You should have bought Quake III Arena Linux edition like me (from Loki) and seen all those #linux guys laughing at you saying the Windows one was cheaper and what kind of fanatic I must be for not dual booting...
Of course, Carmack didn't laugh back and it had serious consequences even effecting open source&gaming today.
In popular rock (based on sales) music, some bands like Dream Theater do side projects, like "Liquid Tension Project" and do whatever they want with the comfort.
I wished some amazing talents who got drowned by "sales" concerns, like Mariah Carey do some classical jazz side projects, even in another nickname if they were concerned about their brand (name) focus. Of course, either them or their producers doesn't have that vision or basically for example Classical jazz listening "elite" won't take it serious no matter how good it could be...
One URL for you, http://www.sourceforge.net/ , pick a random nick, release... I believe there are many doing it.
Funny is, I recently heard some billionaire guys buying 2Mbit DSL instead of "4mbit" since they don't feel the need for 4mbit in their ordinary web usage. It is not some newspaper story, guys actually installing those lines told me about it and they added, "perhaps, that is how they got rich".
Steve Wozniak doesn't wonder around in private jets or live in million dollar houses not because the evil Steve stole all his money, he simply doesn't care that much about money or luxury living.
If Yahoo was a real rival to achieve these things and actually had a real direction, Apple wouldn't pause a second.
They say "OK, we were never a search engine" (I agree!) and "we are now a internet utility"... It doesn't explain 20 obvious spams/scams I get in a week to a single mail account and "my yahoo" displaying "sorry! a problem occurred" on an entire tab of news sources.
I believe Yahoo and Microsoft's incompetence managed to come to a point that Google is actually hurt by it, by lack of real competition. Same thing can be said for iPhone... Nokia and J2ME camp are so stupid that Apple sees no threat, thinking they can do anything. They feel like the days they shipped first Macintosh and laughed to MS-DOS command prompt displaying IBMs. We have all seen what happened later...
Apple gets investigated because that Google guy is in their board. He gets removed but, you can't change search engine of Snow Leopard's default browser (Safari) from Google to something else, its bookmarks are infested by Google, system's right click "search" on any application defaults to Google, their device comes with Google maps...
So, they pull this trick, drama to show that they aren't really running some kind of duopoly trick. What bugs me is, people fighting over both giant companies quickly approaching "MS in 1997" point and insulting each other.
I have an iPod touch on charge now and I keep using Symbian S60. Symbian's UI mistakes are even more obvious to me now and I keep protesting them on Slashdot getting (rare for me) "flamebait" mods...
So, did I miss some "Apple apologizer" pill when I had the device free, from my brother? Or do we install some app for it? Building a device on Unix and not allowing it to multitask could be one of the most absurd things in IT history. Not allowing Google app, like a poor garage shareware guy will really cost them later... In fact, it will serve as "karma is a bitch" to all those poor single developers they chewed.
So, where is the Apple apologizer pill? And do you figure the irony of comparing Apple to Wal-Mart a super market monopoly which is protested Worldwide?
You know the real sad thing right? Apple iPhone policy made MS look like some kind of "freedom fighter hero" along with Nokia. They now have all rights to brag about it and they actually do, even their resellers. I overheard a Toshiba reseller shop guy "Oh, iPhone, that monopolistic device? It is not for you sir, you can't deal with monopoly attitude of Apple". You know what Toshiba runs? Linux? Hell no, Windows Mobile!
What is with programming disability these days? If Apple, your partner banned your Application... Do simultaneous releases on Symbian, windows mobile, blackberry, advanced J2ME and actually advertise it like "Do you have a REAL smart phone? Click here."
You couldn't understand the only thing Apple understands... Oh if your programmers can't code on anything else than XCode, you have chosen them wrong. Just look to Fring and Nimbuzz guys who have 0.000000E19% power of yours and have much more advanced client than you on _all_ platforms.
Iran? The fundamentalist run Islamic republic has banned Yahoo and Google?
Try this, a NATO member, EU member designate, secular (still!) neighbor of Europe and having actual part in Europe country, Turkey has banned Myspace in addition to Youtube today. Yes, Myspace, that "personal blog" or more like "music demo" site.
As they enjoy spending money for obvious, I suggest them to ask those general and professional Apple users (Macbook and iPhone included) if they know UNIX and if they know it celebrates its 40th year today. In fact, start with NeXT.
What is the most trendy Unix today? As it is new, Apple, it is Snow Leopard right?
Run its Terminal, type "su", you won't see password being displayed, even as "*". Why? Because damn thing (UNIX) started on actual paper outputting terminals, more like typewriters. That is also why most used commands are mostly 2-3 char things.
I mean oldness doesn't mean it is outdated. You know what "77" in Fortran 77 means right?
COBOL and Mainframe stories serve a great purpose. We see how many of/. readers (commenters in fact) doesn't have the slightest clue about how real World goes on without breaking. Right, you can't logon to a bank mainframe which is likely underground in some forgotten place, monitored by armed guards but it doesn't grant you to say things like "COBOL runs on vacuum tubes" or "mainframes are dead".
If you don't have any clue, do as I do... Mute.
For example, I learned to shut up about audio processing software in movies and leave people do the real work as a video guy when I saw DTS movie audio track of a Hollywood movie was done on a MacOS 9 running Mac, back in 2003.
What makes you think every government machine/installation must be documented, submitted to top500/slashdot.org so you have to fool World's most elite Scientists if you could?
If they want a AI research, LISP monster machine, they buy it and they (any Govt. in World) has no obligation to make it public. If you look at Cray Research financial reports, they don't tell who they sell these monsters, not every single one. Even a company can ask for secrecy, for example if Apple tells them "we want a exaflop computer for our next product design, don't announce it", they will say "$120M installation to unnamed customer".
Now for the real tinfoil hat... The level of such machines which are so secret to be announced. Here is just one example which has likely upgraded to something else and in display in museum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG
Here is what to do with international standards/systems when in doubt. If British didn't come up with their own weirdo standard, it is generally universal.
Back in day before DVB-* became standard, we had a map of TV broadcasting systems (analogue) on a big World map, you could see there is a single horrible variation (in compatibility sense) of PAL, PAL's British variant which has same video spec but some really needless variation of sound spec. So, if you don't know about it and assume British PAL is the PAL which World uses, you end up watching 5 trucks carrying thousands of VHS tapes parking as tapes came back as defect:) Happened to friend.
IBM already has 2 operating systems in hand which they have massive experience, AIX and System/Z. They can both run as Hypervisors to Linux so they may use Linux too of course but the real unsurprising thing would be use of ZFS as filesystem for such data. It is already named after zetabyte.
They also use Plan 9 on Bluegene/L and certainly they aren't doing OS demos on multi million dollar supercomputers, so Plan 9 must be good on some purpose of Bluegene.
Microsoft? Can they scale really? I mean really, not some "demo show off" things which they abused name of Cray making Mr. Cray roll in his grave.
Can you blame him if both MS (app vendor) tells him to "adopt Safari" while it doesn't exist on MacOS instead of some actually working browser like iCab/Firefox MacOS port etc? Competitor? Apple is a competitor too!
Another brain dead company is AOL. They gave up "Netscape" suite, fine... Why not direct users to Seamonkey which is basically original Mozilla of today? Netscape 6/7 users are "suite" types, they want a "all doing browser suite, including mail". You don't advertise Firefox to them, you advertise Seamonkey with a good donation to the project or basically bandwidth donation. It is more like advertising original (1.x) Winamp to iTunes/Wmedia user.
Plan 9 finally found its place, IBM BlueGebe/L and BG/L runs Plan 9. Plan 9 is not a bad, dead or weird OS, it is just "UNIX is good enough" what kills it. We all use good parts of it, for example Unicode belongs to it, procfs belongs to it or it is "lite" implementation. Do you know a single Unix-like technology instantly adopted by entire industry? It is just a small part of Plan9, Unicode.
Also the times of everyone wanting to run exact same application on multiple devices has not come yet. Supercomputers with insane computing power actually does better with plan 9 since they deal with massive amount of processes distributed to amazing amount of CPUs and memory.
You know what? Something makes me feel like Apple will be bragging "Built on Plan 9" just like "Built on UNIX" in distant future. As usual, users won't know/care about it but the GUI and Frameworks will give the difference. For example, "copy" photoshop process to home computer or laptop while leaving etc.
BTW if you really want to see "weirdest of weird" OS, which first released in 1961 and has Knuth as intern code in it, look nothing else than Burroughs MCP
It is still used, maintained and you must pay millions of dollars to "have" it (more like rent). It has a name like "master control program", need to say more?:)
That is the guy presenting the idea himself. It was interesting enough to watch it at 4 AM my local time. The numbers guy gives, like the 20% of capacity used, everyone having their own data center, it may take $600.000 (yes, 600K) to setup a weblog in certain circumstances while it is free on blogger.com like services are amazing.
As listeners are full of govt. guys, guy repeated 4-5 times that secret/critical things won't be on cloud, outside USA etc. What matters is, they will be forcing very strict privacy and security rules to vendors.
Well, that is what happens if you don't care when applications tell you "a new version of xxx is available, click here to install" and update itself. I bet you must be one of the guys shouting "omg spyware'^%+%&" when poor thing checks for update using a complete open source, documented system (Sparkle)
Or if you are dumb enough to expect OS hacks to run when OS has a major version upgrade and don't disable/remove them before install.
I have never heard/experienced a case when "all applications" fail miserably after OS upgrade, ever. You had something injecting itself to the executable code of the applications and you basically ignored to disable/uninstall it before upgrading. That is the only explanation. It could be not your fault, some idiot company still injects themselves to executable code (e.g. Logitech, the main reason for APE scandal) could be guilty.
I have upgraded a fairly loaded Mac Mini to Snow Leopard. First of all, damn thing doesn't even need to reboot first. It starts putting the "flat packages" to hard disk immediately so it won't have to deal with IO latency of DVD media.
It reboots in 30 secs (Apple fashion) and starts upgrading, running a massive set of perl/python scripts to make sure everything is flawless. I was tired to watch it but we talk about a 1 hour "upgrade" install where entire OS being upgraded to newer one on Mac Mini which has laptop parts (Hard disk, DVD, screen).
At end, you see 7-8 GB freed and wonder "what has changed", in fact everything has changed but you won't see until you run activity monitor.
I know it is not really big deal but what impressed me is, it didn't need to reboot OS. OS was running, even screensaver was functional in first stage.
As I am not a developer, it seemed very easy to me sorry for that.
Considering Firefox is a massively multi platform browser, number 1 concern would be how would that work on all platforms Firefox support. That baffles me since Operais massively multi platform too and somehow they do these things. For example, I see that window popup under OS X, it has nothing to do with Windows at all and Linux people see the same Window.
Wondering what would happen if guy buys his own MS Office, iWork or installs Abiword? Of course, an "admin" would install it for him.
Not a MS office fan but it seems like a bad idea to make choices for employees. For example, lets say there is a huge bank mainframe contract and guy has to prepare his papers in 48 hours. Will he struggle with a totally new, unpolished "open" thing or finish the damn papers? It may cost IBM millions of dollars at the end, just a single mainframe sale especially in this economy and there is still FUD about mainframes.
Please tell me how to use Lotus Symphony instead of ANY office suite or even a basic Word processor if it has this "known issue":
"Graphics with text cannot be copied to other applications
In the Lotus Symphony SpreadSheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations, inserting a graphic and inputting text into it, and then copying the graphic to another editor, or to Lotus Notes, the text inside the graphic may be lost."
Do you realize Apple Lisa (pre Mac) could do it? Or MS Office on Win 3.1? Or OS/2's great, wasted Office suite? (IBM Works)
Last time I checked, it didn't support OS X PowerPC , even a G5 which its official name is IBM 970XX. Does it support IBM POWERPC at least?
Slashdot Mirror
You should have bought Quake III Arena Linux edition like me (from Loki) and seen all those #linux guys laughing at you saying the Windows one was cheaper and what kind of fanatic I must be for not dual booting...
Of course, Carmack didn't laugh back and it had serious consequences even effecting open source&gaming today.
In popular rock (based on sales) music, some bands like Dream Theater do side projects, like "Liquid Tension Project" and do whatever they want with the comfort.
I wished some amazing talents who got drowned by "sales" concerns, like Mariah Carey do some classical jazz side projects, even in another nickname if they were concerned about their brand (name) focus. Of course, either them or their producers doesn't have that vision or basically for example Classical jazz listening "elite" won't take it serious no matter how good it could be...
One URL for you, http://www.sourceforge.net/ , pick a random nick, release... I believe there are many doing it.
Funny is, I recently heard some billionaire guys buying 2Mbit DSL instead of "4mbit" since they don't feel the need for 4mbit in their ordinary web usage. It is not some newspaper story, guys actually installing those lines told me about it and they added, "perhaps, that is how they got rich".
Steve Wozniak doesn't wonder around in private jets or live in million dollar houses not because the evil Steve stole all his money, he simply doesn't care that much about money or luxury living.
He spends money&time to educating children http://www.woz.org/education/index.html
If Yahoo was a real rival to achieve these things and actually had a real direction, Apple wouldn't pause a second.
They say "OK, we were never a search engine" (I agree!) and "we are now a internet utility"... It doesn't explain 20 obvious spams/scams I get in a week to a single mail account and "my yahoo" displaying "sorry! a problem occurred" on an entire tab of news sources.
I believe Yahoo and Microsoft's incompetence managed to come to a point that Google is actually hurt by it, by lack of real competition. Same thing can be said for iPhone... Nokia and J2ME camp are so stupid that Apple sees no threat, thinking they can do anything. They feel like the days they shipped first Macintosh and laughed to MS-DOS command prompt displaying IBMs. We have all seen what happened later...
Apple gets investigated because that Google guy is in their board. He gets removed but, you can't change search engine of Snow Leopard's default browser (Safari) from Google to something else, its bookmarks are infested by Google, system's right click "search" on any application defaults to Google, their device comes with Google maps...
So, they pull this trick, drama to show that they aren't really running some kind of duopoly trick. What bugs me is, people fighting over both giant companies quickly approaching "MS in 1997" point and insulting each other.
I have an iPod touch on charge now and I keep using Symbian S60. Symbian's UI mistakes are even more obvious to me now and I keep protesting them on Slashdot getting (rare for me) "flamebait" mods...
So, did I miss some "Apple apologizer" pill when I had the device free, from my brother? Or do we install some app for it? Building a device on Unix and not allowing it to multitask could be one of the most absurd things in IT history. Not allowing Google app, like a poor garage shareware guy will really cost them later... In fact, it will serve as "karma is a bitch" to all those poor single developers they chewed.
So, where is the Apple apologizer pill? And do you figure the irony of comparing Apple to Wal-Mart a super market monopoly which is protested Worldwide?
You know the real sad thing right? Apple iPhone policy made MS look like some kind of "freedom fighter hero" along with Nokia. They now have all rights to brag about it and they actually do, even their resellers. I overheard a Toshiba reseller shop guy "Oh, iPhone, that monopolistic device? It is not for you sir, you can't deal with monopoly attitude of Apple". You know what Toshiba runs? Linux? Hell no, Windows Mobile!
What is with programming disability these days? If Apple, your partner banned your Application... Do simultaneous releases on Symbian, windows mobile, blackberry, advanced J2ME and actually advertise it like "Do you have a REAL smart phone? Click here."
You couldn't understand the only thing Apple understands... Oh if your programmers can't code on anything else than XCode, you have chosen them wrong. Just look to Fring and Nimbuzz guys who have 0.000000E19% power of yours and have much more advanced client than you on _all_ platforms.
Iran? The fundamentalist run Islamic republic has banned Yahoo and Google?
Try this, a NATO member, EU member designate, secular (still!) neighbor of Europe and having actual part in Europe country, Turkey has banned Myspace in addition to Youtube today. Yes, Myspace, that "personal blog" or more like "music demo" site.
Keep watching Iran and China though...
As they enjoy spending money for obvious, I suggest them to ask those general and professional Apple users (Macbook and iPhone included) if they know UNIX and if they know it celebrates its 40th year today. In fact, start with NeXT.
What is the most trendy Unix today? As it is new, Apple, it is Snow Leopard right?
Run its Terminal, type "su", you won't see password being displayed, even as "*". Why? Because damn thing (UNIX) started on actual paper outputting terminals, more like typewriters. That is also why most used commands are mostly 2-3 char things.
I mean oldness doesn't mean it is outdated. You know what "77" in Fortran 77 means right?
COBOL and Mainframe stories serve a great purpose. We see how many of /. readers (commenters in fact) doesn't have the slightest clue about how real World goes on without breaking. Right, you can't logon to a bank mainframe which is likely underground in some forgotten place, monitored by armed guards but it doesn't grant you to say things like "COBOL runs on vacuum tubes" or "mainframes are dead".
If you don't have any clue, do as I do... Mute.
For example, I learned to shut up about audio processing software in movies and leave people do the real work as a video guy when I saw DTS movie audio track of a Hollywood movie was done on a MacOS 9 running Mac, back in 2003.
What makes you think every government machine/installation must be documented, submitted to top500/slashdot.org so you have to fool World's most elite Scientists if you could?
If they want a AI research, LISP monster machine, they buy it and they (any Govt. in World) has no obligation to make it public. If you look at Cray Research financial reports, they don't tell who they sell these monsters, not every single one. Even a company can ask for secrecy, for example if Apple tells them "we want a exaflop computer for our next product design, don't announce it", they will say "$120M installation to unnamed customer".
Now for the real tinfoil hat... The level of such machines which are so secret to be announced. Here is just one example which has likely upgraded to something else and in display in museum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FROSTBURG
1993, 2TB of RAM. Enough said.
Here is what to do with international standards/systems when in doubt. If British didn't come up with their own weirdo standard, it is generally universal.
Back in day before DVB-* became standard, we had a map of TV broadcasting systems (analogue) on a big World map, you could see there is a single horrible variation (in compatibility sense) of PAL, PAL's British variant which has same video spec but some really needless variation of sound spec. So, if you don't know about it and assume British PAL is the PAL which World uses, you end up watching 5 trucks carrying thousands of VHS tapes parking as tapes came back as defect :) Happened to friend.
IBM already has 2 operating systems in hand which they have massive experience, AIX and System/Z. They can both run as Hypervisors to Linux so they may use Linux too of course but the real unsurprising thing would be use of ZFS as filesystem for such data. It is already named after zetabyte.
They also use Plan 9 on Bluegene/L and certainly they aren't doing OS demos on multi million dollar supercomputers, so Plan 9 must be good on some purpose of Bluegene.
Microsoft? Can they scale really? I mean really, not some "demo show off" things which they abused name of Cray making Mr. Cray roll in his grave.
Can you blame him if both MS (app vendor) tells him to "adopt Safari" while it doesn't exist on MacOS instead of some actually working browser like iCab/Firefox MacOS port etc? Competitor? Apple is a competitor too!
Another brain dead company is AOL. They gave up "Netscape" suite, fine... Why not direct users to Seamonkey which is basically original Mozilla of today? Netscape 6/7 users are "suite" types, they want a "all doing browser suite, including mail". You don't advertise Firefox to them, you advertise Seamonkey with a good donation to the project or basically bandwidth donation. It is more like advertising original (1.x) Winamp to iTunes/Wmedia user.
Plan 9 finally found its place, IBM BlueGebe/L and BG/L runs Plan 9. Plan 9 is not a bad, dead or weird OS, it is just "UNIX is good enough" what kills it. We all use good parts of it, for example Unicode belongs to it, procfs belongs to it or it is "lite" implementation. Do you know a single Unix-like technology instantly adopted by entire industry? It is just a small part of Plan9, Unicode.
Also the times of everyone wanting to run exact same application on multiple devices has not come yet. Supercomputers with insane computing power actually does better with plan 9 since they deal with massive amount of processes distributed to amazing amount of CPUs and memory.
You know what? Something makes me feel like Apple will be bragging "Built on Plan 9" just like "Built on UNIX" in distant future. As usual, users won't know/care about it but the GUI and Frameworks will give the difference. For example, "copy" photoshop process to home computer or laptop while leaving etc.
BTW if you really want to see "weirdest of weird" OS, which first released in 1961 and has Knuth as intern code in it, look nothing else than Burroughs MCP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_MCP
It is still used, maintained and you must pay millions of dollars to "have" it (more like rent). It has a name like "master control program", need to say more? :)
I watched the presentation at NASA TV, it was given at NASA Ames Research Center.
They have archive of it at Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?v=eND7hT8JdwA&user=NASAtelevision
That is the guy presenting the idea himself. It was interesting enough to watch it at 4 AM my local time. The numbers guy gives, like the 20% of capacity used, everyone having their own data center, it may take $600.000 (yes, 600K) to setup a weblog in certain circumstances while it is free on blogger.com like services are amazing.
As listeners are full of govt. guys, guy repeated 4-5 times that secret/critical things won't be on cloud, outside USA etc. What matters is, they will be forcing very strict privacy and security rules to vendors.
Virtual PC Mac, last shipped version (7.0.3) release notes:
"This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code."
Most amazing thing is, it is actually an emulator/hypervisor ,not really something like VirtualBox. Respect to MS really. :)
Well, that is what happens if you don't care when applications tell you "a new version of xxx is available, click here to install" and update itself. I bet you must be one of the guys shouting "omg spyware'^%+%&" when poor thing checks for update using a complete open source, documented system (Sparkle)
Or if you are dumb enough to expect OS hacks to run when OS has a major version upgrade and don't disable/remove them before install.
I have never heard/experienced a case when "all applications" fail miserably after OS upgrade, ever. You had something injecting itself to the executable code of the applications and you basically ignored to disable/uninstall it before upgrading. That is the only explanation. It could be not your fault, some idiot company still injects themselves to executable code (e.g. Logitech, the main reason for APE scandal) could be guilty.
I have upgraded a fairly loaded Mac Mini to Snow Leopard. First of all, damn thing doesn't even need to reboot first. It starts putting the "flat packages" to hard disk immediately so it won't have to deal with IO latency of DVD media.
It reboots in 30 secs (Apple fashion) and starts upgrading, running a massive set of perl/python scripts to make sure everything is flawless. I was tired to watch it but we talk about a 1 hour "upgrade" install where entire OS being upgraded to newer one on Mac Mini which has laptop parts (Hard disk, DVD, screen).
At end, you see 7-8 GB freed and wonder "what has changed", in fact everything has changed but you won't see until you run activity monitor.
I know it is not really big deal but what impressed me is, it didn't need to reboot OS. OS was running, even screensaver was functional in first stage.
As I am not a developer, it seemed very easy to me sorry for that.
Considering Firefox is a massively multi platform browser, number 1 concern would be how would that work on all platforms Firefox support. That baffles me since Operais massively multi platform too and somehow they do these things. For example, I see that window popup under OS X, it has nothing to do with Windows at all and Linux people see the same Window.
Oh BTW, here is the window I talk about for people won't install Opera just to see it.
http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/8444/jstemp.png
Wondering what would happen if guy buys his own MS Office, iWork or installs Abiword? Of course, an "admin" would install it for him.
Not a MS office fan but it seems like a bad idea to make choices for employees. For example, lets say there is a huge bank mainframe contract and guy has to prepare his papers in 48 hours. Will he struggle with a totally new, unpolished "open" thing or finish the damn papers? It may cost IBM millions of dollars at the end, just a single mainframe sale especially in this economy and there is still FUD about mainframes.
Please tell me how to use Lotus Symphony instead of ANY office suite or even a basic Word processor if it has this "known issue":
"Graphics with text cannot be copied to other applications
In the Lotus Symphony SpreadSheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations, inserting a graphic and inputting text into it, and then copying the graphic to another editor, or to Lotus Notes, the text inside the graphic may be lost."
Do you realize Apple Lisa (pre Mac) could do it? Or MS Office on Win 3.1? Or OS/2's great, wasted Office suite? (IBM Works)
Last time I checked, it didn't support OS X PowerPC , even a G5 which its official name is IBM 970XX. Does it support IBM POWERPC at least?