Like Desktop Publishing revolutionized the world of print, fabbers will revolutionize the world of objects. The technology is in its infancy though and its gonna take decades before it becomes interesting for everybody.
Imagine any kind of appliance adjusted to you and only you from superautomatic armchairs with custom inlays to your TV remote control which is crafted to be part of your hand. Finally a remote I can handle with my fat, thick fingers! This is worth waiting and not dying of a heart attack and general slagging...
I do not agree with his argumentation and comparison of the choices a MacOS user has. One thing he has to understand, and this is the reason people still use MacOS, is that most people only care about the applications they are using. As long as any version of MacOS does the job of running them they will stick with it since this is what they are used to. Only if MacOSX will have the same kind of backward compability those users will think of switching.
My experience with MacOSX is not a good one so far. It sucks 2 or 3 times more resources than Windows2000 and its horribly slow forcing you to buy new powerful hardware, which does not exist since the PowerPC processor speeds are stuck around 500-750Mhz. When you boot MacOSX to the finder you will see that about 25-50% of the virtual address space (around 1GB to 2GB) is gone. Launch some applications and each will take another huge chunk of it. The responsivness of the UI is pathetic, although this is something MacOS users know already.
So why do people choose LinuxPPC? Because they have a Mac and have great difficulties running industry standard applications like apache, nfs servers etc. LinuxPPC makes a great server only OS. I dought that MacOSX will allow you that in the way LinuxPPC allows it with such a small footprint.
Perhaps people will buy new Macs to run MacOSX, but their old machines will have LinuxPPC installed since they can't run MacOSX on them.
There one simple solution to this problem: Offer bootable CDs. One boot cd and one game cd. The boot cd will contain all the neccessary stuff including a linux kernel, OpenGL library and some other sugar which will be loaded into memory. The way it work for the user:
1. Insert boot CD
2. Wait until asked to insert the game CD
3. Insert game CD
4. Play the game
The boot cd could be updated from time to time to support new hardware, the game cds stay the same. And everybody will be happy since they do have to install anything...
The flash player is one poor piece of engineering:
-Having two points on the same coordinate in any kind of vectorial shape causes a crash (something like a division by zero).
-The integration into the web browser is at best in pre alpha stage. Try resizing a.swf under Netscape in Linux and you crash within a few seconds. Under IE5 keyboard navigation on a web page becomes impossible (For people who can't use a mouse this is really a problem).
-Viewing web pages with flash content is almost unbearable on a remote X11 display and eats up the complete bandwidth. It especially pisses me off if people have flash web banners on their pages like f.ex. sharkyextreme.com.
-Specs for the newest.swf format revisions are always kept secret. Flash5 contains a JavaScript like language called ActionScript. This kind of stuff scares me to death...
Another company trying to sell second class software. Any serious software developer will tell you that you need more time than that to develop a fully featured software like a DTP application.
In addition I do not see any specifications or screenshots on their web site. Its one thing to come up with shots of the boxes, another to come up with competetive software.
Sorry, but this news looks more like a trap targeted for investors. On the web site you can see that the guy responsible for press releases is also responsible for investor relations. This is pathetic.
Go On www.c64.com. Tons of games and emulators. I suggest Frodo, works nicely on X11 and also includes the ROMs (without any legal problems attached to them).
The english translation comes not even close to the tone in the german version. When he uses 'Sie'(which is translated using 'you') he IMHO mainly addresses the U.S. goverment and the U.S. legal system.
From what I can extract in the article he critisizes their urge to obtain and increase their influence into all aspects of the Internet by using cover up organzations like ICANN. This becomes clear at the very end: "As long as they accept other cultures, it's all good. I am really going to try to make this coexistence thing work."
That is a pretty strong opinion and he is gonna be silenced very quickly if any kind of action in this direction follows from him.
A real good question is: Why had the ICANN to be placed in the U.S. and why did it have to be founded under the legal status of a company and not just a public organisation?
Apart from getting this vintage 'feeling' the price is pretty ridiculous.
You can get a real Z80 (in fact its a modified Z180) development kit including C compiler, debugging tools and tons of standard IO for 140$, a kit with ethernet and a full TCP/IP library for 200$. A standalone module comes to $40.
This ClearType thing looks terrible on my 1024x768 13" TFT display. The color distortions are very visible. I would rather prefer normal antialiasing, which is currently not available for smaller font sizes...
Ever thought of taking legal action against your employer? What they are doing is simply illegal.
They can not fire you in favor of H1B workers, nor are they allowed to offer a salary below your current one to these people.
There are strict regulations for applying for H1Bs and one of them is that the position must be publicly open for at least 1 month. Only after that time are they are allowed to fill the position with a foreign worker.
The usual trick around this is to ask for completly unrealistic qualifications which only this specific foreign worker will fullfill.
By default the Amiga copies the content of ENVARC: into the RamDisk and assigns ENV: to it. This folder basically contains everything/etc/ on Unix systems contains and in addition also all environment variables (they appear as files).
Advantage was certainly speed but also more stability. This way it was possible to use settings only during one session. This was usually done having two buttons in the preferences panel: Use and Save. A simple reboot would bring you back to the saved settings. Very useful if you were changing the screen settings and your monitor did not like it.
Personally I think this concept could be interesting for Linux systems in general, perhaps even provide more security since the content/etc would be mostly temporary. A simple reboot would bring you back to the original state. A simple way to defend hackers? Perhaps it is just a stupid idea...
An OS is an abstract layer to manage files and memory. Hrm. I guess it was of those guys with thick glasses punching in the data which was given to him from the scientists using the most weird interfaces nobody else could understand. Astronauts of the 60s f.ex. where OSs since they did nothing more than that.
I just came back from "The Usual" in San Jose. I am bit loaded, so this report might be incomplete.
I passed by the place around 8pm, noticing the long waiting line. We then decided to first grab a bite in a crappy restaurant and around 9pm the line was down to 2 or 3 people.
The first thing I noticed was this amazing ratio between females and males. 1:10 at most... This got better at the end of the evening, when most of the non dancing whimps left. Anyway, whats this kind of party which fades out around midnight? For european standards this is very poor. A good party should last at least until 6am...
The music was excellent, at least if you like trance. A bunch of very good remixes of classics from Robert Miles, Paul van Dyk etc. Over the evening it faded over to hard trance together with the noise level reaching its peak around 0:30 am.
I spotted Linus and some other famous people from the Debian team during the evening. Before that I had met Linus in San Jose on our way to Linux World. He came in around 2pm. I could not believe my eyes when I realized it was him waiting at the crossing. One of my buddies could not resist to scream "Linus" and he turned his head. I wonder if he gets that a lot... If I only had had my camera ready...
One of the most noteable thing was the free beer (like in speech;-). This lastet until 11pm. There was also no entrace fee. Just everything in the right spririt. From what I could see from the T-Shirts there were a lot of people from VA Linux.
I recently had to replace my 1 year old K6-2/300 2.2V in one of my notebooks with a K6-2/300 1.8V. The difference is impressive. Batterylife is increased by 100% and the machine basically stays cold making it now possible to put the notebook on my lap to work. Price of the new processor was $29. I imagine that a K6-2+ could offer even more.
Do not use X and stick to the console. This makes life way easier. You will be surprised how fast you machine is and realize that 16MB of RAM are just enough to do everything.
The only thing missing is a web browser which runs on the Linux framebuffer. Once this is available I would not even need a Windows machine on the side anymore. How about a framebuffer version of Mozilla?
I believe that this buisness is facing a pretty common problem with technology.
There is a huge gap between goverment and smaller companies when it comes to the ability to pay for these kind services. The problem is that there are no customers in between so far to fill the gap, thus making it difficult to progressivly develop and cutting down the costs of this technology.
The computer buissness faced the same kind of problems at some point, but they were overcome with products like the Intel 4004 leading the way for the personal computer. There was broad laughter in the sixties when some researchers predicted that computers would be actually used in private homes. They did not see the use of computers other than for large scale scientific projects.
What space travel needs is more innovation and creativity, throwing over board old notions of how spacel travel has to work and who will use it. Take a risk and create new products!
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Imagine any kind of appliance adjusted to you and only you from superautomatic armchairs with custom inlays to your TV remote control which is crafted to be part of your hand. Finally a remote I can handle with my fat, thick fingers! This is worth waiting and not dying of a heart attack and general slagging...
My experience with MacOSX is not a good one so far. It sucks 2 or 3 times more resources than Windows2000 and its horribly slow forcing you to buy new powerful hardware, which does not exist since the PowerPC processor speeds are stuck around 500-750Mhz. When you boot MacOSX to the finder you will see that about 25-50% of the virtual address space (around 1GB to 2GB) is gone. Launch some applications and each will take another huge chunk of it. The responsivness of the UI is pathetic, although this is something MacOS users know already.
So why do people choose LinuxPPC? Because they have a Mac and have great difficulties running industry standard applications like apache, nfs servers etc. LinuxPPC makes a great server only OS. I dought that MacOSX will allow you that in the way LinuxPPC allows it with such a small footprint.
Perhaps people will buy new Macs to run MacOSX, but their old machines will have LinuxPPC installed since they can't run MacOSX on them.
1. Insert boot CD
2. Wait until asked to insert the game CD
3. Insert game CD
4. Play the game
The boot cd could be updated from time to time to support new hardware, the game cds stay the same. And everybody will be happy since they do have to install anything...
-Having two points on the same coordinate in any kind of vectorial shape causes a crash (something like a division by zero).
-The integration into the web browser is at best in pre alpha stage. Try resizing a .swf under Netscape in Linux and you crash within a few seconds. Under IE5 keyboard navigation on a web page becomes impossible (For people who can't use a mouse this is really a problem).
-Viewing web pages with flash content is almost unbearable on a remote X11 display and eats up the complete bandwidth. It especially pisses me off if people have flash web banners on their pages like f.ex. sharkyextreme.com.
-Specs for the newest .swf format revisions are always kept secret. Flash5 contains a JavaScript like language called ActionScript. This kind of stuff scares me to death...
Actually it should be 'eamail' like earwax or eased.
In addition I do not see any specifications or screenshots on their web site. Its one thing to come up with shots of the boxes, another to come up with competetive software.
Sorry, but this news looks more like a trap targeted for investors. On the web site you can see that the guy responsible for press releases is also responsible for investor relations. This is pathetic.
Go On www.c64.com. Tons of games and emulators. I suggest Frodo, works nicely on X11 and also includes the ROMs (without any legal problems attached to them).
"ein offenes betriebssystem hat nicht nur vorteile" translates into "an open-source system has NOT ONLY advantages." So they admit it has advantages.
I think the ad is funny and well done. Not that I take the message serious though, Debian will stay on my machine for some time to come...
From what I can extract in the article he critisizes their urge to obtain and increase their influence into all aspects of the Internet by using cover up organzations like ICANN. This becomes clear at the very end: "As long as they accept other cultures, it's all good. I am really going to try to make this coexistence thing work."
That is a pretty strong opinion and he is gonna be silenced very quickly if any kind of action in this direction follows from him.
A real good question is: Why had the ICANN to be placed in the U.S. and why did it have to be founded under the legal status of a company and not just a public organisation?
You can get a real Z80 (in fact its a modified Z180) development kit including C compiler, debugging tools and tons of standard IO for 140$, a kit with ethernet and a full TCP/IP library for 200$. A standalone module comes to $40.
- http://www.rabbitsemiconductor.com
I have one of these and its really cool. The specs are:This ClearType thing looks terrible on my 1024x768 13" TFT display. The color distortions are very visible. I would rather prefer normal antialiasing, which is currently not available for smaller font sizes...
They can not fire you in favor of H1B workers, nor are they allowed to offer a salary below your current one to these people.
There are strict regulations for applying for H1Bs and one of them is that the position must be publicly open for at least 1 month. Only after that time are they are allowed to fill the position with a foreign worker.
The usual trick around this is to ask for completly unrealistic qualifications which only this specific foreign worker will fullfill.
Advantage was certainly speed but also more stability. This way it was possible to use settings only during one session. This was usually done having two buttons in the preferences panel: Use and Save. A simple reboot would bring you back to the saved settings. Very useful if you were changing the screen settings and your monitor did not like it.
Personally I think this concept could be interesting for Linux systems in general, perhaps even provide more security since the content /etc would be mostly temporary. A simple reboot would bring you back to the original state. A simple way to defend hackers? Perhaps it is just a stupid idea...
An OS is an abstract layer to manage files and memory. Hrm. I guess it was of those guys with thick glasses punching in the data which was given to him from the scientists using the most weird interfaces nobody else could understand. Astronauts of the 60s f.ex. where OSs since they did nothing more than that.
I passed by the place around 8pm, noticing the long waiting line. We then decided to first grab a bite in a crappy restaurant and around 9pm the line was down to 2 or 3 people.
The first thing I noticed was this amazing ratio between females and males. 1:10 at most... This got better at the end of the evening, when most of the non dancing whimps left. Anyway, whats this kind of party which fades out around midnight? For european standards this is very poor. A good party should last at least until 6am...
The music was excellent, at least if you like trance. A bunch of very good remixes of classics from Robert Miles, Paul van Dyk etc. Over the evening it faded over to hard trance together with the noise level reaching its peak around 0:30 am.
I spotted Linus and some other famous people from the Debian team during the evening. Before that I had met Linus in San Jose on our way to Linux World. He came in around 2pm. I could not believe my eyes when I realized it was him waiting at the crossing. One of my buddies could not resist to scream "Linus" and he turned his head. I wonder if he gets that a lot... If I only had had my camera ready...
One of the most noteable thing was the free beer (like in speech ;-). This lastet until 11pm. There was also no entrace fee. Just everything in the right spririt. From what I could see from the T-Shirts there were a lot of people from VA Linux.
I recently had to replace my 1 year old K6-2/300 2.2V in one of my notebooks with a K6-2/300 1.8V. The difference is impressive. Batterylife is increased by 100% and the machine basically stays cold making it now possible to put the notebook on my lap to work. Price of the new processor was $29. I imagine that a K6-2+ could offer even more.
The only thing missing is a web browser which runs on the Linux framebuffer. Once this is available I would not even need a Windows machine on the side anymore. How about a framebuffer version of Mozilla?
There is a huge gap between goverment and smaller companies when it comes to the ability to pay for these kind services. The problem is that there are no customers in between so far to fill the gap, thus making it difficult to progressivly develop and cutting down the costs of this technology.
The computer buissness faced the same kind of problems at some point, but they were overcome with products like the Intel 4004 leading the way for the personal computer. There was broad laughter in the sixties when some researchers predicted that computers would be actually used in private homes. They did not see the use of computers other than for large scale scientific projects.
What space travel needs is more innovation and creativity, throwing over board old notions of how spacel travel has to work and who will use it. Take a risk and create new products!
Excellent!!