PalmOS hasn't evolved in a meaningful way since it was launched. It still has no memory protection or multitasking, and the interface looks like something out of 1994. It either needs to be updated to modern computing standards, or die, and it looks like they're choosing die. Good riddance.
I've been a Palm user since the Palm III first came out, but I recently bought my first Windows Mobile device (a Dell Axim x50v), and I love it - I finally have a PDA capable of running modern applications on a (reasonably) modern OS.
Vista only layers OpenGL over Direct3D if you're running it in a window, which is clearly the only option they had, considering the UI itself is Direct3D-based. If you run an OpenGL app fullscreen, like most games, you'll get full performance.
Are you serious? It creates a real-time view of the current consciousness of the entire human population (well, an enormous section of it, anyway)! That's something that has never been possible in the history of mankind.
Furthermore this is to a large degree a derivate of whatever CNN/AP/MTV, and now, ImportantBlog, decides is important.
Not really. Ideas have an amazing tendency to spread through the blogosphere, from a single post, to the point where they're being talked about everywhere. This includes things that the mainstream media, or popular websites, or whatever, never made a mention of until it was already all over the blogosphere (many examples from last fall's presidential election come to mind).
I find it incredible that nobody here grasps why blogs are so important. It's not the individual blog that's important - it's the "blogosphere" (although I'm not a huge fan of that term). It's the immense collection of interlinking sites, with built-in mechanisms for notifying each other of links (trackback/pingback) and of notifying central services of updates (pings, RSS/Atom).
It allows for incredible things to be done - real-time monitoring of the entire internet for anybody writing anything on a particular topic or keyword being one example. It's no longer necessary to have a search provider (i.e. Google) crawl the web periodically and only be able to get updates on the current state of the net weekly or monthly or whatever. As soon as a post is written on a blog on, say, the shuttle landing, services such as Technorati notice it, and you can be notified of this post the next time your aggregator updates your "shuttle" search feed.
So it's not the individual blog that's interesting - most of them (like most of everything) are crap. It's the aggregated state of all the blogs that's interesting. It's being able to tell what's on millions of people's minds at this very instant. It makes the web a much more real-time medium.
But TBL is right - what makes all this work is the fact that blogging software is simple enough for somebody with little or no knowledge of HTML to be able to post and be an equal participant in the "blogosphere."
It would be way more useful to just show the current rate, rather than expecting me to memorize the rate schedule
Are you seriously complaining about the fact that your cell phone has a built-in clock? That fact makes cell phones much more useful, since I no longer have to wear a watch, and I always know what time it is (since I always have my phone on me).
What possible reason could you have to want to get rid of the clock? It's not like it impairs you in any way - if you don't want to use it, ignore it. (also, they're usually set from the tower, so this DST issue is a non-issue for them anyway).
Translucency isn't the interesting part
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The interesting part (of the new GUI framework, anyway) is the under-the-hood changes that enable the transparency. Ever notice how on OS X you never get redraw flickering? Even if a program is stuck to the point where the interface is frozen and you get the spinning beach ball, every window still redraws itself properly. That's because windows now draw into a backing store and are blitted to the screen by the OS (or with any reasonably-modern video card, slapped on an OpenGL polygon) rather than drawing directly to the screen where their display can be wiped by any window being moved over it.
This gets rid of redraw issues entirely and allows neat compositing effects. Translucency support is only a side effect of this.
Re:BeOS _is_ a member of the UNIX family.
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I would happily consider BeOS a member of the UNIX family of operating systems.
Well, you'd be wrong. BeOS is not Unix, never was Unix, and never will be Unix - it just happens to provide a POSIX compatibility layer and a bunch of ported command-line tools. But internally, it's quite different.
The problem is that what was once computationally infeasible becomes much less so as processing power increases.
1024 bit public-key encryption is computationally infeasible to break now, but in 20-30 years it may be easily done.
Yeah, but increasing the key size increases the load much more dramatically on the cracking side than on the encrypting side. A small increase in key size doesn't dramatically increase the amount of time it takes to encrypt something, but it does do so for the time it takes to crack a key.
Someone who comes up with a magical fingerprint that can be tied to one and only one large body of data will have discovered the Holy Grail of data compression.
Well, that's impossible - but that's not even the point. The entire point of hashing algorithms is that they are one way, so you're not (supposed to be) able to retrieve the original.
But anyway, their 2-way equivalent is encryption, not compression. The idea of strong hashing algorithms (like MD5 was thought to be before it was broken) is that it's computationally infeasible to find a collision, so yes, one of its uses is to authenticate data. For a quick check for bit errors, that's what weak hashing mechanisms such as CRC are for.
And you don't need "push", the Treo supports polling.
Or, even better, you can use Chatter, which supports the IMAP Idle command, so it's more-or-less instant, like push, but without constantly polling the server.
There is no emulation on x86 it is done via fat binaries by building in XCode. If you run OS X on x86 it will be an x86 build not an emulated PPC version, same goes for programs. PPC-only compiled apps won't run on x86 based OS X.
Yes they will. Apple developed an emulation layer called Rosetta, and Jobs demoed an Intel Mac running the PPC versions of some apps, including Photoshop.
I'm not saying they'll run well, because they certainly won't, but they'll run.
A couple years ago, I tried to move a project from GCC to VC++ 6. After a couple days of rewriting perfectly valid code to get the idiotic VC++ compiler to compile it, I gave up. I didn't care that VC++ was faster or made faster code. I wanted to be able to write good code.
VC6 has crap C++ support, as does VS.NET 2002. 2003, though, is quite a good C++ compiler, more or less as good in terms of standards support as gcc (and much better in terms of optimizations).
I use it all the time, mostly to listen to music at work. For $10/month I have access to damn near anything I want to listen to.
My only real complaint with it is that there are some bands that I'd like to listen to that haven't licensed their music to Real (notably the Beatles, Zeppelin, and Tool). But most of the music I want to hear is there, the quality is good, and the price is right.
Sure, I feel dirty giving money to Real after their shinanigans (sp?) over the years, but they have a product worth paying for, so I do.
Because nobody else has developed such an API for Windows. It's not impossible for one to replace IE's API if they really tried. I know that many of the open source software developers are a clever breed, and can work around any obstacle presented to them. It's just that nobody's done it, or even tried to do it that I know of.
There's a version of Mozilla out there somewhere which is API-compatible with IE. Apparently it'll work pretty well as an IE replacement for programs which embed IE.
C# classes have significant overhead when there is only a few members, and C# structs doesn't seem to be as flexible as C structs
Eh? Where are you getting this?
The major difference between the two is that classes are reference objects while structs are value objects. Other than that there are limitations in terms of inheritance with structs and things of that nature, but your statement that C# classes with few members have a lot of overhead is simply false.
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PalmOS hasn't evolved in a meaningful way since it was launched. It still has no memory protection or multitasking, and the interface looks like something out of 1994. It either needs to be updated to modern computing standards, or die, and it looks like they're choosing die. Good riddance.
I've been a Palm user since the Palm III first came out, but I recently bought my first Windows Mobile device (a Dell Axim x50v), and I love it - I finally have a PDA capable of running modern applications on a (reasonably) modern OS.
...or devote our lives to far more constructive persuits
/. "humour" the Troll/Overrated/Redundant mod points it deserves.
Yeah, your sig shows the "more constructive persuits (sic)" that you've devoted your life to:
Dedicated to giving unfunny
Vista only layers OpenGL over Direct3D if you're running it in a window, which is clearly the only option they had, considering the UI itself is Direct3D-based. If you run an OpenGL app fullscreen, like most games, you'll get full performance.
I don't know why that's so incredibly important.
Are you serious? It creates a real-time view of the current consciousness of the entire human population (well, an enormous section of it, anyway)! That's something that has never been possible in the history of mankind.
Furthermore this is to a large degree a derivate of whatever CNN/AP/MTV, and now, ImportantBlog, decides is important.
Not really. Ideas have an amazing tendency to spread through the blogosphere, from a single post, to the point where they're being talked about everywhere. This includes things that the mainstream media, or popular websites, or whatever, never made a mention of until it was already all over the blogosphere (many examples from last fall's presidential election come to mind).
I find it incredible that nobody here grasps why blogs are so important. It's not the individual blog that's important - it's the "blogosphere" (although I'm not a huge fan of that term). It's the immense collection of interlinking sites, with built-in mechanisms for notifying each other of links (trackback/pingback) and of notifying central services of updates (pings, RSS/Atom).
.
It allows for incredible things to be done - real-time monitoring of the entire internet for anybody writing anything on a particular topic or keyword being one example. It's no longer necessary to have a search provider (i.e. Google) crawl the web periodically and only be able to get updates on the current state of the net weekly or monthly or whatever. As soon as a post is written on a blog on, say, the shuttle landing, services such as Technorati notice it, and you can be notified of this post the next time your aggregator updates your "shuttle" search feed
So it's not the individual blog that's interesting - most of them (like most of everything) are crap. It's the aggregated state of all the blogs that's interesting. It's being able to tell what's on millions of people's minds at this very instant. It makes the web a much more real-time medium.
But TBL is right - what makes all this work is the fact that blogging software is simple enough for somebody with little or no knowledge of HTML to be able to post and be an equal participant in the "blogosphere."
It would be way more useful to just show the current rate, rather than expecting me to memorize the rate schedule
Are you seriously complaining about the fact that your cell phone has a built-in clock? That fact makes cell phones much more useful, since I no longer have to wear a watch, and I always know what time it is (since I always have my phone on me).
What possible reason could you have to want to get rid of the clock? It's not like it impairs you in any way - if you don't want to use it, ignore it. (also, they're usually set from the tower, so this DST issue is a non-issue for them anyway).
The interesting part (of the new GUI framework, anyway) is the under-the-hood changes that enable the transparency. Ever notice how on OS X you never get redraw flickering? Even if a program is stuck to the point where the interface is frozen and you get the spinning beach ball, every window still redraws itself properly. That's because windows now draw into a backing store and are blitted to the screen by the OS (or with any reasonably-modern video card, slapped on an OpenGL polygon) rather than drawing directly to the screen where their display can be wiped by any window being moved over it.
This gets rid of redraw issues entirely and allows neat compositing effects. Translucency support is only a side effect of this.
I would happily consider BeOS a member of the UNIX family of operating systems.
Well, you'd be wrong. BeOS is not Unix, never was Unix, and never will be Unix - it just happens to provide a POSIX compatibility layer and a bunch of ported command-line tools. But internally, it's quite different.
The problem is that what was once computationally infeasible becomes much less so as processing power increases. 1024 bit public-key encryption is computationally infeasible to break now, but in 20-30 years it may be easily done.
Yeah, but increasing the key size increases the load much more dramatically on the cracking side than on the encrypting side. A small increase in key size doesn't dramatically increase the amount of time it takes to encrypt something, but it does do so for the time it takes to crack a key.
Someone who comes up with a magical fingerprint that can be tied to one and only one large body of data will have discovered the Holy Grail of data compression.
Well, that's impossible - but that's not even the point. The entire point of hashing algorithms is that they are one way, so you're not (supposed to be) able to retrieve the original.
But anyway, their 2-way equivalent is encryption, not compression. The idea of strong hashing algorithms (like MD5 was thought to be before it was broken) is that it's computationally infeasible to find a collision, so yes, one of its uses is to authenticate data. For a quick check for bit errors, that's what weak hashing mechanisms such as CRC are for.
And you don't need "push", the Treo supports polling.
Or, even better, you can use Chatter, which supports the IMAP Idle command, so it's more-or-less instant, like push, but without constantly polling the server.
That's exactly what Spotlight's Smart Folders do. It's a fake folder in Finder which just shows the results of a Spotlight query.
It's noticeably faster than the version that ships with Tiger (and yes, it passes Acid2 :)
There is no emulation on x86 it is done via fat binaries by building in XCode. If you run OS X on x86 it will be an x86 build not an emulated PPC version, same goes for programs. PPC-only compiled apps won't run on x86 based OS X.
Yes they will. Apple developed an emulation layer called Rosetta, and Jobs demoed an Intel Mac running the PPC versions of some apps, including Photoshop.
I'm not saying they'll run well, because they certainly won't, but they'll run.
I'm not going to post my reasoning here since I just did on my blog, but you can read it here. Apple switching to x86 just doesn't make sense.
A couple years ago, I tried to move a project from GCC to VC++ 6. After a couple days of rewriting perfectly valid code to get the idiotic VC++ compiler to compile it, I gave up. I didn't care that VC++ was faster or made faster code. I wanted to be able to write good code.
VC6 has crap C++ support, as does VS.NET 2002. 2003, though, is quite a good C++ compiler, more or less as good in terms of standards support as gcc (and much better in terms of optimizations).
I use it all the time, mostly to listen to music at work. For $10/month I have access to damn near anything I want to listen to.
My only real complaint with it is that there are some bands that I'd like to listen to that haven't licensed their music to Real (notably the Beatles, Zeppelin, and Tool). But most of the music I want to hear is there, the quality is good, and the price is right.
Sure, I feel dirty giving money to Real after their shinanigans (sp?) over the years, but they have a product worth paying for, so I do.
Because nobody else has developed such an API for Windows. It's not impossible for one to replace IE's API if they really tried. I know that many of the open source software developers are a clever breed, and can work around any obstacle presented to them. It's just that nobody's done it, or even tried to do it that I know of.
There's a version of Mozilla out there somewhere which is API-compatible with IE. Apparently it'll work pretty well as an IE replacement for programs which embed IE.
C# classes have significant overhead when there is only a few members, and C# structs doesn't seem to be as flexible as C structs
Eh? Where are you getting this?
The major difference between the two is that classes are reference objects while structs are value objects. Other than that there are limitations in terms of inheritance with structs and things of that nature, but your statement that C# classes with few members have a lot of overhead is simply false.
C# was written specifically to be able to use almost every feature of the CLR. Every other language on the platform is more limited in its abilities.
Not true. Managed C++ gives you access to more CLR internals than C# does (C# does give you more than most other languages, though, including VB.NET)
Heh, I think you may need to work on your Google skills. Try this (first result when I searched for "pdf specification", btw)
You could do that with VNC anyway, yes? IIRC it allows multiple connections to the same server.
Didn't do that for me, Google toolbar (and Google Desktop) is still there and working fine.
I can already see the girlfriend-snooping potential here.
Dammit, gotta finish my comments before I hit post. You can also find me on MSN messenger (spong23).