...would be to store just a URL on the device where drivers can be downloaded from. This way the host OS could go out and pull the drivers automatically. There would need to be some sort of naming convention to differentiate between drivers for the various versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc.... but this would avoid having to store all flavours of drivers on the device itself.
Of course if the device IS your method of connecting to the net then this may prove to be quite hard!;-)
IBM's mainframe customers have been doing it for years... seems to have worked for Big Blue... but as they're now switching to using Linux for a whole load of stuff, maybe it's a sign that the practice of renting is out of favour.
If they write the UI using the Swing API then the Aqua L&F comes for free, according to this page on Apple's developer site. Sure would be cool to have Star/OpenOffice with Aqua... the perfect reason for not buying MS Office v.X!;-)
CNet may be partially right... the article talks about Apple engineers having access to StarOffice source and working on moving the UI to Quartz... maybe just the UI work will be done in Java (which has the Quartz UI on MacOS X) with the core functionality being in C/C++ as per the other Star/Open Office platforms. Using JNI this would certainly be possible... as for performance, well, we'll have to wait and see.
Taking a look at the tech specs for Shake, reveals that a 3 button mouse is required on the Mac platform... now where can I find one of those on the Apple store?;-)
I've heard that the Windows port took something over 100 engineer years, and I imagine Linux would take at least as many. That's, VERY rough ballpark, $20M.
But, if Apple opened it up and let the community do the port (I'm sure there's the will), it would cost them substantially less. If they only open up the playback side and leave the authoring closed and on the current platforms it would still benefit Linux and *BSD greatly.
With MacOS X (Darwin) being a flavor of FreeBSD they probably have a large proportion of the work required to make a *BSD/Linux port possible done already.
But, back in the real world, what would be their motive for taking such a move? With MacOS X, they already have a viable (unix like) platform for Quicktime and it works quite well (at least on my B&W G3 and iBook2), so the benefits for Apple of having QT support on Linux/*BSD would be low. Despite this point, I'd still love to have a native QT player on my Slackware desktop.
I tend to work on the principle that if my SO owns more pairs of shoes than I have servers/switches/routers etc. then I'm in safe territory... at the moment I'm falling far behind and need some more hardware.;-)
As others have commented, VNC does not allow multiple remote sessions on the Windows platform (as it does under Linux and a few others). But when VNC is coupled with WMware (regular workstation version not GX or EX) you can build a server hosting several concurrent Windows users.
I have a server with WinNT and Win2K (and Linux and OpenBSD) running under VMware (on Slackware) which are accessed from both Linux and MacOSX clients using VNC. Both MS OS's are legal (I bought them) copies, but it would seem that I'm using them illegally by installing and accessing them in this manner.
A number of Motorola phones have this already and it works quite well (in my experience).
My service provider (Orange) also has a service called WildFire which works on voice recognition... it allows you to dial numbers in your phone book or other numbers by just saying the number... it's great when you're driving with a handsfree kit attached (not that I would know as this is frowned upon by the local law!). WildFire also manages voice mails by voice commands too... you do feel quite silly initially, talking to the service, but after a while you get used to it.
if you run into a snafu with kernel 2.6.1, who can you sue??
But can I sue Microsoft or Sun if I find a problem in their code? I would imagine (haven't checked) the license agreements give them a "get out of jail free" clause in the event of buggy code.
The short battery life is probably down to the "decent screen" and other components (DVD, Harddisk) and little to do with the CPU if you compare the latest from Intel / Transmeta.
That being said, I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 8100 which I can get 9 hours of work done between recharges... I do have 2 batteries in it, but I think that this is still quite good.
(Running Slackware 8.0, 2.4.6 kernel with APM on, with Windows 2000 under VMWare)
I can assure you that these guys are really thirsty... I used the 15000's smaller brother, the SunFire 4800 at Sun's labs in the UK earlier this year (prior to the launch), and with 5 of them running at the same time we managed to trip the power breakers quite often.
The SunFire machines themselves are great performers when it comes to running large databases. I did find the disk I/O a little dissapointing, but then again we where only using a very basic disk setup.
The article didn't mention that VMWare does just allow you to run Windows on top of Linux. I'm currently running Windows 2000, OpenBSD 2.9, Solaris 8 x86, and Slackware 8 under VMWare environments on top of a Slackware 8 install. Everything runs great (graphics are a little slow), and it's a lot easier than having 4 or 5 different machines around.
I'm developing software that needs to run on all of these platforms and the current setup makes debugging easier.
One word of advice for anyone thinking about running VMWare: get plently of memory... especially if you intend running multiple VMs concurrently. The 2GB that I have is rapidly depleted when a few VMs are going.
Given that this is an IBM contract they're probably using DB2. I've been using that on Linux (RH 6.2) for 6 months now and it's been rock solid.. but I can't say the same for IBM's Websphere which is very flakey on the same system.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean "imagine 16 hour work days"??? - I'm living them already!
...would be to store just a URL on the device where drivers can be downloaded from. This way the host OS could go out and pull the drivers automatically. There would need to be some sort of naming convention to differentiate between drivers for the various versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc.... but this would avoid having to store all flavours of drivers on the device itself.
Of course if the device IS your method of connecting to the net then this may prove to be quite hard! ;-)
I'm sure I've seen the Double Panic on Sequent Dynix boxes also.
While doing some JavaScript programming with and old version of Netscape:
Undefined is not definedGoogle caught up.
IBM's mainframe customers have been doing it for years... seems to have worked for Big Blue... but as they're now switching to using Linux for a whole load of stuff, maybe it's a sign that the practice of renting is out of favour.
If they write the UI using the Swing API then the Aqua L&F comes for free, according to this page on Apple's developer site. Sure would be cool to have Star/OpenOffice with Aqua... the perfect reason for not buying MS Office v.X! ;-)
CNet may be partially right... the article talks about Apple engineers having access to StarOffice source and working on moving the UI to Quartz... maybe just the UI work will be done in Java (which has the Quartz UI on MacOS X) with the core functionality being in C/C++ as per the other Star/Open Office platforms. Using JNI this would certainly be possible... as for performance, well, we'll have to wait and see.
Taking a look at the tech specs for Shake, reveals that a 3 button mouse is required on the Mac platform... now where can I find one of those on the Apple store? ;-)
So, according to yesterdays "$1 per feature" keynote by Jobs about MacOSX 10.2 (Jaguar), this should cost just $50! ;-)
Software to 4000+ boxes... easy, just install Outlook, a few choice lines of script.. well, it works for a load of viruses anyway! ;-)
I've heard that the Windows port took something over 100 engineer years, and I imagine Linux would take at least as many. That's, VERY rough ballpark, $20M.
But, if Apple opened it up and let the community do the port (I'm sure there's the will), it would cost them substantially less. If they only open up the playback side and leave the authoring closed and on the current platforms it would still benefit Linux and *BSD greatly.
With MacOS X (Darwin) being a flavor of FreeBSD they probably have a large proportion of the work required to make a *BSD/Linux port possible done already.
But, back in the real world, what would be their motive for taking such a move? With MacOS X, they already have a viable (unix like) platform for Quicktime and it works quite well (at least on my B&W G3 and iBook2), so the benefits for Apple of having QT support on Linux/*BSD would be low. Despite this point, I'd still love to have a native QT player on my Slackware desktop.
I tend to work on the principle that if my SO owns more pairs of shoes than I have servers/switches/routers etc. then I'm in safe territory... at the moment I'm falling far behind and need some more hardware. ;-)
4. Cowboy Neal
There already is a S/390 emulator... now all you need is the OS... or you could be daring and try Linux on it.
As others have commented, VNC does not allow multiple remote sessions on the Windows platform (as it does under Linux and a few others). But when VNC is coupled with WMware (regular workstation version not GX or EX) you can build a server hosting several concurrent Windows users.
I have a server with WinNT and Win2K (and Linux and OpenBSD) running under VMware (on Slackware) which are accessed from both Linux and MacOSX clients using VNC. Both MS OS's are legal (I bought them) copies, but it would seem that I'm using them illegally by installing and accessing them in this manner.
One wonders if any effort has been made to validate the origins of any of the comments. If it has, I guess this one slipped through.
voice tags to people's numbers
A number of Motorola phones have this already and it works quite well (in my experience).
My service provider (Orange) also has a service called WildFire which works on voice recognition... it allows you to dial numbers in your phone book or other numbers by just saying the number... it's great when you're driving with a handsfree kit attached (not that I would know as this is frowned upon by the local law!). WildFire also manages voice mails by voice commands too... you do feel quite silly initially, talking to the service, but after a while you get used to it.
if you run into a snafu with kernel 2.6.1, who can you sue??
But can I sue Microsoft or Sun if I find a problem in their code? I would imagine (haven't checked) the license agreements give them a "get out of jail free" clause in the event of buggy code.
I'm just producing different mixes of my phone numbers... Rock and Dance so far, was half way through the reggae mix but I got high.
The short battery life is probably down to the "decent screen" and other components (DVD, Harddisk) and little to do with the CPU if you compare the latest from Intel / Transmeta.
That being said, I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron 8100 which I can get 9 hours of work done between recharges... I do have 2 batteries in it, but I think that this is still quite good.
(Running Slackware 8.0, 2.4.6 kernel with APM on, with Windows 2000 under VMWare)
I can assure you that these guys are really thirsty... I used the 15000's smaller brother, the SunFire 4800 at Sun's labs in the UK earlier this year (prior to the launch), and with 5 of them running at the same time we managed to trip the power breakers quite often.
The SunFire machines themselves are great performers when it comes to running large databases. I did find the disk I/O a little dissapointing, but then again we where only using a very basic disk setup.
The article didn't mention that VMWare does just allow you to run Windows on top of Linux. I'm currently running Windows 2000, OpenBSD 2.9, Solaris 8 x86, and Slackware 8 under VMWare environments on top of a Slackware 8 install. Everything runs great (graphics are a little slow), and it's a lot easier than having 4 or 5 different machines around.
I'm developing software that needs to run on all of these platforms and the current setup makes debugging easier.
One word of advice for anyone thinking about running VMWare: get plently of memory... especially if you intend running multiple VMs concurrently. The 2GB that I have is rapidly depleted when a few VMs are going.
Given that this is an IBM contract they're probably using DB2. I've been using that on Linux (RH 6.2) for 6 months now and it's been rock solid.. but I can't say the same for IBM's Websphere which is very flakey on the same system.