Wonderful.
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So I can nest to infinite levels cygwin and the free version of Wine, giving me access to the Linux commands I already have in Linux, only now I have them available to me n+1 times at progressively "deeper" levels. I can dig arbitrarily deep in nested environments and run 'ls'. Huzzah!
But I still cannot run MS Office or Internet Explorer or most games in Wine. D'oh!
X is a well-designed system which serves everyone's needs, works now, and is compatible across the UNIX world. It would take a lot to displace it.
More to the point, in discussions like this everyone always says... "of course it would have to be backward compatible with X..." But these people fail to understand that the only way to be backward compatible with X is to implement the X protocol stream. And once you do that, ta-da you're an X server once again, just like XFree86.
Of course, if your lovely new GUI doesn't reimplement the X protocol and the client/server model, you render useless decades of program code, from ancient embedded applications all the way to current UNIX ports of OpenOffice and Mozilla, from astronomical observatories to cash registers.
And of course, then you will lose one of the biggest benefits of X: the X protocol stream and the client/server model. D'oh!
Skip IRC and chat rooms. These people are not only unhelpful when it comes to Linux, they are unhelpful and full of four letter words in general. That's why parents hate their kids hanging out there.
If you want to learn to use Linux, the best thing you can do for yourself is consult http://groups.google.com early and often. Every question you can think to ask has already been answered there any number of times. You can plug in your problem and get your answer instantly from one of the developers, rather than from some chump in a chat room.
It's an incredible tool that too few users know about.
Your're slowness is definitely caused by KDE, not by X. KDE is much more heavy than Windows 98, but you get what you pay for in features because KDE can do a lot of network transparent and scripting stuff that Windows simply can't.
But you really must learn to separate X from the programs which are running on it.
To run a modern version of KDE+X and get an instant response, the most important thing for you to do is get more memory (preferably 512MB, but 256MB in a pinch) and nicely accelerated display hardware (Voodoo, GeForce) rather than older display hardware. A faster CPU wouldn't hurt either.
Alternatively, you could simply go to http://www.windowmaker.org and get a blazing fast X desktop with your current hardware.
X is no slower than the Windows GDI for many things and is faster in some things. 2D acceleration in X is excellent, better than Windows for most display hardware, and 3D frame rates are within 1-2% of Windows. I routinely watch full-screen DVD in X and I use X (running Windows in emulation, no less) to do tons of graphics work. X is simply not slow.
I wouldn't be surprised if what you're seeing is a lack of memory on your system, meaning that parts of the cache (on a KDE+X system, you want to cache everything) are being flushed and are thus having to be refetched before being displayed again.
If it feels slow to you (especially if it feels slower than OS X, whose display PDF system is dog slow), then you're misconfigured or inadequately configured.
Um, no, a hardcore photoshop user like a photographer or graphic designer who works on today's truly hardcore images (10-40+ million pixels at 48-bit depth) needs much more than 800MHz/128MB/10GB, so for $200 you can not get another computer.
Anyway, don't forget the (absolutely horrid) price of Photoshop. Now for THAT you can maybe get another computer. But what you need is not another computer, what you need is Photoshop mixed with the stability of Win4Lin+Linux, which is much more stable than any native Windows (including W2k) I've ever used.
It's cheap, it's stable, and it runs every version of Photoshop I've had to use, from 5 onward.
Don't worry about speed, either. I clock most of the effects as faster running in Win4Lin using Windows 98 SE than in native Windows 98 SE and the Windows desktop in Win4Lin (which runs in a Linux window) is snappier than native Windows 98 SE as well, I assume because of the much better filesystem caching of Linux.
I also use Win4Lin to run MS Office. It's a great application and it won't cost you a bank!
You're right, except for the reference to communism. Just because China claims to be 'communist' doesn't mean that they are.
By very nature, 'communism' cannot exist alongside 'dictatorship' because the two are anathema to each other. The US is a much more communist state than China is (the US has many and powerful unions, the DeLeonist perspective, while in China unions are either nonexistent or impotent).
But you're right, the Chinese government is not helpful to its citizenry at all.
For those going on about the Chinese spy plane incident, rampant mainland Chinese software piracy, etc...
Taiwan is not China. Taiwan is a very urban, very modern nation which participates fairly in the world economy. Much of the technology used in America and throughout the world is manufactured in and imported from Taiwan. Though "officially" it is a Chinese province according to the US government, Taiwan and China have a very antagonistic relationship with one another -- Taiwan wants independence from China and is basically already fully independent in every way except in name. China considers Taiwan to be a 'rogue capitalist province' and the two governments hate one another (going back to the battles between the Chinese nationalists and communists early in the 20th century).
In fact, the US (if I understand correctly) has a very unusual agreement with Taiwan to jump to their defense if they should ever be invaded by China, even though at the same time the US also officially supports the "one China policy."
It is entirely possible that Taiwan wants to enhance its information security to protect itself from mainland China.
Most tech veterans from the pre-Windows era will already know this but for everyone else:
Hard drives fail.
They always have, they always will. They're mechanical, and even better than that, they're magnetic. That's how it is. You should plan to have to replace your hard drive every 1-3 years at least, if not more often than that, depending on workload and conditions. That's how it's always been. For the people saying 'but... I've never had a hard drive fail...' -- you're lucky as hell, but someday your luck will run out.
Even backup solutions fail.
Removable storage is mechanical as well. There are a lot of variables. Years of experience taught me the following lessons:
If you don't maintain removable storage backups (i.e. not just RAID-0 sitting inside your computer), you will lose data, sooner or later. Period. Some component on your power supply (even your high-end redundant power supply) will blow and take the entire system out with it. Or someone will acidentally bump into the case and cause a head crash. Or you'll have an earthquake. Or the sprinklers will come on because of a fault in the fire system. Or something. Trust me, it will happen.
Never use a single magnetic backup solution as your only solution, or you'll come running to your one set of tapes the day your hard drive crashes only to find that the secretary has been holding notes to that particular file cabinet with a nice magnet... it never fails.
Always keep at least one relatively recent set of backups offsite. Hell, put them in your desk at work, or in your locker at the gym, or in your safe deposit box, or at your mother-in-law's house. If your house or business burns down, you will be glad that you have your data saved somewhere.
If someone else manages your server (i.e. you're paying big bucks to some hosting company), be sure you pay extra for good backup service. Trust me, they will happily lose your data through some dumb operator error, and they'll be happy to tell you that they won't be held liable when you're yelling at them on the phone.
Make sure you back up often, but also keep a number of backups stretching back several weeks at least. Trust me, at some point you'll be glad you can go back and restore that 'old file' you deleted, or the old system, before the root kit that you haven't noticed for two weeks was installed.
This may all seem excessive for the "home" user, but if you're anything like me (these days I'm a writer/photographer), being a "home" user can often mean that your entire livelihood and household are tied up in your data.
As for me, myself, personally, right now I keep my nightlies on a rotating group of 14 8mm tapes using an Exabyte 8505XL drive. I use only data-grade tapes from major manufacturers. I run drive diagnostics often. I never use a tape through more than 10 passes. For my really important data, I also use 9.6GB DVD-RAM for redundancy. I would never consider working without backups, simply depending on this brand of hard drive or that one to not fail. I've lost too many hard drives over the years (ever seen a platter on an 10" drive crack and bits go flying everywhere, cracking the other platters and half the windows in the room?!) ever to be naive enough to trust one again.
Point of post: BACK UP YOUR DATA. Never think of a hard drive as anything other than short-term storage. Never think of any magnetic media as anything other than short-term storage, or you'll be crying sooner or later.
I am well aware that there are young people out there with serious problems like AIDS and other STDs, drug abuse and addiction, rape crises or unwanted pregnancy, etc.
But if these kids are afraid to go to their parents with these problems, then what the library will or won't let them see isn't going to help them much in most of the US, from what I understand. They're pretty much fscked by their conservative parents anyway, legally -- I knew a girl who had had some of these types of problems as she was growing up in Utah and she has always been incredulous at the fact that even when she was 17 years old, she was legally prevented by her parents from seeking help from anyone (they always had to sign a release for everything -- even basic medical treatments). The day she was 18 she left and never spoke to them again.
But I do agree with your point. I'd sooner governments left libraries alone to make information of all types available to all people. That was really the point of the last couple of lines in my post...
Um, how about we do away with the censorship and just ask libraries to use the second half of your suggestion instead:
a requirement that parents actively supervise their children's web-surfing
If libraries used this rule uniformly, there would no need to censor anything at all, parents could decide for themselves what they want their children to see, and libraries would not have to stretch their already woefully tiny budgets in order to pay for twice the number of computers and filtering software for half of them.
By the way, in no way am I suggesting that even this should be codified. If certain parents don't agree with what the library is doing (whether refusing to filter or requiring that a parent attend a child at the Web machines), perhaps such parents should take care to ensure that their child just stays home where everything is safe and they can spend time reading the Bible and the constitutional handgun magazines instead of the dangerous material at the public library...
I do believe the auto companies would be quite upset if people stopped buying cars
But you are missing the point. If we can now clone cars, there is no need for automobile assembly lines, since we can *all* have a car. What the IP proponents are proposing is that the cloning machine be outlawed in order to keep the auto manufacturers in business because they have some inherent right to exist, even at the expense of the populace at large. NOT COOL.
"But who will design the new cars?" some will ask.
Listen, if we have cloning machines and everyone can clone what they need, there will be a great deal more time for hobbyists who like to design new cars to come up with really fun new designs on their own. And as new designs come out, *everyone* can have one. No artificial limits, and everyone benefits, you see?
This is exactly what happens now in the free software community, so often maligned as idealists and communists and whatever else... but nobody can deny that the software is excellent... and that the programmers who work on it are happy, because they can work on what they like to work on, contribute it to the world, and expect other peoples' excellent contributions in return... it's a wonderful new age. Why kill it to save some company?
Except this is another artifical limit where there need not be one. It is Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath all over again -- artifically limiting access to important resources in the interest of maintaining profits.
The cost to copy information in this age is *zero*. The worst thing we can do is use governments as a way to enforce artifical limits on such a valuable commodity which has been so difficult to come by for so long across most of the human race.
Instead of trying to reinvent newer technologies to remove their benefits and make them as useless as older technologies, we should be rethinking the paradigms which say that only some people should have access to information, as well as the paradigms which say that people have some inherent right to profit for coming up with it.
The age of the Internet may well be the beginning of an age of 'new communism' -- people contribue what they can, with the expectation that in return they will receive other peoples contributions as well; it is in in this way tjat they are fairly compensated. Rather like the way the free software movement works now.
I think the age of the "information economy" should be brought to an end entirely. It would be a shame to take the Internet, which is like an infinite hyper-library, and modify it so that it once again behaves like an old-fashioned book-based library, simply to ensure the maintenance of some kind of "information drought" status quo in the interest of profits.
More than a shame, I think it borders on evil to deprive others of knowledge that there is no *real* barrier to their having.
Speeding laws are designed, from the beginning, to save lives -- and there is some evidence that they accomplish this.
Intellectual property laws are designed to allow wealthy individuals to create an indefinite revenue stream for themselves and for their lazy children; the money pours from the pockets of the workers into the pockets of the IP owners and continues to do so for years, even if the IP owners contribute no further labor to society. There is very little evidence that the primary purose of intellectual property laws is to save lives.
In short, they are one of the very worst features of capitalism and bear very little resemblance indeed to speeding laws.
1. Intellectual property is an artifical construction to keep the wealthy classes rich at the expense of the working classes. There is nothing in nature which creates 'intellectual property.'
2. Nobody claims to have produced music they share with friends. They are simply helping their friends to avoid paying for the media.
Honestly, other than the fact that the Stylistic I used only had a P5-120 and 80MB memory, there isn't much difference beyond mere "refinement" -- and not much of it at that. And a P5-120 with 80MB is enough to run most modern software (including Mozilla).
I'm not suggesting that Tablet PC's are appropriate for every venue -- far from it... I would argue that the new round of Tablet PC's are inappropriate for Medical use for the same reason that the older ones have always been...
Comebine industry-specific jargon with horrible handwriting (I've never met a doctor whose handwriting I could read, and I'm related to several) and you'll not ever find a device that can substitute for a human who also has knowledge of the jargon in question and a working knowledge of the poor handwriting as well (i.e. a nurse).
All I was suggesting is that no new problems are solved by this new round of Tablet PC's... Where Tablet PC's have been successful in the past, they will continue to be successful. Where they have failed, they will continue to fail, because precious little new technology is introduced by this marketing campaign.
The Fujitsu Stylistic has a glass screen that is perfectly transparent. There was no 'film' over the top of it of the type you see on Palm devices. The color TFT display of the Stylistic I used rivaled any TFT laptop display you can see today -- it was beautiful, bright and colorful, again much better than any PDA display I've seen, and pretty much identical to a modern laptop display, except that it was covered with glass -- an added, protective benefit.
I can't speak to sampling rate, but I can tell you that I took notes at full speed -- and any college student can write very fast -- and I never felt like I was fighting the technology in any way. It was perfectly natural. I still have all of those notes archived on my computer to this very day!
My home directory (which only contains material back to '98, all else is archived on QIC, which I can't even read any more) is already 6GB, and that's just mail and documents -- all of my images and sound files are stored elsewhere.
No wonder I don't use Hurd.
I think the Hurd is a nice, interesting CS project, but there isn't enough of a pragmatic influence amongst its developers ranks to make it actually useful to anyone.
This has been repeated over and over ad infinitum, but since it pops up in the topic again, I'll answer.
Lines of full-fledged tablet PC's with both digital ink and toggle-on-off-able handwriting recognition have existed for a decade. The original impetus for the IBM ThinkPad line was the PAD concept. Fujitsu has the Stylistic. Casio has the Fiva. Panasonic has a tablet PC or two, as do several other manufacturers.
Years ago I had a Fujitsu Stylistic that ran Windows 95 which had Microsoft pen extensions which would recognize my cursive handwriting, allow me to doodle, mark up Word documents and Excel spreadsheets with revision marks, take notes in "digital ink" and optionally recognize them later. I took notes on it in school. Everyone 'ooh'ed and 'aah'ed even though the machine was already years old. Apparently, people are still 'ooh'ing and 'aah'ing.
This isn't new. The marketing push is new. The technology has been around for ever in technology terms. Prices aren't even all that steep. Go to eBay and search for 'Fujitsu Stylistic' and you'll find yourself a whole gallery of Pentium-based tablet PC's in the $100 range which can run Linux (see http://www.linuxslate.org) or Windows 95 with pen extensions.
If anything is interesting about this, it's the following question: if so many people are so excited about this technology every time they see it, how come it still isn't very well known?
Slashdot Mirror
So I can nest to infinite levels cygwin and the free version of Wine, giving me access to the Linux commands I already have in Linux, only now I have them available to me n+1 times at progressively "deeper" levels. I can dig arbitrarily deep in nested environments and run 'ls'. Huzzah!
But I still cannot run MS Office or Internet Explorer or most games in Wine. D'oh!
X is a well-designed system which serves everyone's needs, works now, and is compatible across the UNIX world. It would take a lot to displace it.
More to the point, in discussions like this everyone always says... "of course it would have to be backward compatible with X..." But these people fail to understand that the only way to be backward compatible with X is to implement the X protocol stream. And once you do that, ta-da you're an X server once again, just like XFree86.
Of course, if your lovely new GUI doesn't reimplement the X protocol and the client/server model, you render useless decades of program code, from ancient embedded applications all the way to current UNIX ports of OpenOffice and Mozilla, from astronomical observatories to cash registers.
And of course, then you will lose one of the biggest benefits of X: the X protocol stream and the client/server model. D'oh!
X is not going away.
Skip IRC and chat rooms. These people are not only unhelpful when it comes to Linux, they are unhelpful and full of four letter words in general. That's why parents hate their kids hanging out there.
If you want to learn to use Linux, the best thing you can do for yourself is consult http://groups.google.com early and often. Every question you can think to ask has already been answered there any number of times. You can plug in your problem and get your answer instantly from one of the developers, rather than from some chump in a chat room.
It's an incredible tool that too few users know about.
Your're slowness is definitely caused by KDE, not by X. KDE is much more heavy than Windows 98, but you get what you pay for in features because KDE can do a lot of network transparent and scripting stuff that Windows simply can't.
But you really must learn to separate X from the programs which are running on it.
To run a modern version of KDE+X and get an instant response, the most important thing for you to do is get more memory (preferably 512MB, but 256MB in a pinch) and nicely accelerated display hardware (Voodoo, GeForce) rather than older display hardware. A faster CPU wouldn't hurt either.
Alternatively, you could simply go to http://www.windowmaker.org and get a blazing fast X desktop with your current hardware.
Same old troll, getting modded up again.
X is no slower than the Windows GDI for many things and is faster in some things. 2D acceleration in X is excellent, better than Windows for most display hardware, and 3D frame rates are within 1-2% of Windows. I routinely watch full-screen DVD in X and I use X (running Windows in emulation, no less) to do tons of graphics work. X is simply not slow.
I wouldn't be surprised if what you're seeing is a lack of memory on your system, meaning that parts of the cache (on a KDE+X system, you want to cache everything) are being flushed and are thus having to be refetched before being displayed again.
If it feels slow to you (especially if it feels slower than OS X, whose display PDF system is dog slow), then you're misconfigured or inadequately configured.
Um, no, a hardcore photoshop user like a photographer or graphic designer who works on today's truly hardcore images (10-40+ million pixels at 48-bit depth) needs much more than 800MHz/128MB/10GB, so for $200 you can not get another computer.
Anyway, don't forget the (absolutely horrid) price of Photoshop. Now for THAT you can maybe get another computer. But what you need is not another computer, what you need is Photoshop mixed with the stability of Win4Lin+Linux, which is much more stable than any native Windows (including W2k) I've ever used.
Get ahold of Win4Lin.
It's cheap, it's stable, and it runs every version of Photoshop I've had to use, from 5 onward.
Don't worry about speed, either. I clock most of the effects as faster running in Win4Lin using Windows 98 SE than in native Windows 98 SE and the Windows desktop in Win4Lin (which runs in a Linux window) is snappier than native Windows 98 SE as well, I assume because of the much better filesystem caching of Linux.
I also use Win4Lin to run MS Office. It's a great application and it won't cost you a bank!
You're right, except for the reference to communism. Just because China claims to be 'communist' doesn't mean that they are.
By very nature, 'communism' cannot exist alongside 'dictatorship' because the two are anathema to each other. The US is a much more communist state than China is (the US has many and powerful unions, the DeLeonist perspective, while in China unions are either nonexistent or impotent).
But you're right, the Chinese government is not helpful to its citizenry at all.
For those going on about the Chinese spy plane incident, rampant mainland Chinese software piracy, etc...
Taiwan is not China. Taiwan is a very urban, very modern nation which participates fairly in the world economy. Much of the technology used in America and throughout the world is manufactured in and imported from Taiwan. Though "officially" it is a Chinese province according to the US government, Taiwan and China have a very antagonistic relationship with one another -- Taiwan wants independence from China and is basically already fully independent in every way except in name. China considers Taiwan to be a 'rogue capitalist province' and the two governments hate one another (going back to the battles between the Chinese nationalists and communists early in the 20th century).
In fact, the US (if I understand correctly) has a very unusual agreement with Taiwan to jump to their defense if they should ever be invaded by China, even though at the same time the US also officially supports the "one China policy."
It is entirely possible that Taiwan wants to enhance its information security to protect itself from mainland China.
Hard drives fail.
They always have, they always will. They're mechanical, and even better than that, they're magnetic. That's how it is. You should plan to have to replace your hard drive every 1-3 years at least, if not more often than that, depending on workload and conditions. That's how it's always been. For the people saying 'but... I've never had a hard drive fail...' -- you're lucky as hell, but someday your luck will run out.
Even backup solutions fail.
Removable storage is mechanical as well. There are a lot of variables. Years of experience taught me the following lessons:
This may all seem excessive for the "home" user, but if you're anything like me (these days I'm a writer/photographer), being a "home" user can often mean that your entire livelihood and household are tied up in your data.
As for me, myself, personally, right now I keep my nightlies on a rotating group of 14 8mm tapes using an Exabyte 8505XL drive. I use only data-grade tapes from major manufacturers. I run drive diagnostics often. I never use a tape through more than 10 passes. For my really important data, I also use 9.6GB DVD-RAM for redundancy. I would never consider working without backups, simply depending on this brand of hard drive or that one to not fail. I've lost too many hard drives over the years (ever seen a platter on an 10" drive crack and bits go flying everywhere, cracking the other platters and half the windows in the room?!) ever to be naive enough to trust one again.
Point of post: BACK UP YOUR DATA. Never think of a hard drive as anything other than short-term storage. Never think of any magnetic media as anything other than short-term storage, or you'll be crying sooner or later.
I am well aware that there are young people out there with serious problems like AIDS and other STDs, drug abuse and addiction, rape crises or unwanted pregnancy, etc.
But if these kids are afraid to go to their parents with these problems, then what the library will or won't let them see isn't going to help them much in most of the US, from what I understand. They're pretty much fscked by their conservative parents anyway, legally -- I knew a girl who had had some of these types of problems as she was growing up in Utah and she has always been incredulous at the fact that even when she was 17 years old, she was legally prevented by her parents from seeking help from anyone (they always had to sign a release for everything -- even basic medical treatments). The day she was 18 she left and never spoke to them again.
But I do agree with your point. I'd sooner governments left libraries alone to make information of all types available to all people. That was really the point of the last couple of lines in my post...
Um, how about we do away with the censorship and just ask libraries to use the second half of your suggestion instead:
a requirement that parents actively supervise their children's web-surfing
If libraries used this rule uniformly, there would no need to censor anything at all, parents could decide for themselves what they want their children to see, and libraries would not have to stretch their already woefully tiny budgets in order to pay for twice the number of computers and filtering software for half of them.
By the way, in no way am I suggesting that even this should be codified. If certain parents don't agree with what the library is doing (whether refusing to filter or requiring that a parent attend a child at the Web machines), perhaps such parents should take care to ensure that their child just stays home where everything is safe and they can spend time reading the Bible and the constitutional handgun magazines instead of the dangerous material at the public library...
I do believe the auto companies would be quite upset if people stopped buying cars
But you are missing the point. If we can now clone cars, there is no need for automobile assembly lines, since we can *all* have a car. What the IP proponents are proposing is that the cloning machine be outlawed in order to keep the auto manufacturers in business because they have some inherent right to exist, even at the expense of the populace at large. NOT COOL.
"But who will design the new cars?" some will ask.
Listen, if we have cloning machines and everyone can clone what they need, there will be a great deal more time for hobbyists who like to design new cars to come up with really fun new designs on their own. And as new designs come out, *everyone* can have one. No artificial limits, and everyone benefits, you see?
This is exactly what happens now in the free software community, so often maligned as idealists and communists and whatever else... but nobody can deny that the software is excellent... and that the programmers who work on it are happy, because they can work on what they like to work on, contribute it to the world, and expect other peoples' excellent contributions in return... it's a wonderful new age. Why kill it to save some company?
Any friend of Ashcroft is an enemy of mine.
Except this is another artifical limit where there need not be one. It is Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath all over again -- artifically limiting access to important resources in the interest of maintaining profits.
The cost to copy information in this age is *zero*. The worst thing we can do is use governments as a way to enforce artifical limits on such a valuable commodity which has been so difficult to come by for so long across most of the human race.
Instead of trying to reinvent newer technologies to remove their benefits and make them as useless as older technologies, we should be rethinking the paradigms which say that only some people should have access to information, as well as the paradigms which say that people have some inherent right to profit for coming up with it.
The age of the Internet may well be the beginning of an age of 'new communism' -- people contribue what they can, with the expectation that in return they will receive other peoples contributions as well; it is in in this way tjat they are fairly compensated. Rather like the way the free software movement works now.
I think the age of the "information economy" should be brought to an end entirely. It would be a shame to take the Internet, which is like an infinite hyper-library, and modify it so that it once again behaves like an old-fashioned book-based library, simply to ensure the maintenance of some kind of "information drought" status quo in the interest of profits.
More than a shame, I think it borders on evil to deprive others of knowledge that there is no *real* barrier to their having.
There has always been one very important difference between Sun and Microsoft, a difference which remains regardless of any new Sun licensing policy:
Sun's products work.
Speeding laws are designed, from the beginning, to save lives -- and there is some evidence that they accomplish this.
Intellectual property laws are designed to allow wealthy individuals to create an indefinite revenue stream for themselves and for their lazy children; the money pours from the pockets of the workers into the pockets of the IP owners and continues to do so for years, even if the IP owners contribute no further labor to society. There is very little evidence that the primary purose of intellectual property laws is to save lives.
In short, they are one of the very worst features of capitalism and bear very little resemblance indeed to speeding laws.
1. Intellectual property is an artifical construction to keep the wealthy classes rich at the expense of the working classes. There is nothing in nature which creates 'intellectual property.'
2. Nobody claims to have produced music they share with friends. They are simply helping their friends to avoid paying for the media.
And so do earlier recognizers, like the ones from Apple or Paragraph (used in PenOffice for Windows). But few people buy the few that are released.
Try:
MkLinux and
Mac OS X
Of course, both are somewhat more successful than the HURD...
Because I've personally seen both devices.
Honestly, other than the fact that the Stylistic I used only had a P5-120 and 80MB memory, there isn't much difference beyond mere "refinement" -- and not much of it at that. And a P5-120 with 80MB is enough to run most modern software (including Mozilla).
I'm not suggesting that Tablet PC's are appropriate for every venue -- far from it... I would argue that the new round of Tablet PC's are inappropriate for Medical use for the same reason that the older ones have always been...
Comebine industry-specific jargon with horrible handwriting (I've never met a doctor whose handwriting I could read, and I'm related to several) and you'll not ever find a device that can substitute for a human who also has knowledge of the jargon in question and a working knowledge of the poor handwriting as well (i.e. a nurse).
All I was suggesting is that no new problems are solved by this new round of Tablet PC's... Where Tablet PC's have been successful in the past, they will continue to be successful. Where they have failed, they will continue to fail, because precious little new technology is introduced by this marketing campaign.
The Fujitsu Stylistic has a glass screen that is perfectly transparent. There was no 'film' over the top of it of the type you see on Palm devices. The color TFT display of the Stylistic I used rivaled any TFT laptop display you can see today -- it was beautiful, bright and colorful, again much better than any PDA display I've seen, and pretty much identical to a modern laptop display, except that it was covered with glass -- an added, protective benefit.
I can't speak to sampling rate, but I can tell you that I took notes at full speed -- and any college student can write very fast -- and I never felt like I was fighting the technology in any way. It was perfectly natural. I still have all of those notes archived on my computer to this very day!
My home directory (which only contains material back to '98, all else is archived on QIC, which I can't even read any more) is already 6GB, and that's just mail and documents -- all of my images and sound files are stored elsewhere.
No wonder I don't use Hurd.
I think the Hurd is a nice, interesting CS project, but there isn't enough of a pragmatic influence amongst its developers ranks to make it actually useful to anyone.
This has been repeated over and over ad infinitum, but since it pops up in the topic again, I'll answer.
Lines of full-fledged tablet PC's with both digital ink and toggle-on-off-able handwriting recognition have existed for a decade. The original impetus for the IBM ThinkPad line was the PAD concept. Fujitsu has the Stylistic. Casio has the Fiva. Panasonic has a tablet PC or two, as do several other manufacturers.
Years ago I had a Fujitsu Stylistic that ran Windows 95 which had Microsoft pen extensions which would recognize my cursive handwriting, allow me to doodle, mark up Word documents and Excel spreadsheets with revision marks, take notes in "digital ink" and optionally recognize them later. I took notes on it in school. Everyone 'ooh'ed and 'aah'ed even though the machine was already years old. Apparently, people are still 'ooh'ing and 'aah'ing.
This isn't new. The marketing push is new. The technology has been around for ever in technology terms. Prices aren't even all that steep. Go to eBay and search for 'Fujitsu Stylistic' and you'll find yourself a whole gallery of Pentium-based tablet PC's in the $100 range which can run Linux (see http://www.linuxslate.org) or Windows 95 with pen extensions.
If anything is interesting about this, it's the following question: if so many people are so excited about this technology every time they see it, how come it still isn't very well known?