Well that depends. I guess if you have some outdated Mac hardware lying around, you have a choice - ditch it all or upgrade it somehow. If upgrading turns out to be feasible via cards or a new box, why not do it? And if the cheapest way happens to be some clone kit, it sounds a reasonable option assuming it has the proprietary ports such as the monitor connection and works out of the box with OS X.
Now obviously if it's approaching the cost of a real mac, it isn't worth it, but if it were 2/3 the price, I'd take the hit in terms of looks and styling for the saving. It's not like I parade my G4 around - it sits under the desk for it's life. I couldn't care any less if there were some generic pizza / tower case there instead.
Other memory formats like compact flash, SD have had hard drives, 802.11b, Bluetooth, GPS, cameras etc. for a long while now. Not to mention PCMCIA cards which offer everything imaginable. I'm not sure I see what the big deal is here.
Admittedly a TV tuner would be cute, but if the price came anywhere near the cost of buying a proper pocket TV (e.g. $80), it would seem to me prohibitve and rather pointless.
Re:X (and other Window systems) reduce productivit
on
Who Needs XFree86?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well that's you. On the other hand, someone staring at an entirely non-intuitive command prompt for the first time for hours when all they "want to do is play a bloody game and why did they install this piece of shit OS in the first place", might disagree with you. As would anyone wishing to browse the web or anything else inherently graphical.
Personally I'm comfortable in both, but if it's a choice between arsing aroung for hours trying to set up a network, reading the nitpicky details of some config file and switches, or just using the Redhat GUI tool to do it, I know which one I would pick.
Technology advances in leaps and bounds. A wristwatch with a battery life that measures in days and allows people can look like complete fools by holding it up to their ears and talking to it.
Re:This will kill X in the long term.
on
DRI Comes to DirectFB
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Some people need X11 and some don't. If local desktop performance and modern windowing behaviour can be achieved by completely bypassing XFree86 and its associated window manager and other processes then it should be done. After all, GTK & QT are abstractions over X11, so most apps really shouldn't care whether they're running on X11 anyway - they just link to the widget lib and let it decide how to do things. Now not every app is clean this way but a good many must be. As the app starts it would straightforward enough to dynamically link to the appropriate version of QT / GTK.
If the net result of a native fb GTK lib is that someone can run all their apps locally with better performance and less screwing around in different places configuring mice, resolution etc., and better support for their hardware and better support for games and multimedia, it means Linux is better suited for the desktop. It doesn't preclude using X11, or even running X11 in rootless mode (as it does on OS X) if people want to but it sounds like a great project to support.
And in some ways it helps Xfree86 since a single direct DRI driver can support a whole range of display hardware without XFree86 having to maintain them themselves.
I have a Canon S750 - it works great. Not the best photo quality images ever being a 4 colour printer as it is, but I cannot fault it on its speed, the drivers or the ink cartridges. In fact it prints great and is good enough to replace my old laser printer for the small amount of threading that inkjets have with paper.
For starters, it has seperate and large cartridges for each colour - cyan, magenta, yellow & black - so when one goes I can replace it and keep the others. Also, there is a thriving market in third-party refill cartridges, selling from five euros and I can even use a refill kit if I want.
It even works with Linux & OS X:)
All in all, I was happy to pay the extra upfront. I would never, ever buy a printer that tries to rip me off by locking me into buying their crappy, small and non-reusable cartridges. If anyone asks me for advice on a printer, it would be one of the first things I would warn them about.
a) What does this new cartoon have to do with American Greetings except for the caption on the desk? b) What does the original "American McGee's" cartoon have to do with them either?
I'm not being dumb here, it is just completely unobvious to an international reader what the issue is.
They have something called AOL Communicator which could do the job. It's a standalone mail client, much like OE or Moz mail which contains bayesian spam filtering capabilities, filters, folders and more.
Gosh, how brave, an anonymous coward. Yeah, you're right. I should take the hint from Apple and pricks like you and stay silent. OS X development is so perfect, how could I possibly quibble?
And those docs are on the dev tools cd as well and they still stink. In MS DevStudio, you can view 700Mb of help by index, by topic, hierarchically, search by keywords in seconds, context sensitive help and more. P
In OS X you get a link to the top page and the fun of hunting fruitlessly for what you're trying to do. The search function is so painfully slow (minutes) it may as well not exist. At least you can bookmark pages but it's still completely inadequate. Some functions such as the Posix / Darwin layer don't even appear in the same help system and appear as man pages. How crap is that?
Re:Right tool for the job
on
Linus on DRM
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· Score: 1
Yes gcc was used and I'm sure the Linux people salute them for it. One from BSD or elsewhere would have been borrowed. That is pragmatism at work. But even so, the parts surround Linux these days are not just GPL software, which is another reason why Linux is useful and HURD isn't. Or has HURD sacrificed some of its GPL purity by using XFree86, or Mozilla, or Apache, or Python, or Perl or any number of other things which comprise a modern and useful Linux OS?
And no, micro vs monolithic makes no damned difference to development. The Tannenbaum debate is interesting, but the straight fact is that a kernel can be designed either way and they have been. A microkernel might impact performance but its extra modularity might give it the edge to approach stability first. As I said QNX went through major iterations of its microkernel in the same space of time - first a strange proprietary version 2.x (that I programmed all the way back in 1992), then a rewritten Posix compliant 4.x and now practically a complete Unix clone, but built around an extremely robust and fast microkernel and even capable of running across a distributed network.
As I said technical issues play no part in it. It boils down to one kernel attracting a lot of developers because it was fun and the other not because it isn't.
Thanks but I program Objective C and Cocoa so I know exactly what I'm talking about. The documentation stinks, the help system stinks, the dev tools stink. Where is the context sensitive help that the likes of MS DevStudio has had for years. Where is the debugger than can handle (horrors!) multiple threads properly? Where is the stable Interface Builder that doesn't arbitrarily crash?
As I said, I think OpenStep / Cocoa is elegant but it is done no favours by the crappy tools or the crappy documentation.
Re:Right tool for the job
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Why don't you try thinking first.
It has nothing to do with microkernel at all. The BSD kernel is based off Mach too yet BSD is miles ahead of HURD too and has been for years. QNX has a microkernel and has gone through at least 3 major iterations in the same period of time. A Mach base kernel (though not micro) even provides the underpinnings of the OS X I'm typing this reply on. And if the microkernel route was so awful as you suggest, then chunks of it could have always been folded into the kernel.
So there is no techical reason (or excuse rather) for HURD to be the way it is. One can only surmise that the reason it is wallowing is because it didn't attract the developers. Why didn't it attract the developers? Because on the one hand you had a Linux that became rapidly usable in a short period of time, attracted a lot of people because it sort of *worked* and could be fixed up, made to run on other processors and son. On the other hand you had some utopian house of cards that even ten years later still only runs on x86 and has a neglible following.
As for your 'even not for Linus' comment, perhaps BSD might be around but even so RMS would have still lost, since BSD doesn't even buy into the GPL vision, not even a bit.
I don't deny that the likes of gcc are great tools, but there would not be nearly 1/100th the amount of interest in them, let alone dozens of paid full time developers if not for Linux.
Re:Right tool for the job
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 1
Linux is storming the world from PDAs to mainframes, while HURD is nowhere to be seen, wallowing in obscurity.
Why? They are both GPL and they both started around the same time (HURD before Linux even). The reason is that one is driven by pragmatism - to get something that works and improve on it - and the other by politics and idealism. It is no wonder that Linux won (and HURD stands little chance of being anything but an oddity) with that stuck in the mud attitude. Open source developers write code for the buzz of writing a tool that does the job now, not to get in some protracted anal retentive vision of the world twenty years hence.
Frankly, it's a damned good job that Linus turned up because open source would be as dead as a doornail by now. Linux single handedly expanded open source from being a beardy sideshow into the commercial mainstream with thousands if not tens of thousands times more developers involved. Some of them even write open source for their living (like me), something inconceivable just ten years ago.
While OpenStep lovers might go on about the elegance of the system (and it is elegant), it is certainly not intuitive nor particularly easy to program, especially if you're a conventional programmer used to event based APIs rather than a wacky Objective C message model.
Perhaps with decent help it would be easier, but Apple's Cocoa documentation stinks and the help system seems about on par with the IBM Redbook system I used to program OS/2 ten years ago. In other words it stinks. In the end I bought a book, to learn it; something I've rarely had to do with any programming system.
I think Cocoa programmers must be masochists, or perhaps Apple are sadists.
So I won't address that here, except to say that on a decent (read: expensive) stereo system, I can distinguish between subtle nuances of source materials.
I don't doubt you, but some people swear they can tell the difference between a normal CD and one that has been stuck in the freezer for a few hours even when there is absolutely no difference at all in the output. The point is that if your mind expects there to be a difference you may very well end up hearing (or thinking you hear) a difference.
Now obviously MP3s are different from CDs and compared side by side there may be subtle differences that you pick up on. But if they're not compared side by side and considering that even CDs are themselves are digitally sampled and thus just approximations to the actual recording, I doubt it makes much of a difference to your listening experience.
Well the Palm Tungsten A has bluetooth so take your pick. No doubt Palm will be selling expansions that provide the missing functionality if you absolutely have to have both.
Of the two I would guess that 802.11b is much more useful for places like restaurants / shops etc. that might use wireless for stock control or whatever. Bluetooth is neat but how many people have other devices to sync up with? Personally I'd just prefer 802.11b.
Maybe Palm has the same problems that the Mac and Amiga had for a while when there was 24 bit addressing - dumb programmers using the unused bits in address registers to store other flags.
Unfortunately this doesn't make much sense. The GBA is completely unsuitable as a PDA. There are no ifs or buts about it - the thing is good for games and nothing else.
How much would a PDA cartridge cost? Best case - at least as much a game, perhaps more and for that you get some crappy organiser with a piss poor rocker pad entry system. GBAs are 'always on' or 'always off' so forget any fancy stuff like reminders.
For the same price you can get any number of better PDAs from Casio, Oregon Scientific, Franklin etc. and you're fast approaching the Palm Zire price range. In other words, such a venture is pointless.
The same could be said of most other GBA extensions. I have to wonder who the hell buys an MP3 player for it, or a Java player, or a Camera when it does none of those things well and in many instances you can pick up a better, dedicated device for the same amount of money.
Speed isn't everything. Java implementations these days are pretty fast, certainly fast enough for straightforward word processing etc. What matters is producing something that isn't restricted to a particular platform or a particular server.
And.NET is most certainly restrictive - it's Windows only! And not just on the client side, but the server too, where presumably a lot of the back end work in this IBM office of versioning, collaborative, security, authentication, storage etc. would be happening. J2EE allows for that quite easily (a fantastically rich set of classes) and as a licensee of the source and other bits, IBM could tune the thing to run well on the hardware.
Now maybe Mono could open up the CLR a bit but I suspect a lot of people consider the project still work in development as well as having the Sword of Damocles hanging over it in the form of MS lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
Now obviously if it's approaching the cost of a real mac, it isn't worth it, but if it were 2/3 the price, I'd take the hit in terms of looks and styling for the saving. It's not like I parade my G4 around - it sits under the desk for it's life. I couldn't care any less if there were some generic pizza / tower case there instead.
What do you say on your insurance form when your cardboard encased, overclocked, gasoline cooled PC burns your house down?
Admittedly a TV tuner would be cute, but if the price came anywhere near the cost of buying a proper pocket TV (e.g. $80), it would seem to me prohibitve and rather pointless.
Personally I'm comfortable in both, but if it's a choice between arsing aroung for hours trying to set up a network, reading the nitpicky details of some config file and switches, or just using the Redhat GUI tool to do it, I know which one I would pick.
Can someone please post up a copy of "Altair BASIC in a Nutshell" please?
Technology advances in leaps and bounds. A wristwatch with a battery life that measures in days and allows people can look like complete fools by holding it up to their ears and talking to it.
If the net result of a native fb GTK lib is that someone can run all their apps locally with better performance and less screwing around in different places configuring mice, resolution etc., and better support for their hardware and better support for games and multimedia, it means Linux is better suited for the desktop. It doesn't preclude using X11, or even running X11 in rootless mode (as it does on OS X) if people want to but it sounds like a great project to support.
And in some ways it helps Xfree86 since a single direct DRI driver can support a whole range of display hardware without XFree86 having to maintain them themselves.
For starters, it has seperate and large cartridges for each colour - cyan, magenta, yellow & black - so when one goes I can replace it and keep the others. Also, there is a thriving market in third-party refill cartridges, selling from five euros and I can even use a refill kit if I want.
It even works with Linux & OS X
All in all, I was happy to pay the extra upfront. I would never, ever buy a printer that tries to rip me off by locking me into buying their crappy, small and non-reusable cartridges. If anyone asks me for advice on a printer, it would be one of the first things I would warn them about.
I'm not being dumb here, it is just completely unobvious to an international reader what the issue is.
They have something called AOL Communicator which could do the job. It's a standalone mail client, much like OE or Moz mail which contains bayesian spam filtering capabilities, filters, folders and more.
Gosh, how brave, an anonymous coward. Yeah, you're right. I should take the hint from Apple and pricks like you and stay silent. OS X development is so perfect, how could I possibly quibble?
In OS X you get a link to the top page and the fun of hunting fruitlessly for what you're trying to do. The search function is so painfully slow (minutes) it may as well not exist. At least you can bookmark pages but it's still completely inadequate. Some functions such as the Posix / Darwin layer don't even appear in the same help system and appear as man pages. How crap is that?
And no, micro vs monolithic makes no damned difference to development. The Tannenbaum debate is interesting, but the straight fact is that a kernel can be designed either way and they have been. A microkernel might impact performance but its extra modularity might give it the edge to approach stability first. As I said QNX went through major iterations of its microkernel in the same space of time - first a strange proprietary version 2.x (that I programmed all the way back in 1992), then a rewritten Posix compliant 4.x and now practically a complete Unix clone, but built around an extremely robust and fast microkernel and even capable of running across a distributed network.
As I said technical issues play no part in it. It boils down to one kernel attracting a lot of developers because it was fun and the other not because it isn't.
As I said, I think OpenStep / Cocoa is elegant but it is done no favours by the crappy tools or the crappy documentation.
It has nothing to do with microkernel at all. The BSD kernel is based off Mach too yet BSD is miles ahead of HURD too and has been for years. QNX has a microkernel and has gone through at least 3 major iterations in the same period of time. A Mach base kernel (though not micro) even provides the underpinnings of the OS X I'm typing this reply on. And if the microkernel route was so awful as you suggest, then chunks of it could have always been folded into the kernel.
So there is no techical reason (or excuse rather) for HURD to be the way it is. One can only surmise that the reason it is wallowing is because it didn't attract the developers. Why didn't it attract the developers? Because on the one hand you had a Linux that became rapidly usable in a short period of time, attracted a lot of people because it sort of *worked* and could be fixed up, made to run on other processors and son. On the other hand you had some utopian house of cards that even ten years later still only runs on x86 and has a neglible following.
As for your 'even not for Linus' comment, perhaps BSD might be around but even so RMS would have still lost, since BSD doesn't even buy into the GPL vision, not even a bit.
I don't deny that the likes of gcc are great tools, but there would not be nearly 1/100th the amount of interest in them, let alone dozens of paid full time developers if not for Linux.
Why? They are both GPL and they both started around the same time (HURD before Linux even). The reason is that one is driven by pragmatism - to get something that works and improve on it - and the other by politics and idealism. It is no wonder that Linux won (and HURD stands little chance of being anything but an oddity) with that stuck in the mud attitude. Open source developers write code for the buzz of writing a tool that does the job now, not to get in some protracted anal retentive vision of the world twenty years hence.
Frankly, it's a damned good job that Linus turned up because open source would be as dead as a doornail by now. Linux single handedly expanded open source from being a beardy sideshow into the commercial mainstream with thousands if not tens of thousands times more developers involved. Some of them even write open source for their living (like me), something inconceivable just ten years ago.
Perhaps with decent help it would be easier, but Apple's Cocoa documentation stinks and the help system seems about on par with the IBM Redbook system I used to program OS/2 ten years ago. In other words it stinks. In the end I bought a book, to learn it; something I've rarely had to do with any programming system.
I think Cocoa programmers must be masochists, or perhaps Apple are sadists.
I don't doubt you, but some people swear they can tell the difference between a normal CD and one that has been stuck in the freezer for a few hours even when there is absolutely no difference at all in the output. The point is that if your mind expects there to be a difference you may very well end up hearing (or thinking you hear) a difference.
Now obviously MP3s are different from CDs and compared side by side there may be subtle differences that you pick up on. But if they're not compared side by side and considering that even CDs are themselves are digitally sampled and thus just approximations to the actual recording, I doubt it makes much of a difference to your listening experience.
Perhaps it's time to introduce Sharia law. Spamming is theft of service so cut the bastard's hands off. That might act as a suitable deterrent.
Of the two I would guess that 802.11b is much more useful for places like restaurants / shops etc. that might use wireless for stock control or whatever. Bluetooth is neat but how many people have other devices to sync up with? Personally I'd just prefer 802.11b.
LOL, I solved my own problem. Cygwin's "tar jxf" command helpfully extracted the files without giving me permission to read them afterwards :)
They don't for me. I double click on any .ttf file and XP complains "The requested file was not a valid font file.".
Maybe Palm has the same problems that the Mac and Amiga had for a while when there was 24 bit addressing - dumb programmers using the unused bits in address registers to store other flags.
How much would a PDA cartridge cost? Best case - at least as much a game, perhaps more and for that you get some crappy organiser with a piss poor rocker pad entry system. GBAs are 'always on' or 'always off' so forget any fancy stuff like reminders.
For the same price you can get any number of better PDAs from Casio, Oregon Scientific, Franklin etc. and you're fast approaching the Palm Zire price range. In other words, such a venture is pointless.
The same could be said of most other GBA extensions. I have to wonder who the hell buys an MP3 player for it, or a Java player, or a Camera when it does none of those things well and in many instances you can pick up a better, dedicated device for the same amount of money.
And
Now maybe Mono could open up the CLR a bit but I suspect a lot of people consider the project still work in development as well as having the Sword of Damocles hanging over it in the form of MS lawsuits.