Yes, it's random if you listen to Leonard Maltin (a particularly poor movie critic). But if you ask the average Star Trek fan, they'll tell you that the Wrath of Khan was a LOT better than The Motion Picture (most of my friends can't sit through ST:1, but we all love ST:2), that The Voyage Home was MUCH more fun to watch than The Search for Spock, and that the Undiscovered Country was a heads and shoulders above The Final Frontier. I don't even understand how Maltin can put these movies so close together in their ratings - 2, 4, and 6 really captured the feel of the original series, with camraderie and action, while 1, 3, and 5, were like stupid versions of the Next Generation, trying to be intelligent but completely failing.
Bill Joy is hardly a luddite. Is is simply that the fact that we will probably stop existing once the sun explodes millions of years from today does not mean that we should accept each and every risk to humanity as merely the cost of living. The sun will explode some day - that does not mean that we should stop weighing the costs and benefits of technological advancements and their spread, and that does not mean that we should stop being careful about what we do with technology.
Interesting market predictions in two posts in this thread, because according to a survey of video game retailers (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-7582191.html ), the Playstation 2 is expected to outsell both the XBox and GameCube this Christmas season. It's not that surprising, actually. The PS2 has a lot more games presently, and if Sony is smart it will drop the price to $250 as soon as the XBox comes out.
I must respond to this because I've seen this claim repeated a lot recently:
the "American Revolution" which to the British at the time was certainly "Terrorism"
This is totally erroneous. Some Brits may have felt that the American Revolution was illegal, but that does not mean that they thought it was terrorism. A war between a rebel army (Americans) and a ruling army (British) - which is how the revolutionary war was fought - is not terrorism. Flying plans of civilians into buildings full of civilians - that is terrorism.
As for the supposed McCarthyism of the current moment, I find it amazing how these claims are made in major newspapers and magazines. One can read about the terrible risk of censorship in Salon and the L.A. Times - complaining about censorship to their huge readerships. Bill Maher, the current poster child for the anti-censorship forces, "is enjoying ratings at the highest level he has seen at ABC" (http://www.tnr.com/express/zimmerman102301.html). McCarthyism is hardly the current threat to America.
Re:Apple reminds me more of Commodore every day
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Apple is in the rich person's market now. Create expensive, beautiful, top of the line products. Market them to rich people as part of a "lifestyle" in elegant stores. Have extremely high profit margins.
The iPod is an integral part of Apple's "digital lifestyle" idea, and fits perfectly into their Apple stores. Apple may not be brilliant, but they are not Commodore. Commodore had no plan. Apple has a plan - it just might be the wrong plan.
Please excuse the language, but, put simply, 'bollocks'. The United States has looked for no solution whatsoe'er - demands on a non-negotiable billet do not come close to being an action of looking for a solution.
Compromise is most definitely not an absolute moral value. Compromise can be valuable, and worthwhile. That does not mean, however, that in this case the United States must make every effort to reach a compromise with the Taliban. By such logic:
* The Nazis want to kill all the Jews, and we'd prefer they kill no Jews, so we compromise at 6,000,000
* The US would like to blow up two atomic bombs in Japanese cities, and the Japanese government would prefer we blow up none, so we only blow up one city.
* Iraq would prefer that no people die from our embargo, and we'd prefer that 200,000 die a year, so we compromise on killing 100,00 a year.
Such compromises are not more moral than the absolute demands. The US made non-negotiable demands, that is true. But our demands were hardly outrageous. We demanded that humanitarian workers be released, that Bin Laden be handed over, and that Al-Qaeda be shut down. Given the attacks Bin Laden has perpetrated and others that have been foiled, that is hardly an unbelievably demand. What should we compromise? "Ok, hand over Bin Laden, but let the rest of Al-Qaeda keep planning attacks"?
You say that Americans are conceited, arrogant, and selfish. You may be right. To a large degree, I believe that it is because we have fewer limits on our power - when you can do whatever you want, you are likely to cross the line. Part of our arrogance is cultural and historical, as well. But if I may draw stereotypes about wherever you are from, I would say that your people have fallen into the weak thinking that "reality equals morality." In other words, you think that the fact that your country is weak and forced to compromise means that compromise is an absolute moral value. But it's not.
No one is saying that they are physical cowards. We are saying that they are moral cowards. It is not government propaganda, it is your own stupidity and unwillingness to find out what people mean by their words:
http://slate.msn.com/code/Chatterbox/Chatterbox. as p?Show=9/11/2001&idMessage=8268
You could say the same thing about the Palestinians - you have to wonder why the Palestinians want to be oppressed by the Jews, and won't just get up and move into a different Arab country (like Jordan, where a majority of the population is Palestinian). That is a fairly irrelevant point. Besides, Jews have a historical connection with the land which they don't have with any other.
Well then, until you even talk about the possibility that: A) Arab states have almost never accepted the right of Israel to exist (Iran still doesn't), B) tried to wipe Israel out many times, C) Deny the existence of the Holocaust (Syria has done this twice this year), and D) blow up bombs in pizza parlors because they aren't getting what they want in negotiations, I reserve the right to blow up bombs in your town.
Maybe some of the drug dealers, computer hackers, etc. were proven guilty of their crimes. Therefore they are not alleged. The foreign agents, on the other hand, perhaps were not.
Alternatively, the writer was tired when she wrote the piece. Yeesh. Slashdot is so paranoid.
How this gets modded up to 2, Insightful I have no idea. Intel neither created the recession, nor single-handedly destroyed investor confidence in the tech sector, nor lied about flagging PC demand. Anyone who has been following the tech industry and economy in the last few months has witnessed the following:
A) A brewing recession, the causes of which it is far too early to pick out. Nevertheless, it is extremely unlikely that Intel singlehandedly caused the slump, because the economy is so huge and there are so many factors outside of Intel (GE, Microsoft, Bush, Greenspan, consumer confidence, investory confidence, etc.)
B) The collapse of the tech stocks began well before Intel began to warn that the overall PC market was softening. Moreover, a warning by Intel would not have triggered a selloff of other tech stocks unless either people were investing based on psychology (and not the numbers) or the other tech stocks were fundamentally weak too. I suspect a little of both. Either way, Intel didn't create the tech selloff - investors and other companies played the major part. After all, if Intel had a bad quarter, but 3Com and Cisco's sales were still flying high, Intel should have had no affect on 3Com and Cisco's stock values.
C) PC demand has been flagging, this is not an Intel invention. Apple, Compaq, Gateway, and Dell have all had brutal quarters, the growth in worldwide PC shipments has been relatively dismal this quarter, and US demand has stayed flat. The US market is glutted, people are worried about a recession, and, as Slashdot recently had a story about, people are finding that they don't need anything better than a two year old 400 MHz PC. As evidence:
AMD missed earnings estimates last quarter and predicted that "first-quarter sales on processors will be 'no better than flat' compared with the fourth-quarter." (source)
"Market researcher Dataquest on Monday warned of continued slow PC sales, with worldwide sales growing 10.7 percent this year, or about four points lower than 2000. Sales in the United States are projected to be downright dismal with--at best--flat year-over-year growth.
Dataquest analyst Martin Reynolds said the researcher's predictions are based on 'the assumption sales in the fourth quarter will be better than the rest of the year. If this doesn't happen, things could be much worse.'" (source)
Dell posted its first quarter-to-quarter revenue decline in 17 years (source. Apple got murdered last quarter. Gateway got murdered last quarter, had a round of layoffs, and is closing 10% of its Gateway Country stores. Compaq is predicting a bad quarter.
Dungeon Master was incredible. I bought it for the Amiga back in 1991, and played it endlessly. The graphics were beautiful. The gameplay was brilliant - you could practice your skills outside of battle, and you had to both think and hack and slash to win. The sound was magnificent -loud footsteps following you down a hallway, a monster SOMEWHERE...It was truly one of all the time great games.
Years later, in 1998 or 1999, I downloaded it and started playing it on the Amiga emulator on the PC. I closed the door to my dorm room and played it for about 6 hours with the headphones on. I lost myself in the game completely, in the sounds and images...until a friend came to get me for dinner. I almost had a heart attack from fright. I had gotten so wrapped up, so involved in the game that when I heard the door open I thought a monster was after me in the dungeon.
Any game that can still induce heart attacks 11 years after it was released is clearly a classic. Modern RPGs leave me cold - we need more Dungeon Masters!
Seems to me "Jef" is a pretty user unfriendly name. Sure, he knows how to use it, but if a bank teller asks for his name, the bank teller will assume it's spelled "Jeff," and then Raskin will either have to correct the bank teller (wasting both his and the bank teller's time) or settle for the incorrect execution of his goal: to have his name spelled correctly in order to identify him.
A good UI should both save time and allow for the accurate execution of the user's goals. "Jef" has to go.
Lots of posts seem to be asking why Apple needs 1-click shopping, since few would seem to be regular customers for computers, but it's important to note that since its introduction the Apple store has been slowing growing the range of products it sells. The Apple store now sells 27 games, 23 "Productivity" applications, mice, printers, speakers, monitors, etc. etc. Since 25% of Macs are sold through the Apple store, it's possible that more and more users will go through the store for other products as well, and make use of 1-click.
The ISS has cost more than $40 billion and is so far not even doing anything. Yet you want to increase funding of space exploration because it's the answer to resource problems? So that we can have colonies far away that we can only trade and communicate with very slowly and in very small amounts? Exploration of America worked because it made economic sense. It simply doesn't make sense to dedicate more resources to space exploration at this point in the technology of space. Continue R&D and some flights, by all means, but we don't need huge increases in expenditure. What we need on earth is for the birth rate to continue to decline and for nations to use resources more efficiently. Space flight is not part of that prognosis.
Your argument on inflation makes no sense. If what you bought 18 months ago today costs 1/4 what it did then, that is not inflation, it is deflation, since the same number of dollars can now buy more, not less. Nor are you losing economic value, since you can get 4 times as much now as you did then. The fact that there are newer, faster computers that you might buy does not destroy the value of the computer you bought 18 months ago. Finally, since the producer produces and the consumer buys the computer knowing about its eventual obsolescence, there must be economic value to both the creation and purchase of the machine. Economic value is not being lost.
As for this story, it is a link to interesting articles on future computing technology. Are there economic interests at stake? Certainly, but the bias in these articles is far less than those of Athlon or GeForce reviews, because the economic interests relating to future computing technologies are being greatly discounted because they lie so far into the future. The companies working on these technologies are not trying to attract loads of public investors nor are they yet selling anything. They don't particularly need puff pieces, since their technologies are being analyzed by other physicists, chemists, biologists, and computer scientists. AMD, on the other hand, DOES need puff pieces.
So the economic interests inherent in this posting are much less than in other postings. But in the final analysis, I would question how much that even matters. CmdrTaco cannot do an in-depth review of every site from which he gets articles, and even if he could, he couldn't do an in-depth review/analysis of every journalist's conscious and subconscious motives. And EVEN if CmdrTaco could do that, who would we get to vet CmdrTaco?
Sometimes you have to just have some trust, read the articles, and shut up.
I must agree with some of the posters that this is a very disappointing move. Not because Linux would not make a good kernel (I cannot comment on that), but because it is once again an Amiga "savior" changing its tune as soon as it is called on to deliver a product. Now, maybe they'll actually deliver on this, but my hopes have been lowered some as a result.
It seems to me that this decision was probably based on the fact that the Linux kernel is free (as in free beer) and has a lot of driver support. With QNX they were partnered with a company that looked like it was trying to finally invade the consumer space to increase its profits, whereas with Linux Amiga has to share no royalties. And of course, having lots of drivers for Linux already makes it much easier for Amiga to make its computers look supported.
The question really is what this means technically. If Amiga is going to be just another Linux distro with a different wm or something like that, forget it, who cares? With QNX at least they had something to differentiate the Amiga from the crowd - "the realtime OS with a microkernel that is used by NASA and nuclear power plants" - sounded nifty, didn't it? Now they've got the Linux marketing juggernaut, but is it really better for the Amiga?
Now, I wouldn't mind having a Linux-based Amiga running on a PPC G4, but it's just wait-and-see time again for the Amiga.
And of course we all know how unbiased the mainstream media is as well. More importantly, we all remember a time (very, very recently) when Linux had no mainstream articles to support it in the mainstream press. Yet somehow, despite the lack of attention from CMP, IDG, and ZD, hackers and programmers realized that there was something to this OS. If the mainstream media's approval is the only sign of a good OS then computing is in trouble indeed.
And finally, I've found that there are brainwashed users of every computer platform. There is no platform without is zealots who illegitimately attack every other OS. Well, maybe when BeOS users make the attack it's legitimate, I don't know the BeOS community well nor the OS at all, but every other OS fanbase I've seen has been this way.
Right, except that everyone does not type 50+ page technical documents. Most people in the world aren't that great at computers and simply want to write small documents. Which is why we have Office, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc. Get off it, you are not the only person in the world. The fact that the BeOS is not open-source has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether LaTeX exists for it, or whether word processors exist for the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Bicycles were invented before sneakers. Don't know about scooters, though.
Yes, it's random if you listen to Leonard Maltin (a particularly poor movie critic). But if you ask the average Star Trek fan, they'll tell you that the Wrath of Khan was a LOT better than The Motion Picture (most of my friends can't sit through ST:1, but we all love ST:2), that The Voyage Home was MUCH more fun to watch than The Search for Spock, and that the Undiscovered Country was a heads and shoulders above The Final Frontier. I don't even understand how Maltin can put these movies so close together in their ratings - 2, 4, and 6 really captured the feel of the original series, with camraderie and action, while 1, 3, and 5, were like stupid versions of the Next Generation, trying to be intelligent but completely failing.
ECS gave 32 out of 4096. AGA gave 256 out of 256,000.
Josh, who had an A2000
Bill Joy is hardly a luddite. Is is simply that the fact that we will probably stop existing once the sun explodes millions of years from today does not mean that we should accept each and every risk to humanity as merely the cost of living. The sun will explode some day - that does not mean that we should stop weighing the costs and benefits of technological advancements and their spread, and that does not mean that we should stop being careful about what we do with technology.
Interesting market predictions in two posts in this thread, because according to a survey of video game retailers (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-7582191.html ), the Playstation 2 is expected to outsell both the XBox and GameCube this Christmas season. It's not that surprising, actually. The PS2 has a lot more games presently, and if Sony is smart it will drop the price to $250 as soon as the XBox comes out.
I must respond to this because I've seen this claim repeated a lot recently:
. McCarthyism is hardly the current threat to America.
the "American Revolution" which to the British at the time was certainly "Terrorism"
This is totally erroneous. Some Brits may have felt that the American Revolution was illegal, but that does not mean that they thought it was terrorism. A war between a rebel army (Americans) and a ruling army (British) - which is how the revolutionary war was fought - is not terrorism. Flying plans of civilians into buildings full of civilians - that is terrorism.
As for the supposed McCarthyism of the current moment, I find it amazing how these claims are made in major newspapers and magazines. One can read about the terrible risk of censorship in Salon and the L.A. Times - complaining about censorship to their huge readerships. Bill Maher, the current poster child for the anti-censorship forces, "is enjoying ratings at the highest level he has seen at ABC" (http://www.tnr.com/express/zimmerman102301.html)
Apple is in the rich person's market now. Create expensive, beautiful, top of the line products. Market them to rich people as part of a "lifestyle" in elegant stores. Have extremely high profit margins.
The iPod is an integral part of Apple's "digital lifestyle" idea, and fits perfectly into their Apple stores. Apple may not be brilliant, but they are not Commodore. Commodore had no plan. Apple has a plan - it just might be the wrong plan.
I think you mean Apple shipped 850,000 machines last quarter.
Please excuse the language, but, put simply, 'bollocks'. The United States has looked for no solution whatsoe'er - demands on a non-negotiable billet do not come close to being an action of looking for a solution.
Compromise is most definitely not an absolute moral value. Compromise can be valuable, and worthwhile. That does not mean, however, that in this case the United States must make every effort to reach a compromise with the Taliban. By such logic:
* The Nazis want to kill all the Jews, and we'd prefer they kill no Jews, so we compromise at 6,000,000
* The US would like to blow up two atomic bombs in Japanese cities, and the Japanese government would prefer we blow up none, so we only blow up one city.
* Iraq would prefer that no people die from our embargo, and we'd prefer that 200,000 die a year, so we compromise on killing 100,00 a year.
Such compromises are not more moral than the absolute demands. The US made non-negotiable demands, that is true. But our demands were hardly outrageous. We demanded that humanitarian workers be released, that Bin Laden be handed over, and that Al-Qaeda be shut down. Given the attacks Bin Laden has perpetrated and others that have been foiled, that is hardly an unbelievably demand. What should we compromise? "Ok, hand over Bin Laden, but let the rest of Al-Qaeda keep planning attacks"?
You say that Americans are conceited, arrogant, and selfish. You may be right. To a large degree, I believe that it is because we have fewer limits on our power - when you can do whatever you want, you are likely to cross the line. Part of our arrogance is cultural and historical, as well. But if I may draw stereotypes about wherever you are from, I would say that your people have fallen into the weak thinking that "reality equals morality." In other words, you think that the fact that your country is weak and forced to compromise means that compromise is an absolute moral value. But it's not.
No one is saying that they are physical cowards. We are saying that they are moral cowards. It is not government propaganda, it is your own stupidity and unwillingness to find out what people mean by their words:
. as p?Show=9/11/2001&idMessage=8268
http://slate.msn.com/code/Chatterbox/Chatterbox
You could say the same thing about the Palestinians - you have to wonder why the Palestinians want to be oppressed by the Jews, and won't just get up and move into a different Arab country (like Jordan, where a majority of the population is Palestinian). That is a fairly irrelevant point. Besides, Jews have a historical connection with the land which they don't have with any other.
Well then, until you even talk about the possibility that: A) Arab states have almost never accepted the right of Israel to exist (Iran still doesn't), B) tried to wipe Israel out many times, C) Deny the existence of the Holocaust (Syria has done this twice this year), and D) blow up bombs in pizza parlors because they aren't getting what they want in negotiations, I reserve the right to blow up bombs in your town.
ZMag may be unsponsored, but I assure you it is not unbiased. :)
Maybe some of the drug dealers, computer hackers, etc. were proven guilty of their crimes. Therefore they are not alleged. The foreign agents, on the other hand, perhaps were not.
Alternatively, the writer was tired when she wrote the piece. Yeesh. Slashdot is so paranoid.
A) A brewing recession, the causes of which it is far too early to pick out. Nevertheless, it is extremely unlikely that Intel singlehandedly caused the slump, because the economy is so huge and there are so many factors outside of Intel (GE, Microsoft, Bush, Greenspan, consumer confidence, investory confidence, etc.)
B) The collapse of the tech stocks began well before Intel began to warn that the overall PC market was softening. Moreover, a warning by Intel would not have triggered a selloff of other tech stocks unless either people were investing based on psychology (and not the numbers) or the other tech stocks were fundamentally weak too. I suspect a little of both. Either way, Intel didn't create the tech selloff - investors and other companies played the major part. After all, if Intel had a bad quarter, but 3Com and Cisco's sales were still flying high, Intel should have had no affect on 3Com and Cisco's stock values.
C) PC demand has been flagging, this is not an Intel invention. Apple, Compaq, Gateway, and Dell have all had brutal quarters, the growth in worldwide PC shipments has been relatively dismal this quarter, and US demand has stayed flat. The US market is glutted, people are worried about a recession, and, as Slashdot recently had a story about, people are finding that they don't need anything better than a two year old 400 MHz PC. As evidence:
AMD missed earnings estimates last quarter and predicted that "first-quarter sales on processors will be 'no better than flat' compared with the fourth-quarter." (source)
"Market researcher Dataquest on Monday warned of continued slow PC sales, with worldwide sales growing 10.7 percent this year, or about four points lower than 2000. Sales in the United States are projected to be downright dismal with--at best--flat year-over-year growth.
Dataquest analyst Martin Reynolds said the researcher's predictions are based on 'the assumption sales in the fourth quarter will be better than the rest of the year. If this doesn't happen, things could be much worse.'" (source)
Dell posted its first quarter-to-quarter revenue decline in 17 years (source. Apple got murdered last quarter. Gateway got murdered last quarter, had a round of layoffs, and is closing 10% of its Gateway Country stores. Compaq is predicting a bad quarter.
Dungeon Master was incredible. I bought it for the Amiga back in 1991, and played it endlessly. The graphics were beautiful. The gameplay was brilliant - you could practice your skills outside of battle, and you had to both think and hack and slash to win. The sound was magnificent -loud footsteps following you down a hallway, a monster SOMEWHERE...It was truly one of all the time great games.
Years later, in 1998 or 1999, I downloaded it and started playing it on the Amiga emulator on the PC. I closed the door to my dorm room and played it for about 6 hours with the headphones on. I lost myself in the game completely, in the sounds and images...until a friend came to get me for dinner. I almost had a heart attack from fright. I had gotten so wrapped up, so involved in the game that when I heard the door open I thought a monster was after me in the dungeon.
Any game that can still induce heart attacks 11 years after it was released is clearly a classic. Modern RPGs leave me cold - we need more Dungeon Masters!
Seems to me "Jef" is a pretty user unfriendly name. Sure, he knows how to use it, but if a bank teller asks for his name, the bank teller will assume it's spelled "Jeff," and then Raskin will either have to correct the bank teller (wasting both his and the bank teller's time) or settle for the incorrect execution of his goal: to have his name spelled correctly in order to identify him.
A good UI should both save time and allow for the accurate execution of the user's goals. "Jef" has to go.
Lots of posts seem to be asking why Apple needs 1-click shopping, since few would seem to be regular customers for computers, but it's important to note that since its introduction the Apple store has been slowing growing the range of products it sells. The Apple store now sells 27 games, 23 "Productivity" applications, mice, printers, speakers, monitors, etc. etc. Since 25% of Macs are sold through the Apple store, it's possible that more and more users will go through the store for other products as well, and make use of 1-click.
The ISS has cost more than $40 billion and is so far not even doing anything. Yet you want to increase funding of space exploration because it's the answer to resource problems? So that we can have colonies far away that we can only trade and communicate with very slowly and in very small amounts? Exploration of America worked because it made economic sense. It simply doesn't make sense to dedicate more resources to space exploration at this point in the technology of space. Continue R&D and some flights, by all means, but we don't need huge increases in expenditure. What we need on earth is for the birth rate to continue to decline and for nations to use resources more efficiently. Space flight is not part of that prognosis.
Your argument on inflation makes no sense. If what you bought 18 months ago today costs 1/4 what it did then, that is not inflation, it is deflation, since the same number of dollars can now buy more, not less. Nor are you losing economic value, since you can get 4 times as much now as you did then. The fact that there are newer, faster computers that you might buy does not destroy the value of the computer you bought 18 months ago. Finally, since the producer produces and the consumer buys the computer knowing about its eventual obsolescence, there must be economic value to both the creation and purchase of the machine. Economic value is not being lost.
As for this story, it is a link to interesting articles on future computing technology. Are there economic interests at stake? Certainly, but the bias in these articles is far less than those of Athlon or GeForce reviews, because the economic interests relating to future computing technologies are being greatly discounted because they lie so far into the future. The companies working on these technologies are not trying to attract loads of public investors nor are they yet selling anything. They don't particularly need puff pieces, since their technologies are being analyzed by other physicists, chemists, biologists, and computer scientists. AMD, on the other hand, DOES need puff pieces.
So the economic interests inherent in this posting are much less than in other postings. But in the final analysis, I would question how much that even matters. CmdrTaco cannot do an in-depth review of every site from which he gets articles, and even if he could, he couldn't do an in-depth review/analysis of every journalist's conscious and subconscious motives. And EVEN if CmdrTaco could do that, who would we get to vet CmdrTaco?
Sometimes you have to just have some trust, read the articles, and shut up.
I must agree with some of the posters that this is a very disappointing move. Not because Linux would not make a good kernel (I cannot comment on that), but because it is once again an Amiga "savior" changing its tune as soon as it is called on to deliver a product. Now, maybe they'll actually deliver on this, but my hopes have been lowered some as a result.
It seems to me that this decision was probably based on the fact that the Linux kernel is free (as in free beer) and has a lot of driver support. With QNX they were partnered with a company that looked like it was trying to finally invade the consumer space to increase its profits, whereas with Linux Amiga has to share no royalties. And of course, having lots of drivers for Linux already makes it much easier for Amiga to make its computers look supported.
The question really is what this means technically. If Amiga is going to be just another Linux distro with a different wm or something like that, forget it, who cares? With QNX at least they had something to differentiate the Amiga from the crowd - "the realtime OS with a microkernel that is used by NASA and nuclear power plants" - sounded nifty, didn't it? Now they've got the Linux marketing juggernaut, but is it really better for the Amiga?
Now, I wouldn't mind having a Linux-based Amiga running on a PPC G4, but it's just wait-and-see time again for the Amiga.
And of course we all know how unbiased the mainstream media is as well. More importantly, we all remember a time (very, very recently) when Linux had no mainstream articles to support it in the mainstream press. Yet somehow, despite the lack of attention from CMP, IDG, and ZD, hackers and programmers realized that there was something to this OS. If the mainstream media's approval is the only sign of a good OS then computing is in trouble indeed.
And finally, I've found that there are brainwashed users of every computer platform. There is no platform without is zealots who illegitimately attack every other OS. Well, maybe when BeOS users make the attack it's legitimate, I don't know the BeOS community well nor the OS at all, but every other OS fanbase I've seen has been this way.
They will, once CS students have to learn some real biology besides Life Sciences for Poets.
Right, except that everyone does not type 50+ page technical documents. Most people in the world aren't that great at computers and simply want to write small documents. Which is why we have Office, StarOffice, WordPerfect, etc. Get off it, you are not the only person in the world. The fact that the BeOS is not open-source has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether LaTeX exists for it, or whether word processors exist for the OS.
Or - hey! - a real puppy...
...Nah, that'd just be silly.
*sigh* When Sony releases robotic human friends we're all in deep shit.