OS/2 ran Windows applications almost as good (some say even better than) on native Windows. The result was that programmers wrote applications for Windows only, they ran after all on OS/2 also. Little native OS/2 software was written.
Okay, it's true that little native software for OS/2 was written. But it's not because of Windows compatibility!
Yes, OS/2 had a great Win16 layer. But it was never compatible with Win32, and Win32 was where the real action was. All the best PC software was released for Win32, and OS/2 couldn't run it, so most companies viewed OS/2 as a non-starter. Thus the installed base of OS/2 was small, so no one wanted to write for it.
It didn't help that IBM wanted to charge lots of money for development kits for OS/2. I think they eventually figured out that it is a bad idea to discourage people from wanting to develop for your OS, and stopped charging so much for the SDK, but by then it was too late.
If a business adopted Win95 or WinNT, they could run DOS applications, Win16 applications, or Win32 applications -- and if they were running NT, they could even run old OS/2 applications. If a business adopted OS/2, they could run native OS/2 applications, and Win16 applications, but no Win32. The choice was clear, especially since applications like Lotus 123/G (the version for OS/2 Presentation Manager) were bloated and slow, while the versions for Win32 were better.
Heck, the first adopters of Windows 3.0 often used it as a super-DesqView, to multitask lots of DOS applications, and sometimes run a Windows app or two. Then they could gradually transition over to more and more Windows apps.
It's always a good thing to run more software on your system. It lowers the barriers for customers to use your system.
The other major problem with OS/2 was that the API for native OS/2 Presentation Manager apps was so different from the API for Windows. I heard that Microsoft wanted to make the two APIs more similar, but IBM felt that the OS/2 PM API was better, and thus it was worth it being different. Well, you couldn't just make a few changes to your app and recompile; you had to substantially re-write your app if you wanted to make it a native OS/2 app. For a small market, it wasn't worth the effort. Microsoft never did make a native version of Word for OS/2; the OS/2 PM version of Word was the Windows version compiled and linked with a compatibility layer something like WINE, called WLO (Windows Libraries for OS/2). WLO apps were slower and consumed more memory than native OS/2 apps, but again it just wasn't worth the effort for Microsoft to make a true native version for the small OS/2 market.
If the DirectX thing works out on Linux, developers of DirectX games could potentially recompile their games to make them native to Linux. This would be a huge win for us. Anything that lowers the barriers for development is a good thing. Then, in a perfect world, the developer might re-write parts of the game to use native Linux system calls instead of the Transgaming DirectX layer; it's easier to port your app one little piece at a time, and eventually you have a completely native app.
1 RAID capable SCSI controller and 2 drives mirrored isn't going to be any hotter or louder than 1 non RAID capable SCSI controller and 2 drives with no mirroring.
Agreed. And even with the system he built, there is no reason not to use Linux software RAID. With RAID 1 (mirroring) he would get half the data storage, but he's using big enough disks. He didn't say if he was using the 18GB version or the 36GB version, but even 18GB is enough for a nice Linux system.
I recently built a system with Linux software RAID 1. I used IDE drives because I like the price/performance. The system boots from one disk, but I have a boot floppy ready to go if that is the one that dies. This was so easy to do, and it works so well, that I am surprised he didn't try it. (Of course he still can, if he changes his mind.)
steveha
Re:Wanted: Linux Half Life + Counterstrike mod
on
Loki Goes Postal
·
· Score: 3, Informative
But
WINE
makes it possible to run Counter-Strike under Linux! Not just CS but any Half-Life game should work.
Full disclosure: I tried this once and I couldn't get it to work. However, I run a bleeding-edge Debian "unstable" system, and perhaps WINE was unstable that day. I plan to try this again soon.
By the way,
Starcraft
and other fun games run well under WINE. You can check the
WINE app database to see if other people have had success running a particular game.
KDE today is as good as window manager as MS windows or Apple finder, Gnome is getting closer
I use a GNOME desktop with the Sawfish window manager. There are exactly no things I wish were better; as far as I am concerned, GNOME is equal to Windows in the window manager department.
I use a pretty theme called aq3, which is vaguely Aqua-ish, but not slavishly. For my wife's account I use RedMonk, which looks and works exactly like the Windows 98 she is used to.
I will be happy when GNOME organizes the control panel thing a bit better, and I'd like a better menu editor, and there are a few other nits I can pick... but I'm completely happy with Sawfish as it is on GNOME today.
Let's say a man in Texas shoots dead a tourist who walked onto his front lawn late a night hoping someone was in who he could ask direction from (true case).
From this bald summary, I have no way to tell whether the Texas man was justified, or not. Details are helpful. Even if you or I would agree the Texas man was negligent, I can think of several reasons why he might not have been convicted; the justice system in the US bends over backwards to protect the rights of the accused person, and sometimes the guilty go free as a result.
Now, if you could show me statistics that demonstrate that lots of people are shooting lots of tourists, and always getting away with it, then I will start to worry.
Even ignoring the gun laws, in the UK the man would be doing 10-15 for manslaughter.
If we are going to trade horror stories, I have heard a few stories of people being attacked in the UK, and defending themselves; and then the people who were attacked spent more time in prison than their attackers. If you are ever attacked in the UK, don't use any kind of weapon to defend yourself, even if your attackers are armed.
So, you see, people are different. Now, people in Afghanistan maybe don't see the crime in killing a few thousand US people. So, chances are they'd acquit someone accused of that.
I doubt this is true; the Taliban is not universally loved among the ordinary people of Afghanistan. But in any event, US military forces will demonstrate now that it is a bad idea to attack the US.
This is most stupid comment. You can't pacify AK-wielding partisans with cruise missiles.
The attack is on Taliban targets, trying to kill as few ordinary Afghan people as possible; and it will be combined with food and medical aid for the ordinary Afghan people.
The message is simple: The Taliban and terrorists need to fear the US, but the Afghan people should welcome us.
Many people in Afghanistan are starving to death, and if they join the Taliban they get fed. Not everyone who joined the Taliban is totally dedicated to the Taliban! If it becomes clear that the US is going to destroy the Taliban, and equally clear that the US is going to feed the hungry people, many people will abandon the Taliban. This in turn will make it harder for the Taliban to do anything about the US attacks.
I agree someone has their thinking cap on. I see a lot of people making fun of our current President, but he and his administration have done a much better job than Clinton and his administration did. I'm glad President Bush didn't order immediate airstrikes on some pharmaceutical plant somewhere.
The Space Shuttle gets much or all of its electricity from fuel cells, and the Shuttle astronauts drink the water produced from the fuel cells. (Or they use that water to rehydrate dried food, and then eat the food.)
Yup. I wanted something that makes you go "Yeah!" when you hear it. TOS and TNG both had cool and memorable theme songs; DS9 and VGR both bored me.
What I would love to see is a Trek show with a rock soundtrack. The original Babylon 5 pilot, oh so many years back now, had a rock theme by Stewart Copeland that I liked very, very much. (When they recut the movie, they did improve it, but they lost the rock and went with the same classical the rest of B5 used.)
Ship: Nice design, though I honestly want to just have someone on the show explain why they picked that design for Star Fleet
There is a good book called The Making of Star Trek about TOS. That book described where the design of the Enterprise came from. Almost everyone figured a space ship should look like a flying cigar or a flying saucer, but Gene Roddenberry and a few other folks wanted something really different. They made a bunch of sketches and models and came up with something cool and different.
Later they came up with reasons for the design: the warp engines have to be out on long poles because they are radioactive or otherwise unhealthy to be around, and the saucer was attached to the rest of the hull with explosive bolts so you could ditch the rest of the ship in a real emergency. (In TNG they of course showed us that the 1701-D could detach the saucer and reattach it whenever Picard felt a need to surrender or something.) The impulse engines are supposed to be on the saucer, so it wouldn't be just dead in space if it blew free from the warp engines.
Crew: Interesting, but I was hoping for at least a little bit more of a clash between everyone's feelings toward each other. They all get along like compadres.
Ehh. They are all happy to be there. Give them a few months on board the somewhat cramped NX-01, and then write stories about them clashing.
Of course, the original show mostly had everyone getting along, but good-naturedly needling each other. You don't think Spock and McCoy actually hated each other, do you?
Hot chick: Well, at least they got one thing right. Ever since Councelor Troi, this has been an absolute must.
"Ever since Troi"? Uhura was a hot chick, and Yoeman Rand was pretty darn hot herself.
Speaking of Uhura, the Hoshi character is sort of close to Roddenberry's original ideas for Uhura. Uhura was supposed to be a linguistic genius, and she was supposed to have a whole department working for her (communications and translations). They wound up just ignoring the language issue, and she got turned into a glorified telephone operator, alas.
Rambus has latency issues. It's great for accessing lots of data sequentially, but for random access you keep tripping on the latency. DDR memory doesn't have this problem.
So, for some applications like cranking through a pile of video frames and compressing them, Rambus is great; but for many typical desktop computer operations, it's not so great.
The nForce chipset that runs two 64-bit wide buses in parallel has more memory bandwidth than an Athlon can use right now. That's a lot of bandwidth. If bandwidth is why Rambus could become more desireable than DDR memory, it won't happen anytime soon.
I worked at Microsoft when they first started using the "One Microsoft Way" in their address.
I remember a discussion on the internal discussion BBS, where people said "Why stop there?" and proposed that someday MS should have the following address:
Microsoft
One Microsoft Way
Microsoft, MS
(Note that the "MS" requires a hostile takeover of the two-letter postal abbreviation for Mississippi.)
And for those of you who may be wondering: yes, it was a joke.
Instead of using gets(), you use fgets(). Use strncpy() instead of strcpy(). And so forth.
Yes.
My question: isn't it sort of a bug that gets() and strcpy() are still there in the standard C library? I would like, at a minimum, to see these cause a compile-time warning. It will be a long time before we can expunge all calls to these functions, but it might go quicker if we can get the compilers to complain about them.
The fast lookup feature lets you look up an entry in the address book using only the four app-launch buttons, in a binary-tree sort of way. It is described, with a screen shot, here:
Yes, I have the "quick lookup" in the address book.
Interesting. I just looked again at the web page, and "Fast lookup" is a listed feature for the Neo, but it is not a listed feature for the Platinum. I don't have a Platinum, and I was going off what the web page said.
Did the Platinum ship with fast lookup all along, or are there some older Platinums that don't have it?
The Neo is exactly the same as a Platinum, but with pretty case colors and a newer version of PalmOS. It has that quick-lookup thing for the address book. Since it costs the same as a Platinum ($200), if I were to buy a Visor today, it would be a Neo.
The Pro has two features over the Platinum/Neo: 16MB and rechargeable battery. The rechargeable battery might actually be cool for people who use their Visor heavily and/or use Springboard devices that need a lot of power. But this is assuming that the rechargeable battery holds more power than a pair of AAA cells... and I haven't found any hard numbers on that. (It ought to; a built-in Lithium ion battery can pack more power into less space than AAA cells, especially rechargeable AAA cells.)
I use NiMH AAA cells in my Visor Deluxe. They do not last as long as Duracell AAA Ultra cells, but I do get weeks out of them. I like being able to carry a couple of AAA cells and swap them in anytime my Visor runs low on power. I also like being able to buy disposable AAA cells at any store if I run out of power and for some reason don't have my spare AAA NiMH cells on me.
Anyway, these are nothing earthshaking. They are competent upgrades, but nothing really new. This is Handspring in a holding pattern.
What Handspring must do is come out with an answer to the Palm m505: small, thin, sexy, and with color. Handspring execs have said in interviews that the Visor Edge has sold very poorly, and they realize that it was a mistake to make a device like the Edge that isn't color. Within a reasonable amount of time, Handspring needs to come out with something like the Edge but with color.
And they should be very careful about introducing any new connectors. Both Palm and Handspring have been surprisingly cavalier about introducing new connectors, breaking compatability with accessories. Palm seems to have reformed: they swear that their new "Universal Connector" will not be changed for several years at least. Handspring needs to either use the same connector as the Visor Edge, or adopt the exact same connector as the Palm Universal Connector, or (distant third choice) maybe a new connector that will be the last new connector they invent for several years at least.
Failing that, they should come out with something like the Pro but with color. The Prism is a good product, but it is bigger than the Visor Deluxe/Platinum/Neo/Pro; you can't use the same cases, you can't use the same keyboard accessories, etc. (I thought about buying a Prism, but it would be a lot of money for the Prism, then more money for a new keyboard, a new case, a charging travel kit, and a battery-powered emergency charger...)
The Visor Deluxe is about as big a PDA as I'm willing to carry around anyway; I don't think I want to try carrying a Prism. If they can make a product exactly like the Prism but with exactly the same form factor as the other Visors, I think it would sell well. I'd buy one.
Where it's really going to hit hard is in the decline of sourceforget.net. They pushed so hard to get everyone off the many free software portals of 1999 that when sourceforget.net eventually founders it's going to wipe out most of what we know as open source projects.
No, no, no!
If SourceForge founders, then a bunch of people have to move their code base somewhere else. That's it. No problem.
If SourceForge were to suddenly founder overnight, with no warning whatsoever, there would be various degrees of inconvenience all around, depending on how careful people have been about keeping their own copies of stuff. I suspect most active developers will have complete copies of everything on their hard disks at all times, so they would have no problem. And at least a few people will keep tarballs around of the source to the other programs, even if they aren't in active development.
I suppose if a few really obscure programs had no active development at all, and further that no one who uses them had a copy of the sources, that the source could be lost for those programs. But I don't think even this will happen. I'll bet you an ice cream it won't.
This is no big deal, unless you have high blood pressure, because the effect is very temporary. The article said "one cup hardened the blood vessels for at least two hours". It's not like you are going to need bypass surgery or something.
If you have average blood pressure, or (as I do) slightly low blood pressure, then have some coffee to celebrate the news!
Months ago, the first articles about the new series quoted Scott Bakula as saying: "It's Star Trek, but with explosions."
They deliberately set up this series for more action, less angst. And I for one am cool with that.
Of course, if you do it right, you can have both exciting action and a morality play. Consider the original Star Trek episode "Arena": Kirk and one Gorn are stuck on a planet and told to kill each other; the Gorn is way stronger and tougher than Kirk, but slower, so Kirk evades the Gorn and builds a weapon that can kill the Gorn; then, at the last moment, Kirk refuses to kill the Gorn and instead gives a morality speech. That episode really rocked.
It would be much better to have functionality like spell checking, etc., split off into separate applications.
You have just put your finger on the core of Miguel de Icaza's essay, "Let's Make UNIX Not Suck". A component model for software is the important part of GNOME, even more than the desktop.
I wanted to include a link to de Icaza's essay, but I cannot find it on the web. (All the search results point to where it was but it isn't there anymore.) I did however find this article, which explains about the GNOME component model.
almost anything that can be an object in Windows can be in a DOC format. In case you do not get it yet, this means the entire operating system's APIs need to be cloned to import a document completely and properly
This is true. However, few people [ab]use this feature enough to make this a deal-breaker for free software.
People really do want to drop spreadsheet data, charts, and graphs into a word processor document. They might even want to grab a record from a database. Once free word processors have enough features to usefully match MS Word, and once free spreadsheets have enough features to usefully match MS Excel, it will be possible to make an import filter that will convert a Word document, even one that references some Excel data.
Yes, there will always be documents that have strange things embedded, but the 99% case is just a few types of embedded data. Those few types can and will be imported by free software.
VNC is a way to remotely control a computer. The desktop of the remote computer appears in a window on your computer. If you want to run Linux on your computer, but you need to use Windows sometimes, this is one way you can do it.
[the standard mass will be] pretty much the same mass for quite some time.
Suppose it isn't. Suppose an anti-metric-system terrorist manages to shave a chunk off the standard kilogram and swallow it. What then?
The basic idea of making a reproducable standard is a really good idea. Right now, the US has a standard kilogram that is a careful copy of the master standard kilogram, but how can we be completely sure it's an accurate copy?
I'd be interested, once they get the new standard sorted out, to have them check the US standard kilogram and see to how many decimal places it is accurate.
This work being done at Sun is one of the reasons why I think GNOME will get a majority of the *NIX desktops, long-term. Another reason is that both Sun and HP have given money for GNOME development.
Basically, any company that wants to sell operating systems (or sell computers and operating systems together) will prefer GNOME. There are never any licensing fees to develop for GNOME; for KDE, sometimes there are.
The sooner GNOME is really good, the sooner Sun and HP stop paying licensing fees for CDE. It is in their best interests to drive GNOME until it is really good. I am confident that GNOME will soon catch up to KDE in polish and usability.
KDE will always have loyal fans; and given the huge amounts of memory computers have these days, there won't be any problems running GNOME stuff under KDE or vice versa... so both platforms have a future. But I do think GNOME is going to become the most popular platform.
Slashdot Mirror
OS/2 ran Windows applications almost as good (some say even better than) on native Windows. The result was that programmers wrote applications for Windows only, they ran after all on OS/2 also. Little native OS/2 software was written.
Okay, it's true that little native software for OS/2 was written. But it's not because of Windows compatibility!
Yes, OS/2 had a great Win16 layer. But it was never compatible with Win32, and Win32 was where the real action was. All the best PC software was released for Win32, and OS/2 couldn't run it, so most companies viewed OS/2 as a non-starter. Thus the installed base of OS/2 was small, so no one wanted to write for it.
It didn't help that IBM wanted to charge lots of money for development kits for OS/2. I think they eventually figured out that it is a bad idea to discourage people from wanting to develop for your OS, and stopped charging so much for the SDK, but by then it was too late.
If a business adopted Win95 or WinNT, they could run DOS applications, Win16 applications, or Win32 applications -- and if they were running NT, they could even run old OS/2 applications. If a business adopted OS/2, they could run native OS/2 applications, and Win16 applications, but no Win32. The choice was clear, especially since applications like Lotus 123/G (the version for OS/2 Presentation Manager) were bloated and slow, while the versions for Win32 were better.
Heck, the first adopters of Windows 3.0 often used it as a super-DesqView, to multitask lots of DOS applications, and sometimes run a Windows app or two. Then they could gradually transition over to more and more Windows apps.
It's always a good thing to run more software on your system. It lowers the barriers for customers to use your system.
The other major problem with OS/2 was that the API for native OS/2 Presentation Manager apps was so different from the API for Windows. I heard that Microsoft wanted to make the two APIs more similar, but IBM felt that the OS/2 PM API was better, and thus it was worth it being different. Well, you couldn't just make a few changes to your app and recompile; you had to substantially re-write your app if you wanted to make it a native OS/2 app. For a small market, it wasn't worth the effort. Microsoft never did make a native version of Word for OS/2; the OS/2 PM version of Word was the Windows version compiled and linked with a compatibility layer something like WINE, called WLO (Windows Libraries for OS/2). WLO apps were slower and consumed more memory than native OS/2 apps, but again it just wasn't worth the effort for Microsoft to make a true native version for the small OS/2 market.
If the DirectX thing works out on Linux, developers of DirectX games could potentially recompile their games to make them native to Linux. This would be a huge win for us. Anything that lowers the barriers for development is a good thing. Then, in a perfect world, the developer might re-write parts of the game to use native Linux system calls instead of the Transgaming DirectX layer; it's easier to port your app one little piece at a time, and eventually you have a completely native app.
It's always good to have more compatibility.
steveha
1 RAID capable SCSI controller and 2 drives mirrored isn't going to be any hotter or louder than 1 non RAID capable SCSI controller and 2 drives with no mirroring.
Agreed. And even with the system he built, there is no reason not to use Linux software RAID. With RAID 1 (mirroring) he would get half the data storage, but he's using big enough disks. He didn't say if he was using the 18GB version or the 36GB version, but even 18GB is enough for a nice Linux system.
I recently built a system with Linux software RAID 1. I used IDE drives because I like the price/performance. The system boots from one disk, but I have a boot floppy ready to go if that is the one that dies. This was so easy to do, and it works so well, that I am surprised he didn't try it. (Of course he still can, if he changes his mind.)
steveha
If you check the Linux Half-Life page you will find the HOWTO.
Full disclosure: I tried this once and I couldn't get it to work. However, I run a bleeding-edge Debian "unstable" system, and perhaps WINE was unstable that day. I plan to try this again soon.
By the way, Starcraft and other fun games run well under WINE. You can check the WINE app database to see if other people have had success running a particular game.
Good luck and happy gaming!
steveha
KDE today is as good as window manager as MS windows or Apple finder, Gnome is getting closer
I use a GNOME desktop with the Sawfish window manager. There are exactly no things I wish were better; as far as I am concerned, GNOME is equal to Windows in the window manager department.
I use a pretty theme called aq3, which is vaguely Aqua-ish, but not slavishly. For my wife's account I use RedMonk, which looks and works exactly like the Windows 98 she is used to.
I will be happy when GNOME organizes the control panel thing a bit better, and I'd like a better menu editor, and there are a few other nits I can pick... but I'm completely happy with Sawfish as it is on GNOME today.
steveha
Let's say a man in Texas shoots dead a tourist who walked onto his front lawn late a night hoping someone was in who he could ask direction from (true case).
From this bald summary, I have no way to tell whether the Texas man was justified, or not. Details are helpful. Even if you or I would agree the Texas man was negligent, I can think of several reasons why he might not have been convicted; the justice system in the US bends over backwards to protect the rights of the accused person, and sometimes the guilty go free as a result.
Now, if you could show me statistics that demonstrate that lots of people are shooting lots of tourists, and always getting away with it, then I will start to worry.
Even ignoring the gun laws, in the UK the man would be doing 10-15 for manslaughter.
If we are going to trade horror stories, I have heard a few stories of people being attacked in the UK, and defending themselves; and then the people who were attacked spent more time in prison than their attackers. If you are ever attacked in the UK, don't use any kind of weapon to defend yourself, even if your attackers are armed.
So, you see, people are different. Now, people in Afghanistan maybe don't see the crime in killing a few thousand US people. So, chances are they'd acquit someone accused of that.
I doubt this is true; the Taliban is not universally loved among the ordinary people of Afghanistan. But in any event, US military forces will demonstrate now that it is a bad idea to attack the US.
steveha
This is most stupid comment. You can't pacify AK-wielding partisans with cruise missiles.
The attack is on Taliban targets, trying to kill as few ordinary Afghan people as possible; and it will be combined with food and medical aid for the ordinary Afghan people.
The message is simple: The Taliban and terrorists need to fear the US, but the Afghan people should welcome us.
Many people in Afghanistan are starving to death, and if they join the Taliban they get fed. Not everyone who joined the Taliban is totally dedicated to the Taliban! If it becomes clear that the US is going to destroy the Taliban, and equally clear that the US is going to feed the hungry people, many people will abandon the Taliban. This in turn will make it harder for the Taliban to do anything about the US attacks.
I agree someone has their thinking cap on. I see a lot of people making fun of our current President, but he and his administration have done a much better job than Clinton and his administration did. I'm glad President Bush didn't order immediate airstrikes on some pharmaceutical plant somewhere.
steveha
The Space Shuttle gets much or all of its electricity from fuel cells, and the Shuttle astronauts drink the water produced from the fuel cells. (Or they use that water to rehydrate dried food, and then eat the food.)
/ 9508001.html
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/pao/factsheets/factsheets
That is not their only source of water, but it is one of the sources.
steveha
Theme Song: Sucked.
Yup. I wanted something that makes you go "Yeah!" when you hear it. TOS and TNG both had cool and memorable theme songs; DS9 and VGR both bored me.
What I would love to see is a Trek show with a rock soundtrack. The original Babylon 5 pilot, oh so many years back now, had a rock theme by Stewart Copeland that I liked very, very much. (When they recut the movie, they did improve it, but they lost the rock and went with the same classical the rest of B5 used.)
Ship: Nice design, though I honestly want to just have someone on the show explain why they picked that design for Star Fleet
There is a good book called The Making of Star Trek about TOS. That book described where the design of the Enterprise came from. Almost everyone figured a space ship should look like a flying cigar or a flying saucer, but Gene Roddenberry and a few other folks wanted something really different. They made a bunch of sketches and models and came up with something cool and different.
Later they came up with reasons for the design: the warp engines have to be out on long poles because they are radioactive or otherwise unhealthy to be around, and the saucer was attached to the rest of the hull with explosive bolts so you could ditch the rest of the ship in a real emergency. (In TNG they of course showed us that the 1701-D could detach the saucer and reattach it whenever Picard felt a need to surrender or something.) The impulse engines are supposed to be on the saucer, so it wouldn't be just dead in space if it blew free from the warp engines.
Crew: Interesting, but I was hoping for at least a little bit more of a clash between everyone's feelings toward each other. They all get along like compadres.
Ehh. They are all happy to be there. Give them a few months on board the somewhat cramped NX-01, and then write stories about them clashing.
Of course, the original show mostly had everyone getting along, but good-naturedly needling each other. You don't think Spock and McCoy actually hated each other, do you?
Hot chick: Well, at least they got one thing right. Ever since Councelor Troi, this has been an absolute must.
"Ever since Troi"? Uhura was a hot chick, and Yoeman Rand was pretty darn hot herself.
Speaking of Uhura, the Hoshi character is sort of close to Roddenberry's original ideas for Uhura. Uhura was supposed to be a linguistic genius, and she was supposed to have a whole department working for her (communications and translations). They wound up just ignoring the language issue, and she got turned into a glorified telephone operator, alas.
steveha
Rambus has latency issues. It's great for accessing lots of data sequentially, but for random access you keep tripping on the latency. DDR memory doesn't have this problem.
So, for some applications like cranking through a pile of video frames and compressing them, Rambus is great; but for many typical desktop computer operations, it's not so great.
The nForce chipset that runs two 64-bit wide buses in parallel has more memory bandwidth than an Athlon can use right now. That's a lot of bandwidth. If bandwidth is why Rambus could become more desireable than DDR memory, it won't happen anytime soon.
steveha
And if you have the whole road, why not make your address number 1?
Note that Apple Computer has the same thing going at their headquarters campus. Their street address is "1 Infinite Loop".
steveha
I worked at Microsoft when they first started using the "One Microsoft Way" in their address.
I remember a discussion on the internal discussion BBS, where people said "Why stop there?" and proposed that someday MS should have the following address:
Microsoft
One Microsoft Way
Microsoft, MS
(Note that the "MS" requires a hostile takeover of the two-letter postal abbreviation for Mississippi.)
And for those of you who may be wondering: yes, it was a joke.
steveha
I suspect the guys who wrote this paper might actually have a sense of humor. "automatically assimilated" indeed.
steveha
Instead of using gets(), you use fgets(). Use strncpy() instead of strcpy(). And so forth.
Yes.
My question: isn't it sort of a bug that gets() and strcpy() are still there in the standard C library? I would like, at a minimum, to see these cause a compile-time warning. It will be a long time before we can expunge all calls to these functions, but it might go quicker if we can get the compilers to complain about them.
Has anyone looked at doing this?
steveha
The fast lookup feature lets you look up an entry in the address book using only the four app-launch buttons, in a binary-tree sort of way. It is described, with a screen shot, here:
http://www.visorcentral.com/page/0-6-102-3-6.htm
steveha
Yes, I have the "quick lookup" in the address book.
Interesting. I just looked again at the web page, and "Fast lookup" is a listed feature for the Neo, but it is not a listed feature for the Platinum. I don't have a Platinum, and I was going off what the web page said.
Did the Platinum ship with fast lookup all along, or are there some older Platinums that don't have it?
Thanks for the correction.
steveha
The Neo is exactly the same as a Platinum, but with pretty case colors and a newer version of PalmOS. It has that quick-lookup thing for the address book. Since it costs the same as a Platinum ($200), if I were to buy a Visor today, it would be a Neo.
The Pro has two features over the Platinum/Neo: 16MB and rechargeable battery. The rechargeable battery might actually be cool for people who use their Visor heavily and/or use Springboard devices that need a lot of power. But this is assuming that the rechargeable battery holds more power than a pair of AAA cells... and I haven't found any hard numbers on that. (It ought to; a built-in Lithium ion battery can pack more power into less space than AAA cells, especially rechargeable AAA cells.)
I use NiMH AAA cells in my Visor Deluxe. They do not last as long as Duracell AAA Ultra cells, but I do get weeks out of them. I like being able to carry a couple of AAA cells and swap them in anytime my Visor runs low on power. I also like being able to buy disposable AAA cells at any store if I run out of power and for some reason don't have my spare AAA NiMH cells on me.
Anyway, these are nothing earthshaking. They are competent upgrades, but nothing really new. This is Handspring in a holding pattern.
What Handspring must do is come out with an answer to the Palm m505: small, thin, sexy, and with color. Handspring execs have said in interviews that the Visor Edge has sold very poorly, and they realize that it was a mistake to make a device like the Edge that isn't color. Within a reasonable amount of time, Handspring needs to come out with something like the Edge but with color.
And they should be very careful about introducing any new connectors. Both Palm and Handspring have been surprisingly cavalier about introducing new connectors, breaking compatability with accessories. Palm seems to have reformed: they swear that their new "Universal Connector" will not be changed for several years at least. Handspring needs to either use the same connector as the Visor Edge, or adopt the exact same connector as the Palm Universal Connector, or (distant third choice) maybe a new connector that will be the last new connector they invent for several years at least.
Failing that, they should come out with something like the Pro but with color. The Prism is a good product, but it is bigger than the Visor Deluxe/Platinum/Neo/Pro; you can't use the same cases, you can't use the same keyboard accessories, etc. (I thought about buying a Prism, but it would be a lot of money for the Prism, then more money for a new keyboard, a new case, a charging travel kit, and a battery-powered emergency charger...)
The Visor Deluxe is about as big a PDA as I'm willing to carry around anyway; I don't think I want to try carrying a Prism. If they can make a product exactly like the Prism but with exactly the same form factor as the other Visors, I think it would sell well. I'd buy one.
steveha
Where it's really going to hit hard is in the decline of sourceforget.net. They pushed so hard to get everyone off the many free software portals of 1999 that when sourceforget.net eventually founders it's going to wipe out most of what we know as open source projects.
No, no, no!
If SourceForge founders, then a bunch of people have to move their code base somewhere else. That's it. No problem.
If SourceForge were to suddenly founder overnight, with no warning whatsoever, there would be various degrees of inconvenience all around, depending on how careful people have been about keeping their own copies of stuff. I suspect most active developers will have complete copies of everything on their hard disks at all times, so they would have no problem. And at least a few people will keep tarballs around of the source to the other programs, even if they aren't in active development.
I suppose if a few really obscure programs had no active development at all, and further that no one who uses them had a copy of the sources, that the source could be lost for those programs. But I don't think even this will happen. I'll bet you an ice cream it won't.
steveha
Why can't I find a nice laptop in the budget $300-500 range?
c ategory_slc.asp?Id=1701
You can buy older notebooks at Tiger Direct:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/
They have at least one in the $300-$500 range, maybe even more than one.
steveha
This is no big deal, unless you have high blood pressure, because the effect is very temporary. The article said "one cup hardened the blood vessels for at least two hours". It's not like you are going to need bypass surgery or something.
If you have average blood pressure, or (as I do) slightly low blood pressure, then have some coffee to celebrate the news!
Months ago, the first articles about the new series quoted Scott Bakula as saying: "It's Star Trek, but with explosions."
They deliberately set up this series for more action, less angst. And I for one am cool with that.
Of course, if you do it right, you can have both exciting action and a morality play. Consider the original Star Trek episode "Arena": Kirk and one Gorn are stuck on a planet and told to kill each other; the Gorn is way stronger and tougher than Kirk, but slower, so Kirk evades the Gorn and builds a weapon that can kill the Gorn; then, at the last moment, Kirk refuses to kill the Gorn and instead gives a morality speech. That episode really rocked.
It would be much better to have functionality like spell checking, etc., split off into separate applications.
You have just put your finger on the core of Miguel de Icaza's essay, "Let's Make UNIX Not Suck". A component model for software is the important part of GNOME, even more than the desktop.
I wanted to include a link to de Icaza's essay, but I cannot find it on the web. (All the search results point to where it was but it isn't there anymore.) I did however find this article, which explains about the GNOME component model.
http://www.ximian.com/devzone/tech/bonobo.html
steveha
almost anything that can be an object in Windows can be in a DOC format. In case you do not get it yet, this means the entire operating system's APIs need to be cloned to import a document completely and properly
This is true. However, few people [ab]use this feature enough to make this a deal-breaker for free software.
People really do want to drop spreadsheet data, charts, and graphs into a word processor document. They might even want to grab a record from a database. Once free word processors have enough features to usefully match MS Word, and once free spreadsheets have enough features to usefully match MS Excel, it will be possible to make an import filter that will convert a Word document, even one that references some Excel data.
Yes, there will always be documents that have strange things embedded, but the 99% case is just a few types of embedded data. Those few types can and will be imported by free software.
steveha
VNC is a way to remotely control a computer. The desktop of the remote computer appears in a window on your computer. If you want to run Linux on your computer, but you need to use Windows sometimes, this is one way you can do it.
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/
steveha
[the standard mass will be] pretty much the same mass for quite some time.
Suppose it isn't. Suppose an anti-metric-system terrorist manages to shave a chunk off the standard kilogram and swallow it. What then?
The basic idea of making a reproducable standard is a really good idea. Right now, the US has a standard kilogram that is a careful copy of the master standard kilogram, but how can we be completely sure it's an accurate copy?
I'd be interested, once they get the new standard sorted out, to have them check the US standard kilogram and see to how many decimal places it is accurate.
steveha
This work being done at Sun is one of the reasons why I think GNOME will get a majority of the *NIX desktops, long-term. Another reason is that both Sun and HP have given money for GNOME development.
Basically, any company that wants to sell operating systems (or sell computers and operating systems together) will prefer GNOME. There are never any licensing fees to develop for GNOME; for KDE, sometimes there are.
The sooner GNOME is really good, the sooner Sun and HP stop paying licensing fees for CDE. It is in their best interests to drive GNOME until it is really good. I am confident that GNOME will soon catch up to KDE in polish and usability.
KDE will always have loyal fans; and given the huge amounts of memory computers have these days, there won't be any problems running GNOME stuff under KDE or vice versa... so both platforms have a future. But I do think GNOME is going to become the most popular platform.
steveha