I just accumulate wired optical mice from Goodwill. I will only buy the ones priced $0.99. The $1.99 ones are priced for somebody else. I keep a reasonable stock of them around because my wife is extremely hard on that kind of stuff. It's on the end of a cable so she can regular drop it and pull the wire to pick it up easily, right?
I agree with you, but it involves much more than using a phillips screwdriver to plug some modules together. When I built my first PC compatible it was with a motherboard I bought at a swapmeet, an incompatible case and power supply, a used keyboard that had no cable on it, and a bare hardware monitor salvaged from a dumb terminal.
I had to reverse engineer the monitor connection by looking at the input signal paths (low value capacitor couples the horizontal sync, high value capacitor couples the vertical synch, etc.) I had to use the IBM Technical Reference manual to build the cable for the keyboard.
The power supply was a standard IBM 63.5 watt supply but the case was from a Leading Edge Model D, so I had to remove the IBM supply from it's case and mount it's circuit board in the Model D case on standoffs.
The RAM in that box I bought second hand at a surplus store, because the second hand 256K x 1 memory chips were only about $8 apiece that way. It was a store where one time I walked in and the guy at the counter was floating pieces of circuit board on a solderpot to pull off more of the used memory chips for resale.
Yeah. Real men make their own PC. But really only in the past anymore. These days you just plug stuff together and twirl the phillips screwdriver a bit.
My local Radio Shack sells Ardunio boards now, and a lot of other stuff. It's the place to go for a quick power connector, etc. I wouldn't go there for general electronic parts except for in a pinch, but they at least exist and are local.
You're correct. More 'pure' forms of Communism have been practiced in non-revisionist places than in the corrupt old USSR (since Stalin died and it all went 'rotten'.) Albania had a pretty good show going for awhile there. And North Korea is still pretty ideologically pure....
On OS X, if you have a single app that runs a piece of custom hardware, you just start the app, it claims the hardware, and that's it. No waiting for a hardware detector to grab a driver, etc. It's a very nice user experience.
That sounds nice, but it doesn't sound like it would scale well. User X has four programs that all connect to proprietary hardware. So the apps are all scrambling to grab the hooks to do this and that.
It also sounds like a potential security nightmare. Joe Trojan slips code into a bigger app that seeks out the secret dongle. If it's there, it begins doing whatever....
Basically all their strategy and decisions assumed a niche/enthusiast type product and their resulting actions may well have been perfectly appropriate had that been the case.
To be fair to the Foundation, they currently envision the RasPi in it's initial rollout as a niche/enthusiast product. The first 10K build is a preliminary release. Their intention is for the board to be pedagogical learning device for kids to use. These first boards are going out to the frenzied enthusiasts to get the ball rolling.
Also, something that hasn't been mentioned in this forum (slashdot) but bears considering is what their tactic is in handing off the 'launch' to big commercial vendors: the Foundation doesn't have the capital for a big build-out of boards. Their margin on the sale is pretty small.
So they can front the money to make 10,000 boards and do a first build. Then with those proceeds, they will have the money to build 25K boards. Then 35K on a third batch, and so on.
They didn't want to ramp things up this way. Their purpose is to build a pedagogical single board computer for very cheap to get into the schools for a computer science curriculum to be developed around. Something nerd kids can afford to buy and have total control over (as opposed to the family Windows machine that they get into trouble if they even install Firefox on, let alone Linux or any software they wrote themselves).
So in the initial launch it is niche/enthusiast, but they have the hope that schools will be ordering them like textbooks, papers, and staplers in the near future.
The Raspberry Pi doesn't really have 'USB, Ethernet, DVI, and sound out.'
It had no sound out whatsoever.
And the ethernet is just an on-board USB dongle permanently welded to the USB hardware. So it's channeled through the USB port (with attendant bottleneck) and has no direct link to the CPU.
The Raspberry Pi is essentially a smartphone minus the display, the keyboard, and the cellular RF circuitry. It's jiggered into being a 'computer' with software, but a lot of hardware is capable of that. Ask the NetBSD folks.
You can't buy one with PayPal even though they promised that before handing the distribution role off.
The thing that got me the most about the 'early morning release' deal the Foundation pulled was that they had a little decoy 'online store' tucked off to the side as a link on the main Raspberry Pi web page. All that was available in 'the store' was a keyboard sticker for weeks and weeks. And there was a 'registration' process to follow to get an account on the 'store.' So, I made a password and carefully made saved an additional bookmark to the 'Store' website and waited for the launch morning.
When the launch morning came, a few hours before launch the 'store' page went 'offline for maintenance.' The assumption anybody would make was that it was being prepped to take the orders for the (turned out to be phantom) 10K boards.
Then when the static page went up (which they had said would be replacing the Raspberry Pi site for 24 hours to handle the 'launch' and then sat there as their only web presence for five or six days after the launch....) all that was on it were links to RS and Farnell. Rather bad links, too, that just steered straight into the Farnell and RS commercial website, leaving buyers to run a generic 'search' to find out where the heck the page to buy the boards was. It was almost the same as if they had put the 10k of mythical boards (which still today don't exist in a sellable form) up on a bid page on eBay, but made no searchable mention of 'Raspberry Pi' on it. A hide and seek scavenger hunt, so it seems.
It's been a rather bizzarre launch, and the feeling one gets when reading the forums on the site is that it's run by surly tavernkeepers.
The big problem, as I see it, is that the thing was initially designed to be a pedagogical trainer-board thing for kids to fool with and encourage them to learn programming. But everybody who is clamoring to buy one has their own pet embedded project in mind for them, and almost none of them have anything to do with education, kids, general purpose 'dabbling' type programming, etc. The project has gotten out of control.
I would question the idea that Jobs 'knew how to make a company successful.' He had a particular knack for making one company successful. Which is more of a 'fate' thing that anything else. Jobs had quite a few fairly unsuccessful ventures after first leaving Apple and before returning. And he would not, ever, be the sort of person who could immerse himself into any random company and make it successful. His success was in a particular niche of a particular industry. His success was more of a quirk than anything else.
Trying to 'learn business success by studying what Apple has done' is similar to when American businesses in the 90's strived to 'learn business success by studying Japanese companies.' It doesn't work. There's no formula there, just an odd phenomenon.
Back during the several years, about 1998-2000, that I exclusively ran Linux on the desktop, I didn't notice I was missing anything on the Web or on my PC whatsoever.
There were whole sections of computer stores like CompUSA and BestBuy that I could skip entirely because there were no shrinkwrapped boxes whatsoever that I could buy and take home and put on my PC.
After a few years it got boring and I moved on. Windows 2000 was pretty damn good, too.
A security model that happens to be working about 100,000 times better than the OS that puts the user in charge of security.
Do you have a cite for that, or can you show your work? Because it sure sounds like you pulled the number 100,000 out of your ass. In substantial logic classes, you have to show your work, or you get a failing grade.
And.... it's very telling that you accuse somebody else of misplaced zealotry. We know how well placed YOUR zealotry is. Uh-huh. Yeah. You're boring and predictable, guy.
I think he was casting Apple and iOS as turd-like. Things that one finds repulsive in some way are not necessarily 'the enemy.' You spend waaaay too much time being a White Knight defending Princess Jobs, dude.
So, you honestly believe that translating horizontal (mouse on desktop) movement to vertical (on-screen) movement is more efficient and direct than just reaching out an directly touching where you want the cursor to be?
It is for any kind of drawing/graphics app. As it stands, on the multi-touch devices, you can only 'draw' or 'paint' with the resolution of a six year old with a box of crayons. Even if you buy a third party stylus, which do exist. They have a big spongy end like a crayon.
Granted, graphic apps are not something the Apple tablets are designed to do. But people like extensible features so they have more control over their gadgets. Apple clearly doesn't like that.
Back in the day, I could run Microsoft Word for MS-DOS on my old XT clone. If it was on a machine that didn't have a mouse driver installed, there was no mouse pointer on the screen.
Actually, you can still do this with modern Windows. There are keyboard shortcuts, including heavy use of the Tab key, that let you 'get around' without a pointer.
So a 'mouse' for an iOS device would cause a mouse pointer to emerge on the screen.
Yeah, we know. It would horrify some designer mincing around at Apple headquarters, so it ain't gonna happen.
When I was a kid, there was a pretty good sized woods at the end of the street. There was a pond in the woods, a raft on the pond, and parts of the woods were hilly. We could slide down the tall grass on the hills on cardboard in the summer and on sleds in the winter.
People put trash out on the curb on a certain day each week and there were often enough cool things like old radios or phonographs to haul home and dismember and re-use the parts for other things.
Phone? What the hell would I have wanted with a phone? Okay, they were okay to take apart. They had big induction coils in you could use for stuff.
You keep saying that over and over in this discussion.
I see you have Mac in your username. Maybe you should work on getting your boys inside the Reality Distortion Field of your cult to improve the JVM on your cult's platform.
Even back in the Mac Plus era, anybody who wanted their Mac to run reliably added a third party fan. And they were expensive. Really expensive, for just a shroud and a little AC muffin fan that pushed into the handle hole.
Jobs didn't think a fan was needed. He apparently worked in an air conditioned office.
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No, I don't want to fix it for you when it breaks.
Yah, that's okay. No heroic IT action needed here.
Can you get around to changing the toner in the LJ5 in Finance anytime soon?
I think they've escalated. They are now firing 'problem' stores. And probably they have a good business case for it.
I just accumulate wired optical mice from Goodwill. I will only buy the ones priced $0.99. The $1.99 ones are priced for somebody else. I keep a reasonable stock of them around because my wife is extremely hard on that kind of stuff. It's on the end of a cable so she can regular drop it and pull the wire to pick it up easily, right?
I first read about the 9/11 Attack on Slashdot. It was an off-topic post on an unrelated topic.
Real men build their own PC.
I agree with you, but it involves much more than using a phillips screwdriver to plug some modules together. When I built my first PC compatible it was with a motherboard I bought at a swapmeet, an incompatible case and power supply, a used keyboard that had no cable on it, and a bare hardware monitor salvaged from a dumb terminal.
I had to reverse engineer the monitor connection by looking at the input signal paths (low value capacitor couples the horizontal sync, high value capacitor couples the vertical synch, etc.) I had to use the IBM Technical Reference manual to build the cable for the keyboard.
The power supply was a standard IBM 63.5 watt supply but the case was from a Leading Edge Model D, so I had to remove the IBM supply from it's case and mount it's circuit board in the Model D case on standoffs.
The RAM in that box I bought second hand at a surplus store, because the second hand 256K x 1 memory chips were only about $8 apiece that way. It was a store where one time I walked in and the guy at the counter was floating pieces of circuit board on a solderpot to pull off more of the used memory chips for resale.
Yeah. Real men make their own PC. But really only in the past anymore. These days you just plug stuff together and twirl the phillips screwdriver a bit.
My local Radio Shack sells Ardunio boards now, and a lot of other stuff. It's the place to go for a quick power connector, etc. I wouldn't go there for general electronic parts except for in a pinch, but they at least exist and are local.
You're correct. More 'pure' forms of Communism have been practiced in non-revisionist places than in the corrupt old USSR (since Stalin died and it all went 'rotten'.) Albania had a pretty good show going for awhile there. And North Korea is still pretty ideologically pure....
That sounds nice, but it doesn't sound like it would scale well. User X has four programs that all connect to proprietary hardware. So the apps are all scrambling to grab the hooks to do this and that.
It also sounds like a potential security nightmare. Joe Trojan slips code into a bigger app that seeks out the secret dongle. If it's there, it begins doing whatever....
You didn't say anything interesting to rebut or defend the notion that Apple products become instantly obsolete as soon as the new version comes out.
Just boring meta-noise.
To be fair to the Foundation, they currently envision the RasPi in it's initial rollout as a niche/enthusiast product. The first 10K build is a preliminary release. Their intention is for the board to be pedagogical learning device for kids to use. These first boards are going out to the frenzied enthusiasts to get the ball rolling.
Also, something that hasn't been mentioned in this forum (slashdot) but bears considering is what their tactic is in handing off the 'launch' to big commercial vendors: the Foundation doesn't have the capital for a big build-out of boards. Their margin on the sale is pretty small.
So they can front the money to make 10,000 boards and do a first build. Then with those proceeds, they will have the money to build 25K boards. Then 35K on a third batch, and so on.
They didn't want to ramp things up this way. Their purpose is to build a pedagogical single board computer for very cheap to get into the schools for a computer science curriculum to be developed around. Something nerd kids can afford to buy and have total control over (as opposed to the family Windows machine that they get into trouble if they even install Firefox on, let alone Linux or any software they wrote themselves).
So in the initial launch it is niche/enthusiast, but they have the hope that schools will be ordering them like textbooks, papers, and staplers in the near future.
The Raspberry Pi doesn't really have 'USB, Ethernet, DVI, and sound out.'
It had no sound out whatsoever.
And the ethernet is just an on-board USB dongle permanently welded to the USB hardware. So it's channeled through the USB port (with attendant bottleneck) and has no direct link to the CPU.
The Raspberry Pi is essentially a smartphone minus the display, the keyboard, and the cellular RF circuitry. It's jiggered into being a 'computer' with software, but a lot of hardware is capable of that. Ask the NetBSD folks.
You can't buy one with PayPal even though they promised that before handing the distribution role off.
The thing that got me the most about the 'early morning release' deal the Foundation pulled was that they had a little decoy 'online store' tucked off to the side as a link on the main Raspberry Pi web page. All that was available in 'the store' was a keyboard sticker for weeks and weeks. And there was a 'registration' process to follow to get an account on the 'store.' So, I made a password and carefully made saved an additional bookmark to the 'Store' website and waited for the launch morning.
When the launch morning came, a few hours before launch the 'store' page went 'offline for maintenance.' The assumption anybody would make was that it was being prepped to take the orders for the (turned out to be phantom) 10K boards.
Then when the static page went up (which they had said would be replacing the Raspberry Pi site for 24 hours to handle the 'launch' and then sat there as their only web presence for five or six days after the launch....) all that was on it were links to RS and Farnell. Rather bad links, too, that just steered straight into the Farnell and RS commercial website, leaving buyers to run a generic 'search' to find out where the heck the page to buy the boards was. It was almost the same as if they had put the 10k of mythical boards (which still today don't exist in a sellable form) up on a bid page on eBay, but made no searchable mention of 'Raspberry Pi' on it. A hide and seek scavenger hunt, so it seems.
It's been a rather bizzarre launch, and the feeling one gets when reading the forums on the site is that it's run by surly tavernkeepers.
The big problem, as I see it, is that the thing was initially designed to be a pedagogical trainer-board thing for kids to fool with and encourage them to learn programming. But everybody who is clamoring to buy one has their own pet embedded project in mind for them, and almost none of them have anything to do with education, kids, general purpose 'dabbling' type programming, etc. The project has gotten out of control.
Also: "processed in a facility that may have contained peanuts" (one of the assemblers ate a Snickers bar on break)
I would question the idea that Jobs 'knew how to make a company successful.' He had a particular knack for making one company successful. Which is more of a 'fate' thing that anything else. Jobs had quite a few fairly unsuccessful ventures after first leaving Apple and before returning. And he would not, ever, be the sort of person who could immerse himself into any random company and make it successful. His success was in a particular niche of a particular industry. His success was more of a quirk than anything else.
Trying to 'learn business success by studying what Apple has done' is similar to when American businesses in the 90's strived to 'learn business success by studying Japanese companies.' It doesn't work. There's no formula there, just an odd phenomenon.
Back during the several years, about 1998-2000, that I exclusively ran Linux on the desktop, I didn't notice I was missing anything on the Web or on my PC whatsoever.
There were whole sections of computer stores like CompUSA and BestBuy that I could skip entirely because there were no shrinkwrapped boxes whatsoever that I could buy and take home and put on my PC.
After a few years it got boring and I moved on. Windows 2000 was pretty damn good, too.
Yes. We know that as soon as a new model is introduced, the old Apple gear becomes instantly shitty and only a fool would continue to use it.
What are you even here on Slashdot for? Regurgitating bullet points from Apple brochures isn't very interesting to the rest of us.
A security model that happens to be working about 100,000 times better than the OS that puts the user in charge of security.
Do you have a cite for that, or can you show your work? Because it sure sounds like you pulled the number 100,000 out of your ass. In substantial logic classes, you have to show your work, or you get a failing grade.
And.... it's very telling that you accuse somebody else of misplaced zealotry. We know how well placed YOUR zealotry is. Uh-huh. Yeah. You're boring and predictable, guy.
I think he was casting Apple and iOS as turd-like. Things that one finds repulsive in some way are not necessarily 'the enemy.' You spend waaaay too much time being a White Knight defending Princess Jobs, dude.
It is for any kind of drawing/graphics app. As it stands, on the multi-touch devices, you can only 'draw' or 'paint' with the resolution of a six year old with a box of crayons. Even if you buy a third party stylus, which do exist. They have a big spongy end like a crayon.
Granted, graphic apps are not something the Apple tablets are designed to do. But people like extensible features so they have more control over their gadgets. Apple clearly doesn't like that.
Back in the day, I could run Microsoft Word for MS-DOS on my old XT clone. If it was on a machine that didn't have a mouse driver installed, there was no mouse pointer on the screen.
Actually, you can still do this with modern Windows. There are keyboard shortcuts, including heavy use of the Tab key, that let you 'get around' without a pointer.
So a 'mouse' for an iOS device would cause a mouse pointer to emerge on the screen.
Yeah, we know. It would horrify some designer mincing around at Apple headquarters, so it ain't gonna happen.
Ah, cool. So every app can have it's own mouse driver.
I remember MS-DOS apps that worked that way....
When I was a kid, there was a pretty good sized woods at the end of the street. There was a pond in the woods, a raft on the pond, and parts of the woods were hilly. We could slide down the tall grass on the hills on cardboard in the summer and on sleds in the winter.
People put trash out on the curb on a certain day each week and there were often enough cool things like old radios or phonographs to haul home and dismember and re-use the parts for other things.
Phone? What the hell would I have wanted with a phone? Okay, they were okay to take apart. They had big induction coils in you could use for stuff.
It's good to know you concede on the over-priced and under-specced part.
You keep saying that over and over in this discussion.
I see you have Mac in your username. Maybe you should work on getting your boys inside the Reality Distortion Field of your cult to improve the JVM on your cult's platform.
Even back in the Mac Plus era, anybody who wanted their Mac to run reliably added a third party fan. And they were expensive. Really expensive, for just a shroud and a little AC muffin fan that pushed into the handle hole.
Jobs didn't think a fan was needed. He apparently worked in an air conditioned office.