> do you know any other os's that could be > patched thusly? i didn't think so. no other > os's are abstracted to such a degree that > the "core" can be replaced.
Abstracted? Ha, that'll be the day. The MacOS is about as abstracted as a Sharp Wizard, certainly in its original design. What you call abstraction in fact means that all legacy Mac apps will only run on the BSD kernel via an ABSTRACTION LAYER, i.e. an emulator. Take that for abstraction.
...your scheme isn't very scalable. Products like Mozilla would have reached Omega a long time (or at least would soon), without ever striking Gold. By using numbered Betas instead, they can spend time in limbo indefinitely, without ever having to grow up.
> Also, some of the features feel like something > to attract windows users who are willing to > sacrifice actual functionality for cool looks.
That's a first. Of all the insidious, evil or decadent character traits Windows users have been accused of, being suckers for eye candy over substance must take the cake. I'll keep that in mind the next time I switch pixmaps in IE5.
Of all the things you CAN accuse Windows users of, don't even touch eye candy! Not when there are certain other OSs that shall remain unnamed where developers would much rather spend time on endless theme development, and theme engine development, than on actual functionality and usability.
Regardless of all the themes, KDE still can't use some sensible window metrics. Why the f**k do edit boxes have to VERTICALLY resize with the window, and why do they have to be so FAT to begin with?
They read regular floppies about 5-10 times faster than a regular drive. I've booted Partition Magic off an LS120 in 5 seconds, versus almost a minute in a regular drive. They're also less destructive on floppy disks, and are supposed to often be able to read bad floppies when other drives have given up.
I agree that 1.5-4.5 hours isn't that much (what's up with that range, anyway? quite a difference between 1.5 hours and 4.5 hours). But--and this also addresses your travelling concern--this device is really home-bound by its very nature. It depends on some kind of base station, be it a modem that dials out, or an 802.11 access point. So they could devise some kind of charging cradle that it could rest in when not in use--kind of like cordless phones, which also don't have terribly long continuous talking times, probably just 2-3 hours. Still, if it had a battery life over 10 hours, it would make it that much less fatal if you forgot to place it back in the cradle after an hour's use.
Something all-out like this should also have good stereo speakers on it and 802.11 networking. It would make a great portable MP3 player around the house, pulling music off a server elsewhere in the house. Take this baby on the back porch, kick back and relax...
I'd really prefer something like a super-sized Palm Pilot, maybe A4 sized or a bit smaller. Mainly because of the thinner case possible and the longer battery life. Grey scale screen is fine for an awful lot of browsing, as long as contrast is good (like on the new Palms and Visors). Add a beefy lithium battery which should more than offset the extra screen size, and we should have very decent battery life--well over 10 hours of continuous use.
That's exactly what I was thinking right now. Basically only a remote graphical dumb terminal. Besides the advantages cited, software updates would also be trivial, since you wouldn't have to change the WebPad itself, only the host computer.
The point is, as has been reiterated numerous times on Slashdot, that the CPU isn't the most power-hogging component in a PC. Even in this WebPad, if they graphed the power usage statistics of all the components, far far at the top of the list would be the LCD backlight and the TFT electronics, then the wireless radio, then only maybe the CPU. Going to a reflective LCD would increase battery life MUCH more than going to Transmeta.
> My favorite browser is IE, which is of course > not available on linux or any other open source > unix, though I'm hoping it will be someday.
Same here. In that spirit, I do hope that they break up Microsoft into OS and Apps. That way we might actually have a chance of seeing it on Linux. It would be an excellent way for Apps to demonstrate that they're not secretly still cooperating with OS.
You're mixing your arguments here. Full-featured IE I believe only exists for desktop Windows. The IE on WinCE is seriously stripped down and probably doesn't even come close to Netscape's features. I buy your argument for IE5/Win9x on the WebPad, but not WinCE.
This thing is tethered to the perimeter of the DECT reach. Outside of that it's just a silly computer without local storage (I assume), not terribly much horsepower, no keyboard, and it weighs a ton to boot. Who wants THAT? The Palm is for mobile organization, this thing is for browsing at home. Very distinct markets.
Hey, I've already done that with a regular old laptop with wireless Ethernet. Sure, it burns my thighs, and sure it weighs a ton, and it most definitely will go to pieces when shifting position and dropping it, but hey! How many people can say they've read Slashdot from the can?
I really need to read up more on FC. What I've heard sounds really great, but it doesn't seem to be currently aimed at the consumer market. Prices I'm sure are way out of Best Buy territory. Besides, what about driver support in mainstream OSs?
For that matter, I think the latest and greatest SCSI is getting too expensive for mainstream use. The controllers might be somewhat reasonably priced (depending on your definition of "reasonable"), but hard drives are simply not competitive with IDE, not even close. And I think the speed benefit for mainstream use is extremely incremental. When a heavy app starts in 1.5 seconds on ATA66, an extra.2 second or so is simply not worth any money to me.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Re:Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it?
on
Maxtor's 80GB Drive
·
· Score: 1
It still is a very valuable technology, since it wasn't meant ONLY for storage, or even mainly for storage. SCSI will also eventually choke on multiple simultaneous transfers. The beauty of 1394 is that it's at the beginning of the lifecycle. There're working on the 800Mbps standard, and even thinking about the 1.6Gbps followup. Eventually it will offer very decent speeds even for storage. Of course, SCSI probably won't stand still either, even though I hate were it's all going with the double wide, double fast, double thick connectors. SCSI is slowly running out of steam and turning up more evolutionary than revolutionary improvements. It took how many years to finally increase the device count to 16 or 32?
All true, it's all true what you say, but if it's cheap enough, it doesn't really matter. There is a market for FAST drives, and there is a market for LARGE and not so fast drives. One of those 80GB babies could hold all the CDs I'll ever buy in this lifetime, neatly squashed into MP3s. And it gives audiophiles the option to keep their 320kbps compression without sacrificing capacity too much.
Things will really take off once we hit the several hundred GB level, where you can do with DVDs what we do with CDs today. I'm thinking of a nice little video server with a couple hundred movies on it, that can serve movie streams to several players at once over the 100BaseT network throughout the house. Oh, and all your CDs fit almost incidentally in the spare capacity of the drive.
Has anyone tried one of those 1394 to IDE adapters that let you connect an IDE drive into the chain? The idea sounds good, but the adapters are still a bit pricey ($149 or so), and I would like to hear some performance reports.
I don't understand your point: there are thousands of competitors to the corner store, but none that come close to Deja. If Deja goes, I'll be back to wasting countless hours scouring newsgroups in a news reader. There are supposed to be other Usenet databases out there, but I don't think any of them come close to Deja.
Mind you, not that I think Deja is perfect. There are many things I hate about it. But that is like faulting a hammer for being heavy and flammable--true, but it does the job.
...I made it perfectly clear what I thought of it by linking it via "crap"? This is all going to be off-topic, but I consider ALL American cars total and utter shit. American car makers can't even begin to approach world-class manufacturing tolerances (by their own admissions), and they certainly couldn't tell a desirable automobile if it bit them in the ass--unless it's a truck, of course, if one considers a truck an automobile, and if a truck could be considered desirable. They can't even start with a good car and keep it that way: consider the Lincoln LS, based on the Jaguar Type S, yet not even a pale shadow of that car. Or the Saturn LS: based on the Opel Vectra, minus all the enjoyable things about it.
I've used Deja pretty much since the beginning, and it's an absolutely invaluable tool. By far my most visited site, even before Slashdot. I've never really understood how they can stay in business while providing their service for free. Please don't kid yourselves that the dinky little banner at the top actually funds the site, any more than Slashdot's does. So I can't blame them for trying to supplement their funding in all sorts of different ways. Personally, I'd rather pay a yearly fee for using them, since I actually get value out of the service. However, the fee users are prepared to pay might not be sufficient to keep them going, same as a magazine subscription doesn't really keep the magazine afloat--it might defray some costs, but the bulk of revenue still comes from advertising.
...soon they want the whole hand, and then some. I remember the early days when ATI (along with Diamond?) wouldn't provide specs for their chips, never mind write drivers, and there was only minimal XFree support. People were howling for the specs. Now that we've got the specs, we're whining about having to write the drivers. There's just no pleasing anyone...
Just an aside, really. If my original post was marked as off-topic, all subsequent replies addressing its contents rather than pointing out that it's off-topic, should also be marked off-topic, right? Just wondering...
I guess that must be another one of those made-up-on-the-spot statistics. Here's a web site with statistics I found while digging around at the ACLU: http://www.essential.org/dpic/po.html. Of course, the ACLU is hardly any death penalty proponent's darling, but it's nevertheless an institution with a high degree of credibility.
Regarding the statistics for Europe in particular, that's your wishful thinking. Germany for example hasn't had the DP since 1949, has much lower violent crime rate (recent sprees notwithstanding), and there would simply be no impetus for a majority of the population to be in favor of the DP. Show us some figures please.
Slashdot Mirror
> do you know any other os's that could be
> patched thusly? i didn't think so. no other
> os's are abstracted to such a degree that
> the "core" can be replaced.
Abstracted? Ha, that'll be the day. The MacOS is about as abstracted as a Sharp Wizard, certainly in its original design. What you call abstraction in fact means that all legacy Mac apps will only run on the BSD kernel via an ABSTRACTION LAYER, i.e. an emulator. Take that for abstraction.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
...your scheme isn't very scalable. Products like Mozilla would have reached Omega a long time (or at least would soon), without ever striking Gold. By using numbered Betas instead, they can spend time in limbo indefinitely, without ever having to grow up.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> Also, some of the features feel like something
> to attract windows users who are willing to
> sacrifice actual functionality for cool looks.
That's a first. Of all the insidious, evil or decadent character traits Windows users have been accused of, being suckers for eye candy over substance must take the cake. I'll keep that in mind the next time I switch pixmaps in IE5.
Of all the things you CAN accuse Windows users of, don't even touch eye candy! Not when there are certain other OSs that shall remain unnamed where developers would much rather spend time on endless theme development, and theme engine development, than on actual functionality and usability.
Regardless of all the themes, KDE still can't use some sensible window metrics. Why the f**k do edit boxes have to VERTICALLY resize with the window, and why do they have to be so FAT to begin with?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
They read regular floppies about 5-10 times faster than a regular drive. I've booted Partition Magic off an LS120 in 5 seconds, versus almost a minute in a regular drive. They're also less destructive on floppy disks, and are supposed to often be able to read bad floppies when other drives have given up.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I agree that 1.5-4.5 hours isn't that much (what's up with that range, anyway? quite a difference between 1.5 hours and 4.5 hours). But--and this also addresses your travelling concern--this device is really home-bound by its very nature. It depends on some kind of base station, be it a modem that dials out, or an 802.11 access point. So they could devise some kind of charging cradle that it could rest in when not in use--kind of like cordless phones, which also don't have terribly long continuous talking times, probably just 2-3 hours. Still, if it had a battery life over 10 hours, it would make it that much less fatal if you forgot to place it back in the cradle after an hour's use.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Something all-out like this should also have good stereo speakers on it and 802.11 networking. It would make a great portable MP3 player around the house, pulling music off a server elsewhere in the house. Take this baby on the back porch, kick back and relax...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I'd really prefer something like a super-sized Palm Pilot, maybe A4 sized or a bit smaller. Mainly because of the thinner case possible and the longer battery life. Grey scale screen is fine for an awful lot of browsing, as long as contrast is good (like on the new Palms and Visors). Add a beefy lithium battery which should more than offset the extra screen size, and we should have very decent battery life--well over 10 hours of continuous use.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Finnish, I believe.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
That's exactly what I was thinking right now. Basically only a remote graphical dumb terminal. Besides the advantages cited, software updates would also be trivial, since you wouldn't have to change the WebPad itself, only the host computer.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
The point is, as has been reiterated numerous times on Slashdot, that the CPU isn't the most power-hogging component in a PC. Even in this WebPad, if they graphed the power usage statistics of all the components, far far at the top of the list would be the LCD backlight and the TFT electronics, then the wireless radio, then only maybe the CPU. Going to a reflective LCD would increase battery life MUCH more than going to Transmeta.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
> My favorite browser is IE, which is of course
> not available on linux or any other open source
> unix, though I'm hoping it will be someday.
Same here. In that spirit, I do hope that they break up Microsoft into OS and Apps. That way we might actually have a chance of seeing it on Linux. It would be an excellent way for Apps to demonstrate that they're not secretly still cooperating with OS.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
You're mixing your arguments here. Full-featured IE I believe only exists for desktop Windows. The IE on WinCE is seriously stripped down and probably doesn't even come close to Netscape's features. I buy your argument for IE5/Win9x on the WebPad, but not WinCE.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
This thing is tethered to the perimeter of the DECT reach. Outside of that it's just a silly computer without local storage (I assume), not terribly much horsepower, no keyboard, and it weighs a ton to boot. Who wants THAT? The Palm is for mobile organization, this thing is for browsing at home. Very distinct markets.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Hey, I've already done that with a regular old laptop with wireless Ethernet. Sure, it burns my thighs, and sure it weighs a ton, and it most definitely will go to pieces when shifting position and dropping it, but hey! How many people can say they've read Slashdot from the can?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I really need to read up more on FC. What I've heard sounds really great, but it doesn't seem to be currently aimed at the consumer market. Prices I'm sure are way out of Best Buy territory. Besides, what about driver support in mainstream OSs?
.2 second or so is simply not worth any money to me.
For that matter, I think the latest and greatest SCSI is getting too expensive for mainstream use. The controllers might be somewhat reasonably priced (depending on your definition of "reasonable"), but hard drives are simply not competitive with IDE, not even close. And I think the speed benefit for mainstream use is extremely incremental. When a heavy app starts in 1.5 seconds on ATA66, an extra
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
It still is a very valuable technology, since it wasn't meant ONLY for storage, or even mainly for storage. SCSI will also eventually choke on multiple simultaneous transfers. The beauty of 1394 is that it's at the beginning of the lifecycle. There're working on the 800Mbps standard, and even thinking about the 1.6Gbps followup. Eventually it will offer very decent speeds even for storage. Of course, SCSI probably won't stand still either, even though I hate were it's all going with the double wide, double fast, double thick connectors. SCSI is slowly running out of steam and turning up more evolutionary than revolutionary improvements. It took how many years to finally increase the device count to 16 or 32?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
All true, it's all true what you say, but if it's cheap enough, it doesn't really matter. There is a market for FAST drives, and there is a market for LARGE and not so fast drives. One of those 80GB babies could hold all the CDs I'll ever buy in this lifetime, neatly squashed into MP3s. And it gives audiophiles the option to keep their 320kbps compression without sacrificing capacity too much.
Things will really take off once we hit the several hundred GB level, where you can do with DVDs what we do with CDs today. I'm thinking of a nice little video server with a couple hundred movies on it, that can serve movie streams to several players at once over the 100BaseT network throughout the house. Oh, and all your CDs fit almost incidentally in the spare capacity of the drive.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Has anyone tried one of those 1394 to IDE adapters that let you connect an IDE drive into the chain? The idea sounds good, but the adapters are still a bit pricey ($149 or so), and I would like to hear some performance reports.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I don't understand your point: there are thousands of competitors to the corner store, but none that come close to Deja. If Deja goes, I'll be back to wasting countless hours scouring newsgroups in a news reader. There are supposed to be other Usenet databases out there, but I don't think any of them come close to Deja.
Mind you, not that I think Deja is perfect. There are many things I hate about it. But that is like faulting a hammer for being heavy and flammable--true, but it does the job.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
...I made it perfectly clear what I thought of it by linking it via "crap"? This is all going to be off-topic, but I consider ALL American cars total and utter shit. American car makers can't even begin to approach world-class manufacturing tolerances (by their own admissions), and they certainly couldn't tell a desirable automobile if it bit them in the ass--unless it's a truck, of course, if one considers a truck an automobile, and if a truck could be considered desirable. They can't even start with a good car and keep it that way: consider the Lincoln LS, based on the Jaguar Type S, yet not even a pale shadow of that car. Or the Saturn LS: based on the Opel Vectra, minus all the enjoyable things about it.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I've used Deja pretty much since the beginning, and it's an absolutely invaluable tool. By far my most visited site, even before Slashdot. I've never really understood how they can stay in business while providing their service for free. Please don't kid yourselves that the dinky little banner at the top actually funds the site, any more than Slashdot's does. So I can't blame them for trying to supplement their funding in all sorts of different ways. Personally, I'd rather pay a yearly fee for using them, since I actually get value out of the service. However, the fee users are prepared to pay might not be sufficient to keep them going, same as a magazine subscription doesn't really keep the magazine afloat--it might defray some costs, but the bulk of revenue still comes from advertising.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Then again, they might link crap to something really interesting, right?
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
...soon they want the whole hand, and then some. I remember the early days when ATI (along with Diamond?) wouldn't provide specs for their chips, never mind write drivers, and there was only minimal XFree support. People were howling for the specs. Now that we've got the specs, we're whining about having to write the drivers. There's just no pleasing anyone...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
Just an aside, really. If my original post was marked as off-topic, all subsequent replies addressing its contents rather than pointing out that it's off-topic, should also be marked off-topic, right? Just wondering...
Uwe Wolfgang Radu
I guess that must be another one of those made-up-on-the-spot statistics. Here's a web site with statistics I found while digging around at the ACLU: http://www.essential.org/dpic/po.html. Of course, the ACLU is hardly any death penalty proponent's darling, but it's nevertheless an institution with a high degree of credibility.
Regarding the statistics for Europe in particular, that's your wishful thinking. Germany for example hasn't had the DP since 1949, has much lower violent crime rate (recent sprees notwithstanding), and there would simply be no impetus for a majority of the population to be in favor of the DP. Show us some figures please.
Uwe Wolfgang Radu