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Amazon Launches Full Text Book Search
m00nun1t writes "Amazon have launched a new service that allows you to search the full text of books. This sounds like an incredibly useful function as well as technically impressive at this scale. I wonder if a patent is in the works." Or if a patent is already owned.
I downloaded the QNX 6.2.1 ISO, burnt a CD, and installed onto my hard drive. This was after erasing an old Windows 2000/Linux dual-boot install. Things went smoothly, and I was easily able to connect to the Internet for updates to various packages. I was really impressed at this point.
After a couple days of playing with it, however, I was boggled at how much like Windows the system acted. Here I was with a 1 GHz processor (the minimum required is 600 MHz) and 1 gigabyte of RAM and Photon, the GUI, was lagging. If I have a few programs open and an MP3 playing in the background, I can watch widgets redraw. Tweaking some options helped a little, but this is not in line with what I have read about QNX performance.
Isn't this supposed to be a hard realtime operating system that runs on medical devices meant to save peoples' lives? How is it that it runs on 33 MHz processors with 128k of RAM in an IV drip yet skips MP3s on a system 100x beefier in every way imagineable? Do they release a different version for free that doesn't try for realtime performance or what?
After less than a full month I've grown dissatisfied with something I'd hoped I could replace my Windows and Linux installs with for leisure and hobbyist purposes. My main system is a dual 3 GHz Pentium4 box with 4 gigs of RAM, but that's a DV workstation and I can't use it just to see how QNX scales with more robust hardware and a dual processor configuration. Something tells me it might not, though.
Can anyone offer me any insights? I realize that this is a free operating system and that I have little room to bitch, but I want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing before I discount QNX altogether and go back to Windows or Linux, which while performing slugglishly are more familiar to me.
Thank you.
A higher score?!? Let me try...NO CARRI(+5, funny)
Amateurs.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Amateurs.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Hemos: When you tell people that you're an "editor", do they really take you seriously ?
The post's headline proclaims, "Amazon Launchs (sic) Full Text Book Search".
Why not just fix it by placing the missing 'e' in 'launches'?
I'm sure it niggles others... It is no harder to be correct.
They are just testing the 'recent discovery' that people have no problems reading even misspelled words, as long as the first and last letters are the correct ones.
Simpy
Many people, myself included, download movies. Very few people owning what is called 'a life' would rather download a crappy DivX rip of a movie off Usenet than rent it at Blockbuster's.