One of those processes at least is to detect when you plug in an iPod - otherwise Windows just mounts the iPod as a disk, rather than popping up iTunes. Seriously, is running two processes (out of the 50+ normally running) really that much of a problem that you would stop using the software?
But voicemail replaced the need for tape based machines: what does a WebOS replace?
You still need a fairly powerful computer, you still need an normal OS to load the web browser, you still need some local storage unless you want to be completely stuck if your internet connection dies or someone slashdots the server, or to avoid having to download your OS every morning. So what components can you remove?
OK, I'm extremely sceptical about this ever taking off because:
- It relies on an internet connection - It actually increases the processing requirements of the client - it sticks another huge layer of abstraction and source of incompatibility between my apps and the system - It doesn't solve a user problem.
Can anyone give me an argument for why anyone would use this instead of a USB thumbdrive, or a laptop, which are pretty cheap these days?
Re:Reinventing the wheel again and again and again
on
WebOS Market Review
·
· Score: 1
This isn't even a dumb terminal, though. Most code still runs on the client, it's just a different language to write it in. If anything, the processor requirements of running every process in an interpreted language mean it actually takes more processor power. All this allows you to get rid of is the storage requirement, although you will still need a local cache if you want to carry on working away from a net connection.
The article mentions applications in gas and oil companies. I would guess that means things like:
- MINLP/MILP (Wikipedia article is a bit weak) and Branch and Bound optimisation for things like pipeline routing, well selection etc. - fluid mechanics for pipeline design - geological data-mining for finding reservoirs Those kind of jobs can have runtimes measured in days and weeks, so an accelerator could make a real difference.
Freespace 2 was an incredible game. I spent hours flying the infinite dogfight mode and flying the bombers against the capital ships was great fun, trying to evade the fighters and flak. I bought Rogue Squadron 2 the other day, thinking it might recapture that excitement, but it pales in comparison to FS 1&2.
- you can stick the player on random and not hear repeats from the day before - You don't have to worry about changing the music on the player so much, you can just keep it in your bag - you can carry music with you that you might not listen to otherwise with a small capacity. I have a bunch of classical music on my 4GB which is nice to listen to occasionally, but wouldn't fit on a 1GB alongside the other music.
I used to use a Palm and two 512Mb cards as my music player - a 4GB iPod is an order of magnitude better.
Modded 5 insightful? The battery life on the 2G minis was very good, around 15-18hrs (more than the full iPods at the time IIRC). The nano's battery life seems a little shorter, around 10-14hrs.
That bloody advert: it has at least become synonymous with bad pop culture, anyway. The adverts on commmercial channels over here are definitely getting worse, as the commercial stations fight for revenue and find every loophole in the regulations. At least there's always the BBC, though - every time I tried to watch PBS they seemed to be begging for money.
I think the point is that while budgets for most shows are dropping (hence reality TV etc.), the amount of advertising and its degree of intrusiveness are going up. From the point of view of a viewer, that's not a very good deal.
In the long term, it's not even very good for the advertisers or the networks. While cramming in more adverts may produce greater profits in the short term, by making TV less attractive they are making alternatives (DVDs, WWW etc) more appealing, so long term it may actually reduce revenues.
I was visiting the US recently (from the UK) and tried to watch TV. I just couldn't bear it - the adverts were just so frequent and intrusive that I had wandered off and started browsing the web by the time the show came back on. And these guys want to make that *worse* by removing the option of just flicking channels? Stupid in the extreme.
The comments over there seem to be a lot more childish even than Slashdot. The comment moderation is even stranger: I posted a comment once saying how I find GNOME easier to use than Windows for some things, only to get negatively dugg into oblivion.
Another part of the problem is the sheer over-complexity of the problem. How many times have you seen in forums "edit your xorg.conf file" as a response to a video-related question? That is a ridiculous level of competence to expect from a newbie.
Possibly they are expecting the kind of documentation you see in a lot of commercial software and when they try to read the source you point them to,they just feel more lost. A lot of free sofware documentation I've seen is poorly organised and assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader.
Some of their examples do seem pretty horrible, though:
int *ptr; int i; ptr = (int *) i;
I'm struggling to see why anyone would do that. All I can think of is something like an API using int32 'handles', which are actually pointers internally. That's pretty ugly, though - opaque pointers would be better.
I would say my level of interest is about similar to yours: I won't be an early adopter, but I would like something better quality than PAL. That said, I think the number of people who care about that is very small. For example, when I point out the glaring digital encoding artifacts we get on a lot of Digital TV here, people look at me like I'm crazy or have some kind of super-sight.
Probably because ATI have worked out that (for them) the cost of developing and supporting full Linux drivers is greater than the value of the increased sales to Linux users, who are not generally a big gaming crowd. Seriously, ATI don't owe anyone drivers.
Oh goody, another licence flamewar. Seriously, proprietary software is going to be a fact of life for ever, intentionally annoying your users by preventing them using binary modules is only going to reduce Linux uptake.
Hopefully it will have been fixed by the final release, but I apt-get dist-upgraded to Flight 5 from Breezy and had some weird bugs which dissappeared when I did a clean install. Things like VMware not working or CUPS hanging and refusing to print.
Slashdot Mirror
One of those processes at least is to detect when you plug in an iPod - otherwise Windows just mounts the iPod as a disk, rather than popping up iTunes. Seriously, is running two processes (out of the 50+ normally running) really that much of a problem that you would stop using the software?
Also, once malware is installed, can it not just turn off the firewall outbound or pop up its own dialogs to further confuse the user?
But voicemail replaced the need for tape based machines: what does a WebOS replace?
You still need a fairly powerful computer, you still need an normal OS to load the web browser, you still need some local storage unless you want to be completely stuck if your internet connection dies or someone slashdots the server, or to avoid having to download your OS every morning. So what components can you remove?
OK, I'm extremely sceptical about this ever taking off because:
- It relies on an internet connection
- It actually increases the processing requirements of the client
- it sticks another huge layer of abstraction and source of incompatibility between my apps and the system
- It doesn't solve a user problem.
Can anyone give me an argument for why anyone would use this instead of a USB thumbdrive, or a laptop, which are pretty cheap these days?
This isn't even a dumb terminal, though. Most code still runs on the client, it's just a different language to write it in. If anything, the processor requirements of running every process in an interpreted language mean it actually takes more processor power.
All this allows you to get rid of is the storage requirement, although you will still need a local cache if you want to carry on working away from a net connection.
The article mentions applications in gas and oil companies. I would guess that means things like:
- MINLP/MILP (Wikipedia article is a bit weak) and Branch and Bound optimisation for things like pipeline routing, well selection etc.
- fluid mechanics for pipeline design
- geological data-mining for finding reservoirs
Those kind of jobs can have runtimes measured in days and weeks, so an accelerator could make a real difference.
Freespace 2 was an incredible game. I spent hours flying the infinite dogfight mode and flying the bombers against the capital ships was great fun, trying to evade the fighters and flak. I bought Rogue Squadron 2 the other day, thinking it might recapture that excitement, but it pales in comparison to FS 1&2.
A larger capacity means:
- you can stick the player on random and not hear repeats from the day before
- You don't have to worry about changing the music on the player so much, you can just keep it in your bag
- you can carry music with you that you might not listen to otherwise with a small capacity. I have a bunch of classical music on my 4GB which is nice to listen to occasionally, but wouldn't fit on a 1GB alongside the other music.
I used to use a Palm and two 512Mb cards as my music player - a 4GB iPod is an order of magnitude better.
Modded 5 insightful? The battery life on the 2G minis was very good, around 15-18hrs (more than the full iPods at the time IIRC). The nano's battery life seems a little shorter, around 10-14hrs.
That bloody advert: it has at least become synonymous with bad pop culture, anyway. The adverts on commmercial channels over here are definitely getting worse, as the commercial stations fight for revenue and find every loophole in the regulations. At least there's always the BBC, though - every time I tried to watch PBS they seemed to be begging for money.
According to Nielsen SoundScan, album sales are up 3.6% on 2005 in the US (article), caused in part by a large increase in *legal* downloads.
I think the point is that while budgets for most shows are dropping (hence reality TV etc.), the amount of advertising and its degree of intrusiveness are going up. From the point of view of a viewer, that's not a very good deal.
In the long term, it's not even very good for the advertisers or the networks. While cramming in more adverts may produce greater profits in the short term, by making TV less attractive they are making alternatives (DVDs, WWW etc) more appealing, so long term it may actually reduce revenues.
I was visiting the US recently (from the UK) and tried to watch TV. I just couldn't bear it - the adverts were just so frequent and intrusive that I had wandered off and started browsing the web by the time the show came back on. And these guys want to make that *worse* by removing the option of just flicking channels? Stupid in the extreme.
The comments over there seem to be a lot more childish even than Slashdot. The comment moderation is even stranger: I posted a comment once saying how I find GNOME easier to use than Windows for some things, only to get negatively dugg into oblivion.
Another part of the problem is the sheer over-complexity of the problem. How many times have you seen in forums "edit your xorg.conf file" as a response to a video-related question? That is a ridiculous level of competence to expect from a newbie.
How do you know his friend wasn't trying to set up a new ASCII Star Wars? SSH would be a major waste of CPU for something like that.
Possibly they are expecting the kind of documentation you see in a lot of commercial software and when they try to read the source you point them to,they just feel more lost. A lot of free sofware documentation I've seen is poorly organised and assumes too much knowledge on the part of the reader.
Sony and MS are focused on tech specs for a reason because that's what real gamers want
Don't real gamers want games?
Isn't that mostly acheived with types.h? int16_t, uint32_t etc.
I would say my level of interest is about similar to yours: I won't be an early adopter, but I would like something better quality than PAL. That said, I think the number of people who care about that is very small. For example, when I point out the glaring digital encoding artifacts we get on a lot of Digital TV here, people look at me like I'm crazy or have some kind of super-sight.
Probably because ATI have worked out that (for them) the cost of developing and supporting full Linux drivers is greater than the value of the increased sales to Linux users, who are not generally a big gaming crowd.
Seriously, ATI don't owe anyone drivers.
But we all can bet that the emerging product would be by far better than the closed one.
You are joking right? Or has Stallman started using hypnosis on his acolytes now?
Oh goody, another licence flamewar. Seriously, proprietary software is going to be a fact of life for ever, intentionally annoying your users by preventing them using binary modules is only going to reduce Linux uptake.
Hopefully it will have been fixed by the final release, but I apt-get dist-upgraded to Flight 5 from Breezy and had some weird bugs which dissappeared when I did a clean install. Things like VMware not working or CUPS hanging and refusing to print.