Remind me to avoid whatever roads you drive on. Hasn't someone tried to take your license away yet?
No, the airbags are in my system case, between the CD-ROM and the hard drive. That way, in case of a system crash, the blow will be cushioned by a soft, comfy airbag.
I highly recommend it. They come in both 5.25" and 3.5" bay sizes.
And if you don't believe me, look at your current software and OS and tell me you would just as soon run it on a 4MB 486SX/25Mhz.
I draw a line between my various computers. Each one serves a purpose. I do most of my writing on an an IBM PS/2 Model 30. That's an 8086 with 640K of RAM and a 20MB hard drive.
Why? Because it works.
But I'm writing this now on a 350mHz G3 with 190MB of RAM and 8MB of VRAM. Why? Because I like to play Quake on this machine.
I use most of my systems as appliances. They do a few things, and that's all that I want them to do. And I strongly believe that this is a trend that more and more people will follow. But they don't want multiple computers as they think of them now, but devices. (With, as discussed today, Be as the OS.)
So, yes, in that sense, I fully believe that there will continue to be a use for less-than-stellar processors, for the VW bug of processors. (Though I maintain that some people will knowingly purchase traditional desktops with less souped-up processors.) Whether Celeron or something else, there will be room for them in a mass-market sense.
"This is like cars that do 0-60 in 2.4 milliseconds and can go up to 250mph" But it is the cars like Saturn that are surviving 'crashes' and intersection collisions. Is there a push for chipmakers to meet the side impact compliance standard?
I dunno, but I've survived several crashes thanks to my airbags.
Celerons already have that reputation among geeks, though it's not advertised as such (in fact, I don't remember ever seeing an ad for celerons (or athlons!), just P3s).
You know, you're absolutely right, they really are filling that niche. I hadn't thought about Celeron a) because it's Intel, an existing company and b) they don't advertise it as such.
I wonder if, upon advertising it appropriately, Intel could have Celeron capture that market?
This is like cars that do 0-60 in 2.4 milliseconds and can go up to 250mph.
It just doesn't matter to most people, at least practically-speaking. As people pointed out in a recent discussion, even though it doesn't matter, people will still buy the hottest chip around. Very much like how people buy the greatest SUVs, the fastest Porches, etc.
But consider that VW does well with their "0-60? Yes." advertisments. How long will it be until a processor company pops up with a similar ad campaign? I give it 12-18 months.
And I'll get one, too, because I don't need the latest, greatest hardware. 'Cuz I run Linux.:)
I think it's great that Be may have a niche here. I know that I'll probably get flamed for saying this, but Be isn't terribly likely to make it as a desktop environment. (No more, anyhow, than the Batmobile is likely to make it as the everman's car.)
But as a 'net appliance OS? Fantastic! It's so much more powerful and flexible than WinCE (or whatever they're calling it these days), and, of course, it's not made by Microsoft. (I'll get flamed for that, too.:)
Rejoice!
Re:Why Intel chips are slower than AMD chips
on
News on Pentium IV
·
· Score: 1
They'd be a lot faster if they gave up on this binary business and moved to something faster, like trinary. Just think -- an instant 50% speed improvement!
I'm always in a bit of shock after I talk with people that are relative newbies (ie, less knowledgable than us folk:) about computers. They'll tell me something like "I got the 12.2 gig RAMs with a 15" drive and 256 of cache. Of course, it's a Pentium III. They're the fastest, you know."
Explaining that the speed increase between a P2 and a P3 is negligible doesn't seem to help any. They just know that they've got to have that "III," they have to have that "MMX" on there.
I wonder how much longer it will continue like this? Remember the rabid VCR market in the late 80s and early 90s? Maybe it was just my young geek mind, but it seemed to me that there was always some new feature, some great reason to upgrade to the next great generation of VCRs.
Where has that gone? In part, DVDs have increased the upgrade crazy, to be certain. But, if we go back a couple of years, you'll notice a laid-back attitude about these simple devices. "Does it record? Good enough." Again, this might just be my perception.
This same pattern has been repeated with radios, telephones, TVs (to some extent), coffeemakers, refrigerators, and just about any other overpriced gadget that you can think of. They become a commodity.
Is the processor industry going to drive itself into commodity status? I assume so. No doub t that you and I will keep right on upgrading and getting the biggest backside cache and fastest motherboard speed that we can. But as computers are reduced to appliance status, consumers won't care about whether it's a P3 or a P4. They'll just want to know if it's "on the e-mail."
robots.txt was just an example. eBay, or anybody else, could easily block IPs from accessing their site. But then things quickly devolve into a cat-and-mouse game of switch-the-IP. No business wants to play that game.
What makes using robots.txt interesting is that it's just a request to follow a set of standards, not a demand. And that, I think, is what's so unsettling about creating a law around that. That turns an optional standard into a mandatory one.
Xybernaut has, in the past anyhow, fallen into the idea that a wearable computer is any computer that can be strapped onto your body. Take a laptop, hang it on a belt, and add a heads-up display. *poof* Wearable computer.
What constitutes a wearable computer? Well, for one, I think that anything that makes me lose my balance is pretty well out of the running. ("Yeah, I just hang this here iMac off my hip. I walk a bit funny, but I can play Quake anywhere!") Further, traditional input methods are pretty much as waste of time.
Obviously, voice-based input is the way that things have to go. I've never had a great deal of luck with that on any of my systems, but I recently used Jupiter, MIT's voice-based weather service. Call (1-888-573-8255) and ask it any question that you want about the weather anywhere in the US. It's really an amazing system.
Short of that, considering the processing power that's required in order to handle voice adequately, a VR keyboard might be a good first step. A HUD could show you a keyboard, floating in the air. Small devices on the fingers (like little round bandaids, perhaps, on the backs on top knuckle) could track your finger movements so that you could type.
Audio-based feedback, as we all have probably found, is helpful. So now we need a small device on the back of the ear(s), too.
Glasses, headphone, fingerpads, microphone, CPU. With all of these things, you truly do *wear* your computer. Quite an assembly to get all of this on.
Is it possible to improve on this setup? Of course. Somewhere in the middle ground between hanging a Toshiba Satellite on your belt and pulling on a computer-suit is going to be the everyman's wearable computer. And if I knew what that would be, I'd be a very rich man.:)
Many of my sites are database-driven sites that run on PHP and MySQL. No problem with indexing, and no problem with the file extensions.
If you can get beyond the backend concept of a dynamic page, most pages really appear to be quite static, from an indexing perspective. A http-based indexing system (as opposed to filesystem-level) can't tell that pages are dynamic, and don't care.
I've never had a problem with search engines failing to index pages just because they had convoluted URL. If some engines do that, it's a bloody shame.
"No, they were only *busted* for the forging. MicroSoft was busted for being a monopoly, not for selling software. Nevertheless, the FoF do indicate that MicroSoft sells software. It may be a fact that Christian Brothers were spamming AOL, but they were busted for infringing on the trademark."
Ah -- I thought I understood the difference, but I see that I did not. Good point.
Jamie wrote: "If a specialized search engine for auctions is illegal, aren't all search engines illegal? Disobey the robots.txt file and go to jail?"
Well, maybe it *should* be illegal. I suppose that constitutes an unauthorised access of a network, despite explicit instructions through a known standard to stay off of that network.
Still, it's creepy, no?
BTW, eBay has no robots.txt file. That, IMHO, gives them no room to gripe.
"Since 1997, the report said, Christian Brothers had unlawfully obtained mailing lists of the e-mail addresses of AOL members and sent more than 20 million messages to them using AOL's computer networks."
It appears that both points are valid: They were busted for the spam, as well as forging headers.
Yeah, I go back and forth on this issue. My conclusion is that we should be angry with the USPTO for giving Amazon.com the patent, and not with Amazon.com for getting it. And, to be honest, I wouldn't be boycotting them if that were the whole story.
The fact that Amazon.com is actively defending the patent is what make me mad. And that's what, IMHO, makes a boycott necessary.
Sure, here ya' go. I won't make any jokes about this, it's just too easy:
-------------------------
Dear Waldo,
Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.
As you know, Amazon.com has filed suit against barnesandnoble.com, saying it has illegally copied Amazon.com's patented 1-Click technology.
The 1-Click feature securely stores billing and shipping information so that returning customers need only click their mouse once to buy a selected item. In recognition of the innovative and unique nature of the 1-Click technology, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent No. 5,960,411 to Amazon.com on September 28, 1999.
Amazon.com spent thousands of hours to develop the 1-Click process. As our founder, Jeff Bezos, has said, "The reason we have a patent system in this country is to encourage people to take these kinds of risks and make these kinds of investments for customers."
I hope you'll understand that we are unable to discuss this case any further as we are currently in litigation. Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us.
Best regards,
Titus G. Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/ Earth's Biggest Selection
I think that RMS is really just making this official, more or less. I e-mailed Amazon about this one-click nonsense shortly after I heard it, and received, as I'd expected, nothing more than a form letter regarding my stated boycott.
I have not, of course, purchased anything from them since, and I actively encourage others to do the same. I know many of my fellow geeks are also boycotting Amazon.com, but I don't think that Amazon.com is really aware of how many people really are frustrated over this. Perhaps an 'official' boycott is what it will take.
Which is, in turn, a Hunter S. Thompson reference. Hunter S. claims that in a bathroom he asked Nixon, at the urinal next to him, "But what of the doomed?" Nixon replied, "Fuck the doomed."
I think the "Do your Christmas shopping online, avoid the mall" message would scare the crap out a multi-million dollar mall owner.
You're right. The problem is that it scares them so much that they're taking it out on their sole source of income -- the stores within the mall. There is immense pressure on stores -- especially chains, like Gap, Banana Republic, etc., -- to create a strong on-line presence. So if the Gap is told by some mall "sorry, you can't advertise the URL," I suspect they may pack up and move on out.
Now, for all I know, this particular mall is the only game in town. But I've made a fair number of websites for merchants that want to move into e-commerce in a big way, going from a small (2-10 stores) chain onto a bigger web presence. And for some of them, it's worked out really quite well. And they continue to maintain their retail presences. But if the landlord of one of those places said "it's our way or the highway," then the highway it would be.
My rambling point is that the social portion of the mall is essential. Being able to sell something one-to-one is essential to many businesses. E-Commerce is booming not only because it's a great way to buy, but also because it's a novelty. Retail stores aren't, for the most part, going to go anywhere. But given the hype surrounding e-commerce, it seems like a particularly bad times for malls to be telling stores to eliminate URLs from their stores. It's bad PR, it results in unhappy tenants, and it makes them look foolish.
I took some classes at a fairly mediocre public college here in Virginia for a year. My favourite class, an honours World History class, was taught by a leading expert in historical cartography. This gave a bit of a map-based slant to everything that we learned, which was actually really interesting. She was, IMHO, the best teacher in the school.
Anyhow, they let her go last year. They said that she had to pick between continuing her research or teaching, that doing both showed a lack of committment to education. She, as any reasonable human would do, opted to continue her personal education. I wrote an angry letter to the Dean of Education, and I haven't taken a class there since. It's pretty unlikely that I ever will again.
I've used pen devices. Granted, they were tethered, but the same problem applies: It's a pain in the ass to keep putting down and picking up a pen. Impractical for those of us that switch back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse frequently.
Slashdot Mirror
Remind me to avoid whatever roads you drive on. Hasn't someone tried to take your license away yet?
No, the airbags are in my system case, between the CD-ROM and the hard drive. That way, in case of a system crash, the blow will be cushioned by a soft, comfy airbag.
I highly recommend it. They come in both 5.25" and 3.5" bay sizes.
It's funny. Laugh.
And if you don't believe me, look at your current software and OS and tell me you would just as soon run it on a 4MB 486SX/25Mhz.
I draw a line between my various computers. Each one serves a purpose. I do most of my writing on an an IBM PS/2 Model 30. That's an 8086 with 640K of RAM and a 20MB hard drive.
Why? Because it works.
But I'm writing this now on a 350mHz G3 with 190MB of RAM and 8MB of VRAM. Why? Because I like to play Quake on this machine.
I use most of my systems as appliances. They do a few things, and that's all that I want them to do. And I strongly believe that this is a trend that more and more people will follow. But they don't want multiple computers as they think of them now, but devices. (With, as discussed today, Be as the OS.)
So, yes, in that sense, I fully believe that there will continue to be a use for less-than-stellar processors, for the VW bug of processors. (Though I maintain that some people will knowingly purchase traditional desktops with less souped-up processors.) Whether Celeron or something else, there will be room for them in a mass-market sense.
"This is like cars that do 0-60 in 2.4 milliseconds and can go up to 250mph"
But it is the cars like Saturn that are surviving 'crashes' and intersection collisions.
Is there a push for chipmakers to meet the side impact compliance standard?
I dunno, but I've survived several crashes thanks to my airbags.
Celerons already have that reputation among geeks, though it's not advertised as such (in fact, I don't remember ever seeing an ad for celerons (or athlons!), just P3s).
You know, you're absolutely right, they really are filling that niche. I hadn't thought about Celeron a) because it's Intel, an existing company and b) they don't advertise it as such.
I wonder if, upon advertising it appropriately, Intel could have Celeron capture that market?
This is like cars that do 0-60 in 2.4 milliseconds and can go up to 250mph.
:)
It just doesn't matter to most people, at least practically-speaking. As people pointed out in a recent discussion, even though it doesn't matter, people will still buy the hottest chip around. Very much like how people buy the greatest SUVs, the fastest Porches, etc.
But consider that VW does well with their "0-60? Yes." advertisments. How long will it be until a processor company pops up with a similar ad campaign? I give it 12-18 months.
And I'll get one, too, because I don't need the latest, greatest hardware. 'Cuz I run Linux.
I think it's great that Be may have a niche here. I know that I'll probably get flamed for saying this, but Be isn't terribly likely to make it as a desktop environment. (No more, anyhow, than the Batmobile is likely to make it as the everman's car.)
:)
But as a 'net appliance OS? Fantastic! It's so much more powerful and flexible than WinCE (or whatever they're calling it these days), and, of course, it's not made by Microsoft. (I'll get flamed for that, too.
Rejoice!
They'd be a lot faster if they gave up on this binary business and moved to something faster, like trinary. Just think -- an instant 50% speed improvement!
:)
I'm always in a bit of shock after I talk with people that are relative newbies (ie, less knowledgable than us folk :) about computers. They'll tell me something like "I got the 12.2 gig RAMs with a 15" drive and 256 of cache. Of course, it's a Pentium III. They're the fastest, you know."
Explaining that the speed increase between a P2 and a P3 is negligible doesn't seem to help any. They just know that they've got to have that "III," they have to have that "MMX" on there.
I wonder how much longer it will continue like this? Remember the rabid VCR market in the late 80s and early 90s? Maybe it was just my young geek mind, but it seemed to me that there was always some new feature, some great reason to upgrade to the next great generation of VCRs.
Where has that gone? In part, DVDs have increased the upgrade crazy, to be certain. But, if we go back a couple of years, you'll notice a laid-back attitude about these simple devices. "Does it record? Good enough." Again, this might just be my perception.
This same pattern has been repeated with radios, telephones, TVs (to some extent), coffeemakers, refrigerators, and just about any other overpriced gadget that you can think of. They become a commodity.
Is the processor industry going to drive itself into commodity status? I assume so. No doub t that you and I will keep right on upgrading and getting the biggest backside cache and fastest motherboard speed that we can. But as computers are reduced to appliance status, consumers won't care about whether it's a P3 or a P4. They'll just want to know if it's "on the e-mail."
Come on Intel, isn't it time to retire the Pentium name? As if Pentium II and III weren't bad enough, now we have to deal with the Pentium IV.
They were, in all likelihood, just dodging the inevitable "Sextium." Can you blame 'em?
robots.txt was just an example. eBay, or anybody else, could easily block IPs from accessing their site. But then things quickly devolve into a cat-and-mouse game of switch-the-IP. No business wants to play that game.
What makes using robots.txt interesting is that it's just a request to follow a set of standards, not a demand. And that, I think, is what's so unsettling about creating a law around that. That turns an optional standard into a mandatory one.
Xybernaut has, in the past anyhow, fallen into the idea that a wearable computer is any computer that can be strapped onto your body. Take a laptop, hang it on a belt, and add a heads-up display. *poof* Wearable computer.
:)
What constitutes a wearable computer? Well, for one, I think that anything that makes me lose my balance is pretty well out of the running. ("Yeah, I just hang this here iMac off my hip. I walk a bit funny, but I can play Quake anywhere!") Further, traditional input methods are pretty much as waste of time.
Obviously, voice-based input is the way that things have to go. I've never had a great deal of luck with that on any of my systems, but I recently used Jupiter, MIT's voice-based weather service. Call (1-888-573-8255) and ask it any question that you want about the weather anywhere in the US. It's really an amazing system.
Short of that, considering the processing power that's required in order to handle voice adequately, a VR keyboard might be a good first step. A HUD could show you a keyboard, floating in the air. Small devices on the fingers (like little round bandaids, perhaps, on the backs on top knuckle) could track your finger movements so that you could type.
Audio-based feedback, as we all have probably found, is helpful. So now we need a small device on the back of the ear(s), too.
Glasses, headphone, fingerpads, microphone, CPU. With all of these things, you truly do *wear* your computer. Quite an assembly to get all of this on.
Is it possible to improve on this setup? Of course. Somewhere in the middle ground between hanging a Toshiba Satellite on your belt and pulling on a computer-suit is going to be the everyman's wearable computer. And if I knew what that would be, I'd be a very rich man.
Many of my sites are database-driven sites that run on PHP and MySQL. No problem with indexing, and no problem with the file extensions.
If you can get beyond the backend concept of a dynamic page, most pages really appear to be quite static, from an indexing perspective. A http-based indexing system (as opposed to filesystem-level) can't tell that pages are dynamic, and don't care.
I've never had a problem with search engines failing to index pages just because they had convoluted URL. If some engines do that, it's a bloody shame.
"No, they were only *busted* for the forging. MicroSoft was busted for being a monopoly, not for selling software. Nevertheless, the FoF do indicate that MicroSoft sells software. It may be a fact that Christian Brothers were spamming AOL, but they were busted for infringing on the trademark."
Ah -- I thought I understood the difference, but I see that I did not. Good point.
Jamie wrote:
"If a specialized search engine for auctions is illegal, aren't all search engines illegal? Disobey the robots.txt file and go to jail?"
Well, maybe it *should* be illegal. I suppose that constitutes an unauthorised access of a network, despite explicit instructions through a known standard to stay off of that network.
Still, it's creepy, no?
BTW, eBay has no robots.txt file. That, IMHO, gives them no room to gripe.
"Since 1997, the report said, Christian Brothers had unlawfully obtained mailing lists of the e-mail addresses of AOL members and sent more than 20 million messages to them using AOL's computer networks."
It appears that both points are valid: They were busted for the spam, as well as forging headers.
Yeah, I go back and forth on this issue. My conclusion is that we should be angry with the USPTO for giving Amazon.com the patent, and not with Amazon.com for getting it. And, to be honest, I wouldn't be boycotting them if that were the whole story.
The fact that Amazon.com is actively defending the patent is what make me mad. And that's what, IMHO, makes a boycott necessary.
Sure, here ya' go. I won't make any jokes about this, it's just too easy:
-------------------------
Dear Waldo,
Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.
As you know, Amazon.com has filed suit against barnesandnoble.com,
saying it has illegally copied Amazon.com's patented 1-Click
technology.
The 1-Click feature securely stores billing and shipping information
so that returning customers need only click their mouse once to buy a
selected item. In recognition of the innovative and unique nature of
the 1-Click technology, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent
No. 5,960,411 to Amazon.com on September 28, 1999.
Amazon.com spent thousands of hours to develop the 1-Click process.
As our founder, Jeff Bezos, has said, "The reason we have a patent
system in this country is to encourage people to take these kinds of
risks and make these kinds of investments for customers."
I hope you'll understand that we are unable to discuss this case any
further as we are currently in litigation. Thank you for taking the
time to share your views with us.
Best regards,
Titus G.
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/
Earth's Biggest Selection
I think that RMS is really just making this official, more or less. I e-mailed Amazon about this one-click nonsense shortly after I heard it, and received, as I'd expected, nothing more than a form letter regarding my stated boycott.
I have not, of course, purchased anything from them since, and I actively encourage others to do the same. I know many of my fellow geeks are also boycotting Amazon.com, but I don't think that Amazon.com is really aware of how many people really are frustrated over this. Perhaps an 'official' boycott is what it will take.
Which is, in turn, a Hunter S. Thompson reference. Hunter S. claims that in a bathroom he asked Nixon, at the urinal next to him, "But what of the doomed?" Nixon replied, "Fuck the doomed."
Or something like that.
I think the "Do your Christmas shopping online, avoid the mall" message would scare the crap out a multi-million dollar mall owner.
You're right. The problem is that it scares them so much that they're taking it out on their sole source of income -- the stores within the mall. There is immense pressure on stores -- especially chains, like Gap, Banana Republic, etc., -- to create a strong on-line presence. So if the Gap is told by some mall "sorry, you can't advertise the URL," I suspect they may pack up and move on out.
Now, for all I know, this particular mall is the only game in town. But I've made a fair number of websites for merchants that want to move into e-commerce in a big way, going from a small (2-10 stores) chain onto a bigger web presence. And for some of them, it's worked out really quite well. And they continue to maintain their retail presences. But if the landlord of one of those places said "it's our way or the highway," then the highway it would be.
My rambling point is that the social portion of the mall is essential. Being able to sell something one-to-one is essential to many businesses. E-Commerce is booming not only because it's a great way to buy, but also because it's a novelty. Retail stores aren't, for the most part, going to go anywhere. But given the hype surrounding e-commerce, it seems like a particularly bad times for malls to be telling stores to eliminate URLs from their stores. It's bad PR, it results in unhappy tenants, and it makes them look foolish.
Anyhow, they let her go last year. They said that she had to pick between continuing her research or teaching, that doing both showed a lack of committment to education. She, as any reasonable human would do, opted to continue her personal education. I wrote an angry letter to the Dean of Education, and I haven't taken a class there since. It's pretty unlikely that I ever will again.
You're right, it is best not to take C|Net seriously. I sure don't.
The Art of Programming: Fundamental Algorithms (Vol. 1). 700 pages of hard-core genius from Donald Knuth.
I've used pen devices. Granted, they were tethered, but the same problem applies: It's a pain in the ass to keep putting down and picking up a pen. Impractical for those of us that switch back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse frequently.
Glorified format converter, unfortunately. But you've got to start somewhere.