Unfortunately, that cruel truth made it hard to sell even during the AI-mania of the 80s. I worked for one of the MIT-spinoff Lisp Machine companies (LMI, the other was Symbolics), and while commercial AI was overhyped, I beleived (and still do) that Lisp is a great purpose for building and maintain all kinds of complex systems, "intelligent" or otherwise.
And, by the way, I actually worked a bit with Stallman in those days. First, at MIT, trying to bring some sense to the MIT (non-Symbolics) branch of the system software would do network file access (it was fine for its "native" network system but was awkward for adding the new TCP-based access methods that were coming out), and at LMI, doing TeX and other document-processor hacking (a long story). Some of the latter work might still survive as texinfo -- are the TeX macros still there or is everydone done in elisp now ?
Anyway, the joke at LMI had to do with the way our workstation competitors at Sun, Apollo, and so on would refer to Lisp processor as "special" purposes machines. Poppycock ! Their CPUs and memory systems were only good for modular arithmetic and chasing pointers, while Lisp processors could dispatch on byte fields (useful for dynamic type checking), support generational garbage collection, and in general support all kinds of data structures easily, not to mention numbers that behaved like mathematical entities instead of PDP-11 registers.
Warsh is savvy. I really like the guy's take on things, especially Monicagate and comparing the assertions that polticians make about the economy to what has actually happended in the past.
The three-part version number scheme is easier to understand, since the significant of the changes can be expressed in which part you decide to increment. Besides, the Mac and Windows versioning schemes have done this for a while.
I love Macs but I do Windows for a living. I was recently issued an IBM Thinkpad iSeries, and it's very good, but the battery life is short, it will sometimes freeze on wakeup if there's a disc in the DVD drive, the USB port is not v1.1-compliant (so forget using a USB mouse and Zip drive at the same time) and Windows doesn't provide a nice way to switch configurations like the MacOS Location Manager (the last is actually the most important issue for me). And this is one of the best PC laptops you can buy, at least $1000 more expensive than an iBook.
And yeah, the Sony VAIOs look nice, but the cheaper models have ridiculously feeble keyboards and screens. I think most media professionals would for a Bronze G3 PowerBook with a FireWire card.
Perhaps the media have been too hard on this movie, but Lucas really ought to bring in directors and script help, otherwise he won't be able to sustain interest in the series.
There was a rumor on Coming Attractions (Corona) that Spike Jonze might direct one of the movies, although it's probably not going to happen now. But that would have been cool...
Well, Xoom's case is the little different -- normally, an FTP server throws a non-anonymous user into the users's home directory by default. For Xoom, the home directory would be the user's web directory, but normally they are two separate things. Besides, even if the FTP client is nice, it's another client to learn.
The hard drives are interesting for P1394 mindshare because they are obviously computer peripherals. Yes, they aren't amazing drives in themselves but they look pretty cool. The only other peripheral I can think of at the moment is a Sony audio/video A-D/D-A converter. In fact, Sony is pushing P1394 harder than Apple, with digital camcorders and the VAIO PCs.
I think that not taxing e-commerce when other kinds of commerce are taxed is a stupid idea. The fairest taxes are broadly applied and don't force people to do things they ordinarily wouldn't do just because the tax system is set up a certain way. Of course, that would mean getting rid of dependent and mortgage deductions, too, which will probably never happen, but at least we shouldn't twist the tax system more than it already is.
I myself favor a national consumption tax over income or property taxes (the latter the least fair of all); in countries that already have a national value-added tax, I think it's perfectly fine for e-commerce to be taxed that way -- no more, no less than other kinds of commerce. But in the US, we don't have anything like VAT in place, so we can't have a coherent national policy on e-commerce taxation (if states decided they want a cut of the proceeds).
Agreed. Linux benefits from these things: Microsoft's bungling of NT (they lost the plot after 3.51) and the Unix hardware vendors' bungling of OSF/1 and damn near any other interoperatbility standard.
I don't think this is an attack on Linux, which really can't be attacked anyway. I suppose if Apple's plan is so attractive that it drains development effort from Linux, that would be harmful to Linux, but that is just a weird scenario.
I don't think it will be the only Unix in ten years, but I can't help but beleive that it's going to take out of few of weaker variants, especially on Intel-based hardware. If the development effort can be managed properly, you can also build kernel variants that allow you to get the same kind of diversity that you get from different Unix brands now, but still be confident that it's still Linux and that you will still be able to track changes in the "normal" versions.
> How so? PCI is PCI, whether its on a proprietary system or a relatively open system. Works the same either way. I haven't had any problem adding peripherals to my x86 Linux box.
Yeah, I thought PCI avoided a lot of the problems with adding cards, but you can *still* have IRQ conflicts with PCI cards ! Is this because the cards are inadequate, or due to something in the x86 architecture ?
Another possible outcome: there have been rumors that Apple would acquire Connectix (before the Sony action). They'd get the emulator smarts as well as specific good products like Virtual PC the VGS. If this actually happened soon, Apple's lawyer's would probably get a better deal out of Sony's lawyers than Connectix could.
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Unfortunately, that cruel truth made it hard to sell even during the AI-mania of the 80s. I worked for one of the MIT-spinoff Lisp Machine companies (LMI, the other was Symbolics), and while commercial AI was overhyped, I beleived (and still do) that Lisp is a great purpose for building and maintain all kinds of complex systems, "intelligent" or otherwise.
And, by the way, I actually worked a bit with Stallman in those days. First, at MIT, trying to bring some sense to the MIT (non-Symbolics) branch of the system software would do network file access (it was fine for its "native" network system but was awkward for adding the new TCP-based access methods that were coming out), and at LMI, doing TeX and other document-processor hacking (a long story). Some of the latter work might still survive as texinfo -- are the TeX macros still there or is everydone done in elisp now ?
Anyway, the joke at LMI had to do with the way our workstation competitors at Sun, Apollo, and so on would refer to Lisp processor as "special" purposes machines. Poppycock ! Their CPUs and memory systems were only good for modular arithmetic and chasing pointers, while Lisp processors could dispatch on byte fields (useful for dynamic type checking), support generational garbage collection, and in general support all kinds of data structures easily, not to mention numbers that behaved like mathematical entities instead of PDP-11 registers.
So there !
Warsh is savvy. I really like the guy's take on things, especially Monicagate and comparing the assertions that polticians make about the economy to what has actually happended in the past.
The three-part version number scheme is easier to understand, since the significant of the changes can be expressed in which part you decide to increment. Besides, the Mac and Windows versioning schemes have done this for a while.
And yeah, the Sony VAIOs look nice, but the cheaper models have ridiculously feeble keyboards and screens. I think most media professionals would for a Bronze G3 PowerBook with a FireWire card.
But the moment is against you, as Lotus is not doing Unix-based Notes clients for R5.
I think audiences of the near future will take the touchy-feeliness of the Next Generation series as camp.
There was a rumor on Coming Attractions (Corona) that Spike Jonze might direct one of the movies, although it's probably not going to happen now. But that would have been cool...
Well, Xoom's case is the little different -- normally, an FTP server throws a non-anonymous user into the users's home directory by default. For Xoom, the home directory would be the user's web directory, but normally they are two separate things. Besides, even if the FTP client is nice, it's another client to learn.
The hard drives are interesting for P1394 mindshare because they are obviously computer peripherals. Yes, they aren't amazing drives in themselves but they look pretty cool. The only other peripheral I can think of at the moment is a Sony audio/video A-D/D-A converter. In fact, Sony is pushing P1394 harder than Apple, with digital camcorders and the VAIO PCs.
http, of course. Would MP3 streaming perform better if it could be wrapped in RTSP ?
However, given the perceived "good enoughness" of GIF and current JPEG, any new format faces an uphill battle.
I myself favor a national consumption tax over income or property taxes (the latter the least fair of all); in countries that already have a national value-added tax, I think it's perfectly fine for e-commerce to be taxed that way -- no more, no less than other kinds of commerce. But in the US, we don't have anything like VAT in place, so we can't have a coherent national policy on e-commerce taxation (if states decided they want a cut of the proceeds).
Agreed. Linux benefits from these things: Microsoft's bungling of NT (they lost the plot after 3.51) and the Unix hardware vendors' bungling of OSF/1 and damn near any other interoperatbility standard.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1999/mar/16opensou rce.html
WebObjects, which is continually evolving, depends on it.
> I wonder what will be the cool thing after "open source"? "Working ?" Naahhhh...
I don't think this is an attack on Linux, which really can't be attacked anyway. I suppose if Apple's plan is so attractive that it drains development effort from Linux, that would be harmful to Linux, but that is just a weird scenario.
Two questions:
Can I put the live file on an HFS+ volume ?
Can it be a DHCP client ?
I don't think it will be the only Unix in ten years, but I can't help but beleive that it's going to take out of few of weaker variants, especially on Intel-based hardware. If the development effort can be managed properly, you can also build kernel variants that allow you to get the same kind of diversity that you get from different Unix brands now, but still be confident that it's still Linux and that you will still be able to track changes in the "normal" versions.
> How so? PCI is PCI, whether its on a proprietary system or a relatively open system. Works the same either way. I haven't had any problem adding peripherals to my x86 Linux box.
Yeah, I thought PCI avoided a lot of the problems with adding cards, but you can *still* have IRQ conflicts with PCI cards ! Is this because the cards are inadequate, or due to something in the x86 architecture ?
Another possible outcome: there have been rumors that Apple would acquire Connectix (before the Sony action). They'd get the emulator smarts as well as specific good products like Virtual PC the VGS. If this actually happened soon, Apple's lawyer's would probably get a better deal out of Sony's lawyers than Connectix could.