Re:Dapper is good, but it's not there yet.
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Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
This is a major problem for all distributions. Basically I as a user don't give a damn if the driver I need to get my display to work is binary-only or not. I just want the installer to do its job and install the bloody thing.
A dist should still offer to download and install it if it feels putting it on the CD violates their sensibilities in some way.
But how many real world apps use GTK#? Certainly there are some but they are vastly outnumbered by those written with Windows.Forms. Until Mono adequately supports the defacto standard, there is little chance of it becoming more mainstream. Even aside from Windows.Forms, most real world apps drag in COM, PInvoke or unmanaged code somewhere along the line. But getting one of the critical APIs for UI development would be a good start.
I really don't see much hope for Mono in its current form. It works well for what it is, but it isn't a viable replacement for.NET as Microsoft chooses to define (and redefine it). The weird thing is that complex GPL apps like #Develop provide the perfect platform for honing its compatibility and providing a great alternative to.NET on XP where it would be most useful. So what does the Mono community do - waste time porting #Develop from Windows.Forms to GTK#, tossing out most of the functionality in the process and making it Linux specific.
If the answer is yes, VB.NET vs. C# vs. Managed C++ is a secondary call.
Stay the hell away from managed C++ if you can avoid it. There is precious little reason to use C++ unless you intend to do something unsafe such as call Win32 or other unmanaged code so managed C++ is something of a misnomer. The only reason to use it in my opinion is if you have some legacy C++ that you need to abstract behind an object and expose into.NET land.
It's also worth pointing out that if ever the day arrives where Mono is interchangeable with.NET that C# is a future proof option. Managed C++ is unlikely to happen on Linux for a host of reasons, and I suspect that MS only support it since it's a great way to muddy the waters for Mono and cross-platform development in general - just like the ease with which they allow you to use COM interop or PInvoke.
My experience of VB6 is that it's mostly useful to glue components together. If you are looking to do anything remotely demanding you will soon hit massive issues since the feature set is so bleak that you will be relying on 3rd party components in no time. That most of the 3rd party components will be ActiveX controls written in C++ should tell you all you need to know about VB. With those components come licence fees, limitations and bugs you will not be able to fix. There is also the issue that (in my experience) VB programmers tend to be very poor coders. I shudder when I read VB, VB.NET or ASP.NET on a CV.
This is not surprising since VB is basically glue. Programmers spend much of their time pointing and clicking, and calling components without understanding what they are doing or the rationale for the way things work they way they do.
Attempting to rewrite any code in VB is sheer stupidity. Even if it was VB to begin with.
Porting to VB.NET is an option but even there I would be extremely wary of using it. VB.NET might be easier for VB coders to pick up, but as I mentioned before, such people tend to be lousy programmers and will consequently turn out rotten code. It would be far better to code in C# and hire C#, C++ or Java programmers who tend to have a clue about what they are doing. Be aware that.NET framework is a large runtime and doesn't work on older versions of Windows.
Another alternative is to port to Java. This isn't without pain of its own but it at least allows you to produce something that runs anywhere.
The only reason you have to do this is because ATi and nVidia (and seriously, what's with the F'd up capitalization people!) won't release their drivers as open source.
Of course they won't. The graphics market is a cutthroat business and there's not a cat's chance in hell they're going to release drivers which might give their competitors insight into what their hardware is doing, or capable of.
With that reality in mind, what do you do about it? Do you suggest that OEMs should open source their drivers when they plainly won't, causing Linux to suffer or do you pragmatically strive to make it easier and simpler to install drivers whether they are proprietary or not?
It's quite obvious what route is best for consumers, irrespective of what it means for people who put GNU/ in front of everything.
I really don't see how you can claim 64-bit is more stable than 32-bit. It's the same codebase, just compiled with a different switch. Most bugs in 32-bit land are going to manifest themselves in much the same way as 64-bit land.
The only way you could claim it was more stable as you say is if the dearth of OEM drivers meant it was stable simply because there was less third party code to destablise it.
The specific reason that I did not go with it (aside from having a copy of XP x32 to use) is that it did not seem to be worth the risk or effort of installing the 64-bit version. I have software such as virus checkers, DVD burners, and games that I still want to run and I doubt it would. Besides which benchmarks comparing the two appear to show no appreciable performance difference from using one over the other. I expect in part that just like Apple with OS X, Microsoft only compiled a few parts of XP to 64-bits and most of the rest is 32-bits anyway. I would hope that the compiler technology and the code itself in Vista will be far more optimized for 64-bit computing than XP and will therefore show larger performance benefits.
You hit the nail on the head. It is an attempt to smear him, as was taking quotes made by staunch advocates of evolution out of context and attempting to misinterpret or invert the meaning of what was actually said. After all, if you tar the guy as a "marxist", he can't possibly have a point in a peer reviewed scientific journal.
Also note that whenever ID comes up, you can bet that some ID nitwit with moderation points will attempt to mod down anyone who points out the hypocrisy of these people. I would have though that a devout christian (for this is what they are mostly) would consider lying to be a major sin. But it seems not.
And I'm not so sure I've given a false representation of Patterson.
Yes you did by cutting his remark in half, just at the point where it was qualified. You simply cut and pasted and expected to run away with victory. In every case where ID proponents have quote mined, without fail they have done so in a fashion that attempts distort or invert what was being said originally. Once might be considered a mistake, twice sloppy research, but dozens upon dozens of times? It is pure blatant deception.
It is pretty clear what both of these people saying here. There is no way to say with exactitude that one set of bones is a direct descendant of another set of bones. That would be an absurd thing to claim. It doesn't mean that there is no distinct lineage that can be observed through the fossil records. Since evolution is falsifiable, all you need do is dig up a fossilized cat amongst dinosaur bones or a bird-amphibian creature and and evolution will be proven wrong.
It still won't mean ID is right though, since ID has yet to produce a testable theory. All we get from IDers are lies, distortion and misdirection.
If it's syntax highlighting, proper indentation etc., then why not. If you're meant to be learning the language, why try and hobble your poor students by forcing them to learn arcane commands and keystrokes just to get some lousy command line editor working?
They can learn about makefiles, and text editors later on when they have a general grasp of the language. Personally I see no reason that anyone should have vi or emacs inflicted on them ever. While they're handy for people who live in the shell, they are masochistic environments and there are countless numbers of very good, intuitive GUI-based editors.
I used to use jed (a micro emacs) all the time in XP for quick hacking, but since I discovered Notepad++, I really don't see much need for remembering a bunch of crappy keystrokes. Jed is great and all, but it is a pain to configure (and emacs is a nightmare), and when I just want to edit something I really don't want to be sidetracked trying to convince the POS to indent with 4 spaces not tabs when it takes 2 seconds to do it in other editors. Notepad++ does everything I need of an editor and has useful features like tabbed views and syntax highlighting. For more in depth hacking I use the IDE provided with the language which for me means Developer Studio for.NET or C++, or Eclipse for Java, xml, wsdl or html editting.
Makefiles are an interesting exercise later on after the basics have been learnt, but I'd argue that makefiles are not important until your programs reach a point that they should be split over multiple files. Besides which, makefiles have been supplanted with ant / nant. Unless the language in question is C or C++, there is little reason to be using make.
That's a pretty feeble troll Mr Anonymous Coward. Or perhaps you're being sincere and somehow I've offended your sensibilities. I didn't realise there were people so fanatical about an integrated graphics processor that they're prepared to defend it on the grounds that its shitty performance means you can't do anything that might make your laptop more fun or useful.
We still do know that organisms evolve into new species. And, dare I say, I doubt we ever will. The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote: "I fully agree with your comments about the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them... . I will lay it on the line--there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument." The renowned evolutionist (and Marxist) Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
As if your arguments weren't absurd enough we can still see your ingrained dishonesty from the mined quotes you chose to tack on.
Regarding Dr Collin Patterson, let's see what Talk Origins says about him. Ooops, you totally misrepresented what he said. There's a surprise.
I can buy a Lenovo model for $899 with $100 rebate which is functionally equivalent to the MacBook. It has a slightly slower CPU but a larger hard drive, screen and DVD burner. So it's $200 less or $300 with the rebate. Just enough if you wanted to kit yourself with a dock, 15" flatscreen monitor, mouse and keyboard.
The point is that people who think the MacBook is cheap are clearly not shopping around. If Dell are more expensive right now, perhaps it has something to do with the relatively short period of time the Core Duo has been available on the market. I expect a lot of manufacturers are trying to shift their existing stock out of the way. Hence, a Core Duo costs a lot on Dell but you can find a perfectly acceptable laptop with an "inferior" chip for far less.
I'd argue that the Core Duo is a waste of time in most laptops (of any kind) if they're going to be crippled with a crappy integrated graphics chip or slow hard drive. If you can't play games, then what is the point of stuffing a fast dual core CPU in there?
The same is going on with the XBox and PS3. In market-speak, they'll claim they're offering people the choice, but in reality they want as many people as possible to pay for the high end system by artificially removing functionality from the low end system.
No, Sony have said the games will be region free. The model worked on the PSP so obviously they're taking it to their big consoles too. Movies are still region encoded though.
I'm sure it is possible for a game maker to lock the region on a game but I expect that if Sony will make sure it is financially not a good idea to do so unless you have a damned good reason.
Until Linux rules the world or Microsoft produce a 64-bit version of Windows that actually works seamlessly, I think 64-bit instruction sets are overrated. I say this as someone posting this message on an Athlon 64 X2 3800+.
I really, really hope that Microsoft intends to allow XP32 to be upgraded to Vista64.
It is meaningless because you're converting to dollars and ignoring that the UK price includes VAT (tax) whereas the US price is before tax. You should regard its price in proportion to what other consoles cost in the UK. For example the XBox 360 costs £280 in the UK so that's the price to be working off.
Back to consumers. I think the issue faced by the consumer is that they're faced with the unappealing prospect of a razor blade model. Batteries are essentially "free" since they come with the phone. A fuel cell certainly would not be any cheaper than a battery. And a battery costs a few pence to charge but fuel cell refills are likely to cost a few pounds. It's not economical for a consumer to use these even if they lasted three times as long.
It would be useful for businesses. It means that you can maintain a box of walk-talkies, phones, handheld systems etc. without the constant need to be fiddling around with chargers or batteries. Just slap a cell in and away you go. It may not even be convenient to have charge devices in some environments, such as an oil rig, a forest, a factory floor or whatever. The military would appreciate it too simply because a fuel cell weighs a hell of a lot less than a battery and there aren't any chargers in the middle of nowhere.
It would also be possible to make these things in an eco friendly way but whether they do or not is another matter. Methanol can be made from renewable sources. Plastic can be made from renewable sources (and biodegrade). That means in theory (and discounting manufacture and transportation) these things can be non-polluting, unlike regular batteries.
So my thoughts are fuel cells are great for certain kinds of business and the military, but it would be madness to pitch these at consumers unless the price is practically nothing which I don't see happening.
I've had shares in MTI for over a year now only to watch them wallow along in a display of volatile but slowly sinking value. A 30% boost is just what I like to see though it still doesn't cover what I forked out for them. If this bears fruit, then I might just have something to show from my investment.
The PS2 shipped with a removable backplate that you slot in a network adapter and hard drive. It makes sense that the wifi and smart card readers for the PS3 will be done in a similar way, possibly in the same module. It means Sony can flog wifi for $50, the larger HD for $150, the wireless controllers for $50 etc. and make the $100 difference between the two systems look like a good value proposition (of $200 value!). You'd might even find that the HDMI is some kind of internal daughterboard.
Microsoft did the same with the XBox 360, withholding things from the "Core" model to make people buy the regular model. At least all PS3s have a harddrive which will encourage games to make use of it.
How about writing a Lotus Notes adaptor for Evolution and porting it to Windows? Then everyone benefits - IBM from dumping the shitfest which is their Lotus Notes Client, and every user who would like a decent replacement for Outlook.
The two PCs that I literally pulled from the heap with no effort are competing with the Apple. Acer and Lenovo are top-tier brands. I have an Acer and it works and looks just fine. Lenovo inherits most of the build quality, processes, and support from IBM ensuring very good quality and aftersales. In either case they were cheaper than the Apple with roughly comparable specs. You claimed the MacBook was smaller than both. Yes it was, but then the Lenovo had a larger screen and a larger drive. In fact, if I go to the Lenovo website I can even buy that model with DVD burner, XP Pro and fingerprint reader for $899 plus a $100 rebate. So with the rebate, we're talking $300 cheaper, though the CPU is a bit lower. The point being its swings and roundabouts, but Apple laptops are expensive for what they are.
A camera is a neat thing to have in a laptop, but I suspect that most people, including Apple users could do without it. The same could be said for a fingerprint reader too btw.
I'd also argue that Apple have a mixed reputation for their laptops and it sure as hell does not compare to Thinkpad, not even remotely. It was only recently that the MacBook Pro was discovered to be overheating because there was thermal paste smeared all over the place, sending the heat into the board instead of the heat sink. This is the latest in a long line of build quality issues that have plagued Apple products.
The comparison to a Thinkpad is certainly unfounded. A Thinkpad can be stripped down into about 20 pieces, all of which are replaceable with part ordering and other aftersales. The reason that corporates hand them out to employees (I use one for work) is because they are robust and easy to fix. I seriously doubt the same can be said of any Apple laptop product.
There is some merit to comparing it to a Vaio. Personally I think the Vaio is terrible value for money and you'd have to be mad to buy one. But the MacBook does look cheap by comparison.
Perhaps if schizophrenics are hyper-rational as you say, it may refer to their ability to rationalize rather than think rationally. The former implies that they will fold any crazy delusion straight into their psychosis and its no good convincing them otherwise. The latter means being able to reason things through which should be enough to know all these 9/11 conspiracies are absurd.
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A dist should still offer to download and install it if it feels putting it on the CD violates their sensibilities in some way.
I really don't see much hope for Mono in its current form. It works well for what it is, but it isn't a viable replacement for .NET as Microsoft chooses to define (and redefine it). The weird thing is that complex GPL apps like #Develop provide the perfect platform for honing its compatibility and providing a great alternative to .NET on XP where it would be most useful. So what does the Mono community do - waste time porting #Develop from Windows.Forms to GTK#, tossing out most of the functionality in the process and making it Linux specific.
Stay the hell away from managed C++ if you can avoid it. There is precious little reason to use C++ unless you intend to do something unsafe such as call Win32 or other unmanaged code so managed C++ is something of a misnomer. The only reason to use it in my opinion is if you have some legacy C++ that you need to abstract behind an object and expose into .NET land.
It's also worth pointing out that if ever the day arrives where Mono is interchangeable with .NET that C# is a future proof option. Managed C++ is unlikely to happen on Linux for a host of reasons, and I suspect that MS only support it since it's a great way to muddy the waters for Mono and cross-platform development in general - just like the ease with which they allow you to use COM interop or PInvoke.
This is not surprising since VB is basically glue. Programmers spend much of their time pointing and clicking, and calling components without understanding what they are doing or the rationale for the way things work they way they do.
Attempting to rewrite any code in VB is sheer stupidity. Even if it was VB to begin with.
Porting to VB.NET is an option but even there I would be extremely wary of using it. VB.NET might be easier for VB coders to pick up, but as I mentioned before, such people tend to be lousy programmers and will consequently turn out rotten code. It would be far better to code in C# and hire C#, C++ or Java programmers who tend to have a clue about what they are doing. Be aware that .NET framework is a large runtime and doesn't work on older versions of Windows.
Another alternative is to port to Java. This isn't without pain of its own but it at least allows you to produce something that runs anywhere.
Of course they won't. The graphics market is a cutthroat business and there's not a cat's chance in hell they're going to release drivers which might give their competitors insight into what their hardware is doing, or capable of.
With that reality in mind, what do you do about it? Do you suggest that OEMs should open source their drivers when they plainly won't, causing Linux to suffer or do you pragmatically strive to make it easier and simpler to install drivers whether they are proprietary or not?
It's quite obvious what route is best for consumers, irrespective of what it means for people who put GNU/ in front of everything.
The only way you could claim it was more stable as you say is if the dearth of OEM drivers meant it was stable simply because there was less third party code to destablise it.
The specific reason that I did not go with it (aside from having a copy of XP x32 to use) is that it did not seem to be worth the risk or effort of installing the 64-bit version. I have software such as virus checkers, DVD burners, and games that I still want to run and I doubt it would. Besides which benchmarks comparing the two appear to show no appreciable performance difference from using one over the other. I expect in part that just like Apple with OS X, Microsoft only compiled a few parts of XP to 64-bits and most of the rest is 32-bits anyway. I would hope that the compiler technology and the code itself in Vista will be far more optimized for 64-bit computing than XP and will therefore show larger performance benefits.
Also note that whenever ID comes up, you can bet that some ID nitwit with moderation points will attempt to mod down anyone who points out the hypocrisy of these people. I would have though that a devout christian (for this is what they are mostly) would consider lying to be a major sin. But it seems not.
Yes you did by cutting his remark in half, just at the point where it was qualified. You simply cut and pasted and expected to run away with victory. In every case where ID proponents have quote mined, without fail they have done so in a fashion that attempts distort or invert what was being said originally. Once might be considered a mistake, twice sloppy research, but dozens upon dozens of times? It is pure blatant deception.
It is pretty clear what both of these people saying here. There is no way to say with exactitude that one set of bones is a direct descendant of another set of bones. That would be an absurd thing to claim. It doesn't mean that there is no distinct lineage that can be observed through the fossil records. Since evolution is falsifiable, all you need do is dig up a fossilized cat amongst dinosaur bones or a bird-amphibian creature and and evolution will be proven wrong.
It still won't mean ID is right though, since ID has yet to produce a testable theory. All we get from IDers are lies, distortion and misdirection.
They can learn about makefiles, and text editors later on when they have a general grasp of the language. Personally I see no reason that anyone should have vi or emacs inflicted on them ever. While they're handy for people who live in the shell, they are masochistic environments and there are countless numbers of very good, intuitive GUI-based editors.
I used to use jed (a micro emacs) all the time in XP for quick hacking, but since I discovered Notepad++, I really don't see much need for remembering a bunch of crappy keystrokes. Jed is great and all, but it is a pain to configure (and emacs is a nightmare), and when I just want to edit something I really don't want to be sidetracked trying to convince the POS to indent with 4 spaces not tabs when it takes 2 seconds to do it in other editors. Notepad++ does everything I need of an editor and has useful features like tabbed views and syntax highlighting. For more in depth hacking I use the IDE provided with the language which for me means Developer Studio for .NET or C++, or Eclipse for Java, xml, wsdl or html editting.
Makefiles are an interesting exercise later on after the basics have been learnt, but I'd argue that makefiles are not important until your programs reach a point that they should be split over multiple files. Besides which, makefiles have been supplanted with ant / nant. Unless the language in question is C or C++, there is little reason to be using make.
That's a pretty feeble troll Mr Anonymous Coward. Or perhaps you're being sincere and somehow I've offended your sensibilities. I didn't realise there were people so fanatical about an integrated graphics processor that they're prepared to defend it on the grounds that its shitty performance means you can't do anything that might make your laptop more fun or useful.
Lenovo is a tier 1 brand. It's what the IBM PC division used to be until recently.
As if your arguments weren't absurd enough we can still see your ingrained dishonesty from the mined quotes you chose to tack on.
Regarding Dr Collin Patterson, let's see what Talk Origins says about him. Ooops, you totally misrepresented what he said. There's a surprise.
And now Stephen Jay Gould. Oh yes you quote mined him too. There's another surprise.
Intellectual dishonesty seems to be a hallmark of the ID movement.
The point is that people who think the MacBook is cheap are clearly not shopping around. If Dell are more expensive right now, perhaps it has something to do with the relatively short period of time the Core Duo has been available on the market. I expect a lot of manufacturers are trying to shift their existing stock out of the way. Hence, a Core Duo costs a lot on Dell but you can find a perfectly acceptable laptop with an "inferior" chip for far less.
I'd argue that the Core Duo is a waste of time in most laptops (of any kind) if they're going to be crippled with a crappy integrated graphics chip or slow hard drive. If you can't play games, then what is the point of stuffing a fast dual core CPU in there?
The same is going on with the XBox and PS3. In market-speak, they'll claim they're offering people the choice, but in reality they want as many people as possible to pay for the high end system by artificially removing functionality from the low end system.
I'm sure it is possible for a game maker to lock the region on a game but I expect that if Sony will make sure it is financially not a good idea to do so unless you have a damned good reason.
I really, really hope that Microsoft intends to allow XP32 to be upgraded to Vista64.
But you'd have to make sure you got a 230V model from somewhere otherwise you'll have to buy some ugly line voltage converter to make it work.
It is meaningless because you're converting to dollars and ignoring that the UK price includes VAT (tax) whereas the US price is before tax. You should regard its price in proportion to what other consoles cost in the UK. For example the XBox 360 costs £280 in the UK so that's the price to be working off.
It would be useful for businesses. It means that you can maintain a box of walk-talkies, phones, handheld systems etc. without the constant need to be fiddling around with chargers or batteries. Just slap a cell in and away you go. It may not even be convenient to have charge devices in some environments, such as an oil rig, a forest, a factory floor or whatever. The military would appreciate it too simply because a fuel cell weighs a hell of a lot less than a battery and there aren't any chargers in the middle of nowhere.
It would also be possible to make these things in an eco friendly way but whether they do or not is another matter. Methanol can be made from renewable sources. Plastic can be made from renewable sources (and biodegrade). That means in theory (and discounting manufacture and transportation) these things can be non-polluting, unlike regular batteries.
So my thoughts are fuel cells are great for certain kinds of business and the military, but it would be madness to pitch these at consumers unless the price is practically nothing which I don't see happening.
I've had shares in MTI for over a year now only to watch them wallow along in a display of volatile but slowly sinking value. A 30% boost is just what I like to see though it still doesn't cover what I forked out for them. If this bears fruit, then I might just have something to show from my investment.
Microsoft did the same with the XBox 360, withholding things from the "Core" model to make people buy the regular model. At least all PS3s have a harddrive which will encourage games to make use of it.
What good is it without the kernel? Doesn't that make it just a bunch of BSD tools?
How about writing a Lotus Notes adaptor for Evolution and porting it to Windows? Then everyone benefits - IBM from dumping the shitfest which is their Lotus Notes Client, and every user who would like a decent replacement for Outlook.
A camera is a neat thing to have in a laptop, but I suspect that most people, including Apple users could do without it. The same could be said for a fingerprint reader too btw.
I'd also argue that Apple have a mixed reputation for their laptops and it sure as hell does not compare to Thinkpad, not even remotely. It was only recently that the MacBook Pro was discovered to be overheating because there was thermal paste smeared all over the place, sending the heat into the board instead of the heat sink. This is the latest in a long line of build quality issues that have plagued Apple products.
The comparison to a Thinkpad is certainly unfounded. A Thinkpad can be stripped down into about 20 pieces, all of which are replaceable with part ordering and other aftersales. The reason that corporates hand them out to employees (I use one for work) is because they are robust and easy to fix. I seriously doubt the same can be said of any Apple laptop product.
There is some merit to comparing it to a Vaio. Personally I think the Vaio is terrible value for money and you'd have to be mad to buy one. But the MacBook does look cheap by comparison.
Perhaps if schizophrenics are hyper-rational as you say, it may refer to their ability to rationalize rather than think rationally. The former implies that they will fold any crazy delusion straight into their psychosis and its no good convincing them otherwise. The latter means being able to reason things through which should be enough to know all these 9/11 conspiracies are absurd.