I'm sure this will help many people deal with the emergency by using the net to communicate.. an interesting side effect, since phone service isn't provided, is people will probably use more VOIP programs such as Skype, which are an alternative to T-Mobile's regular service..
I think you're wrong. At its heart, free/open source has to be useful to everyone who needs it. If everyone who used it was expected to "give back" every little change, there would be no coherence as a zillion features that are useless to very few people are jammed in.
At its best, the model involves a few coders at the top who develop features based on either community need, service for a fee, or their own itch, all of which are integrated in the core offering only if it makes sense to most people. Its the same old hierarchical model of control, but there's no other realistic way to do it.
Spammers use unsuspecting third party email "from" addresses to to send spam. Spammers could also use fake unsubscribe links to redirect to innocent people's sites. Those people would be incidentally taken offline and might end up with tremendous bandwith bills. So this is just another bad idea.
In my research in low-medium end projectors (up to about $4000), LCD is better than DLP (which is what I assume you mean by "DSP.") Sharper, brighter, better colour, and no danger of the "rainbow effect" which plagues DLP projects and distracts or even give viewers headaches.
DLP still wins in contrast, but you'll rarely notice the difference and newer LCDs are getting pretty good (2000:1 for the AE700U). The only drawback of LCD I've seen is the greater likelihood of dead pixels.
I've had a Toshiba M200 for almost a year. Its a very popular tablet. It weighs a bit more than this new Lenovo, but has a higher screen res (1400x1050) and a faster CPU and probably hard disk (mine is a 60GB 7200 RPM drive). It also has a tilt sensing accelerometer, but I'm not aware of any cool applications for that.:)
Just to swipe at a few fallacies:
1. As a tablet, its a decently powerful machine. Pentium M @1600 mhz is a nice chip, and it supports up to 2 GB RAM. I used to disdain notebooks and always go for custom built desktops, but its been my full time workstation since I got it.
2. It was more expensive, but not much more than a comparable good quality notebook. Certainly not cheap though.
3. Battery life is up to four hours.
4. Getting Linux to run on it is a pain, but that has more to do with laptop power management functions and other non Tablet details. Several people (who have more dedication/knowledge than me) have gotten theirs running fully, including pen input.
For my *nix needs, I currently use CoLinux; I can run a CoLinux instance (which is running X, Gnome, and server stuff like Apache and Mysql), Eclipse on the Windows side, a bunch of Firefox browsers on both sides (which use the most memory), VNC @ 1400x1050x16 into the Linux side, and assorted shells and its still comfortably usable for dev with 1 GB of RAM.
5. I almost never use the pen for text input, but the convertible form factor is very handy (for example, when on a train/plane or reading on the couch) and using the pen is a nice alternative to the mouse/trackpad (I do wish it had a trackpoint).
6. All the Journal/Onenote stuff seems interesting, but I haven't really checked it out since it doesn't have much to do with my main work and I don't feel particularly inclined to commit to anything from one vendor.
The speech integration is cool, and after MS did an update I notice it responds to some words especially well (it favours pronounciation of "United Nations").
7. It has a dedicated button to take you to Windows Task Manager (where you view and kill processes). The button icon represents a toilet plunger. Very apropos. This is probably to cover for the fact that there has been a memory leak problem with the MS tablet software 'tcserver' for some time that MS has refused to fix. After a week or so of operation it gobbles up a bunch of RAM. Go Microsoft.
Note I'm talking about a convertible, not a true tablet, which don't have an attached keyboard and are lighter. If any of the above sounds good to you or you just like trying new stuff, you might want to consider a similar device.
No, my original post was about all the tools and libraries that exist for java, which will work for any java project. As well as the many support forums so you generally don't have to find someone to ask about something since it has already been asked.
From talking to friends, for a language like Ruby (or Python, or...), you will usually have one XML parser, for example. It is usually pretty good, but there is always some way that these things fall down (for example, processing large documents). In the Java space, there are many many XML parsers, and you can locate lots of discussion about using them.
(This might not be the best example, but I hope you get the idea).
If you're referring to EJBs, you don't have to use them, and most people don't. "J2EE" to many people does mean EJBs, but you can use JSP and JDBC for the equivilent of the PHP world, or Java classes and some kind of lightweight (Spring) to heavy (EJB) kit depending on what you need to do.
So you're left with a language with lots of history and support, which isn't a bad thing. You may have more code, but I'd be quite surprised if that doesn't have some advantages as well as you need to make finger grained changes to your application, and this is where the refactoring and constant state awareness comes in through language features and tool support. (although these features are less available in the JSP world).
Anyway, I'm not digging my heels in against ROR, just stating there's more to development than getting an app off the ground, and Java offers quite a lot of support (and diversity) along the way.
Yes, decent design is required. I don't think any framework is going to save you from requiring experience and knowledge.
Ruby sounds really interesting, but after all the language is just one aspect of development.
I use Java (and parts of J2EE). Its too bad there's no truly free/open source runtime yet, but I'm sure that day will come soon.
Another problem with Java is really too much choice. Sun's higher level solutions tend to be over engineered, so everyone and their uncle have designed their own complex framework for object persistance and session management, along with the mixed bag of JSRs. Thus you have Java advocates like Javalobby saying Ruby on Rails is a great framework, and all the best free CMSs are PHP.
I am sure that Ruby on Rails makes it quick to put up a web site that supports database CRUD operations, but just like using Visual Basic to create forms, what do you have after that part is done?
The reason I like Java is its maturity and community, as well as the rigidity of the language.
Because of its multi vendor and open software support, you can find an open source or at worst free-as-in-beer library to do just about anything, and there's plenty of discussion about using all the components that exist.
If you don't like Java's rigidity and verbosity, there are some nice improvements in JDK 1.5.
From pre-1.5:
void cancelAll(Collection c) {
for (Iterator i = c.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
TimerTask tt = (TimerTask) i.next();
tt.cancel();
} }
in 1.5:
void cancelAll(Collection c) {
for (TimerTask task : c)
task.cancel(); }
Or you can execute Groovy, Jython, JRuby, etc in a JVM, or alongside PHP with JSR 223.
I don't think execution speed arguments against Java are accurate any more, especially when comparing it to languages such as Ruby, Python and PHP, and I find the memory requirements to be easily manageable in typical situations (Firefox, alas, takes much more memory on my workstation).
Creating a working application in any environment is fairly easy for anyone with sufficient training and experience, but unless you're a rare master, once you are at that plateau of a working app and you need to change it, the maturity and popularity of your environment become very important for support.
I think hands down Java is the winner here with great tools like Eclipse, with great refactoring support and where you know even in large projects what is broken as you're working on code, as well as the large community for support.
The portability of Java is also very good, you can become very OS agnostic (unless you need to get into a few aspects such as multimedia).
Anyway, sorry to wax on, and I'm always trying to find out what other environments offer, but I don't think Java is given enough credit.
It seems like they are imagining a free (to the user) all-knowledge-and-communication-anywhere brought to you by anonymous infrastructure. The problem with their scheme is its all based on advertising. Bleagh.
Everyone I know who uses a Mac still uses Linux on their servers. The reasons should be obvious, Apple offers a better user experience while the history and economics (and probably performance) of Linux on the server are better. Unless Apple starts focusing on server performance and cost effectiveness, I don't see this changing, and there'll continue to be an exchange of workstation and server software between the two, which will be free and open source.:)
Its true I know nothing about the stock market, and I have no doubt Google is a great company with much potential. But from my understanding, in the 1990s internet boom, companies took their inflated stock market values and bought other companies, which sounds like a wise move, if it can be managed.
I just saw the film "Enron: smartest guys in the room," which talked about how Enron kept up the hype by constantly diversifying and pumping their overall value (along with using mark to market techniques: basing their accounting on future potential earnings), so it had nothing to do with any real capabilities in the short to medium term, aside from their ability to keep hyping, which was eventually burst.
So, as much as I believe in good guys and the value of hype for positive change, it seems likely that if Google tried to diversify in "unnatural" ways they would certainly come crashing down, probably with a few skeletons in their closests as various humans tried to cover for the pressure that would no doubt be at the centre of their empire.
Retooling a company like GM, which is probably very finely balanced based on conservative principals and would start going through massive amounts of money if they tried to change suddenly, would probably be a good way to get themselves in a lot of trouble.
I think they are much more likely to crawl into bed with Apple or other companies that are trying to line themselves up as progressive lifestyle information service providers, but I really think they cannot sustain their hype as they get deeper and deeper into change management and working with old boys networks.
I work with a lot of people who use Macs, some of whom had them pushed on them, and the response is generally "it does the job." Now lets see, I'm using a shell, a browser, and a development environment, which is platform agnostic (thank god). What is the Mac going to do for me again? Its all the same, with a higher price tag. Oh, and lower performance. Except for the visuals. Whee.
Comments complaining about resolution are beyond ridiculous. When computers are 10240x70680, are you going to make the same claim? Its just sharper, you don't see the dots, and you can cram more in, if you want to. Maybe your "head tech" didn't realize he could increase the font size.
As for the hardware problems, I can see the dent in the middle of my friend's screen, I can hear about the broken down systems, I can read about the battery problems, I can see how all Apple notebooks look the same, with limited assumptions about each size. And what, they're switching to Intel? Its no mystery, they are simply not perfect machines, and therefore should be compared in a competitive market where people make more choices than how many whizzy effects fly at them when they click on something.
Anyway, anonymous mac coward, I hope you have fun shilling for Apple, the world needs more competition.
Great if you want a 17" notebook. I find the 17" powerbook to be not really portable. Anyone who carries one around looks like a dork hogging so much desk space at a meeting, aside from that its just not as portable as a smaller notebook. A smaller notebook with a bigger monitor is a better idea, to me. Then again my notebook has a 12.1" screen with 1400x1050 resolution, too diverse for Apple to provide anything like this.
Many people I've spoken to have found Mac hardware to be boring, lacking choice, and not particularly robust as well as in general not liking the sleek silvery appearance.
IBM has dropped out of the notebook market because its too much of a commodity to make profit on for their higher end approach. Maybe Apple has the same concerns. Targetting a smaller population might yield higher prices, but also higher expenses.
In terms of profit: 2% at $500 profit per, or 20% at $200 profit per? The profits are substantially higher for the latter. Maybe Apple wants to have an opportunity to have a Mac OS tax. The competition would be great.
I don't understand why anyone would salivate over a powerbook. They offer very limited choice in design, have been riddled with problems (screen indent, battery problems, just falling apart problems), and apparently the performance is not great for anything but whizzy visual effects. This is one area where the PC at least offers a lot of choice compared to the "any colour as long as its silver" Mac notebook lineup. I would be very happy if I could pay $300 to put Mac OS X on my favourite hardware out of the diverse market of choices, but unfortunately this doesn't look likely.
IMHO, Apple should team up with a big vendor like HP and sell Mac OS X on HP computers to compete with Dell and Windows. I'm not a huge fan of HP's hardware, but its a logical choice.
The funny thing is, while I've always been ambivilant about Apple, I'd probably buy OS X for my existing x86 based notebook. Why? I want *nix, but they are all a pain to get working completely on computer to computer, and Apple's hardware is limited and -boring-.
Oh sure, its built for the purpose, but you have very few choices at each form factor to choose from.
I got my m200 for its small, high resolution screen, convertible form factor, robustness, and, ahem, non silver colour, and it'd be a dream to run OS X on it, but since as a non platform oriented developer I'm "doing the same thing" on each computer, I chose the one with the better hardware.
The big question is, would Apple consider it worthwhile to go for the X milion customers at $200 per head (Mac OS on certified Intel systems), vs the X hundred thousand customers at $500 a head? I think they'd have to work with particular vendors, but I can see them working out deals with a few manufacturers, like HP, which already sells iPods. (in fact, climbing into bed with HP could make a lot of sense from the volume point of view. How about this? Apple, HP and Sun? The dream team of innovative also-rans).
Nvidia and ATI seems to ship virtual desktop managers with their full blown drivers, which are at least better than Microsoft's supplied hack. Used ATI's in the past, using NVidia's now - mostly works but has terrible rules for when to switch (yes, I do want to switch away from a busy desktop to read my mail) and just goes away sometimes, leaving me stranded on a virtual destkop.
Nothing has been nearly as good ("just works") as the 1990s and on implementions I'm used to under systems like Gnome. Amazing.
Someday Linux notebook drivers will be good and I'll switch back.
I shudder to say this in many ways, but some good could actually come out of this if Sun and Microsoft could get some cooperation happening on Java (or more generally a unified runtime and API). Sun may be near irrelevant but Java is in many ways the main competitor to Microsoft's broad development platform (is it still called.NET?)
Putting aside the important considerations around free/open software, it could make a lot of people's lives simpler. Its not that Java isn't already rich and cross platform, it would just be a next step in unification and perhaps make development for small devices for example easier.
But due to their contexts, I wouldn't fully trust either company, and especially both, to carry the flag for a unified development environment, just like I'm sure this latest cooperation will yield to some selling out of purely technical or ethical concerns. "Liberty Alliance" (groan) appeared to be much more important than MS' solution, with much more real third party participation, so this is a consolidation that will have repurcussions. The third party opinions and participation of interested parties like geeks is still important to prevent sneaking in designs intended purely for the benefit of MS and Sun, rather than contributing to developments that are generally useful.
I've been vegetarian (not vegan) for three years, exercise moderately, and I still have a gut.;( And all the vegetarian/vegans I know are healthy, and don't appear as you suggest. Its one of the reasons I "switched." Some are also overweight. I think there is something else distinguishing the people you know.
Why don't you try travelling. And stay out of the McDonalds while you're doing it. There's more to life than conquering, assimilating, and justifying things to economic models.
I don't know what "we" you are talking about in your previous post, but it's not me or, apparently, the majority. The majority who understand that life is about more than money and that there is more going on than your simplistic assessment.
Quebec is a distinct presence within our country and Canada would suffer a great loss if it went away.
I can't understand why the idea of using an FM transmitter from a PC to an FM tuner on a device like this isn't exploited. You could then essentially turn your small device/headphones into a wireless audio receiver for your pc, so you can walk around the room, etc while still hearing music and other audio from your PC over headphones.
That's a one track statement. You could also argue free/open source is the most competitive way to move foward, instead of having thugs^W government and lawyers shut down competition for you.
Is it Sun or Sun's geeks? Would they work for Sun, and would other technical companies work with Sun, if they didn't release free/open software?
Royally? Is it all at the forbearance of Scott McNeally, or is Scott McNeally at the forbearance of the skills, initiative and connections of people who work for Sun?
Is Sun's passive aggressive behavior, or other companies open pushing of free/open software better for the trend of free/open software?
Do people have free will and corporations are trying to ride that, or are we all pawns of corporations?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure this will help many people deal with the emergency by using the net to communicate.. an interesting side effect, since phone service isn't provided, is people will probably use more VOIP programs such as Skype, which are an alternative to T-Mobile's regular service..
I think you're wrong. At its heart, free/open source has to be useful to everyone who needs it. If everyone who used it was expected to "give back" every little change, there would be no coherence as a zillion features that are useless to very few people are jammed in.
At its best, the model involves a few coders at the top who develop features based on either community need, service for a fee, or their own itch, all of which are integrated in the core offering only if it makes sense to most people. Its the same old hierarchical model of control, but there's no other realistic way to do it.
You could start with this: http://www.yacy.net/yacy/
Spammers use unsuspecting third party email "from" addresses to to send spam. Spammers could also use fake unsubscribe links to redirect to innocent people's sites. Those people would be incidentally taken offline and might end up with tremendous bandwith bills. So this is just another bad idea.
In my research in low-medium end projectors (up to about $4000), LCD is better than DLP (which is what I assume you mean by "DSP.") Sharper, brighter, better colour, and no danger of the "rainbow effect" which plagues DLP projects and distracts or even give viewers headaches.
DLP still wins in contrast, but you'll rarely notice the difference and newer LCDs are getting pretty good (2000:1 for the AE700U). The only drawback of LCD I've seen is the greater likelihood of dead pixels.
Is this stuff really meant to be worn? No.
I've had a Toshiba M200 for almost a year. Its a very popular tablet. It weighs a bit more than this new Lenovo, but has a higher screen res (1400x1050) and a faster CPU and probably hard disk (mine is a 60GB 7200 RPM drive). It also has a tilt sensing accelerometer, but I'm not aware of any cool applications for that. :)
Just to swipe at a few fallacies:
1. As a tablet, its a decently powerful machine. Pentium M @1600 mhz is a nice chip, and it supports up to 2 GB RAM. I used to disdain notebooks and always go for custom built desktops, but its been my full time workstation since I got it.
2. It was more expensive, but not much more than a comparable good quality notebook. Certainly not cheap though.
3. Battery life is up to four hours.
4. Getting Linux to run on it is a pain, but that has more to do with laptop power management functions and other non Tablet details. Several people (who have more dedication/knowledge than me) have gotten theirs running fully, including pen input.
For my *nix needs, I currently use CoLinux; I can run a CoLinux instance (which is running X, Gnome, and server stuff like Apache and Mysql), Eclipse on the Windows side, a bunch of Firefox browsers on both sides (which use the most memory), VNC @ 1400x1050x16 into the Linux side, and assorted shells and its still comfortably usable for dev with 1 GB of RAM.
5. I almost never use the pen for text input, but the convertible form factor is very handy (for example, when on a train/plane or reading on the couch) and using the pen is a nice alternative to the mouse/trackpad (I do wish it had a trackpoint).
6. All the Journal/Onenote stuff seems interesting, but I haven't really checked it out since it doesn't have much to do with my main work and I don't feel particularly inclined to commit to anything from one vendor.
The speech integration is cool, and after MS did an update I notice it responds to some words especially well (it favours pronounciation of "United Nations").
7. It has a dedicated button to take you to Windows Task Manager (where you view and kill processes). The button icon represents a toilet plunger. Very apropos. This is probably to cover for the fact that there has been a memory leak problem with the MS tablet software 'tcserver' for some time that MS has refused to fix. After a week or so of operation it gobbles up a bunch of RAM. Go Microsoft.
Note I'm talking about a convertible, not a true tablet, which don't have an attached keyboard and are lighter. If any of the above sounds good to you or you just like trying new stuff, you might want to consider a similar device.
No, my original post was about all the tools and libraries that exist for java, which will work for any java project. As well as the many support forums so you generally don't have to find someone to ask about something since it has already been asked.
From talking to friends, for a language like Ruby (or Python, or
(This might not be the best example, but I hope you get the idea).
If you're referring to EJBs, you don't have to use them, and most people don't. "J2EE" to many people does mean EJBs, but you can use JSP and JDBC for the equivilent of the PHP world, or Java classes and some kind of lightweight (Spring) to heavy (EJB) kit depending on what you need to do.
So you're left with a language with lots of history and support, which isn't a bad thing. You may have more code, but I'd be quite surprised if that doesn't have some advantages as well as you need to make finger grained changes to your application, and this is where the refactoring and constant state awareness comes in through language features and tool support. (although these features are less available in the JSP world).
Anyway, I'm not digging my heels in against ROR, just stating there's more to development than getting an app off the ground, and Java offers quite a lot of support (and diversity) along the way.
Yes, decent design is required. I don't think any framework is going to save you from requiring experience and knowledge.
Ruby sounds really interesting, but after all the language is just one aspect of development.
I use Java (and parts of J2EE).
Its too bad there's no truly free/open source runtime yet, but I'm sure that day will come soon.
Another problem with Java is really too much choice. Sun's higher level solutions tend to be over engineered, so everyone and their uncle have designed their own complex framework for object persistance and session management, along with the mixed bag of JSRs. Thus you have Java advocates like Javalobby saying Ruby on Rails is a great framework, and all the best free CMSs are PHP.
I am sure that Ruby on Rails makes it quick to put up a web site that supports database CRUD operations, but just like using Visual Basic to create forms, what do you have after that part is done?
The reason I like Java is its maturity and community, as well as the rigidity of the language.
Because of its multi vendor and open software support, you can find an open source or at worst free-as-in-beer library to do just about anything, and there's plenty of discussion about using all the components that exist.
If you don't like Java's rigidity and verbosity, there are some nice improvements in JDK 1.5.
From pre-1.5:
void cancelAll(Collection c) {
for (Iterator i = c.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
TimerTask tt = (TimerTask) i.next();
tt.cancel();
}
}
in 1.5:
void cancelAll(Collection c) {
for (TimerTask task : c)
task.cancel();
}
Or you can execute Groovy, Jython, JRuby, etc in a JVM, or alongside PHP with JSR 223.
I don't think execution speed arguments against Java are accurate any more, especially when comparing it to languages such as Ruby, Python and PHP, and I find the memory requirements to be easily manageable in typical situations (Firefox, alas, takes much more memory on my workstation).
Creating a working application in any environment is fairly easy for anyone with sufficient training and experience, but unless you're a rare master, once you are at that plateau of a working app and you need to change it, the maturity and popularity of your environment become very important for support.
I think hands down Java is the winner here with great tools like Eclipse, with great refactoring support and where you know even in large projects what is broken as you're working on code, as well as the large community for support.
The portability of Java is also very good, you can become very OS agnostic (unless you need to get into a few aspects such as multimedia).
Anyway, sorry to wax on, and I'm always trying to find out what other environments offer, but I don't think Java is given enough credit.
You forgot Keyhole. I think they read Snow Crash.
It seems like they are imagining a free (to the user) all-knowledge-and-communication-anywhere brought to you by anonymous infrastructure. The problem with their scheme is its all based on advertising. Bleagh.
Everyone I know who uses a Mac still uses Linux on their servers. The reasons should be obvious, Apple offers a better user experience while the history and economics (and probably performance) of Linux on the server are better. Unless Apple starts focusing on server performance and cost effectiveness, I don't see this changing, and there'll continue to be an exchange of workstation and server software between the two, which will be free and open source. :)
Its true I know nothing about the stock market, and I have no doubt Google is a great company with much potential. But from my understanding, in the 1990s internet boom, companies took their inflated stock market values and bought other companies, which sounds like a wise move, if it can be managed.
I just saw the film "Enron: smartest guys in the room," which talked about how Enron kept up the hype by constantly diversifying and pumping their overall value (along with using mark to market techniques: basing their accounting on future potential earnings), so it had nothing to do with any real capabilities in the short to medium term, aside from their ability to keep hyping, which was eventually burst.
So, as much as I believe in good guys and the value of hype for positive change, it seems likely that if Google tried to diversify in "unnatural" ways they would certainly come crashing down, probably with a few skeletons in their closests as various humans tried to cover for the pressure that would no doubt be at the centre of their empire.
Retooling a company like GM, which is probably very finely balanced based on conservative principals and would start going through massive amounts of money if they tried to change suddenly, would probably be a good way to get themselves in a lot of trouble.
I think they are much more likely to crawl into bed with Apple or other companies that are trying to line themselves up as progressive lifestyle information service providers, but I really think they cannot sustain their hype as they get deeper and deeper into change management and working with old boys networks.
I work with a lot of people who use Macs, some of whom had them pushed on them, and the response is generally "it does the job." Now lets see, I'm using a shell, a browser, and a development environment, which is platform agnostic (thank god). What is the Mac going to do for me again? Its all the same, with a higher price tag. Oh, and lower performance. Except for the visuals. Whee.
Comments complaining about resolution are beyond ridiculous. When computers are 10240x70680, are you going to make the same claim? Its just sharper, you don't see the dots, and you can cram more in, if you want to. Maybe your "head tech" didn't realize he could increase the font size.
As for the hardware problems, I can see the dent in the middle of my friend's screen, I can hear about the broken down systems, I can read about the battery problems, I can see how all Apple notebooks look the same, with limited assumptions about each size. And what, they're switching to Intel? Its no mystery, they are simply not perfect machines, and therefore should be compared in a competitive market where people make more choices than how many whizzy effects fly at them when they click on something.
Anyway, anonymous mac coward, I hope you have fun shilling for Apple, the world needs more competition.
Great if you want a 17" notebook. I find the 17" powerbook to be not really portable. Anyone who carries one around looks like a dork hogging so much desk space at a meeting, aside from that its just not as portable as a smaller notebook. A smaller notebook with a bigger monitor is a better idea, to me. Then again my notebook has a 12.1" screen with 1400x1050 resolution, too diverse for Apple to provide anything like this.
Many people I've spoken to have found Mac hardware to be boring, lacking choice, and not particularly robust as well as in general not liking the sleek silvery appearance.
IBM has dropped out of the notebook market because its too much of a commodity to make profit on for their higher end approach. Maybe Apple has the same concerns. Targetting a smaller population might yield higher prices, but also higher expenses.
In terms of profit: 2% at $500 profit per, or 20% at $200 profit per? The profits are substantially higher for the latter. Maybe Apple wants to have an opportunity to have a Mac OS tax. The competition would be great.
I don't understand why anyone would salivate over a powerbook. They offer very limited choice in design, have been riddled with problems (screen indent, battery problems, just falling apart problems), and apparently the performance is not great for anything but whizzy visual effects. This is one area where the PC at least offers a lot of choice compared to the "any colour as long as its silver" Mac notebook lineup. I would be very happy if I could pay $300 to put Mac OS X on my favourite hardware out of the diverse market of choices, but unfortunately this doesn't look likely.
IMHO, Apple should team up with a big vendor like HP and sell Mac OS X on HP computers to compete with Dell and Windows. I'm not a huge fan of HP's hardware, but its a logical choice.
The funny thing is, while I've always been ambivilant about Apple, I'd probably buy OS X for my existing x86 based notebook. Why? I want *nix, but they are all a pain to get working completely on computer to computer, and Apple's hardware is limited and -boring-.
Oh sure, its built for the purpose, but you have very few choices at each form factor to choose from.
I got my m200 for its small, high resolution screen, convertible form factor, robustness, and, ahem, non silver colour, and it'd be a dream to run OS X on it, but since as a non platform oriented developer I'm "doing the same thing" on each computer, I chose the one with the better hardware.
The big question is, would Apple consider it worthwhile to go for the X milion customers at $200 per head (Mac OS on certified Intel systems), vs the X hundred thousand customers at $500 a head? I think they'd have to work with particular vendors, but I can see them working out deals with a few manufacturers, like HP, which already sells iPods. (in fact, climbing into bed with HP could make a lot of sense from the volume point of view. How about this? Apple, HP and Sun? The dream team of innovative also-rans).
Nvidia and ATI seems to ship virtual desktop managers with their full blown drivers, which are at least better than Microsoft's supplied hack. Used ATI's in the past, using NVidia's now - mostly works but has terrible rules for when to switch (yes, I do want to switch away from a busy desktop to read my mail) and just goes away sometimes, leaving me stranded on a virtual destkop.
Nothing has been nearly as good ("just works") as the 1990s and on implementions I'm used to under systems like Gnome. Amazing.
Someday Linux notebook drivers will be good and I'll switch back.
I shudder to say this in many ways, but some good could actually come out of this if Sun and Microsoft could get some cooperation happening on Java (or more generally a unified runtime and API). Sun may be near irrelevant but Java is in many ways the main competitor to Microsoft's broad development platform (is it still called .NET?)
Putting aside the important considerations around free/open software, it could make a lot of people's lives simpler. Its not that Java isn't already rich and cross platform, it would just be a next step in unification and perhaps make development for small devices for example easier.
But due to their contexts, I wouldn't fully trust either company, and especially both, to carry the flag for a unified development environment, just like I'm sure this latest cooperation will yield to some selling out of purely technical or ethical concerns. "Liberty Alliance" (groan) appeared to be much more important than MS' solution, with much more real third party participation, so this is a consolidation that will have repurcussions. The third party opinions and participation of interested parties like geeks is still important to prevent sneaking in designs intended purely for the benefit of MS and Sun, rather than contributing to developments that are generally useful.
I've been vegetarian (not vegan) for three years, exercise moderately, and I still have a gut.
Why don't you try travelling. And stay out of the McDonalds while you're doing it. There's more to life than conquering, assimilating, and justifying things to economic models.
I don't know what "we" you are talking about in your previous post, but it's not me or, apparently, the majority. The majority who understand that life is about more than money and that there is more going on than your simplistic assessment.
Quebec is a distinct presence within our country and Canada would suffer a great loss if it went away.
I can't understand why the idea of using an FM transmitter from a PC to an FM tuner on a device like this isn't exploited. You could then essentially turn your small device/headphones into a wireless audio receiver for your pc, so you can walk around the room, etc while still hearing music and other audio from your PC over headphones.
That's a one track statement. You could also argue free/open source is the most competitive way to move foward, instead of having thugs^W government and lawyers shut down competition for you.
Is it Sun or Sun's geeks? Would they work for Sun, and would other technical companies work with Sun, if they didn't release free/open software?
Royally? Is it all at the forbearance of Scott McNeally, or is Scott McNeally at the forbearance of the skills, initiative and connections of people who work for Sun?
Is Sun's passive aggressive behavior, or other companies open pushing of free/open software better for the trend of free/open software?
Do people have free will and corporations are trying to ride that, or are we all pawns of corporations?
Note these are all (free/)open questions.