They wanted to improve 3270 terminal handling.

I read the headline and my first thought was "wait...the company that wrote Extra? They're still around?" Then all those nightmares of HLLAPI programing came back and I sat under my desk and cried.

...and watch me through the window as I play Crazy Taxi and Jet Set (Grind) Radio on my Dreamcast. After that, I'm going to bring it down a little with some Shenmue.

Sigh, even if I'm modded down to oblivion, I've got to say it: the Dreamcast was probably the best console ever created, in terms of graphics quality (Soul Calibur just like it played in the arcade!), awesome games (see above, plus Marvel vs Capcom), and experimental "what were you smoking when you came up with that???" games (Pen Pen Trilcelon, Seaman, Space Chanel 5). It was the console that really breached the chasm between the old school Nintendo-era sprite games and the $50 million mega sequels of today. It was the last console where big publishers could take a risk insofar as they were going to have to actually put it on a disc and sell it in the stores, as opposed to just downloading it to the console today. Plus not only did it have the modem/nic attachment, it also had those mini games that doubled as memory carts. I remember playing Tetris on one waiting for the train.

From the description above, it sounds like going home to discover main street's all boarded up and tumble weeds roll down the sidewalk. Sigh...you can't go home again, even with video games.

Oh, wait, yes you can....I'll just fire up my Dreamcast!

The Beatles on iTMS is a great example of holding out too long for some unknown reason; as others have said, anyone who wanted Beatles music on their ripped it long ago from the CDs they waited in line to buy because "the Beatles records are now available on CD!!!!!!!"

From everything I've heard, it was EMI and the Beatles themselves who apparently either saw no need to have their music available for download, or wanted some insane amount of money that it made it a non-starter. This was probably one of the rare moments where Steve Jobs was chasing *them* to do a deal, and they still held off.

I fired up iTunes and looked through the albums, mentally checking off the tunes I've been listening to for years on my computer from ripping them from my CDs, and I realize I have no need to purchase anything. Thanks guys, day late and a dollar short.

Check out the geek atlas. There's a lot of places that are very heavy on the geek factor, plus generally interesting to see.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

I think you're right; the tech world is full of weirdness right now. Everyone was familiar with the whole "windows on the desktop, unix on server, mac for graphics" paradigms, but with the rise of the smart phones, cloud, social-media-everything, it really is a new world, but not new enough that you can't read the billboards.

Awesome times if you embrace the weirdness; people who hold fast to the way it used to be will ....HEY GET OFF MY LAWN!

He's a ninja.

Or, at least, he can afford to hire a bunch of them.

I really wish I still had all my green-bar output from the decwriter I used to play adventure, tic-tac-toe, and even Star Trek. I think one game of that generated more than 100 pages (and took about 8 hours to play).

More than that, I can't for the life of me remember how exactly I *got* to the games, being a little kid; I remember it was a PDP-something, but no idea what the OS was.

Regardless, this looks like an awesome hack and makes me wish I'd kept that old IBM Selectric I had for years and years....it hadn't even occurred to me to do something like this (much to my dismay), even though that *was* the interface to a system like the IBM 7090 or somesuch.

I read TFA and it seems more focused on the excitement that the bees can solve the TSP, but the researchers never seem to indicate how the bees are doing it, and given the nature of the problem, how do they know it really is the "optimum" solution. Based on my limited work with the TSP, the only algorithm that, for my purposes, has worked the best is Nearest Neighbor, which is also, I believe, the simplest but also most naive.

Would be interesting to know what the bees' algorithm is.

On a Mac running OSX, click the apple menu and there is an item called "Mac OS X software..." which launches the browser and brings you to essentially as what's been described as the Apple store. You can buy software, download trials, etc. Sure it's not the same as the App Store way of doing things, but it's not like the Mac didn't have a similar concept.

As far as installing stuff, I personally am not worried because the Mac is meant to be a general purpose tool that, since it has a command-line interface as part of the base OS, you have a guaranteed way to get into the guts of the OS and do all sorts of nice things.

If they announce that the terminal would not be an app available on the Mac, and that software can only be developed with "development" machines, then yes, I'm hanging it up and switching to a straight Linux machine. Until then, the Mac is still my choice for developing Unix software, as well as anything else I darn well please.

ZFS had some licensing issues, but that was under Sun. Now that Sun == Oracle, and Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are friends, apparently, maybe a deal can be reached.

I like the versioning filesystem, and I like the idea that you have to use sysadmin-level commands to allow a program to listen on a particular port (along with being able to hard-limit how many connections the app will handle). The built-in clustering is also pretty awesome, considering how long it's been available. Having a unified help system is also pretty slick too.

That said, Unix presents the user with a filesystem tree that is entirely directory-based; no need to worry about the underlying disks themselves. Maybe it's just the local admins, but whenever they replace a disk, for some reason it can't be named the same thing as the previous one, so I have to go in and fix my com jobs (luckily not very often).

And this may seem petty, but it bites me far more often than it should, but why does the system allow me to set def ("cd" in Unix/Windows parlance) into a non-existant directory? That is the one huge aspect that I have never ever understood.

I used Lotus Notes for many years, starting with version 3, and I got the impression that there was some sort of philosophy behind it, but I just couldn't figure out what it was; I admit I got tangled up in the interface. A good friend of mine was a Lotus Notes admin, and while I believe he "got it", the hoops the interface made him go through to do various tasks (backing up a database by copy-n-paste because it was the only "reliable" way?) negated whatever deeper benefits the platform provided.

Ultimately it comes down to execution; the web has its shortcomings, but it's simple enough that people "get it" and can use it effectively. Being relatively simple and text-based, it encourages experimentation without needing to worry that the underlying database can somehow can be corrupted or external links permanently invalidated. It doesn't hurt either the the web itself is basically "free", while Notes was (is still?) quite expensive.

I don't want to get all Godwin here, but I think a decent analogy is that Notes is a Tiger tank; sophisticated and extremely powerful, but ultimately done in by the cheap and plentiful Sherman. It doesn't mean that the Tiger wasn't better than the Sherman, it's just that the Sherman won by sheer volume.

Ozzie may be a brilliant guy, with an IQ of 100!, but if he can't execute his ideas in a way that people nowhere near as smart (say, 2!) as him can use, what's the point? History is littered with people who had brilliant ideas but are forgotten because they botched the execution. Having used both Notes and Groove (as I understand it the only other actual piece of software Ozzie actually worked on), he took a serious leap forward, just down the wrong evolutionary path.

He's stepping down to spend more time with his baby, Lotus Notes.