The new $1000 SPARC has not been launched yet. It will be launched later today, so after that I would expect to see this appear on Sun's web site. From Yahoo! news:
Sun Microsystems Inc. will unveil Tuesday its first Unix workstation priced less than $1,000 as it tries to regain ground lost to competitors.
- Feb 27 12:34 AM ET
BSD Today has this story about IBM refusing to deal with the fact
that FreeBSD will not boot on thier laptops. The actual service page
is on IBM's support site. They list supported OS's on that page, and
surprise, surprise, Linux is not among them either. IBM does support
Linux on the A20m though, but only OpenLinux.
I think I know why IBM claims support on the IBM A20m laptop series. I attended EDUCAUSE about a month ago (EDUCAUSE is to the education world what COMDEX is to industry - it's a chance for us to get together and hear what we're all doing in our areas with technology, and for vendors to wow us with new product offerings, etc.) I had the opportunity to attend the vendor fair. Being a geek, I naturally was happy to wander around and see who was presenting something that had anything to do with Linux. (Compaq had the coolest - a 16-node Alpha Beowulf cluster.... but I digress.)
I stopped at the IBM booth to talk to the sales people there. I asked about their Linux support. My wife uses a Thinkpad 770 laptop, so I also asked if there were any plans to ship Thinkpad laptops with Linux pre-installed.
I was pointed towards some education partners who were helping to staff the booth. They showed me an IBM A20 laptop that IBM had donated (I think) to the school to help put the university on a higher tech level. As part of what this university was doing (sorry, but I forgot the name) they helped all the students who were assigned laptops install both Windows 98 and Linux. I believe it was Caldera OpenLinux, because we had a discussion about Caldera, and how I personally don't feel they take the open source concept seriously enough (yup, that's my personal opinion.)
So I suspect this university got IBM to issue some kind of support for Linux on the A20 laptops, since the school was planning to issue them to students. But I understand that some of the hardware IBM uses in (at least) the Thinkpad 770 series isn't supported by Linux. In particular, I think the DSP is not supported (either well, or at all.) One side effect is you can't use the modem, and I think it runs the sound card as well.
At the risk of sounding like I'm promoting my own project, I also recommend checking out GNU Robots. This is a game/diversion for X Windows where you construct a program for a little robot, then set him loose and watch him explore a world on his own. The robot program is written in Scheme (a sub-set of LISP). There are very simple commands you can give your robot, so he can turn in different directions, pick up things, look for obstacles, and zap the baddies that are also hanging out in the world. Every action will take energy from your robot (you can pick up food, though) so you need to write the most efficient robot program that you can. It's fun!
I have not updated this in a while, and even though it is a 0.9x release, it is really the same as the 1.0 that I will release soon. (I need to re-compile kerberos for my system, so I can check in several patches and contributions that have been submitted, then we'll have a 1.0 release.)
GNU Robots really is simple to learn. You'll have to pick up a book on Scheme, though, so you can figure out how to do the "if" constructs, and other stuff that your program will need to do. But Scheme is a good programming language to learn from.
At one point, someone was going to write a programming interface for this, so you could construct a robot program by dropping in these little computer chips with the action represented by a little icon. For example, you'd have a "move forward" icon and a "turn right" icon. But the person who was writing this fell out of touch with me. So maybe someone else will volunteer to help me.
I prefer the MS Natural keyboard, but not the new "Elite" or "Gold" or whatever they call it these days with the chiclets-size arrow keys and flipped-around home/end/del/pgup/pgdn/ins keys. Go for a clone that gives you the standard arrow-key layout but the same ergonomic touch.
I've used Applix for some time (first started with the "student" edition, and now a "full" edition.) I've been quite happy with Applix.
The only complaints that I have of Applix are these:
1) Key bindings - It really irritates me that every application vendor wants to re-invent the keyboard bindings. I think it would be really nice to have this set up in a "Preferences" menu. Then I can choose to use Applix default bindings, vi, emacs, or Microsoft-like bindings. Talk about what would really help the user! I am too used to the emacs bindings so I do everything via the menus in Applix Words, but my wife is too used to the Microsoft bindings so I know she'll never consider using Applix because of the perceived learning curve (even though I think ApplixWords is really well done.)
2) User interface/icons - Applix really needs to hire someone to re-do their icons and make them easier to read (and make the buttons bigger.) The GNOME team has some nice-looking icons. It baffles me why Applix would continue using such God-awful icons. It reminds me of the quality of icons we had back in the Win30 days! The screenshot from the above article seems to show that the icons haven't improved. (And how about changing the "*" to something a little more meaningful... like maybe your Applixware logo or a "document" icon or something?)
3) New style creation - While I really like the style creator in ApplixWords, where all your styles are presented in a tree-like layout so you really understand the style inheritance (and the "Import Styles" feature is nice, if you have another document that has all the styles that you want already defined!) but it's a pain in the butt to create new styles. Microsoft Word actually got this part right. If I don't have a particular style defined that does something for me (maybe just an indented paragraph, but the whole thing italicized) under MS Word I would highlight, indent, italicize, and type in a new style name. Not too much of an interruption in my work to create something that I know I'll use later in the document. Under ApplixWords, I have to stop my work, go into the Style creator, and define a new style. These little interruptions are really annoying.
If Applix will fix these issues, then I'll be a much happier user!
We certainly have! When I was made aware of this yesterday 7/28, I immediately contacted Borland to determine if (a) their free compilers can be included in our distribution, and (b) if Borland will consider releasing the source as well along with the binaries.
This is a Good Thing(tm) for FreeDOS, and pretty much anyone who uses DOS.
Anyone else out there do a double-take on the article title? For a second there, I thought the article was saying that Microsoft had patented the concept of Closed Source Software. That would be ironic.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun Microsystems Inc. will unveil Tuesday its first Unix workstation priced less than $1,000 as it tries to regain ground lost to competitors. - Feb 27 12:34 AM ET
I think I know why IBM claims support on the IBM A20m laptop series. I attended EDUCAUSE about a month ago (EDUCAUSE is to the education world what COMDEX is to industry - it's a chance for us to get together and hear what we're all doing in our areas with technology, and for vendors to wow us with new product offerings, etc.) I had the opportunity to attend the vendor fair. Being a geek, I naturally was happy to wander around and see who was presenting something that had anything to do with Linux. (Compaq had the coolest - a 16-node Alpha Beowulf cluster.... but I digress.)
I stopped at the IBM booth to talk to the sales people there. I asked about their Linux support. My wife uses a Thinkpad 770 laptop, so I also asked if there were any plans to ship Thinkpad laptops with Linux pre-installed.
I was pointed towards some education partners who were helping to staff the booth. They showed me an IBM A20 laptop that IBM had donated (I think) to the school to help put the university on a higher tech level. As part of what this university was doing (sorry, but I forgot the name) they helped all the students who were assigned laptops install both Windows 98 and Linux. I believe it was Caldera OpenLinux, because we had a discussion about Caldera, and how I personally don't feel they take the open source concept seriously enough (yup, that's my personal opinion.)
So I suspect this university got IBM to issue some kind of support for Linux on the A20 laptops, since the school was planning to issue them to students. But I understand that some of the hardware IBM uses in (at least) the Thinkpad 770 series isn't supported by Linux. In particular, I think the DSP is not supported (either well, or at all.) One side effect is you can't use the modem, and I think it runs the sound card as well.
I have not updated this in a while, and even though it is a 0.9x release, it is really the same as the 1.0 that I will release soon. (I need to re-compile kerberos for my system, so I can check in several patches and contributions that have been submitted, then we'll have a 1.0 release.)
GNU Robots really is simple to learn. You'll have to pick up a book on Scheme, though, so you can figure out how to do the "if" constructs, and other stuff that your program will need to do. But Scheme is a good programming language to learn from.
At one point, someone was going to write a programming interface for this, so you could construct a robot program by dropping in these little computer chips with the action represented by a little icon. For example, you'd have a "move forward" icon and a "turn right" icon. But the person who was writing this fell out of touch with me. So maybe someone else will volunteer to help me.
I prefer the MS Natural keyboard, but not the new "Elite" or "Gold" or whatever they call it these days with the chiclets-size arrow keys and flipped-around home/end/del/pgup/pgdn/ins keys. Go for a clone that gives you the standard arrow-key layout but the same ergonomic touch.
The only complaints that I have of Applix are these:
1) Key bindings - It really irritates me that every application vendor wants to re-invent the keyboard bindings. I think it would be really nice to have this set up in a "Preferences" menu. Then I can choose to use Applix default bindings, vi, emacs, or Microsoft-like bindings. Talk about what would really help the user! I am too used to the emacs bindings so I do everything via the menus in Applix Words, but my wife is too used to the Microsoft bindings so I know she'll never consider using Applix because of the perceived learning curve (even though I think ApplixWords is really well done.)
2) User interface/icons - Applix really needs to hire someone to re-do their icons and make them easier to read (and make the buttons bigger.) The GNOME team has some nice-looking icons. It baffles me why Applix would continue using such God-awful icons. It reminds me of the quality of icons we had back in the Win30 days! The screenshot from the above article seems to show that the icons haven't improved. (And how about changing the "*" to something a little more meaningful... like maybe your Applixware logo or a "document" icon or something?)
3) New style creation - While I really like the style creator in ApplixWords, where all your styles are presented in a tree-like layout so you really understand the style inheritance (and the "Import Styles" feature is nice, if you have another document that has all the styles that you want already defined!) but it's a pain in the butt to create new styles. Microsoft Word actually got this part right. If I don't have a particular style defined that does something for me (maybe just an indented paragraph, but the whole thing italicized) under MS Word I would highlight, indent, italicize, and type in a new style name. Not too much of an interruption in my work to create something that I know I'll use later in the document. Under ApplixWords, I have to stop my work, go into the Style creator, and define a new style. These little interruptions are really annoying.
If Applix will fix these issues, then I'll be a much happier user!
I'd like to know what your title is. Is it something like 'webmaster to Her Highness The Queen'?
-jh
We certainly have! When I was made aware of this yesterday 7/28, I immediately contacted Borland to determine if (a) their free compilers can be included in our distribution, and (b) if Borland will consider releasing the source as well along with the binaries.
This is a Good Thing(tm) for FreeDOS, and pretty much anyone who uses DOS.
-jh
Anyone else out there do a double-take on the article title? For a second there, I thought the article was saying that Microsoft had patented the concept of Closed Source Software. That would be ironic.
Wonder if I can do that?..... :)