The problem was the non-availability of a mainboard + CPU. If Transmeta had done mass production of their evaluation board and sold it for $250 each, they'd have done well, even though that is way more than VIA's boards cost. Salespeople couldn't have changed that. I asked Transmeta for exactly that purpose. I would have imported small quantities myself.
Maybe I should note that indeed the wide spreading of Centrinos stems from the availability of standard mainboard and laptop case designs that companies just use and put their sticker on it. I don't know why Transmeta didn't get this. People don't want eval boards, they want a reference implementation that can also be bought.
Today, people use Centrino CPUs and underclocked Athlon 64s for passive cooling + performance, so Transmeta wouldn't really stand a chance anymore, though.
It would be a big industry, and it would sell well (just like the VIA EPIA boards), had Transmeta chosen to sell them.
Instead Transmeta didn't ever bother to sell any mainboard with a Transmeta CPU on it (except an expensive development board), and responded to my email enquiries with something like "if noone in Europe sells our CPUs, we can't do anything about that, sorry."
A company that doesn't even bother to make revenue deserves to die, pure and simple.
The government has no right to waste taxpayers' money on a needless study. People have the right to communicate freely, and the internet is just a voluntary network (consisting of individuals and network carriers) to provide a communication medium.
There is no reason at all for the goverment to study anything about internet traffic. If that's considered interesting, then some research lab should do that, or a student for their whatever thesis.
Once again I'm happy not to be a US citizen (the other reason would be that stupid war). But I think Europe is just as bad.
I encourage everyone to write to their 1998 congressmen and ask them why they voted for this stupid thing.
While this might be somewhat off-topic: when I read guerilla RFID, I thought of building your own device that sends out RFID signals to mess with some system.
For instance you might read in the RFID tags of everything you buy, but slightly change the tags. If the encoding is known, you might even vary and multiply them. The next time you enter a store, the device could send out that you went shopping there for the last 100 years, buy 100 pounds of ammunition every week, female hygiene products, and childrens' books, or something weird like that. Or you "tell" the store that you are entering the store with RFID tags of everything they sell inside right now:D
Yes. As I wrote in that rant, sometimes I didn't check the RSS feeds for two days. But since the RSS feed is I think like a file, it only gave me the newest, say, 20 headlines, somewhat like the/. frontpage. That way I missed the older news (if there were more than 20 headlines in the meanwhile).
Sure, you could tell to the RSS feed the time you last checked, but I'm not sure if an RSS feed is implemented dynamically and would adapt to that. I always thought it to me more like a static file (that's updated when the website gets a new entry). So it will always only give you the newest stuff. News doesn't have that restriction; it has all the good sides of e-mail: *you* choose how to handle your information subscriptions, and when.
They didn't really base Mac OS on BSD. The started with another OS (Mach+NeXTStep) and added features like Classic (Mac OS 9 emulation). AFAIK NeXTStep already was BSD compatible. Apple just updated the BSD component to use newer FreeBSD code.
But I agree; using NeXT (even though BeOS rocks) was their best move. Having Unix under the hood is what made me switch.
How about a nice news server instead (meaning NNTP)? That way people could read and post job news, you could see "old" job postings even if you fail to check the feed for a couple of days, and a news article of course could include a full job description, while most RSS feeds tend to only include short info (I don't know if that's a technical limit, or the RSS feeders just choose to only include a couple of lines per article).
RSS AFAIK, because of it's website (http) nature, is publish only, so that you would need to browse/search all websites that offer job-RSSes; with a news server there is one common marketplace for companies and job-seekers.
I've always wondered what is wrong with "modern" software that its resource usage is so through the roof. That's a HUNDRED MILLION BYTES, for God's sake! I don't know how big the Library of Congress is, but seriously: Eclipse is just an editor + some wizards, doc, compiler and other plugins. There's nothing that justifies a HUNDRED MILLION BYTES.
When I have to Java, I use XCode, which takes about 30-50MB. And it's about four times as snappy.
From the newest JoelOnSoftware:
"If one of our competitors think this is cool, they can copy us, but it'll take them a while, especially if they read my site and bought my line about only shipping every 18 months."
Isn't that the spirit? At least *they* don't need patents to do what they do.
Hm, what takes money: the idea or the creation of a product? Your competition has to deal with the same costs.
Besides, lots of people gladly innovate to distinguish themselves from the competition, or because they like it. PCs are cloned, medicines are cloned, still there are huge profits.
And when do patents expire? How long do you have to wait until you may freely use that idea again, that you had one month after someone unfortunately carried it to the patent office to get his monopoly?
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today.
Bill Gates (1991)
You're right. It's just that those who call themselves conservatives right now (even though they seem to have no principles at all and do everything on a whim) are pro-big-money and anti-environment in the process. Environmentalism seems to be one issue for leftist parties, for reasons I don't quite understand.
You might even say that my liberal treatment of religion, sex and family matters is conservative. I think that religion doesn't belong in the White House and that everyone should live however they want as long as they don't harm anybody.
Do you remember the old digital vs. analog controller debates?
I've heard of them. Anyway, are you trying to say that this innovation wouldn't have happened without patents' being there as an incentive? I think they would have happened just as much.
And if there were no patents, even Sony couldn't sue, that's how it should be. I object to anyone suing competition. In a free market you should compete by competing, not suing.
I think patents only harm the small guy. A big company can always find ways even in a patent world. But they could just as well exist in a world without patents, only that competition would work better in such a world, because they couldn't exclude anyone from competing.
Patents are just an excuse. Corporations are afraid in today's quickly changing world that they are out-innovated by anyone with a brain. That's why they need to erect legal walls around innovation.
About the left freaking out: Fox news might have been somewhat one-sided during the war, but nobody is forced to watch it, right? The sadder thing is that -- from what I've heard -- all US reporting was one-sided. So I should rather blame the left-wing channels for that.
I'd say I'm conservative as regards free-market economy, but *very* liberal as regards religion, family, sex, the environment etc. Maybe I'm not the one to ask; I surely welcome ideas from all sides, as long as they make sense.
Why? If you're the inventing expert, I assume that you can make a better product than Mr Steal.
If you OWN vibration, then implement it and sell it to the Sony people, the cellphone people and, um, girls, for less than it takes them to build it themselves.
That's how economy works, that's why businesses outsource: in answer to the company's buy-or-build question you should offer a product that says "buy".
Of course the competitor or stealer does the same. In a world without patents ideas don't count. They are worthless, as your bank will also tell you when you ask them for a business credit. If you have an implementation that you can sell, then you suddenly count.
Wow. I've always been against software patents, in much the same way I am against music, art, literature, and poem patents. (If you are paranoid people might steal your precious IP: there's always copyright for that.)
But now we begin to see examples of braindead hardware patents, as well. People: it's a GAME CONTROLLER! *Nothing* in it is rocket science.
Some things about humans:
* they are creative
* that means they might invent something
* more than one person might come up with the same idea, independently
* usually that's fun, so people will invent, even without incentives (like patents)
* there is nothing that justifies that just because I come up with an idea first, everyone else should be forbidden to use that some idea without paying me royalties
So why do we have patents at all? Innovating is fun; innovating pays, even if other companies clone your product. Quit the patent nonsense; abolish the very concept!
(Besides it goes against the very principles of liberalism, the core of most Western societies! Me gaining a monopoly on an idea infringes on another human's freedom to express and implement his/her own ideas.)
1. (Summer 2005) get Mac OS Tiger 2. copy relevant functions 3. reverse engineer Spotlight to finally be able to build WinFS (which will be part of Longhorn SP2) 4. Profit!
When someone tells you something they believe is true (BT is illegal) which you know is false, you cannot use logic. Simply don't argue with them or demand proof, since they can't produce any evidence that it's illegal.
The sad thing about this is, that seemingly everything that's not explicitly decided by court as being legal, is illegal to these people.
Logic shouldn't be necessary; neither should be arguing with those people. Universities (or anyone for that matter) should just not be allowed to block web access that might be illegal. It IS NOT illegal until proven so, so I consider this censorship akin to the stuff they do in China.
It doesn't matter, if only parts of the port 80 domain are blocked, if someone blocks port 25, or if someone blocks some P2P ports. You should have a right for free internet connections, just like you may call any number on the phone.
Unix has a simple, clean philosophy. Mach messaging is also quite nice.
The abomination that is Windows, that evolved from VMS, isn't nearly as clean.
I don't know how much influence this has on the libraries and apps developed on top of it, but it shows that MS doesn't really endorse clean abstractions and simplicity.
The Unix philosophy doesn't and I like that. If you want to search through files, use grep.
I'm sure you could find ways to index file contents just like locate indexes a list of all files on disk (so it's just a text file after all). I'm not familiar with tools for that though. I think Apple's Spotlight does that under the hood.
Firefox: + more Mozilla features, more prefs - like you said, not the best integration
Safari: + uses less memory + faster than Camino (IMHO slightly) - always pops up dialog with bad certificates
Camino: + Gecko rendering + Fast + good integration, like Safari + better prefs than Safari + remembers bad certificate, doesn't ask every time
I have cookies and plugins disabled in Camino. For cookies I set some exceptions; for Flash I have to turn plugins on and restart, but mostly I don't want Flash.
BTW, try the new nightlies; Camino has new tabs and is nicer in general!
Slashdot Mirror
The problem was the non-availability of a mainboard + CPU. If Transmeta had done mass production of their evaluation board and sold it for $250 each, they'd have done well, even though that is way more than VIA's boards cost. Salespeople couldn't have changed that. I asked Transmeta for exactly that purpose. I would have imported small quantities myself.
Maybe I should note that indeed the wide spreading of Centrinos stems from the availability of standard mainboard and laptop case designs that companies just use and put their sticker on it. I don't know why Transmeta didn't get this. People don't want eval boards, they want a reference implementation that can also be bought.
Today, people use Centrino CPUs and underclocked Athlon 64s for passive cooling + performance, so Transmeta wouldn't really stand a chance anymore, though.
It would be a big industry, and it would sell well (just like the VIA EPIA boards), had Transmeta chosen to sell them.
Instead Transmeta didn't ever bother to sell any mainboard with a Transmeta CPU on it (except an expensive development board), and responded to my email enquiries with something like "if noone in Europe sells our CPUs, we can't do anything about that, sorry."
A company that doesn't even bother to make revenue deserves to die, pure and simple.
First of all, Adobe Reader sucks. Get something that works. I don't know the Windows situation, but on linux I used to have xpdf or gpdf and gv.
On the Mac you're fine with the built-in Preview. And it's about four times as fast as Acrobat.
For Mozilla: somewhere in the preferences you can tell it to save all, say, PDF files to disk instead of opening them. I do that.
My now worm is dominating the world already, and you all just don't know it.
Ok, I shut up.
The government has no right to waste taxpayers' money on a needless study. People have the right to communicate freely, and the internet is just a voluntary network (consisting of individuals and network carriers) to provide a communication medium.
There is no reason at all for the goverment to study anything about internet traffic. If that's considered interesting, then some research lab should do that, or a student for their whatever thesis.
Once again I'm happy not to be a US citizen (the other reason would be that stupid war). But I think Europe is just as bad.
I encourage everyone to write to their 1998 congressmen and ask them why they voted for this stupid thing.
While this might be somewhat off-topic:
:D
when I read guerilla RFID, I thought of building your own device that sends out RFID signals to mess with some system.
For instance you might read in the RFID tags of everything you buy, but slightly change the tags. If the encoding is known, you might even vary and multiply them. The next time you enter a store, the device could send out that you went shopping there for the last 100 years, buy 100 pounds of ammunition every week, female hygiene products, and childrens' books, or something weird like that. Or you "tell" the store that you are entering the store with RFID tags of everything they sell inside right now
Yes. As I wrote in that rant, sometimes I didn't check the RSS feeds for two days. But since the RSS feed is I think like a file, it only gave me the newest, say, 20 headlines, somewhat like the /. frontpage. That way I missed the older news (if there were more than 20 headlines in the meanwhile).
Sure, you could tell to the RSS feed the time you last checked, but I'm not sure if an RSS feed is implemented dynamically and would adapt to that. I always thought it to me more like a static file (that's updated when the website gets a new entry). So it will always only give you the newest stuff. News doesn't have that restriction; it has all the good sides of e-mail: *you* choose how to handle your information subscriptions, and when.
Hm, I bought my iBook *despite* nobody else having a Mac in my area, and even though all my friends (used to :D) hate them.
p.p.p.s., Please note, reading the above post qualifies you to place out of a graduate level Consumer Behavior marketing class.
Funny, I learnt about all that stuff in my (undergrad) 3XX Buyer Behavior. It's not really rocket science.
They didn't really base Mac OS on BSD. The started with another OS (Mach+NeXTStep) and added features like Classic (Mac OS 9 emulation). AFAIK NeXTStep already was BSD compatible. Apple just updated the BSD component to use newer FreeBSD code.
But I agree; using NeXT (even though BeOS rocks) was their best move. Having Unix under the hood is what made me switch.
How about a nice news server instead (meaning NNTP)? That way people could read and post job news, you could see "old" job postings even if you fail to check the feed for a couple of days, and a news article of course could include a full job description, while most RSS feeds tend to only include short info (I don't know if that's a technical limit, or the RSS feeders just choose to only include a couple of lines per article).
RSS AFAIK, because of it's website (http) nature, is publish only, so that you would need to browse/search all websites that offer job-RSSes; with a news server there is one common marketplace for companies and job-seekers.
BTW, my full rant why RSS sucks, is here.
I've always wondered what is wrong with "modern" software that its resource usage is so through the roof. That's a HUNDRED MILLION BYTES, for God's sake! I don't know how big the Library of Congress is, but seriously: Eclipse is just an editor + some wizards, doc, compiler and other plugins. There's nothing that justifies a HUNDRED MILLION BYTES.
When I have to Java, I use XCode, which takes about 30-50MB. And it's about four times as snappy.
From the newest JoelOnSoftware:
"If one of our competitors think this is cool, they can copy us, but it'll take them a while, especially if they read my site and bought my line about only shipping every 18 months."
Isn't that the spirit? At least *they* don't need patents to do what they do.
(The article)
Interesting that everyone calls them bugs, as if it was something that crept in.
It's not a bug, it's a feat^Wan error, and one the programmer made.
Hm, what takes money: the idea or the creation of a product? Your competition has to deal with the same costs.
Besides, lots of people gladly innovate to distinguish themselves from the competition, or because they like it. PCs are cloned, medicines are cloned, still there are huge profits.
And when do patents expire? How long do you have to wait until you may freely use that idea again, that you had one month after someone unfortunately carried it to the patent office to get his monopoly?
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today.
Bill Gates (1991)
You're right. It's just that those who call themselves conservatives right now (even though they seem to have no principles at all and do everything on a whim) are pro-big-money and anti-environment in the process. Environmentalism seems to be one issue for leftist parties, for reasons I don't quite understand.
You might even say that my liberal treatment of religion, sex and family matters is conservative. I think that religion doesn't belong in the White House and that everyone should live however they want as long as they don't harm anybody.
I've heard of them. Anyway, are you trying to say that this innovation wouldn't have happened without patents' being there as an incentive? I think they would have happened just as much.
And if there were no patents, even Sony couldn't sue, that's how it should be. I object to anyone suing competition. In a free market you should compete by competing, not suing.
I think patents only harm the small guy. A big company can always find ways even in a patent world. But they could just as well exist in a world without patents, only that competition would work better in such a world, because they couldn't exclude anyone from competing.
Patents are just an excuse. Corporations are afraid in today's quickly changing world that they are out-innovated by anyone with a brain. That's why they need to erect legal walls around innovation.
About the left freaking out: Fox news might have been somewhat one-sided during the war, but nobody is forced to watch it, right? The sadder thing is that -- from what I've heard -- all US reporting was one-sided. So I should rather blame the left-wing channels for that.
I'd say I'm conservative as regards free-market economy, but *very* liberal as regards religion, family, sex, the environment etc. Maybe I'm not the one to ask; I surely welcome ideas from all sides, as long as they make sense.
Why? If you're the inventing expert, I assume that you can make a better product than Mr Steal.
If you OWN vibration, then implement it and sell it to the Sony people, the cellphone people and, um, girls, for less than it takes them to build it themselves.
That's how economy works, that's why businesses outsource: in answer to the company's buy-or-build question you should offer a product that says "buy".
Of course the competitor or stealer does the same. In a world without patents ideas don't count. They are worthless, as your bank will also tell you when you ask them for a business credit. If you have an implementation that you can sell, then you suddenly count.
Wow. I've always been against software patents, in much the same way I am against music, art, literature, and poem patents. (If you are paranoid people might steal your precious IP: there's always copyright for that.)
But now we begin to see examples of braindead hardware patents, as well. People: it's a GAME CONTROLLER! *Nothing* in it is rocket science.
Some things about humans:
* they are creative
* that means they might invent something
* more than one person might come up with the same idea, independently
* usually that's fun, so people will invent, even without incentives (like patents)
* there is nothing that justifies that just because I come up with an idea first, everyone else should be forbidden to use that some idea without paying me royalties
So why do we have patents at all? Innovating is fun; innovating pays, even if other companies clone your product. Quit the patent nonsense; abolish the very concept!
(Besides it goes against the very principles of liberalism, the core of most Western societies! Me gaining a monopoly on an idea infringes on another human's freedom to express and implement his/her own ideas.)
1. (Summer 2005) get Mac OS Tiger
2. copy relevant functions
3. reverse engineer Spotlight to finally be able to build WinFS (which will be part of Longhorn SP2)
4. Profit!
The sad thing about this is, that seemingly everything that's not explicitly decided by court as being legal, is illegal to these people.
Logic shouldn't be necessary; neither should be arguing with those people. Universities (or anyone for that matter) should just not be allowed to block web access that might be illegal. It IS NOT illegal until proven so, so I consider this censorship akin to the stuff they do in China.
It doesn't matter, if only parts of the port 80 domain are blocked, if someone blocks port 25, or if someone blocks some P2P ports. You should have a right for free internet connections, just like you may call any number on the phone.
to boldly post where no non-geek has posted before.
Quit playing games, please.
Oh wait, that was what Windows was for, wasn't it?
Unix has a simple, clean philosophy. Mach messaging is also quite nice.
The abomination that is Windows, that evolved from VMS, isn't nearly as clean.
I don't know how much influence this has on the libraries and apps developed on top of it, but it shows that MS doesn't really endorse clean abstractions and simplicity.
Who says you need one tool for everything?
The Unix philosophy doesn't and I like that. If you want to search through files, use grep.
I'm sure you could find ways to index file contents just like locate indexes a list of all files on disk (so it's just a text file after all). I'm not familiar with tools for that though. I think Apple's Spotlight does that under the hood.
Firefox:
+ more Mozilla features, more prefs
- like you said, not the best integration
Safari:
+ uses less memory
+ faster than Camino (IMHO slightly)
- always pops up dialog with bad certificates
Camino:
+ Gecko rendering
+ Fast
+ good integration, like Safari
+ better prefs than Safari
+ remembers bad certificate, doesn't ask every time
I have cookies and plugins disabled in Camino. For cookies I set some exceptions; for Flash I have to turn plugins on and restart, but mostly I don't want Flash.
BTW, try the new nightlies; Camino has new tabs and is nicer in general!