Electric cars don't emit any fumes, computers with their hard drives don't cut down forests to store their data. Wow these technologies are fantabulous, they don't pollute at all. Oh, wait we forgot something. Production and generation. To produce said computers with their computer chips you need some form of energy, that is most likely got from some form of fossil fuels. The electric car of the future is being produced in a factory belching out all sorts of smoke and chemicals. All the metals using in the production of said eletric car are also being smelted and forged in very dirty factories (although the metal production now is a hundred times cleaner than it ever used to be to which I give mad props). Both the computer and electric car are being electrified mostly by fossil fuels which in case you missed the lecture earlier this decade, are running out. An electric car spits out more pollutants per mile than my car does since its power is coming from coal and oil power stations. The pollution is entirely besides the enormous strain we're going to be putting on the eletrical grid in the next fifteen years. There are plenty of things that could be done to better manage our power requirements. Take Southern California for instance. There are oodles of noodles of new houses being built out in the desert yet they are hooking themselves up to the same overtaxed power that LA has a hard enough time with, especially in the summertime when all the air conditioners go on in the south western part of the country. I think it'd be a good idea to stick some solar panels on all these new houses, maybe at a discount since the panels are bought and installed in bulk when the houses are built (hey there is even a company that builds microinverters for home solar panels which converts it from DC to AC in unit so every panel ends up spitting out AC instead of DC). This would at least relieve some stress during the most taxing parts of the year. Thats just residential housing. Would it really hurt companies so much to stick solar panels on the roofs of their warehouses. Solar panels also don't need to be the ultra bulky rotating panels we usually think of. Nowadays you can whip out some photovoltaic film that yould be embedded in windows on office buildings and such. We'd have alot more free power all about if cities produced a little bit of power rather than just mooching it. Thats idealistic, I know.
How did this story even get posted? Every other time a company has offered their source under a non GPL license all you get is endless bitching from all the weenies crying for the GPL. There is an open license which doesn't have to be free, we call it the BSD license and whenever you mention it the blood of the GPL weenies boils. They cry for 100% open code and they want the specs to everything. Redhat will never be a Fortune 500 company by giving their product away for free and selling support for it.
Most of these free apps you speak of are in beta for years and once they do hit a stable release hardly ever have the same capabilities as their commercial counterparts. Of course there are plenty of excellent open source projects but then there are alot of Asteroids and Tetris clones. Linux needs an enormous amont of work before it is ready for the real desktop market. The apps needs a unified config file structure and preferably a wizard-type setup program for said programs. Linux is still designed for geeks and developers, Windows and MacOS are designed for the average user.
Uh...how exactly do the apps have the OS in them? If you mean API then you WANT API code in your apps. I'd much rather have real tight integration with the kernel than complete abstraction.
Do you even know who Jim Clark is? He's put so much jizz into the computer industry since 1980 it isn't even funny. His companies have really kicked ass in their prime but after he left and their management fell to other less competant people they floundered. He makes a good point in saying that IE currently is part of the desktop of Windows and trying to change that is stupid. Why should Microsoft be forced to use a competing product in their product? Should I bitch about KDE because it treats all files as MIME types like IE does? Yeah I didn't think so.
What I don't think people see with the Microsoft breakup is that Microsoft is not getting any less powerful, they're just being hacked at like a Hydra. Microsoft the application company will still be able to leverage everyone by threatening to not offer discounts to OEMs if the OEM doesn't go with an all M$ solution. Microsoft the OS company is also going to remain a huge player in the business. Do you think suddenly millions of people are going to go out and buy a copy of Redhat because Microsoft was found to be a monopoly? Fuck no. More people trust Microsoft than they trust the government. Windows was installed on many of the millions of computers sold in the last couple of years and will continue to be sold on the computers. Windows ME is going to be even more popular than 98 because it will further abstract the user from the hardware which is what people want. Businesses don't want people fiddling with their hardware, they want the system to turn on and work with little or not user intervention. Home users want to turn their computer on and get on the internet or edit videos or email their friends or play their games. The closest thing to a simplified setup on Linux is GNOME's Helixcode installer. Apple is going to benefit from the M$ breakup simply because they have a REALLY abstracted OS that has the eyecandy people love. Apple is probably the only Unix based solution that is ever really going to give MS a run for its money, especially if OS X is going to end up available on PC hardware. Linux and is the choice of a bunch of geeks who capitalize the phrase open source. Linux is a fractured OS with too many comflicting and incompatible distrobutions where OS X is a unified model that developers can get behind with some confidence. The author of the little scenario seems like he's thinking Microsoft will suddenly become a minor player in the market once they're broken up. This is definitely not going to happen. I remember a speech by Bill Gates saying how Microsoft wanted a PC in every living room, this is something thats definitely happening. I don't see Microsoft being any less of player in the future than they are now.
The writer is incompetant? I think you've got it backwards. Have you ever seen an app for BeOS in a store? Or Linux for that matter. Neither Be or Linux is viable because they do not have commercial development 100% behind them as Mac and Windows do. I think you just wanted to post something to make yourself feel cool.
We're seeing arguments over television, one of the horsemen of the technological apocalypse. Interactive television is a misnomer, you're not interacting with Buffy the vampire slayer of Carson Daily. You're merely getting to choose at which camaera angle you view them or look at their bio on the side of the screen. It reminds me so much of Fahrenheit 451 where his wife thought she was interacting with the people on the television because they paused while she read her lines. Thats actually exactly that people are asking for. Its funny because we stare at the glowing picture on the television like pre-historic man sat and stared at his fire. Its amazing to think how far we haven't come since them. Theres an alternative (a rather cheap one) to the DTV troubles. Before virtual reality was really feasible we used this thing called real reality. Instead of needing fancy goggles and a body suit all you need is some shorts and tank top. Theres tons of applications for real reality too. Some of my favourites include the beach and driving. Quake is fun and all but nothing beats running around playing paintball until you're too tired to drive home. Oh well, some people like sitting on their couch enough to put an ass print in it.
Vision and cognitive disorders? Aren't these the same people who can't watch TV because of this? Should I put fucking Braille on my keyboard just in case a blind person comes over to my house and decides he wants to type up an email? You ENTIRELY missed the guy's point with Java. They want to use Java as the actual compiled code that handles processing of such things as text and video. There is no need to translate the display code into different languages. The text the display code would be handling could be in any damn language people wanted. It'd be awfly easy to have one large XML file with text in several languages and it merely picks out the tag that says English or Spanish. HTML would be a pretty fucking stupid markup language to use because it tells the rendering program how to view the data. Contextual info needs to be just raw data that a parsing program can figure out how to display according to a set number of preferences. I shouldn't have to worry about HTML formatting on my television.
Do you realize how much bandwidth that would require? Even with a highly compressed video stream you still need several Mbps, and since you're not special that means everyone needs a pipe that size. No nationwide network can provide that amount of data yet. The quip about booting to Windows it also pretty stupid, the point of open source is that if you don't like something you fucking write your own. Show some initiative man, complaining gets nothing done.
The problem I see with Windows running on such a chip is the native emulation Windows does. Every app is opened in a virtual machine. These VMs are most stable running 32 bit apps but since Windows has to remain compatible with 16 and 8 bit apps you get a bit of a problem. Windows has a bit of hard coding for x86 instructions which I imagine would need to be specifically handled by the Crusoe's emulation.
Not particularly, at least not interesting to me. Theres plenty of places water is liquid and it being liquid on an asteroid (and free floating) is interesting to me only because it would be interesting to study the dynamics of its flow in a low gravity zero atmosphere environment. Personally I'd be more interested in the study of the ice in craters on the moon and in the ice caps of Mars. Those two places being the source of facination and possible colonization sometime in the future.
Aren't you a little small to be a Stormtrooper?
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Crusoe WebPads By FIC
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These webpads would be a rad idea if they were cheaper and larger. Does anyone remember the webpad deceloped by Cyrix a year or so ago? That sucker was pretty nice sized and did most if not all the things this little bitch does. The main difference was running a MediaGX chip rather than a Crusoe. Personally I think the MediaGX idea was better becayse it incorporated the media processing on the chip so you needed less internal components for decent performance. These webpads are also teeny tiny with a 7.4 inch screen. How am I supposed to sit around looking at news and porn on such a screen? The smallest screen I want is 9 inches with about 800x600 resolution. The WebPlayer by Virgin has the right idea for a web console. You buy it on a lease-to-own basis (50$ per year) and get internet service bindled with it. It isn't portable but something similar could be made portable. I want a webpad for checking out websites from the couch so I can use my DSL with an RF networking card rather than WebTV or something along those lines. I think this was posted due to the trend factor of it having a Crusoe processor. I really hope we start seeing some decent Crusoe based designs rather than underpowered overpriced Palm VII's.
Hmmm it seems to me that the chips are desigtned to emulate a particular chipset architecture. Since both Linux and Windows are probably going to be x86 how can you optimize the chip more for one than the other?
timothy needs to head back to chemistry class. Water is by no means rare in the universe. If you're the astronomer type and look in the right stellar structures you can see interstellar water floating about. Take a quick flight through the Kuiper belt or around most comets and you'll see a bunch of water there too. Humans have been looking up and seeing extra terrestrial water for years.
happening here is Microsoft being punished in the wrong way. What Microsoft did was tell OEMs that they were going to up their licensing fees if they tried bundling anything other than MS Windows on their systems. This is leveraging the competition. It tells IBM and their like that they best not develop their own operating system because M$ will up the ante on licensing. This they ought to be cited and punished for because this is abuse of their psotion in the market. What IS happening is they are being punished for practicing capitalism and putting Netscape et al into a small sack which they tossed in a closet. My problem with the complaints against M$ is that M$ wrote the operating system and is under no obligation to let other people write software for it. The government hasn't busted down on Ford for not letting GM build car parts for them. Why should Borland and Netscape get special treatment? Here's a scenario. I want to start a company making a compiler for Solaris because I love the SPARC architecture and really enjoy using Solaris. My compiler and programming toolkit gets really popular and Sun changes around the internal mechanics of Solaris a little bit so my toolkit no longer works and then they use some hidden API code which their programmers conceived which allows apps compiled with their toolkit to run 3% faster than mine. Do I get to whine to the government that Sun changed the internals of their OS and made my toolkit less effective than theirs? Sun is evil! They have a monopoly on the operating system they wrote! All of the software produced by Microsoft is owned by Microsoft, they merely sell licenses for people like my parents or your parents to use that software. A similar license is given to development houses that build software to run on said operating system. The laws that defend the GPL also defend Microsoft's code. Microsoft has done plenty of unprofessional things in their history but you'd be hard pressed to find a company who hasn't. Breaking M$ up as punishment is a very bad idea because it is only going to harm the people who don't know better. Microsoft the application company can easily use the same leverage tactics that Microsoft the monolith can use. They'll offer MS Office and Works to OEMs at a discount but if the OEM wants to offer Wordperfect Office or Lotus MS the application company will just raise licensing fees causing the OEM to no longer offer the MS Office products. Since many people depend on Office file formats due to excessive saturation in the business and home market already and because people feel more familar with it, people will be lining up to buy Lite copies of Office directly from Microsoft. Either way they are getting the dollar from the consumers. The lack of threat not to offer Windows on manufactured PCs will not stop OEMs from bundling it as a matter of course. No other OS save Mac OS is mature enough to compete directly with Windows. If Linux matures in the next two years into a very usable OS OEMs would have migrated to it anyways and left Windows behind. Right now at this instant there is no real competition for Windows on business and home PCs. Whine all you want about the reasons for this but the fact remains that Windows will be dominating the desktop for a few more years. Apple is going to be doing alot more business and Redhat might see some good profit in the near future but for the most part things will stay the same. By the time Windows has less than a 50% market share in userspace the PC of today most likely won't exist. Stuff like WebTV and iOpener will be sitting on people's desks and take up space in their living rooms. Breaking up Microsoft is NOT going to cause some sort of glorious revolution. It is going to be alot more of the same. It's all a bunch of electronic pulses anyways, who the fuck cares.
You are very mistaken on your supposed counterpoints. IDE is inferior to SCSI and FW in many ways, most specifically that it only allows one channel to speak at any one time. This means if I have my CD-ROm and hard drive on the same IDE cable they have to use burst transfer to a DMA buffer to transfer data back and forth. This is horribly inefficient especially in lowend workstations who may only be using one IDE channel at any given time. SCSI and FW (FW is actually based on SCSI and is merely a serial implimentation of it) devices can all talk at the same time which actually allows you to maximize your bandwidth. SCSI is artificially expensive, the price of the chips in a SCSI drive are about the same as those in an IDE drive, manufacturers just set higher margins because of a lack of demand. If tomorrow everyone bought a SCSI drive next week the price would drop very quickly. Sticking with a standard because it's already in use is sort of ironic isn't it. People say move to Linux/Mac/Be because you don't need to follow convention yet insist that we ought to be using severely outdated technology in our computers. Strange. Do you know the real difference between a SCSI and ATA hard drive? The pin arrangement and controller chip. Don't bother responding unless you really have a wonderful insight.
Software rendering has always been a questionable benchmark between operating systems. One OS might allow more or less resources per process than another and some code simple runs better on one kernel than another. Windows actually has more layers of abstraction than a Unix with X on top of it. Windows runs all processes in a virtual machine whose overhead in some cases makes the app run really sluggishly. In Linux using X you've got the app running in a memory space talking to both the kernel and X directly with no virtual abstraction. This is just one possibility why X is faster or slower. X is a behemoth in many aspects compared to Windows or Be which combine the windowing system with the desktop and window manager. XFree 4.x looks like its making major headway in that department though, a rework of the process management and rasterizer looks like its helping a good deal.
Nethack is NOT Final Fantasy 7 or Resident Evil. I wasn't being a troll, I was being realistic and a reluctant capitalist. Money drives the world, the moral highground doesn't have nearly the same property value as the capitalistic pig slop around it.
Yeah the problem here is money, maybe you've heard of it? Ever wonder why some open source projects are classified as 501 organizations? They are meant to be donated to. They don't make much money if at all. Theres little research I can do on equipment that I already have. I don't need to discover the interesting eletrical conductivity properties of a circa 1985 Mac floppy disk controller. Software projects are nothing compared to hardware projects. Oh you found a new way to program an Asteroids clone, boy you rox0r. Research in algorithms is where the big money lies, and if you're capable of doing it well and doing it for free you should probably try a 12 step program.
Amazing, yet more wasted bandwidth on desktop systems. So tell me again why we are getting faster IDE speeds rather than moving to something like SCSI or IEEE 1394 (Firewire)? IDE blows if you're concerned with speed, 66 and 100mhz are fine if you're running several devices simultaneously but IDE doesn't do that does it? No. We'd be fine with PIO 4 since even 7200rpm hard drives can barely max out that bandwidth. Keeping IDE alive longer is pissing me off, why can't we move onto some more efficient standards? The Serial STS is an option, as is Firewire. Internal FW drives would be awesome, no more jumpers or SCSI IDs and alot less wiring inside my box. It'd be a nice thing to have removeable drives that could be both internal and external, say if I want to take my Orb drive or CD-R over to my friend's box to do some data transfering. Linux needs plenty of work in the Firewire area (which by the way has supported devices out RIGHT NOW). Imagine if VA or LinuxCOmputers could ship FW enabled systems, they would make as much headway as Apple has with them. I bet many companies would even write up Linux drivers for their equipment since it is a viable platform that more people are migrating to.
Why are you defending Ion Storm? They've been promising a game for four years and then release a POS that Eidos sucked up the cost of. This new drink coaster is putting Eidos out of money that could be better used to hire Lara Croft models with.
There has always been a number of subcultures living within any larger culture. In the past as well as in the present, not all of these subcultures make it into your high school history books though. Go to college and learn something.
I doubt we will EVER see a popular Open Source video game. Games may use open libraries and formats and such but we're not going to see an open game taking up space on pages of video game magazines or websites. Why? Most games start out as an engine and then someone is called in to write a story or something to use said engine. Engines will be all over the place because that is the work of programmers. The real meat of the game lies in the content creation. Would anyone play Quake 3 if there were no textures, just a bunch of surfaces and the occasional light? No. If Need for Speed was just boxes you steered around a track that you could add Object X, Y, and Z to would anyone have bought it? No. A good game most people can relate to is Diablo and Diablo 2. Both of these games were developed in studios which employ numerous graphic artists and sound dudes. These people can make a hundred thousand dollars on a contract with a real company or get their name of a "special thanks goes to:" mention on an open project. For those of you new to economics, the hundred thousand dollars is the payment that pays the rent. I see too many supposed Linux zealots calling for the source code to games. What good will it do the average Joe to have the source code for a game. I guess of course you could use it to build cheat-bots or make your own cheap knock-off version of the same game. I do have a suggestion for the XFree people in the matter of gaming. How about a windowing system that is non-networked but with many of the same function calls as the normal version of X so things don't have to be entirely rewritten. A speedy windoing system would go a really long way to making gaming on unix based system a viable prospect.
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Electric cars don't emit any fumes, computers with their hard drives don't cut down forests to store their data. Wow these technologies are fantabulous, they don't pollute at all. Oh, wait we forgot something. Production and generation. To produce said computers with their computer chips you need some form of energy, that is most likely got from some form of fossil fuels. The electric car of the future is being produced in a factory belching out all sorts of smoke and chemicals. All the metals using in the production of said eletric car are also being smelted and forged in very dirty factories (although the metal production now is a hundred times cleaner than it ever used to be to which I give mad props). Both the computer and electric car are being electrified mostly by fossil fuels which in case you missed the lecture earlier this decade, are running out. An electric car spits out more pollutants per mile than my car does since its power is coming from coal and oil power stations. The pollution is entirely besides the enormous strain we're going to be putting on the eletrical grid in the next fifteen years.
There are plenty of things that could be done to better manage our power requirements. Take Southern California for instance. There are oodles of noodles of new houses being built out in the desert yet they are hooking themselves up to the same overtaxed power that LA has a hard enough time with, especially in the summertime when all the air conditioners go on in the south western part of the country. I think it'd be a good idea to stick some solar panels on all these new houses, maybe at a discount since the panels are bought and installed in bulk when the houses are built (hey there is even a company that builds microinverters for home solar panels which converts it from DC to AC in unit so every panel ends up spitting out AC instead of DC). This would at least relieve some stress during the most taxing parts of the year. Thats just residential housing. Would it really hurt companies so much to stick solar panels on the roofs of their warehouses. Solar panels also don't need to be the ultra bulky rotating panels we usually think of. Nowadays you can whip out some photovoltaic film that yould be embedded in windows on office buildings and such. We'd have alot more free power all about if cities produced a little bit of power rather than just mooching it. Thats idealistic, I know.
How did this story even get posted? Every other time a company has offered their source under a non GPL license all you get is endless bitching from all the weenies crying for the GPL. There is an open license which doesn't have to be free, we call it the BSD license and whenever you mention it the blood of the GPL weenies boils. They cry for 100% open code and they want the specs to everything. Redhat will never be a Fortune 500 company by giving their product away for free and selling support for it.
Most of these free apps you speak of are in beta for years and once they do hit a stable release hardly ever have the same capabilities as their commercial counterparts. Of course there are plenty of excellent open source projects but then there are alot of Asteroids and Tetris clones. Linux needs an enormous amont of work before it is ready for the real desktop market. The apps needs a unified config file structure and preferably a wizard-type setup program for said programs. Linux is still designed for geeks and developers, Windows and MacOS are designed for the average user.
Uh...how exactly do the apps have the OS in them? If you mean API then you WANT API code in your apps. I'd much rather have real tight integration with the kernel than complete abstraction.
Do you even know who Jim Clark is? He's put so much jizz into the computer industry since 1980 it isn't even funny. His companies have really kicked ass in their prime but after he left and their management fell to other less competant people they floundered. He makes a good point in saying that IE currently is part of the desktop of Windows and trying to change that is stupid. Why should Microsoft be forced to use a competing product in their product? Should I bitch about KDE because it treats all files as MIME types like IE does? Yeah I didn't think so.
What I don't think people see with the Microsoft breakup is that Microsoft is not getting any less powerful, they're just being hacked at like a Hydra. Microsoft the application company will still be able to leverage everyone by threatening to not offer discounts to OEMs if the OEM doesn't go with an all M$ solution. Microsoft the OS company is also going to remain a huge player in the business. Do you think suddenly millions of people are going to go out and buy a copy of Redhat because Microsoft was found to be a monopoly? Fuck no. More people trust Microsoft than they trust the government. Windows was installed on many of the millions of computers sold in the last couple of years and will continue to be sold on the computers. Windows ME is going to be even more popular than 98 because it will further abstract the user from the hardware which is what people want. Businesses don't want people fiddling with their hardware, they want the system to turn on and work with little or not user intervention. Home users want to turn their computer on and get on the internet or edit videos or email their friends or play their games. The closest thing to a simplified setup on Linux is GNOME's Helixcode installer. Apple is going to benefit from the M$ breakup simply because they have a REALLY abstracted OS that has the eyecandy people love. Apple is probably the only Unix based solution that is ever really going to give MS a run for its money, especially if OS X is going to end up available on PC hardware. Linux and is the choice of a bunch of geeks who capitalize the phrase open source. Linux is a fractured OS with too many comflicting and incompatible distrobutions where OS X is a unified model that developers can get behind with some confidence. The author of the little scenario seems like he's thinking Microsoft will suddenly become a minor player in the market once they're broken up. This is definitely not going to happen. I remember a speech by Bill Gates saying how Microsoft wanted a PC in every living room, this is something thats definitely happening. I don't see Microsoft being any less of player in the future than they are now.
A sub-modern GUI and a not quite functional office suite? Yeah that's some competition.
The writer is incompetant? I think you've got it backwards. Have you ever seen an app for BeOS in a store? Or Linux for that matter. Neither Be or Linux is viable because they do not have commercial development 100% behind them as Mac and Windows do. I think you just wanted to post something to make yourself feel cool.
We're seeing arguments over television, one of the horsemen of the technological apocalypse. Interactive television is a misnomer, you're not interacting with Buffy the vampire slayer of Carson Daily. You're merely getting to choose at which camaera angle you view them or look at their bio on the side of the screen. It reminds me so much of Fahrenheit 451 where his wife thought she was interacting with the people on the television because they paused while she read her lines. Thats actually exactly that people are asking for. Its funny because we stare at the glowing picture on the television like pre-historic man sat and stared at his fire. Its amazing to think how far we haven't come since them. Theres an alternative (a rather cheap one) to the DTV troubles. Before virtual reality was really feasible we used this thing called real reality. Instead of needing fancy goggles and a body suit all you need is some shorts and tank top. Theres tons of applications for real reality too. Some of my favourites include the beach and driving. Quake is fun and all but nothing beats running around playing paintball until you're too tired to drive home. Oh well, some people like sitting on their couch enough to put an ass print in it.
Vision and cognitive disorders? Aren't these the same people who can't watch TV because of this? Should I put fucking Braille on my keyboard just in case a blind person comes over to my house and decides he wants to type up an email? You ENTIRELY missed the guy's point with Java. They want to use Java as the actual compiled code that handles processing of such things as text and video. There is no need to translate the display code into different languages. The text the display code would be handling could be in any damn language people wanted. It'd be awfly easy to have one large XML file with text in several languages and it merely picks out the tag that says English or Spanish. HTML would be a pretty fucking stupid markup language to use because it tells the rendering program how to view the data. Contextual info needs to be just raw data that a parsing program can figure out how to display according to a set number of preferences. I shouldn't have to worry about HTML formatting on my television.
Do you realize how much bandwidth that would require? Even with a highly compressed video stream you still need several Mbps, and since you're not special that means everyone needs a pipe that size. No nationwide network can provide that amount of data yet. The quip about booting to Windows it also pretty stupid, the point of open source is that if you don't like something you fucking write your own. Show some initiative man, complaining gets nothing done.
The problem I see with Windows running on such a chip is the native emulation Windows does. Every app is opened in a virtual machine. These VMs are most stable running 32 bit apps but since Windows has to remain compatible with 16 and 8 bit apps you get a bit of a problem. Windows has a bit of hard coding for x86 instructions which I imagine would need to be specifically handled by the Crusoe's emulation.
Not particularly, at least not interesting to me. Theres plenty of places water is liquid and it being liquid on an asteroid (and free floating) is interesting to me only because it would be interesting to study the dynamics of its flow in a low gravity zero atmosphere environment. Personally I'd be more interested in the study of the ice in craters on the moon and in the ice caps of Mars. Those two places being the source of facination and possible colonization sometime in the future.
These webpads would be a rad idea if they were cheaper and larger. Does anyone remember the webpad deceloped by Cyrix a year or so ago? That sucker was pretty nice sized and did most if not all the things this little bitch does. The main difference was running a MediaGX chip rather than a Crusoe. Personally I think the MediaGX idea was better becayse it incorporated the media processing on the chip so you needed less internal components for decent performance. These webpads are also teeny tiny with a 7.4 inch screen. How am I supposed to sit around looking at news and porn on such a screen? The smallest screen I want is 9 inches with about 800x600 resolution. The WebPlayer by Virgin has the right idea for a web console. You buy it on a lease-to-own basis (50$ per year) and get internet service bindled with it. It isn't portable but something similar could be made portable. I want a webpad for checking out websites from the couch so I can use my DSL with an RF networking card rather than WebTV or something along those lines. I think this was posted due to the trend factor of it having a Crusoe processor. I really hope we start seeing some decent Crusoe based designs rather than underpowered overpriced Palm VII's.
Hmmm it seems to me that the chips are desigtned to emulate a particular chipset architecture. Since both Linux and Windows are probably going to be x86 how can you optimize the chip more for one than the other?
timothy needs to head back to chemistry class. Water is by no means rare in the universe. If you're the astronomer type and look in the right stellar structures you can see interstellar water floating about. Take a quick flight through the Kuiper belt or around most comets and you'll see a bunch of water there too. Humans have been looking up and seeing extra terrestrial water for years.
happening here is Microsoft being punished in the wrong way. What Microsoft did was tell OEMs that they were going to up their licensing fees if they tried bundling anything other than MS Windows on their systems. This is leveraging the competition. It tells IBM and their like that they best not develop their own operating system because M$ will up the ante on licensing. This they ought to be cited and punished for because this is abuse of their psotion in the market. What IS happening is they are being punished for practicing capitalism and putting Netscape et al into a small sack which they tossed in a closet. My problem with the complaints against M$ is that M$ wrote the operating system and is under no obligation to let other people write software for it. The government hasn't busted down on Ford for not letting GM build car parts for them. Why should Borland and Netscape get special treatment? Here's a scenario. I want to start a company making a compiler for Solaris because I love the SPARC architecture and really enjoy using Solaris. My compiler and programming toolkit gets really popular and Sun changes around the internal mechanics of Solaris a little bit so my toolkit no longer works and then they use some hidden API code which their programmers conceived which allows apps compiled with their toolkit to run 3% faster than mine. Do I get to whine to the government that Sun changed the internals of their OS and made my toolkit less effective than theirs? Sun is evil! They have a monopoly on the operating system they wrote! All of the software produced by Microsoft is owned by Microsoft, they merely sell licenses for people like my parents or your parents to use that software. A similar license is given to development houses that build software to run on said operating system. The laws that defend the GPL also defend Microsoft's code. Microsoft has done plenty of unprofessional things in their history but you'd be hard pressed to find a company who hasn't. Breaking M$ up as punishment is a very bad idea because it is only going to harm the people who don't know better. Microsoft the application company can easily use the same leverage tactics that Microsoft the monolith can use. They'll offer MS Office and Works to OEMs at a discount but if the OEM wants to offer Wordperfect Office or Lotus MS the application company will just raise licensing fees causing the OEM to no longer offer the MS Office products. Since many people depend on Office file formats due to excessive saturation in the business and home market already and because people feel more familar with it, people will be lining up to buy Lite copies of Office directly from Microsoft. Either way they are getting the dollar from the consumers. The lack of threat not to offer Windows on manufactured PCs will not stop OEMs from bundling it as a matter of course. No other OS save Mac OS is mature enough to compete directly with Windows. If Linux matures in the next two years into a very usable OS OEMs would have migrated to it anyways and left Windows behind. Right now at this instant there is no real competition for Windows on business and home PCs. Whine all you want about the reasons for this but the fact remains that Windows will be dominating the desktop for a few more years. Apple is going to be doing alot more business and Redhat might see some good profit in the near future but for the most part things will stay the same. By the time Windows has less than a 50% market share in userspace the PC of today most likely won't exist. Stuff like WebTV and iOpener will be sitting on people's desks and take up space in their living rooms. Breaking up Microsoft is NOT going to cause some sort of glorious revolution. It is going to be alot more of the same. It's all a bunch of electronic pulses anyways, who the fuck cares.
You are very mistaken on your supposed counterpoints. IDE is inferior to SCSI and FW in many ways, most specifically that it only allows one channel to speak at any one time. This means if I have my CD-ROm and hard drive on the same IDE cable they have to use burst transfer to a DMA buffer to transfer data back and forth. This is horribly inefficient especially in lowend workstations who may only be using one IDE channel at any given time. SCSI and FW (FW is actually based on SCSI and is merely a serial implimentation of it) devices can all talk at the same time which actually allows you to maximize your bandwidth. SCSI is artificially expensive, the price of the chips in a SCSI drive are about the same as those in an IDE drive, manufacturers just set higher margins because of a lack of demand. If tomorrow everyone bought a SCSI drive next week the price would drop very quickly. Sticking with a standard because it's already in use is sort of ironic isn't it. People say move to Linux/Mac/Be because you don't need to follow convention yet insist that we ought to be using severely outdated technology in our computers. Strange. Do you know the real difference between a SCSI and ATA hard drive? The pin arrangement and controller chip. Don't bother responding unless you really have a wonderful insight.
Software rendering has always been a questionable benchmark between operating systems. One OS might allow more or less resources per process than another and some code simple runs better on one kernel than another. Windows actually has more layers of abstraction than a Unix with X on top of it. Windows runs all processes in a virtual machine whose overhead in some cases makes the app run really sluggishly. In Linux using X you've got the app running in a memory space talking to both the kernel and X directly with no virtual abstraction. This is just one possibility why X is faster or slower. X is a behemoth in many aspects compared to Windows or Be which combine the windowing system with the desktop and window manager. XFree 4.x looks like its making major headway in that department though, a rework of the process management and rasterizer looks like its helping a good deal.
Nethack is NOT Final Fantasy 7 or Resident Evil. I wasn't being a troll, I was being realistic and a reluctant capitalist. Money drives the world, the moral highground doesn't have nearly the same property value as the capitalistic pig slop around it.
Yeah the problem here is money, maybe you've heard of it? Ever wonder why some open source projects are classified as 501 organizations? They are meant to be donated to. They don't make much money if at all. Theres little research I can do on equipment that I already have. I don't need to discover the interesting eletrical conductivity properties of a circa 1985 Mac floppy disk controller. Software projects are nothing compared to hardware projects. Oh you found a new way to program an Asteroids clone, boy you rox0r. Research in algorithms is where the big money lies, and if you're capable of doing it well and doing it for free you should probably try a 12 step program.
Amazing, yet more wasted bandwidth on desktop systems. So tell me again why we are getting faster IDE speeds rather than moving to something like SCSI or IEEE 1394 (Firewire)? IDE blows if you're concerned with speed, 66 and 100mhz are fine if you're running several devices simultaneously but IDE doesn't do that does it? No. We'd be fine with PIO 4 since even 7200rpm hard drives can barely max out that bandwidth. Keeping IDE alive longer is pissing me off, why can't we move onto some more efficient standards? The Serial STS is an option, as is Firewire. Internal FW drives would be awesome, no more jumpers or SCSI IDs and alot less wiring inside my box. It'd be a nice thing to have removeable drives that could be both internal and external, say if I want to take my Orb drive or CD-R over to my friend's box to do some data transfering. Linux needs plenty of work in the Firewire area (which by the way has supported devices out RIGHT NOW). Imagine if VA or LinuxCOmputers could ship FW enabled systems, they would make as much headway as Apple has with them. I bet many companies would even write up Linux drivers for their equipment since it is a viable platform that more people are migrating to.
Why are you defending Ion Storm? They've been promising a game for four years and then release a POS that Eidos sucked up the cost of. This new drink coaster is putting Eidos out of money that could be better used to hire Lara Croft models with.
There has always been a number of subcultures living within any larger culture. In the past as well as in the present, not all of these subcultures make it into your high school history books though. Go to college and learn something.
I doubt we will EVER see a popular Open Source video game. Games may use open libraries and formats and such but we're not going to see an open game taking up space on pages of video game magazines or websites. Why? Most games start out as an engine and then someone is called in to write a story or something to use said engine. Engines will be all over the place because that is the work of programmers. The real meat of the game lies in the content creation. Would anyone play Quake 3 if there were no textures, just a bunch of surfaces and the occasional light? No. If Need for Speed was just boxes you steered around a track that you could add Object X, Y, and Z to would anyone have bought it? No. A good game most people can relate to is Diablo and Diablo 2. Both of these games were developed in studios which employ numerous graphic artists and sound dudes. These people can make a hundred thousand dollars on a contract with a real company or get their name of a "special thanks goes to:" mention on an open project. For those of you new to economics, the hundred thousand dollars is the payment that pays the rent. I see too many supposed Linux zealots calling for the source code to games. What good will it do the average Joe to have the source code for a game. I guess of course you could use it to build cheat-bots or make your own cheap knock-off version of the same game.
I do have a suggestion for the XFree people in the matter of gaming. How about a windowing system that is non-networked but with many of the same function calls as the normal version of X so things don't have to be entirely rewritten. A speedy windoing system would go a really long way to making gaming on unix based system a viable prospect.