That's what's called for, really -- a basic laptop design, add your own processor, video on a daughter card. Either that or a standardized laptop mobo form factor, but that would perhaps be asking too much from the current market?
I'd prefer a bit more in-depth reviewage, but I guess you can only do so many install/wipe cycles before you get bored. What would be really useful would be a page with a number of these reviews for smaller distros.
/Brian
Re:A crutch for the weak-minded?
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 2
Er... Pascal was a Jansenist (Counter-reformation extremist movement that considered science sinful). The majority of his scientific work came in his youth before he threw himself into religion. Read Zero by Charles Seife -- it tells the story.
My call: split the difference. For your own work go with Scheme. Tutorials are easy to find, and LispMe (the GPLed Lisp Machine on a PalmPilot) is actually a Scheme interpreter, so you've got portable prototyping capability; it's also the scripting language for the GIMP. However, if you're going to do Lisp at all it probably pays to know both dialects, since Common Lisp seems to be the Lisp that gets used in the Real World.
APL? Ugh...
You want some real fun, though, take a look at BANCstar, which is very possibly the nastiest thing I've ever seen in a commercial setting./Brian
Eh on XML... it's very possibly the coolest thing to come down the pike in years as far as data formats go, but it's a red herring saying that XML==open. After all, MS uses XML everywhere, but I don't see an RFC (yet) for HTTPMail...
Actually, I was just thinking black case. I'm assuming off-the-shelf components here, and my original thought was an NLX slimline case, which would be the ideal size... but of course the idea fell apart when I realized that most of those are designed more with minimal-but-complete functionality in mind and simply don't have the drive bays to do what I was thinking.
The truth is that it would be rather nice to be able to get a stereo component case for a computer -- the only problem is that I'm not sure how much a front panel display and IR reciever would add on to the price.
Would it really be that hard to build one of those for far less than HP is charging, say with an LCD display and remote on the front of a filthy-cheap tower box? (Not to mention a video card with an S-video jack so you can do your selecting through the TV...)
I don't think it's that bad, actually -- I did it in school (running an AppleTalk archive rather than a web server, but the same idea) and it's sort of like white noise.
That said, I find myself wondering if you can still find something along the lines of a case for the old IBM Aptiva S series -- drive bays on the desk, box under it. I thought that was rather cool, and a lot more practical today than it was when it came out ~5 years ago since the desktop box would essentially combine a 3.5 bay, a 5.25 bay, and hubs for USB and FireWire -- maybe $200 on top of the original system price...
I know there are manufacturers out there that actually sell some kind of chip refrigerator -- are those worth the trouble or do they just wind up putting more strain on the power supply?
"Interesting"? Surely you've seen the same line a million times from Microsoft already -- it stopped being interesting or ironic a long time ago. Now it's just empty.
Actually, I think Microsoft does this just so Pointy-Haired Bosses and Mordac types can have another TLA to point to as something nothing but their favorite OS (Windows) supports.
Think about this: it's not open source. They have a whole question on this in the FAQ: Why should we trust them? I agree with you, but with different reasoning. There's no point in a (partially) closed-source clone of an existing dead project -- it's an attempt to profit off of something that didn't pull a profit in the first place.
When BlueOS dies I want its creators to take a lesson: the whole point of cloning something is to future-proof something that seemed like a good idea but was locked up. Locking up the clone is pointless and self-defeating.
Trying to figure out how parent got modded off-topic...
This is in fact true, IMHO -- IBM was the only company that I can think of with the clout to load OS/2 along with Windows, and even they weren't doing it for very long.
Oh, definitely. Actually, one of the nice things about the iOpener was its form factor -- create something of roughly the same design only don't cripple it and you have what I'd consider to be a pretty nice OEM what-can-we-do-with-this sort of machine. That's one thing none of the rest of these things on the market have/had.
Anyway, I have to add my voice to the chorus saying, "Shocked? Not hardly." The fact is that a computer is a computer, and if you gut it it's not going to sell. I think even non-geeks realize that; why sell a Mailstation when you can use nearly the same parts with minor enhancements to bring back the glory days of the Trash-80 Model 100?
Guess it depends on whether you want to build or buy. My used HP Vectra (P2/333) cost me a little less than $200 as is, with another $30 for a 64MB DIMM. You can probably get that price on eBay or some place like that.
I will say, however, that the vast majority of used PCs you're going to find out there are ex-corporate machines. Something like mine with a Slot 1 mobo has a little bit of wiggle room (I could probably slap a mid-range P3 in there no problem) but for the most part you're dealing with custom form factors (slots on riser cards, FlexATX (or worse) motherboard shapes, and name brand oddities that you won't get in a generic box. The result is that these boxes are invariably throwaways; my Vectra midtower has its drive bays on the bottom, for example (it lives on a stack of books on the floor to compensate). When it finally outlives its usefulness two or three years from now there ain't no motherboard swap in the world that's going to save it.
If none of that bothers you, you can find some great bargains.
RTFSpec. Or go to Tom's Hardware and watch the footage yourself. Mofo sizzles like a strip of bacon. The P4, on the other hand... it's got plenty of issues, but Intel designed the thing to be damn near indestructible; it'll throttle down to 33mHz if it has to to avoid burning up.
For the record, before I got my used P2 I was in the market for an Athlon, and AMD would still be my first choice (mind you I'd check the heat sink out of the box to make sure it was in place). But I do know what the facts are.
VBA would be the out-of-the-box tool; it's the closest equivalent IMHO. The guts of Windows scripting I don't know a whole lot about.
My point is really about what comes out of the box. Perl is great, yes, but Perl/Python/Ruby are a separate class -- protean, and much higher-level than things like AppleScript/WinSH (and far more so than shell scripting).
Let me give a general example:
With a shell script you are generally limited to
data > program > output
This is all well and good for the traditional Unix environment; tools are (generally) small and well-defined, so you just feed the data in, let the program massage it, and then read it out. Most command shells (DOS/Win batch files included) are programming languages in and of themselves, so this is a good thing.
The problem is when you start scaling up into monolithic desktop apps like MSWord or Photoshop (which has a scripting language of its own built in). You need a finer level of control for big applications like that; that's what AppleScript is all about. Read an AppleScript some time; they look like
tell application
do this to foo 1 of bar 2 of document "mydoc"
end tell
It's wordy, but it's self-explanatory. It's also the only practical way to control a large application from outside. You can of course write glue programs that will do this for you from a shell script (I think there's something of the sort in Darwin/OS X; I know there are AppleScript command line tools), but that's still an external approach. It's not a *wrong* approach (I'm not saying shells should have that kind of thing as a built-in; it's not necessary), but it's still a bag on the side no matter what you call it.
So I stand by my evaluation: AppleScript is a Good Thing, and it is a very good (though not quite ideal) solution for its domain.
Simple: shell scripts bind small programs together, and that's about all they do well. VBA is a direct ripoff of AppleScript that's tied to COM/ActiveX.
What AppleScript does so well (candygrammar aside) is work with the AppleEvent Object Model. A properly designed AEOM application can be controlled at a very fine-grained level by an AppleScript or anything else capable of sending the proper AppleEvents. The AppleScript grammar is a bit clumsy, but it works very well for what it's designed to do. (Yes, you could do better, but that's not my point.) The fact is that with an AppleScript you can control a properly designed app like a marionette. You can't do that with a basic old-school shell script.
Windows -- Grudgingly useful for desktop/secretarial environments, and you'll also find that most of the accounting packages out there, as well as many embedded systems packages, require it. Windows is also, like it or not, the OS of choice for hard-core gamers. Sucks, but true. Generally not a good choice for server environments due to cost and MS lockin (stability issues were all but eliminated with Win2K). Limited to x86 platforms; all other versions died of user apathy.
Unix -- Useful for light-to-medium duty single server environments (especially file-sharing and WWW), as well as clustering; Solaris, AIX, Irix, and occasionally even Linux pop up on high-end (i.e. mainframe or supercomputer class) systems. Also the system of choice for cluster computing (though MacOS Classic can make a credible case for being a viable cluster computation environment as well). Unix's traditional timesharing environment is a very small niche in the modern market, but still useful. Also a major scientific computing platform. The downside is that the proliferation of standards makes generalizing about anything above the command line difficult and/or pointless; Solaris != Linux != BSD, and it's going to stay that way. Runs on everything concievable, from a Commodore 64 all the way up to gigantic Cray supercomputers and Linux clusters.
MacOS -- Don't run a publishing house or recording studio without it; the Mac is the platform of choice for the creative industry. Also a good choice for education, but a weak gaming platform. MacOS X largely eliminates instability from legacy code. AppleScript as a scripting platform makes VBA and Unix Shell look horribly primitive (and MacPerl is available as well). Limited to PowerPC hardware.
Besides, Intel owns StrongARM now anyway -- presumably this happened long after Apple went hunting (probably 1991 or so, but I don't remember for certain), but they've got a strong RISC platform if they want to push it. Obviously they don't care to, so...
Slashdot Mirror
That's what's called for, really -- a basic laptop design, add your own processor, video on a daughter card. Either that or a standardized laptop mobo form factor, but that would perhaps be asking too much from the current market?
/Brian
I'd prefer a bit more in-depth reviewage, but I guess you can only do so many install/wipe cycles before you get bored. What would be really useful would be a page with a number of these reviews for smaller distros.
/Brian
Er... Pascal was a Jansenist (Counter-reformation extremist movement that considered science sinful). The majority of his scientific work came in his youth before he threw himself into religion. Read Zero by Charles Seife -- it tells the story.
/Brian
My call: split the difference. For your own work go with Scheme. Tutorials are easy to find, and LispMe (the GPLed Lisp Machine on a PalmPilot) is actually a Scheme interpreter, so you've got portable prototyping capability; it's also the scripting language for the GIMP. However, if you're going to do Lisp at all it probably pays to know both dialects, since Common Lisp seems to be the Lisp that gets used in the Real World.
/Brian
APL? Ugh... You want some real fun, though, take a look at BANCstar, which is very possibly the nastiest thing I've ever seen in a commercial setting. /Brian
Eh on XML... it's very possibly the coolest thing to come down the pike in years as far as data formats go, but it's a red herring saying that XML==open. After all, MS uses XML everywhere, but I don't see an RFC (yet) for HTTPMail...
/Brian
Actually, I was just thinking black case. I'm assuming off-the-shelf components here, and my original thought was an NLX slimline case, which would be the ideal size... but of course the idea fell apart when I realized that most of those are designed more with minimal-but-complete functionality in mind and simply don't have the drive bays to do what I was thinking.
The truth is that it would be rather nice to be able to get a stereo component case for a computer -- the only problem is that I'm not sure how much a front panel display and IR reciever would add on to the price.
/Brian
Would it really be that hard to build one of those for far less than HP is charging, say with an LCD display and remote on the front of a filthy-cheap tower box? (Not to mention a video card with an S-video jack so you can do your selecting through the TV...)
/Brian
I don't think it's that bad, actually -- I did it in school (running an AppleTalk archive rather than a web server, but the same idea) and it's sort of like white noise.
That said, I find myself wondering if you can still find something along the lines of a case for the old IBM Aptiva S series -- drive bays on the desk, box under it. I thought that was rather cool, and a lot more practical today than it was when it came out ~5 years ago since the desktop box would essentially combine a 3.5 bay, a 5.25 bay, and hubs for USB and FireWire -- maybe $200 on top of the original system price...
/Brian
I know there are manufacturers out there that actually sell some kind of chip refrigerator -- are those worth the trouble or do they just wind up putting more strain on the power supply?
/Brian
"Interesting"? Surely you've seen the same line a million times from Microsoft already -- it stopped being interesting or ironic a long time ago. Now it's just empty.
/Brian
Actually, I think Microsoft does this just so Pointy-Haired Bosses and Mordac types can have another TLA to point to as something nothing but their favorite OS (Windows) supports.
/Brian
I'm not overly impressed to begin with...
Think about this: it's not open source. They have a whole question on this in the FAQ: Why should we trust them? I agree with you, but with different reasoning. There's no point in a (partially) closed-source clone of an existing dead project -- it's an attempt to profit off of something that didn't pull a profit in the first place.
When BlueOS dies I want its creators to take a lesson: the whole point of cloning something is to future-proof something that seemed like a good idea but was locked up. Locking up the clone is pointless and self-defeating.
/Brian
Trying to figure out how parent got modded off-topic...
This is in fact true, IMHO -- IBM was the only company that I can think of with the clout to load OS/2 along with Windows, and even they weren't doing it for very long.
/Brian
Oh, definitely. Actually, one of the nice things about the iOpener was its form factor -- create something of roughly the same design only don't cripple it and you have what I'd consider to be a pretty nice OEM what-can-we-do-with-this sort of machine. That's one thing none of the rest of these things on the market have/had.
Anyway, I have to add my voice to the chorus saying, "Shocked? Not hardly." The fact is that a computer is a computer, and if you gut it it's not going to sell. I think even non-geeks realize that; why sell a Mailstation when you can use nearly the same parts with minor enhancements to bring back the glory days of the Trash-80 Model 100?
/Brian
Humorless moderators: -1 Blinding Flash Of The Obvious
Moderators with a sense of humor: +.5 Giggleworthy
/Brian
Guess it depends on whether you want to build or buy. My used HP Vectra (P2/333) cost me a little less than $200 as is, with another $30 for a 64MB DIMM. You can probably get that price on eBay or some place like that.
I will say, however, that the vast majority of used PCs you're going to find out there are ex-corporate machines. Something like mine with a Slot 1 mobo has a little bit of wiggle room (I could probably slap a mid-range P3 in there no problem) but for the most part you're dealing with custom form factors (slots on riser cards, FlexATX (or worse) motherboard shapes, and name brand oddities that you won't get in a generic box. The result is that these boxes are invariably throwaways; my Vectra midtower has its drive bays on the bottom, for example (it lives on a stack of books on the floor to compensate). When it finally outlives its usefulness two or three years from now there ain't no motherboard swap in the world that's going to save it.
If none of that bothers you, you can find some great bargains.
/Brian
RTFSpec. Or go to Tom's Hardware and watch the footage yourself. Mofo sizzles like a strip of bacon. The P4, on the other hand... it's got plenty of issues, but Intel designed the thing to be damn near indestructible; it'll throttle down to 33mHz if it has to to avoid burning up.
For the record, before I got my used P2 I was in the market for an Athlon, and AMD would still be my first choice (mind you I'd check the heat sink out of the box to make sure it was in place). But I do know what the facts are.
/Brian
VBA would be the out-of-the-box tool; it's the closest equivalent IMHO. The guts of Windows scripting I don't know a whole lot about.
My point is really about what comes out of the box. Perl is great, yes, but Perl/Python/Ruby are a separate class -- protean, and much higher-level than things like AppleScript/WinSH (and far more so than shell scripting).
Let me give a general example:
With a shell script you are generally limited to
data > program > output
This is all well and good for the traditional Unix environment; tools are (generally) small and well-defined, so you just feed the data in, let the program massage it, and then read it out. Most command shells (DOS/Win batch files included) are programming languages in and of themselves, so this is a good thing.
The problem is when you start scaling up into monolithic desktop apps like MSWord or Photoshop (which has a scripting language of its own built in). You need a finer level of control for big applications like that; that's what AppleScript is all about. Read an AppleScript some time; they look like
tell application
do this to foo 1 of bar 2 of document "mydoc"
end tell
It's wordy, but it's self-explanatory. It's also the only practical way to control a large application from outside. You can of course write glue programs that will do this for you from a shell script (I think there's something of the sort in Darwin/OS X; I know there are AppleScript command line tools), but that's still an external approach. It's not a *wrong* approach (I'm not saying shells should have that kind of thing as a built-in; it's not necessary), but it's still a bag on the side no matter what you call it.
So I stand by my evaluation: AppleScript is a Good Thing, and it is a very good (though not quite ideal) solution for its domain.
/Brian
Er... you *had* to point this out? It's a fairly pointless distinction...
/Brian
Simple: shell scripts bind small programs together, and that's about all they do well. VBA is a direct ripoff of AppleScript that's tied to COM/ActiveX.
What AppleScript does so well (candygrammar aside) is work with the AppleEvent Object Model. A properly designed AEOM application can be controlled at a very fine-grained level by an AppleScript or anything else capable of sending the proper AppleEvents. The AppleScript grammar is a bit clumsy, but it works very well for what it's designed to do. (Yes, you could do better, but that's not my point.) The fact is that with an AppleScript you can control a properly designed app like a marionette. You can't do that with a basic old-school shell script.
/Brian
Windows -- Grudgingly useful for desktop/secretarial environments, and you'll also find that most of the accounting packages out there, as well as many embedded systems packages, require it. Windows is also, like it or not, the OS of choice for hard-core gamers. Sucks, but true. Generally not a good choice for server environments due to cost and MS lockin (stability issues were all but eliminated with Win2K). Limited to x86 platforms; all other versions died of user apathy.
Unix -- Useful for light-to-medium duty single server environments (especially file-sharing and WWW), as well as clustering; Solaris, AIX, Irix, and occasionally even Linux pop up on high-end (i.e. mainframe or supercomputer class) systems. Also the system of choice for cluster computing (though MacOS Classic can make a credible case for being a viable cluster computation environment as well). Unix's traditional timesharing environment is a very small niche in the modern market, but still useful. Also a major scientific computing platform. The downside is that the proliferation of standards makes generalizing about anything above the command line difficult and/or pointless; Solaris != Linux != BSD, and it's going to stay that way. Runs on everything concievable, from a Commodore 64 all the way up to gigantic Cray supercomputers and Linux clusters.
MacOS -- Don't run a publishing house or recording studio without it; the Mac is the platform of choice for the creative industry. Also a good choice for education, but a weak gaming platform. MacOS X largely eliminates instability from legacy code. AppleScript as a scripting platform makes VBA and Unix Shell look horribly primitive (and MacPerl is available as well). Limited to PowerPC hardware.
That's my summation...
/Brian
Besides, Intel owns StrongARM now anyway -- presumably this happened long after Apple went hunting (probably 1991 or so, but I don't remember for certain), but they've got a strong RISC platform if they want to push it. Obviously they don't care to, so...
/Brian
It's not that they're sensitive to heat per se; they just lack the safeguards Intel chips have. It's all on board on the P4, for example.
/Brian
I don't know -- Windows is one of several OSes competing for Itanium mindshare right now. Don't forget Linux Trillian, for example...
/Brian