Most developers (companies, and their management) wanted to get a niche market and then have the secure position of maintaining it.
Microsoft broke that paradigm because they knew that a commodity owned by a single company is a monopoly. Now that they have the monopoly, they are trying to do the same thing, except with the whole market and not a niche.
And we let them do it. We must not forget that our $99 or $1999 or whatever, and our participation in their forums supported them.
The only way to beat the monopoly is to make the OS a true commodity, and we know how to do that.
we chose to let them do it because they promised impossible things cheap and then slipped us the mickey when they could only deliver 20% of what the other guys could have.
And as someone who has invested twenty years failing at fitting into the corporate world and six years failing at starting up a business, I've got kids and rent (never broke through enough to pay on a mortgage, how's that for failure?) and I think failing in the corporate environment is more damaging.
56KBps is slow, but the BBS sub-thread has it right. And if analog phone lines get closed off to try to force us all through filtered pipes, there's always tunnelling. Put your DRM-enabled box on line, start up a process that listens to the serial port, run your bridge over serial, invent your own replacement for TCP and tunnel it over TCP.
And if they start looking for tunnels and shutting them down, well, we could all start talking about the weather and yesterday's game and,
Great seals fly turgidly over a ballpark. Your wetsuit friend dances rumbling to alpha. Three felicitous ferrings on the pultice raise shares of diamonds.
There's just nothing to see here, and that's the point.
I look at it and I see a number of things:
The median time spent ranges from the bottom scores to the top.
The nearly top scores range from close to the least time spent all the way up to the most time spent.
The median scores nearly reproduce the full range on time.
Only the lowest scores seem to group closely relative to time, and they group at the median.
And that doesn't surprise me one bit.
What I would like to know is whether the guys with the high scores on COMPRESS01 tended to show reduced time on COMPRESS99. My guess would be that they would show somewhat reduced time, but there would still be a large range from quickest finish to slowest, some who finished COMPRESS01 quickly taking a long time on COMPRESS99 and vice versa.
There is so much covered in those overview-of-applied-algorithms courses that it's impossible for any student to understand all the examples well unless the student comes in with ten+ years of wide ranging experience under his or her belt. Although, for example, the concepts of parsing might help with compression, the libraries the student might have built wouldn't.
The high scores should all be considered the result of one of three things, gaming the system, luck, or spending too much time on the project.
And that is very much how things work out in the real world. Spolsky can have his iPod.
Irony.
MSIE7 has a bug. Given Microsoft's history, it's a very embarrassing bug.
So el reg points out the natural irony in the situation with some artificial irony. That's not the same as being wrong.
Bang & Olufsen (sp?) had a turntable that used a laser to find the tracks, but used a more-or-less standard needle to play. But it wasn't around $10,000 by any means.
I think Stoddard and his group had a proof of concept out, but I don't remember any full laser turntable in production back then.
I do remember getting a transistor from Radio Shack with a photovoltaic base or something, attaching it to an op-amp and holding the phototransistor and a flashlight over the turntable, and piping the signal into the stereo. With practice, I was able to get several rotations of continuous tracking, but it was really muddy, lots of crosstalk, as can be imagined.
Ah, for the good old days, when an audiophile's sound equipment cost as much as the house it was installed in.
(Shooting from the hip again, so if you really want to know, you should probably hit the search engines.)
Videodisks use a completely different tracking mechanism. Actually, there were two, as I recall, one of which was physical. Neither is compatible with audio on vinyl. There was not much to be backward compatible with, so the whole thing was much simpler for video.
The machines that cut audio in vinyl vary so widely that the tracking mechanism has to be extremely intelligent. That's the reason for five lasers, and a big part of the excuse for the price tag until this becomes popular enough for mass production. And irregular color in the vinyl messes the tracking lasers up still, according to the reviews. (I'm wondering why they don't have custom multi-color+UV LED lasers built for the tracking.)
Vinyl could be pretty lousy, and it often was. The recording industry has always complained about pirates and warned about the poor quality, but they've been great for cutting corners, too.
CDs are one prime example of corner-cutting. Vinyl has dropoff in both amplitude resolution and high-frequency sensitivity, but CD just completely clips everything over the edge.
The nice thing about CDs is that they are better than AM broadcast and competitive with FM, and the digital nature allows delaying the noisy elements down to the final output amplifier stages, so it sounds noiseless.
Also, most people find the high frequencies to be more distracting than interesting, so the sudden chop at 22KHz (oversampled to fake 44Khz) actually sounds "better" to the casual listener who really isn't interested in telling a flute from a fife.
To truly maintain flat reproduction, you need more than 16 bits of resolution in amplitude, and you need 120K sampling rates or better. (I worked the math out in college, while taking an acoustical physics class twenty or so years ago.)
From the reviews of the current models of these laser turntables for vinyl, I'm thinking they need a number of improvements. For the dust, I'd juggest employing a built in cleaning system to pre-clean the disk before playing, and air filtration like removable hard disks have. Variable color and possibly variable angle tracking lasers should help on issues with the color of the vinyl.
But I think it's really important to be able to profile a disk, to compensate for the cutting and press machinery and for the wear and tear the disk has suffered. Not just moving the laser up and down in the groove, but to be able to customize the response curves for various frequencies. That would probably take a little human interaction on the user's part.
None of this, of course, has much to do with using a floppy motor for a turntable motor.
The first prototype lazer turntables appeared in California in the 80s, IIRC. The big record companies refused it for whatever reasons. (Too much invested in CD?) I don't remember much more, but I think it's another example of IP laws getting in the way of progress.
$15,000? It's not that much more complicated than CD mechanics. The original inventor figured the price could drop just like it did with CDs, again, IIRC.
You wouldn't have the lawsuits if the current laws didn't encourage it.
But, yeah, the problem always comes back to the people. If we didn't drink the kool-aide, Microsoft wouldn't have as big a monopoly, and if we didn't pay them money, they would eventually be unable to continue using the courts to stall, and the worst example of bad IP behavior would go away.
Fewer bad examples to follow wouldn't result in Utopia, but it would result in fewer bad examples followed.
Ten years from now, you're going to find yourself digging through the backups anyway.
If you have so many things going on that you can't remember where you put it all, you need to either lighten your load or learn better organization skills.
Spotlight may have some uses, but it is no substitute for organization. If you get it organized now, it's far more likely to be in an organized state in your backups in ten years.
Well, that said, without something like Spotlight and very good incremental backup software, aliases do tend to break. However, if you expect Spotlight (or the MSLonghorn equivalent) to organize for you, you're going to be disappointed.
inventing the new game of "Software Monopoly"? (Soft-opoly?)
Hmm.
Trading property titles for IP titles would be a no-brainer, and likely run risk of offending certain, ahem, IP property owners. So, instead of Boardwalk and Park Place, it would have to be erm, MeltingFluff Off-this, and MF Foo-foo.
(You know, the wind blows, fooooooo fooooooooooo.
Sorry.)
Free Parking, of course, would be Free (as in speech) Software, but you could choose to go there any time and stay as long as you want. In fact, not just one corner, make it a parallel inside track. On a property like PostGreSQL, you'd choose to pay or not, and how much, and you could pay in lines of code instead of money, and you'd get karma for paying. On a property like MySQL, you could choose to put a hood over your piece as you pass, but hooded pieces get no karma.
Uh, oh.
The above game description is copyright 2005, by Joseph Daniel Zukiger, and is licensable under the GPL or under MIT terms.
just like the control key mess. It's the whole reason Microsoft sold, and it's the whole reason Microsoft continues to sell.
It's the illusion that you don't have to change anything to get an advantage.
No fuss, no muss, no changing your keyboard, cpu, memory, etc.
Pay MS your money and they'll bring you all the features everybody else invents,
at rock bottom prices,
with no inconveniences
(And you don't even have to understand what you're doing.)
bad sectors, disks that won't spin up, more bad sectors. And the interface bottleneck.
Where I have to use ATA technology, I (now) make sure I back up regularly. Back up that notebook every night. Actual cost requires adding a spare drive for every drive in use.
For anything even halfway important, give me SCSI, even if it means buying the controller separate.
I have a 30 GB hitachi that I had been running full time (about a year) in my ancient tangerine iBook, using it as my home web server. That drive always had a tendency to be noisy when I bought it, but I had bought it used, and getting it into the iBook the first time was such a pain I didn't take it back.
Every now and then it would buzz and click, like a refrigerator starting its compressor, but lower volume, and repeating.
About a month back, it wouldn't quit the buzz-click, so I figured it was time to shut down and hope I could recover my data over the weekend. Wouldn't boot up, so I started calculating how much data I'd lost. (Also prayed a bit, because there was some that is not replaceable.) When I had time on the weekend, I opened the iBook and swapped the old 6 GB drive back in. (Also Hitachi, but it usually is not noisy.
I hooked the 30GB drive to the ATA-to-USB converter that I had plugged the old drive into (one of those shirt-pocket-case kits), and, indeed, it did not spin up. Tried freezing it and also tapping it, no effect.
So, since I had nothing to lose, I broke the seals and popped the cover. The platters are a nice silvery-aluminumy color. Carefully avoiding touching the platters themselves, I rotated them manually by the hubs. The first spin, I could feel the flat bearing or stuck grease breaking, then they spun easy. So I plugged the ATA-to-USB interface back on, plugged the USB cable to the iBook, and it powered up and mounted just fine.
My son enjoyed watching the platters spin before I replaced the covers, but he was disappointed that he didn't get the magnets out of there after all.
Got all my data out, and they still spin. I may be able to use it for moving non-critical data, I suppose. Definitely not for anything critical.
Slashdot Mirror
Most developers (companies, and their management) wanted to get a niche market and then have the secure position of maintaining it.
Microsoft broke that paradigm because they knew that a commodity owned by a single company is a monopoly. Now that they have the monopoly, they are trying to do the same thing, except with the whole market and not a niche.
And we let them do it. We must not forget that our $99 or $1999 or whatever, and our participation in their forums supported them.
The only way to beat the monopoly is to make the OS a true commodity, and we know how to do that.
on our hands, on our arms, on our backs, ...
we chose to let them do it because they promised impossible things cheap and then slipped us the mickey when they could only deliver 20% of what the other guys could have.
And where do you get this information?
That's why I hate Microsoft. Their published docs only reflect reality where nobody's making money any more.
The good stuff? You get to help make it.
And Microsoft keeps what makes them money.
Closed open source.
(And people talk about Steve Job's reality distortion field.)
Desktops and laptops?
Mind-boggling.
Linux?
FreeBSD, just to show Apple up?
(No, I'm not really biting here, but the phantasy is, well, maybe I'm biting. Lousy troll.)
This guy knows what he's talking about, even if he's only 99% correct. That other guy missed it by a centimeter, but doesn't show much comprehension.
Maybe it's because that other guy spent so long working for Microsoft before he got free to work in the real world.
And as someone who has invested twenty years failing at fitting into the corporate world and six years failing at starting up a business, I've got kids and rent (never broke through enough to pay on a mortgage, how's that for failure?) and I think failing in the corporate environment is more damaging.
56KBps is slow, but the BBS sub-thread has it right. And if analog phone lines get closed off to try to force us all through filtered pipes, there's always tunnelling. Put your DRM-enabled box on line, start up a process that listens to the serial port, run your bridge over serial, invent your own replacement for TCP and tunnel it over TCP.
And if they start looking for tunnels and shutting them down, well, we could all start talking about the weather and yesterday's game and,
Great seals fly turgidly over a ballpark. Your wetsuit friend dances rumbling to alpha. Three felicitous ferrings on the pultice raise shares of diamonds.
(Think of Smart showing you the quarter-inch.)
Look at the graph on COMPRESS01. He says
There's just nothing to see here, and that's the point.
I look at it and I see a number of things:
The median time spent ranges from the bottom scores to the top.
The nearly top scores range from close to the least time spent all the way up to the most time spent.
The median scores nearly reproduce the full range on time.
Only the lowest scores seem to group closely relative to time, and they group at the median.
And that doesn't surprise me one bit.
What I would like to know is whether the guys with the high scores on COMPRESS01 tended to show reduced time on COMPRESS99. My guess would be that they would show somewhat reduced time, but there would still be a large range from quickest finish to slowest, some who finished COMPRESS01 quickly taking a long time on COMPRESS99 and vice versa.
There is so much covered in those overview-of-applied-algorithms courses that it's impossible for any student to understand all the examples well unless the student comes in with ten+ years of wide ranging experience under his or her belt. Although, for example, the concepts of parsing might help with compression, the libraries the student might have built wouldn't.
The high scores should all be considered the result of one of three things, gaming the system, luck, or spending too much time on the project.
And that is very much how things work out in the real world. Spolsky can have his iPod.
Irony. MSIE7 has a bug. Given Microsoft's history, it's a very embarrassing bug. So el reg points out the natural irony in the situation with some artificial irony. That's not the same as being wrong.
IIRC, iCab sometimes claims, or is claimed to, pass the acid test.
But the author doesn't seem to be claiming that now.
You might prefer to be arrested.
Bang & Olufsen (sp?) had a turntable that used a laser to find the tracks, but used a more-or-less standard needle to play. But it wasn't around $10,000 by any means.
I think Stoddard and his group had a proof of concept out, but I don't remember any full laser turntable in production back then.
I do remember getting a transistor from Radio Shack with a photovoltaic base or something, attaching it to an op-amp and holding the phototransistor and a flashlight over the turntable, and piping the signal into the stereo. With practice, I was able to get several rotations of continuous tracking, but it was really muddy, lots of crosstalk, as can be imagined.
Ah, for the good old days, when an audiophile's sound equipment cost as much as the house it was installed in.
(Shooting from the hip again, so if you really want to know, you should probably hit the search engines.)
Videodisks use a completely different tracking mechanism. Actually, there were two, as I recall, one of which was physical. Neither is compatible with audio on vinyl. There was not much to be backward compatible with, so the whole thing was much simpler for video.
The machines that cut audio in vinyl vary so widely that the tracking mechanism has to be extremely intelligent. That's the reason for five lasers, and a big part of the excuse for the price tag until this becomes popular enough for mass production. And irregular color in the vinyl messes the tracking lasers up still, according to the reviews. (I'm wondering why they don't have custom multi-color+UV LED lasers built for the tracking.)
Vinyl could be pretty lousy, and it often was. The recording industry has always complained about pirates and warned about the poor quality, but they've been great for cutting corners, too.
CDs are one prime example of corner-cutting. Vinyl has dropoff in both amplitude resolution and high-frequency sensitivity, but CD just completely clips everything over the edge.
The nice thing about CDs is that they are better than AM broadcast and competitive with FM, and the digital nature allows delaying the noisy elements down to the final output amplifier stages, so it sounds noiseless.
Also, most people find the high frequencies to be more distracting than interesting, so the sudden chop at 22KHz (oversampled to fake 44Khz) actually sounds "better" to the casual listener who really isn't interested in telling a flute from a fife.
To truly maintain flat reproduction, you need more than 16 bits of resolution in amplitude, and you need 120K sampling rates or better. (I worked the math out in college, while taking an acoustical physics class twenty or so years ago.)
From the reviews of the current models of these laser turntables for vinyl, I'm thinking they need a number of improvements. For the dust, I'd juggest employing a built in cleaning system to pre-clean the disk before playing, and air filtration like removable hard disks have. Variable color and possibly variable angle tracking lasers should help on issues with the color of the vinyl.
But I think it's really important to be able to profile a disk, to compensate for the cutting and press machinery and for the wear and tear the disk has suffered. Not just moving the laser up and down in the groove, but to be able to customize the response curves for various frequencies. That would probably take a little human interaction on the user's part.
None of this, of course, has much to do with using a floppy motor for a turntable motor.
Here's the history and some review. The story on the site hosting that is also interesting.
At any rate, it looks like the guy who produces that laser turntable does so with proper permission from the owner of the original patent.
The first prototype lazer turntables appeared in California in the 80s, IIRC. The big record companies refused it for whatever reasons. (Too much invested in CD?) I don't remember much more, but I think it's another example of IP laws getting in the way of progress.
$15,000? It's not that much more complicated than CD mechanics. The original inventor figured the price could drop just like it did with CDs, again, IIRC.
Use a laser.
You wouldn't have the lawsuits if the current laws didn't encourage it.
But, yeah, the problem always comes back to the people. If we didn't drink the kool-aide, Microsoft wouldn't have as big a monopoly, and if we didn't pay them money, they would eventually be unable to continue using the courts to stall, and the worst example of bad IP behavior would go away.
Fewer bad examples to follow wouldn't result in Utopia, but it would result in fewer bad examples followed.
Ten years from now, you're going to find yourself digging through the backups anyway.
If you have so many things going on that you can't remember where you put it all, you need to either lighten your load or learn better organization skills.
Spotlight may have some uses, but it is no substitute for organization. If you get it organized now, it's far more likely to be in an organized state in your backups in ten years.
Well, that said, without something like Spotlight and very good incremental backup software, aliases do tend to break. However, if you expect Spotlight (or the MSLonghorn equivalent) to organize for you, you're going to be disappointed.
inventing the new game of "Software Monopoly"? (Soft-opoly?)
Hmm.
Trading property titles for IP titles would be a no-brainer, and likely run risk of offending certain, ahem, IP property owners. So, instead of Boardwalk and Park Place, it would have to be erm, MeltingFluff Off-this, and MF Foo-foo.
(You know, the wind blows, fooooooo fooooooooooo.
Sorry.)
Free Parking, of course, would be Free (as in speech) Software, but you could choose to go there any time and stay as long as you want. In fact, not just one corner, make it a parallel inside track. On a property like PostGreSQL, you'd choose to pay or not, and how much, and you could pay in lines of code instead of money, and you'd get karma for paying. On a property like MySQL, you could choose to put a hood over your piece as you pass, but hooded pieces get no karma.
Uh, oh.
The above game description is copyright 2005, by Joseph Daniel Zukiger, and is licensable under the GPL or under MIT terms.
Although I can't say I'm using Spotlight at all.
I cannot understand why people want their computers to do _all_ their thinking for them. Thinking is half the fun of being a sentient animal.
If the computer does all the thinking for you, what's left to do? Nothing but behave like a context free grammar or a finite state machine.
grumble mutter grumble mutter grumble mutter peep grumble mutter
Thanks for that link.
Unless there's a lot more that the guy is telling, this is a very clear case of IP laws directly impeding the industry.
just like the control key mess. It's the whole reason Microsoft sold, and it's the whole reason Microsoft continues to sell.
It's the illusion that you don't have to change anything to get an advantage.
No fuss, no muss, no changing your keyboard, cpu, memory, etc.
Pay MS your money and they'll bring you all the features everybody else invents,
at rock bottom prices,
with no inconveniences
(And you don't even have to understand what you're doing.)
bad sectors, disks that won't spin up, more bad sectors. And the interface bottleneck.
Where I have to use ATA technology, I (now) make sure I back up regularly. Back up that notebook every night. Actual cost requires adding a spare drive for every drive in use.
For anything even halfway important, give me SCSI, even if it means buying the controller separate.
I have a 30 GB hitachi that I had been running full time (about a year) in my ancient tangerine iBook, using it as my home web server. That drive always had a tendency to be noisy when I bought it, but I had bought it used, and getting it into the iBook the first time was such a pain I didn't take it back.
Every now and then it would buzz and click, like a refrigerator starting its compressor, but lower volume, and repeating.
About a month back, it wouldn't quit the buzz-click, so I figured it was time to shut down and hope I could recover my data over the weekend. Wouldn't boot up, so I started calculating how much data I'd lost. (Also prayed a bit, because there was some that is not replaceable.) When I had time on the weekend, I opened the iBook and swapped the old 6 GB drive back in. (Also Hitachi, but it usually is not noisy.
I hooked the 30GB drive to the ATA-to-USB converter that I had plugged the old drive into (one of those shirt-pocket-case kits), and, indeed, it did not spin up. Tried freezing it and also tapping it, no effect.
So, since I had nothing to lose, I broke the seals and popped the cover. The platters are a nice silvery-aluminumy color. Carefully avoiding touching the platters themselves, I rotated them manually by the hubs. The first spin, I could feel the flat bearing or stuck grease breaking, then they spun easy. So I plugged the ATA-to-USB interface back on, plugged the USB cable to the iBook, and it powered up and mounted just fine.
My son enjoyed watching the platters spin before I replaced the covers, but he was disappointed that he didn't get the magnets out of there after all.
Got all my data out, and they still spin. I may be able to use it for moving non-critical data, I suppose. Definitely not for anything critical.