WinCE also runs on MIPS and SH3/SH4 processors -- the majority of the PDAs (for lack of a better term) use these processors. If you see WinCE running on an x86, chances are it's under the emulation environment that ships with the WinCE toolkit. I can't remember seeing a PDA with an x86 chip inside....
I'm also not sure where the licensing fees come into play. I do a bit of development under WinCE in my spare time, and I only had to pay for the CE toolkit (under $200, iirc). For a company planning on developing WinCE apps that's not much of a hurdle.
I remember when they installed ethernet in the residences here at Waterloo -- for the first couple of months the top five computers in terms of bandwidth usage were all machines in the dorms. Then the admins clamped bandwidth usage to ~200MB/day. You can do whatever you want with the bandwidth, but once you're over the limit, that's it for the day. You could still communicate with other university machines (i.e., anything in uwaterloo.ca), but not to the outside world.
Not a bad solution, since you're welcome to do whatever you want with the bandwidth, but since you have a cap, you're not going to interfere with other users of the network.
I read (ok, scanned) the article, and I couldn't really see what RedHat was giving the schools that isn't already available for free. From the sounds of it, they're just supplying the schools with the operating system, but not giving them anything that they usually charge for (namely support). There was mention of documentation, but is it printed documentation?
More than anything it sounds like a case of RedHat getting some free publicity by sounding like they're doing something generous when in reality they're doing something that they normally do anyway.
I'm finishing off my last year here at U. Waterloo, and most of the residences here have ethernet connections in each room[1]. For those not living in a wired residence (be it another residence or off-campus), there's @Home and Sympatico HSE (ADSL), both of which are about CDN$40 a month. Not bad at all.
For other universities, I'm not sure what the situation is like. I know both Guelph and Carleton have wired residences, but I've not heard about the situation from other schools.
[1] As a side note, when the connections were first introduced the external pipe was swamped -- now you're only allowed ~25MB of external traffic a day. Generally not too bad (I liked the connections for the 24/7 uptime, not the bandwidth), but download anything like a service pack and you're hosed).
True, you do lose out on syntax highlighting, but you gain an incredible advantage -- #ifdef 0 / #endif pairs can be nested, while/* */ cannot be nested.
If you are having problems seeing what's in an #ifdef 0 / #endif pair you can append comments to the #ifdef and #endif so it's easier to tell where the beginning and ending of each block is.
Oh, and they're not pragma statements, they're pre-processor statements.
I think the real problem is that our societ has defined childhood as ending at an absurdly high age (18 or 21). In most past societies, childhood ended at around 14.
Things were also a lot different in past societies. Children were expected to help their parents out in the fields when they were (at most) 10, and women were expected to have children when they were 14 as well. Children had a lot more responsibility back then, and a lot more was expected of them as well, so I'm not too surprised that one became an adult at an earlier age.
These days, not much is expected of children (other than, say, doing well in school). Whether or not this is a good thing I don't know, but I do know that it was nice to have a childhood.
Let me get this straight? "when I have to boot to Win9x in order to play a game" Ah, when exactly do you HAVE to play a game?
I don't have to play games, I just have to boot to Win9x when I want to play a game. I'm not that much of a gamer, but it is nice to have a quick game of Half-Life when I want a break from whatever I'm working on.
Remember, life is more than just work -- you're allowed to have fun, too.
Whether or not an operating system is multi-user does not affect whether or not a user program can access hardware directly (although the idea of a multi-user system with direct hardware access is pretty daft). Win9x is practically a single-user operating system, yet you cannot directly access hardware as a user program in Win9x[1]. The same goes for BeOS -- single user, yet direct hardware access isn't allowed in user programs
As for whether Linux needs games, it's nice not to have to reboot your computer in order to play a game. I generally have a lot of state on my desktop that I regret losing when I have to boot to Win9x in order to play a game.
As for Mesa, every game out there won't benefit from Mesa, since it's an OpenGL replacement, and yes there are games out there that aren't 3D. Strange but true.
The main problem with running games under Windows NT has been the lack of DirectX support (NT 4.0 SP3+ only has DX3.0, and D3D is not hardware accelerated). As a result, a lot of games check to see whether or not they're running under Win9x, and if they're not, abort the installation. This is what BZII does, and it is possible to convince it that it's running under Win9x through the use of a utility (the name of which I forget).
Mind you, there are cases where a Win9x game won't work under Win2K, and there are cases where a WinNT game won't work under Win2K, too.
As for OpenGL support, it's there in Win2K (the version that is shipping), but there won't be any hardware support bundled on the CD -- if you want that you'll have to get the drivers yourself -- not too different from the current situation. As a plus, WinNT drivers, for the most part, will work under Win2K.
No POSIX, eh? I can understand most of the mods, but to me it seems like the machine pretty much becomes a dumb terminal after all of this.
You've got to remember that POSIX isn't that useful under WinNT. Only the most basic POSIX standard is implemented (1003.1, I think), and any program that uses POSIX can't use any other subsystem (Win32, OS/2, etc). In other words, POSIX isn't very useful under WinNT and is mainly limited to command line programs. No networking, either. Disabling it won't result in a large loss of functionality to the OS.
It is possible to extend the POSIX subsystem by getting a package like OpenNT, but I doubt many people do that....
As far as I know, you cannot patent something that has already been published. I believe it falls under the idea of "prior art" or something like that. Of course, given the state of the patent office today, they'd probably let you do it anyway. The trick would come up when you're trying to enforce the patent.
What I've found (in my somewhat limited experience) is that it's not the processor that's slow with a WinCE device, but rather the screen. The colour WinCE devices that have come out feel so much more responsive than the greyscale devices and the only real difference is the screen.
Still, I guess it doesn't matter why a device feels sluggish since it feels sluggish....
I did my first Linux installation in over two years a couple of weeks ago, and I must admit things have improved to a point where I was able to get most stuff working fairly well. It was faster than a WinNT 4.0 install, too. There are still a couple of things that I found a wee bit arcane, though:
Setting up X: It's fairly simple to get X up and running, but it's hard (as far as I can tell) to tweak it to run well. I'm still running at 60Hz, and it's painful. Modeline calculations scare me. Under Windows it's just a couple of clicks away from the Control Panel.
Setting up Sound: As far as I can tell, this requires a kernel recompile. With Windows9x, the OS installs the drivers for you. With WinNT, you have to do a bit of hunting, but otherwise it's still fairly straightforward. To me, this seems easier than rebuilding your kernel, and I've a funny feeling the average user would agree with me.
Mounting Drives: I need to mount my cdrom in order to use it? This I found confusing.
Overall, I'm impressed with how far Linux has come in the past two years, but after a weekend of fiddling there are still some faults apparent. I'm sure I'll find more as I keep fiddling with Linux in my spare time (the various package mechanisms worry me), but it is getting better. I just don't agree it's as easy as Windows (overall).
3. A month to a month and a half on 2 AAA batteries.
I've had my Nino for over six months now and I've not yet had to replace the batteries. Every time I drop it in the cradle it gets recharged. I've no idea how long it can go before it needs to be recharged, but I've had it out for a week of fairly regular use with no problems.
My WinCE Palm PC came with four different input methods -- handwriting recognition, an on-screen keyboard, an on-screen probabilistic keyboard (it's really weird), and a Graffiti clone (Jot Character Recognizer). I end up using Jot most of the time, and I've actually found it faster than the Graffiti found on the Palms. I'll touch the keyboard occasionally when I can't remember the appropriate symbols, too. I tried working with the handwriting recognition -- while it's not bad, it's only about 90% accurate if you're careful and you have to train it.
(Note that you needn't have all four methods in RAM at once, so you don't have to worry about an increased footprint. You do have a bigger ROM, though, but that's not really a problem)
It's cool that there will finally be a colour version of the PalmPilot out, but there have been colour version of various WinCE Palm PCs out for a while now, with far more colours to boot (65K vs. 256). Plus, the innards of a WinCE device tend to be more impressive (32 bit processor over 75mHz vs 16(?) at less than 33mHz), and the WinCE devices tend to have more memory, too (no, WinCE doesn't use all of it, either).
The only two advantages I see Palms having now are:
Form factor: PalmPilots are small. I can fit one fairly easily in my pocket. Even the Palm-sized WinCE devices are a bit too big to do that comfortably (is that a Nino in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?)
Sync OS: PalmPilots sync with more operating systems than WinCE devices do (Linux, Win32, Mac vs Win32). May or may not be an issue, but I've a funny feeling it's a drawback for most people here.
What's rather interesting is that Ottawa Life recently did an article on Frank -- apparently Cowpland likes the attention. He claims that it's not nearly as bad as the press in England (where he grew up) and has also provided Frank with computer hardware and software over the years (e.g., CD ROM drives back when they were rare and expensive).
As for something more on-topic, I've no idea whether or not Cowpland is guilty or not, but he seems like a nice guy, although I disagree with the way he runs Corel (and I've seen it up close since I worked there for a while).
This would be OK, _IFF_ there was any form of document compatibility between versions.
The file format didn't change from Office 97 to Office 2000, and after the fiasco with Office 95 to Office 97, I'll be surprised if it changes again in the near future:)
As one of the members of the Microsoft team, part of the reason might be because a lot of the people I know running the client are running it on their "test box", usually a P133 or something in that neighbourhood, since that's the box that gets the least use. I'd install it on my dev box, too, but I've found it's a bit disruptive at times. *sigh*
Saihttam mentions that SMP and RAID are not well-supported in Linux. I'm wondering if this is an issue with OSS. Since most developers don't have access to high-end hardware, does this mean that features found in high-end hardware won't be as well-supported as those found in most consumer-based hardware?
I can understand if you're frustrated that college graduates can't write a routine to print a number in octal, but if you're only allowing them to use printf, that's insane. College isn't a place where a student should learn all the useless minutae of various languages -- that's what reference manuals are for. College is more about theory than "practical knowledge", and I doubt knowing how to use printf to print octal numbers even counts as "practical".
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WinCE also runs on MIPS and SH3/SH4 processors -- the majority of the PDAs (for lack of a better term) use these processors. If you see WinCE running on an x86, chances are it's under the emulation environment that ships with the WinCE toolkit. I can't remember seeing a PDA with an x86 chip inside....
I'm also not sure where the licensing fees come into play. I do a bit of development under WinCE in my spare time, and I only had to pay for the CE toolkit (under $200, iirc). For a company planning on developing WinCE apps that's not much of a hurdle.
Just my 2 cents, as always.
I remember when they installed ethernet in the residences here at Waterloo -- for the first couple of months the top five computers in terms of bandwidth usage were all machines in the dorms. Then the admins clamped bandwidth usage to ~200MB/day. You can do whatever you want with the bandwidth, but once you're over the limit, that's it for the day. You could still communicate with other university machines (i.e., anything in uwaterloo.ca), but not to the outside world.
Not a bad solution, since you're welcome to do whatever you want with the bandwidth, but since you have a cap, you're not going to interfere with other users of the network.
I read (ok, scanned) the article, and I couldn't really see what RedHat was giving the schools that isn't already available for free. From the sounds of it, they're just supplying the schools with the operating system, but not giving them anything that they usually charge for (namely support). There was mention of documentation, but is it printed documentation?
More than anything it sounds like a case of RedHat getting some free publicity by sounding like they're doing something generous when in reality they're doing something that they normally do anyway.
I'm finishing off my last year here at U. Waterloo, and most of the residences here have ethernet connections in each room[1]. For those not living in a wired residence (be it another residence or off-campus), there's @Home and Sympatico HSE (ADSL), both of which are about CDN$40 a month. Not bad at all.
For other universities, I'm not sure what the situation is like. I know both Guelph and Carleton have wired residences, but I've not heard about the situation from other schools.
[1] As a side note, when the connections were first introduced the external pipe was swamped -- now you're only allowed ~25MB of external traffic a day. Generally not too bad (I liked the connections for the 24/7 uptime, not the bandwidth), but download anything like a service pack and you're hosed).
True, you do lose out on syntax highlighting, but you gain an incredible advantage -- #ifdef 0 / #endif pairs can be nested, while /* */ cannot be nested.
If you are having problems seeing what's in an #ifdef 0 / #endif pair you can append comments to the #ifdef and #endif so it's easier to tell where the beginning and ending of each block is.
Oh, and they're not pragma statements, they're pre-processor statements.
I think the real problem is that our societ has defined childhood as ending at an absurdly high age (18 or 21). In most past societies, childhood ended at around 14.
Things were also a lot different in past societies. Children were expected to help their parents out in the fields when they were (at most) 10, and women were expected to have children when they were 14 as well. Children had a lot more responsibility back then, and a lot more was expected of them as well, so I'm not too surprised that one became an adult at an earlier age.
These days, not much is expected of children (other than, say, doing well in school). Whether or not this is a good thing I don't know, but I do know that it was nice to have a childhood.
Let me get this straight?
"when I have to boot to Win9x in order to play a game"
Ah, when exactly do you HAVE to play a game?
I don't have to play games, I just have to boot to Win9x when I want to play a game. I'm not that much of a gamer, but it is nice to have a quick game of Half-Life when I want a break from whatever I'm working on.
Remember, life is more than just work -- you're allowed to have fun, too.
Whether or not an operating system is multi-user does not affect whether or not a user program can access hardware directly (although the idea of a multi-user system with direct hardware access is pretty daft). Win9x is practically a single-user operating system, yet you cannot directly access hardware as a user program in Win9x[1]. The same goes for BeOS -- single user, yet direct hardware access isn't allowed in user programs
As for whether Linux needs games, it's nice not to have to reboot your computer in order to play a game. I generally have a lot of state on my desktop that I regret losing when I have to boot to Win9x in order to play a game.
As for Mesa, every game out there won't benefit from Mesa, since it's an OpenGL replacement, and yes there are games out there that aren't 3D. Strange but true.
The main problem with running games under Windows NT has been the lack of DirectX support (NT 4.0 SP3+ only has DX3.0, and D3D is not hardware accelerated). As a result, a lot of games check to see whether or not they're running under Win9x, and if they're not, abort the installation. This is what BZII does, and it is possible to convince it that it's running under Win9x through the use of a utility (the name of which I forget).
Mind you, there are cases where a Win9x game won't work under Win2K, and there are cases where a WinNT game won't work under Win2K, too.
As for OpenGL support, it's there in Win2K (the version that is shipping), but there won't be any hardware support bundled on the CD -- if you want that you'll have to get the drivers yourself -- not too different from the current situation. As a plus, WinNT drivers, for the most part, will work under Win2K.
No POSIX, eh? I can understand most of the mods, but to me it seems like the machine pretty much becomes a dumb terminal after all of this.
You've got to remember that POSIX isn't that useful under WinNT. Only the most basic POSIX standard is implemented (1003.1, I think), and any program that uses POSIX can't use any other subsystem (Win32, OS/2, etc). In other words, POSIX isn't very useful under WinNT and is mainly limited to command line programs. No networking, either. Disabling it won't result in a large loss of functionality to the OS.
It is possible to extend the POSIX subsystem by getting a package like OpenNT, but I doubt many people do that....
As far as I know, you cannot patent something that has already been published. I believe it falls under the idea of "prior art" or something like that. Of course, given the state of the patent office today, they'd probably let you do it anyway. The trick would come up when you're trying to enforce the patent.
Maybe he meant on a technical basis, although that wouldn't be really true, either, since most WinCE devices already have CompactFlash ports.
What I've found (in my somewhat limited experience) is that it's not the processor that's slow with a WinCE device, but rather the screen. The colour WinCE devices that have come out feel so much more responsive than the greyscale devices and the only real difference is the screen.
Still, I guess it doesn't matter why a device feels sluggish since it feels sluggish....
I did my first Linux installation in over two years a couple of weeks ago, and I must admit things have improved to a point where I was able to get most stuff working fairly well. It was faster than a WinNT 4.0 install, too. There are still a couple of things that I found a wee bit arcane, though:
Overall, I'm impressed with how far Linux has come in the past two years, but after a weekend of fiddling there are still some faults apparent. I'm sure I'll find more as I keep fiddling with Linux in my spare time (the various package mechanisms worry me), but it is getting better. I just don't agree it's as easy as Windows (overall).
3. A month to a month and a half on 2 AAA batteries.
I've had my Nino for over six months now and I've not yet had to replace the batteries. Every time I drop it in the cradle it gets recharged. I've no idea how long it can go before it needs to be recharged, but I've had it out for a week of fairly regular use with no problems.
My WinCE Palm PC came with four different input methods -- handwriting recognition, an on-screen keyboard, an on-screen probabilistic keyboard (it's really weird), and a Graffiti clone (Jot Character Recognizer). I end up using Jot most of the time, and I've actually found it faster than the Graffiti found on the Palms. I'll touch the keyboard occasionally when I can't remember the appropriate symbols, too. I tried working with the handwriting recognition -- while it's not bad, it's only about 90% accurate if you're careful and you have to train it.
(Note that you needn't have all four methods in RAM at once, so you don't have to worry about an increased footprint. You do have a bigger ROM, though, but that's not really a problem)
It's cool that there will finally be a colour version of the PalmPilot out, but there have been colour version of various WinCE Palm PCs out for a while now, with far more colours to boot (65K vs. 256). Plus, the innards of a WinCE device tend to be more impressive (32 bit processor over 75mHz vs 16(?) at less than 33mHz), and the WinCE devices tend to have more memory, too (no, WinCE doesn't use all of it, either).
The only two advantages I see Palms having now are:
Just my two cents on the whole thing
What's rather interesting is that Ottawa Life recently did an article on Frank -- apparently Cowpland likes the attention. He claims that it's not nearly as bad as the press in England (where he grew up) and has also provided Frank with computer hardware and software over the years (e.g., CD ROM drives back when they were rare and expensive).
As for something more on-topic, I've no idea whether or not Cowpland is guilty or not, but he seems like a nice guy, although I disagree with the way he runs Corel (and I've seen it up close since I worked there for a while).
Just my 2 cents on the matter.
Since the source is under GPL, who says *they* have to do the port?
This would be OK, _IFF_ there was any form of document compatibility between versions.
:)
The file format didn't change from Office 97 to Office 2000, and after the fiasco with Office 95 to Office 97, I'll be surprised if it changes again in the near future
As one of the members of the Microsoft team, part of the reason might be because a lot of the people I know running the client are running it on their "test box", usually a P133 or something in that neighbourhood, since that's the box that gets the least use. I'd install it on my dev box, too, but I've found it's a bit disruptive at times. *sigh*
Saihttam mentions that SMP and RAID are not well-supported in Linux. I'm wondering if this is an issue with OSS. Since most developers don't have access to high-end hardware, does this mean that features found in high-end hardware won't be as well-supported as those found in most consumer-based hardware?
I can understand if you're frustrated that college graduates can't write a routine to print a number in octal, but if you're only allowing them to use printf, that's insane. College isn't a place where a student should learn all the useless minutae of various languages -- that's what reference manuals are for. College is more about theory than "practical knowledge", and I doubt knowing how to use printf to print octal numbers even counts as "practical".