Mods, please stop marking these statements "Insightful." IBM and Microsoft did at one time collaborate on OS/2, but in the late 80's/early 90's they severed the collaboration. IBM started a new OS/2 code branch with what they had and Microsoft took their portion and tried to turn it into Windows NT. (Which was eventually scrapped started again from scratch by hiring the guy who designed VMX.)
Bottom line: Current OS/2 code has little or no Microsoft code. There is no legal threat from Microsoft if IBM opens the code. The biggest blocker to opening the source to OS/2 that I can tell is the fact that OS/2 powers a large number of sensitive embedded systems (e.g., almost all ATMs) that evil hackers would love to have the source to.
It's clearly not meant for touch typists. (Or elitists.)
Also, if you need to look down to see what key does what in an FPS game (Quake (III?) is depicted) you're already dead.
Yes, but if you're NEW to Quake 3 or any FPS for that matter, it beats the two current leading methods:
1) Print off a copy of the keyboard/mouse controls (or try to clamp the manual open) and set it next to your keyboard. Die while frantically scanning the sheet of paper for the grenade key.
2) Review the keyboard/mouse controls before playing the game and try to memorize as much as you can. Die while trying to remember the grenade key.
At least on with a keyboard with a grenade icon on the key, you simply glance down quickly and bang on the grenade key the nanosecond you spot it. The icons on the keys give you a better visual representation of the layout than the usual "Z = jump, Q = bunny hop, etc" list of keyboard controls in most game manuals. Additionally, this keyboard would do away with key translation: if you want to kill something, you hit a button labeled "Kill," not the friggen "Catarl" key.
Next week's Slashdot article schedule: - Sun: Open-source editors: vi or Emacs? - Mon: Open-source desktops: KDE or GNOME? - Tue: Open-source revolutionaries: RMS or Linus? - Wed: Open-source editors: vi or Emacs? - Thu: Open-source scripting: Perl or Python? - Fri: Open-source platforms: Linux or FreeBSD - Sat: Open-source revolutionaries: RMS or Linus?
Why is IBM unvailing it now? There are no known potential customers for this chip.
Eh? First off, Apple never said that they were going to stop buying PowerPC chips altogether. As many have speculated, they will probably continue using PowerPC chips in the PowerMacs and PowerBooks where heat dissipation and power consumption are not quite as big a deal. Even if they did happen to go completely Intel, it would still be a good many years before they migrated the entire line of Apple computers off of PowerPC.
Second... since when is Apple the only implementor of PowerPC chips? All the CPU world is not the desktop. IBM makes big-iron machines that use these. They're used in supercomputers and I've heard that they're quite popular in high-density clusters.
And how many times have/.'ers complained about somebody who had great credentials but didn't actually know anything. There are some PhD's earned their degree by being handheld by a professor and just following what he says.
If you ever want proof of this, just pick up any Intro to Computing textbook for entry-level college classes. (A+ exam study guides are also usually good examples.) I've perused several such books and they are invariably incomplete, misleading, or plain wrong because the high-and-mighty PhDs who write them have had next to ZERO experience in actually working with the technology. They rarely acknowledge that there are any other OSes than Windows nor any other CPU manufacturer than Intel. Invariably, the worst chapters are the ones that try to explain TCP/IP networking and basic security concepts... they very topics that you usually have to work in for awhile in just to grasp.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure most PhD's work hard and really do know the shit they talk about. It just that the vast majority of those that write intro-level textbooks that cause me to doubt the overall effectiveness of a university education vs actual career experience.
I used to be a gaming fiend during my teenage years, but now I can't sit down an play more than about a 2 hours a week without feeling like I'm wasting an enormous amount of time. To make matters worse, RPGs used to be my favorite genre and 2 hours/week isn't enough to keep me interested in the plot or characters, so I end up never finishing games anymore.
Then I got into arcade (MAME) emulation. Arcade games are pefect for me now, because I can sit down, load up a game, and start having fun immediately rather than having to first take the time to get into the story or learn how the game works, etc. Most are geared specifically toward multiplayer fun. They're also easier to quit playing once your alloted time is up.
Two that I highly recommend are Puzzle Bobble (Usually called Bust a Move over here) and Super Puzzle Fighter.
I'm currently pulling together all the possible opportunities the broadcasters have for sneaking the flag in. I'm tempted to publish that, because it would give people a better overview, but there's a bit of me that thinks "Don't let them know what the opposition knows!". What do people think?
I'm thinking yes, publish it, because the broadcasters have lawyers and congresscritters that already know all about these possibilities.
Let's see here, Google's being criticized by "industry insiders" for giving their employees loads of free time, starting up new and enormously popular projects, "disregarding the status quo", and making billions of dollars in the meantime.
Sounds like somebody's jealous. Isn't it even remotely possible that Google is simply proving to the old-fashioned business world what can be accomplished when you take real, meaningful steps boost and maintain morale among employees?
All slashdotters should therefore direct their attention to criticizing the outcome pre-emptively in order to maintain an effective schedule.
Additionally, those who slough off will be given a second chance later in the week to voice their opinion when the story is duplica^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hre-run.
Re:Private and public are not mutually exclusive
on
Open Source Molecules
·
· Score: 1
Why is it that people always see public and private services as mutually exclusive options?
You got that wrong. The private sector sees public and private services as mutually exclusive options. Most "people" don't really give a damn either way, unfortunately.
The private weather sector is trying to do the same thing with weather information. They actually have a bill in congress that would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing basic, watered-down weather information on the web and from providing free online access to raw real-time weather information (used by educators and researchers around the world).
Basically, this asinine bill would force consumers to pay for weather information TWICE. Once through taxes (who do you think pays for the thousands upon thousands of weather stations situated around the nation?) and once again to a private service that merely "packages" the information for public consumption.
Now that information distribution is incredibly easy and insanely cheap, there is a GREAT need for laws that require taxpayer-funded research and data-gathering from being locked down or monopolized by private interests.
"The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."...to new portions of Windows architecture that will soon be vulnerable to malicious attack.
Consider OS-X running on an off the shelf PC box. Consider that there are hundreds of manufacturers (probably less than 100 of any real quality and providing any kind of support), which crank out 10's of millions of these PC boxes every year and suddenly, you can run all your OS-X apps on them.
BAM!
A huge market has opened up for Apple.
Hate to burst your bubble, but Apple will not, I repeat NOT, ever deliberately produce a version of OS X for commodity x86 beige boxes for a number of very good reasons.
From the very beginning, Apple's corporate mission has been to sell complete computer systems to their customers. People go on and on about how beautiful and stable Mac systems are, but that's only half the story. They also function extremely well, which is a direct result of the operating system being specifically tailored to Apple hardware. The fact that they function so well earns Apple a lot of trust among their customers.
I know analogies suck, but here's one that I think it applicable. The current line of Apple computers is like a well-groomed suburban neighborhood. Every yard and home is beautiful, neighbors get along, the roads and utilities are well-maintained. Windows systems, by contrast, are an urban jungle. There are intrusive ads everywhere, buildings are run down, people yell at each other, and illness is quite common. (Viruses, particularly.)
If Apple produced OS X for beige boxes and stopped making Macs, they would be dropping their customers into an urban jungle. Windows doesn't just suck due to bad design, it sucks also because of the enormous amount of crap x86 hardware out there and the similarly crap drivers. OS X would suffer these same problems.
Apple is not going out of the hardware business any time soon because they would then lose the opportunity to provide a picture-perfect computing experience to their customers. Once this is gone, so is the trust that their customer base has invested in them and then Apple is history.
Neither could they both still make Macs and start selling beige box OS X, because most people aren't smart enough to realize that Apple hardware is what will run OS X the best. They'd stop buying the more expensive Macs, which would force Apple out of the hardware business, which brings us back to the point in the previous paragraph.
Not to mention that fact that Microsoft would stomp Apple into the ground as soon as OS X gained any appreciable market share. I'd rather see Apple stay at 10% market share forever (or whatever it is) than plunge to 0% in under a decade.
If anything, Apple moving closer toward commodity hardware may be the undoing of the Mac
Eh? Apple's been "moving closer toward commodity hardware" ever since the first revisions of the original Macintosh. If your definition of "commodity" means "used or made popular by PCs", then you're in for a shocker as today's Macs have:
* commodity memory * commodity hard disks * commodity optical drives * commodity system bus (PCI) * commodity video chipsets * commodity peripheral buses (Firewire, USB)
Along with the motherboard chipsets and BIOS, the CPU was one of the few components left that drastically separated Macs from beige-box x86s.
but it's the attraction of Linux I believe is there regardless of Apple's existence.
You are correct here. The move to x86 will not affect Linux on the Mac in the slightest, as getting Linux to run on PowerPC was never the hard part in the first place.
Exactly. Before R'ing TFA, I thought the slashvertisement was for two LCD panels in one enclosure. Not two completely seperate displays joined together by a plastic base, as these are. No thanks, I can get two better quality moniors than that and sit them side-by-side on my desk for far less than $1k.
If you want to go an easier and far more flexible route, just do like I did and pick up a keyboard interface from Ultimarc Their I-PAC keyboard encoders are pretty much specifically designed for DIY controllers. They can be easily programmed too, with nothing more than a text editor.
Unless you happen to have a spare clean room in your basement that can filter out ultra-fine particles and perhaps a loaner Intel-style bunny suit, you're not going to be opening up any hard disks and expecting them to work for very long afterwards.
Sometimes you can get away with straightening a bent pin on the connector or even changing out the drive electronics or repairs of that nature, but in general hard disks are about as non-user-serviceable as a cathode ray tube.
Note also that the author of the blurb linked to above says that he put dodgy memory in his system and was shocked and amazed that data corruption occured. Then proceeded to blame subversion. Idiot.
Actually, I thought Enterprise as a prequel was a stroke of genius, because I reasoned that the writers wouldn't be able to go back to the plots and characters of the previous series' and just rehash them whilst breaking Star Trek's histories and timelines in the process.
Unfortunately, that's just what they did. And poorly, at that.
Good point. I meant my original post to be humorous (as it was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the article), but it seems nobody took it that way. Have to remember the smily next time!
Slashdot Mirror
This is quite eerie, as the wife and I just watched that episode last night...
Mods, please stop marking these statements "Insightful." IBM and Microsoft did at one time collaborate on OS/2, but in the late 80's/early 90's they severed the collaboration. IBM started a new OS/2 code branch with what they had and Microsoft took their portion and tried to turn it into Windows NT. (Which was eventually scrapped started again from scratch by hiring the guy who designed VMX.)
Bottom line: Current OS/2 code has little or no Microsoft code. There is no legal threat from Microsoft if IBM opens the code. The biggest blocker to opening the source to OS/2 that I can tell is the fact that OS/2 powers a large number of sensitive embedded systems (e.g., almost all ATMs) that evil hackers would love to have the source to.
How completely useless for us touch typists.
It's clearly not meant for touch typists. (Or elitists.)
Also, if you need to look down to see what key does what in an FPS game (Quake (III?) is depicted) you're already dead.
Yes, but if you're NEW to Quake 3 or any FPS for that matter, it beats the two current leading methods:
1) Print off a copy of the keyboard/mouse controls (or try to clamp the manual open) and set it next to your keyboard. Die while frantically scanning the sheet of paper for the grenade key.
2) Review the keyboard/mouse controls before playing the game and try to memorize as much as you can. Die while trying to remember the grenade key.
At least on with a keyboard with a grenade icon on the key, you simply glance down quickly and bang on the grenade key the nanosecond you spot it. The icons on the keys give you a better visual representation of the layout than the usual "Z = jump, Q = bunny hop, etc" list of keyboard controls in most game manuals. Additionally, this keyboard would do away with key translation: if you want to kill something, you hit a button labeled "Kill," not the friggen "Catarl" key.
Next week's Slashdot article schedule:
- Sun: Open-source editors: vi or Emacs?
- Mon: Open-source desktops: KDE or GNOME?
- Tue: Open-source revolutionaries: RMS or Linus?
- Wed: Open-source editors: vi or Emacs?
- Thu: Open-source scripting: Perl or Python?
- Fri: Open-source platforms: Linux or FreeBSD
- Sat: Open-source revolutionaries: RMS or Linus?
Why is IBM unvailing it now? There are no known potential customers for this chip.
Eh? First off, Apple never said that they were going to stop buying PowerPC chips altogether. As many have speculated, they will probably continue using PowerPC chips in the PowerMacs and PowerBooks where heat dissipation and power consumption are not quite as big a deal. Even if they did happen to go completely Intel, it would still be a good many years before they migrated the entire line of Apple computers off of PowerPC.
Second... since when is Apple the only implementor of PowerPC chips? All the CPU world is not the desktop. IBM makes big-iron machines that use these. They're used in supercomputers and I've heard that they're quite popular in high-density clusters.
And how many times have
If you ever want proof of this, just pick up any Intro to Computing textbook for entry-level college classes. (A+ exam study guides are also usually good examples.) I've perused several such books and they are invariably incomplete, misleading, or plain wrong because the high-and-mighty PhDs who write them have had next to ZERO experience in actually working with the technology. They rarely acknowledge that there are any other OSes than Windows nor any other CPU manufacturer than Intel. Invariably, the worst chapters are the ones that try to explain TCP/IP networking and basic security concepts... they very topics that you usually have to work in for awhile in just to grasp.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure most PhD's work hard and really do know the shit they talk about. It just that the vast majority of those that write intro-level textbooks that cause me to doubt the overall effectiveness of a university education vs actual career experience.
I used to be a gaming fiend during my teenage years, but now I can't sit down an play more than about a 2 hours a week without feeling like I'm wasting an enormous amount of time. To make matters worse, RPGs used to be my favorite genre and 2 hours/week isn't enough to keep me interested in the plot or characters, so I end up never finishing games anymore.
Then I got into arcade (MAME) emulation. Arcade games are pefect for me now, because I can sit down, load up a game, and start having fun immediately rather than having to first take the time to get into the story or learn how the game works, etc. Most are geared specifically toward multiplayer fun. They're also easier to quit playing once your alloted time is up.
Two that I highly recommend are Puzzle Bobble (Usually called Bust a Move over here) and Super Puzzle Fighter.
I'm currently pulling together all the possible opportunities the broadcasters have for sneaking the flag in. I'm tempted to publish that, because it would give people a better overview, but there's a bit of me that thinks "Don't let them know what the opposition knows!". What do people think?
I'm thinking yes, publish it, because the broadcasters have lawyers and congresscritters that already know all about these possibilities.
We, however, do not.
Let's see here, Google's being criticized by "industry insiders" for giving their employees loads of free time, starting up new and enormously popular projects, "disregarding the status quo", and making billions of dollars in the meantime.
Sounds like somebody's jealous. Isn't it even remotely possible that Google is simply proving to the old-fashioned business world what can be accomplished when you take real, meaningful steps boost and maintain morale among employees?
All slashdotters should therefore direct their attention to criticizing the outcome pre-emptively in order to maintain an effective schedule.
Additionally, those who slough off will be given a second chance later in the week to voice their opinion when the story is duplica^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hre-run.
Why is it that people always see public and private services as mutually exclusive options?
You got that wrong. The private sector sees public and private services as mutually exclusive options. Most "people" don't really give a damn either way, unfortunately.
The private weather sector is trying to do the same thing with weather information. They actually have a bill in congress that would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing basic, watered-down weather information on the web and from providing free online access to raw real-time weather information (used by educators and researchers around the world).
Basically, this asinine bill would force consumers to pay for weather information TWICE. Once through taxes (who do you think pays for the thousands upon thousands of weather stations situated around the nation?) and once again to a private service that merely "packages" the information for public consumption.
Now that information distribution is incredibly easy and insanely cheap, there is a GREAT need for laws that require taxpayer-funded research and data-gathering from being locked down or monopolized by private interests.
You are not ever going to record studio-quality audio with a "regular old microphone" and an iPod.
</PEDANTIC>
Er, I think you missed the joke. The parent post to yours was a satirical take of his parent.
"The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."
Consider OS-X running on an off the shelf PC box. Consider that there are hundreds of manufacturers (probably less than 100 of any real quality and providing any kind of support), which crank out 10's of millions of these PC boxes every year and suddenly, you can run all your OS-X apps on them.
BAM!
A huge market has opened up for Apple.
Hate to burst your bubble, but Apple will not, I repeat NOT, ever deliberately produce a version of OS X for commodity x86 beige boxes for a number of very good reasons.
From the very beginning, Apple's corporate mission has been to sell complete computer systems to their customers. People go on and on about how beautiful and stable Mac systems are, but that's only half the story. They also function extremely well, which is a direct result of the operating system being specifically tailored to Apple hardware. The fact that they function so well earns Apple a lot of trust among their customers.
I know analogies suck, but here's one that I think it applicable. The current line of Apple computers is like a well-groomed suburban neighborhood. Every yard and home is beautiful, neighbors get along, the roads and utilities are well-maintained. Windows systems, by contrast, are an urban jungle. There are intrusive ads everywhere, buildings are run down, people yell at each other, and illness is quite common. (Viruses, particularly.)
If Apple produced OS X for beige boxes and stopped making Macs, they would be dropping their customers into an urban jungle. Windows doesn't just suck due to bad design, it sucks also because of the enormous amount of crap x86 hardware out there and the similarly crap drivers. OS X would suffer these same problems.
Apple is not going out of the hardware business any time soon because they would then lose the opportunity to provide a picture-perfect computing experience to their customers. Once this is gone, so is the trust that their customer base has invested in them and then Apple is history.
Neither could they both still make Macs and start selling beige box OS X, because most people aren't smart enough to realize that Apple hardware is what will run OS X the best. They'd stop buying the more expensive Macs, which would force Apple out of the hardware business, which brings us back to the point in the previous paragraph.
Not to mention that fact that Microsoft would stomp Apple into the ground as soon as OS X gained any appreciable market share. I'd rather see Apple stay at 10% market share forever (or whatever it is) than plunge to 0% in under a decade.
That sound you just heard was the sound of a joke-laiden sparrow doing mach 6 right over your head.
If anything, Apple moving closer toward commodity hardware may be the undoing of the Mac
Eh? Apple's been "moving closer toward commodity hardware" ever since the first revisions of the original Macintosh. If your definition of "commodity" means "used or made popular by PCs", then you're in for a shocker as today's Macs have:
* commodity memory
* commodity hard disks
* commodity optical drives
* commodity system bus (PCI)
* commodity video chipsets
* commodity peripheral buses (Firewire, USB)
Along with the motherboard chipsets and BIOS, the CPU was one of the few components left that drastically separated Macs from beige-box x86s.
but it's the attraction of Linux I believe is there regardless of Apple's existence.
You are correct here. The move to x86 will not affect Linux on the Mac in the slightest, as getting Linux to run on PowerPC was never the hard part in the first place.
Exactly. Before R'ing TFA, I thought the slashvertisement was for two LCD panels in one enclosure. Not two completely seperate displays joined together by a plastic base, as these are. No thanks, I can get two better quality moniors than that and sit them side-by-side on my desk for far less than $1k.
Very expensive Tamagotchi.
If you want to go an easier and far more flexible route, just do like I did and pick up a keyboard interface from Ultimarc Their I-PAC keyboard encoders are pretty much specifically designed for DIY controllers. They can be easily programmed too, with nothing more than a text editor.
Unless you happen to have a spare clean room in your basement that can filter out ultra-fine particles and perhaps a loaner Intel-style bunny suit, you're not going to be opening up any hard disks and expecting them to work for very long afterwards.
Sometimes you can get away with straightening a bent pin on the connector or even changing out the drive electronics or repairs of that nature, but in general hard disks are about as non-user-serviceable as a cathode ray tube.
Note also that the author of the blurb linked to above says that he put dodgy memory in his system and was shocked and amazed that data corruption occured. Then proceeded to blame subversion. Idiot.
Newsflash: All databases are vulnerable to irrecoverable corruption.
(That is, unless you back them up regularly.)
Actually, I thought Enterprise as a prequel was a stroke of genius, because I reasoned that the writers wouldn't be able to go back to the plots and characters of the previous series' and just rehash them whilst breaking Star Trek's histories and timelines in the process.
Unfortunately, that's just what they did. And poorly, at that.
Good point. I meant my original post to be humorous (as it was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the article), but it seems nobody took it that way. Have to remember the smily next time!