Aegis sounds like a nice system, but it doesn't even run on Windows, nor did it ever run on Mac OS 8/9. CVS runs on everything, and Subversion is designed to be extremely portable, too. Sorry, but that's a critical requirement of a lot of developers - even open-source developers, because lots of us want our open-source programs running on as many platforms as possible.
Last time I checked, Bush isn't the governor of California, and the article was about California legislation, not federal. Since the last election, every single state office in California is held by a Democrat.
The most important thing you need to do when submitting a bug report is to give your name and email address. 90% of the time, the author or maintainer will need some extra piece of information from you that you forgot to include.
I'm the lead developer for Audacity, and we get lots of anonymous bugs submitted on our SourceForge bug tracker. Clearly the ones that just say "I tried to use your program but it crashed..." are not at all helpful, but sometimes even people who try to give a very detailed report don't include the one useful piece of information we need to track it down! So please identify yourself. We'll contact you for more information.
To be honest, we're thinking seriously of shutting down the bug tracker for our project on Sourceforge. It's generally far more efficient when people submit the bug to the mailing list, and IF it's valid, one of the developers adds it to our bugs.txt file. Low-tech? Yes, but far more efficient considering we don't have any full-time developers.
I don't use my Mac as a server, but I do use it for lots of compilation. Because of all of the programs I develop and compile, I have 10x more files on my disk than the average user. Would it be worth my while to use a journaling file system?
One thing I'd like to try is a speed comparison to see how much it slows down a long build. If building wxWindows takes 10-15% longer, that would suck.
The key to getting hardware to work with your computer is to have the correct drivers, the software that enables your PC to communicate with your hardware. Windows XP or your computer manufacturer will pre-install most of them. If not, go to the Web site of the company that makes the peripheral you want to attach to find the most current drivers.
Wow, switching to Windows XP must be so much fun! You get to spend all that time hunting for drivers!
You should never ever, cross the backbone when getting data from a site that has an agreement with [Akamai].
I mostly agree with your post, except for one small point: Akamai generally only serves the images for their sites, not the actual content. So you do still cross the backbone - but for less data.
i WISH i was getting 5-10. i'm still getting 50-70 a day, after peaking at ~100.
I'm getting somewhere between 10 and 20 Klez worms a day, too. Of course I filter them with procmail, but I'm paranoid and I send them to a separate mail folder.
What's really annoying is the automatic mail I get from the few with-it ISPs out there who detect a Klez worm sent through their mail servers with my name on it!
I've been collecting the mail headers, hoping to track down the worst offenders. So, is there a way to trace Klez, or are the headers forged so much that it's impossible to track? I haven't had any luck so far...
Stupid question: why would anyone buy Word for $350 (last time I checked) when they could get Word bundled with Works for $99? I'm not talking about Office, which costs more like $500 - if you only want Word, it costs around $350.
Is there any chance that the Word that comes with even the $99 Works is not full-featured?
I've thought about porting some of my software to OS X, but I'm not ready to give up precious desk space to yet another box just yet.
If you have open-source, command-line software to port, consider using Sourceforge's compile farm. They have some OS X boxen you can get an account on.
Yes, I know this subject has been beaten into the ground ad-infinitum, but it still needs to be said once again: DUMP THE PROPRIETARY HARDWARE.
Apple uses off-the-shelf hard drives, optical drives, RAM, and graphics cards. The only proprietary pieces of hardware are their motherboards and cases.
Apple is selling hardware that is half the speed at 2 to 4 times the price of Intel hardware. Yes, apparently there are enough hard-core fanatics to keep the company alive, but why be satisfied with that? Why sit arrogantly back and just preach to those people?
Half the speed, only if you count Megahertz. Mac OS X comes with lots of software which runs faster than any comparable software in the Intel world, such as their G4-optimized MP3 encoder, which can encode high-quality 160kpbs MP3s at 10x real-time on a 733 MHz G4, directly from a CD. Your P4 may be running at 2+ GHz, but since there are currently no MP3 encoders that are optimized for the P4 architecture, your MP3 encoder is slower. Also, Mac OS X takes advantage of your graphics card for all of its drawing now - something that neither Windows or Linux does. This frees up the Mac's poor MHz-starved processors to do other things.
2 to 4 times the price? What are you smoking? The only way you can get a PC for half the price of a similarly-equipped Mac is by using dirt-cheap components that only work half the time. If you want poor-quality or mediocre hardware, you can get a cheaper PC. If you really want good hardware, a Mac is usually priced about the same, or maybe 10-20% more. (Mac laptops are often a better deal than similarly equipped PC laptops; desktop Macs are usually 10-20% more expensive.)
Yes, I know that Apple is traditionally a hardware company. So what? Being a software company hasn't exactly hurt Microsoft. Software is HUGELY more profitable than hardware.
Ha! Apple has at least twice the profit margins as Dell. They make plenty of money on hardware.
Unfortunately, as long as Microsoft has all of the major computer manufacturers in their back pocket, all major brand-name PCs will come with Windows preinstalled. Nobody has a chance of competing with that.
And besides, what's stopping them from "doing Intel right" and coming out with their own line of expensive hardware? Oh, no one will buy it because it will be so much more expensive? Well, some fanatics will continue to buy it, and meanwhile they continue to make huge $$$ on the software.
The main problem with Mac OS X running on ALL Intel hardware is drivers. Unless you're going to talk all peripheral manufacturers into writing Mac OS X drivers, there'd be no point.
As much as I despise Apple-the-company, I would LOVE to have a real competitor to Microsoft on the desktop, particularly one that was Unix based.
If you're unwilling to buy Apple's hardware, you'd better put your money behind your favorite Linux distro, then. Apple makes a great hardware/software combination and they have no reason to start running on PCs.
I really wish Steve would pull his head out of his ass and stop being satisfied being a boutique.
Yeah, wouldn't it be cool if Apple started advertising to Windows users, letting them know how Mac OS X is fast, stable, practical, and "just works"? Oh wait...
I've heard somewhere that Apple is relaxing the licensing restriction in certain cases, where you may install one copy on up to 5 Macs. I can't remember where I saw it at, or the restrictions...but I guess that makes it somewhat more bearable...even if we all did that anyway:)
You're thinking of Apple's Mac OS X Family Pack, which lets you install it on up to 5 Macs in one household for $199. I think it's great for people who want to be legal and have more than one Mac at home.
I can't figure out how to post a direct URL (the Apple Store doesn't like deep linking) but here's how to get there:
However, this could be built into the system, at the expense of efficiency... Translate from English to Arabic... Then translate back for 'proofreading' by the English speaker... When he hears "Hey, worm, thanks a bunch!", he can cancel the translation, and try a new phrase instead. This would take a hit to "real-time" communications, however.
Actually I saw a demo of Tongues at CMU a couple years ago and that's exactly what it did.
Person A speaks a sentence. The computer displays the phrase, translates it to language B, translates that back to language A, then displays that sentence on the screen. If person A approves, he/she passes the computer to person B, who can then hear the sentence in language B.
I'm assuming that's why the article says that it takes more than a minute to convey a ten-second sentence.
Most of the article consists of a list of audio software that can currently run on GNU/Linux systems. It's a pretty good list, but things like Cubase aren't there yet.
Yeah, it really is too bad that there isn't anything like Cubase for Linux. I miss getting that instant blue screen of death every time I tried to record from SPDIF-in during the wrong phase of the moon. Or the fact that it would crash and you'd lose all of your work if you gave it a wav file that was mistakenly named ".aif". And its anti-piracy authentication method which forced me to find the original disk every time it got confused - wow, that brings back memories.
We need Cubase for Linux about as badly as we need a native port of SirCam.
Apples are largely built from the same components as the PC's they supposedly outlast.
The only difference is that Apple tends to choose more high quality components than average PC manufacturers.
A top of the line Dell actually ought to last about as long as a typical Apple. But what about that $699 Dell system? They get the price that low by choosing the cheapest possible components.
I stopped drinking pop a little less than a year ago and I'm now 25 pounds lighter. I tried drinking diet pop for a while, but I kept reading about how bad that is for you, so I'm avoiding that now, too. Plus I had already cut back seriously on Caffeine (it was ruining my sleeping habits) and at most restaurants it's hard to find a diet pop that's not Diet Coke!
Now I usually drink water when I go out, and I drink flavored carbonated water at home or at work. It costs about the same as pop but has 1/10 of the calories. It's a great replacement while coding - the tingling of the carbonation tricks my brain into thinking I'm drinking pop, which makes me code better (really!) but I don't gain weight.
Now he's supporting a CPU scheme that, well, doesn't break anything and may even sacrifice performance for that compatibility.
Except that it's quite likely that an Opteron will be faster than an Itanium for most real-world tasks. At the very least it looks like it will be comparable in speed, and cheaper. If the Itanium really was screamingly fast, that would be different.
I think some HTML formatting was inadvertantly removed in this sentence.
A little arithmetic shows that the number of sentences of 20 words or less (not an unusual length) is about 1020.
Actually the number of sentences is about 10 ^ 20, or 10 to the power of 20. (I'm guessing that the HTML superscript tag was removed.) The point here was that even though the number of possible sentences is astronomically large, the number of different sentences that people tend to say in practice is actually surprisingly small (once you factor our proper nouns).
Unfortunately, CDs explode into bits of metal and plastic shrapnal if spun too fast. This isn't like burning out a CPU from over clocking./. had an article a while back about a guy testing the spin limits of CDs.
Has anyone ever tried to keep the CD stationary and spin the laser instead?
Maybe this story ought to be in the Apple section as well, because the appearance of a decent audio editor for OSX is huge.
I'm also very excited about finally getting Audacity to run on OS X, but we need lots of help. It still needs quite a few Mac-specific features (and some bug fixes) and I'm spread thin, trying to lead development of Audacity on all platforms and also work on all of the Mac features. Please join the Audacity development team if you have any programming experience and can help out with the OS X version!
> Say, do they have any ambitions of getting MIDI score editing thrown into this?
I personally don't have plans to start on any serious MIDI features in Audacity for a while. But the nice thing about an open-source project is that if somebody else wanted to come along and start working on MIDI functionality now without getting in the way of the rest of the program's development, we would welcome it.
Can anyone find a link to the bogus Technical Note which was attributed to Scott Knaster, or the even crazier one he wrote in Macintosh Programming Secrets in response to it? Among other things, it attempted to describe how a program should deal with users upgrading their CPU while the program is running, and the API to a new compression routine called "PackMan" which could compress anything to exactly 4 bytes....
Slashdot Mirror
Aegis sounds like a nice system, but it doesn't even run on Windows, nor did it ever run on Mac OS 8/9. CVS runs on everything, and Subversion is designed to be extremely portable, too. Sorry, but that's a critical requirement of a lot of developers - even open-source developers, because lots of us want our open-source programs running on as many platforms as possible.
Last time I checked, Bush isn't the governor of California, and the article was about California legislation, not federal. Since the last election, every single state office in California is held by a Democrat.
Oh no! I just saw it and I didn't stay for the end of the credits. What is it???? Please tell me!!!!
The most important thing you need to do when submitting a bug report is to give your name and email address. 90% of the time, the author or maintainer will need some extra piece of information from you that you forgot to include.
I'm the lead developer for Audacity, and we get lots of anonymous bugs submitted on our SourceForge bug tracker. Clearly the ones that just say "I tried to use your program but it crashed..." are not at all helpful, but sometimes even people who try to give a very detailed report don't include the one useful piece of information we need to track it down! So please identify yourself. We'll contact you for more information.
To be honest, we're thinking seriously of shutting down the bug tracker for our project on Sourceforge. It's generally far more efficient when people submit the bug to the mailing list, and IF it's valid, one of the developers adds it to our bugs.txt file. Low-tech? Yes, but far more efficient considering we don't have any full-time developers.
Please mod this up, the AC is correct. Freenet is far more clever than it seems at first.
What about developers?
I don't use my Mac as a server, but I do use it for lots of compilation. Because of all of the programs I develop and compile, I have 10x more files on my disk than the average user. Would it be worth my while to use a journaling file system?
One thing I'd like to try is a speed comparison to see how much it slows down a long build. If building wxWindows takes 10-15% longer, that would suck.
From the article:
The key to getting hardware to work with your computer is to have the correct drivers, the software that enables your PC to communicate with your hardware. Windows XP or your computer manufacturer will pre-install most of them. If not, go to the Web site of the company that makes the peripheral you want to attach to find the most current drivers.
Wow, switching to Windows XP must be so much fun! You get to spend all that time hunting for drivers!
I mostly agree with your post, except for one small point: Akamai generally only serves the images for their sites, not the actual content. So you do still cross the backbone - but for less data.
i WISH i was getting 5-10. i'm still getting 50-70 a day, after peaking at ~100.
I'm getting somewhere between 10 and 20 Klez worms a day, too. Of course I filter them with procmail, but I'm paranoid and I send them to a separate mail folder.
What's really annoying is the automatic mail I get from the few with-it ISPs out there who detect a Klez worm sent through their mail servers with my name on it!
I've been collecting the mail headers, hoping to track down the worst offenders. So, is there a way to trace Klez, or are the headers forged so much that it's impossible to track? I haven't had any luck so far...
Stupid question: why would anyone buy Word for $350 (last time I checked) when they could get Word bundled with Works for $99? I'm not talking about Office, which costs more like $500 - if you only want Word, it costs around $350.
Is there any chance that the Word that comes with even the $99 Works is not full-featured?
I've thought about porting some of my software to OS X, but I'm not ready to give up precious desk space to yet another box just yet.
If you have open-source, command-line software to port, consider using Sourceforge's compile farm. They have some OS X boxen you can get an account on.
I'll bite.
Yes, I know this subject has been beaten into the ground ad-infinitum, but it still needs to be said once again: DUMP THE PROPRIETARY HARDWARE.
Apple uses off-the-shelf hard drives, optical drives, RAM, and graphics cards. The only proprietary pieces of hardware are their motherboards and cases.
Apple is selling hardware that is half the speed at 2 to 4 times the price of Intel hardware. Yes, apparently there are enough hard-core fanatics to keep the company alive, but why be satisfied with that? Why sit arrogantly back and just preach to those people?
Half the speed, only if you count Megahertz. Mac OS X comes with lots of software which runs faster than any comparable software in the Intel world, such as their G4-optimized MP3 encoder, which can encode high-quality 160kpbs MP3s at 10x real-time on a 733 MHz G4, directly from a CD. Your P4 may be running at 2+ GHz, but since there are currently no MP3 encoders that are optimized for the P4 architecture, your MP3 encoder is slower. Also, Mac OS X takes advantage of your graphics card for all of its drawing now - something that neither Windows or Linux does. This frees up the Mac's poor MHz-starved processors to do other things.
2 to 4 times the price? What are you smoking? The only way you can get a PC for half the price of a similarly-equipped Mac is by using dirt-cheap components that only work half the time. If you want poor-quality or mediocre hardware, you can get a cheaper PC. If you really want good hardware, a Mac is usually priced about the same, or maybe 10-20% more. (Mac laptops are often a better deal than similarly equipped PC laptops; desktop Macs are usually 10-20% more expensive.)
Yes, I know that Apple is traditionally a hardware company. So what? Being a software company hasn't exactly hurt Microsoft. Software is HUGELY more profitable than hardware.
Ha! Apple has at least twice the profit margins as Dell. They make plenty of money on hardware.
Unfortunately, as long as Microsoft has all of the major computer manufacturers in their back pocket, all major brand-name PCs will come with Windows preinstalled. Nobody has a chance of competing with that.
And besides, what's stopping them from "doing Intel right" and coming out with their own line of expensive hardware? Oh, no one will buy it because it will be so much more expensive? Well, some fanatics will continue to buy it, and meanwhile they continue to make huge $$$ on the software.
The main problem with Mac OS X running on ALL Intel hardware is drivers. Unless you're going to talk all peripheral manufacturers into writing Mac OS X drivers, there'd be no point.
As much as I despise Apple-the-company, I would LOVE to have a real competitor to Microsoft on the desktop, particularly one that was Unix based.
If you're unwilling to buy Apple's hardware, you'd better put your money behind your favorite Linux distro, then. Apple makes a great hardware/software combination and they have no reason to start running on PCs.
I really wish Steve would pull his head out of his ass and stop being satisfied being a boutique.
Yeah, wouldn't it be cool if Apple started advertising to Windows users, letting them know how Mac OS X is fast, stable, practical, and "just works"? Oh wait...
You're thinking of Apple's Mac OS X Family Pack, which lets you install it on up to 5 Macs in one household for $199. I think it's great for people who want to be legal and have more than one Mac at home.
I can't figure out how to post a direct URL (the Apple Store doesn't like deep linking) but here's how to get there:
However, this could be built into the system, at the expense of efficiency... Translate from English to Arabic... Then translate back for 'proofreading' by the English speaker... When he hears "Hey, worm, thanks a bunch!", he can cancel the translation, and try a new phrase instead.
This would take a hit to "real-time" communications, however.
Actually I saw a demo of Tongues at CMU a couple years ago and that's exactly what it did.
Person A speaks a sentence. The computer displays the phrase, translates it to language B, translates that back to language A, then displays that sentence on the screen. If person A approves, he/she passes the computer to person B, who can then hear the sentence in language B.
I'm assuming that's why the article says that it takes more than a minute to convey a ten-second sentence.
Most of the article consists of a list of audio software that can currently run on GNU/Linux systems. It's a pretty good list, but things like Cubase aren't there yet.
Yeah, it really is too bad that there isn't anything like Cubase for Linux. I miss getting that instant blue screen of death every time I tried to record from SPDIF-in during the wrong phase of the moon. Or the fact that it would crash and you'd lose all of your work if you gave it a wav file that was mistakenly named ".aif". And its anti-piracy authentication method which forced me to find the original disk every time it got confused - wow, that brings back memories.
We need Cubase for Linux about as badly as we need a native port of SirCam.
Apples are largely built from the same components as the PC's they supposedly outlast.
The only difference is that Apple tends to choose more high quality components than average PC manufacturers.
A top of the line Dell actually ought to last about as long as a typical Apple. But what about that $699 Dell system? They get the price that low by choosing the cheapest possible components.
I stopped drinking pop a little less than a year ago and I'm now 25 pounds lighter. I tried drinking diet pop for a while, but I kept reading about how bad that is for you, so I'm avoiding that now, too. Plus I had already cut back seriously on Caffeine (it was ruining my sleeping habits) and at most restaurants it's hard to find a diet pop that's not Diet Coke!
Now I usually drink water when I go out, and I drink flavored carbonated water at home or at work. It costs about the same as pop but has 1/10 of the calories. It's a great replacement while coding - the tingling of the carbonation tricks my brain into thinking I'm drinking pop, which makes me code better (really!) but I don't gain weight.
Now he's supporting a CPU scheme that, well, doesn't break anything and may even sacrifice performance for that compatibility.
Except that it's quite likely that an Opteron will be faster than an Itanium for most real-world tasks. At the very least it looks like it will be comparable in speed, and cheaper. If the Itanium really was screamingly fast, that would be different.
I think some HTML formatting was inadvertantly removed in this sentence.
A little arithmetic shows that the number of sentences of 20 words or less (not an unusual length) is about 1020.
Actually the number of sentences is about 10 ^ 20, or 10 to the power of 20. (I'm guessing that the HTML superscript tag was removed.) The point here was that even though the number of possible sentences is astronomically large, the number of different sentences that people tend to say in practice is actually surprisingly small (once you factor our proper nouns).
Would it be possible to leave the CD stationary, and spin the laser instead?
Unfortunately, CDs explode into bits of metal and plastic shrapnal if spun too fast. This isn't like burning out a CPU from over clocking. /. had an article a while back about a guy testing the spin limits of CDs.
Has anyone ever tried to keep the CD stationary and spin the laser instead?
I'm pretty sure you have an old version of wxGTK.
Maybe this story ought to be in the Apple section as well, because the appearance of a decent audio editor for OSX is huge.
I'm also very excited about finally getting Audacity to run on OS X, but we need lots of help. It still needs quite a few Mac-specific features (and some bug fixes) and I'm spread thin, trying to lead development of Audacity on all platforms and also work on all of the Mac features. Please join the Audacity development team if you have any programming experience and can help out with the OS X version!
> Say, do they have any ambitions of getting MIDI score editing thrown into this?
I personally don't have plans to start on any serious MIDI features in Audacity for a while. But the nice thing about an open-source project is that if somebody else wanted to come along and start working on MIDI functionality now without getting in the way of the rest of the program's development, we would welcome it.
Here's one:
Technical Note 31 (Clarus the Dogcow)
Can anyone find a link to the bogus Technical Note which was attributed to Scott Knaster, or the even crazier one he wrote in Macintosh Programming Secrets in response to it? Among other things, it attempted to describe how a program should deal with users upgrading their CPU while the program is running, and the API to a new compression routine called "PackMan" which could compress anything to exactly 4 bytes....