By giving Windows developers access to the great development tools of Linux/Unix (Cygwin et all..) I think you make it easier to have developers stick with windows than switch.
I worked at a small software house that had a linux "mainframe" . Developers machines were dual boot Linux/NT. The NT had a Xserver and once Cygwin was installed on the NT side almost noonne booted into linux ever..WinCVS and SAMBA, TCL for windows, emacs, perl and Java, X made it super easy to do development on NT as opposed to using those tools in the native linux world. once compenets were build they could be loaded onto the linux machine and tested.
I think it may make some more open to using linux, but not as many as those who stick it out with windows longer because the tools are almost the same now.
Its Been done and failed... Remember DivX?
on
Rent Music Over the Net
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Dixv (not to be confused with the codec) was this DVD based movie format. The Divx -DVD's and your player would phone in and charge you every time you played the movie..
I think there was a larger fee to "unlock" the movie permanently for 1 player as well. It was supposed to make rentals that you didn't have to return etc..
Judging from the complete lack of Divx/DVD players in stores, I'd say consumers didn't go for it. So being fast learners they try it with music now..
Of course with the headphone jack and a MiniDisc player the issure becomes moot..
I took the EIT exam which this first step tword becomming an "engineer". It was 4 hours and covered all of the engineering fields (electrical, mechanical, civil, chemisty).. It wasn't too bad, but tested my entire undergraduate schooling.
After going through graduate computer science/software engineering, I can't see how a CS ciriculum is going to prepare students for this "engineering" test.
The states make you an engineer, and unless they are all going to impliment a standard and separate cs engineering test, I don't see it flying.
Computer science pay is much much higher than
civil engeering..
Re:Home made calendars when they run out of wall
on
Geek Gift Ideas 2001
·
· Score: 2
I made homemade calendars with my epson wide printer. I gave b/w prints for a number of years and it worked great, but how many can you give...
Now armed with a negative scanner and a printer capable of 11 x 17 my girlfriend and I cranked out a bunch calendars to give to parents and friends. We put a photo on top and the calendar part on the bottom and the "hinge" at the top. We used a photoshop/ illustrator, but almost any program wilil do. the "cal" unix program provided the month layouts..
You could also do it with a middle hinged 8x10 too.
The prints are amazing looking, and since they're calendars they can't be expected to last forever. (ie not archival...). Good paper is expensive though, but not much more than photo paper..
I know linux ppc can read apple hfs partitions. I've used this feature to move files from the mac side of my ppc to the linux side. The unix permissions thing gets a little strange... but it works.
However It can't read hfs+... that I know of.
I don't know what the ipod it though hfs or hfs+.. hfs+ is sort of the window equivalent of fat32..
I had DSL from verizon with a fixed IP at the regular price (I signed up early). Port 80 was unblocked...
Then my linux server was attacked, by code-red. The server survived but port 80 hasn't come back yet....
I've been using ada at a job for 6 months now. It is a "safe" language.
I didn't like it at first. Now I find I'm liking it more and more. It does a lot that make it really usefull in the "very very high" reliability programing.
It does have very strong type checking al la jave. You can make you own range constraints on types you create..Y is an it between -360 and 360.
If you try to make Y bigger or smaller that that range you throw a contraint exception
You pay a little in performance for this, but although I hear that if you did all that checking manually in another language it would be even slower.
It has some other nice features that other programming languages have in various forms, including enumeration types , records types (like a struct) and you can specify down to the bit level the arrangement of the struct..ie which fields go where. It even has "packages" which are a bit like objects.
Ada isn't as powerful as C though and it lacks a lot of the tools and libraries . Its also hard to find good books on it too.
One joke at work is that Ada actually more powerfull because you can bind it to C code.
We hear stories about other projects having problems with C and bigger problems with C++. Ada although slow to program in does nice for systems that require very high reliability.
There is a Gnatt compiler which is free and open source too... Try it.
I don't think I would ever have passed all the number crunching civil engineering classes and the dreaded EIT (engineer licencing test) without my trusty 32s.
I lothe regular calculators now...
When It got stolen with my bookbag (uggg) I got the 42s. even better! 2 lines of stack on the screen!!! I still use it. Durable too.
Maybe its not as big a deal now that calculators can enter equations with parens..
I was thinking of wipping up a desktop calculator that did rpm.... Maybe its time..
The decordova museum in lincoln ma had an exhibit which included the latest state of the art video games. Zaxxon was free!! this was in the 80's and had a bunch of games..
since the decordova is art museum arcade games must be art.
If they are good art or bad art might depend on the game in question.
I don't think the screenshots are real.. If the gateway tv/computer taught me anything is that the resolutions of tv's is not high
first person shooters on consoles and bungie.
on
First Review of Halo
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· Score: 2
I guess I've never liked first person shooters on consoles. My brother had doom for Play Station and I didn't really like the control. Maybe the new controlers will work better. I still think it will work better with mouse/keyboard.
I just don't know. Halo was big news a couple years ago (they did a demo at mac-world..). Then bungie got bought by MS the game was delayed and now seems to be Xbox only. Like the mac world needed one less game developer developing for them....
I grew up on ultima.. I actually one ultima I,2, and 3.. Loved exploring all the levels and caves and towns...
Its nice to have retro games redone when there redone right. Ambrosia software had a game calles:Mallstrom that was an asteriods rip off with better graphics and new features. It is great.
Because if MAME and hooking up my old intellivision has taught me anything the games of the past were great but the graphics stank..
(back in my day humans were shown on screen with 6 rectangles and one color, none of this namby pamby 3d vector shaded triangle stuff.. and We LIKED it...)
Old games can be found on abandonware sites and most still run on "modern" OSs(at least shufflepuck does.. although without sound..) But its nice to see the best games comming back with better graphics..
but seriously, your downloading an execuable, its being decompressed.
You can run it now, or run it later when you launch it....
Some Mac users don't diferentiate executables and documents. They often double click on executables and documents. The mac stores file type and application to run with documents (at least up to 9.x) so it knows which application to run. Many mac users use documents to launch their programs (a more doc-u-centric approach)
The danger here is people may think they are downloading a data file, when its an executable. most people don't check. The pc sircam virus uses this technique to trick users into launching it, so its not a unique "mac" problem.
Watch what you download..!
On the plus side the Unixy features of OSX should prevent it from hosing your system, you just have to worry about your documents...
I was photo editor at my college paper (dailly collegian!) So I hung out with many journalists. They make very little money so how can you expect someone who is knowledgable about computers to choose a career in journalism as opposed to a lucrative computer job.
Thats why slashdot/usenet is a usefull place to get computer information from people actually working and the web is so bad about reporting facts properly.
I think a lot of the mind share has to do with mr jobs.
Steve Jobs is a computer legend, no matter what you think of him personally he deserves a lot of credit for mainstreaming the gui/ mouse and pushing the computing envelope. ( a gui computer with 128k ram and no hard drive.... even today it seems somewhat amazing)
So when steve talks, lots of people take notice. I think alot of the hype around OS-X has less to do with what it is than what people expect the "next" (no pun intended) thing in os's to be, and steve is selling this future.
He's also captured the imagination of unix folks with open source underpinnings and the ability to run word and photoshop and grep / script at the same time. Its GCC based so expect a lot of that nice GNU software will run on OS-X in short order making it more powerful at little expense to apple.
We'll see how it works out. Can't hurt to have more unix boxen out there though, especially in schools.
I've installed linux on PCs and macs. The 2 macs I've installed on are "old world" machines a starmax motorola clone and a 7200.
It was fairly easy and straightforward (the documentation could have been better though.....)
I used linuxPPC The one thing that helps on the ppc side is that most hardware is fairly standard and autodetected.
It works great.. I have a firewall/ip masq machine and a server...
I remeber games for mac SE that were networked via apple-talk . Net Trek was one and this maze game with a shoe was another... Long before doom and the 1990s..
I have 2 mac clones.. I'm very happy with them. My next machine will be a mac.
I've been very happy with my machines. They've been painless in terms of both OS and hardware (I've upgraded the CPU and memory added 2nd video card... all easy). It seems a lot of thought was put into the machines. I had a quantum harddrive I added fail (twice actually, the one covered under warrenty failed too...), but the original IBM drive is still ticking 5+ years later.
The machines aren't cheap, but they last a long time, and save me lots of time and hassle, and after working with computers all day (HPUX) and fixing some friends windows pc's they work great.
OS-Xs unix underpinnings make the decision easier (I can perl and grep!!!)
Slashdot Mirror
makes sense to me. Products that are worse and cost more don't survive.
Battery life matter much to me, so I use my Minidisc (40 hrs aa per charge). Those these units definetly have there plusses.
By giving Windows developers access to the great development tools of Linux/Unix (Cygwin et all..) I think you make it easier to have developers stick with windows than switch.
I worked at a small software house that had a linux "mainframe" . Developers machines were dual boot Linux/NT. The NT had a Xserver and once Cygwin was installed on the NT side almost noonne booted into linux ever..WinCVS and SAMBA, TCL for windows, emacs, perl and Java, X made it super easy to do development on NT as opposed to using those tools in the native linux world. once compenets were build they could be loaded onto the linux machine and tested.
I think it may make some more open to using linux, but not as many as those who stick it out with windows longer because the tools are almost the same now.
Dixv (not to be confused with the codec) was this DVD based movie format. The Divx -DVD's and your player would phone in and charge you every time you played the movie..
I think there was a larger fee to "unlock" the movie permanently for 1 player as well. It was supposed to make rentals that you didn't have to return etc..
Judging from the complete lack of Divx/DVD players in stores, I'd say consumers didn't go for it. So being fast learners they try it with music now..
Of course with the headphone jack and a MiniDisc player the issure becomes moot..
stop.. come here .... pass please
I took the EIT exam which this first step tword becomming an "engineer". It was 4 hours and covered all of the engineering fields (electrical, mechanical, civil, chemisty).. It wasn't too bad, but tested my entire undergraduate schooling.
After going through graduate computer science/software engineering, I can't see how a CS ciriculum is going to prepare students for this "engineering" test.
The states make you an engineer, and unless they are all going to impliment a standard and separate cs engineering test, I don't see it flying.
Computer science pay is much much higher than
civil engeering..
I made homemade calendars with my epson wide printer. I gave b/w prints for a number of years and it worked great, but how many can you give...
Now armed with a negative scanner and a printer capable of 11 x 17 my girlfriend and I cranked out a bunch calendars to give to parents and friends. We put a photo on top and the calendar part on the bottom and the "hinge" at the top. We used a photoshop/ illustrator, but almost any program wilil do. the "cal" unix program provided the month layouts..
You could also do it with a middle hinged 8x10 too.
The prints are amazing looking, and since they're calendars they can't be expected to last forever. (ie not archival...). Good paper is expensive though, but not much more than photo paper..
However It can't read hfs+... that I know of.
I don't know what the ipod it though hfs or hfs+.. hfs+ is sort of the window equivalent of fat32..
I had DSL from verizon with a fixed IP at the regular price (I signed up early). Port 80 was unblocked...
Then my linux server was attacked, by code-red. The server survived but port 80 hasn't come back yet....
Then apple bought NEXT...
But the interface lives on as "Afterstep"!!
Long live Afterstep (untill something better comes along...)
I've been using ada at a job for 6 months now. It is a "safe" language.
..Y is an it between -360 and 360.
I didn't like it at first. Now I find I'm liking it more and more. It does a lot that make it really usefull in the "very very high" reliability programing.
It does have very strong type checking al la jave. You can make you own range constraints on types you create
If you try to make Y bigger or smaller that that range you throw a contraint exception
You pay a little in performance for this, but although I hear that if you did all that checking manually in another language it would be even slower.
It has some other nice features that other programming languages have in various forms, including enumeration types , records types (like a struct) and you can specify down to the bit level the arrangement of the struct..ie which fields go where. It even has "packages" which are a bit like objects.
Ada isn't as powerful as C though and it lacks a lot of the tools and libraries . Its also hard to find good books on it too.
One joke at work is that Ada actually more powerfull because you can bind it to C code.
We hear stories about other projects having problems with C and bigger problems with C++. Ada although slow to program in does nice for systems that require very high reliability.
There is a Gnatt compiler which is free and open source too... Try it.
works every time. Then just click on the starwars trailer button..
I think the refering page has to be from apple.com for some reason.
NYtimes article.. For MusiciansX box is no jackpot.
I guess they didn't get to be rich by writing a lot of checks.... (thanks homer)..
Its a shame.
I don't think I would ever have passed all the number crunching civil engineering classes and the dreaded EIT (engineer licencing test) without my trusty 32s.
I lothe regular calculators now...
When It got stolen with my bookbag (uggg) I got the 42s. even better! 2 lines of stack on the screen!!! I still use it. Durable too.
Maybe its not as big a deal now that calculators can enter equations with parens..
I was thinking of wipping up a desktop calculator that did rpm.... Maybe its time..
Last I heard IBM/Seagate/WD wern't going to support 133 ata...
I don't think anything has changed...
The decordova museum in lincoln ma had an exhibit which included the latest state of the art video games. Zaxxon was free!! this was in the 80's and had a bunch of games..
since the decordova is art museum arcade games must be art.
If they are good art or bad art might depend on the game in question.
I don't think the screenshots are real.. If the gateway tv/computer taught me anything is that the resolutions of tv's is not high
I guess I've never liked first person shooters on consoles. My brother had doom for Play Station and I didn't really like the control. Maybe the new controlers will work better. I still think it will work better with mouse/keyboard.
I just don't know. Halo was big news a couple years ago (they did a demo at mac-world..). Then bungie got bought by MS the game was delayed and now seems to be Xbox only. Like the mac world needed one less game developer developing for them....
data drive is kinda neet.. You can haul around some images. videos etc.. Firewire makes syncing fast too..
/it can be used on "Non" apple computers...
Not bad. The big question is whether they'll let
I grew up on ultima.. I actually one ultima I,2, and 3.. Loved exploring all the levels and caves and towns...
Its nice to have retro games redone when there redone right. Ambrosia software had a game calles
Because if MAME and hooking up my old intellivision has taught me anything the games of the past were great but the graphics stank..
(back in my day humans were shown on screen with 6 rectangles and one color, none of this namby pamby 3d vector shaded triangle stuff.. and We LIKED it...)
Old games can be found on abandonware sites and most still run on "modern" OSs(at least shufflepuck does
I think the autoexecution is a dumb idea...
but seriously, your downloading an execuable, its being decompressed.
You can run it now, or run it later when you launch it....
Some Mac users don't diferentiate executables and documents. They often double click on executables and documents. The mac stores file type and application to run with documents (at least up to 9.x) so it knows which application to run. Many mac users use documents to launch their programs (a more doc-u-centric approach)
The danger here is people may think they are downloading a data file, when its an executable. most people don't check. The pc sircam virus uses this technique to trick users into launching it, so its not a unique "mac" problem.
Watch what you download..!
On the plus side the Unixy features of OSX should prevent it from hosing your system, you just have to worry about your documents...
I was photo editor at my college paper (dailly collegian!) So I hung out with many journalists. They make very little money so how can you expect someone who is knowledgable about computers to choose a career in journalism as opposed to a lucrative computer job.
/usenet is a usefull place to get computer information from people actually working and the web is so bad about reporting facts properly.
Thats why slashdot
I think a lot of the mind share has to do with mr jobs.
Steve Jobs is a computer legend, no matter what you think of him personally he deserves a lot of credit for mainstreaming the gui/ mouse and pushing the computing envelope. ( a gui computer with 128k ram and no hard drive.... even today it seems somewhat amazing)
So when steve talks, lots of people take notice. I think alot of the hype around OS-X has less to do with what it is than what people expect the "next" (no pun intended) thing in os's to be, and steve is selling this future.
He's also captured the imagination of unix folks with open source underpinnings and the ability to run word and photoshop and grep / script at the same time. Its GCC based so expect a lot of that nice GNU software will run on OS-X in short order making it more powerful at little expense to apple.
We'll see how it works out. Can't hurt to have more unix boxen out there though, especially in schools.
Finaly something I know something about.
I've installed linux on PCs and macs. The 2 macs I've installed on are "old world" machines a starmax motorola clone and a 7200.
It was fairly easy and straightforward (the documentation could have been better though.....)
I used linuxPPC The one thing that helps on the ppc side is that most hardware is fairly standard and autodetected.
It works great.. I have a firewall/ip masq machine and a server...
I remeber games for mac SE that were networked via apple-talk . Net Trek was one and this maze game with a shoe was another... Long before doom and the 1990s..
/Aram
I have 2 mac clones.. I'm very happy with them. My next machine will be a mac.
I've been very happy with my machines. They've been painless in terms of both OS and hardware (I've upgraded the CPU and memory added 2nd video card... all easy). It seems a lot of thought was put into the machines. I had a quantum harddrive I added fail (twice actually, the one covered under warrenty failed too...), but the original IBM drive is still ticking 5+ years later.
The machines aren't cheap, but they last a long time, and save me lots of time and hassle, and after working with computers all day (HPUX) and fixing some friends windows pc's they work great.
OS-Xs unix underpinnings make the decision easier (I can perl and grep!!!)
The old machines make good LinuxPPC servers too!