You've always known Mac is sh*t-hot,
but you've paid lots for what you have got.
So Intel is cheaper?
Well don't fear the reaper!
We'll switch sides and hope you forgot.
...the losses they were going to be taking on the PS2 and Xbox, but apparently those bets worked out OK.
Well, it helps if you've got a massively profitable company behind you to help cover the losses. There's an intersting read here : Microsoft's Red-Ink Game.
One tidbit from the article says "...the Xbox console, which contained about $323 worth of parts and materials when released, but sold at retail for $299. [The 360 is] certainly not going to help Microsoft reverse the trend of losses in its home-entertainment segment. In the fiscal year ended June 30, [the Xbox] lost $391 million on sales just shy of $3.25 billion. That's a little more than 8% of Microsoft's total sales of $39.8 billion."
It was more that you recognised most ST users went to Macs.
Oh absolutely. It's interesting that the people who chose ST over the more popular Amiga are now the kind to choose Mac over Windows. But we don't want to dwell on that too much here or we'll start a flame war.
I still have most of my old gear too. My A500 and Atari 2600 are still functional. The Apple//e is lost to the world of family hand-me-downs. I've never owned a Mac, but I'm seriously considering getting a Mini Mac.
In Australia, it was always a two horse race. I guess the import costs and the smaller market meant a lot of stuff that was reasonably popular elsewhere just didn't take off here.
I was born in 1971, so I was about the perfect age when the Atari 2600 came out. Wikipedia says that was 1977. (Which probably meant 1979 in Australia, back when stuff took much longer to become available here.) There really wasn't any competition to the Atari 2600 here that I recall.
Then there was a Mattel unit. I think it was called "Intellivision". The only competition for that I recall was the "Dick Smith Wizard". Dick Smith is a local electronics retail chain. Google tells me the Wizard was also known as "Creativision". But I can't tell if it was a locally made box, or if he was just relabelling something from overseas. Regardless, the "Wizard" was the first time I experienced computer programming. It came with a BASIC interpreter on cartridge, and the two joysticks each featured half of a keyboard. It also had a tennis game. That's all I remember. Most people who had an Atari 2600 didn't bother upgrading to either of these units (including me).
Next it became Commodore 64 vs Apple//e. Maybe 60% of people I knew had C64, about 35% had//e. The other 2 or 3 had something from Amstrad, or something from Tandy (which was the local brand of the US Radio Shack).
Then, it was all about Amiga 500 vs Atari ST. I saw hardly anything other than an A500 or ST for years. A500s were used by the people who'd previously had C64s. STs were used by the people who now use Macs;) There were quite a lot of Macs around at the time at school, but they were only available to the art students, one of which I was not. (No further comment)
Later, it was Intel x86 processors with SVGA adapters, and it's all downhill from there. (I'm kidding, kind of)
I do have vague memories of those rubbery-key Spectrums, but I think that was from fiddling with them in shops. I've never run across anyone who owned one that I know of. And don't recall ever seeing an Acorn. I have certainly heard of MicroBee but have no idea what it was, other than heavily advertised.
But other than that, it was mainly Commodore and Atari, with a bit of Apple. I haven't mentioned where the console world branched off into Sega and Nintendo, mainly because I personally don't know much about it, also because I think it was fairly similar to what happened in the UK and elsewhere.
Sooo.... if I define a "computer" as a system that lets you enter your own programs, the first I actually owned was an Apple//e, followed by Amiga 500, then a 486 "clone", then.. you know the rest.
"The difference is that I'm a game developer these days instead of working on business apps."
Wow, good on you. I was talking to a friend about this a couple of days ago. We were both talking about getting out of IT, but neither of us have anything else we can do.
When I was in high school, I had an Amiga 500. I'd previously taught myself BASIC on an Apple//e, and attempted to make the giant leap from BASIC to 68K assembler on the Amiga. My heroes were the guys in the "demo scene" who created those amazing animations that fit on 640K floppy disks. It was a huge learning curve, but I loved it. I got to the point where I could create some nice looking graphical animations using the Amiga hardware (The "Blitter" chip if I recall correctly) and started to play around with collision detection and that kind of stuff.
At school I was learning Pascal on one of those boring IBM PC things(VGA? - bah!). I hated it. Then the time came to decide what kind of job I wanted. I saw a job advertised for "computer operator". All I knew about it was it had nothing to do with Pascal, and it was working on *Mainframes*!!! I didn't even know what a mainframe was. But it wasn't Pascal, and surely there couldn't be any career path in coding games.
Needless to say, the job was primarily loading tape drives and printers. 16 years later I'm a well paid "consultant" in a relatively specialised, but generally boring, part of corporate IT. Really a glorified System Administrator. I haven't written a single line of code, other than Perl and similar interpreted languages, since my school days.
The point of this long disjointed story is that these days I really, really, wish I'd seen the future of "computer games" and stuck with 68k assembler.
I never used the "social" aspect of del.icio.us. [...] The only reason for moving my bookmarks to del.icio.us was to have them available anywhere I access the web.
I started using del.icio.us for the same reason. But I soon realised the potential of tagging your bookmarks as opposed to using folders. And although I don't actively participate in the social aspect, just by storing your bookmarks there you are participating, by adding extra "weight" to sites you've linked to which others might be looking for.
It would be great to be able to combine del.icio.us tags with a regular web content search engine. You could use the tagging system at one level to make sure you are searching worthwhile sites, then use the search engine to drill into the contents of those sites for more specific keywords.
I would hope this is what Yahoo! are planning to do. If not, I guess I just gave away my idea.
The only virus I ever caught was Byte Bandit on the Amiga 500. It spread via floppy disk and got onto just about all my "backup" games, rendering most of them useless.
Stupid Byte Bandit. I still have the A500 and the floppies, and they're still infected:(
"that would mean that before the invention of glasses, the human race consisted partly of half-blind people who were lucky to catch prey once in a while. It seems very weird to me that our eyesight would be, on the average, that bad."
Perhaps the average human eyesight was better back then than it is now. A genetically half-blind person in the past would have been more likely to be eaten by a tiger before they had a chance to reproduce. And the others didn't spend their lives living in boxes under artificial light looking at cathode ray tubes.
Driving is very pleasant in Victoria now, thanks to speed limit compliance, and the roads feel much safer than they do anywhere else I've been on the planet.
I tend to disagree. I think that the lowered speeds has increased angst and road rage. I describe driving around Melbourne now as a "blocking game". Everyone tries to get in front of the car in front of them, and stay in front at any cost, even though it's only going to get them to their destination a second earlier, if they're lucky.... especially bloody 4WDs (or SUVs as we so obediently call them these days).
I think Melbourne is the *worst* Australian city to drive around now. I used to hate the windey thin roads of Sydney, but Sydney drivers generally have a better attitude. Up there, I get the feeling that "we're all in this together so let's all just get along and get home". Melbourne is now the opposite. It wasn't 10 years ago.
Agreed. We must be about the same vintage. I was a member of the same kind of computer club. In my area it was mainly C64 and Apple//e.
Now I'm surrounded by these young arrogant zealots at work all day, telling me there's no reason to run anything other than Linux and that I don't understand it. Why would I want to go and surrround myself with even more of them at a LUG?
"Hey, I was installing Yggdrasil Linux from floppies downloaded via UUCP when you were still in nappies (diapers), bucko."
Song: I wanna go to Mount Splashmore, take me take me take me take me now! Now now now now now! Mount Splashmore take me there right now!
Lisa: This is a rather shameless promotion
Bart: Hey, it worked on me!
Lisa: Me too!
Sun has attempted to undermine linux by quasi-open sourcing their stuff... the two companies more likely to get hurt by the sun moves are Novell and RedHat
I don't think Sun are attempting to undermine Linux. I believe one aim would be to increase Solaris' exposure. But more-so, I think it's to give customers another reason *not* to migrate away from UNIX (including Linux) to Windows, which would likely be run on IBM or Dell hardware with Intel processors.
Of course I'm sure they'd prefer you run Solaris on a SPARC box, but Suse on an Sunfire Opteron box is fine, or even Windows if you must.
From http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4200/features.js p...
Options are good: With Sun Fire X4200 servers, you can run Solaris, Linux, and Windows. And you can get support for all these operating systems from Sun. No problem. Stick with your favorite OS while deploying faster, more efficient servers that give you flexible options for the future:
Most people aren't that bright, but confusing specific byproduct of smelting metal with a soft drink is beyond reason.
I believe the GP's point is that if you chose "American Coke" as a brand name (or kid's name, maybe), you'd better have good justification to be able to claim you're *not* referring to the soft drink.
Back to the original story (or non-story), I don't think this guy can reasonably claim that his "Windows Defender" is referring to the glass things in your walls.
Also, us Australian individuals tend to be less eager than some of our northern hemispherian friends to jump into court at any opportunity. (But we're not far behind)
The first SSD was delivered to the MVS mainframe market in 1978 by StorageTek and sold for $8,800 per megabyte-much cheaper than add-on memory-and had a maximum capacity of 90MB.
(SSD = Solid State Disk)
It had moderate success back then, but then disappeared as mainframe memory and disk costs dropped. Obviously it can be done a lot cheaper today, but in comparison to the cost of disk, it's still hard to justify the cost, particularly in business. And realistically, the home market for this kind of thing is kinda niche.
If you think that a hard drive (or any number of hard drives) for that matter could contribute to hearing problems, then I'm assuming that you don't leave your house? Hell, a fart is louder than even the loudest hard drive.
I just spent the last 2 weeks working in a computer room wearing earplugs due to OH&S regulations, because of the excessive noise in the room being generated by several high end disk subsystems.
5000 people farting simultaneously and continuously in an enclosed space could get a bit noisy (and smelly).
Back in my day the floors were raised to accommodate the truckloads of cabling that strung all the pieces of machinery to each other and to the power supply.
Ah yes, the old mainframe parallel channel cables. Almost an inch thick each, and usually bunched together in groups of 16 or 32. The mainframe engineers needed muscles back in those days.
It's a fallacy that modern equipment needs that much more cooling
Even after my days wedged between mainframe devices, nothing compares heat-wise to multiple rows of 45U racks completely loaded with 1U Dell servers all blowing like there's no tomorrow. Computer room cooling is becoming a big problem, even in old-school data centres orginally designed for mainframes.
to see it at work, go to a bible passage... and click on the little [!] icons on the right
I like it. It works well here in Firefox. The only comment I have is that my natural instinct after clicking the [!] was to click on the [!] again to close the text box. It took me a few seconds to notice the [X] for this purpose. But perhaps that's just me...
I installed it on my home PC when it first came out months ago and couldn't see any real use for it, so uninstalled it.
But then I saw a colleague at work using it and saw how it could be very helpful in that environment. Being an IT consultant, just about all of my work related communications occur via email (Exchange), web browsing, PDF's and Office documents on my laptop. Google Desktop indexes *all* this information, making it very fast and easy to search it at whim, which I often have to do. The ability to search all of these sources of information at once is extremely helpful.
You can turn the dodgy sidebar off and just have a small text input area in the Windows task bar, or access the search interface through your web browser.
Often I work at customer sites and aren't able to connect my laptop to the internet. At these times I've found Google Desktop's cache to be very handy.
But I still can't see much use for it on my home PC:]
Slashdot Mirror
You've always known Mac is sh*t-hot,
..Hmm.. surely someone can do better.
but you've paid lots for what you have got.
So Intel is cheaper?
Well don't fear the reaper!
We'll switch sides and hope you forgot.
Even more importantly, "pirate" doesn't really rhyme with "great".
...the losses they were going to be taking on the PS2 and Xbox, but apparently those bets worked out OK.
Well, it helps if you've got a massively profitable company behind you to help cover the losses. There's an intersting read here : Microsoft's Red-Ink Game.
One tidbit from the article says "...the Xbox console, which contained about $323 worth of parts and materials when released, but sold at retail for $299. [The 360 is] certainly not going to help Microsoft reverse the trend of losses in its home-entertainment segment. In the fiscal year ended June 30, [the Xbox] lost $391 million on sales just shy of $3.25 billion. That's a little more than 8% of Microsoft's total sales of $39.8 billion."
It was more that you recognised most ST users went to Macs.
//e is lost to the world of family hand-me-downs. I've never owned a Mac, but I'm seriously considering getting a Mini Mac.
Oh absolutely. It's interesting that the people who chose ST over the more popular Amiga are now the kind to choose Mac over Windows. But we don't want to dwell on that too much here or we'll start a flame war.
I still have most of my old gear too. My A500 and Atari 2600 are still functional. The Apple
>A500s were used by the people who'd previously had C64s. STs were used by the people who now use Macs ;)
Heh. I had a C64 but moved to the ST. And my current machine? Yep, you're right - I'm on Macs.
Yeah, that was a bad generalistaion; that all C64 users went to Amiga. I had great respect for both the Amiga and ST, and still do.
In Australia, it was always a two horse race. I guess the import costs and the smaller market meant a lot of stuff that was reasonably popular elsewhere just didn't take off here.
//e. Maybe 60% of people I knew had C64, about 35% had //e. The other 2 or 3 had something from Amstrad, or something from Tandy (which was the local brand of the US Radio Shack).
;) There were quite a lot of Macs around at the time at school, but they were only available to the art students, one of which I was not. (No further comment)
//e, followed by Amiga 500, then a 486 "clone", then .. you know the rest.
I was born in 1971, so I was about the perfect age when the Atari 2600 came out. Wikipedia says that was 1977. (Which probably meant 1979 in Australia, back when stuff took much longer to become available here.) There really wasn't any competition to the Atari 2600 here that I recall.
Then there was a Mattel unit. I think it was called "Intellivision". The only competition for that I recall was the "Dick Smith Wizard". Dick Smith is a local electronics retail chain. Google tells me the Wizard was also known as "Creativision". But I can't tell if it was a locally made box, or if he was just relabelling something from overseas. Regardless, the "Wizard" was the first time I experienced computer programming. It came with a BASIC interpreter on cartridge, and the two joysticks each featured half of a keyboard. It also had a tennis game. That's all I remember. Most people who had an Atari 2600 didn't bother upgrading to either of these units (including me).
Next it became Commodore 64 vs Apple
Then, it was all about Amiga 500 vs Atari ST. I saw hardly anything other than an A500 or ST for years. A500s were used by the people who'd previously had C64s. STs were used by the people who now use Macs
Later, it was Intel x86 processors with SVGA adapters, and it's all downhill from there. (I'm kidding, kind of)
I do have vague memories of those rubbery-key Spectrums, but I think that was from fiddling with them in shops. I've never run across anyone who owned one that I know of. And don't recall ever seeing an Acorn. I have certainly heard of MicroBee but have no idea what it was, other than heavily advertised.
But other than that, it was mainly Commodore and Atari, with a bit of Apple. I haven't mentioned where the console world branched off into Sega and Nintendo, mainly because I personally don't know much about it, also because I think it was fairly similar to what happened in the UK and elsewhere.
Sooo.... if I define a "computer" as a system that lets you enter your own programs, the first I actually owned was an Apple
Damn straight. That old Atari/Commodore rivalry dies hard.
:P
E.T. phone home!
Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!
"The difference is that I'm a game developer these days instead of working on business apps."
//e, and attempted to make the giant leap from BASIC to 68K assembler on the Amiga. My heroes were the guys in the "demo scene" who created those amazing animations that fit on 640K floppy disks. It was a huge learning curve, but I loved it. I got to the point where I could create some nice looking graphical animations using the Amiga hardware (The "Blitter" chip if I recall correctly) and started to play around with collision detection and that kind of stuff.
Wow, good on you. I was talking to a friend about this a couple of days ago. We were both talking about getting out of IT, but neither of us have anything else we can do.
When I was in high school, I had an Amiga 500. I'd previously taught myself BASIC on an Apple
At school I was learning Pascal on one of those boring IBM PC things(VGA? - bah!). I hated it. Then the time came to decide what kind of job I wanted. I saw a job advertised for "computer operator". All I knew about it was it had nothing to do with Pascal, and it was working on *Mainframes*!!! I didn't even know what a mainframe was. But it wasn't Pascal, and surely there couldn't be any career path in coding games.
Needless to say, the job was primarily loading tape drives and printers. 16 years later I'm a well paid "consultant" in a relatively specialised, but generally boring, part of corporate IT. Really a glorified System Administrator. I haven't written a single line of code, other than Perl and similar interpreted languages, since my school days.
The point of this long disjointed story is that these days I really, really, wish I'd seen the future of "computer games" and stuck with 68k assembler.
I never used the "social" aspect of del.icio.us. [...] The only reason for moving my bookmarks to del.icio.us was to have them available anywhere I access the web.
I started using del.icio.us for the same reason. But I soon realised the potential of tagging your bookmarks as opposed to using folders. And although I don't actively participate in the social aspect, just by storing your bookmarks there you are participating, by adding extra "weight" to sites you've linked to which others might be looking for.
It would be great to be able to combine del.icio.us tags with a regular web content search engine. You could use the tagging system at one level to make sure you are searching worthwhile sites, then use the search engine to drill into the contents of those sites for more specific keywords.
I would hope this is what Yahoo! are planning to do. If not, I guess I just gave away my idea.
+1 Insightful to the parent.
:(
The only virus I ever caught was Byte Bandit on the Amiga 500. It spread via floppy disk and got onto just about all my "backup" games, rendering most of them useless.
Stupid Byte Bandit. I still have the A500 and the floppies, and they're still infected
"that would mean that before the invention of glasses, the human race consisted partly of half-blind people who were lucky to catch prey once in a while. It seems very weird to me that our eyesight would be, on the average, that bad."
Perhaps the average human eyesight was better back then than it is now. A genetically half-blind person in the past would have been more likely to be eaten by a tiger before they had a chance to reproduce. And the others didn't spend their lives living in boxes under artificial light looking at cathode ray tubes.
Driving is very pleasant in Victoria now, thanks to speed limit compliance, and the roads feel much safer than they do anywhere else I've been on the planet.
I tend to disagree. I think that the lowered speeds has increased angst and road rage. I describe driving around Melbourne now as a "blocking game". Everyone tries to get in front of the car in front of them, and stay in front at any cost, even though it's only going to get them to their destination a second earlier, if they're lucky.... especially bloody 4WDs (or SUVs as we so obediently call them these days).
I think Melbourne is the *worst* Australian city to drive around now. I used to hate the windey thin roads of Sydney, but Sydney drivers generally have a better attitude. Up there, I get the feeling that "we're all in this together so let's all just get along and get home". Melbourne is now the opposite. It wasn't 10 years ago.
PS - I'm born and bred in Melbourne.
Agreed. We must be about the same vintage. I was a member of the same kind of computer club. In my area it was mainly C64 and Apple //e.
Now I'm surrounded by these young arrogant zealots at work all day, telling me there's no reason to run anything other than Linux and that I don't understand it. Why would I want to go and surrround myself with even more of them at a LUG?
"Hey, I was installing Yggdrasil Linux from floppies downloaded via UUCP when you were still in nappies (diapers), bucko."
Linux had a lot of catching up to do.
Song: I wanna go to Mount Splashmore, take me take me take me take me now! Now now now now now! Mount Splashmore take me there right now!
Lisa: This is a rather shameless promotion
Bart: Hey, it worked on me!
Lisa: Me too!
most Europeans are too snobby to watch our "football"
Why would they when they have Rugby Union?
Sun has attempted to undermine linux by quasi-open sourcing their stuff... the two companies more likely to get hurt by the sun moves are Novell and RedHat
s p ...
I don't think Sun are attempting to undermine Linux. I believe one aim would be to increase Solaris' exposure. But more-so, I think it's to give customers another reason *not* to migrate away from UNIX (including Linux) to Windows, which would likely be run on IBM or Dell hardware with Intel processors.
Of course I'm sure they'd prefer you run Solaris on a SPARC box, but Suse on an Sunfire Opteron box is fine, or even Windows if you must.
From http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4200/features.j
Options are good: With Sun Fire X4200 servers, you can run Solaris, Linux, and Windows. And you can get support for all these operating systems from Sun. No problem. Stick with your favorite OS while deploying faster, more efficient servers that give you flexible options for the future:
Most people aren't that bright, but confusing specific byproduct of smelting metal with a soft drink is beyond reason.
I believe the GP's point is that if you chose "American Coke" as a brand name (or kid's name, maybe), you'd better have good justification to be able to claim you're *not* referring to the soft drink.
Back to the original story (or non-story), I don't think this guy can reasonably claim that his "Windows Defender" is referring to the glass things in your walls.
Also, us Australian individuals tend to be less eager than some of our northern hemispherian friends to jump into court at any opportunity. (But we're not far behind)
What are the IT department grunts (assuming that is who we are talking about) doing with confidential papers on their desks day to day?
Shhh... the "confidential papers" are usually magazines, takeaway food menus, and the occasional sudoku puzzle.
Disclaimer: I do work in IT.
The thing is, it's not new technology. From http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/is _9_22/ai_101679012 ...
The first SSD was delivered to the MVS mainframe market in 1978 by StorageTek and sold for $8,800 per megabyte-much cheaper than add-on memory-and had a maximum capacity of 90MB.
(SSD = Solid State Disk)
It had moderate success back then, but then disappeared as mainframe memory and disk costs dropped. Obviously it can be done a lot cheaper today, but in comparison to the cost of disk, it's still hard to justify the cost, particularly in business. And realistically, the home market for this kind of thing is kinda niche.
If you think that a hard drive (or any number of hard drives) for that matter could contribute to hearing problems, then I'm assuming that you don't leave your house? Hell, a fart is louder than even the loudest hard drive.
I just spent the last 2 weeks working in a computer room wearing earplugs due to OH&S regulations, because of the excessive noise in the room being generated by several high end disk subsystems.
5000 people farting simultaneously and continuously in an enclosed space could get a bit noisy (and smelly).
Back in my day the floors were raised to accommodate the truckloads of cabling that strung all the pieces of machinery to each other and to the power supply.
Ah yes, the old mainframe parallel channel cables. Almost an inch thick each, and usually bunched together in groups of 16 or 32. The mainframe engineers needed muscles back in those days.
It's a fallacy that modern equipment needs that much more cooling
Even after my days wedged between mainframe devices, nothing compares heat-wise to multiple rows of 45U racks completely loaded with 1U Dell servers all blowing like there's no tomorrow. Computer room cooling is becoming a big problem, even in old-school data centres orginally designed for mainframes.
Bring back water cooling, I say!
to see it at work, go to a bible passage ... and click on the little [!] icons on the right
...
I like it. It works well here in Firefox. The only comment I have is that my natural instinct after clicking the [!] was to click on the [!] again to close the text box. It took me a few seconds to notice the [X] for this purpose. But perhaps that's just me
I installed it on my home PC when it first came out months ago and couldn't see any real use for it, so uninstalled it.
:]
But then I saw a colleague at work using it and saw how it could be very helpful in that environment. Being an IT consultant, just about all of my work related communications occur via email (Exchange), web browsing, PDF's and Office documents on my laptop. Google Desktop indexes *all* this information, making it very fast and easy to search it at whim, which I often have to do. The ability to search all of these sources of information at once is extremely helpful.
You can turn the dodgy sidebar off and just have a small text input area in the Windows task bar, or access the search interface through your web browser.
Often I work at customer sites and aren't able to connect my laptop to the internet. At these times I've found Google Desktop's cache to be very handy.
But I still can't see much use for it on my home PC
Despite what some news articles are saying, Sun is not involved as far as I know.
e ed_pl_stp
"But just as notable is the list of companies that are missing, among them EMC, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Symantec."
http://www.storagepipeline.com/172900196?cid=rssf
[disclaimer : I work for Sun (and have heard nothing about this until today)]