I completely forgot about WebOS. Though I haven't seen it for myself yet, all I have read about it is that it's more Linux geek friendly than Android. Perhaps there is hope, let's wait and see.
It's really depressing. I was looking forward to using a MeeGo handset in a few years once my N900 would start getting old. Please let there be another handset manufacturer who will take up MeeGo or a similar full Linux OS, else my N900 will be the last phone I'll ever have.
But for how long? The N900 activley encouraged users to hack around. There was a fucking xterm in the main menu. With Android you have to first research if the handset has an active community that provide modded images if you want all the fun.
With the IOS concentration camp, Android bootloader lockdown, and Windows Phone 7 copying everything that we hated about IOS it looks like a bleak future for anyone who wants to do cool stuff with their phone beyond the simple apps you get on the common platforms. If Nokia abandons MeeGo with this deal then any hope we have of being able to get new phones with the same freedom as the N900 will be fed to the meat grinder.
Looks like I will have to take great care of my N900. It's the first and last of it's kind.
Actually, Microsoft makes the Windows 7 DVD images available for download as part of Technet. Burn it to a DVD (or mount it with VMWare/VirtualBox) and you're good to go. You still need a valid key to activate though.
Is there one for Vista? (My laptop has a licence, may as well use it)
I think that was to test the downstream bandwidth. If you go to the Kippo site in the summary and watch the demos, you will notice one of those guys wget an XP service pack and kill it off once the download speed was stable.
Watch the way he makes mistakes and backspaces them when trying to cd into/var/spool/samba. I don't think automated scripts work like that. This idiot doesn't seem to know his way around a filesystem and is probably just copy pasting shit from a forum.
CPU0: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ stepping 01 is slower than my old 486 at rendering a mandelbrot. I wrote my own viewer on an archimedes for a school project over 14 years ago and it was faster than this.
You're doing it wrong
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you HTML5 fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a PC (a box with two AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ stepping 01 processors and 16GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to render a 17 Meg fractal from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this fractal transfer, Minecraft will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various HTML5s, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a HTML5 that has run faster than its native counterpart, despite the JavaScripts' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2x 2.26Ghz 8-core machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the HTML5 is a superior machine.
HTML5 addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a HTML5 over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Sounds like you have an Nvidia card. The 2D and Xrender performance is really poor and I find that PowerMizer makes the sliding menu choppy only when it's at the lowest speed. It's the price you pay for working 3D.
I can crash kwin at will sometimes. When it does work, the display is less likely to be as smooth with or without the compositing. I'm looking forward to trying 4.6 as they say kwin's been fixed up quite a bit.
Prepare to be disappointed. While KWin crashes are rare since the bad old days pre 4.3, it's performance leaves much to be desired. 4.6 is still slower than other WMs like OpenBox. For example: If you play Minecraft and use F11 to toggle fullscreen it takes a few seconds for KWin to do it, but OpenBox does it instantly. This is with compositing off.
I still use KWin because it integrates better than Compiz.
On the topic of scrolling, like in Idle in the old version, the top bar thing breaks the behaviour of page up/down. Usually when you press page down the browser keeps a little of the previous page in view to help you keep track of reading. Now it is the exact opposite, where you actually lose a few pixels when you press page down. I might as well attach a belt sander to the scroll wheel.
When I click on the arrow buttons on the scroll bar it will sometimes use so much CPU that Firefox becomes unresponsive to the fact that the mouse button is no longer clicked on the scroll button and will continuously scroll down slowly for about 4 screens worth before stopping. (It could also be the shitty 2D of Nvidia's Linux driver factoring in, but it hasn't happened to any other pages.)
Firefox is eating 26% CPU (52% of one core) doing barely anything.
Why is there a preview button in the preview? It does nothing when I click on it
While it's a nuisance to see someone shine a laser beam around your cockpit, the plane's speed, the shakiness of human hands, and the distance from the person pointing it makes it unlikely that the laser beam will find its way directly into one of the two pupils a pilot may have for more than a fraction of a second.
A fraction of a second is enough to do permanent damage if the laser in question is powerful enough.
I have used a high density 4mW HeNe laser in an optics lab and given safety warnings that if this were to be shone into your eye that the time it takes you to instinctively blink would be too late. This same laser was pointed to a black cardboard backdrop when there was no equipment in the way which wasn't powerful enough to burn.
Compare this to videos and instructions on how to use a DVD burner laser as a weapon that can start fires, pop balloons and burn your skin. Remember the cheap 2W laser from Wickedlasers featured here last year. If some dickhead gets his hands on one of these and thinks it a good idea to point it at a plane and just happens to be unlucky enough to hit the pilots pupil (with these thousands of incidents a year and coordinated attacks it's bound to eventually happen) you're looking at assault charges at the least.
But, for both my wife and I to get smartphones would add at least $100/month to our already large cable/internet/phone/cell bill -- I know someone who says his smart phone costs him around $200/month.
:-o The phone plans in the US sound like consumer rape.
I bought my N900 for about $440AUD including shipping and taxes. Americans get even better with Amazon selling it for $350USD. This phone is unlocked so you can use any GSM SIM you feel like and you will be able to make phone calls. Other things like 3G you have to check yourself if the provider would work. Stick your old SIM in or get pre-paid, etc.
I pay $1 a month on a pay-as-you-go plan, no contract, no """free""" handset thay you won't use. 9.9c/min to local/mobile + 10c flag-fall, 9.9c SMS. It comes with 50MB free data (for emergencies when wlan isn't there) but is then 2.75c/meg. (You have to pay $20 for a SIM and $20 deposit before but it is worth it)
I never use my N900 for phone things if I can avoid it, so the compulsory $1 is sometimes greater than the calls I make.
I treat the N900 as a handheld computer that has a phone app as a bonus. I no longer have to take my laptop everywhere with me (though I tend to anyway)
Does anyone know where to find decent Bluetooth keyboards? It would make the N900 so much better for typing stuff up on. I find my thumbs get sore after a while.
What the article doesn't make exactly clear is whether the iPad2 (assuming for sake of argument it gets a USB port) will act as a host or peripheral through the USB port. The former would be more appropriate for pulling photos off cameras. The thing is, I don't know of any examples of USB hosts (like laptops) that can be charged through their USB port. Usually they're *providing* power through that port.
Ever wondered what that 5th pin on the mini/micro USB port was for when the computer end has only 4? When this pin (number 4) is pulled to ground your device acts as a USB host (the pin is floating otherwise). You can buy special adaptors that give you a female USB A port to stick USB peripherals into. The only obstacles are the power supply (phones would be hard pressed to deliver the full 500mA a 2.5" HDD needs) and software (drivers, auto mount).
If your Compact Flash reader presents itself as a USB mass storage device then it should work with most USB OTG implementations. I would suggest you wait and see if the successor of the Nokia N900 has proper USB OTG. You would get decent Linux tools to manipulate RAW files (whether a decent handset friendly GUI port or the desktop version in the inevitable Debian chroot available 5 mins after release). Can't wait? The N900 doesn't have official USB OTG (on that extra pin), but there has been decent progress on hacking it in requiring a kernel hack and making your own cable. Needless to say, this will probably void your warranty in the same way the overclocking hack it does.
Yes you get distracted. But you know what I do when I have paper and I'm bored ? I doodle or daydream.
I'm worse. I fall asleep when the lecture is boring. I sometimes get out my laptop so I'm actively doing something stimulating and at least half pay attention to the lecture instead of nothing.
The only sad part is that Archlinux will loose its strogest plus
Look at it as there being less noobs spamming the forums.
But seriously, I swapped from Ubuntu to Arch (difficult but eventually pulled though) because of the rolling updates, awesome wiki and heard good things about their KDE version. That and Ubuntu 8.10 didn't handle my Intel graphics as well as 8.04. I stayed for the ABS/AUR/PKGBUILD system and never leaving.
A word to anyone wanting to try it out: Install it on an old PC first to get the hang of it. Check the forums before you start an update to critical packages. Never pacman -Sc until you have boot cycled between the last update.
The other day a friend sent a static discharge through her headphones (in ear and everything) as she got up and toasted up the audio controller. It didn't turn on again after a shutdown the next day but suddenly decided to start booting again a while later. The headphone jack only outputs noise now.
I think that was Firewire, not USB. I think it had something to do with Firewire code running at very high privileges on the OS meaning that an exploit would lead to getting root (or admin).
I know, it's just easier to say "emulate" than to say "provides a win32 compatible API conversion layer on top of Linux and X11" or whatever is technically correct.
Wine's aim is to be binary compatible with windows apps as much as feasibly possible. There are apps that use subsystems that Wine can never emulate, for example the 3rd party wireless WAN dial-up manager that came with your cellular USB modem and things that sit between the hardware and Windows subsystems. It works fairly well for well behaved apps that don't use obscure APIs.
Wine really shows it's usefulness when a developer wants to port their Windows app to Linux/Mac. They have the source and know what things are having problems and can change it or even fix Wine itself. This new DX11 API is meant to assist developers in porting Windows games to run in Linux natively. When you are porting you can adjust your code to work around holes in the implementation. Whether working around the incomplete DX implementation is easier than porting to OpenGL is yet to be shown. If in 2 years this becomes mature enough to work reasonably well and Nvidia get Gallium3D working we may see a few more indie shops port to Linux (The big publishers sadly never will for the foreseeable future).
The 200 MB plans are used by people like my grandfather who only use the connection every 2 days to check their email. Anything requiring the use of the keyboard is too complicated.
Windows updates are surprisingly small since they are just bug patches and not new features. Updating a fresh XP SP3 I think would use up most of that 200 MB but after that it's way less. If you also factor in apps that update (whether with systray bloatware or check on run) it may run over the 200 MB limit.
200 MB wouldn't last more than 6 hours at my place.
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I completely forgot about WebOS. Though I haven't seen it for myself yet, all I have read about it is that it's more Linux geek friendly than Android. Perhaps there is hope, let's wait and see.
It's really depressing. I was looking forward to using a MeeGo handset in a few years once my N900 would start getting old. Please let there be another handset manufacturer who will take up MeeGo or a similar full Linux OS, else my N900 will be the last phone I'll ever have.
But for how long? The N900 activley encouraged users to hack around. There was a fucking xterm in the main menu. With Android you have to first research if the handset has an active community that provide modded images if you want all the fun.
With the IOS concentration camp, Android bootloader lockdown, and Windows Phone 7 copying everything that we hated about IOS it looks like a bleak future for anyone who wants to do cool stuff with their phone beyond the simple apps you get on the common platforms. If Nokia abandons MeeGo with this deal then any hope we have of being able to get new phones with the same freedom as the N900 will be fed to the meat grinder.
Looks like I will have to take great care of my N900. It's the first and last of it's kind.
Actually, Microsoft makes the Windows 7 DVD images available for download as part of Technet. Burn it to a DVD (or mount it with VMWare/VirtualBox) and you're good to go. You still need a valid key to activate though.
Is there one for Vista? (My laptop has a licence, may as well use it)
I think that was to test the downstream bandwidth. If you go to the Kippo site in the summary and watch the demos, you will notice one of those guys wget an XP service pack and kill it off once the download speed was stable.
Watch the way he makes mistakes and backspaces them when trying to cd into /var/spool/samba.
I don't think automated scripts work like that. This idiot doesn't seem to know his way around a filesystem and is probably just copy pasting shit from a forum.
CPU0: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ stepping 01
is slower than my old 486 at rendering a mandelbrot.
I wrote my own viewer on an archimedes for a school project over 14 years ago and it was faster than this.
You're doing it wrong
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you HTML5 fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a PC (a box with two AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ stepping 01 processors and 16GB of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to render a 17 Meg fractal from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this fractal transfer, Minecraft will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various HTML5s, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a HTML5 that has run faster than its native counterpart, despite the JavaScripts' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 2x 2.26Ghz 8-core machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the HTML5 is a superior machine.
HTML5 addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a HTML5 over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
Didn't crash my Firefox 3.6.13 but it is using over 400MB of RAM.
Sounds like you have an Nvidia card. The 2D and Xrender performance is really poor and I find that PowerMizer makes the sliding menu choppy only when it's at the lowest speed. It's the price you pay for working 3D.
I can crash kwin at will sometimes. When it does work, the display is less likely to be as smooth with or without the compositing. I'm looking forward to trying 4.6 as they say kwin's been fixed up quite a bit.
Prepare to be disappointed. While KWin crashes are rare since the bad old days pre 4.3, it's performance leaves much to be desired. 4.6 is still slower than other WMs like OpenBox. For example: If you play Minecraft and use F11 to toggle fullscreen it takes a few seconds for KWin to do it, but OpenBox does it instantly. This is with compositing off.
I still use KWin because it integrates better than Compiz.
On the topic of scrolling, like in Idle in the old version, the top bar thing breaks the behaviour of page up/down. Usually when you press page down the browser keeps a little of the previous page in view to help you keep track of reading. Now it is the exact opposite, where you actually lose a few pixels when you press page down. I might as well attach a belt sander to the scroll wheel.
When I click on the arrow buttons on the scroll bar it will sometimes use so much CPU that Firefox becomes unresponsive to the fact that the mouse button is no longer clicked on the scroll button and will continuously scroll down slowly for about 4 screens worth before stopping. (It could also be the shitty 2D of Nvidia's Linux driver factoring in, but it hasn't happened to any other pages.)
Firefox is eating 26% CPU (52% of one core) doing barely anything.
Why is there a preview button in the preview? It does nothing when I click on it
While it's a nuisance to see someone shine a laser beam around your cockpit, the plane's speed, the shakiness of human hands, and the distance from the person pointing it makes it unlikely that the laser beam will find its way directly into one of the two pupils a pilot may have for more than a fraction of a second.
A fraction of a second is enough to do permanent damage if the laser in question is powerful enough.
I have used a high density 4mW HeNe laser in an optics lab and given safety warnings that if this were to be shone into your eye that the time it takes you to instinctively blink would be too late. This same laser was pointed to a black cardboard backdrop when there was no equipment in the way which wasn't powerful enough to burn.
Compare this to videos and instructions on how to use a DVD burner laser as a weapon that can start fires, pop balloons and burn your skin. Remember the cheap 2W laser from Wickedlasers featured here last year. If some dickhead gets his hands on one of these and thinks it a good idea to point it at a plane and just happens to be unlucky enough to hit the pilots pupil (with these thousands of incidents a year and coordinated attacks it's bound to eventually happen) you're looking at assault charges at the least.
But, for both my wife and I to get smartphones would add at least $100/month to our already large cable/internet/phone/cell bill -- I know someone who says his smart phone costs him around $200/month.
:-o The phone plans in the US sound like consumer rape.
I bought my N900 for about $440AUD including shipping and taxes. Americans get even better with Amazon selling it for $350USD. This phone is unlocked so you can use any GSM SIM you feel like and you will be able to make phone calls. Other things like 3G you have to check yourself if the provider would work. Stick your old SIM in or get pre-paid, etc.
I pay $1 a month on a pay-as-you-go plan, no contract, no """free""" handset thay you won't use. 9.9c/min to local/mobile + 10c flag-fall, 9.9c SMS. It comes with 50MB free data (for emergencies when wlan isn't there) but is then 2.75c/meg. (You have to pay $20 for a SIM and $20 deposit before but it is worth it)
I never use my N900 for phone things if I can avoid it, so the compulsory $1 is sometimes greater than the calls I make.
I treat the N900 as a handheld computer that has a phone app as a bonus. I no longer have to take my laptop everywhere with me (though I tend to anyway)
Does anyone know where to find decent Bluetooth keyboards? It would make the N900 so much better for typing stuff up on. I find my thumbs get sore after a while.
What the article doesn't make exactly clear is whether the iPad2 (assuming for sake of argument it gets a USB port) will act as a host or peripheral through the USB port. The former would be more appropriate for pulling photos off cameras. The thing is, I don't know of any examples of USB hosts (like laptops) that can be charged through their USB port. Usually they're *providing* power through that port.
You are thinking of USB On-the-go. Full USB wiki page.
Ever wondered what that 5th pin on the mini/micro USB port was for when the computer end has only 4? When this pin (number 4) is pulled to ground your device acts as a USB host (the pin is floating otherwise). You can buy special adaptors that give you a female USB A port to stick USB peripherals into. The only obstacles are the power supply (phones would be hard pressed to deliver the full 500mA a 2.5" HDD needs) and software (drivers, auto mount).
If your Compact Flash reader presents itself as a USB mass storage device then it should work with most USB OTG implementations. I would suggest you wait and see if the successor of the Nokia N900 has proper USB OTG. You would get decent Linux tools to manipulate RAW files (whether a decent handset friendly GUI port or the desktop version in the inevitable Debian chroot available 5 mins after release). Can't wait? The N900 doesn't have official USB OTG (on that extra pin), but there has been decent progress on hacking it in requiring a kernel hack and making your own cable. Needless to say, this will probably void your warranty in the same way the overclocking hack it does.
Yes you get distracted. But you know what I do when I have paper and I'm bored ? I doodle or daydream.
I'm worse. I fall asleep when the lecture is boring. I sometimes get out my laptop so I'm actively doing something stimulating and at least half pay attention to the lecture instead of nothing.
That happens to my mother when I used to play Doom just by looking at me play
The only sad part is that Archlinux will loose its strogest plus
Look at it as there being less noobs spamming the forums.
But seriously, I swapped from Ubuntu to Arch (difficult but eventually pulled though) because of the rolling updates, awesome wiki and heard good things about their KDE version. That and Ubuntu 8.10 didn't handle my Intel graphics as well as 8.04. I stayed for the ABS/AUR/PKGBUILD system and never leaving.
A word to anyone wanting to try it out: Install it on an old PC first to get the hang of it. Check the forums before you start an update to critical packages. Never pacman -Sc until you have boot cycled between the last update.
The other day a friend sent a static discharge through her headphones (in ear and everything) as she got up and toasted up the audio controller. It didn't turn on again after a shutdown the next day but suddenly decided to start booting again a while later. The headphone jack only outputs noise now.
I think that was Firewire, not USB. I think it had something to do with Firewire code running at very high privileges on the OS meaning that an exploit would lead to getting root (or admin).
You can run
But you can't glide
I know, it's just easier to say "emulate" than to say "provides a win32 compatible API conversion layer on top of Linux and X11" or whatever is technically correct.
Wine's aim is to be binary compatible with windows apps as much as feasibly possible. There are apps that use subsystems that Wine can never emulate, for example the 3rd party wireless WAN dial-up manager that came with your cellular USB modem and things that sit between the hardware and Windows subsystems. It works fairly well for well behaved apps that don't use obscure APIs.
Wine really shows it's usefulness when a developer wants to port their Windows app to Linux/Mac. They have the source and know what things are having problems and can change it or even fix Wine itself. This new DX11 API is meant to assist developers in porting Windows games to run in Linux natively. When you are porting you can adjust your code to work around holes in the implementation. Whether working around the incomplete DX implementation is easier than porting to OpenGL is yet to be shown. If in 2 years this becomes mature enough to work reasonably well and Nvidia get Gallium3D working we may see a few more indie shops port to Linux (The big publishers sadly never will for the foreseeable future).
The 200 MB plans are used by people like my grandfather who only use the connection every 2 days to check their email. Anything requiring the use of the keyboard is too complicated.
Windows updates are surprisingly small since they are just bug patches and not new features. Updating a fresh XP SP3 I think would use up most of that 200 MB but after that it's way less. If you also factor in apps that update (whether with systray bloatware or check on run) it may run over the 200 MB limit.
200 MB wouldn't last more than 6 hours at my place.