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I think there's some truth to the parent post. A single PDA that merged the best features of both the Newton and the Palm could be really slick. While I'll assume that most people reading this are pretty familiar with the Palm and what it has to offer, I recognize that the Newton may be a bit more of a mystery. I blogged a bit about what the Newton has to offer in 2006 elsewhere and won't repeat it all here.

The Newton has actually been mentioned on various news sites a lot lately, due largely in part to the recent Worldwide Newton Conference but also because of recent advances like the Einstein project and the Newton book reader for Firefox.

I'm personally hoping that maybe some of its innovative user interface ideas get carried over into other projects. Obviously Apple's current Ink tablet handwriting recognition system is a direct port from the Newton. Less obviously perhaps is that its Dock removal animation is, too.

The person who wrote it, Thom Holwerda, is a managing editor at OSNews. Check out his biography for yourself. Putting his young age aside, he obviously lacks a solid background in IT and computer security. He apparently studied psychology and some form of linguistics at the university level. That's not the resume of somebody who is capable of writing a serious and informative article on computer security.

OSNews can be considered as one of the worst sites on the Internet, nearly as bad as GameFAQs.com.

Thomas Halwedra is a young'in with very little real world experience and any practical experience. They kid is in college and has a bunch of machines at home. I think he takes an extremely simplistic view of windows and unix security.

His 'OSNEWS' bio: http://www.osnews.com/editor.php?editors_id=11

I was doing systems programming on UNIX BSD 4.2 Tahoe when he was born. :-)

I am surprised that his article was even published/posted, I can't really even see his argument or what point is he trying to make. Oh that's right he's a 'managing editor' WTF?

Back to work.

Screenshots here:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13423
Interesting discussion here about how good Opera Mini really is or it is not:
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008770.htm l

So what's the problem? Create a meta "section" and don't post to the front page. Those who want to read the meta can visit the meta area. And Slash is already built for such an operation!

That's what we did over at OSNews and it's worked well. Those who are interested read it, and everyone else is unbothered.

• What Wold Microsoft Do (Editor's Blog)
• A Google OS by 2010 (Article)
• GooOS (Blog)
• The new 'G' o/s (Article)

I believe you can get the behavior you want with a third party utility; I don't feel a need for those features (and I use my powerbook constantly), but I can understand why their lack may be an annoyance.

From the Subscription FAQ:

Do I have to subscribe?

Of course not. Subscriptions are voluntary. You can even view tomorrow's Slashdot stories right now at OSNews. Want Karma? Find the good comments from the OSNews link, and paste them here at Slashdot when the story arrives.

Wrong. There was a whole fiasco with the gaim-vv and gaim 2.0 merge. In a nutshell, the guys working on gaim-vv submitted a big patchset, the lead gaim developer got hired by Google, and now, in a weird coincidence, the gaim-vv merge is cancelled to add Google Talk voice support instead.

> It is true that as a scripting language Python is slower than (byte)compiled languages. But it is slower
> by a constant factor.

Python is just as fast as c or java when it comes to io-intensive applications:
    http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602&page= 3
That code that cannot be optimized by Pycho is considerably slower, though the above benchmark exaggerates it through errors in their use of python.

My application processes over twenty million events a day through python - which includes transforming each event, and then applying a metadata-driven validation against each as well. The application is designed to handle a billion events a day. Performance is not a problem. Though at some point we might end up rewriting a few functions in c. We originally thought we would by 10 million events a day, but now realize that we should be fine until about 100 million a day.

And the benefits? Very low labor costs, quick time to market, easy maintenance, almost no data quality problems due to code defects. The small performance trade off has been an extremely good compromise in my experience.

Why oh why do people feel they need to say the same things everytime a discussion about Java starts up. Slow, memory hogging, swing sucks, etc, etc. These arguments simply are not true about modern JVM's

As for Swing's problems: not truly native look & feel (doesn't behave like other Windows/Mac apps),

I love to hear this argument. OK...can you show me what a native windows app should look like? Why don't we take a look at Microsoft Office. You will note that microsoft doesn't even use a consistent L&F between different versions of office. Please repeat after me...there is no such thing as a truly native look and feel. Apple now uses 4 different L&Fs for the applications they write. What is the native L&F on Linux (Motif, KDE, Gnome, etc...what theme?). Look, here's an article that discusses it: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10633 In Java, you can set the look and feel to be platform native. The problem is a lot of folks set there app to use the Java L&F (Metal) which does stand out and is down right butt-ugly. This is the developers choice, not a problem with Java.

terrible event model (bad queuing design - pretty much mandates a separate gui thread),

Can you explain to me what's wrong with Java's event queue? I do a great deal of swing programming and I find the event queue very simple to work with. Generally you can ignore it. If you have long running actions (such as long database transactions) you can fire them off in a seperate thread or use SwingWorker or Foxtrot http://foxtrot.sourceforge.net/docs/toc.php. If you don't understand the threading model, just say so, don't rag on it.

slow slow slow, memory hogging, even more increase in startup time.

Here's a few benchmarks:

• Since we're talking about Ruby..let's compare Ruby and Java -> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?te st=all&lang=javaclient&lang2=ruby..whoa Ruby got smoked!
• Let's look at a few numerical benchmarks: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602&page= 3. Java doesn't do to hot on the trig part here but on all other parts of the test it's comparible to C++.

I could go on, but for a serious GUI app (e.g. a desktop front-end to a web app) its performance is unacceptable and it is too buggy. In our testing, it was not very cross-platform either. We ended up having a fair amount of platform-specific code.

Them's fighting words!! ;-) Please oh please stop spreading such lies though. Look, I just wrote a database app that's used for annotating video data in real time. Not only is it plenty fast enough but it's cross-platform. There's no platform specific code in it what-so-ever.

p.s. Happy Holidays

Why oh why do people feel they need to say the same things everytime a discussion about Java starts up. Slow, memory hogging, swing sucks, etc, etc. These arguments simply are not true about modern JVM's

As for Swing's problems: not truly native look & feel (doesn't behave like other Windows/Mac apps),

I love to hear this argument. OK...can you show me what a native windows app should look like? Why don't we take a look at Microsoft Office. You will note that microsoft doesn't even use a consistent L&F between different versions of office. Please repeat after me...there is no such thing as a truly native look and feel. Apple now uses 4 different L&Fs for the applications they write. What is the native L&F on Linux (Motif, KDE, Gnome, etc...what theme?). Look, here's an article that discusses it: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=10633 In Java, you can set the look and feel to be platform native. The problem is a lot of folks set there app to use the Java L&F (Metal) which does stand out and is down right butt-ugly. This is the developers choice, not a problem with Java.

terrible event model (bad queuing design - pretty much mandates a separate gui thread),

Can you explain to me what's wrong with Java's event queue? I do a great deal of swing programming and I find the event queue very simple to work with. Generally you can ignore it. If you have long running actions (such as long database transactions) you can fire them off in a seperate thread or use SwingWorker or Foxtrot http://foxtrot.sourceforge.net/docs/toc.php. If you don't understand the threading model, just say so, don't rag on it.

slow slow slow, memory hogging, even more increase in startup time.

Here's a few benchmarks:

• Since we're talking about Ruby..let's compare Ruby and Java -> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?te st=all&lang=javaclient&lang2=ruby..whoa Ruby got smoked!
• Let's look at a few numerical benchmarks: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602&page= 3. Java doesn't do to hot on the trig part here but on all other parts of the test it's comparible to C++.

I could go on, but for a serious GUI app (e.g. a desktop front-end to a web app) its performance is unacceptable and it is too buggy. In our testing, it was not very cross-platform either. We ended up having a fair amount of platform-specific code.

Them's fighting words!! ;-) Please oh please stop spreading such lies though. Look, I just wrote a database app that's used for annotating video data in real time. Not only is it plenty fast enough but it's cross-platform. There's no platform specific code in it what-so-ever.

p.s. Happy Holidays

[..]Gaim-vv devs were all ready to merge into CVS HEAD, but Sean Egan changed all the hooks for voice and video without any notice, all so google's voice chat could be integrated[..]

This is taken SO BADLY out of context, to the point it could be considered FUD. The entire story ran on OSNews and both parties made their position clear, in public. There are even links to the actual discussion on the dev list. Here's the original piece and Sean Egan's response.

I wonder what it would take to make people happy, short of a miracle. Here we have a guy who has working code for voice, and he's willing to commit it even though he's working for Google now (which, incidentally, I think says something about whether he's any good or not). And he's not some alien as he's made out to appear, he's been a part of the Gaim team for quite a while, even wrote a Gaim book.

So he does it, and we'll have voice in Gaim ASAP. He even did it in such a manner so the switch to GStreamer can still be made later when it matures. What else do you want?

[..]Gaim-vv devs were all ready to merge into CVS HEAD, but Sean Egan changed all the hooks for voice and video without any notice, all so google's voice chat could be integrated[..]

This is taken SO BADLY out of context, to the point it could be considered FUD. The entire story ran on OSNews and both parties made their position clear, in public. There are even links to the actual discussion on the dev list. Here's the original piece and Sean Egan's response.

I wonder what it would take to make people happy, short of a miracle. Here we have a guy who has working code for voice, and he's willing to commit it even though he's working for Google now (which, incidentally, I think says something about whether he's any good or not). And he's not some alien as he's made out to appear, he's been a part of the Gaim team for quite a while, even wrote a Gaim book.

So he does it, and we'll have voice in Gaim ASAP. He even did it in such a manner so the switch to GStreamer can still be made later when it matures. What else do you want?

The POSIX subsytem in Windows is now called Interix. Some people disagree with your conclusion that the subsytem is a sham.

Maybe you just made the method call incorrectly.

Despite the claim that Java is So 90's, IBM, RedHat and Novell continues to pledge their commitment to J2EE and the Java community. Also, Java has recently overtaken C++ as the most popular language on Sourceforge. Also, every Blu-ray unit will come with a JVM, and menues and other content will be created with J2ME, and it seems like Blu-ray is winning the next gen DVD war.

You spread onto all sorts of hardware, so it's not like anyone could write a decent operating system for them and compete.

Yes, I know my karma is going to suffer immensely for this, but it must be said. Linux spreads and spreads and spreads to all different sorts of hardware, but when are they going to slow down and open up space for other operating systems?

Why New Operating Systems Won't Stand a Chance

Something really should change, and it would be rather nice if Linux could stop spreading itself onto every last piece of hardware in the world.

I can't take this seriously after Java has recently taken over from C++ as the most popular language on sourceforge:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12778

Java is a popular and versatile language. Software development involves far more than the very restricted aspects covered by LAMP.

this guy evidently posts this everywhere:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12813& comment_id=67157
mod troll, please.

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12813& comment_id=66297

Now Java's a total winner today on OSTG. Check this day

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12778

Further arguments: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12685

Read it here

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12551

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602

why?

seriously.

Too late, we already won.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12414

Everyone--please see Digg.com where YOU vote for the stories. You actually get real news and info there, right when it happens.

I agree with you. I have started to read OSNews. I have a Slashdot RSS feedback and a OSSNews setup on my netvibes.com page and I have seen that usually all the news that I care for get on OSSnews before they get n slashdot. And there are also comments on OSSnews but without the 14 year old trolls.

you forgot Osnews on your list, I am just waiting for the /. post of the Corel & ODF story :)

Some of these questions are answered here, in an editorial posted last night.

this is the best response i have seen to this situation

http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=12310& comment_id=47546

Yes. It is an American internet.

There are times when nostalgia gets in the way of a person's sight. It IS our baby, but it's all grown up now.

I don't have any particular problem with the status quo. I also generally agree with Bush. In this case I think their view on this is short-sighted and rather silly.

Conversely, the rest of the world is acting like having control over the internet is their *right*, which it is not. If we reliquish control (which I am _not_ arguing against), then everyone else need to realize that *we* are relinquishing control over something that was *ours*.

...HaikuOS has a paid developer for a few weeks.

Axel's development blog is available, as is the story on OSNews where I found the link.

Apparently, Haiku should have a bootable CD image soon.

"How is it being used for icons? Is there a window manager that uses it or is it being used as a file type in graphics editing?"

Gnome 2.4 ->

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/gnome2.4.ars/3

ZetaOS 1.0->

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=11251&page =1

But why do the always call their DVD isos something with "eval" ? I mean it sounds a bit like "evaluation copy"?
Because it is meant as an 'evaluation' meaning you can try it, but without official support from SuSE, and no guarantees.

http://www.osnews.com/read_thread.php?news_id=1213 4&comment_id=40933

be aware that thats great in europe where software patents don't apply yet but for the americas mono is a can of worms. see:

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=11889&comm ent_id=32499 [osnews.com]

"1. It is not illegal to use mono or to develop mono.
2. C#/.net libraries are ECMA standards

However,

1. Microsoft has the right to charge a RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) fee at any time for the use of these standards.
2. They have never, ever, stated in any binding way that they would not do so in the future.
3. *any* fee, even minimal would result in the instant death of any OSS project dependent on those standards.
4. RAND can (and frequently does in the proprietary software world) mean several dollars per download! Or requiring build licenses for all developers producing binaries (every end user of gentoo for example!) that are in the hundreds of $ range. These are all reasonable and non-descriminatory in that context!

Miguel De Icasa and Ximian/Mono people *know* this full well but don't want to admit how dangerous mono adoption is for the gnome community. They cite a BS casual mailing list post from the head engineer of .net as their claim that MS will never sue.

See how much crap this is for yourself (from official Mono faq):

http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://m ailserver.di.unip [archive.org].....
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents [go-mono.com]

Jim Miller's off hand email is the *only* assurance anyone has every received that MS would never charge a RAND fee! If this were truly MS's commitment then they could release a statement or legally commit themselves to that! This email is not not not legally binding people! Until MS makes a legally binding agreement to never charge for use of these standards, it is not ok to use mono!

See also Seth Nickels' blog on this subject "Why Mono is currently an unnacceptable risk":

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2004/May [gnome.org]

The two main arguments against what I'm saying are realy crap also:

1. Java is also proprietary: Yes but Sun has licensed Java in such a way that they are legally prohibited from charging *any* royalties at all for existing releases of Java. We know with 100% certainty that Sun will never try and collect any RAND fee. Ever. The situation with Java is totally different for this reason.
2. You are always infringing somewhere, worrying about this is wasting your time: True, there is always a danger of unknowingly infringing. However, in this case mono is knowingly using patented software. If MS decided to collect or sue, mono and gnome would have absolutely zero defense! Furthermore, MS is well known for destroying threatening companies when it suits them to do so! They have done this many times in the past. Remeber how they *lost* an anti-trust lawsuit? It is because they are agressive, unscrupulous and incredibly rich. They can and will crush gnome if gnome threatens MS! Mono is the ultimate submarine. We build it, integrate it so gnome can't live without it, then they kill gnome by charging for builds. Bam. Gnome is dead on that day.

Take Away: Mono is cool but way too dangerous. Smart people and companies are staying away from it (which turns out to be *most* companies bye the way. That is why Redhat and others are pushing Java as an alternative). People who back mono either have motive (ximian), are misinformed (most of the people on this forum), or just dumb (people who are really drooling over the potential of mono so they are ignoring the risk, probably ximian and some gnome developers again)"

Some companies, such as Google, use code covered by GPL to offer their services through the Web. Do you plan to extend GPL 3 copyleft to request code publication in this case too, considering this behavior like a product distribution?

Running a program in a public server is not distribution; it is public use. We're looking at an approach where programs used in this way will have to include a command for the user to download the source for the version that is running.

But this will not apply to all GPL-covered programs, only to programs that already contain such a command. Thus, this change would have no effect on existing software, but developers could activate it in the future.

This is only a tentative plan, because we have not finished studying the matter to be sure it will work.

How would it work?

If you release a program that implements such a command, GPL 3 will require others to keep the command working in their modified versions of the program.

The article is completely slashdotted. Even the coral caches of the second and third pages don't work.


You should have read it on OSNEWS when it was posted a full week ago.

The article is completely slashdotted. Even the coral caches of the second and third pages don't work.


You should have read it on OSNEWS when it was posted a full week ago.

Holy Smokes BATMAN! its A DUPE OF A COMMEND IN A DUPE OF AN ARTICLE. wOw!




this stinks... check out http://www.osnews.com/

It was lindows that I was thinking of, not Xandros. Just so that you know, Lindows basically logs in as root by default. You have to go out of your way to create individual accounts. I am guessing that when you did Xandros, it did root password and then insisted on at least one user account (same as in SUSE, Redhat, Mandrake, etc). Sorry again. These days, I stay with more of the major lines rather than the minor distros.

Perhaps you need to pick up a dictionary and look up the term "DUPLICATE". You might be amazed at what you find. Sure, there has been alot of coverage on /. of Zeta, but no duplicates of this story. You posted articles with links to OSNews and NewsForge. The current Slashdot posting is linked to Mad Penguin. See what I'm getting at here? If you RTFA on any of them you'd know enough to realize none of them are dupes of the others. Enough said.

"Nonsense. Mono is quite clean of Microsoft intellectual "property". There is no legal threat to the Mono project."

*said by a Novell representative* Oh, wait!

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=11889&comm ent_id=32499

"1. It is not illegal to use mono or to develop mono.
2. C#/.net libraries are ECMA standards

However,

1. Microsoft has the right to charge a RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) fee at any time for the use of these standards.
2. They have never, ever, stated in any binding way that they would not do so in the future.
3. *any* fee, even minimal would result in the instant death of any OSS project dependent on those standards.
4. RAND can (and frequently does in the proprietary software world) mean several dollars per download! Or requiring build licenses for all developers producing binaries (every end user of gentoo for example!) that are in the hundreds of $ range. These are all reasonable and non-descriminatory in that context!

Miguel De Icasa and Ximian/Mono people *know* this full well but don't want to admit how dangerous mono adoption is for the gnome community. They cite a BS casual mailing list post from the head engineer of .net as their claim that MS will never sue.

See how much crap this is for yourself (from official Mono faq):

http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://m ailserver.di.unip.....
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents

Jim Miller's off hand email is the *only* assurance anyone has every received that MS would never charge a RAND fee! If this were truly MS's commitment then they could release a statement or legally commit themselves to that! This email is not not not legally binding people! Until MS makes a legally binding agreement to never charge for use of these standards, it is not ok to use mono!

See also Seth Nickels' blog on this subject "Why Mono is currently an unnacceptable risk":

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2004/May

The two main arguments against what I'm saying are realy crap also:

1. Java is also proprietary: Yes but Sun has licensed Java in such a way that they are legally prohibited from charging *any* royalties at all for existing releases of Java. We know with 100% certainty that Sun will never try and collect any RAND fee. Ever. The situation with Java is totally different for this reason.
2. You are always infringing somewhere, worrying about this is wasting your time: True, there is always a danger of unknowingly infringing. However, in this case mono is knowingly using patented software. If MS decided to collect or sue, mono and gnome would have absolutely zero defense! Furthermore, MS is well known for destroying threatening companies when it suits them to do so! They have done this many times in the past. Remeber how they *lost* an anti-trust lawsuit? It is because they are agressive, unscrupulous and incredibly rich. They can and will crush gnome if gnome threatens MS! Mono is the ultimate submarine. We build it, integrate it so gnome can't live without it, then they kill gnome by charging for builds. Bam. Gnome is dead on that day.

Take Away: Mono is cool but way too dangerous. Smart people and companies are staying away from it (which turns out to be *most* companies bye the way. That is why Redhat and others are pushing Java as an alternative). People who back mono either have motive (ximian), are misinformed (most of the people on this forum), or just dumb (people who are really drooling over the potential of mono so they are ignoring the risk, probably ximian and some gnome developers again)"

I don't know if this makes you feel better or worse about the editors, but it looks to me like the summary was simply plagiarized from osnews.

Same old GNU/Linux FUD, that has been disproved countless times..
In short: the MIT research is *11 years old*, and that Rice study on the TCP/IP stack uses FreeBSD *2.2.6*.

(And btw, Eric Raymond advocates BSD license over GPL.) :)

The "5.8GHz" refers to analog circuitry that oscillates at that rate to generate an analog signal for propagation in the air or other media. This is very different from clock rates in digital circuits, where millions of transistors organized into chains of combinatorial circuits (logic AND, OR, etc.) which process digital (1 and 0, if you will) signals before their outputs are captured by memory (sequential, or storage elements) all of which are activated by a synchronous clock. There are no transistors that are fast enough to do any significant number of logical operations between clock edges of a 5.8GHz clock (~172 picoseconds, or 1.72413793 × 10^-10 seconds).

The more transistors shrink and the lower their operating voltage gets, the faster they get, but the lower the noise margin and greater the chance for error (failure to properly distinguish a 1 from a 0.) But, even with the lower voltage, shrinking the transistors and packing more into smaller spaces creates heat dissipation problems. This, and managing design complexity, are the motivation for multiple cores. Not sure what you were trying to get at, but I am sure it was painfully wrong.

The first quantum computer will not be the last processor anyone ever needs any more than 640kB is "enough for anyone."

I hope you are not suggesting that nuclear bombs violate the laws of physics, because they do not, but I would not really be surprised given the rest of your post.

In conclusion: be surprised if this happens any time soon. Oh, and please, stick to programming very high-level languages, and only those with good compilers.

Keep a healthy skepticism,

Yeah, that's it. The price is too high. There's nothing else fish.

Nothing at all.

That's the only thing that makes you wonder, eh? Nothing else seemed odd?

Huh. I suppose with the editorial staff so goes the readership. What am I still doing here?

Did you really not instantly see that this is a joke?

The suckers falling for this and offering to spare us all from being mislead and providing their serious doubts about the truthfulness of the specifications are almost as funny as the AtomChip(TM) laptop itself.

Here's a link to the OSNews discussion itself:

http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11784

Read the debunking for yourself.

The general consensus at OSNews is that this is a fraud and a complete lie.

http://osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=11784

Some people have pointed out some interesting discrepancies in the images and so forth.

OSNews has posted an article describing a laptop with a 6.8 GHz laptop processor and over 1 TB of RAM and solid-state storage.

If combined with this hydrogen-based technology, we could be on the very edge of a massive breakthrough in computing power. Imagine a laptop that could run for years, literally, on several of these hydrogen pellets. Now imagine a laptop with the specs of the aforementioned laptop. Such a system would be, to put it bluntly, a revolution on personal computing.

Now let's bring it to the desktop. Suppose you fit four, or even eight, of the processors capable of 6.8 GHz into a typical PC desktop. Power it with these hydrogen pellets, removing any dependency on the power grid (potentially reducing costs magnificently). You'll basically be bringing the power of supercomputing to all computer owners.

When you consider what a company like Apple, or the Linux and *BSD projects, can accomplish today with our meager (in comparison) systems, it would be absolutely fantastic to see what they could achieve with such vast amounts of processing power and RAM.