As early as two days ago, I was sending MIDI files to my phone via email. It worked just fine. I'm currently using one of these MIDIs as my ringtones for calls, TXT, voicemail, etc. The files have a.mid extension and everything.
All I did was send it to: mytendigitnumber@vzwpix.com
I just sent myself another one as a test. Worked like a charm. Same thing with sending pix for a background wallpaper. I do have a picture messaging plan (20 pix/month).
And for what it's worth, I even wrote an article about getting on Verizon's 1xRTT network using Bluetooth and OS X. That also works like a charm.
I had a subscription to Linux Journal for a couple of years and loved the technical details and general nerdiness. Since going to the Mac side for my desktop computing, I've been wishing for a Mac analog to Linux Journal. I'd love to see a magazine for OS X/Cocoa developers.
"The total I/O throughput capacity of the current z900 mainframes is no less than 24GB (that's bytes, not bits) per second."
I would call this a major reason why we still use mainframes to manage all of the student records at my university/job. When you've got to process various data contained within several hundred thousand individual records in a couple hundred jobs that must run nightly, it's hard to compare much of anything to the mainframe.
Keep in mind that the workload I just mentioned is only for the Registrar's Office (where I work). All the other offices on campus (Financial Aid, Financial Services, etc) are also using this mainframe nightly.
Err... You're kidding right? I've used both, but own neither:-( but given the choice I'd have a PowerBook G4, why?
I had the choice, and I opted to get the iBook. My primary reason is that the iBook runs a lot cooler. I also have found that the iBook (14.1-inch model) has slightly better battery life than the TiBook.
Both the G4 and G3 processors are excellent for a laptop system, but I'm a big fan of G3 laptops.
(Oh, yeah, I'm considering a double-major in English and Comp Sci...aside from the threatening senior-year workload, I think it should be doable.)
It's very doable. I chose a similar (but slightly different) path myself. I chose to get my undergraduate degree in English (emphasis in critical theory), and now I'm working on my Masters in Computer Science. You'd really be surprised how nicely the two fit together. English (especially with a lot of courses in theory and critical models) teaches you how to think about thinking and writing (metacognition and metanarrative). Computer science teaches you how to think about programming. The thought pattern is quite similar and (to a theory geek like me) quite enjoyable as well.
If that's how you feel about Linux, why not go over to FreeBSD and revel in its non-mainstream glory?
Disclaimer: This is a not a frothing at the mouth defend-my-OS-to-the-death post. This is just my observation.
Actually, I find that the BSD community as a whole is pretty accepting of folks who are new to this whole thing. The FreeBSD Diary is quite possibly the best newbie resource for any OS out there. Back when I was using RedHat Linux, I was often wishing for a site exactly like that.
In addition to that, the mailing list archives for all of the *BSDs are excellent. I've gotten a lot more help out of them than I got from RedHat's documentation. The only thing I don't like about the mailing list archives is that the search function for FreeBSD's archive is about as intelligent as a monkey with braindamage. But after two or three tries, I find usually find exactly what I'm looking for.
And I won't continue to go on about the wonders of the ports system (packages under NetBSD). But suffice it to say, they are clean, simple, and just plain wonderful. (I do have to give credit where credit is due though and mention that Debian's system is pretty awesome too.)
There's not as much information out there about BSD as there is about Linux, but the documentation/assistance that is there I've found to be truly excellent.
Starship Titanic is definitely worth the ten bucks they want for it in the bargain bin. Back when it first came out, some friends of mine locked themselves in my apartment and we just played that game straight through until it was over. Very quirky and humorous with an almost Infocom feel to it. You'd never believe that a graphical game could managed to capture that frustrating/fun mix of the Infocom HHGTTG game, but Starship Titanic definitely did it for me.
And your nitpicking was duly deserved. Pre-coffee brain fart, I guess.
You are officially my hero. I plan on killing several hours here with some HHGTG/Infocom goodness.
You know, the fact that someone bothered to even make this game over a decade after it was made initially points to exactly how good these old Infocom games are.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Game was the best Infocom game hands down. I think that the part on the Gorgon ship where you have to figure out how to get the Babel Fish is one of the best parts of any text-based game ever.
Hmmm...Maybe I need a DOS emulator on my FreeBSD box...
I find that the PCMCIA stuff works pretty well under FreeBSD 4.x. I just recently bought a used IBM Thinkpad 365XD, and I've got everything up and running smoothly (with the minor exception that I can't get X running in 800x600). The pccard daemon smoothly handles the hot swapping of my various cards quite happily.
I had a lot of trouble getting my PCMCIA ethernet card - a LinkSys PCMPC100 V2 - working with the standard 4.1.1 boot floppies (I wanted to use that card to download via FTP). The fact that the ID string for the card had "V2" in it was confusing pccardd. So I hacked up my own installation floppies which recognized the card and it worked like a dream.
Plus (I know this is kind of lame), FreeBSD 5.x PCMCIA support is going to be even better. (Try tracking bleeding edge -CURRENT to see what I'm talking about.)
I have nothing against Linux. BSD just feels a lot more natural to me.
Actually my local Wal-Mart has been selling Linux distros for a while now. They've had several boxes of RedHat 6.1 sitting right on the shelf in the computer aisle.
It might be important to note that they haven't been sold and they've been there for at least six months.
Will the typical Wal-Mart shopper - myself excluded - actually give a darn about Linux being on the shelf?
According to the article BSD will cease to exist. Or at least remain completely unnoticed by journalists.
We'll just keep churning out a solid OS and leave the media to find stories about two-headed babies and politicians who can't tell the truth.;)
I for one hope that the media never picks up on the various BSDs. I love the look of confusion on people's faces when I tell them what I'm running on my laptop.
My favorite comment:
"Is that a distribution of Linux?"
Plus, for a data collection application I would give serious consideration to the WinCE machines with keyboards. I wouldn't trade my Palm Pro for one, but then I'm not writing up accident reports on my Palm Pro.
Excellent point. In this specific application, precision and speed of entry could be very important. If the people in the field know how to type on a computer keyboard, you might get much better results with a PocketPC.
Of course all the other advantages of the Palm should be weighed as well. Think about which one is going to best meet your needs in this specific situation.
Although I personally think that Slackware is a superior distro to RedHat, you have to look at it from the corporate point of view.
I think you're pretty close to the truth here. I try to stay out of the Linux distro wars (being a BSD man myself), but I think you hit this one quite squarely on the head. In the choice of Linux distros, I personally prefer Slackware because it feels more like the brand of Unix that I'm accustomed to. It's a lot more spartan and therefore functional to me.
On the other hand, I get the feeling that Slack would feel like an out-of-body experience to a lot of corporate folks. Not necessarily to the engineers who are keeping that mainframe properly admin-ed, but to the executives. Most of the executives in my office would totally go off the deep end if they didn't have a corporate tech support contact. RedHat fills that gap.
Because RedHat works more like a standard corporation, it feels more comfortable to businesses who are looking for a Linux solution.
Pretty good stuff. I got to read the first part before their server got slashdotted...
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, noeld@pair.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
I can't say that Java is going to be the next big language, but I can certainly say that its design philosophy is excellent. In a world where operating systems want to make their APIs so convoluted and complex that no one would want to port them to another platform, Java is turning the tables. The idea behind Java is that if I choose I can write software for Windows and Linux and MacOS and any other machine that's running a JVM.
Granted, I know that Java isn't quite there yet. I personally experienced the pain of moving some of my Java programs that I had written under Windows and moving them to Linux, my new OS. And honestly Java seems to take a performance hit by compiling to byte codes and doing run-time optimization.
The strength of this article is that it points out (with some tentative evidence) that the performance hit doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as we (or at least I) thought. Perhaps the author is right. Maybe the problem isn't because of byte code compilation. Maybe it lies in the relative newness of Java as a language/platform.
Someday C will be superceded by another language. That language may or may not be Java. Honestly I'll probably keep programming in C, but I'll definitely keep an eye on Java as it matures.
By splitting the company into an apps co and an OS co, the reasoning (hope?) is that the applications company will now be free to write apps for other OS's.
You make a good point here. And there certainly seems to be evidence to back it up. Why is it that Corel's WordPerfect is available for both the Windows and Linux platforms? Taken from the other side, why isn't MS Office offered to Linux when it's clear that Microsoft would pull in additional revenue (however small) by selling to a new set of users? The reason is that Corel isn't trying to protect an OS (though I am a bit uncomfortable about their decision to make a Linux distribution) while Microsoft is.
Can anyone tell me if X is better than GNOME or KDE or Enlightenment or any of the others?
Actually, you're already using X. You just don't know it. Linux/Unix GUIs are divided into two parts--a server and a client. XFree86 is the X-Windows server. GNOME and KDE are actually the clients on your system. Most of the Linux distribuitions use XFree86, but there are other X servers.
This is further complicated by the fact that both GNOME and KDE also require a "window manager". GNOME 1.2 uses Sawfish as a window manager. Most previous versions of GNOME use Enlightenment. KDE uses it's own K Window Manager.
If I've got anything wrong, I hope that someone else will correct it. I'm just trying to offer help from one newbie to another.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this the whole plot to Crisis on Infinite Earths?
As early as two days ago, I was sending MIDI files to my phone via email. It worked just fine. I'm currently using one of these MIDIs as my ringtones for calls, TXT, voicemail, etc. The files have a .mid extension and everything.
All I did was send it to:
mytendigitnumber@vzwpix.com
I just sent myself another one as a test. Worked like a charm. Same thing with sending pix for a background wallpaper. I do have a picture messaging plan (20 pix/month).
And for what it's worth, I even wrote an article about getting on Verizon's 1xRTT network using Bluetooth and OS X. That also works like a charm.
I had a subscription to Linux Journal for a couple of years and loved the technical details and general nerdiness. Since going to the Mac side for my desktop computing, I've been wishing for a Mac analog to Linux Journal. I'd love to see a magazine for OS X/Cocoa developers.
Actually, it was in the honors dorms. Luck had less to do with it than earning a high SAT or ACT score.
I would call this a major reason why we still use mainframes to manage all of the student records at my university/job. When you've got to process various data contained within several hundred thousand individual records in a couple hundred jobs that must run nightly, it's hard to compare much of anything to the mainframe.
Keep in mind that the workload I just mentioned is only for the Registrar's Office (where I work). All the other offices on campus (Financial Aid, Financial Services, etc) are also using this mainframe nightly.
I had the choice, and I opted to get the iBook. My primary reason is that the iBook runs a lot cooler. I also have found that the iBook (14.1-inch model) has slightly better battery life than the TiBook.
Both the G4 and G3 processors are excellent for a laptop system, but I'm a big fan of G3 laptops.
(Oh, yeah, I'm considering a double-major in English and Comp Sci...aside from the threatening senior-year workload, I think it should be doable.)
It's very doable. I chose a similar (but slightly different) path myself. I chose to get my undergraduate degree in English (emphasis in critical theory), and now I'm working on my Masters in Computer Science. You'd really be surprised how nicely the two fit together. English (especially with a lot of courses in theory and critical models) teaches you how to think about thinking and writing (metacognition and metanarrative). Computer science teaches you how to think about programming. The thought pattern is quite similar and (to a theory geek like me) quite enjoyable as well.
Disclaimer: This is a not a frothing at the mouth defend-my-OS-to-the-death post. This is just my observation.
Actually, I find that the BSD community as a whole is pretty accepting of folks who are new to this whole thing. The FreeBSD Diary is quite possibly the best newbie resource for any OS out there. Back when I was using RedHat Linux, I was often wishing for a site exactly like that.
In addition to that, the mailing list archives for all of the *BSDs are excellent. I've gotten a lot more help out of them than I got from RedHat's documentation. The only thing I don't like about the mailing list archives is that the search function for FreeBSD's archive is about as intelligent as a monkey with braindamage. But after two or three tries, I find usually find exactly what I'm looking for.
And I won't continue to go on about the wonders of the ports system (packages under NetBSD). But suffice it to say, they are clean, simple, and just plain wonderful. (I do have to give credit where credit is due though and mention that Debian's system is pretty awesome too.)
There's not as much information out there about BSD as there is about Linux, but the documentation/assistance that is there I've found to be truly excellent.
Starship Titanic is definitely worth the ten bucks they want for it in the bargain bin. Back when it first came out, some friends of mine locked themselves in my apartment and we just played that game straight through until it was over. Very quirky and humorous with an almost Infocom feel to it. You'd never believe that a graphical game could managed to capture that frustrating/fun mix of the Infocom HHGTTG game, but Starship Titanic definitely did it for me.
And your nitpicking was duly deserved. Pre-coffee brain fart, I guess.
You are officially my hero. I plan on killing several hours here with some HHGTG/Infocom goodness.
You know, the fact that someone bothered to even make this game over a decade after it was made initially points to exactly how good these old Infocom games are.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Game was the best Infocom game hands down. I think that the part on the Gorgon ship where you have to figure out how to get the Babel Fish is one of the best parts of any text-based game ever.
Hmmm...Maybe I need a DOS emulator on my FreeBSD box...
I find that the PCMCIA stuff works pretty well under FreeBSD 4.x. I just recently bought a used IBM Thinkpad 365XD, and I've got everything up and running smoothly (with the minor exception that I can't get X running in 800x600). The pccard daemon smoothly handles the hot swapping of my various cards quite happily.
I had a lot of trouble getting my PCMCIA ethernet card - a LinkSys PCMPC100 V2 - working with the standard 4.1.1 boot floppies (I wanted to use that card to download via FTP). The fact that the ID string for the card had "V2" in it was confusing pccardd. So I hacked up my own installation floppies which recognized the card and it worked like a dream.
Plus (I know this is kind of lame), FreeBSD 5.x PCMCIA support is going to be even better. (Try tracking bleeding edge -CURRENT to see what I'm talking about.)
I have nothing against Linux. BSD just feels a lot more natural to me.
Actually my local Wal-Mart has been selling Linux distros for a while now. They've had several boxes of RedHat 6.1 sitting right on the shelf in the computer aisle.
It might be important to note that they haven't been sold and they've been there for at least six months.
Will the typical Wal-Mart shopper - myself excluded - actually give a darn about Linux being on the shelf?
According to the article BSD will cease to exist. Or at least remain completely unnoticed by journalists.
We'll just keep churning out a solid OS and leave the media to find stories about two-headed babies and politicians who can't tell the truth. ;)
I for one hope that the media never picks up on the various BSDs. I love the look of confusion on people's faces when I tell them what I'm running on my laptop.
My favorite comment:
"Is that a distribution of Linux?"
Plus, for a data collection application I would give serious consideration to the WinCE machines with keyboards. I wouldn't trade my Palm Pro for one, but then I'm not writing up accident reports on my Palm Pro.
Excellent point. In this specific application, precision and speed of entry could be very important. If the people in the field know how to type on a computer keyboard, you might get much better results with a PocketPC.
Of course all the other advantages of the Palm should be weighed as well. Think about which one is going to best meet your needs in this specific situation.
Although I personally think that Slackware is a superior distro to RedHat, you have to look at it from the corporate point of view.
I think you're pretty close to the truth here. I try to stay out of the Linux distro wars (being a BSD man myself), but I think you hit this one quite squarely on the head. In the choice of Linux distros, I personally prefer Slackware because it feels more like the brand of Unix that I'm accustomed to. It's a lot more spartan and therefore functional to me.
On the other hand, I get the feeling that Slack would feel like an out-of-body experience to a lot of corporate folks. Not necessarily to the engineers who are keeping that mainframe properly admin-ed, but to the executives. Most of the executives in my office would totally go off the deep end if they didn't have a corporate tech support contact. RedHat fills that gap.
Because RedHat works more like a standard corporation, it feels more comfortable to businesses who are looking for a Linux solution.
At least that's what I think...
If the porn industry ever caught on to this...oh man!
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Pretty good stuff. I got to read the first part before their server got slashdotted...
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, noeld@pair.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
couldn't spawn child process:
/usr/www/cgi-bin/php-cgiwrap
Mmmmmmmmmm...RedHat anus...
If only people weren't so stupid as to download everything that someone sends to them...
I saw "kernel" and "released" and got my hopes up that 2.4 was finished. Damn the man and his female consort.
I can't say that Java is going to be the next big language, but I can certainly say that its design philosophy is excellent. In a world where operating systems want to make their APIs so convoluted and complex that no one would want to port them to another platform, Java is turning the tables. The idea behind Java is that if I choose I can write software for Windows and Linux and MacOS and any other machine that's running a JVM.
Granted, I know that Java isn't quite there yet. I personally experienced the pain of moving some of my Java programs that I had written under Windows and moving them to Linux, my new OS. And honestly Java seems to take a performance hit by compiling to byte codes and doing run-time optimization.
The strength of this article is that it points out (with some tentative evidence) that the performance hit doesn't seem to be nearly as bad as we (or at least I) thought. Perhaps the author is right. Maybe the problem isn't because of byte code compilation. Maybe it lies in the relative newness of Java as a language/platform.
Someday C will be superceded by another language. That language may or may not be Java. Honestly I'll probably keep programming in C, but I'll definitely keep an eye on Java as it matures.
By splitting the company into an apps co and an OS co, the reasoning (hope?) is that the applications company will now be free to write apps for other OS's.
You make a good point here. And there certainly seems to be evidence to back it up. Why is it that Corel's WordPerfect is available for both the Windows and Linux platforms? Taken from the other side, why isn't MS Office offered to Linux when it's clear that Microsoft would pull in additional revenue (however small) by selling to a new set of users? The reason is that Corel isn't trying to protect an OS (though I am a bit uncomfortable about their decision to make a Linux distribution) while Microsoft is.
Can anyone tell me if X is better than GNOME or KDE or Enlightenment or any of the others?
Actually, you're already using X. You just don't know it. Linux/Unix GUIs are divided into two parts--a server and a client. XFree86 is the X-Windows server. GNOME and KDE are actually the clients on your system. Most of the Linux distribuitions use XFree86, but there are other X servers.
This is further complicated by the fact that both GNOME and KDE also require a "window manager". GNOME 1.2 uses Sawfish as a window manager. Most previous versions of GNOME use Enlightenment. KDE uses it's own K Window Manager.
If I've got anything wrong, I hope that someone else will correct it. I'm just trying to offer help from one newbie to another.
rusty