Re-read the *Matrix Orbital* site again.:) You're right, the fellow that suggested it did suggest the hardware, not monitoring software. However the Matrix Orbital hardware is insufficient for use as a "monitor". It lacks the resolution. Most of their displays are 3 or 4 lines by 80 characters. Some are "graphics" capable, but only have a resolution of 160x80 or similar. Not very useful to display a Linux/BeOS/Windows/FreeBSD desktop on.
Not to mention that the Matrix Orbital displays are fed serially, which is *way* too slow to handle a VGA video feed.
That being said, the Matrix Orbital stuff is wonderful, if you want/need a small LCD display for showing system stats, MP3 playlists or the like.
Each of them either produces a PowerPC-based Linux distribution that runs on iBooks (as well as iMacs, Powerbooks and other PowerPC systems), or in the case of fink, ports common Linux apps to the OS X platform.
Agreed. I purchased the OMP (Original MessagePad) and was appalled at it's handwriting recognition - it was just as bad as the Simpsons and Doonesbury cartoons made it out to be.
But despite it's shortcomings, the platform was promising. So when the MP130 came out (I skipped the 110 and 120), I picked one up. What a difference! The thing nailed my handwriting within the first couple days. Here was a completely usable PDA, with excellent PIM functionality. The Intelligent Assistant was tres cool - you'd simply write "Lunch with joe on Friday" and it would open up an appointment slip for 12 noon the following Friday, and present you with a list of "Joes" from your addressbook. Two taps and the appointment was scheduled.
I picked up a 2100 shortly thereafter, and life couldn't be better - 206 Mhz StrongARM processor, tons o'RAM, two PCMCIA slots... ethernet support, and wicked-fast and accurate HWR. My only complaint? It was a little too big. But I just picked another one up to replace my Sony Clie - PalmOS and PocketPC still haven't matched it's functionality.
Sorry for the inconvenience? That's just something our politicians tell yours. We've been using the US as a toxic waste dump for bad talent for *years* and you people haven't caught on yet! Celine Dion, Alanis Morrisette, William Shatner, Lorne Greene, and our latest triumph, April Lavigne!
If it wasn't for you guys, we'd have to put up with them here. The US is the Botany Bay of the Canadian Entertainment Industry!
In this comment, I will demonstrate a simple, mathematically sound solution to the GNU/Linux naming issue.
1. Branch the GNU toolset sources. Make any minor modifications you wish. Make sure to credit the original authors and sources, and make your source code freely available. 2. Name your branch Linux^2/GNU. 3. Install your new toolset over an existing GNU/Linux installation.
Mathematically speaking, this gives you:
(GNU/Linux) * (Linux^2/GNU) = Linux
Voila. You can now refer to your new distribution as Linux.
Re:I'm tired of the bickering...
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 2
And don't forget former physicists turned Linux system administrators at open source companies, who pull down over $80k a year.
Now litte kid, go back to your nice game of counterstrike and come back when you're old enough to participate in a grown up world.
Re:Please enlighten a doofus
on
LinuXbox Boots
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Not sure what they go for in the US, Linux on XBox means that for $299 Canadian, I can pick up a webserver / NWN server / mail server / whatever server.
That's a good deal. And it'll bug Microsoft, as MS is losing money on each and every XBox being sold, and instead intends to recoup their loss via software license fees.
*sigh* I had hoped that the mathematics & Comp Sci department at U of W knew better. But who am I kidding? When I went there, we used to joke about how U of W's secondary campus was located in Redmond - given the large # of UW CompSci co-ops and graduates that worked there.
Ah well, at least my old Physics department is underfunded (wait... RIM is investing $150 million in a new Physics research institute @ the U of Waterloo? DOH!)
Waterloo always had close ties with industry. Now they appear to have an umbilical cord.
It's not very well known in the Windows world - seems to be something that us Unix folk load onto Windows machines to make them feel a little more like "home". I hope it gains more recognition by the Windows "mainstream" types, as it's one excellent bundle of useful apps.
Speak for yourself, not "most of us". Unless you've taken a poll of the population of the entire 'net, then about all you can be sure of is your own opinion.
With regards to the Slashdot reader reactions, hey, it's understandable. Do I love the Lone Gunmen? Nah. I liked them though. But what happens if the next time around Slashdot spoils the plot to something I'm really interested in. That's what annoys me about this. Completely irresponsible. Katz manages to prefix his reviews with spoiler warnings, so why couldn't Chris D? It's "A Good Idea" when discussing the plot to a movie or television show that not everyone may have seen.
Even John Katz knows enough to put spoiler notices on his articles and hides the meat in the BODY, not the bloody header (never mind putting it in a completely unthoughtful, unoriginal title). For crying out loud Chrisd, thanks for ruining the episode for me.
Just about every other news site out there that deals with TV/movie info knows what spoiler warnings are and how to use them. May I politely suggest that the editors of Slashdot take a peek at Dark Horizons or Trek Today and get a clue.
Not everyone in this world lives by the schedule of the US East coast. Twit.
Saw a demo of this on The Screen Savers tonight. The video switcher is built in - it's a knob on the front panel - twist it, and it switches from one feed to another.
See Espial's website. (disclaimer: I used to work for them). They do some neat stuff in Java, and target handhelds, PDAs, cell phones, etc... Their DeviceServer platform is nifty.
You might also want to look at DeviceTop - it's a reference site for people doing just what you're talking about - developing and running Java apps on mobile devices. (again, sponsored by Espial and Sun, among others I believe)...
But you don't *need* the root account. sudo and the GUI version of it (the "click lock to make changes" dialog) are fully functional.
True, if you want an honest-to-goodness root account, you can pop into the Netinfo manager and enable it, but there really is never any need to. "sudo su -" or "sudo {sh,tcsh,bash}" work wonders...
Get *over* the fact that Macs only have one button! That's the *silliest* reason I've heard *not* to buy one. The OS supports multiple buttons - hook up a USB mouse, away you go... left click, right click, middle-click, scroll, go *wild*.
Sure, I understand missing the extra mouse buttons on the TiBook, especially when running Linux. I know, I have one. *But*, you'll note on Apple's keyboard layout that the Apple key and a secondary Enter key are located on either side of the keyboard. Simply remap them as mousebuttons in YellowDog or your Linux of choice. They're within easy reach when your hand is on the trackpad and work quite well.
Not true at all. Canadians *have* to keep their basic math skills up, it's in our best interests to.
In order to claim any prize from a lottery, or free giveaway (such as the scratch and win stuff at McDonalds), by law a Canadian must answer a "skill testing question", usually mathematical in nature.
The reasoning behind this is quite old and goes along the lines of "all lotteries and gambling are bad - but if the player answers a skill testing question, they 'earned' the prize".
I kid you not. You will see this on the back of pretty much every lottery ticket, McDonalds give-away, and Tim Horton's coffee cups during the Roll-up-the-rim-to-win contests.
Usually the questions are along the lines of "What is the square root of (10^2 / 2) + 206" - pretty simple, but no calculators are allowed...
So yes, most of us do tend to keep up on the basics... after all, a free cup of Tim Hortons coffee may lie in the balance.
Victoria BC is quite nice, with winter temperatures rarely dropping below freezing. It's a common US misconception that all of Canada is a frigid wasteland.
Look at PDAs / handheld PCs. They use flash memory, albeit out of necessity (price, power consumption, size, etc)... but we're already beginning to see laptops incorporate solid state storage technologies. It's only a matter of time.
Now, if we could just get around that pesky limited-write lifetime...;)
Don't judge it by it's name alone. French Canadian companies often choose interesting names. For example: OEone (based in Hull, Quebec... makers of a Linux based internet appliance that was reviewed on Slashdot awhile ago)... and can't forget Newlix - well, maybe you can. They went under last year, but were making a linux distro targetted towards small and medium sized businesses (Firewall, email, filesharing, etc).
The difference here is that ZDnet isn't a small-time website. ZDnet is fairly well respected in large corporate management circles (frightening, I know). All sorts of corporate justifications and purchases are made based on the content of large sites such as ZDNet.
If I were a Microsoft-friendly IT person who wanted to standardize on.NET for my corporate computing infrastructure, one of the things I might do is hit ZDNet and start pulling down stats. Well, look at what I'd find: A recent poll says that 74% of users prefer.NET to Java.
Not knowing the ways of the net (and you'd be surprised at just how many corporate IT workers *don't*), I'd pull the stat, put it in a nice report, and quote the source as "Ziff Davis Net"... and it probably wouldn't even occur to me to credit it as an unofficial poll, or that it could even be ballot stuffed.
That's why people are annoyed about this. Sure, ballot stuffing happens all the time on web polls. But when it happens on a large enough site, ballot stuffing can actually influence millions of dollars worth of sales.
1. As I mentioned, that was a long time ago. I'm 28 now, and *do* work full time thanks much.
2. I specified 32-35 hours a week, employed as "part-time". The regular "full-time" work week is 37.5 hours (at least here in Canada). Therefore, I was working 5 hours a week short of being considered full-time. Perhaps though, I should have specified "non standard" hours, rather than the phrase "part time", which seems to have a rather negative connotation, at least in your mind. During that period of time, my job was essentially full-time, with highschool being a part-time consideration. Not perhaps the best arrangement, but c'est la vie.
Some part-time jobs are a joke. Mine wasn't. Scoff somewhere else please.
Well, I can't speak for the person who wrote the original post, but I can relate a little something of my background.
I'm a senior Unix system administrator, 28 years old, and have been *working* in the "computer industry" for 15 years now.
I purchased my first computer when I was 10 (a TI-99 4/A... and 16k was all you needed back then.;) and "played" / taught myself to program, etc... until I was about 14.
A local computer store that I frequented needed a part-time technician, and the owner offered me a job (after school of course, and "off the record" as I wasn't legally old enough to be employed). I learned a bit about small businesses, got some hands-on experience with hardware I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to work with, and made some money.
When I was 16 I went to work (again, "part time" which translated to about 32 hours a week for me) for ComputerLand, a large Canadian VAR, again as a technician... and from there it snowballed (and I moved from technician to software development): SHL SystemHouse, Dell Computer Corp, Nortel, Mitel, Espial, and a few more. Eventually, I ended up going to school part time and working full-time... oddly enough, the hours didn't really change all that much.;)
I can honestly say that my 14 years of experience include nearly 13 years of "professional" experience - ie: client management, project proposals, justifications, reviews, functional specs, etc...
I can relate to the poster - I often found that people didn't take me seriously at first because of my age. Never had a problem with someone trying to fire me though. 15 year-old "know it alls" often don't (at least, not everything), so I tried to remind myself of that now and then, and made an effort to at least listen to the other person, no matter how old (or wrong) I thought they were.:)
I was also lucky enough to have some great mentors along the way, that schooled me in the fine art of memory management, OpenGL and more.
So, it might not be common but 19 year olds with 5 years of experience *do* happen now and then.
Halo is visually quite nice, and has a decent plot to it.
My main complaint is I finished it in two days, and I did *not* stay up all night to do it. I actually went outside, talked to people, and generally lived my life.
Excellent news Dan. Was it my imagination or was the delay between 2.0's commercial release and ISO release much longer than two weeks? Seemed that way at the time.
This is good news though. Now that I've got a shiny G4 Ti, if YDL 2.1 is as good as I hope it will be, a week or two after I play with the ISO you'll have an order from me for a package.
I don't mind paying, I just like to know what I'm getting first. (I too work for an open source Linux company, and understand the survival issues...;)
Well, in keeping with YDL tradition, the iso is not available on their FTP and probably won't be for a couple months.
I'm a little ambivilent about this - I can understand that they want to make money from their open source endeavors, and by withholding the ISO, they ensure that if you really, got to have it, you'll buy it from them.
On the other hand, it would be nice to actually play with it before putting the cash out. I was once called an OS slut by another sysadmin, and he was right - I like to play with every distribution - not just of Linux, but OSes in general. So to me, freely available ISOs are a godsend. When I find a distribution I like, I've often purchased the retail version, to support the company/group in question. But I *do* enjoy trying before buying.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that the Matrix Orbital displays are fed serially, which is *way* too slow to handle a VGA video feed.
That being said, the Matrix Orbital stuff is wonderful, if you want/need a small LCD display for showing system stats, MP3 playlists or the like.
Ummm... Someone should tell these guys:
http://www.linuxppc.org
and these guys ...
http://www.yellowdoglinux.com
and these guys ...
http://fink.sourceforge.net
and these guys ...
http://www.debian.org
and these guys ...
http://www.gentoo.org
and these guys ...
http://www.linux-mandrake.com
Each of them either produces a PowerPC-based Linux distribution that runs on iBooks (as well as iMacs, Powerbooks and other PowerPC systems), or in the case of fink, ports common Linux apps to the OS X platform.
Agreed. I purchased the OMP (Original MessagePad) and was appalled at it's handwriting recognition - it was just as bad as the Simpsons and Doonesbury cartoons made it out to be.
But despite it's shortcomings, the platform was promising. So when the MP130 came out (I skipped the 110 and 120), I picked one up. What a difference! The thing nailed my handwriting within the first couple days. Here was a completely usable PDA, with excellent PIM functionality. The Intelligent Assistant was tres cool - you'd simply write "Lunch with joe on Friday" and it would open up an appointment slip for 12 noon the following Friday, and present you with a list of "Joes" from your addressbook. Two taps and the appointment was scheduled.
I picked up a 2100 shortly thereafter, and life couldn't be better - 206 Mhz StrongARM processor, tons o'RAM, two PCMCIA slots... ethernet support, and wicked-fast and accurate HWR. My only complaint? It was a little too big. But I just picked another one up to replace my Sony Clie - PalmOS and PocketPC still haven't matched it's functionality.
Sorry for the inconvenience? That's just something our politicians tell yours. We've been using the US as a toxic waste dump for bad talent for *years* and you people haven't caught on yet! Celine Dion, Alanis Morrisette, William Shatner, Lorne Greene, and our latest triumph, April Lavigne!
If it wasn't for you guys, we'd have to put up with them here. The US is the Botany Bay of the Canadian Entertainment Industry!
In this comment, I will demonstrate a simple, mathematically sound solution to the GNU/Linux naming issue.
1. Branch the GNU toolset sources. Make any minor modifications you wish. Make sure to credit the original authors and sources, and make your source code freely available.
2. Name your branch Linux^2/GNU.
3. Install your new toolset over an existing GNU/Linux installation.
Mathematically speaking, this gives you:
(GNU/Linux) * (Linux^2/GNU) = Linux
Voila. You can now refer to your new distribution as Linux.
And don't forget former physicists turned Linux system administrators at open source companies, who pull down over $80k a year.
Now litte kid, go back to your nice game of counterstrike and come back when you're old enough to participate in a grown up world.
Not sure what they go for in the US, Linux on XBox means that for $299 Canadian, I can pick up a webserver / NWN server / mail server / whatever server.
That's a good deal. And it'll bug Microsoft, as MS is losing money on each and every XBox being sold, and instead intends to recoup their loss via software license fees.
*sigh* I had hoped that the mathematics & Comp Sci department at U of W knew better. But who am I kidding? When I went there, we used to joke about how U of W's secondary campus was located in Redmond - given the large # of UW CompSci co-ops and graduates that worked there.
Ah well, at least my old Physics department is underfunded (wait... RIM is investing $150 million in a new Physics research institute @ the U of Waterloo? DOH!)
Waterloo always had close ties with industry. Now they appear to have an umbilical cord.
Perhaps the poor guy just didn't know about it.
It's not very well known in the Windows world - seems to be something that us Unix folk load onto Windows machines to make them feel a little more like "home". I hope it gains more recognition by the Windows "mainstream" types, as it's one excellent bundle of useful apps.
With regards to the Slashdot reader reactions, hey, it's understandable. Do I love the Lone Gunmen? Nah. I liked them though. But what happens if the next time around Slashdot spoils the plot to something I'm really interested in. That's what annoys me about this. Completely irresponsible. Katz manages to prefix his reviews with spoiler warnings, so why couldn't Chris D? It's "A Good Idea" when discussing the plot to a movie or television show that not everyone may have seen.
Even John Katz knows enough to put spoiler notices on his articles and hides the meat in the BODY, not the bloody header (never mind putting it in a completely unthoughtful, unoriginal title). For crying out loud Chrisd, thanks for ruining the episode for me.
Just about every other news site out there that deals with TV/movie info knows what spoiler warnings are and how to use them. May I politely suggest that the editors of Slashdot take a peek at Dark Horizons or Trek Today and get a clue.
Not everyone in this world lives by the schedule of the US East coast. Twit.
Saw a demo of this on The Screen Savers tonight. The video switcher is built in - it's a knob on the front panel - twist it, and it switches from one feed to another.
You might also want to look at DeviceTop - it's a reference site for people doing just what you're talking about - developing and running Java apps on mobile devices. (again, sponsored by Espial and Sun, among others I believe)...
But you don't *need* the root account. sudo and the GUI version of it (the "click lock to make changes" dialog) are fully functional.
True, if you want an honest-to-goodness root account, you can pop into the Netinfo manager and enable it, but there really is never any need to. "sudo su -" or "sudo {sh,tcsh,bash}" work wonders...
Get *over* the fact that Macs only have one button! That's the *silliest* reason I've heard *not* to buy one. The OS supports multiple buttons - hook up a USB mouse, away you go... left click, right click, middle-click, scroll, go *wild*.
Sure, I understand missing the extra mouse buttons on the TiBook, especially when running Linux. I know, I have one. *But*, you'll note on Apple's keyboard layout that the Apple key and a secondary Enter key are located on either side of the keyboard. Simply remap them as mousebuttons in YellowDog or your Linux of choice. They're within easy reach when your hand is on the trackpad and work quite well.
Not true at all. Canadians *have* to keep their basic math skills up, it's in our best interests to.
In order to claim any prize from a lottery, or free giveaway (such as the scratch and win stuff at McDonalds), by law a Canadian must answer a "skill testing question", usually mathematical in nature.
The reasoning behind this is quite old and goes along the lines of "all lotteries and gambling are bad - but if the player answers a skill testing question, they 'earned' the prize".
I kid you not. You will see this on the back of pretty much every lottery ticket, McDonalds give-away, and Tim Horton's coffee cups during the Roll-up-the-rim-to-win contests.
Usually the questions are along the lines of "What is the square root of (10^2 / 2) + 206" - pretty simple, but no calculators are allowed...
So yes, most of us do tend to keep up on the basics... after all, a free cup of Tim Hortons coffee may lie in the balance.
Victoria BC is quite nice, with winter temperatures rarely dropping below freezing. It's a common US misconception that all of Canada is a frigid wasteland.
Look at PDAs / handheld PCs. They use flash memory, albeit out of necessity (price, power consumption, size, etc)... but we're already beginning to see laptops incorporate solid state storage technologies. It's only a matter of time.
... ;)
Now, if we could just get around that pesky limited-write lifetime
Don't judge it by it's name alone. French Canadian companies often choose interesting names. For example: OEone (based in Hull, Quebec... makers of a Linux based internet appliance that was reviewed on Slashdot awhile ago)... and can't forget Newlix - well, maybe you can. They went under last year, but were making a linux distro targetted towards small and medium sized businesses (Firewall, email, filesharing, etc).
The difference here is that ZDnet isn't a small-time website. ZDnet is fairly well respected in large corporate management circles (frightening, I know). All sorts of corporate justifications and purchases are made based on the content of large sites such as ZDNet.
If I were a Microsoft-friendly IT person who wanted to standardize on .NET for my corporate computing infrastructure, one of the things I might do is hit ZDNet and start pulling down stats. Well, look at what I'd find: A recent poll says that 74% of users prefer .NET to Java.
Not knowing the ways of the net (and you'd be surprised at just how many corporate IT workers *don't*), I'd pull the stat, put it in a nice report, and quote the source as "Ziff Davis Net" ... and it probably wouldn't even occur to me to credit it as an unofficial poll, or that it could even be ballot stuffed.
That's why people are annoyed about this. Sure, ballot stuffing happens all the time on web polls. But when it happens on a large enough site, ballot stuffing can actually influence millions of dollars worth of sales.
No offense to you, but:
1. As I mentioned, that was a long time ago. I'm 28 now, and *do* work full time thanks much.
2. I specified 32-35 hours a week, employed as "part-time". The regular "full-time" work week is 37.5 hours (at least here in Canada). Therefore, I was working 5 hours a week short of being considered full-time. Perhaps though, I should have specified "non standard" hours, rather than the phrase "part time", which seems to have a rather negative connotation, at least in your mind. During that period of time, my job was essentially full-time, with highschool being a part-time consideration. Not perhaps the best arrangement, but c'est la vie.
Some part-time jobs are a joke. Mine wasn't. Scoff somewhere else please.
Well, I can't speak for the person who wrote the original post, but I can relate a little something of my background.
;) and "played" / taught myself to program, etc... until I was about 14.
;)
:)
I'm a senior Unix system administrator, 28 years old, and have been *working* in the "computer industry" for 15 years now.
I purchased my first computer when I was 10 (a TI-99 4/A... and 16k was all you needed back then.
A local computer store that I frequented needed a part-time technician, and the owner offered me a job (after school of course, and "off the record" as I wasn't legally old enough to be employed). I learned a bit about small businesses, got some hands-on experience with hardware I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to work with, and made some money.
When I was 16 I went to work (again, "part time" which translated to about 32 hours a week for me) for ComputerLand, a large Canadian VAR, again as a technician... and from there it snowballed (and I moved from technician to software development): SHL SystemHouse, Dell Computer Corp, Nortel, Mitel, Espial, and a few more. Eventually, I ended up going to school part time and working full-time... oddly enough, the hours didn't really change all that much.
I can honestly say that my 14 years of experience include nearly 13 years of "professional" experience - ie: client management, project proposals, justifications, reviews, functional specs, etc...
I can relate to the poster - I often found that people didn't take me seriously at first because of my age. Never had a problem with someone trying to fire me though. 15 year-old "know it alls" often don't (at least, not everything), so I tried to remind myself of that now and then, and made an effort to at least listen to the other person, no matter how old (or wrong) I thought they were.
I was also lucky enough to have some great mentors along the way, that schooled me in the fine art of memory management, OpenGL and more.
So, it might not be common but 19 year olds with 5 years of experience *do* happen now and then.
Halo is visually quite nice, and has a decent plot to it.
My main complaint is I finished it in two days, and I did *not* stay up all night to do it. I actually went outside, talked to people, and generally lived my life.
A little annoying, given the hype surrounding it.
Excellent news Dan. Was it my imagination or was the delay between 2.0's commercial release and ISO release much longer than two weeks? Seemed that way at the time.
;)
This is good news though. Now that I've got a shiny G4 Ti, if YDL 2.1 is as good as I hope it will be, a week or two after I play with the ISO you'll have an order from me for a package.
I don't mind paying, I just like to know what I'm getting first. (I too work for an open source Linux company, and understand the survival issues...
Well, in keeping with YDL tradition, the iso is not available on their FTP and probably won't be for a couple months.
I'm a little ambivilent about this - I can understand that they want to make money from their open source endeavors, and by withholding the ISO, they ensure that if you really, got to have it, you'll buy it from them.
On the other hand, it would be nice to actually play with it before putting the cash out. I was once called an OS slut by another sysadmin, and he was right - I like to play with every distribution - not just of Linux, but OSes in general. So to me, freely available ISOs are a godsend. When I find a distribution I like, I've often purchased the retail version, to support the company/group in question. But I *do* enjoy trying before buying.