A lot of the distinction seems to be in how the install goes. With a Debian install, it tends to be a bit more crude, low-level, but still pretty simple and straightforward. Gentoo even more so, but with long periods of waiting while stuff compiles.
Newbie-oriented distros like Mandrake and Xandros (neé Corel) on the other hand try to make things very approachable in the install- everything is laid out like in an Windows app. You usually have an X11 GUI to guide you through the process. Another thing a lot of newbie-oriented distros tend to do is install a lot of stuff that you don't neccesarily need. I guess they're working on the assumption that a lot of Linux newbies would rather have almost everything they could ever need already installed and configured, rather than hoping they have the abilities to do it later.
There's nothing you really can't accomplish on one distro that you can on another, provided you have the source and the abilities to compile libraries and applications. Some commercial apps may be tailored to a specific distro to the point that it doesn't work on another, but usually it works out fine.
Aside from ease of installation, distros have fairly minor differences like a what binaries go where,/opt? or/usr/local? things of that nature, but they're not a huge deal.
A piece of software being cost effective at one point in time doesn't mean it will be forever, or that the evaluating body will believe it to be cost effective in the future. I never said that if some company chooses Windows in the year 2002 because they can get licenses for cheap they would have to stick with it forever. Get a clue, and quit "diluding" yourself.:)
I would be GLAD to give several hundred dollars to any company that can make a consistent, user-friendly, non-MS OS for my x86 hardware (all of it, not just some). Is this possible? Apple - where are you?
One of the reasons Apple's OS works so well is that it's integrated with its hardware, designed to work with it not just on top of it. Apple is in the consistency biz, which is why they wouldn't be interested in selling a copy of OS X for the ugly monster that is PC hardware, unless of course it was their own x86-based design, with the advantages of current Mac hardware.
Why not take that several hundred dollars and just save it- and use it to buy a Mac when your PCs outlive their usefulness in a year or two.
Haha! OUCH! Perhaps this is the first in a string of M$ sponsored attempts at actually killing open source! Next, we'll the plane Linus and his family are taking between conferences mysteriously crash in the woods in northern Minnesota...
Almost any huge company employs similar tactics when trying to win customers over from or keep current customers from switching to another vendor. As someone else mentioned, IBM does this with Oracle, HP with Dell, and vice versa and across many industries. It's nothing new. As far as a company claiming to be considering switching to Linux, it's like a game of poker- sometimes people bluff, sometimes they don't; sometimes their bluff is called, sometimes not.
It may sound too simple to you, but trust me- MS won't be fooled if some kid calls them up on the phone and says "Hello!!!1 I am pretty good haker and I was thinking of swichz0ring to Lindows OS you better give me VisualWarezStudeo.NET and WinXP (p stands for porn EHEHEH) for only $30 or else I will sooooo go to Leenucks!!"
It's damn near impossible to undercut a product (most Linux distros) that costs $0. Perhaps so many here sling mud at MS regardless of what they do because they know Linux may not continue to appear as an attractive alternative when it doesn't have that $0 as a big advantage? If Linux is so wonderful, why not let it compete based on how good it is, rather than how cheap it is?
Sure the poster could've stated it better, but isn't hard to figure out what he meant...
What he meant to say was that Mac OS X cannot run Windows apps in the same way Linux+WINE can/could/will-be-able-to. Sure, you could install Virtual PC, but you'll still have to buy a copy of Windows, so it would be all the same to MS.
Unless you were to install a Linux/x86 distro with good WINE integration into VPC, and run applications meant for Windows that way. But if you did that, Linux would be the thing enabling that, not Mac OS X or Virtual PC.
How can you kill open source competition? MS could give away copies of Windows until their face turns blue, but what are they going to do to step Debian? Kill everyone who knows C, destroy every HD and CD containing Debian?
If MS can provide $0-cheap copies of Windows that lower TCO, so be it. Why should a dumb suit care if something is open source or not provided they can get the best work done with it in the most cost efficient matter?
Sure, less business folks will switch to Linux from Windows, but only because MS is attempting to compete with Linux, which is a good thing for customers.
Perhaps it'll drive Linux to improve, getting individuals and businesses to choose Linux because it's better and not just cheaper.
The monopoly ride was good, but now they gotta get back to selling the shit on the grounds of quality and superiority in peoples mind, even if that means selling it for less.
When did MS ever sell their horse on the grounds of quality and superiority? MS QuickC vs. Borland Turbo C? VisualBasic was a good idea, I'll admit that- but they've never offered a platform that won out because of it's superiority or quality, but simply because it was what everyone else already ran...
The popularity of OpenOffice? Perhaps all of your friends switched to OpenOffice, but when you look at the rest of the world, especially the sectors that actually pay for copies of MS Office rather than pirating it, you will find a lot of them are still using MS Office. And paying MS a lot of money for it. OpenOffice is very popular with Linux users because it's the only real option they have, but it's not popular in the world of general Windows users.
Static screen shots don't show the interaction well. Will there be a lot of OSX-ish animation. I would suggest a minimal amount of flash. It seems to fit the *nix crowd better (everyone wants to run it on their 90mhz p1), and it would set it appart from XP and OSX.
That crowd of people wouldn't be using KDE 2 or 3 in the first place, which is quite slow, even with minimal animations. Yes, it would be nice to have a fancy-pants desktop that works well on a 90 MHz P5, but it seems to be a bit of a pipe dream to build something that is super-fast on top of a slow foundation.
Ah, I was thinking about that too, but wasn't planning on mentioning it.
I am kind of like on of those emacs freaks, but with Squeak. I use Squeak basically as my computing environment, using the Squeak web browser, email client, irc client and xterm/telnet client for the bulk of my computing activities.
I have my environment setup to use these flaps. You can toggle whether you want the flaps to expand on mouse over or on clicking the flap. I put my email client in a flap, having it nicely tucked away, but immediately accessible. When I'm doing real work (e.g. programming), I will put my IRC session in one as well. I have a number of other tools I put in flaps that do auto-hiding depending on what I'm doing.
So no, this KDE concept thing is nothing new to some of us.:)
Did you read his post? He says he only wants it to show when he holds down the alt-key, not use the mouse. He is far to l33t to use the mouse to bring it up, as is quite evident.:)
The PDA I use is a Newton MessagePad 2100. It's an awesome tool. I carry it around with me most of the time. I take all of my college lecture notes [1] on it using handwriting recognition (which comes in incredibly handy when you are trying to find something- don't just page through, do a full-text search!); I use it as a 'net pad with 802.11b (regular ethernet when I'm at school) and web browsers, irc, email, telnet; I use it for data collection any analysis with a spreadsheet; I use it for writing papers, between NewtonWorks (WYSIWYG) and a small TeX interpreter; I use it for coding, in Forth, Lisp and NewtonScript, with and without the keyboard, whether I'm just trying to find a number quick or writing a full blown application.
That's most of what I do. I never sync. I backup onto a memory card, but a Newton does not need a desktop to be useful. I had to use a desktop in order to put on the driver for ethernet, but past that, everything else I've been able to install using it. Unlike the 3600-series iPAQs (are they still this bad?) I get a lot more than 2-3 hours of battery life, so I only have to charge once a week. I usually get a few weeks out of a charge of the NiMH battery if I'm not doing much with the wireless ethernet... if I am using it for an hour or so a day, about a week.
A while back, I tried both a Jornada 720 and an iPAQ 3150 to replace the Newton, and for doing real work it just isn't practical yet for me. Someday, my own PDA environment/OS Dynapad will be mature enough to be useful, but not for a while. Until then, I'm going to stick to the Newt, preferring to have a PDA be a computer that supplants some of the activities I do at a desktop or laptop rather than being an overpriced electronic organizer or status symbol...
[1] But I stopped putting them up online- no one wanted my messy notes.:)
Yeah it sucks. Not much more to say, other than Viva La Green! With DragonHack2, it worked with a friend's upgraded 2000, but not my 2100. I've no idea why, but I wasn't too excited to get it to work...
Sphinx might be portable, but yeah, it would probably require rewriting lot sof it to force it to live in the C++ environment the newton OS imposes.
You could try running this version of VoiceType within PocketDOS on a Handheld PC 2000 or PocketPC machine... Or, you could find an older PDA that has a 486-class processor. Not sure if PocketDOS can handle sound, but it worked great for running Lotus Agenda on the Jornada 720... Not a DOS shell for WinCE, but a x86 emulator with DOS installed.
You can get a version of ViaVoice for the PocketPC. However, it sucks. It's not a real dictation system though- it only allows you do use a pretty small pre-defined group of commands, not general english word dictation. I was pretty disapointed. However, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there will be a full-blown ViaVoice Embedded version for the PocketPC.
As usual, there are some results that come up with a simple Google search.
There was a Dragon Naturally Speaking beta for the Newton OS 2.1, and it works OK. But it's still a beta and is far from perfect.
If you're looking for voice recognition for other PDAs, including PalmOS or Linux devices, you'll probably have much less luck.
It is about damn time this happened. There has been no technical or biological barriers to producing a non-painful or non-surgical male contraceptive drug like this. It is simply that pharm companies do the vast majority of contraceptive research on women and drugs to hold back their reproduction, rather than looking into the same topic on men. Eventually this comes down to our cultural meme that, for some reason, birth control is the responsibility of the woman rather than the man. A rather sexist policy held up at most drug companies.
Hell, it may just come down to the fact that most pharm researchers are men, and that there is some curious idea men have that they're somehow less masculine if they don't have a high sperm count. Silly. I for one wouldn't mind it one bit, unless I was trying to concieve. However, most men aren't almost trying to concieve most of the time, so guys: get over it.
All the same, I'm really glad someone took the initiative to do more than some prototype work on a contraceptive pill for men. I hope it makes it to market.
But I can't help but wonder... does it fuck with your emotions and hormonal balance in the ways the pill, Norplant and Depo do to women? No matter how much drug companies may try to ignore this, every woman I've known that has gone on the pill or Norplant (never known a depo user) had an absolutely hellish time while her body got used to it- 2-month long periods, unnatural mood swings, huge increases in acne, weight or fatigue; no wonder the decidedly male business of drug development hasn't bothered to find a contraceptive drug for men.
Note I said "real HWR," not character or stroke recognition. There are many packages available for Linux in general as well as with Qtopia on the Zaurus to provide character and stroke recognition, but no handwriting recognition, like Newton HWR or CalliGrapher on PocketPC, as I said above.
However, I'd love to be proved wrong though, but if the Z has real HWR, it must be incredibly new...
It has a form of HWR based on writing into a grid. It's not real HWR, like you see with the Newton OS or CalliGrapher on WinCE, but real HWR doesn't exist anywhere on Linux to my knowledge, at least in a form available to regular folks.
Motorolla has it's QuickPrint software for Linux, but it requires quite a bit of MIPS compared to Newton HWR, and would be slow on something with a 206 MHz StrongARM. It's moot anyway, because you have to be an OEM to get your hands on it, I've never heard of a product using it other than the defunct Sonicblue ProGear tablet.
Heh. You have a strange idea of a fun Friday night.:)
Re:doubts about future of wine
on
Fun With Wine
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· Score: 2
But luckily, we have Mono and dotGNU and the benefit of a more-open spec with.NET.
Re:They probably forgot they even owned it
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MAME To Become GPL?
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· Score: 2
Legality does not dictate morality, at least not for me. My point wasn't that being illegal things is bad, but that it's still illegal and could technically get you in trouble. You can't depend on the good will or apathy of companies forever, eventually it might bite you in the ass. I often eschew laws, but no matter how little you care about a law, you can't make it disappear just because you don't agree with the flawed ethics or logic behind it. Myself and many others see no ethical problem with cannabis consumption provided they're not hurting anyone else, but it doesn't stop millions of people from getting thrown in jail for posetion.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the distinction seems to be in how the install goes. With a Debian install, it tends to be a bit more crude, low-level, but still pretty simple and straightforward. Gentoo even more so, but with long periods of waiting while stuff compiles.
/opt? or /usr/local? things of that nature, but they're not a huge deal.
Newbie-oriented distros like Mandrake and Xandros (neé Corel) on the other hand try to make things very approachable in the install- everything is laid out like in an Windows app. You usually have an X11 GUI to guide you through the process. Another thing a lot of newbie-oriented distros tend to do is install a lot of stuff that you don't neccesarily need. I guess they're working on the assumption that a lot of Linux newbies would rather have almost everything they could ever need already installed and configured, rather than hoping they have the abilities to do it later.
There's nothing you really can't accomplish on one distro that you can on another, provided you have the source and the abilities to compile libraries and applications. Some commercial apps may be tailored to a specific distro to the point that it doesn't work on another, but usually it works out fine.
Aside from ease of installation, distros have fairly minor differences like a what binaries go where,
A piece of software being cost effective at one point in time doesn't mean it will be forever, or that the evaluating body will believe it to be cost effective in the future. I never said that if some company chooses Windows in the year 2002 because they can get licenses for cheap they would have to stick with it forever. Get a clue, and quit "diluding" yourself. :)
There was a story on Slashdot a while back about it. See.
I would be GLAD to give several hundred dollars to any company that can make a consistent, user-friendly, non-MS OS for my x86 hardware (all of it, not just some). Is this possible? Apple - where are you?
One of the reasons Apple's OS works so well is that it's integrated with its hardware, designed to work with it not just on top of it. Apple is in the consistency biz, which is why they wouldn't be interested in selling a copy of OS X for the ugly monster that is PC hardware, unless of course it was their own x86-based design, with the advantages of current Mac hardware.
Why not take that several hundred dollars and just save it- and use it to buy a Mac when your PCs outlive their usefulness in a year or two.
Haha! OUCH! Perhaps this is the first in a string of M$ sponsored attempts at actually killing open source! Next, we'll the plane Linus and his family are taking between conferences mysteriously crash in the woods in northern Minnesota...
Really goes to show how dumb you are...
Almost any huge company employs similar tactics when trying to win customers over from or keep current customers from switching to another vendor. As someone else mentioned, IBM does this with Oracle, HP with Dell, and vice versa and across many industries. It's nothing new. As far as a company claiming to be considering switching to Linux, it's like a game of poker- sometimes people bluff, sometimes they don't; sometimes their bluff is called, sometimes not.
It may sound too simple to you, but trust me- MS won't be fooled if some kid calls them up on the phone and says "Hello!!!1 I am pretty good haker and I was thinking of swichz0ring to Lindows OS you better give me VisualWarezStudeo.NET and WinXP (p stands for porn EHEHEH) for only $30 or else I will sooooo go to Leenucks!!"
It's damn near impossible to undercut a product (most Linux distros) that costs $0. Perhaps so many here sling mud at MS regardless of what they do because they know Linux may not continue to appear as an attractive alternative when it doesn't have that $0 as a big advantage? If Linux is so wonderful, why not let it compete based on how good it is, rather than how cheap it is?
Sure the poster could've stated it better, but isn't hard to figure out what he meant...
What he meant to say was that Mac OS X cannot run Windows apps in the same way Linux+WINE can/could/will-be-able-to. Sure, you could install Virtual PC, but you'll still have to buy a copy of Windows, so it would be all the same to MS.
Unless you were to install a Linux/x86 distro with good WINE integration into VPC, and run applications meant for Windows that way. But if you did that, Linux would be the thing enabling that, not Mac OS X or Virtual PC.
How can you kill open source competition? MS could give away copies of Windows until their face turns blue, but what are they going to do to step Debian? Kill everyone who knows C, destroy every HD and CD containing Debian?
If MS can provide $0-cheap copies of Windows that lower TCO, so be it. Why should a dumb suit care if something is open source or not provided they can get the best work done with it in the most cost efficient matter?
Sure, less business folks will switch to Linux from Windows, but only because MS is attempting to compete with Linux, which is a good thing for customers.
Perhaps it'll drive Linux to improve, getting individuals and businesses to choose Linux because it's better and not just cheaper.
The monopoly ride was good, but now they gotta get back to selling the shit on the grounds of quality and superiority in peoples mind, even if that means selling it for less.
When did MS ever sell their horse on the grounds of quality and superiority? MS QuickC vs. Borland Turbo C? VisualBasic was a good idea, I'll admit that- but they've never offered a platform that won out because of it's superiority or quality, but simply because it was what everyone else already ran...
The popularity of OpenOffice? Perhaps all of your friends switched to OpenOffice, but when you look at the rest of the world, especially the sectors that actually pay for copies of MS Office rather than pirating it, you will find a lot of them are still using MS Office. And paying MS a lot of money for it. OpenOffice is very popular with Linux users because it's the only real option they have, but it's not popular in the world of general Windows users.
Static screen shots don't show the interaction well. Will there be a lot of OSX-ish animation. I would suggest a minimal amount of flash. It seems to fit the *nix crowd better (everyone wants to run it on their 90mhz p1), and it would set it appart from XP and OSX.
That crowd of people wouldn't be using KDE 2 or 3 in the first place, which is quite slow, even with minimal animations. Yes, it would be nice to have a fancy-pants desktop that works well on a 90 MHz P5, but it seems to be a bit of a pipe dream to build something that is super-fast on top of a slow foundation.
Ah, I was thinking about that too, but wasn't planning on mentioning it.
:)
I am kind of like on of those emacs freaks, but with Squeak. I use Squeak basically as my computing environment, using the Squeak web browser, email client, irc client and xterm/telnet client for the bulk of my computing activities.
I have my environment setup to use these flaps. You can toggle whether you want the flaps to expand on mouse over or on clicking the flap. I put my email client in a flap, having it nicely tucked away, but immediately accessible. When I'm doing real work (e.g. programming), I will put my IRC session in one as well. I have a number of other tools I put in flaps that do auto-hiding depending on what I'm doing.
So no, this KDE concept thing is nothing new to some of us.
(I wonder what a desktop that actually looked like a desktop would do for ease of use? Hmmm. Have to give that some thought.)
It's been tried a number of times. Two of the most successful attempts are Microsoft Bob and MagicCap OS (which was targeted for PDAs).
While it might be done in a more useful way, both Bob and MagicCap weren't terribly user-friendly. They're both very cumbersome.
Did you read his post? He says he only wants it to show when he holds down the alt-key, not use the mouse. He is far to l33t to use the mouse to bring it up, as is quite evident. :)
The PDA I use is a Newton MessagePad 2100. It's an awesome tool. I carry it around with me most of the time. I take all of my college lecture notes [1] on it using handwriting recognition (which comes in incredibly handy when you are trying to find something- don't just page through, do a full-text search!); I use it as a 'net pad with 802.11b (regular ethernet when I'm at school) and web browsers, irc, email, telnet; I use it for data collection any analysis with a spreadsheet; I use it for writing papers, between NewtonWorks (WYSIWYG) and a small TeX interpreter; I use it for coding, in Forth, Lisp and NewtonScript, with and without the keyboard, whether I'm just trying to find a number quick or writing a full blown application.
:)
That's most of what I do. I never sync. I backup onto a memory card, but a Newton does not need a desktop to be useful. I had to use a desktop in order to put on the driver for ethernet, but past that, everything else I've been able to install using it. Unlike the 3600-series iPAQs (are they still this bad?) I get a lot more than 2-3 hours of battery life, so I only have to charge once a week. I usually get a few weeks out of a charge of the NiMH battery if I'm not doing much with the wireless ethernet... if I am using it for an hour or so a day, about a week.
A while back, I tried both a Jornada 720 and an iPAQ 3150 to replace the Newton, and for doing real work it just isn't practical yet for me. Someday, my own PDA environment/OS Dynapad will be mature enough to be useful, but not for a while. Until then, I'm going to stick to the Newt, preferring to have a PDA be a computer that supplants some of the activities I do at a desktop or laptop rather than being an overpriced electronic organizer or status symbol...
[1] But I stopped putting them up online- no one wanted my messy notes.
Yeah it sucks. Not much more to say, other than Viva La Green! With DragonHack2, it worked with a friend's upgraded 2000, but not my 2100. I've no idea why, but I wasn't too excited to get it to work...
Sphinx might be portable, but yeah, it would probably require rewriting lot sof it to force it to live in the C++ environment the newton OS imposes.
You could try running this version of VoiceType within PocketDOS on a Handheld PC 2000 or PocketPC machine... Or, you could find an older PDA that has a 486-class processor. Not sure if PocketDOS can handle sound, but it worked great for running Lotus Agenda on the Jornada 720... Not a DOS shell for WinCE, but a x86 emulator with DOS installed.
You can get a version of ViaVoice for the PocketPC. However, it sucks. It's not a real dictation system though- it only allows you do use a pretty small pre-defined group of commands, not general english word dictation. I was pretty disapointed. However, I wouldn't be surprised if eventually there will be a full-blown ViaVoice Embedded version for the PocketPC.
As usual, there are some results that come up with a simple Google search.
There was a Dragon Naturally Speaking beta for the Newton OS 2.1, and it works OK. But it's still a beta and is far from perfect.
If you're looking for voice recognition for other PDAs, including PalmOS or Linux devices, you'll probably have much less luck.
It is about damn time this happened. There has been no technical or biological barriers to producing a non-painful or non-surgical male contraceptive drug like this. It is simply that pharm companies do the vast majority of contraceptive research on women and drugs to hold back their reproduction, rather than looking into the same topic on men. Eventually this comes down to our cultural meme that, for some reason, birth control is the responsibility of the woman rather than the man. A rather sexist policy held up at most drug companies.
Hell, it may just come down to the fact that most pharm researchers are men, and that there is some curious idea men have that they're somehow less masculine if they don't have a high sperm count. Silly. I for one wouldn't mind it one bit, unless I was trying to concieve. However, most men aren't almost trying to concieve most of the time, so guys: get over it.
All the same, I'm really glad someone took the initiative to do more than some prototype work on a contraceptive pill for men. I hope it makes it to market.
But I can't help but wonder... does it fuck with your emotions and hormonal balance in the ways the pill, Norplant and Depo do to women? No matter how much drug companies may try to ignore this, every woman I've known that has gone on the pill or Norplant (never known a depo user) had an absolutely hellish time while her body got used to it- 2-month long periods, unnatural mood swings, huge increases in acne, weight or fatigue; no wonder the decidedly male business of drug development hasn't bothered to find a contraceptive drug for men.
Note I said "real HWR," not character or stroke recognition. There are many packages available for Linux in general as well as with Qtopia on the Zaurus to provide character and stroke recognition, but no handwriting recognition, like Newton HWR or CalliGrapher on PocketPC, as I said above.
However, I'd love to be proved wrong though, but if the Z has real HWR, it must be incredibly new...
It has a form of HWR based on writing into a grid. It's not real HWR, like you see with the Newton OS or CalliGrapher on WinCE, but real HWR doesn't exist anywhere on Linux to my knowledge, at least in a form available to regular folks.
Motorolla has it's QuickPrint software for Linux, but it requires quite a bit of MIPS compared to Newton HWR, and would be slow on something with a 206 MHz StrongARM. It's moot anyway, because you have to be an OEM to get your hands on it, I've never heard of a product using it other than the defunct Sonicblue ProGear tablet.
Heh. You have a strange idea of a fun Friday night. :)
But luckily, we have Mono and dotGNU and the benefit of a more-open spec with .NET.
Legality does not dictate morality, at least not for me. My point wasn't that being illegal things is bad, but that it's still illegal and could technically get you in trouble. You can't depend on the good will or apathy of companies forever, eventually it might bite you in the ass. I often eschew laws, but no matter how little you care about a law, you can't make it disappear just because you don't agree with the flawed ethics or logic behind it. Myself and many others see no ethical problem with cannabis consumption provided they're not hurting anyone else, but it doesn't stop millions of people from getting thrown in jail for posetion.