If I'd be the owner of PalmOne, I'd try to make a mixture with embedded linux to improve their poor OS.
For starters, I've developed for Palm OS, for Windows PPC and for embedded Linux (Agenda, remember that one?:-). After all that, my summary would be that Palm has a little week foundation, but a very good grasp of what a PDA is for.
I think you're right with this merge to Linux, and a perfect example is of course Apple, who had upto OS-9 a perfect GUI but a very week foundation. After merging (still don't know 'who bought who':-) with NeXT they managed to put their great user experience and productivity on top of a solid foundation consisting of FreeBSD and NeXTstep. Et voila, problem solved and a winner in the market.
I still think that Palm understands better than Redmond what a PDA is about. Doesn't matter if it is a "stand-alone" or integrated into a phone. So, if they can adopt the same method and port the base to some Linux variant, they could build a great system. Still, Apple's marketshare is only tiny compared to Windows PCs. So, even a "Palm on Linux" could have the same fate. But it would be a very interesting proposition.
But look at it from the Intel/AMD perspective. Let's say your top end CPU is currently running at 3 GHz (for argument's sake). And you want to double the performance of that CPU. For sure it will cost you couple of years to get the same CPU running at 6 GHz, while it definitely should take less than a year to produce a dual core based on the CPUs and clockspeeds you have already.
I know, this is an oversimplification, but still, doubling the speed of a CPU takes years and we all know that double CPU speed gives you only.... mmm, 50%?? increase in application speed.
So, it's an easy guess why all CPU manufacturers (also IBM, Sun, etc.) are going this multi-core route.
If I would start with a bunch of guys/gals fresh to programming, it could be I would start with SmallTalk. I know it's old, very old, and will have to fall back on "outdated" implementations, but there are still many around, but the advantages are IMHO great.
SmallTalk is fun!! SmallTalk is small, that helps to understand it quickly. SmallTalk is probably the most pure OO language. I read some posters saying that you better start procedurally and then move on in the next year. Well, I started 20 years ago procedurally (Fortran, then Pascal, then C, then Java) and I still have trouble making the transition to OO. I witnessed others who were never, ever infected by procedural programming and they "got" the OO way of thinking 10 times faster than me.
So, if you want to achieve that, and that all what teaching is about, you better start with a language that is pure, that is small, that is fun and who cares if it is by now irrelevant.
My main message is: If you have students that are still "programming virgins":-), don't infect them with any procedural stuff. There's still plenty of opportunity later to learn stuff like C, Assembler (!!) and such.
Ohhh, and if you want to start OO, but not with something as irrelevant as SmallTalk, then the only choice is of course Java!!!!
All mac laptops come with airport built in these days, but that's a very recent change...
Apple confuses me totally. If I look in the tech spec it says: "Built-in antennas and expansion slot for optional 54 Mbps AirPort Extreme Card; (compliant with 802.11g standard; Wi-Fi Certified for 802.11g and 802.11b interoperability)". But if you look at the list of possible options, a WiFi card is not listed. So, which if the two is true???
Doesn't surprise me. My domain was once hosted with a pretty satisfactory ISP called SimpleNet (what a name, but their service was good!!). They were absorbed by Yahoo and continued under the brandname Yahoo WebServices. So far, so good...
Over the years, I got more and more spam, so when Yahoo one time announced (I'm sure I read it on/.) that they had now the absolutely perfect SPAM filtering solution in place, I wrote them why they implemented this for their freebie "mail.yahoo" accounts, but not for folks that are paying them 15 bucks a month.
Oh dear, had I underestimated Yahoo logic!! The reply was that I could upgrade my account to a business account (for 30+ bucks a month) to obtain the SERVICE (!!!) of spam filtering..... the fuckers..... So, I replied to them that I didn't think it fair that freebie customers got a better SLA than those people paying 150 bucks a year.
No answer of course and I moved my domain to another ISP at the end of the year.....
check out Ortleib These are my favorite bike paniers. I made a 4 month 7200 km trip with them, not a drop of rain managed to get inside. Mmm, even my campsite coffee filter is made by Ortleib.:-)
my laptop survived six flights, five hotels, and countless bus rides without a scratch. But that is not much travel to test a laptop bag. Not that I want to say anything against your Jansport, but my el-cheapo backpack (with notebook compartment) that cost me $20 Canadian (US $15) is protecting my notebook successfully now for over 2 years. And I fly weekly, so that is probably 100 flights, 50 hotels, mmmm, don't know about the bus rides:-), but plenty of subway rides.
Bill Gates would have flown in personally to cut them a "charitable donation" cheque for $31,000 on the condition they go the conventional route.
That's not how Microsoft normally plays the game. If you play hardball with them, you can even get $60,000.... however, all in vouchers for Microsoft software. Little problem is that all that stuff doesn't run well on 8 year old hardware. So, you have to buy new computers, which will quickly drain that "$1,000 net profit". Or was that by now $30,000 profit:-), still it's quickly gone when buying new hardware for a whole school.
At least you have improved your Japanese a little with the knowledge that "$*#!*&$*#@&($ Microsoft Windows XP Professional" surely means "Sharp recommends Microsoft Windows XP Professional".:-)
Anyone using the intent of the law as a defense in court will lose and possibly be laughed out of court.
Although I (unfortunately) have to agree completely with the general message of your posting, luckily not the whole world is like the USA... luckily!! There are parts, mmm, probably over 90%, where the intent is more important than the letter. Anyway, I'm always surprised that in the US everybody fiercely hates lawyers, and at the same time everybody tries as hard as he/she can to become one.....
If Betamax was really saved by this project, what's going to happen?
Then we'll get all our TV broadcasts in LDTV:-). A bit more seriously, Betamax probably failed by superiour quality and lack of porn. At least that's what happened to the V2000 system (the third one in this battle) brought to the market by Philips (my employer). Superior quality, but the traditional family owners didn't want to support "pink tapes". Result: the technology failed.
Or is it just the old "IBM minus 1 -> HAL" joke?..... "MS plus 1 -> NT"!
Similarly Sun had once the windowing system "NeWS" after which Steve Jobs named his workstation "NeXT". But this could of course all be a case of far fetched 'reverse engineering'.
I always kept that WinNT startup splash screen with "Microsoft Neanderthal Technology". The big monkey saying "Me discover fire, invent wheel, build server".:-)
I bet there's folks here still running RH6 probably, and similar vintage older various distros/OSes.
Yepp, RH6.2 still was and is a great release. For example my router/firewall is still running 6.2 for couple of years now. Still going strong, no reason to change it.
Before you come to the conclusion that this beast is really doing MPS computing and competes with Sun's F15k, let's first see how well it vertically scales using something like Oracle. Something like "N" transactions on a single CPU box, "1000 x N" (I won't bother about the last 24:-) transactions on SGI's machine. We'll see...
I would say that even stronger, Linux works BETTER on old laptops. If I see how many of my colleagues have an awful time to get things like wireless, power management, etc. working on their latest/greatest notebooks, while I run various (at least 5-6) different distro's on mainly 4 year old Sony's and Fujitsu's (the PIII, 500-600Mhz type) and have no issues with video projectors, USB sticks, battery monitoring and suspension/hibernation, WiFi, PalmPilot interfacing, you name it.
Why old laptops are so great is of course simple, all the problems have in the meantime been ironed out. And on the average, IMHO performance is still pretty decent. Take care of a decent new harddisk, beef up the memory as much as you can (both are cheap nowadays) and off you go. Many new notebooks get cheap and underpowered CPU's like Celeron's. In my experience those are in real life not faster than 3-4 year old PIII's. The new Pentium M's will give you a bit more juice, but many employers are "going cheap". And all those newer laptops come with all those headaches to get them configured.
Mmmm, funny, in all those distro's you mention there is a piece of code, that I wrote. Better said, that I many, many, many very late nights worked on. However, I never saw a single penny from those 30-60 dollars you spent on "official" distro's.
In other words, if people buy cheap CDs for 3 bucks or official shrink-wrap boxes for $30 per CD, for developers of Linux software it doesn't make a dime of difference. I would like it to be different (not just for myself!!:-) but that's how it is unfortunately.
The fact that a message "Skole means school in Norwegian" gets moderated as 5 Informative, tells us something about the language sensitivity of the average/. audience. I don't speak a word of any of the Scandinavian languages, but making the transition from "skole" to "school", especially when you realize that the latter is pronounced as "skool", is not what I would call a very tough one. And that's then the understatement of the year.
If I'd be the owner of PalmOne, I'd try to make a mixture with embedded linux to improve their poor OS.
:-). After all that, my summary would be that Palm has a little week foundation, but a very good grasp of what a PDA is for.
:-) with NeXT they managed to put their great user experience and productivity on top of a solid foundation consisting of FreeBSD and NeXTstep. Et voila, problem solved and a winner in the market.
For starters, I've developed for Palm OS, for Windows PPC and for embedded Linux (Agenda, remember that one?
I think you're right with this merge to Linux, and a perfect example is of course Apple, who had upto OS-9 a perfect GUI but a very week foundation. After merging (still don't know 'who bought who'
I still think that Palm understands better than Redmond what a PDA is about. Doesn't matter if it is a "stand-alone" or integrated into a phone. So, if they can adopt the same method and port the base to some Linux variant, they could build a great system. Still, Apple's marketshare is only tiny compared to Windows PCs. So, even a "Palm on Linux" could have the same fate. But it would be a very interesting proposition.
However pretty it may look, it's still just a metal box.
:-).
Isn't the same true for a car? And don't people easily pay $20.000 for it..... Oops, I forgot, it's a moving metal box
But look at it from the Intel/AMD perspective. Let's say your top end CPU is currently running at 3 GHz (for argument's sake). And you want to double the performance of that CPU. For sure it will cost you couple of years to get the same CPU running at 6 GHz, while it definitely should take less than a year to produce a dual core based on the CPUs and clockspeeds you have already.
.... mmm, 50%?? increase in application speed.
I know, this is an oversimplification, but still, doubling the speed of a CPU takes years and we all know that double CPU speed gives you only
So, it's an easy guess why all CPU manufacturers (also IBM, Sun, etc.) are going this multi-core route.
If I would start with a bunch of guys/gals fresh to programming, it could be I would start with SmallTalk. I know it's old, very old, and will have to fall back on "outdated" implementations, but there are still many around, but the advantages are IMHO great.
:-), don't infect them with any procedural stuff. There's still plenty of opportunity later to learn stuff like C, Assembler (!!) and such.
SmallTalk is fun!! SmallTalk is small, that helps to understand it quickly. SmallTalk is probably the most pure OO language. I read some posters saying that you better start procedurally and then move on in the next year. Well, I started 20 years ago procedurally (Fortran, then Pascal, then C, then Java) and I still have trouble making the transition to OO. I witnessed others who were never, ever infected by procedural programming and they "got" the OO way of thinking 10 times faster than me.
So, if you want to achieve that, and that all what teaching is about, you better start with a language that is pure, that is small, that is fun and who cares if it is by now irrelevant.
My main message is: If you have students that are still "programming virgins"
Ohhh, and if you want to start OO, but not with something as irrelevant as SmallTalk, then the only choice is of course Java!!!!
So, Apple should update the tech-specs on their web site.
All mac laptops come with airport built in these days, but that's a very recent change...
Apple confuses me totally. If I look in the tech spec it says: "Built-in antennas and expansion slot for optional 54 Mbps AirPort Extreme Card; (compliant with 802.11g standard; Wi-Fi Certified for 802.11g and 802.11b interoperability)". But if you look at the list of possible options, a WiFi card is not listed. So, which if the two is true???
(not even Yahoo has started that yet)
/.) that they had now the absolutely perfect SPAM filtering solution in place, I wrote them why they implemented this for their freebie "mail.yahoo" accounts, but not for folks that are paying them 15 bucks a month.
..... the fuckers..... So, I replied to them that I didn't think it fair that freebie customers got a better SLA than those people paying 150 bucks a year.
Doesn't surprise me. My domain was once hosted with a pretty satisfactory ISP called SimpleNet (what a name, but their service was good!!). They were absorbed by Yahoo and continued under the brandname Yahoo WebServices. So far, so good...
Over the years, I got more and more spam, so when Yahoo one time announced (I'm sure I read it on
Oh dear, had I underestimated Yahoo logic!! The reply was that I could upgrade my account to a business account (for 30+ bucks a month) to obtain the SERVICE (!!!) of spam filtering
No answer of course and I moved my domain to another ISP at the end of the year.....
check out Ortleib :-)
:-), but plenty of subway rides.
These are my favorite bike paniers. I made a 4 month 7200 km trip with them, not a drop of rain managed to get inside. Mmm, even my campsite coffee filter is made by Ortleib.
my laptop survived six flights, five hotels, and countless bus rides without a scratch.
But that is not much travel to test a laptop bag. Not that I want to say anything against your Jansport, but my el-cheapo backpack (with notebook compartment) that cost me $20 Canadian (US $15) is protecting my notebook successfully now for over 2 years. And I fly weekly, so that is probably 100 flights, 50 hotels, mmmm, don't know about the bus rides
Bill Gates would have flown in personally to cut them a "charitable donation" cheque for $31,000 on the condition they go the conventional route.
.... however, all in vouchers for Microsoft software. Little problem is that all that stuff doesn't run well on 8 year old hardware. So, you have to buy new computers, which will quickly drain that "$1,000 net profit". Or was that by now $30,000 profit :-), still it's quickly gone when buying new hardware for a whole school.
That's not how Microsoft normally plays the game. If you play hardball with them, you can even get $60,000
At least you have improved your Japanese a little with the knowledge that "$*#!*&$*#@&($ Microsoft Windows XP Professional" surely means "Sharp recommends Microsoft Windows XP Professional". :-)
Anyone using the intent of the law as a defense in court will lose and possibly be laughed out of court.
... luckily!! There are parts, mmm, probably over 90%, where the intent is more important than the letter. Anyway, I'm always surprised that in the US everybody fiercely hates lawyers, and at the same time everybody tries as hard as he/she can to become one.....
Although I (unfortunately) have to agree completely with the general message of your posting, luckily not the whole world is like the USA
If Betamax was really saved by this project, what's going to happen?
:-). A bit more seriously, Betamax probably failed by superiour quality and lack of porn. At least that's what happened to the V2000 system (the third one in this battle) brought to the market by Philips (my employer). Superior quality, but the traditional family owners didn't want to support "pink tapes". Result: the technology failed.
Then we'll get all our TV broadcasts in LDTV
NT stands for New Technology
..... "MS plus 1 -> NT"!
Or is it just the old "IBM minus 1 -> HAL" joke?
Similarly Sun had once the windowing system "NeWS" after which Steve Jobs named his workstation "NeXT". But this could of course all be a case of far fetched 'reverse engineering'.
I always kept that WinNT startup splash screen with "Microsoft Neanderthal Technology". The big monkey saying "Me discover fire, invent wheel, build server". :-)
I bet there's folks here still running RH6 probably, and similar vintage older various distros/OSes.
Yepp, RH6.2 still was and is a great release. For example my router/firewall is still running 6.2 for couple of years now. Still going strong, no reason to change it.
Well, but if you would park your car somewhere on Antartica, I think that even with keys on the dashboard it won't get stolen quickly. :-)
Before you come to the conclusion that this beast is really doing MPS computing and competes with Sun's F15k, let's first see how well it vertically scales using something like Oracle. Something like "N" transactions on a single CPU box, "1000 x N" (I won't bother about the last 24 :-) transactions on SGI's machine. We'll see...
Nice overview, but why is the Fender Rhodes missing? It is an icon of its time (1970s).
Apple doesn't have 95% of the market ...
:-) With the iPod, that could very well already have happened .....
Depends which market you talk about.
it doesn't need watercooling :-)
Linux, at least, works on old laptops.
I would say that even stronger, Linux works BETTER on old laptops. If I see how many of my colleagues have an awful time to get things like wireless, power management, etc. working on their latest/greatest notebooks, while I run various (at least 5-6) different distro's on mainly 4 year old Sony's and Fujitsu's (the PIII, 500-600Mhz type) and have no issues with video projectors, USB sticks, battery monitoring and suspension/hibernation, WiFi, PalmPilot interfacing, you name it.
Why old laptops are so great is of course simple, all the problems have in the meantime been ironed out. And on the average, IMHO performance is still pretty decent. Take care of a decent new harddisk, beef up the memory as much as you can (both are cheap nowadays) and off you go. Many new notebooks get cheap and underpowered CPU's like Celeron's. In my experience those are in real life not faster than 3-4 year old PIII's. The new Pentium M's will give you a bit more juice, but many employers are "going cheap". And all those newer laptops come with all those headaches to get them configured.
real hackers browse the web with "telnet www.whatever.com 80 [return] [return]" :-)
The article heading:
:-)
The copyright cold war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley is about to heat up.
So, is California standing at the start of a summer season of Bush fires??
Mmmm, funny, in all those distro's you mention there is a piece of code, that I wrote. Better said, that I many, many, many very late nights worked on. However, I never saw a single penny from those 30-60 dollars you spent on "official" distro's.
:-) but that's how it is unfortunately.
In other words, if people buy cheap CDs for 3 bucks or official shrink-wrap boxes for $30 per CD, for developers of Linux software it doesn't make a dime of difference. I would like it to be different (not just for myself!!
The fact that a message "Skole means school in Norwegian" gets moderated as 5 Informative, tells us something about the language sensitivity of the average /. audience. I don't speak a word of any of the Scandinavian languages, but making the transition from "skole" to "school", especially when you realize that the latter is pronounced as "skool", is not what I would call a very tough one. And that's then the understatement of the year.
Oh well.....