer rather than an embedded board, the Cappuccino PC's are nice. There are also lots of mini-ITX boards out there.
(I'm assuming that your robot doesn't need to be running Mac OS X.)
But personally, I'd go for an embedded board that is built for low power consumption or an eviscerated laptop. A robot that has to spend most the day sitting in the corner with his butt plugged into a wall socket because he can't keep his batteries charged isn't a very fun robot.
The formatting stuff is is an example of XML being so hyped that it is starting to become a solution in need of a problem.
As for languages that allow you to metaprogram the language in order to extend it, FORTH has been doing this for four decades, and LISP has been doing it for at least four decades, too.
And they both do it in a way that is a lot more intuitive and readable than any XML implementation I can imagine.
I think that the Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, 3DO, and Jaguar have all shown fairly solidly that being the first to market is not the way to win the market in the video games industry. In fact, it would appear that it's a pretty well-established way to not win the market.
it is slow compared to C or C++
What'd you expect from a language that is pseudodynamically typed, uses a redirectable message passing architecture for calling object methods, and allows for addition of new methods to existing objects (that's objects, not just classes) at run-time?
Face it, every language feature comes at a price. C's speed at run-time comes at the price of development speed. ObjC's dynamic features come at the cost of run-time speed.
For most applications, the speed difference is barely even noticeable, so unless you're talking about the relative merits of C, C++, and ObjC for writing a process scheduler or a scientific library or an embedded app or something, I fail to see why the speed argument matters in this case. It's basically saying, "I'll spend potentially an extra few hours or days developing my app to shave a few milliseconds off the program's execution time and a few bytes off its memory consumption."
But personally, I don't think that's a good trade, so I'm going to stick with my ObjC and perl and bash scripts and such.
Well, I believe that the Apple G3 is a PowerPC 750.
Assuming there is some sanity to PowerPC CPU numbers (which don't have anything to do with mhz, btw), that 403GCX is not a very powerful CPU at all.