MarkWatson wrote: Smalltalk servlets - mimimum memory footprint is about 20 megabytes
Ouch! What system are you using for that? Sure, that's a lot better than Java, but 20 MB of a footprint is a lot more than it has to be for Smalltalk.
I am not running a huge setup, but the small group of servlets I have running on my own machine for my personal access has a running RAM footprint of about 3-5 MB, serving regular static web data, webmail-esque access to my email collection (via a custom module I wrote), a web-based Smalltalk class browser and workspace (for doing scripting and such under some circumstances), some XML-RPC methods (again for my personal use) and a Wiki all under ComSwiki and Comanche running in Squeak Smalltalk.
Granted, I also have a Smalltalk image for this that has been stripped down to only what is needed for the servlet/web setup. One could the default Squeak image, load in Comanche and get a 20 MB footprint- but then again, you'd have the source and binary loaded into RAM for a ton of stuff that isn't related to serving dynamic and static data. A web browser, a complete IDE, debuggers, inspectors, irc clients, email reader, GUI designer among oodles and oodles of other stuff.
But I'm guessing you're not using an-worked Squeak image for doing servlets- you're probably using VisualWorks and VisualWave.:)
I personally use Smalltalk because you can get realworld performance that is adequate (usually faster than Python, but Python is fast enough for me too) and development time that is really outstanding.
That said, Smalltalk isn't right for everyone, and I'm not trying to convince you to quit using VisualWorks or VisualAge (or whatever Smalltalk dialect you're using) and switch to Squeak, I just am a Smalltalk user with experience in some web apps.
Actually, an Emacs-like editor for.NET/Mono would be pretty cool. It'd be great to have an interpreted/incrementally compiled language with.NET access (SmallScript, a Lisp dialect) as the scripting or main language of this Emacs.NET- you could use Emacs to modify and extend your entire.NET computing environment.
Some people seem to think it is slow. Not just Mach- it's usually a generalization made across all message passing microkernels vs. monolithic kernels. And a lot of times, it probably is a wee bit slower, but the argument that what is gained makes it worth it.
Plenty of tools available now to do this, although not so many for the subset of software that most Slashdot readers use: open-source, written in C, and using fairly traditional and limited GUI toolkits.
*sigh*
As some have mentioned, you can do this with Adobe Acrobat. You can get it on Unix. And no, it is unfortuantely non-Free. Call me crazy, but in my moral scheme, I have a much higher importance on reducing the amount I waste than using the occasional hunk of proprietary (although free) software. Killing something that was alive comes before thet GPL. I know, I must be nuts.
That said, I luckily do not have to use proprietary software for doing annotation. I have a little tool written in Squeak Smalltalk for annotating documents. Namely, I can annotate HTML, PostScript and PDF right now. You can add text (less storage space) or a drawing. There's even a handy little button where you can enable and disable the annotation marks.
In PS and PDF, I cannot resave as a PS or PDF with the new layers, but I can save in a format I can later open up and read. I can also do a fresh export to GIF or PostScript (and could then use ps2pdf if I wanted to share as PDF).
The app in question would run on any platform (Squeak is actually cross-platform- don't equate this with Java), except for the current version does some calls out to libraries in OS X, namely the AppKit. This isn't really absolutely necesary, with more work, it could be written to work with both the AppKit as well as GhostScript. Someone is making progress on a pure Squeak PDF renderer, so if that becomes even more usable soon, I could ditch the usage of Mac OS X's class library and just use that...
It can also annotate a "stack" of images (PNG, JPG, GIF), but you don't often come by documents in such way. However, it was super easy to add, so I did- and there are some docs I've come across in this format, e.g., a bunch of books where each page is a.GIF, found on pre-PDF ubiquity on some old ZIP disks of mine.
And yes, this tool is completely open source and Free. I don't have it online for download, but it was such an easy thing to write, I assumed it was not something hard to come by. If people are interested, I could prepare it for such distribution...
For the PDA... Also, the Newton can do it. Every eBook reader on the Newton I've used (PaperBack and Newt's Cape) can do annotation. Just tap the annotation button, and it interprets what you write as a drawing to annotate. To my knowledge, neither let you do pure text annotation, which would be nice I guess- but it 's better than nothing!
Sure, you could do it in XML. But you could just as easily do this in any other format as well, binary or text. XML doesn't lend anything special to this type of problem that any other format couldn't. I am guessing you're not consciously thinking that XML is some magic bullet, but people suggest it for things like it is. Yes, XML could applied in this situation, but it isn't going to make your job all that much easier than if you went with a format that you also already could parse with relative easy...
BAH. I had written up a nice example of the format of such a document, using s-expressions ala Lisp. Which could very easily be translated to XML, one-for-one. However, Slashdot's silly lameness filter didn't like all the parens I used?
For the college ACM chapter to which I belong (and am president), we have an annual habit of touring the Leinenkugle Brewery and Cray facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. It's a few hour drive for us in northern Minnesota, but it's worth it and makes a great day out for a bunch of college nerds!:)
We may not do it this year, problems with making the trip to Cray. Not sure if they give tours anymore, bring a bit down and out... but it's quite the tour!
Plus, you get the benefit of drinking decent beer. I saw someone else reccomend a tour of the Busch and Budweister plants- I say "plants" because they could hardly be called breweries! Leine's may not be as good as Moose Drool, but it sure as hell isn't the torture like most of the stuff AB makes...
If you're up in the Duluth area, there is also the Lake Superior Brewing brewery that deserves a tour- some really tasty beer! Hell, their Kayak Kölsch is pretty light, yet full of real flavor for those of you who may venture north but are used to drinking piss instead of the good stuff...:)
I looked at getting a Libretto, but just wouldn't cut it. No touch screen nor a reflective screen. Worthless outside or when I'm not at a desk or some other similar surface. The Jornada 720 can be used when not on a lap or anything, thanks to the touch screen. Nice machine, and faster than an old Liberetto...
I'm waiting for the OQO as a replacement for my current combination of * Newton 2100: my PDA. all my college lecture notes and field data collection in a spreadsheet; * Jornada 720: Handheld/PC- great keyboard a nice 640x240 screen. Main drawback is that the screen isn't reflective and is impossible to read in the out of doors. Great for coding, writing in LaTeX, sshin around without having a full laptop. And yes, all of this is under WinCE. * iBook: nice computer, but I really wish I could run all of my machines on solar. Silly dream perhaps, but we all have them.
I have a 2 GB Toshiba PCMCIA drive that I swap between the Jornada 720 and the Newton with music and data. Cost me a wee $80. It's the same kind you find in the iPod, but smaller. You can buy the 5, 10 and 20 GB versions, but at least in the 20 GB case, it'd be cheaper to buy an iPod and yank out the drive.
I was looking at the new Zaurus as something that could possibly do the same thing that I'm using my Newton and Jornada for, but it doesn't look like it. Without a reflective screen, there's no way it could replace them. But it would be nice to have a PCMCIA slot like my Jornada (it has both that and CF!)
I can't wait til the OQO. I almost did an advance order deposit (they're shipping in April), but I wanted to make sure it was what I wanted.
Well, OSS people have already put 3 or 4 such things together. The silly thing expecting anyone else of seeing the benefit of using them.
You could use CORBA as is on GNOME, but in the truest tradition which you mention, people don't use it for aynthing but GNOME, where it would make a good way of hookup libraries for entirely non-GNOME uses as well. COM is a lot thinner than CORBA, but hell, better than writing C extensions for the rest of OSS's days.
Why pen? Could you just have print-offs notarized?
In the case of notaries, what kind of docs do they keep? That is, I could have a stack of paper with "My great of idea of this week is" and have it notarized, to later fill it in. Doesn't matter, pen or print.
Too bad there's not an MD5-like hash for physical documents that could be stamped by the notary.:)
Oh, come off of it. Just because I'm disagreeing with the/. mainstream doesn't mean I'm trolling- my post was (relatively) well-formed and sensical discussing specific points that pertained to the matter at hand. A dissenting opinion, yes, a troll, no. If you don't agree with it, try replying to it with a similar level of intelligence (it's not hard), or is just easier to try to mark it a troll in a poor effort to get the pointage down so no one reads the truth?
Yes, that'd be another way of doing it, and IMO much better in the long run. However, it'd probably be silly to hope that the OSS community could put such a thing together, for use by PHP or for any language, especially a cross platform one...
Oh wait! We're talking about Ximian's Mono or Portable dotNEt/dotGNU...;) Now the PHP just have to port PHP5 to C# (or another.NET language) and we'll be sitting pretty...
Check out the OQO. By default, it runs Win XP or Linux rather than WinCE, but you can run WinCE for x86 on it if that's your fancy -in most single-app/embedded situations it would likely perform better and be more robust than WinXP at least!
The OQO is a bit expensive and it's not out until April... But the cheaper model has a 800 MHz Transmeta CPU, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, USB, FireWire and docking ports (adds VGA, PCI and AGP bus interface). Not sure what the shock protection is like, but you could always run it out of a RAM disk.
It's mostly a matter of entrenchment. Perl, being a more general purpose language, would likely perform better than PHP in a lot of areas, including web apps. PHP, however, is known as a "web language" simply because that's where it was marketed too and where it's used. People could (a few do) write full GUI apps in PHP, but there's no real advantage to using it in such an area when there are better options available.
At some point in history, PHP provided a few features which were relatively novel at the time, at least in the Free software arena, which has a tendancy to be a bit behind the rest of the world. [1] At this point though, you can get templating ala ASP in plenty of free and open languages, including perl.
I could be full of it though- other than having the benefit of entrenchment, does PHP have any features that truly set it apart from perl, python or any of the more mature languages?
[1] Not in all areas of OSS, of course, but this statement is relatively true for the mainstream of OSS. There are interesting projects and acedemic research things going on that are doing new and interesting things. Like the regular mainstream, most people in the OSS mainstream aren't interested in doing things better so much as doing them as they already know how.
I just wish that there was a way to compile PHP into some sorta byte code. 'cause then you'd write your Mysql, XML, expat, imagemagik, and other php modules IN php. THEN it'd be truely portable.
What's your logic?
Having PHP compile to bytecode wouldn't increase the portability of the extension that interface with libraries and apps written in C. If you want an XML parser to work on all platforms you could write it in PHP. A lot of languages that already perform well enough to write libraries in do that rather than doing it in C. Even with PHP compiled to bytecode, it would still have to interface with those C extension dynlib/.so/dll files.
It might be a bit easier to maintain ports of PHP extensions if PHP had a FFI (foreign function interface) that was workable at runtime rather than requiring a specific C extension to be written for it. Languages with such an FFI (Smalltalk, Lisp and others) often can call into shared libraries on the platform with a lot less trouble and extra code.
The only real way around this portability problem is to write everything in PHP or a language with similar portability. There's no reason you can't write an XML parser or image manipulator in pure PHP. Bytecode has nothing to do with this though, other than perhaps increasing PHP's speed to something more workable.
It's easy to push PHP's limits- it was meant to do relatively simple web templating. And sure, it's great at that for some people's use of it.
1. Buy a laptop with a swappable drive bay; or 2. You shouldn't want to boot from an external drive. Nothing to see here folks, move on.
Someone else mentioned using a CD based Linux distro like Knoppix or DemoLinux and then mounting the external storage after that. That would work, but would be a huge pain in the ass if you wanted to do much more than experiment superficially.
Need to upgrade the kernel? Figure out what kinds of changes throughout the CD you'd have to make (special cases due to being on a CD) and then put the kernel on there. Upgrade a package that's on the CD? Have to get another machine to copy the image of the CD to, install the RPM/DEB/TGZ then figure out how to make a new CD. Not incredibly impossible for a Linux guru, but definately not something approachable for a relative newbie whenever she wants to install a package that already exists on the CD.
Again- not impossible, but a bit daunting. Sure would be a lot easier if the PC hardware was as well designed as the Mac counterparts.
About the booting via a bootloader like lilo or GRUB:
How possible is that? Do any of these bootloaders have drivers for USB, USB2 or FireWire? One of the really cool things about Mac hardware is OpenFirmware, which makes possible booting off of the network (no matter if your card explicitly supports it in its own ROM or not), USBx, FireWire or SCSI.
I have gone on to college biology. I like it so much that I'm majoring in it.
No, a mouse isn't "higher" in the sense that it's better- there is no such thing as an evolutionary ladder. Higher in this sense dictates a level of complexity. Yes, in each and every cell, regardless if it's part of a archea, euglenoid, or mouse, contains a mind boggling complexity of relationships, chemical and otherwise. However, one would be silly to deny that a mouse is on a higher order of complexity than a moss or yeast cell.
No need to get on your high horse and assume that I associate "higher" with better- perhaps you just read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and feel the need to preach, I could certainly understand that. But what good does it do to make similarily silly assumptions?
Re:This man didn't invent Bigfoot!
on
Bigfoot A Hoax?
·
· Score: 2
Has this guy been traveling around the world planting fake evidence? There has been stuff found in places other than the pacific northwest...
A mouse is a higher lifeform. Meaning it's above singled-cell creatures. It's ok that you failed high school biology, but that's no reason to take it out on everyone else.:)
This man didn't invent Bigfoot!
on
Bigfoot A Hoax?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
He may have hoaxed it a few places, but Bigfeet, Yeti, Sasquatches have been around in our mythologies for thousands of years. It's not like it was just invented one day in '58! Not that having a mythology about it makes it a reality, but take everything, even this guy's claims, with ag rain of salt.
PC architecture as it is now sucks in ways other than it doesn't run OS X. Mac PCI cards are easier to write drivers for and more importantly, it's easier to write really good drivers for Mac PCI cards, thanks to OpenFirmware. Things used to be different, but since Jobs took over, every Mac Apple sells basically has the same architecture, the same chipsets driving the motherboards. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is vastly less variation (largely redundant, needless variation) in the Mac world than in the PC world, meaning Apple can spend more time making sure their OS works really well rather than making sure it works at all on a huge mass of hardware that differs just a little bit.
Yes, Apple could make a version of OS X for a small group of x86 models. It could be done on the current PC architecture, but it wouldn't work as well as the Mac does now. A new architecture based on the x86 chip could be created with the same perks as Mac hardware provides.
However, why bother? That group of x86-based machine would probably be sold at a premium as well. I guess higher GHz would be the only factor for such an abomination.:)
You can get an eMac for $999, and that Dell listed for "from $599." If you configure the Dell to have as similar specs as the iMac as possible- 17" CRT, 128 MB RAM, CD-RW+DVD, XP Pro, Dell Picture Studio Premium, an optical mouse, and a keyboard with audio controls the Dell comes to $957.00.
Sure, with similar specs, the Mac is $40 more. I don't know about you, but having a computer that actually works is definitely worth $40 extra. The lowest-end iMac you can get has the same specs, but with the attached 15" LCD. If you have the Dell come with a 15" LCD instead of a 17" CRT, the iMac ends up being $60 more than a similarly configured. Again, $60 is pretty trivial when you factor in all the time you'll end up wasting reinstalling Windows or dealing with it's painful nature.
However, these kind of exersizes are a waste of time- often, a Mac will end up more expensive. However, the gap has gotten pretty small when you compare the consumer lines.
Slashdot Mirror
MarkWatson wrote:
:)
Smalltalk servlets - mimimum memory footprint is about 20 megabytes
Ouch! What system are you using for that? Sure, that's a lot better than Java, but 20 MB of a footprint is a lot more than it has to be for Smalltalk.
I am not running a huge setup, but the small group of servlets I have running on my own machine for my personal access has a running RAM footprint of about 3-5 MB, serving regular static web data, webmail-esque access to my email collection (via a custom module I wrote), a web-based Smalltalk class browser and workspace (for doing scripting and such under some circumstances), some XML-RPC methods (again for my personal use) and a Wiki all under ComSwiki and Comanche running in Squeak Smalltalk.
Granted, I also have a Smalltalk image for this that has been stripped down to only what is needed for the servlet/web setup. One could the default Squeak image, load in Comanche and get a 20 MB footprint- but then again, you'd have the source and binary loaded into RAM for a ton of stuff that isn't related to serving dynamic and static data. A web browser, a complete IDE, debuggers, inspectors, irc clients, email reader, GUI designer among oodles and oodles of other stuff.
But I'm guessing you're not using an-worked Squeak image for doing servlets- you're probably using VisualWorks and VisualWave.
I personally use Smalltalk because you can get realworld performance that is adequate (usually faster than Python, but Python is fast enough for me too) and development time that is really outstanding.
That said, Smalltalk isn't right for everyone, and I'm not trying to convince you to quit using VisualWorks or VisualAge (or whatever Smalltalk dialect you're using) and switch to Squeak, I just am a Smalltalk user with experience in some web apps.
Well, it can't really be much easier than using Inline C in Perl... :)
Well, it can't really be much easier than using Inline C in Perl...
Actually, an Emacs-like editor for .NET/Mono would be pretty cool. It'd be great to have an interpreted/incrementally compiled language with .NET access (SmallScript, a Lisp dialect) as the scripting or main language of this Emacs.NET- you could use Emacs to modify and extend your entire .NET computing environment.
Some people seem to think it is slow. Not just Mach- it's usually a generalization made across all message passing microkernels vs. monolithic kernels. And a lot of times, it probably is a wee bit slower, but the argument that what is gained makes it worth it.
Plenty of tools available now to do this, although not so many for the subset of software that most Slashdot readers use: open-source, written in C, and using fairly traditional and limited GUI toolkits.
.GIF, found on pre-PDF ubiquity on some old ZIP disks of mine.
*sigh*
As some have mentioned, you can do this with Adobe Acrobat. You can get it on Unix. And no, it is unfortuantely non-Free. Call me crazy, but in my moral scheme, I have a much higher importance on reducing the amount I waste than using the occasional hunk of proprietary (although free) software. Killing something that was alive comes before thet GPL. I know, I must be nuts.
That said, I luckily do not have to use proprietary software for doing annotation. I have a little tool written in Squeak Smalltalk for annotating documents. Namely, I can annotate HTML, PostScript and PDF right now. You can add text (less storage space) or a drawing. There's even a handy little button where you can enable and disable the annotation marks.
In PS and PDF, I cannot resave as a PS or PDF with the new layers, but I can save in a format I can later open up and read. I can also do a fresh export to GIF or PostScript (and could then use ps2pdf if I wanted to share as PDF).
The app in question would run on any platform (Squeak is actually cross-platform- don't equate this with Java), except for the current version does some calls out to libraries in OS X, namely the AppKit. This isn't really absolutely necesary, with more work, it could be written to work with both the AppKit as well as GhostScript. Someone is making progress on a pure Squeak PDF renderer, so if that becomes even more usable soon, I could ditch the usage of Mac OS X's class library and just use that...
It can also annotate a "stack" of images (PNG, JPG, GIF), but you don't often come by documents in such way. However, it was super easy to add, so I did- and there are some docs I've come across in this format, e.g., a bunch of books where each page is a
And yes, this tool is completely open source and Free. I don't have it online for download, but it was such an easy thing to write, I assumed it was not something hard to come by. If people are interested, I could prepare it for such distribution...
For the PDA...
Also, the Newton can do it. Every eBook reader on the Newton I've used (PaperBack and Newt's Cape) can do annotation. Just tap the annotation button, and it interprets what you write as a drawing to annotate. To my knowledge, neither let you do pure text annotation, which would be nice I guess- but it 's better than nothing!
Sure, you could do it in XML. But you could just as easily do this in any other format as well, binary or text. XML doesn't lend anything special to this type of problem that any other format couldn't. I am guessing you're not consciously thinking that XML is some magic bullet, but people suggest it for things like it is. Yes, XML could applied in this situation, but it isn't going to make your job all that much easier than if you went with a format that you also already could parse with relative easy...
BAH. I had written up a nice example of the format of such a document, using s-expressions ala Lisp. Which could very easily be translated to XML, one-for-one. However, Slashdot's silly lameness filter didn't like all the parens I used?
For the college ACM chapter to which I belong (and am president), we have an annual habit of touring the Leinenkugle Brewery and Cray facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. It's a few hour drive for us in northern Minnesota, but it's worth it and makes a great day out for a bunch of college nerds! :)
:)
We may not do it this year, problems with making the trip to Cray. Not sure if they give tours anymore, bring a bit down and out... but it's quite the tour!
Plus, you get the benefit of drinking decent beer. I saw someone else reccomend a tour of the Busch and Budweister plants- I say "plants" because they could hardly be called breweries! Leine's may not be as good as Moose Drool, but it sure as hell isn't the torture like most of the stuff AB makes...
If you're up in the Duluth area, there is also the Lake Superior Brewing brewery that deserves a tour- some really tasty beer! Hell, their Kayak Kölsch is pretty light, yet full of real flavor for those of you who may venture north but are used to drinking piss instead of the good stuff...
I looked at getting a Libretto, but just wouldn't cut it. No touch screen nor a reflective screen. Worthless outside or when I'm not at a desk or some other similar surface. The Jornada 720 can be used when not on a lap or anything, thanks to the touch screen. Nice machine, and faster than an old Liberetto...
I'm waiting for the OQO as a replacement for my current combination of
* Newton 2100: my PDA. all my college lecture notes and field data collection in a spreadsheet;
* Jornada 720: Handheld/PC- great keyboard a nice 640x240 screen. Main drawback is that the screen isn't reflective and is impossible to read in the out of doors. Great for coding, writing in LaTeX, sshin around without having a full laptop. And yes, all of this is under WinCE.
* iBook: nice computer, but I really wish I could run all of my machines on solar. Silly dream perhaps, but we all have them.
I have a 2 GB Toshiba PCMCIA drive that I swap between the Jornada 720 and the Newton with music and data. Cost me a wee $80. It's the same kind you find in the iPod, but smaller. You can buy the 5, 10 and 20 GB versions, but at least in the 20 GB case, it'd be cheaper to buy an iPod and yank out the drive.
I was looking at the new Zaurus as something that could possibly do the same thing that I'm using my Newton and Jornada for, but it doesn't look like it. Without a reflective screen, there's no way it could replace them. But it would be nice to have a PCMCIA slot like my Jornada (it has both that and CF!)
I can't wait til the OQO. I almost did an advance order deposit (they're shipping in April), but I wanted to make sure it was what I wanted.
Well, OSS people have already put 3 or 4 such things together. The silly thing expecting anyone else of seeing the benefit of using them.
You could use CORBA as is on GNOME, but in the truest tradition which you mention, people don't use it for aynthing but GNOME, where it would make a good way of hookup libraries for entirely non-GNOME uses as well. COM is a lot thinner than CORBA, but hell, better than writing C extensions for the rest of OSS's days.
Why pen? Could you just have print-offs notarized?
:)
In the case of notaries, what kind of docs do they keep? That is, I could have a stack of paper with "My great of idea of this week is" and have it notarized, to later fill it in. Doesn't matter, pen or print.
Too bad there's not an MD5-like hash for physical documents that could be stamped by the notary.
Oh, come off of it. Just because I'm disagreeing with the /. mainstream doesn't mean I'm trolling- my post was (relatively) well-formed and sensical discussing specific points that pertained to the matter at hand. A dissenting opinion, yes, a troll, no. If you don't agree with it, try replying to it with a similar level of intelligence (it's not hard), or is just easier to try to mark it a troll in a poor effort to get the pointage down so no one reads the truth?
(cranky early work day)
Yes, that'd be another way of doing it, and IMO much better in the long run. However, it'd probably be silly to hope that the OSS community could put such a thing together, for use by PHP or for any language, especially a cross platform one...
;) Now the PHP just have to port PHP5 to C# (or another .NET language) and we'll be sitting pretty...
Oh wait! We're talking about Ximian's Mono or Portable dotNEt/dotGNU...
Check out the OQO. By default, it runs Win XP or Linux rather than WinCE, but you can run WinCE for x86 on it if that's your fancy -in most single-app/embedded situations it would likely perform better and be more robust than WinXP at least!
The OQO is a bit expensive and it's not out until April... But the cheaper model has a 800 MHz Transmeta CPU, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB HD, USB, FireWire and docking ports (adds VGA, PCI and AGP bus interface). Not sure what the shock protection is like, but you could always run it out of a RAM disk.
It's mostly a matter of entrenchment. Perl, being a more general purpose language, would likely perform better than PHP in a lot of areas, including web apps. PHP, however, is known as a "web language" simply because that's where it was marketed too and where it's used. People could (a few do) write full GUI apps in PHP, but there's no real advantage to using it in such an area when there are better options available.
At some point in history, PHP provided a few features which were relatively novel at the time, at least in the Free software arena, which has a tendancy to be a bit behind the rest of the world. [1] At this point though, you can get templating ala ASP in plenty of free and open languages, including perl.
I could be full of it though- other than having the benefit of entrenchment, does PHP have any features that truly set it apart from perl, python or any of the more mature languages?
[1] Not in all areas of OSS, of course, but this statement is relatively true for the mainstream of OSS. There are interesting projects and acedemic research things going on that are doing new and interesting things. Like the regular mainstream, most people in the OSS mainstream aren't interested in doing things better so much as doing them as they already know how.
I just wish that there was a way to compile PHP into some sorta byte code. 'cause then you'd write your Mysql, XML, expat, imagemagik, and other php modules IN php. THEN it'd be truely portable.
What's your logic?
Having PHP compile to bytecode wouldn't increase the portability of the extension that interface with libraries and apps written in C. If you want an XML parser to work on all platforms you could write it in PHP. A lot of languages that already perform well enough to write libraries in do that rather than doing it in C. Even with PHP compiled to bytecode, it would still have to interface with those C extension dynlib/.so/dll files.
It might be a bit easier to maintain ports of PHP extensions if PHP had a FFI (foreign function interface) that was workable at runtime rather than requiring a specific C extension to be written for it. Languages with such an FFI (Smalltalk, Lisp and others) often can call into shared libraries on the platform with a lot less trouble and extra code.
The only real way around this portability problem is to write everything in PHP or a language with similar portability. There's no reason you can't write an XML parser or image manipulator in pure PHP. Bytecode has nothing to do with this though, other than perhaps increasing PHP's speed to something more workable.
It's easy to push PHP's limits- it was meant to do relatively simple web templating. And sure, it's great at that for some people's use of it.
A lot of people so far have answered:
1. Buy a laptop with a swappable drive bay; or
2. You shouldn't want to boot from an external drive. Nothing to see here folks, move on.
Someone else mentioned using a CD based Linux distro like Knoppix or DemoLinux and then mounting the external storage after that. That would work, but would be a huge pain in the ass if you wanted to do much more than experiment superficially.
Need to upgrade the kernel? Figure out what kinds of changes throughout the CD you'd have to make (special cases due to being on a CD) and then put the kernel on there. Upgrade a package that's on the CD? Have to get another machine to copy the image of the CD to, install the RPM/DEB/TGZ then figure out how to make a new CD. Not incredibly impossible for a Linux guru, but definately not something approachable for a relative newbie whenever she wants to install a package that already exists on the CD.
Again- not impossible, but a bit daunting. Sure would be a lot easier if the PC hardware was as well designed as the Mac counterparts.
About the booting via a bootloader like lilo or
GRUB:
How possible is that? Do any of these bootloaders have drivers for USB, USB2 or FireWire? One of the really cool things about Mac hardware is OpenFirmware, which makes possible booting off of the network (no matter if your card explicitly supports it in its own ROM or not), USBx, FireWire or SCSI.
I have gone on to college biology. I like it so much that I'm majoring in it.
No, a mouse isn't "higher" in the sense that it's better- there is no such thing as an evolutionary ladder. Higher in this sense dictates a level of complexity. Yes, in each and every cell, regardless if it's part of a archea, euglenoid, or mouse, contains a mind boggling complexity of relationships, chemical and otherwise. However, one would be silly to deny that a mouse is on a higher order of complexity than a moss or yeast cell.
No need to get on your high horse and assume that I associate "higher" with better- perhaps you just read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and feel the need to preach, I could certainly understand that. But what good does it do to make similarily silly assumptions?
Has this guy been traveling around the world planting fake evidence? There has been stuff found in places other than the pacific northwest...
A mouse is a higher lifeform. Meaning it's above singled-cell creatures. It's ok that you failed high school biology, but that's no reason to take it out on everyone else. :)
He may have hoaxed it a few places, but Bigfeet, Yeti, Sasquatches have been around in our mythologies for thousands of years. It's not like it was just invented one day in '58! Not that having a mythology about it makes it a reality, but take everything, even this guy's claims, with ag rain of salt.
It should be noted that the $600 lowest price model doesn't even include a monitor, but I'm sure you knew that, but plenty of others probably don't.
PC architecture as it is now sucks in ways other than it doesn't run OS X. Mac PCI cards are easier to write drivers for and more importantly, it's easier to write really good drivers for Mac PCI cards, thanks to OpenFirmware. Things used to be different, but since Jobs took over, every Mac Apple sells basically has the same architecture, the same chipsets driving the motherboards. It's a bit of an exaggeration, but there is vastly less variation (largely redundant, needless variation) in the Mac world than in the PC world, meaning Apple can spend more time making sure their OS works really well rather than making sure it works at all on a huge mass of hardware that differs just a little bit.
:)
Yes, Apple could make a version of OS X for a small group of x86 models. It could be done on the current PC architecture, but it wouldn't work as well as the Mac does now. A new architecture based on the x86 chip could be created with the same perks as Mac hardware provides.
However, why bother? That group of x86-based machine would probably be sold at a premium as well. I guess higher GHz would be the only factor for such an abomination.
You can get an eMac for $999, and that Dell listed for "from $599." If you configure the Dell to have as similar specs as the iMac as possible- 17" CRT, 128 MB RAM, CD-RW+DVD, XP Pro, Dell Picture Studio Premium, an optical mouse, and a keyboard with audio controls the Dell comes to $957.00.
Sure, with similar specs, the Mac is $40 more. I don't know about you, but having a computer that actually works is definitely worth $40 extra. The lowest-end iMac you can get has the same specs, but with the attached 15" LCD. If you have the Dell come with a 15" LCD instead of a 17" CRT, the iMac ends up being $60 more than a similarly configured. Again, $60 is pretty trivial when you factor in all the time you'll end up wasting reinstalling Windows or dealing with it's painful nature.
However, these kind of exersizes are a waste of time- often, a Mac will end up more expensive. However, the gap has gotten pretty small when you compare the consumer lines.