I would be surprised if any serious, long-term development effort would go into this. Most likely, it's a strawman product to show to the world that ODF is the standard format not only of OpenOffice and StarOffice, but also of "Lotus Symphony", making ODF look better on paper.
Mac OS X makes heavy use of hardware accelerated functions: Quartz/Aqua 3D graphics (which unlike Vista's Aero can't be turned off), GPU-rendered graphics processing among others in CoreImage and iMovie, low-latency sound in CoreAudio,... - likely making it perhaps the worst candidate for virtualization among all operating systems.
download an app folder, drag it to your appliactions folder. go.
Unfortunately not. OS X programs often spread their files all over the file system, with a mess of binary configuration files, possible netinfo entries (akin to the Windows registry...), etc. There is no standard method in OS X to cleanly remove them - just deleting the application won't do the trick in most cases. Even Windows is superior in that respect.
Besides, downloading binary code somewhere from the Internet and installing it in your system is a security nightmare and practice that should be abandoned ASAP. I find the Linux/BSD model of providing all software in distribution-provided repositories blessed by the distribution's maintainers vastly superior to OS X, with unmatched clean and safe installation, removal and upgrading of software. (How, for example, do you upgrade all your Mac OS X software with one command or click?)
I use both Debian and Mac OS X and find Debian vastly superior in this respect.
...is seriously the best calendaring solution I have come across. It provides a mini languages for recording virtually every possible repetition and exception patterns of recurring appointments (next to storing unique appointments of course), prints out reminders or tabular calendars on the terminal or outputs nicely formatted postscript calendars. And all its functionality is packed into a lean 100k executable. If you don't like noting appointments in its markup language, you can use the program "wyrd" as an interactive, terminal-visual frontend. "remind" is a BSD program and part of all free BSD and Linux distributions. If you install it on a server, you use it via ssh. Implementing a web frontend should be trivial, too.
Such a computer would exist outside of Operating Systems - it could and would run anything.
You must have got something wrong. CHRP simply was a specification for an open standard PowerPC hardware platform, just as the IBM PC is an open standard for x86-based hardware.
Dell, HP, Panasonic, and Sony all make crappy PC's compared to an Apple product.
I bet you have never seen a Panasonic Toughbook laptop. They are literally the most solid laptops you can buy and far superior in build quality to any Apple notebook. (Solid as in: drop them from 6 ft. height onto concrete, use them outdoors in rain or in winter climate,kick them around or spill liquids over them - which is what they are designed for.)
Re:One Point For Gmail
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
You can also use pine (better: mutt) everywhere if you use into on a machine that can be accessed via SSH - either your home machine or over an ISP that offers shell accounts.
"TUD:OS" is simply an acronym of "Technical University Dresden Operating System". Their computer science department has done amazing work on the l4 microkernel, and continues to release all its code under free licenses, btw.
Low level: drivers. For example, there are no free accelerated drivers for the majority of today's video cards, and no Linux drivers for most WLAN cards and laptop modems. If Joe Sixpack buys a USB gadget at BestBuy, plugs it into his Linux PC, and it doesn't work, he will ditch Linux. The more hardware manufacturers keep their specs secret, and the more DRM is creeping into hardware design, the tougher this part will get.
Mid level: plug'n'play, ease of administration. Linux won't be "there" for desktop users as long as there will still be administrative tasks and problems that throw them onto the commandline. Desktop Linux still has a long way to go before it comes close to Mac OS X in this respect.
High level: applications. While there are GUI databases (a la FileMaker/Access), video editors (a la Premiere/iMovie/Final Cut), DVD authoring programs, music programs (a la Cubase/Logic), desktop publishing programs (a la Quark/inDesign) for Linux, they often aren't mature and don't match up to their commercial counterparts. Some popular types of software are completely missing - decent OCR, for example. Few people accept technically inferior or even lacking solutions for the gain of free software (as in beer and speech).
XUL did take off as the framework for Mozilla/Firefox plugins and crossplatform applications (including Sunbird, Songbird etc.). But it was never intended to be a replacement for web applets - for good reasons, since it offers no sandboxing and no safety constraints for code. Making the XUL interface world-writable from web sites would be the ActiveX fiasco all over again. This is why Firefox tries its best to prevent XUL plugin installations from untrusted sources.
Why does the default user account of Windows XP have administrator
privileges? Why does it still include technology like ActiveX although
Microsoft has developed safer technologies (such as.Net) that could
replace it? Why do critical parts of Windows like Windows Update depend
on ActiveX?
I'm simply saying that it's going to remain the domain of early-adopters and techies, and by the time the general public is ready for any new format it will be superior to either of the new DVD formats.
I dare to disagree. In some years, every DVD player down to the Chinese
$50 models will support BluRay and HD-DVD as a standard
feature, just as most DVD players today support DiVX and mp3, or as
every modern computer has 3D graphics and a DVD-ROM drive no matter
whether people actually need it. If it doesn't cost extra, and as long
as they can still play their old DVDs, buyers won't mind. But once the
market will be saturated with BluRay/HD players, the movie industry will
switch to releasing their new titles only in those formats, chiefly
because of their tighter DRM. Whether people will actually
have suitable HDTV sets for them, is pretty irrelevant.
I have excellent experiences with partimage. It creates image files of both Windows (FAT & NTFS), Linux and *BSD partitions, compressing them with gzip/bzip, optionally breaking them down to fixed size segments (for CD-R/DVD-R backups). It also can save and restore file system image via the net through partimaged, an optional file server.
Since partimage is contained on every Knoppix CD, the easiest and cheapest solution is to boot your computer with Knoppix, save the file system image either to a local disk or over the network to another computer running partimaged.
We wouldn't have this debate if ICANN weren't so royally screwed up and operating in sometimes shady ways. Think of the monopolies and $$$ granted to Network Solutions/Verisign which have, to the detriment of common users, kept the prices for.com/.org/.net domains artificially high. (Counter example: In Germany, every 9th citizen statistically owns a ".de" domain because they are dirt-cheap and offered for free with almost every ISP/hosting deal.)
And an example of U.S. censorship is how the creation of ".xxx" domains was blocked after the federal government had intervened.
I'm not suggesting that turning DNS and root servers from ICANN over to the U.N.'s ITU will necessarily improve things. But the current status quo isn't good either.
Story gets it terribly wrong
on
Etch Goes Beta
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The installer for Etch has gone Beta (as it clearly states on the page the story links to), not Etch itself. The Etch release is scheduled for late 2006, which is still an ambitious goal given the amount of necessary work - such as moving all documentation that doesn't meet the Debian Free Software guidelines into non-free.
Besides from being shorter, mmv doesn't stop there. Your example doesn't scale to multiple replacements within one string, i.e. 'mmv "*_*.htm" "#1-#2.html"'. But above all, your example isn't safe. You could avoid filename collisions and accidental overwriting by aliasing "mv" to "mv -i"; however, that still wouldn't give you a complete check in advance, but make the command exit half-finished and non-reversable. mmv on the other hand cancels the operation before doing anything if there are any name collisions. - If you try to put all these features and safety measure into your shell script, you will probably end up with something that is as complex as the the C sourcecode of mmv...
I couldn't live without "mmv", i.e. renaming and moving of multiple files through wildcard expressions, like: 'mmv "*.htm" "#1.html"'. And he wouldn't have mentioned cdargs if he knew zsh - especially with compinit, i.e. the expanded tab completion system. Not only does it have cd history with tab completion, but also:
tab completion of hosts and - believe it or not - files and directories on remote hosts accessed by ssh
recursing into directories with wildcards "**"
tab completion of commandline tool switches, ie "foo -x"
tool-dependent tab completion, i.e. "mplayer " expands only to files playable by mplayer
tab completion of environment variables
spell correction for misstyped commands or arguments
The quality of Nelson's ideas have always been impaired by his cluelessness in software engineering, rendering Xanadu a monumental piece of vaporware and broken architecture/code. Look at transquoter: The software is broken by design because any change of a source document, or it's URL, will screw up the document that uses the quotation. This is software engineering on the level of a hack "designed" by a 10-year-old kid.
Berners-Lee weeded out the reasonable subset of Nelson's visions and fortunately knew how to properly implement them - creating a client-server architecture, using open standards like SGML and TCP/IP, designing a well-engineering network protocol, and writing usable reference implementations of server and client.
Minix v3 looks like a much improved system, with large memory addressing and software like Emacs, vim, Python, Perl and gcc included. However, resource usage has become more like Linux and *BSD in the process, too. While Minix v2 happily ran with 2 MB RAM (I actually used it on a 386sx laptop), Minix v3 requires 8 MB, better 16 MB RAM. This is pretty much the same as NetBSD, an arguably more versatile and mature embedded OS. - Of course, I am aware that Minix is primarily an educational system and the microkernel/driver architecture has interesting hack value. Nevertheless, it seems that Minix' niche has rather shrunk than grown with the direction the project has taken...
The switch to x86 doesn't change the API of MacOS X and hence won't magically give you Intel PC software. And if that software had been cross-API-compatible (via Qt, wxwidgets etc.), it could have been released for PPC-MacOS already.
The only thing that is likely to happen with Intel-Mac is that Windows Emulators - and hence Windows software - will run at nearly native speed.
The enthusiastic rambling on "Web 2.0" in the opening paragraph is quite unrelated to OpenOffice, an old-fashioned stand-alone application. It's probably related to a mistake Florian Reuter makes throughout the interview. He speaks of "formulas" where he actually means "forms" - He's a native German speaker and mixes up the two words because the German word for "form" is "Formular".
The new FreeBSD site boldly states: "Based on BSD Unix (r)". To my knowledge,
the AT&T vs. Berkeley case was settled with (among others) the regulation
that BSD may not be called Unix. The official Unix trademark
FAQ states that Unix "must not be used as a generic term. It must
not be used in connection with products, unless the product is licensed
to use the mark".
I am not sure whether the new headline on the homepage is a very wise
and professional move of the FreeBSD project.
...is that is finally shuts up all rumors about a pending Google Office/Google OS. Google would hardly announce an OpenOffice distribution deal if it had its own alternative in the making.
Seems that people are desperate in looking for a Microsoft contender on the desktop, in the light of Linux never seeming to get real mainstream desktop user market/mindshare.
It seems all development efforts goes into 3D gaming and no brains into vanilla PC requirements. Why is it impossible to find a reasonably priced, fanless graphics card with two DVI connectors? Why can't I have dual head graphics with hardware video acceleration/overlay on either monitor? Why don't Nvidia and ATI at least take care that the non-3D features of their cards are fully supported under Linux and X11? Yes, Matrox's cards come close, but even their vintage G550 require buggy binary X11 drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be surprised if any serious, long-term development effort would go into this. Most likely, it's a strawman product to show to the world that ODF is the standard format not only of OpenOffice and StarOffice, but also of "Lotus Symphony", making ODF look better on paper.
Mac OS X makes heavy use of hardware accelerated functions: Quartz/Aqua 3D graphics (which unlike Vista's Aero can't be turned off), GPU-rendered graphics processing among others in CoreImage and iMovie, low-latency sound in CoreAudio, ... - likely making it perhaps the worst candidate for virtualization among all operating systems.
Besides, downloading binary code somewhere from the Internet and installing it in your system is a security nightmare and practice that should be abandoned ASAP. I find the Linux/BSD model of providing all software in distribution-provided repositories blessed by the distribution's maintainers vastly superior to OS X, with unmatched clean and safe installation, removal and upgrading of software. (How, for example, do you upgrade all your Mac OS X software with one command or click?) I use both Debian and Mac OS X and find Debian vastly superior in this respect.
...is seriously the best calendaring solution I have come across. It provides a mini languages for recording virtually every possible repetition and exception patterns of recurring appointments (next to storing unique appointments of course), prints out reminders or tabular calendars on the terminal or outputs nicely formatted postscript calendars. And all its functionality is packed into a lean 100k executable. If you don't like noting appointments in its markup language, you can use the program "wyrd" as an interactive, terminal-visual frontend. "remind" is a BSD program and part of all free BSD and Linux distributions. If you install it on a server, you use it via ssh. Implementing a web frontend should be trivial, too.
You can also use pine (better: mutt) everywhere if you use into on a machine that can be accessed via SSH - either your home machine or over an ISP that offers shell accounts.
"TUD:OS" is simply an acronym of "Technical University Dresden Operating System". Their computer science department has done amazing work on the l4 microkernel, and continues to release all its code under free licenses, btw.
-F
XUL did take off as the framework for Mozilla/Firefox plugins and crossplatform applications (including Sunbird, Songbird etc.). But it was never intended to be a replacement for web applets - for good reasons, since it offers no sandboxing and no safety constraints for code. Making the XUL interface world-writable from web sites would be the ActiveX fiasco all over again. This is why Firefox tries its best to prevent XUL plugin installations from untrusted sources.
Why does the default user account of Windows XP have administrator privileges? Why does it still include technology like ActiveX although Microsoft has developed safer technologies (such as .Net) that could
replace it? Why do critical parts of Windows like Windows Update depend
on ActiveX?
Since partimage is contained on every Knoppix CD, the easiest and cheapest solution is to boot your computer with Knoppix, save the file system image either to a local disk or over the network to another computer running partimaged.
And an example of U.S. censorship is how the creation of ".xxx" domains was blocked after the federal government had intervened.
I'm not suggesting that turning DNS and root servers from ICANN over to the U.N.'s ITU will necessarily improve things. But the current status quo isn't good either.
The installer for Etch has gone Beta (as it clearly states on the page the story links to), not Etch itself. The Etch release is scheduled for late 2006, which is still an ambitious goal given the amount of necessary work - such as moving all documentation that doesn't meet the Debian Free Software guidelines into non-free.
Besides from being shorter, mmv doesn't stop there. Your example doesn't scale to multiple replacements within one string, i.e. 'mmv "*_*.htm" "#1-#2.html"'. But above all, your example isn't safe. You could avoid filename collisions and accidental overwriting by aliasing "mv" to "mv -i"; however, that still wouldn't give you a complete check in advance, but make the command exit half-finished and non-reversable. mmv on the other hand cancels the operation before doing anything if there are any name collisions. - If you try to put all these features and safety measure into your shell script, you will probably end up with something that is as complex as the the C sourcecode of mmv...
Berners-Lee weeded out the reasonable subset of Nelson's visions and fortunately knew how to properly implement them - creating a client-server architecture, using open standards like SGML and TCP/IP, designing a well-engineering network protocol, and writing usable reference implementations of server and client.
Minix v3 looks like a much improved system, with large memory addressing and software like Emacs, vim, Python, Perl and gcc included. However, resource usage has become more like Linux and *BSD in the process, too. While Minix v2 happily ran with 2 MB RAM (I actually used it on a 386sx laptop), Minix v3 requires 8 MB, better 16 MB RAM. This is pretty much the same as NetBSD, an arguably more versatile and mature embedded OS. - Of course, I am aware that Minix is primarily an educational system and the microkernel/driver architecture has interesting hack value. Nevertheless, it seems that Minix' niche has rather shrunk than grown with the direction the project has taken...
The only thing that is likely to happen with Intel-Mac is that Windows Emulators - and hence Windows software - will run at nearly native speed.
The enthusiastic rambling on "Web 2.0" in the opening paragraph is quite unrelated to OpenOffice, an old-fashioned stand-alone application. It's probably related to a mistake Florian Reuter makes throughout the interview. He speaks of "formulas" where he actually means "forms" - He's a native German speaker and mixes up the two words because the German word for "form" is "Formular".
I am not sure whether the new headline on the homepage is a very wise and professional move of the FreeBSD project.
Seems that people are desperate in looking for a Microsoft contender on the desktop, in the light of Linux never seeming to get real mainstream desktop user market/mindshare.
It seems all development efforts goes into 3D gaming and no brains into vanilla PC requirements. Why is it impossible to find a reasonably priced, fanless graphics card with two DVI connectors? Why can't I have dual head graphics with hardware video acceleration/overlay on either monitor? Why don't Nvidia and ATI at least take care that the non-3D features of their cards are fully supported under Linux and X11? Yes, Matrox's cards come close, but even their vintage G550 require buggy binary X11 drivers.