I have been using personal computers of one sort or another since I was sixteen; I'm forty two now. Thats right, I started with the TRS80 Model I from RadioShack:)
Since the death of CP/M, I've been a diehard PC user, and not always a happy one. The absence of an assembler and linker in the OS was a harbinger of dark times for those of us who were assembler programmers when windows finally rolled out in a (questionably) useable form.
Late in '94 I found the Internet, or maybe it found me. Within a month I had wiped windows from my box and replaced it with linux (slackware on a 0.98 kernel if you're interested).
As of one year and eight days ago I became the owner of a refurb dual proc 1.25GHz G4.
I can tell you that I am in love with this machine, and I can tell you that while the design of the hardware certainly plays into it, cosmetics are not my first requirement; it's all because of OS/X. This OS is what linux wants to grow up to be. And the spit and polish represented by Aqua/Cocoa/Carbon are at the core of the benefits of OS/X.
As a result of my experiences with OS/X I have made the switch from linux to FreeBSD on my server; and I have to say, as I work FreeBSD on an old wintel box and OS/X on the Mac, the differences are quite apparent; FreeBSD ala Apple and FreeBSD ala carte are very different beasts, the Mac being far simpler and easier both to use and to administer.
The reason I've gone through all this preamble is to qualify my next statement: until about the time of the advent of Panther, which I consider to be first release of OS/X refined enough for general use, Apple simply had it mostly wrong. The insistence on a price point that alone made them a nich market product, the insistence on hardware and operating system software that were not only proprietary but closed, is so backward that were it not for all the substance of it, it would be not unlike the emporor's new clothes.
Sometime recently though Big Steve drank the right cup of electric coolaid. The iPod is a device of sheer genius. Not in its design, its implementation or its pricepoint; these features had all been clearly defined by the market place well in advance of Apple's offering. No, the real power of the iPod for Apple is as a marketing device, where it has introduced literally millions of PC users who would never have considered buying an Apple product to the company, just in time to push the Mac Mini under their noses. This has the potential to be a one-two punch for the WinTel world that should have them all shaking in their boots.
If I haven't made myself clear, I'm really impressed with Apple these days, their products are solid, their support is solid, and they seem to have finally gotten the company on track to become the major force in the market that it should have been all along.
Maybe it has something to do with Big Steve returning home to roost.
Anyway, given the success to date since the advent of OS/X, and the consistently right moves made since with the iPod, iTunes, and potentially the Mac Mini, its a no-brainer that the litigious in the world will spare no opportunity to haul them into court for whatever they can get for it.
All I can say is, go Apple, go Steve, keep up the good work, and don't leave us in the lurch this time.
Oh this is nothing, next week my patent on breathing comes through, and you all owe me BIG TIME......Jesus, when will something get done about this crap? It's like frivolous lawsuits, only orders of magnitude worse...
I have never seen such a pile of yellow journalism in my life. Why don't we portray Steve Forbes as a miserly penny-pinching thief in the next article? Wouldn't read quite so well as this would it.
Steve is not a miser, nor a thief; he is someone who has made a fortune off of a fortune he has inherited.
In much the same fashion the Open Source movement has built a powerful operating system from the legacy code they inherited in the public domain and in the classroom, SCO notwithstanding.
To belittle the efforts of a more-or-less anonymous group like this is pretty easy for a writer with the backing of a huge publishing clearinghouse like that which publishes Forbes Magazine. Why not pick on someone your own size instead, like Microsoft for instance? There are plenty of good reasons; marketplace bullying, pisspoor security, buggy products; but that might incur a serious legal problem, from a full legal staff with a multibillion dollar bankroll!
Your pettiness is pathetic; so is your knee-jerk reaction in characterising the Open Source movement as a bunch of communists.
Patents and copyrights in the US were concieved as methods of increasing innovation and promoting advances in technology. No doubt many of the forebears of your readership were instrumental in the lobbying efforts that turned them into draconian mechanisms that lock up innovation and prevent all but the wealthiest from challenging the status quo (and why would the wealthy ever challenge the status quo?)
The Free Software Foundation and the GPL do what has never been done before: turn the copyright back into something that insures innovation. This is why in the short space of ten or so years linux has gone from a hacker's toy to the most comprehensive, most secure, and most powerfull operating system available on any platform, bar none.
Additionally the GPL provides a means for software to effectively be copyrighted in the name of the public, essentially employing the overly strong copyright laws in the public interest.
You should actually READ the FSF charter and GPL before you attempt to write articles about them. Your lack of understanding makes you look like something of an idiot to the more well-informed.
Sincerely,
James G. Stallings II
Linux user since kernel version 1.0.2
(no I am NOT the Jim Stallings of the IBM Linux Group)
This NOT P2P. P2P=Peer to Peer - this is client-pays-for-access-per-access-to-server.
Get it right - it's why it won't succeed. The power of P2P is that what you have that I dont and I want I will soon have and so on, the same applying for every user of the system.
There's no library that can be assembled like the one that we assemble when we all put all our books together on the same set of shelves.
Any 'service' such as these, especially insofar as they incorporate any DRM/copy protection features, is simply broken.
Speaking of broken, so is this 18th century copyright model. Which, incidentally, it isn't. Copyright as institued in its American inception would never have allowed this to happen. Lobbiests have, through the power of political peer to peer networking, mutated the copyright into a beast that protects them while they do all the evils it was designed to prevent.
While I'm on the subject of broken things, so is the RIAA business model. We have them on the coals - lets keep them there till they burn. There was music and art long before RIAA - there will be long afterwards. Anyone who's read the recent Wired mag has probably seen the charts that illustrate the one-to-one correspondence in the decrease of new musical offerings to their CD sales. They should consider themselves fortunate its not worse than it is given the crap that they are offering for sale.
Cuz I can't imagine him posting this obvious bit of trollbait.
Neil Stephenson should be more (in)famous for a paper he did called "In the Beginning was the Command Line", which does a better job of explaining the social factors driving the contemporary O/S "Religious Wars" than anything else I have ever seen. Go read it and and come back with a clear head.
As for "jumping ship", well, I think I mentioned trollbait...
My best suggestion (if you're really stuck on bluetooth) is to investigate parallax's basic stamp and bluetooth integration goodies; that's probably about as breadboardable and programmable as you could ask for. Genrally speaking, the prices are pretty decent too.
Dont forget to investigate educational and bulk discounts:)
Slashdot Mirror
I have been using personal computers of one sort or another since I was sixteen; I'm forty two now. Thats right, I started with the TRS80 Model I from RadioShack :)
Since the death of CP/M, I've been a diehard PC user, and not always a happy one. The absence of an assembler and linker in the OS was a harbinger of dark times for those of us who were assembler programmers when windows finally rolled out in a (questionably) useable form.
Late in '94 I found the Internet, or maybe it found me. Within a month I had wiped windows from my box and replaced it with linux (slackware on a 0.98 kernel if you're interested).
As of one year and eight days ago I became the owner of a refurb dual proc 1.25GHz G4.
I can tell you that I am in love with this machine, and I can tell you that while the design of the hardware certainly plays into it, cosmetics are not my first requirement; it's all because of OS/X. This OS is what linux wants to grow up to be. And the spit and polish represented by Aqua/Cocoa/Carbon are at the core of the benefits of OS/X.
As a result of my experiences with OS/X I have made the switch from linux to FreeBSD on my server; and I have to say, as I work FreeBSD on an old wintel box and OS/X on the Mac, the differences are quite apparent; FreeBSD ala Apple and FreeBSD ala carte are very different beasts, the Mac being far simpler and easier both to use and to administer.
The reason I've gone through all this preamble is to qualify my next statement: until about the time of the advent of Panther, which I consider to be first release of OS/X refined enough for general use, Apple simply had it mostly wrong. The insistence on a price point that alone made them a nich market product, the insistence on hardware and operating system software that were not only proprietary but closed, is so backward that were it not for all the substance of it, it would be not unlike the emporor's new clothes.
Sometime recently though Big Steve drank the right cup of electric coolaid. The iPod is a device of sheer genius. Not in its design, its implementation or its pricepoint; these features had all been clearly defined by the market place well in advance of Apple's offering. No, the real power of the iPod for Apple is as a marketing device, where it has introduced literally millions of PC users who would never have considered buying an Apple product to the company, just in time to push the Mac Mini under their noses. This has the potential to be a one-two punch for the WinTel world that should have them all shaking in their boots.
If I haven't made myself clear, I'm really impressed with Apple these days, their products are solid, their support is solid, and they seem to have finally gotten the company on track to become the major force in the market that it should have been all along.
Maybe it has something to do with Big Steve returning home to roost.
Anyway, given the success to date since the advent of OS/X, and the consistently right moves made since with the iPod, iTunes, and potentially the Mac Mini, its a no-brainer that the litigious in the world will spare no opportunity to haul them into court for whatever they can get for it.
All I can say is, go Apple, go Steve, keep up the good work, and don't leave us in the lurch this time.
Peace
ReallyTweakin
Oh this is nothing, next week my patent on breathing comes through, and you all owe me BIG TIME... ...Jesus, when will something get done about this crap? It's like frivolous lawsuits, only orders of magnitude worse...
I have never seen such a pile of yellow journalism in my life. Why don't we portray Steve Forbes as a miserly penny-pinching thief in the next article? Wouldn't read quite so well as this would it.
Steve is not a miser, nor a thief; he is someone who has made a fortune off of a fortune he has inherited.
In much the same fashion the Open Source movement has built a powerful operating system from the legacy code they inherited in the public domain and in the classroom, SCO notwithstanding.
To belittle the efforts of a more-or-less anonymous group like this is pretty easy for a writer with the backing of a huge publishing clearinghouse like that which publishes Forbes Magazine. Why not pick on someone your own size instead, like Microsoft for instance? There are plenty of good reasons; marketplace bullying, pisspoor security, buggy products; but that might incur a serious legal problem, from a full legal staff with a multibillion dollar bankroll!
Your pettiness is pathetic; so is your knee-jerk reaction in characterising the Open Source movement as a bunch of communists.
Patents and copyrights in the US were concieved as methods of increasing innovation and promoting advances in technology. No doubt many of the forebears of your readership were instrumental in the lobbying efforts that turned them into draconian mechanisms that lock up innovation and prevent all but the wealthiest from challenging the status quo (and why would the wealthy ever challenge the status quo?)
The Free Software Foundation and the GPL do what has never been done before: turn the copyright back into something that insures innovation. This is why in the short space of ten or so years linux has gone from a hacker's toy to the most comprehensive, most secure, and most powerfull operating system available on any platform, bar none.
Additionally the GPL provides a means for software to effectively be copyrighted in the name of the public, essentially employing the overly strong copyright laws in the public interest.
You should actually READ the FSF charter and GPL before you attempt to write articles about them. Your lack of understanding makes you look like something of an idiot to the more well-informed.
Sincerely,
James G. Stallings II
Linux user since kernel version 1.0.2
(no I am NOT the Jim Stallings of the IBM Linux Group)
This NOT P2P. P2P=Peer to Peer - this is client-pays-for-access-per-access-to-server.
Get it right - it's why it won't succeed. The power of P2P is that what you have that I dont and I want I will soon have and so on, the same applying for every user of the system.
There's no library that can be assembled like the one that we assemble when we all put all our books together on the same set of shelves.
Any 'service' such as these, especially insofar as they incorporate any DRM/copy protection features, is simply broken.
Speaking of broken, so is this 18th century copyright model. Which, incidentally, it isn't. Copyright as institued in its American inception would never have allowed this to happen. Lobbiests have, through the power of political peer to peer networking, mutated the copyright into a beast that protects them while they do all the evils it was designed to prevent.
While I'm on the subject of broken things, so is the RIAA business model. We have them on the coals - lets keep them there till they burn. There was music and art long before RIAA - there will be long afterwards. Anyone who's read the recent Wired mag has probably seen the charts that illustrate the one-to-one correspondence in the decrease of new musical offerings to their CD sales. They should consider themselves fortunate its not worse than it is given the crap that they are offering for sale.
This simply means a new itch will develop and be scratched: the Open Source BIOS.
Most decent mobos these days can have the BIOS reflashed; it will simply become part of the linux installation process.
There's always a way around such bullshit; when there's not, the products die a well deserved and miserable death.
When they start building DRM dongles into the mobos I will simply not buy them. Cash is a language even Micro$uck understands.
~Later
Cuz I can't imagine him posting this obvious bit of trollbait. Neil Stephenson should be more (in)famous for a paper he did called "In the Beginning was the Command Line", which does a better job of explaining the social factors driving the contemporary O/S "Religious Wars" than anything else I have ever seen. Go read it and and come back with a clear head. As for "jumping ship", well, I think I mentioned trollbait...
My best suggestion (if you're really stuck on bluetooth) is to investigate parallax's basic stamp and bluetooth integration goodies; that's probably about as breadboardable and programmable as you could ask for. Genrally speaking, the prices are pretty decent too. Dont forget to investigate educational and bulk discounts :)
Who cares? The bad news for microsoft is I quit even pirating their software before win2k came out. Teh $ux!