I should be able to determine what your product is, and why I need it within 5 minutes of being on your website. Don't tell me what it's going to do -for- me, tell me what it really does, and I'd wager the person to best provide the verbage for something like that is going to be a tech that help develop it. Don't tell me it's going to increase my productivity by 50%, or provide a scalable architecture for me to build my applications on... tell me how it's built. I'll know whether or not it's right for me.
Well...there are also blind web surfers. Both CSS and HTML explicitly support markup and styling for non-graphical browsers.
.... Which you'll have to code for if you want to do something that's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant in the USA. Ie: any work you do for the federal government, or an entity which receives federal funds.
They're not ficticious... I really have had webpages I've built beta tested by a blind user to check for compliance.
Ok ok, let's stop right here at the first paragraph. So, he already had his drive partitioned from a previous install (meaning he didn't have to mess with fips, partition magic, etc.) and he used fdisk to partition. And exactly how is this easier than a Windows install?
Try it the other way around... I had an existing Linux installation on an 8GB disk. I move the 8GB disk to the pimary-slave spot (jumpers) and slapped a new 8GB blank disk into the primary-master position.
... Insert Windows NT 4.0 disk and begin installation. Lo and be-hold the bugger won't install on primary-master becuase there's stuff on primary-slave that it thinks is evil. It halts... refuses plainly to install. I'm not asking it to go onto primary-slave at all!. I remove the primary-slave drive, try again. Viola. Now that's intuitive.
Lets say the programmer makes double what the typical business process user costs. If it takes the programmer two months to do a project and the net result is that a business function/transaction occurring 480 times a day is cut from 90 seconds to 30 seconds, then the project pays for itself in four months. That kind of work isn't sexy, but it sure does pay for itself, especially when departments can delay hiring more people because their existing folks are more productive.
Maybe I'm a fringe lunatic in the IT world... but to me that kind of work is sexy and fun. I think it's great to know that I've worked on a project that cost a client $X dollars but saved them $X*4 within a year. That's one heck of a feeling of accomplishment and worth to the world. Makes me feel a whole lot better than converting an existing app from technology X to technology Y just because technology Y is now the in thing.
It AOL changes it Default browser to Netscape, than web designers will again have to consider netscape/mozilla when doing pages..
No... it will mean designers will have to think about W3C compliance. The days of dual-coding for NS4 and IE4 are long gone. Anybody who can't right a page that works on both browsers without even detecting which one you're on has done of one two things:
a) Designed it poorly.
b) Written it without ever looking at the standards.
A database abstraction layer was used which made all the difference. I used dal [sourceforge.net], which is a nice object-oriented layer that only involves changing a single line of code to change different databases.
Personally, it sounds to me like your company's problem was bad design (not allowing for expansion) rather than php.
Thank you! I am absolutely sick of developers blaming PHP for being bad at switching databases because they didn't built their app properly. PHP lets you get right down to the raw nitty gritty DB specific stuff -- which is nice, but you really shouldn't ever be using those UNLESS you are writing a wrapper, or really don't care about database independence. I really wish the php.net official manuals would warn new developers of this.
The very fact that this book targets PHP and MySQL sort of ticks me off too -- why not PHP and DB wrappers? Why MySQL of all things too? It's horrid (sorry)... for large scale sites IMHO.
I think this has alot to do with Larry Wall's influence in the Perl world. His writing is absolutely hilarious to me at points... and I really enjoy reading anything he writes. Granted, most of the humor would fly right over a non-tech's head.
It's a great idea really... at least I think so. I tend to pay more attention to writing when I'm occasionally hit with a bit of humor. I try and do the same with comments in code and rather mundane updates I may email out to a team I'm working with.
I hate discs. Be it CD or DVD I really do not like handling them. What -I- have been dreaming of is a system that will let me rip my DVDs onto a HD and play them back onto my TV, all without having to get up and swap discs in and out of a drive. There's really no good reason for me to have this.. as my DVD collection really isn't that big but the pure "geek factor" just makes it oh-so-appealing to me. The thing I've always loved about having a nice big mp3 (well, now it's all ogg) collection on a single computer is that I could pick whatever I felt like w/out having to track down any media and swap it in and out when I'm at home.
Now... has anybody done this? I admit I've done -zero- research into how I would accomplish it, and have only been day-dreaming/brainstorming at this point. Is it really feasible to just copy the UDF filesystem stuff off a DVD onto a generic filesystem (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, whatever) and play it back via something like 'ogle' for Linux? I can imagine coming home, firing up the TV and using my DVD remote to navigate my own custom menu to pick from the various DVDs that I have stored away on a server sitting in the next room over. Now, if I ever end up -totally- loaded I'd have an EMC Symmetrix in the basement with every movie I ever wanted on demand.:) Sweet....
And no, I don't want some compressed DivX;-) format or anything. I want raw DVD quality, no compression. I'm not concerned at all with playing pirated material -- just stuff that I have the disc for.
Talk to Saddam Husein about that one... anybody else remember a fairly large amount of PS2's being bought by Iraq when they were first released?
Now, I don't know if it ws their government doing it or not... but I found it interesting. The US doesn't allow high-end computers to be shipped over there, but the PS2's weren't restricted by the US export regulations.
While I really like the idea of porting Linux to everything I think it's kind of odd that porting Linux the PS2 might actually help the Iraqi government build a super computer.
Same here. I actually went and saw it at 12:30 opening night/morning with some friends, but the office bought tickets to see it at 1pm on opening day and had extras -- so I went again.
It was a nice break. Everybody here had been pulling longs hours and it was a nice thing to do for the employees. We were still required to get our regualr 40 in though.
Yes, we're most a technical place. Ironically the biggest Star Wars fan is one of the sales guys. He took the week off and made a trip a few hundred miles south of here to see it in digital.
Part of the problem is I don't think anyone (including Stroustrup) have any idea of all the complicated things you can do with it.
Quite true... if memory serves me right in The C++ Programming Language Stroustrup actually says he does not consider himself an expert at C++. It's pretty much humanly impossible (IMHO) to know the entire language and make proper use of it 100% of the time. I smile to myself everytime I see young programmers fresh out of college calling themselves C++ experts.
For the average person, "copying" a DVD would imply being able to *play* the copy.
It's perfectly possible to do a bit-by-bit copy of an encrypted DVD and play it back on your MPAA certified equipment. DeCSS doesn't do diddly to aid in the copying of DVDs except for enabling the content to be compressed down for easier transit across the Internet.
Uhhh... the US isn't much better there. Last I had heard (around 4 years ago) the average American was dumping over 50% of their income into taxes. After federal income, state income, city income, property taxes, sales tax, excise taxes, gasoline taxes, etc, etc it all adds up.
I pretty much figure the US is at that threshold where democracies begin to collapse. Eventually people figure out that they can get money out of the government with a few votes and all hell breaks loose.
As I see it, the real problem is that when it comes to something people don't understand that sometimes has the ability to maim or kill them they don't want to take the time to learn more about it. They want it banned, damnit, banned! Out of my children's face!!!
For further proof of this statement you only need to look at firearms control laws.
Simply because they know how to use it -- and sometimes it's a good idea to be using it. I use AOLIM and MSN to keep in touch with developers that I respect to help me out in my job. We shoot IMs back and forth and work together now and again; it's encouraged where I'm at.
I've seen IT departments that have ONLY HTTP access through a proxy. I was once stationed at a consultant through my full time employer as such a place and when I neeeded to do a text dump of a DB I couldn't even FTP it back to our site because -nobody- in the building could do an FTP transfer. Solution: NFS mount the Unix partition that had the.txt files on them onto a Win NT box and burn it to CD. Not too hard, if the consultant can do it themselves but I kid you not I had to track down 3-4 people in the plant every time I had to do this task. A huge waste of friggen time.
IT may abuse it from time to time, but take it away and you pull a huge resource from the good workers.
I agree with what you say, and I'll expound a bit based on my own experiences.
I too started fiddling with computers when I was around 8 years old and found them fascinating machines. Unfortunately it was a fair number of years before I got the opportunities to really start hounding away at them. I was 12 when my family got their first PC, so I had about a 4 year gap between initial exposure and a period where I could really start experimenting and learning for hours at a time. Sure, we had Apples and some PCs around school but you weren't allowed to actually -do- anything with them but run Works 2.0 from the Novell network.
I beleive that complex thinking starts developing in children around the age of puberty, at least for males. I'm still not sure when it develops in females, if ever <tongue in cheek>. For better or worse when I was going through this period my biggest intellectual "outlet" if you will was programming. Perhaps because of this I was hindered, if you wish to look at it that way, later in life because to grasp a new concept I had to categorize it in a series of steps that I could picture in my head as a computer program. Makes me a hell of a programmer I'd say, but terrible at calculus.
I'm all in favor of the education system making computers more accessible to students, and perhaps even providing some structured classes in how they work, but certainly not as just another tool which they're requied to used because they'll possibly have to deal with one in the workplace. Use them to teach kids how to think about complex problems -- not how to use a word processor. The same could, and I beleive should, be done in other areas too. I'm all for some robotics experiments in classes, with the ability to go "above and beyond" if the students wishes. Same for programming, or networking, or auto-repair, engineering, things like that.
Giving kids the tools and guidance to do something they like earlier on in life is something that I think is -really- lacking in the US education system. I'm often told how horrid it is in other socities where before you're even of the age of 18 you're enrolled in a vocational program of some type. Doesn't sound that horrible to me really, so long as it's -your- choice what you're studying. We're sending alot of talented people out into the world after high school here with barely enough knowledge to keep themselves employeed at any trade. Why? We don't want to pigeon-hole kids... nor do we want them to stick themselves in a pigeon hole. I just don't get it.
Granted, I've never used the CML2 tools, but I followed along on the discussion on LKM for quite some time. It seems as though every post is way off the mark.
First, ask yourself this. Is 'make xconfig' a bad user interface? Nope, it ain't. What sucks about kernel configuration? The dependency resolution crap. Linus has a nifty little program in place that does a pretty good job of figuring them out too -- but it's ugly, and admittedly a kludgey solution. CML is more "elegant and flexible" which is a damn good thing -- but last I knew the bugger took 2x longer to do it's job than the old system. Kernel developers do probably 99% -or more- of kernel builds so why on God's good green earth would they want a system that's going to slow them down right now? They don't and I can't blame them in the least bit.
CML2 is nice, and it seems like it's a really good little system, nobody on LKM is opposed to it really (that I saw) they just don't want something that's going to suck minutes out of their programming day. "Aunt Millie" can't answer kernel configuration question anyway, period. Heck, most Windows users don't know if they have 95/98/NT/2000/Me/XP some of the time, let alone if their processor is Pentium III, Pentium IV, or K7 based.. unless the sticker is still on it. Shoot, they don't know if their mouse is ps/2 or serial, or what USB is. Do they know if their USB host system is UHCI or OHCI? Hell no.
CML2 is about making kernel configuration easier in terms of expandability -- not usability. The current interface is very usable, just not very flexible. Because of it's inflexibility and complexity it leads to un-bootable systems sometimes when depency stuff get borked up in strange configuration situations. CML2 takes care of -that- and nothing else. It doesn't keep you from having to know your hardware inside and out. End of story.
While not done on a Mac, a buddy of mine loves playing around with the Microsoft Agent stuff and writing little VB applications to control things. After muddling around with X10 and his love of music he's got a nice new trick.
Walks into the bedroom and says "Lets get it on..." lights dim down to 5% and starts playing some smooth music.
If the governement taxed email, say a penny a piece, legitimate users would harly notice, but spammers would be tanked.
Better yet, if they charged 34 cents per spam -nobody- would -ever- send out unsolicited messages to people in mass quantities. <roll eyes>
Aside from that the government has no business taxing what goes over a privately owned network. If high speed bandwidth came along with being a tax paying citizen of the US I could see email as being taxable -- but there's no way something like that can, should, or would go through.
If it does next I'll expect a tax on swearing to keep me from doing that too.
Any Linux PDA, though, has the entire OpenSource/GPL universe to draw applications from if the device itself is capable of running them hardware-wise. While the PalmOS does have many purpous built applications for it - I woulden't want to program that thing with it's 64K barriers and non POSIX 'operating system.' As applications for PDA's mature, then Linux becomes a great choice, not for the 'address book/organiser' of tomorrow but for the database connected point of sale sytem that can only be now dreamed about.
I don't see how the majority of X11 applications would ever run on one of these things to tell you the truth. Ever tried X in 640x480 with most applications? They're built by developers for developers. Developers that run in 1280x1024 mode all day long. Even at 1024x768 on my laptop I frequently find applications spilling over the edges of my screen. As far as console applications go I wouldn't see them as -ever- being useful on such a thing. I just can't fathom a useful console application on a handheld device -- too cumbersome.
The PalmOS limit of 64k data chunks (which can be worked around) really isn't all that bad if you ask me. I've written a bit of PalmOS code now and to tell you the truth I really like it. I'm only moderately annoyoned that things like sprintf() are renamed to StrPrintF() and such but there's a good reason for them doing this -- a standard C library is just a bit overkill for such a little device with applications that are intended to be small.
I couldn't care less about POSIX compliance on one of these things either. The majority of things defined in POSIX would be entirely non-existent on such a device IMHO.
I, and I would assume most developers, have very little qualms with an embedded device such as a PDA requireing you to re-learn some very basic things. All in all it takes less than an hour.
Besides that, most applications (well, the rinky-dink ones) are only ever tested on the x86 platform. Simply switching to a new architecuture and re-compiling is quite likely going to break things as some developers aren't always aware of little-endian vs bid-ending or that 'int' might not always be the size they expected.
This is an excellent move to make. I'd prefer that it be accomplished with compile-time directives[*] rather than another series of kernels but it's still a great move.
This is -exactly- what MS does with their kernels. It's really a great move. Think Win2k pro, server, advanced server, and datacenter server versions. They have different kernels. Different schedules, different priorities. It's great. It scares some people but the thing to remember is that there are NO API CHANGES going on here. It doesen't matter if you're running the -ac tree, the Linus tree or this new one. The application doesn't even need to be recompiled to move kernels.
*Doing something like that would be a coding nightmare and things would be -really- ugly looking. The pre-empt patch touches alot of places in the kernel and I'd hate to see code with a bunch of #ifdef's splattered about. When I say it'd be nice I mean nice from a user point of view, not as a coder or somebody who cares about things working right.
Slashdot Mirror
I should be able to determine what your product is, and why I need it within 5 minutes of being on your website. Don't tell me what it's going to do -for- me, tell me what it really does, and I'd wager the person to best provide the verbage for something like that is going to be a tech that help develop it. Don't tell me it's going to increase my productivity by 50%, or provide a scalable architecture for me to build my applications on... tell me how it's built. I'll know whether or not it's right for me.
Well...there are also blind web surfers. Both CSS and HTML explicitly support markup and styling for non-graphical browsers.
They're not ficticious... I really have had webpages I've built beta tested by a blind user to check for compliance.
Ok ok, let's stop right here at the first paragraph. So, he already had his drive partitioned from a previous install (meaning he didn't have to mess with fips, partition magic, etc.) and he used fdisk to partition. And exactly how is this easier than a Windows install?
Try it the other way around... I had an existing Linux installation on an 8GB disk. I move the 8GB disk to the pimary-slave spot (jumpers) and slapped a new 8GB blank disk into the primary-master position.
Lets say the programmer makes double what the typical business process user costs. If it takes the programmer two months to do a project and the net result is that a business function/transaction occurring 480 times a day is cut from 90 seconds to 30 seconds, then the project pays for itself in four months. That kind of work isn't sexy, but it sure does pay for itself, especially when departments can delay hiring more people because their existing folks are more productive.
Maybe I'm a fringe lunatic in the IT world... but to me that kind of work is sexy and fun. I think it's great to know that I've worked on a project that cost a client $X dollars but saved them $X*4 within a year. That's one heck of a feeling of accomplishment and worth to the world. Makes me feel a whole lot better than converting an existing app from technology X to technology Y just because technology Y is now the in thing.
Trained Monkeys.
It AOL changes it Default browser to Netscape, than web designers will again have to consider netscape/mozilla when doing pages..
No... it will mean designers will have to think about W3C compliance. The days of dual-coding for NS4 and IE4 are long gone. Anybody who can't right a page that works on both browsers without even detecting which one you're on has done of one two things:
a) Designed it poorly.
b) Written it without ever looking at the standards.
A database abstraction layer was used which made all the difference. I used dal [sourceforge.net], which is a nice object-oriented layer that only involves changing a single line of code to change different databases.
... for large scale sites IMHO.
Personally, it sounds to me like your company's problem was bad design (not allowing for expansion) rather than php.
Thank you! I am absolutely sick of developers blaming PHP for being bad at switching databases because they didn't built their app properly. PHP lets you get right down to the raw nitty gritty DB specific stuff -- which is nice, but you really shouldn't ever be using those UNLESS you are writing a wrapper, or really don't care about database independence. I really wish the php.net official manuals would warn new developers of this.
The very fact that this book targets PHP and MySQL sort of ticks me off too -- why not PHP and DB wrappers? Why MySQL of all things too? It's horrid (sorry)
I think this has alot to do with Larry Wall's influence in the Perl world. His writing is absolutely hilarious to me at points... and I really enjoy reading anything he writes. Granted, most of the humor would fly right over a non-tech's head.
It's a great idea really... at least I think so. I tend to pay more attention to writing when I'm occasionally hit with a bit of humor. I try and do the same with comments in code and rather mundane updates I may email out to a team I'm working with.
I hate discs. Be it CD or DVD I really do not like handling them. What -I- have been dreaming of is a system that will let me rip my DVDs onto a HD and play them back onto my TV, all without having to get up and swap discs in and out of a drive. There's really no good reason for me to have this.. as my DVD collection really isn't that big but the pure "geek factor" just makes it oh-so-appealing to me. The thing I've always loved about having a nice big mp3 (well, now it's all ogg) collection on a single computer is that I could pick whatever I felt like w/out having to track down any media and swap it in and out when I'm at home.
:) Sweet....
;-) format or anything. I want raw DVD quality, no compression. I'm not concerned at all with playing pirated material -- just stuff that I have the disc for.
Now... has anybody done this? I admit I've done -zero- research into how I would accomplish it, and have only been day-dreaming/brainstorming at this point. Is it really feasible to just copy the UDF filesystem stuff off a DVD onto a generic filesystem (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, whatever) and play it back via something like 'ogle' for Linux? I can imagine coming home, firing up the TV and using my DVD remote to navigate my own custom menu to pick from the various DVDs that I have stored away on a server sitting in the next room over. Now, if I ever end up -totally- loaded I'd have an EMC Symmetrix in the basement with every movie I ever wanted on demand.
And no, I don't want some compressed DivX
Talk to Saddam Husein about that one... anybody else remember a fairly large amount of PS2's being bought by Iraq when they were first released?
Now, I don't know if it ws their government doing it or not... but I found it interesting. The US doesn't allow high-end computers to be shipped over there, but the PS2's weren't restricted by the US export regulations.
While I really like the idea of porting Linux to everything I think it's kind of odd that porting Linux the PS2 might actually help the Iraqi government build a super computer.
Food for though?
Same here. I actually went and saw it at 12:30 opening night/morning with some friends, but the office bought tickets to see it at 1pm on opening day and had extras -- so I went again.
It was a nice break. Everybody here had been pulling longs hours and it was a nice thing to do for the employees. We were still required to get our regualr 40 in though.
Yes, we're most a technical place. Ironically the biggest Star Wars fan is one of the sales guys. He took the week off and made a trip a few hundred miles south of here to see it in digital.
Part of the problem is I don't think anyone (including Stroustrup) have any idea of all the complicated things you can do with it.
Quite true... if memory serves me right in The C++ Programming Language Stroustrup actually says he does not consider himself an expert at C++. It's pretty much humanly impossible (IMHO) to know the entire language and make proper use of it 100% of the time. I smile to myself everytime I see young programmers fresh out of college calling themselves C++ experts.
How much kernel code is actually in the stable series which was written under the influence of alcohol?
For the average person, "copying" a DVD would imply being able to *play* the copy.
It's perfectly possible to do a bit-by-bit copy of an encrypted DVD and play it back on your MPAA certified equipment. DeCSS doesn't do diddly to aid in the copying of DVDs except for enabling the content to be compressed down for easier transit across the Internet.
Uhhh... the US isn't much better there. Last I had heard (around 4 years ago) the average American was dumping over 50% of their income into taxes. After federal income, state income, city income, property taxes, sales tax, excise taxes, gasoline taxes, etc, etc it all adds up.
I pretty much figure the US is at that threshold where democracies begin to collapse. Eventually people figure out that they can get money out of the government with a few votes and all hell breaks loose.
As I see it, the real problem is that when it comes to something people don't understand that sometimes has the ability to maim or kill them they don't want to take the time to learn more about it. They want it banned, damnit, banned! Out of my children's face!!!
For further proof of this statement you only need to look at firearms control laws.
Simply because they know how to use it -- and sometimes it's a good idea to be using it. I use AOLIM and MSN to keep in touch with developers that I respect to help me out in my job. We shoot IMs back and forth and work together now and again; it's encouraged where I'm at.
.txt files on them onto a Win NT box and burn it to CD. Not too hard, if the consultant can do it themselves but I kid you not I had to track down 3-4 people in the plant every time I had to do this task. A huge waste of friggen time.
I've seen IT departments that have ONLY HTTP access through a proxy. I was once stationed at a consultant through my full time employer as such a place and when I neeeded to do a text dump of a DB I couldn't even FTP it back to our site because -nobody- in the building could do an FTP transfer. Solution: NFS mount the Unix partition that had the
IT may abuse it from time to time, but take it away and you pull a huge resource from the good workers.
I agree with what you say, and I'll expound a bit based on my own experiences.
I too started fiddling with computers when I was around 8 years old and found them fascinating machines. Unfortunately it was a fair number of years before I got the opportunities to really start hounding away at them. I was 12 when my family got their first PC, so I had about a 4 year gap between initial exposure and a period where I could really start experimenting and learning for hours at a time. Sure, we had Apples and some PCs around school but you weren't allowed to actually -do- anything with them but run Works 2.0 from the Novell network.
I beleive that complex thinking starts developing in children around the age of puberty, at least for males. I'm still not sure when it develops in females, if ever <tongue in cheek>. For better or worse when I was going through this period my biggest intellectual "outlet" if you will was programming. Perhaps because of this I was hindered, if you wish to look at it that way, later in life because to grasp a new concept I had to categorize it in a series of steps that I could picture in my head as a computer program. Makes me a hell of a programmer I'd say, but terrible at calculus.
I'm all in favor of the education system making computers more accessible to students, and perhaps even providing some structured classes in how they work, but certainly not as just another tool which they're requied to used because they'll possibly have to deal with one in the workplace. Use them to teach kids how to think about complex problems -- not how to use a word processor. The same could, and I beleive should, be done in other areas too. I'm all for some robotics experiments in classes, with the ability to go "above and beyond" if the students wishes. Same for programming, or networking, or auto-repair, engineering, things like that.
Giving kids the tools and guidance to do something they like earlier on in life is something that I think is -really- lacking in the US education system. I'm often told how horrid it is in other socities where before you're even of the age of 18 you're enrolled in a vocational program of some type. Doesn't sound that horrible to me really, so long as it's -your- choice what you're studying. We're sending alot of talented people out into the world after high school here with barely enough knowledge to keep themselves employeed at any trade. Why? We don't want to pigeon-hole kids... nor do we want them to stick themselves in a pigeon hole. I just don't get it.
Granted, I've never used the CML2 tools, but I followed along on the discussion on LKM for quite some time. It seems as though every post is way off the mark.
First, ask yourself this. Is 'make xconfig' a bad user interface? Nope, it ain't. What sucks about kernel configuration? The dependency resolution crap. Linus has a nifty little program in place that does a pretty good job of figuring them out too -- but it's ugly, and admittedly a kludgey solution. CML is more "elegant and flexible" which is a damn good thing -- but last I knew the bugger took 2x longer to do it's job than the old system. Kernel developers do probably 99% -or more- of kernel builds so why on God's good green earth would they want a system that's going to slow them down right now? They don't and I can't blame them in the least bit.
CML2 is nice, and it seems like it's a really good little system, nobody on LKM is opposed to it really (that I saw) they just don't want something that's going to suck minutes out of their programming day. "Aunt Millie" can't answer kernel configuration question anyway, period. Heck, most Windows users don't know if they have 95/98/NT/2000/Me/XP some of the time, let alone if their processor is Pentium III, Pentium IV, or K7 based.. unless the sticker is still on it. Shoot, they don't know if their mouse is ps/2 or serial, or what USB is. Do they know if their USB host system is UHCI or OHCI? Hell no.
CML2 is about making kernel configuration easier in terms of expandability -- not usability. The current interface is very usable, just not very flexible. Because of it's inflexibility and complexity it leads to un-bootable systems sometimes when depency stuff get borked up in strange configuration situations. CML2 takes care of -that- and nothing else. It doesn't keep you from having to know your hardware inside and out. End of story.
While not done on a Mac, a buddy of mine loves playing around with the Microsoft Agent stuff and writing little VB applications to control things. After muddling around with X10 and his love of music he's got a nice new trick.
Walks into the bedroom and says "Lets get it on..." lights dim down to 5% and starts playing some smooth music.
1) Send an unsolicited resume _everywhere_, not just to places you have researched and have some reason to think you might have a chance at...
<gulp>
killall spam_monster_dot_com.pl
If the governement taxed email, say a penny a piece, legitimate users would harly notice, but spammers would be tanked.
Better yet, if they charged 34 cents per spam -nobody- would -ever- send out unsolicited messages to people in mass quantities. <roll eyes>
Aside from that the government has no business taxing what goes over a privately owned network. If high speed bandwidth came along with being a tax paying citizen of the US I could see email as being taxable -- but there's no way something like that can, should, or would go through.
If it does next I'll expect a tax on swearing to keep me from doing that too.
Any Linux PDA, though, has the entire OpenSource/GPL universe to draw applications from if the device itself is capable of running them hardware-wise. While the PalmOS does have many purpous built applications for it - I woulden't want to program that thing with it's 64K barriers and non POSIX 'operating system.' As applications for PDA's mature, then Linux becomes a great choice, not for the 'address book/organiser' of tomorrow but for the database connected point of sale sytem that can only be now dreamed about.
I don't see how the majority of X11 applications would ever run on one of these things to tell you the truth. Ever tried X in 640x480 with most applications? They're built by developers for developers. Developers that run in 1280x1024 mode all day long. Even at 1024x768 on my laptop I frequently find applications spilling over the edges of my screen. As far as console applications go I wouldn't see them as -ever- being useful on such a thing. I just can't fathom a useful console application on a handheld device -- too cumbersome.
The PalmOS limit of 64k data chunks (which can be worked around) really isn't all that bad if you ask me. I've written a bit of PalmOS code now and to tell you the truth I really like it. I'm only moderately annoyoned that things like sprintf() are renamed to StrPrintF() and such but there's a good reason for them doing this -- a standard C library is just a bit overkill for such a little device with applications that are intended to be small.
I couldn't care less about POSIX compliance on one of these things either. The majority of things defined in POSIX would be entirely non-existent on such a device IMHO.
I, and I would assume most developers, have very little qualms with an embedded device such as a PDA requireing you to re-learn some very basic things. All in all it takes less than an hour.
Besides that, most applications (well, the rinky-dink ones) are only ever tested on the x86 platform. Simply switching to a new architecuture and re-compiling is quite likely going to break things as some developers aren't always aware of little-endian vs bid-ending or that 'int' might not always be the size they expected.
This is an excellent move to make. I'd prefer that it be accomplished with compile-time directives[*] rather than another series of kernels but it's still a great move.
This is -exactly- what MS does with their kernels. It's really a great move. Think Win2k pro, server, advanced server, and datacenter server versions. They have different kernels. Different schedules, different priorities. It's great. It scares some people but the thing to remember is that there are NO API CHANGES going on here. It doesen't matter if you're running the -ac tree, the Linus tree or this new one. The application doesn't even need to be recompiled to move kernels.
*Doing something like that would be a coding nightmare and things would be -really- ugly looking. The pre-empt patch touches alot of places in the kernel and I'd hate to see code with a bunch of #ifdef's splattered about. When I say it'd be nice I mean nice from a user point of view, not as a coder or somebody who cares about things working right.
Why would that bother the Linux community? If anybody would it would be Andrew Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix.