I dont think that's true. Perhaps it is in Delphi, but the non-client area is the frame, the title bar, the system buttons. i.e. you have to handle a WM_NCPAINT if you want to change the title bar, add a new system button or whatnot. Now perhaps you could screw around with the non-client HDC by using HDC that you obtain in some nonstandard way or whatever, but you'd still be fighting against the default implementation of WM_NCPAINT. You'd override it, and also implement WM_NCHITTEST to stop the default minimize / maximize / restore / close buttons from firing by accident.
The reason that Delphi might let you do this is perhaps they do something screwy with their title bars too.
But as I said b) is probably the answer in this case. In fact I just fired up Spy++ and the frame has no WS_CAPTION so that pretty much confirms it. The chrome extends into the top edge of the frame and they've simulated the effect of a title using chrome. It wouldn't be that hard to do.
Probably not. In case you're interested, this effect is probably achieved by either a) overriding the paint routines for the non-client areas of the frame window or more likely b) producing a title-less frame window and handling mouse down events in the top area of the frame to simulate dragging the window around.
I was going to suggest you load view-source:chrome://browser/content/browser.xul to see how the chrome does that top part, but their view-source: code seems to be broken. Ooops! Still, you could probably browse the.jar files if you were interested.
"this Firefox UI is great and easy to use, so let's add a bunch crazy buttons and just generally shit all over it! Oh and throw in a theme that makes our customers want to claw out their eyes. And for extra confusion, make sure some of the pages load with IE so people are never sure what behaviour they're going to get!"
There have been small form factor PCs for donkey's years. Over 12 years ago I recall a 286 no larger than a Mac Mini complete with a teeny tiny keyboard and monochrome monitor. There is nothing new or amazing about this.
In fact, various Mini-ITX machines, barebones boxes like Shuttle and of course the Cobalt Qube have been selling for the last five years or so. If anything the Mac G4 Cube and Mac Mini could be accused of being knockoffs of the Qube.
Well then you're in a small minority. While it is true that W2K / XP do not crash anywhere near as much as 95/98, they do crash and much more frequently than OS X or Linux.
I'd say on average I get one or two BSODs in a month. Mostly this is driver related (e.g. Nvidia + HL2), but I have instances where the machine has blue screened for no apparant reason whatsoever. The machine was under some kind of load, e.g. a compiler + some apps and then *poof* it blue screened with some kind of NTOSKRNL exception. Considering that I reboot my machine everyday so that it never runs for more than 16 hours, I'd say this is pretty poor. And yes my box is service packed, drivers are up to date etc. etc.
OS X isn't perfect either, but in the two years and several iterations of 10.x, I've only seen two panics. Panics on Linux have been rarer than hens teeth. The only time I've seen that crash at all was when I've been screwing around with the kernel source and forgotten to do important something such as mkinitrd or whatever.
Sorry, but that's a pretty unlikely exploit. To carry it out, someone has to be convinced to drag and drop an image onto an empty address bar. Have you seen many sites that do that? Have you seen many users who either understand or follow such instructions?
While it would be cool to see Colinux working, I seriously doubt it will allow networking. Getting colinux to network is a massive pain involving installing Win32-Tap, reboots, messing around with bridges / NAT, fiddling Linux-side to make it work and generally ripping your hair out. This is definitely one area that requires improvement - both for Colinux and Microsoft who should ship some kind of TAP device by default.
Once it does work, it works like a charm, but it took me a couple of hours to figure it to work with my setup. I started with a pre3.0 Debian root_fs I grabbed from the net. Once I got the networking going, I changed sources.list and upgraded to Debian 'sarge' dist. Now I have a lovely GNOME 2.8 desktop all running under XP at (my guess) 80-90% of native speed. I've sucessfully gotten both VNC and NX to run under it though performance through NX is more sluggish than I expected.
Okay so he runs a large company with UK offices, but so what? Microsoft has offices in every large country. So what has Bill Gates done specifically for the benefit of the UK?
The state telco has a monopoly and sees VoIP as a threat to its massively expensive and arcane service. Solution? Criminalize VoIP under the feeble pretense that you're fighting a war against drugs or somesuch.
Somewhere (legal) sells MP3s? But assuming its downloadable music in general, to buy an album of MP3 or AAC songs costs almost as much as a physical CD. How can the labels possibly expect people to pay more? Doing that will simply drive them back to the P2P networks.
Why are they even complaining? They almost certainly get as much money from legitimate online sales as they would from CDs, especially since the cost of distribution is passed onto the likes of Apple, Napster et al.
Newspapers sell for a dollar or so every day. But surely it should cost $15 to provide a decent standard of living to all the American people involved in its manufacture, marketing and distribution?
The simple fact is that if a company buys a widget wholesale for less than $4, the distribution, shipping and infrastructure to support all of that would perhaps double or triple the cost. So it might cost $12 at most. The rest is profit.
Hence the reason that the US market is besieged by products made in China, India, Guatemala, Honduras etc. - to maximize profits. It's not that a US factory couldn't sell stuff at retail at the same or close to the same, it just that the margins are so much wider. While it might be good for multinationals, it certainly isn't good for the economy.
My dual CPU Mac has 512Mb. I believe the Mac mini in the shop was 512Mb too although I'm not sure. I recall thinking it wasn't the basic model.
The mini surely did suck though and totally put me off the idea of "upgrading" even though it was higher clocked. I think I'll wait a year or two until they get around to making one which has some decent specs out of the box such as G5, more memory.
As for Gentoo, unfortunately I'm talking about an XP box. While it would be nice if my main machine were Linux, it isn't practical for the work I do.
Not all the threads are asleep when I'm building something, running a virus checker, burning a DVD / CD, listening to music, watching a video or playing a game. Which is the times when you need a dual CPU. The rest of the time it doesn't matter that much, unless of course you're running something like SETI which I am as well.
CPU utilization on my box is always 100% or nearly since I run SETI & Climate Prediction through BOINC. Dual CPUs means they don't have to be put to sleep as often so they run faster. But it's not just about BOINC.
For example, I build lots of source code. Things like Mozilla take 30 minutes or more to build.
On my current system drags down other tasks such and the whole system is stilted and slow. With a dual CPU, one of processors can be doing the the intensive task while the other keeps the desktop running. Or I could possibly throw a -j4 onto GNU make and benefit from builds in a fraction of the time.
Or if I'm playing a game that plays background music, it might spawn a thread to play it. It might spawn another thread to be loading scenery as I walk through a level. A dual CPU means that those tasks can be offloaded leaving the other dedicated to handling the gameplay. The net result is less jumps, freezing and stutters and a better framerate.
Or I can be compressing / burning a DVD while getting on with something else without fear of having a buffer underflow on the recorder.
While my PC is a single CPU, I also own a Mac G4 500Mhz dual CPU system. It's not the fastest thing in the world, but what impresses me is that I can be building something on it (e.g. Mozilla) and the desktop is still responsive and fast. That's what a dual CPU gets you. I recently tried a Mac mini (clocked at 1.25Gz) and the different in performance was very noticeable - if I launched a video or something, and ran the mouse over the dock the desktop would start getting all jerky as it tried to service both tasks. My venerable G4 has a slower clockspeed than a Mac mini, but I've never seen anything like that before.
I'd be interested how you don't spill a drop. I have a Canon S800 printer and every time I refill a cartridge, the ink immediately seeps out of the other end. The only way to prevent this is to layout lots of old newspapers, tape up the open end as best I can, refill and furiously jam the bung back in. I always end up with ink all over the place (hence the newspapers).
And even when I do use a replacement ink cartridge, there are plenty of 3rd party cartridges available for 5 euro or so.
I know for certain that if I ever replace that inkjet it will only be for another one which is equally easy to refill. There is no way in hell I would buy anything that tried to force me to use "official" cartridges via chips or any other means.
Install cygwin (www.cygwin.com) first. It's free and offers most Unix tools - ls, grep, sed, awk, tar, bzip2, perl, split, etc. The setup program picks a reasonable subset of packages which may or may not include bzip2 but its easy enough to add if its not included.
It's a little more work to get going than WinRAR but it's not a great effort, especially if you've using Linux or some other *nix before.
Bzip2 + tar gets as good compression as RAR and has the added benefit of being almost ubiquitous, as well as having decent open source tools for compression and extraction on virtually every platform. Multi-volume is simply a matter of calling split before storing it.
PalmOS is past it, however the OS that a PDA runs is really neither here nor there if the apps are lacklustre or if the hardware is poor.
Having had experience of both Palm & PocketPC, I'd say that the Palm still has much better PIM software but the hardware is lacking. The PocketPC software is far too tap happy and dialog filled - entering an appointment takes many more taps compared to the Palm. And PocketPCs are very crash-prone and and often need a soft-reset.
Still, popular PocketPC devices such as my iPaq have great support for bluetooth & wifi out of the box. The latest Palms have gorgeous screens but they suck at the wireless. Its just great to be able to fire up Skype or a browser on my iPaq from a hotel room.
I don't even know if Skype is out on the Palm, but if I wanted wifi I'd have to slap a huge dongle into SD slot to do it.
So my recipe for Palm would be to keep the apps as simple to use as they are now, but fix the bloody hardware, especially the wireless support. The burgeoning use of multimedia should also see better support for playing music and video content. Certainly, the OS should be more up to date to support this, but it's more of an enabler than something most people care about.
Personally I'd love to run Linux on a PDA but that's because I'm a geek. I did have a look at the Zaurus, but the high price, non-existent support and sucky apps hardly made a compelling case. I'll just have to wait for some brave soul on handhelds.org to port the kernel to my iPaq.
Either support or make it easy (to the point of transparency) to install multimedia applications, hardware accelerated graphics drivers and drivers for other popular consumer gear.
There, it's more vibrant.
To be honest, Fedora is a very good dist, but the lack of multimedia and the consequent messing around to get it, hangs like a millstone around the project. I'm sure RH could have a post-install step tied to some kind of OS X download site + click and run which would make it easy to install additional packages.
If you're too fucking lazy to administer a box for yourself, or see what a patch fixes or consider any of the other implications of installing it, then yes you can make Linux patch itself automatically. A one line cron job will work in most places.
That's what I'm saying. I've seen my own stocks take a 10% dump in one day, for no reason at all, except that some institutions were hedging this one company against another.
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The reason that Delphi might let you do this is perhaps they do something screwy with their title bars too.
But as I said b) is probably the answer in this case. In fact I just fired up Spy++ and the frame has no WS_CAPTION so that pretty much confirms it. The chrome extends into the top edge of the frame and they've simulated the effect of a title using chrome. It wouldn't be that hard to do.
I was going to suggest you load view-source:chrome://browser/content/browser.xul to see how the chrome does that top part, but their view-source: code seems to be broken. Ooops! Still, you could probably browse the .jar files if you were interested.
"this Firefox UI is great and easy to use, so let's add a bunch crazy buttons and just generally shit all over it! Oh and throw in a theme that makes our customers want to claw out their eyes. And for extra confusion, make sure some of the pages load with IE so people are never sure what behaviour they're going to get!"
Netscape is a shell brand. This work was done in-house by AOL or contracted out to someone.
In fact, various Mini-ITX machines, barebones boxes like Shuttle and of course the Cobalt Qube have been selling for the last five years or so. If anything the Mac G4 Cube and Mac Mini could be accused of being knockoffs of the Qube.
I'd say on average I get one or two BSODs in a month. Mostly this is driver related (e.g. Nvidia + HL2), but I have instances where the machine has blue screened for no apparant reason whatsoever. The machine was under some kind of load, e.g. a compiler + some apps and then *poof* it blue screened with some kind of NTOSKRNL exception. Considering that I reboot my machine everyday so that it never runs for more than 16 hours, I'd say this is pretty poor. And yes my box is service packed, drivers are up to date etc. etc.
OS X isn't perfect either, but in the two years and several iterations of 10.x, I've only seen two panics. Panics on Linux have been rarer than hens teeth. The only time I've seen that crash at all was when I've been screwing around with the kernel source and forgotten to do important something such as mkinitrd or whatever.
Sorry, but that's a pretty unlikely exploit. To carry it out, someone has to be convinced to drag and drop an image onto an empty address bar. Have you seen many sites that do that? Have you seen many users who either understand or follow such instructions?
Once it does work, it works like a charm, but it took me a couple of hours to figure it to work with my setup. I started with a pre3.0 Debian root_fs I grabbed from the net. Once I got the networking going, I changed sources.list and upgraded to Debian 'sarge' dist. Now I have a lovely GNOME 2.8 desktop all running under XP at (my guess) 80-90% of native speed. I've sucessfully gotten both VNC and NX to run under it though performance through NX is more sluggish than I expected.
Okay so he runs a large company with UK offices, but so what? Microsoft has offices in every large country. So what has Bill Gates done specifically for the benefit of the UK?
The state telco has a monopoly and sees VoIP as a threat to its massively expensive and arcane service. Solution? Criminalize VoIP under the feeble pretense that you're fighting a war against drugs or somesuch.
Why are they even complaining? They almost certainly get as much money from legitimate online sales as they would from CDs, especially since the cost of distribution is passed onto the likes of Apple, Napster et al.
The simple fact is that if a company buys a widget wholesale for less than $4, the distribution, shipping and infrastructure to support all of that would perhaps double or triple the cost. So it might cost $12 at most. The rest is profit.
Hence the reason that the US market is besieged by products made in China, India, Guatemala, Honduras etc. - to maximize profits. It's not that a US factory couldn't sell stuff at retail at the same or close to the same, it just that the margins are so much wider. While it might be good for multinationals, it certainly isn't good for the economy.
The mini surely did suck though and totally put me off the idea of "upgrading" even though it was higher clocked. I think I'll wait a year or two until they get around to making one which has some decent specs out of the box such as G5, more memory.
As for Gentoo, unfortunately I'm talking about an XP box. While it would be nice if my main machine were Linux, it isn't practical for the work I do.
Why? Because people are suckers.
Not all the threads are asleep when I'm building something, running a virus checker, burning a DVD / CD, listening to music, watching a video or playing a game. Which is the times when you need a dual CPU. The rest of the time it doesn't matter that much, unless of course you're running something like SETI which I am as well.
For example, I build lots of source code. Things like Mozilla take 30 minutes or more to build. On my current system drags down other tasks such and the whole system is stilted and slow. With a dual CPU, one of processors can be doing the the intensive task while the other keeps the desktop running. Or I could possibly throw a -j4 onto GNU make and benefit from builds in a fraction of the time.
Or if I'm playing a game that plays background music, it might spawn a thread to play it. It might spawn another thread to be loading scenery as I walk through a level. A dual CPU means that those tasks can be offloaded leaving the other dedicated to handling the gameplay. The net result is less jumps, freezing and stutters and a better framerate.
Or I can be compressing / burning a DVD while getting on with something else without fear of having a buffer underflow on the recorder.
While my PC is a single CPU, I also own a Mac G4 500Mhz dual CPU system. It's not the fastest thing in the world, but what impresses me is that I can be building something on it (e.g. Mozilla) and the desktop is still responsive and fast. That's what a dual CPU gets you. I recently tried a Mac mini (clocked at 1.25Gz) and the different in performance was very noticeable - if I launched a video or something, and ran the mouse over the dock the desktop would start getting all jerky as it tried to service both tasks. My venerable G4 has a slower clockspeed than a Mac mini, but I've never seen anything like that before.
And how many apps & other processes is your system running at the moment? Mine's running 58 with 518 threads.
Thanks. I've used regular tape before but electrical tape does sound more likely to be leakproof.
And even when I do use a replacement ink cartridge, there are plenty of 3rd party cartridges available for 5 euro or so.
I know for certain that if I ever replace that inkjet it will only be for another one which is equally easy to refill. There is no way in hell I would buy anything that tried to force me to use "official" cartridges via chips or any other means.
It's a little more work to get going than WinRAR but it's not a great effort, especially if you've using Linux or some other *nix before.
Bzip2 + tar gets as good compression as RAR and has the added benefit of being almost ubiquitous, as well as having decent open source tools for compression and extraction on virtually every platform. Multi-volume is simply a matter of calling split before storing it.
Having had experience of both Palm & PocketPC, I'd say that the Palm still has much better PIM software but the hardware is lacking. The PocketPC software is far too tap happy and dialog filled - entering an appointment takes many more taps compared to the Palm. And PocketPCs are very crash-prone and and often need a soft-reset.
Still, popular PocketPC devices such as my iPaq have great support for bluetooth & wifi out of the box. The latest Palms have gorgeous screens but they suck at the wireless. Its just great to be able to fire up Skype or a browser on my iPaq from a hotel room.
I don't even know if Skype is out on the Palm, but if I wanted wifi I'd have to slap a huge dongle into SD slot to do it.
So my recipe for Palm would be to keep the apps as simple to use as they are now, but fix the bloody hardware, especially the wireless support. The burgeoning use of multimedia should also see better support for playing music and video content. Certainly, the OS should be more up to date to support this, but it's more of an enabler than something most people care about.
Personally I'd love to run Linux on a PDA but that's because I'm a geek. I did have a look at the Zaurus, but the high price, non-existent support and sucky apps hardly made a compelling case. I'll just have to wait for some brave soul on handhelds.org to port the kernel to my iPaq.
There, it's more vibrant.
To be honest, Fedora is a very good dist, but the lack of multimedia and the consequent messing around to get it, hangs like a millstone around the project. I'm sure RH could have a post-install step tied to some kind of OS X download site + click and run which would make it easy to install additional packages.
If you're too fucking lazy to administer a box for yourself, or see what a patch fixes or consider any of the other implications of installing it, then yes you can make Linux patch itself automatically. A one line cron job will work in most places.
That's what I'm saying. I've seen my own stocks take a 10% dump in one day, for no reason at all, except that some institutions were hedging this one company against another.