Well, to play devil's advocate, I'd say the hard disk manufacturer's move from 512 to 4096 byte sectors came at an opportune time to push people to the "other" new technology. Esp. since people running older systems (there are an awful lot of corporate WinXP installs still floating around!) would well experience ~4x slowdown on writes due to misaligned filesystems. I could see a lot of big corporations putting SSDs in their standard loads for that reason alone:-P
Thanks to desktop standards, people have been doing this for years... makes sense that a major distro is following suit.
My desktop pretty much only uses gdm and gnome-terminal from GNOME, and occasionally nautilus (though I turn off the desktop handling).
Using Enlightenment DR16 or occasionally compiz as the window manager, and awn ("Avant Window Navigator") as the panel, with compatible taskbar and notification area.
Word up. For me it comes down to capability. I could buy 2x-4x conventional drives and run software RAID on them for the price of one midrange SSD... hell, a whole other computer for the price of a high-end SSD. Other than the added complexity, I have no idea why more people don't do this. Maybe we just need a friendly GUI for mdadm?
You can run RAID10 on 2 disks (with offset=far), so for read-heavy loads, you can double your throughput (the second copy is maintained on the "slower" inner tracks on the second half of each hard disk). So you get close to 2x performance reading large files, parallel reads of small files with lower "closest head" seek times, and *much* better system responsiveness because your system isn't stuck on iowaits as often... usually one of the disks is able to service your IO request. Oh, yeah, and all that extra storage... terabytes more. And some fault tolerance, so you have some time to make backups, get a replacement drive, oh, and finish that work you were doing *now* if one of your disk drives happens to fail (haven't heard that the failure rates of SSDs were all that much better yet, despite having no moving parts)
Sure, performance, yes, but if you want performance you might as well spend it on even more RAM, which is still more than 10x faster than SSD. I typically run servers and/or suspend to RAM, so the system files in my cache don't typically expire, and I can put up with an extra 10 seconds or so the few times I reboot in a month or year. Heck, I run all my Windows games on Steam from an external USB drive that only pushes maybe 10MB/s max, and it works fine since all the content pre-loads at the beginning of each map:-P
I do plan to look at SSDs someday, maybe if the price / performance drops another order of magnitude (doesn't look like it will happen soon, from what I've read). But for now there are plenty of other things I'd rather spend my money on to get more capability.
Word... HFT is not much different than the plot for Office Space. "Making" money from money by taking other people's money from their transactions just by essentially skimming what would otherwise be roundoff errors off the top.
On the plus side, at least it's a plug for Linux performance? Obligatory: http://xkcd.org/808/
OK, Gawker Media has a whole site dedicated to exactly this kind of thing, surprised no one mentioned it yet: http://lifehacker.com/ Worth perusing to find interesting ways to simplify things.
For myself, I've found:
short term (daily / weekly): With pen and notepad, write down checklists. If it's written down, it's not taking up space in your brain or causing stress. Cross things out when they're done. (though I don't like deleting them entirely, since it helps to see how much you've accomplished any given day)
long term: Any outlining tool (I really like Progect for PalmOS, haven't found anything comparable anywhere else yet)
I've seen similar issues on certain hardware... I did a lot of tweaking on my older platform (Tyan Tiger MPX with a Trident 4D Wave NX audio card) but never really got audio jitter to go away completely until I simply bit the bullet and upgraded my computer (to some AMD760 chipset with onboard audio).
But if you've got a reasonably modern system, I'd suggest disabling PulseAudio on Ubuntu and running your audio apps on straight ALSA drivers.
And lest I lose my Linux fanboi cred, I might want to add that the Tyan Tiger MPX was a real pain under Windows... while audio worked fine, nVidia 6800 was a mess due to the crappy windows AGP drivers... mistesselated triangles showing up everywhere!
Phoronix is the site that cares about that sort of thing. I can't seem to find their most recent article on Windows vs. Linux closed drivers, but I remember there being one within the last year or so.
All I know is that nVidia is really making a killing on all the Linux graphics clusters for government/defense sims that are replacing all the older SGI and SUN workstations. And it's still even difficult for them sometimes supporting certain API and driver options and wiping out graphics glitches between releases... I can only imagine how much work ATi would have to do to get into that rather lucrative field.
I want to like ATi, but I got burned big time the last time I bought an ATi Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder way back when, just prior to the cutoff for their initial closed driver support. Have been pretty happy paying a small premium for nVidia cards and solid Linux support ever since.
This is a great discovery, but what are we going to do with it? The obvious thing is to mine it out, but wouldn't lightening the mass of the moon have a (probably quite bad) effect on it's tidal effects to the earth?
Well, the moon is moving away from us approximately 3.8cm per year, so we better hurry up and grab what we can before it disappears completely!
No! Anyone who watches the Colbert Report must realize by now that scientists are evil conniving bunches conspiring to take over the world! I bet this whole report was concocted by them in secret to drive a gold rush to the moon, securing their funding for the next few decades! And like fools, we're believing them! By the time we figure it out, it will be too late, and they will leave for the stars on the expensive mining equipment our tax dollars paid for! And we'll be stuck here with nothing but national debt and the same old moon made out of green cheese.
Well I for one am not going to listen to them!!!1!
Guy IS a hero, though the slashdot article comes off as a little weird... "engineer mode"? I mean, (a) this isn't a special brand of engineer-only heroism; and (b) the physical principles aren't exactly so esoteric that you need an engineering background to have figured it out. Can't we just salute his bravery and quick-thinking? Or was the submitter an engineer looking for reflected glory?
Cynic mode ENGAGE:
The newspapers love to report on things that might positively affect the stock prices of certain companies in people's stock portfolios. Especially ones that might be titled "Seattle Times"
True fact: I once was a finalist in some local paper airplane contest done as an art project Newspaper headlines: "Boeing Engineer Wins Paper Airplane Contest" <rolls eyes/>
VirtualBox works very well using Linux as a host, plus you get experimental DirectX/OpenGL acceleration support... (VMware Workstation charges extra for that, though I have no idea how well it actually works)
ESX is for enterprises running servers. You'll be missing out on a lot of hardware support, just to gain a few extra MB of RAM (cheap!) and a few CPU cycles. Also it's a pain:P
Last I checked a few months ago, VMware Workstation / Server on Linux still uses a file on disk to back the virtual machine's memory. This will kill your file I/O performance on your host, since these huge files are constantly being written to. There's a workaround involving moving this to tmpfs, but of course then your virtual machines use twice as much RAM. Anyway, I've been pretty disappointed in VMware ever since they got consumed by EMC^2.
But frankly, virtualization is kinda last year... physicalization is the buzzword now. Get a cheap cluster of ION-based nettops to host all your various servers, and filesystems, and stuff 24x7, and dual boot your beefy application desktops depending upon what game you're trying to play or application you're trying to run... I think you'll be much happier and free to tinker.
That's what I've heard, the N900 doesn't support the HSDPA freqs used for higher data rates in the US.
3G is not all that slow (~256kbps), but T-mobile has pretty good HSDPA coverage everywhere I've checked, which is lower latency and often ~1Mbps. So I've been pretty happy with the myTouch 3G Slide that I picked off of Craigslist a few months ago. Very usable for tethering.
Hmm, I have been burned by smartphones in the past - too big and chunky, slow, complicated to use for simple tasks, fragile touch screens, proprietary-only interfaces and connectors,... Have they actually got better? What I want to know about any new smartphone is:
Don't know what "smartphones" you've used in the past... assuming you're talking about older Blackberries, Palm Treo, maybe even Winphones based on the HP iPaQ...
The current crop have capacitive touchscreens vs. resistive touchscreens, meaning you have to use the pad of your finger instead of a fingernail / stylus. Much harder to be accurate (so buttons need to be much larger), but much more durable as well.
I don't like the newer trackballs or capacitive directional touchpads, since they don't provide enough haptic feedback. I'd much rather use even the volume toggle for pgdn/pgup, but oh well.
- Is it possible to access ALL functions without using touch-screen/stylo?
Speaking for my Android phone (myTouch 3G Slide running CyanogenMOD 6.0)...
The keyboard is a great help! I think I can pretty much do everything except pinch zoom. To be honest, I sometimes find myself using the soft keyboard for very short text entry, which surprised me nonetheless.
Blackberry had a slightly better keyboard, where digits were arranged in keypad layout rather than across the top, and would automatically go into number mode when you were at a phone prompt or other numerical input field. But maybe there's a hackapp that could do something like that for Android.
- Can you connect to it using a simply USB cable?
Yep, tethering works great, the adb channel works great (as long as Windows detects the adb device properly... works great under Linux). Not sure if you want to run IP over the USB link (I used to do this with PalmOS), but that's probably possible as well.
- Can it connect to my wirewless router?
Wifi is awesome simple... even have it attached to my work guest Wifi with all the encryption. Also great for wifi diagnostics with the "Wifi Analyzer".
- Can I attach an external standard keyboard?
I suppose you could with bluetooth, might be simpler to just SSH or VNC to it from your PC, though.
- And of course, is basic functionality available without having to go through three layers of menus?
Yep. It doesn't have a dedicated Ctrl key like the N900, but I seldom have to dig through lots of menus to send special characters when I'm using ConnectBot SSH or AndroidVNC. Lots of shortcuts and apps available to make expose a lot of the settings that you'd otherwise have to dig in the preferences for (PowerBar, TeslaLED widgets to control radios and operating modes).
Finally, if it runs Linux, can I ssh to it over a simple, standard wireless connection?
Yes, but I haven't tested it personally yet. But as I mentioned, there are apps that will serve sshd, VNC, FTP, and others from your Android device.
Still waiting for an apt repo, though.... my one regret for giving up on the N900
As long as we're on the topic, anyone have any success connecting the Android 2.2 Mail app to a courier-imapd server? I'm not having any joy, though it works with mutt / thunderbird / etc.
Though I suppose it would be better to connect to something with a full PIM suite, like Evolution... but haven't convinced myself to migrate there from JPilot + PalmOS beyond an occasional one-way sync.
I myself recently made the move from a Palm TX to an Android phone (purely because I'm a Google Maps Mobile addict), but still find myself carrying the Palm TX around for a lot of legacy apps that I haven't been able to find "modern" equivalents for...
DB
Progect (haven't found a better user-sortable outlining / project tracking tool anywhere else, even on PCs)
Cryptopad / KeyRing (though I guess I should try to migrate to the KeePass compatible thing eventually)
DiddleBug (haven't found any decent drawing apps for Android period, much less ones targeted for free-form note-taking)
HandyShopper (very useful for recurring lists, birthday party invitation lists, it even does a great job tallying my monthly budget!)
HappyDays (anniversary reminder linked to "birthday" field in address book, curiously good for popping up reminders for annual maintenance)
PIM entry is still much more streamlined than in Android 2.2 (too many submenus)
HP48GX emulator (some Android scientific / graphic calcs are close, but not really feature complete yet)
Plucker (still looking for some sort of automated web scraper for Android that allows offline viewing... I know Dolphin browser can sort of save individual pages, but it would be nice to carry complete sites around... Waiting for FBReaderJ to support the plkr format someday.)
Anyway, I too am quite interested in where all the hardcore Palm users have migrated to (evidently it wasn't WebOS, if only for the lack of SD storage:P )
I like the idea from TFA about using balloons... those are getting pretty cheap and hobbyist right now, and they could stay in place above a metropolitan area.
Say, a little solar-powered dirigible running on arduino, hoisting up a little wifi gateway that you could use to create a reasonably big wifi umbrella over a city or town to seed a wireless mesh. People would just aim an extra wifi router at it to get connected. It could make a great ISP-less mesh network.
Best part is, once you scale up production a little bit (or probably even without), they would probably be much cheaper to deploy than the missiles or fighter scrambles needed for law enforcement to shoot them down. I suppose they could be nice and include GPS position updates to ATC as well so commercial aircraft can steer clear of them.
Smoke is reasonably easy to produce and it's even possible to burn oneself. But fire, that takes a totally disproportionate amount of skill. I wouldn't be surprised if building a hut to live in year round is an easier challenge.
Heh, so I've never seen "Castaway", but I heard one of the little jokes in it is that the guy initially spends days and days trying to get a fire lit, and his hands are all dirty and bloody and finally the smoke poofs up into a flame and he has this elated dance of joy and celebration. He has FIRE! He can COOK his FOOD now!
The scene then changes to a few years later, after he becomes accustomed to the lifestyle. He somewhat expertly spears a fish in the water. Then he guts it and eats it raw.
Meh, I could see them possibly doing this to strengthen Oracle's suit against Google's Dalvik VM in Android.
Or possibly Apple wants to introduce the straightjacket-in-a-walled-garden appstore approach to their desktop in addition to iOS, so they're starting to make moves to discourage the distribution of portable Java apps the same way they inhibit Flash on iOS.
Other than that, seems like a bunch of maneuverings between companies and technologies I don't really care all that much about. But at least hopefully it'll keep the fanbois who like chatting about soap opera politics preoccupied for a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to play devil's advocate, I'd say the hard disk manufacturer's move from 512 to 4096 byte sectors came at an opportune time to push people to the "other" new technology. Esp. since people running older systems (there are an awful lot of corporate WinXP installs still floating around!) would well experience ~4x slowdown on writes due to misaligned filesystems. I could see a lot of big corporations putting SSDs in their standard loads for that reason alone :-P
Thanks to desktop standards, people have been doing this for years... makes sense that a major distro is following suit.
My desktop pretty much only uses gdm and gnome-terminal from GNOME, and occasionally nautilus (though I turn off the desktop handling).
Using Enlightenment DR16 or occasionally compiz as the window manager, and awn ("Avant Window Navigator") as the panel, with compatible taskbar and notification area.
Word up. For me it comes down to capability. I could buy 2x-4x conventional drives and run software RAID on them for the price of one midrange SSD... hell, a whole other computer for the price of a high-end SSD. Other than the added complexity, I have no idea why more people don't do this. Maybe we just need a friendly GUI for mdadm?
You can run RAID10 on 2 disks (with offset=far), so for read-heavy loads, you can double your throughput (the second copy is maintained on the "slower" inner tracks on the second half of each hard disk). So you get close to 2x performance reading large files, parallel reads of small files with lower "closest head" seek times, and *much* better system responsiveness because your system isn't stuck on iowaits as often... usually one of the disks is able to service your IO request. Oh, yeah, and all that extra storage... terabytes more. And some fault tolerance, so you have some time to make backups, get a replacement drive, oh, and finish that work you were doing *now* if one of your disk drives happens to fail (haven't heard that the failure rates of SSDs were all that much better yet, despite having no moving parts)
Sure, performance, yes, but if you want performance you might as well spend it on even more RAM, which is still more than 10x faster than SSD. I typically run servers and/or suspend to RAM, so the system files in my cache don't typically expire, and I can put up with an extra 10 seconds or so the few times I reboot in a month or year. Heck, I run all my Windows games on Steam from an external USB drive that only pushes maybe 10MB/s max, and it works fine since all the content pre-loads at the beginning of each map :-P
I do plan to look at SSDs someday, maybe if the price / performance drops another order of magnitude (doesn't look like it will happen soon, from what I've read). But for now there are plenty of other things I'd rather spend my money on to get more capability.
fortune -m "cleverly as possible"
(Don't have an install for fortune nearby to test, tho :/ )
Word... HFT is not much different than the plot for Office Space. "Making" money from money by taking other people's money from their transactions just by essentially skimming what would otherwise be roundoff errors off the top.
On the plus side, at least it's a plug for Linux performance?
Obligatory: http://xkcd.org/808/
OK, Gawker Media has a whole site dedicated to exactly this kind of thing, surprised no one mentioned it yet: http://lifehacker.com/
Worth perusing to find interesting ways to simplify things.
For myself, I've found:
Ha, reminds me of a corollary...
"Borrow a million bucks, and the bank owns you; borrow a few billion bucks, and you own the bank."
Used in reference to US foreign policy with China, for better for for worse :P
I've seen similar issues on certain hardware... I did a lot of tweaking on my older platform (Tyan Tiger MPX with a Trident 4D Wave NX audio card) but never really got audio jitter to go away completely until I simply bit the bullet and upgraded my computer (to some AMD760 chipset with onboard audio).
But if you've got a reasonably modern system, I'd suggest disabling PulseAudio on Ubuntu and running your audio apps on straight ALSA drivers.
And lest I lose my Linux fanboi cred, I might want to add that the Tyan Tiger MPX was a real pain under Windows... while audio worked fine, nVidia 6800 was a mess due to the crappy windows AGP drivers... mistesselated triangles showing up everywhere!
< googles his root password >
Nope, they don't seem to have my password.
Well, at least they didn't until now... But I feel safer knowing ;-P
Phoronix is the site that cares about that sort of thing. I can't seem to find their most recent article on Windows vs. Linux closed drivers, but I remember there being one within the last year or so.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=category&item=Display%20Drivers
(There was still a big gap in 2007)
All I know is that nVidia is really making a killing on all the Linux graphics clusters for government/defense sims that are replacing all the older SGI and SUN workstations. And it's still even difficult for them sometimes supporting certain API and driver options and wiping out graphics glitches between releases... I can only imagine how much work ATi would have to do to get into that rather lucrative field.
I want to like ATi, but I got burned big time the last time I bought an ATi Radeon 7500 All-in-Wonder way back when, just prior to the cutoff for their initial closed driver support. Have been pretty happy paying a small premium for nVidia cards and solid Linux support ever since.
This is a great discovery, but what are we going to do with it? The obvious thing is to mine it out, but wouldn't lightening the mass of the moon have a (probably quite bad) effect on it's tidal effects to the earth?
Well, the moon is moving away from us approximately 3.8cm per year, so we better hurry up and grab what we can before it disappears completely!
No! Anyone who watches the Colbert Report must realize by now that scientists are evil conniving bunches conspiring to take over the world! I bet this whole report was concocted by them in secret to drive a gold rush to the moon, securing their funding for the next few decades! And like fools, we're believing them! By the time we figure it out, it will be too late, and they will leave for the stars on the expensive mining equipment our tax dollars paid for! And we'll be stuck here with nothing but national debt and the same old moon made out of green cheese.
Well I for one am not going to listen to them!!!1!
Guy IS a hero, though the slashdot article comes off as a little weird... "engineer mode"? I mean, (a) this isn't a special brand of engineer-only heroism; and (b) the physical principles aren't exactly so esoteric that you need an engineering background to have figured it out. Can't we just salute his bravery and quick-thinking? Or was the submitter an engineer looking for reflected glory?
Cynic mode ENGAGE:
The newspapers love to report on things that might positively affect the stock prices of certain companies in people's stock portfolios. Especially ones that might be titled "Seattle Times"
True fact: I once was a finalist in some local paper airplane contest done as an art project />
Newspaper headlines: "Boeing Engineer Wins Paper Airplane Contest" <rolls eyes
VirtualBox works very well using Linux as a host, plus you get experimental DirectX/OpenGL acceleration support... (VMware Workstation charges extra for that, though I have no idea how well it actually works)
ESX is for enterprises running servers. You'll be missing out on a lot of hardware support, just to gain a few extra MB of RAM (cheap!) and a few CPU cycles. Also it's a pain :P
Last I checked a few months ago, VMware Workstation / Server on Linux still uses a file on disk to back the virtual machine's memory. This will kill your file I/O performance on your host, since these huge files are constantly being written to. There's a workaround involving moving this to tmpfs, but of course then your virtual machines use twice as much RAM. Anyway, I've been pretty disappointed in VMware ever since they got consumed by EMC^2.
But frankly, virtualization is kinda last year... physicalization is the buzzword now. Get a cheap cluster of ION-based nettops to host all your various servers, and filesystems, and stuff 24x7, and dual boot your beefy application desktops depending upon what game you're trying to play or application you're trying to run... I think you'll be much happier and free to tinker.
If you used some groupware with an https-based frontend, I think you should be covered, as long as all data stays on the server.
But yeah, not terribly impressed by encryption options on just about any phone.
That's what I've heard, the N900 doesn't support the HSDPA freqs used for higher data rates in the US.
3G is not all that slow (~256kbps), but T-mobile has pretty good HSDPA coverage everywhere I've checked, which is lower latency and often ~1Mbps. So I've been pretty happy with the myTouch 3G Slide that I picked off of Craigslist a few months ago. Very usable for tethering.
Hmm, I have been burned by smartphones in the past - too big and chunky, slow, complicated to use for simple tasks, fragile touch screens, proprietary-only interfaces and connectors, ... Have they actually got better? What I want to know about any new smartphone is:
Don't know what "smartphones" you've used in the past... assuming you're talking about older Blackberries, Palm Treo, maybe even Winphones based on the HP iPaQ...
The current crop have capacitive touchscreens vs. resistive touchscreens, meaning you have to use the pad of your finger instead of a fingernail / stylus. Much harder to be accurate (so buttons need to be much larger), but much more durable as well.
I don't like the newer trackballs or capacitive directional touchpads, since they don't provide enough haptic feedback. I'd much rather use even the volume toggle for pgdn/pgup, but oh well.
- Is it possible to access ALL functions without using touch-screen/stylo?
Speaking for my Android phone (myTouch 3G Slide running CyanogenMOD 6.0)...
The keyboard is a great help! I think I can pretty much do everything except pinch zoom. To be honest, I sometimes find myself using the soft keyboard for very short text entry, which surprised me nonetheless.
Blackberry had a slightly better keyboard, where digits were arranged in keypad layout rather than across the top, and would automatically go into number mode when you were at a phone prompt or other numerical input field. But maybe there's a hackapp that could do something like that for Android.
- Can you connect to it using a simply USB cable?
Yep, tethering works great, the adb channel works great (as long as Windows detects the adb device properly... works great under Linux). Not sure if you want to run IP over the USB link (I used to do this with PalmOS), but that's probably possible as well.
- Can it connect to my wirewless router?
Wifi is awesome simple... even have it attached to my work guest Wifi with all the encryption. Also great for wifi diagnostics with the "Wifi Analyzer".
- Can I attach an external standard keyboard?
I suppose you could with bluetooth, might be simpler to just SSH or VNC to it from your PC, though.
- And of course, is basic functionality available without having to go through three layers of menus?
Yep. It doesn't have a dedicated Ctrl key like the N900, but I seldom have to dig through lots of menus to send special characters when I'm using ConnectBot SSH or AndroidVNC. Lots of shortcuts and apps available to make expose a lot of the settings that you'd otherwise have to dig in the preferences for (PowerBar, TeslaLED widgets to control radios and operating modes).
Finally, if it runs Linux, can I ssh to it over a simple, standard wireless connection?
Yes, but I haven't tested it personally yet. But as I mentioned, there are apps that will serve sshd, VNC, FTP, and others from your Android device.
Still waiting for an apt repo, though.... my one regret for giving up on the N900
Cool, thanks, I'll be sure to check those out.
My favorite drawing app so far is "Sketch Online", but it's really just a well-done pictionary game. I suppose I'll try "Draw and Share".
As long as we're on the topic, anyone have any success connecting the Android 2.2 Mail app to a courier-imapd server? I'm not having any joy, though it works with mutt / thunderbird / etc.
Though I suppose it would be better to connect to something with a full PIM suite, like Evolution... but haven't convinced myself to migrate there from JPilot + PalmOS beyond an occasional one-way sync.
Not to mention that the N900 has a PalmOS Garnet emulator available, so you might still be able to run some of your other legacy palm apps:
http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/index.html
I myself recently made the move from a Palm TX to an Android phone (purely because I'm a Google Maps Mobile addict), but still find myself carrying the Palm TX around for a lot of legacy apps that I haven't been able to find "modern" equivalents for...
Anyway, I too am quite interested in where all the hardcore Palm users have migrated to (evidently it wasn't WebOS, if only for the lack of SD storage :P )
I just want to tip my hat to you, sir, for a sig that's tragically hilarious.
I like the idea from TFA about using balloons... those are getting pretty cheap and hobbyist right now, and they could stay in place above a metropolitan area.
Say, a little solar-powered dirigible running on arduino, hoisting up a little wifi gateway that you could use to create a reasonably big wifi umbrella over a city or town to seed a wireless mesh. People would just aim an extra wifi router at it to get connected. It could make a great ISP-less mesh network.
Best part is, once you scale up production a little bit (or probably even without), they would probably be much cheaper to deploy than the missiles or fighter scrambles needed for law enforcement to shoot them down. I suppose they could be nice and include GPS position updates to ATC as well so commercial aircraft can steer clear of them.
Smoke is reasonably easy to produce and it's even possible to burn oneself. But fire, that takes a totally disproportionate amount of skill. I wouldn't be surprised if building a hut to live in year round is an easier challenge.
Heh, so I've never seen "Castaway", but I heard one of the little jokes in it is that the guy initially spends days and days trying to get a fire lit, and his hands are all dirty and bloody and finally the smoke poofs up into a flame and he has this elated dance of joy and celebration. He has FIRE! He can COOK his FOOD now!
The scene then changes to a few years later, after he becomes accustomed to the lifestyle. He somewhat expertly spears a fish in the water. Then he guts it and eats it raw.
Cooking his food isn't worth the extra energy :P
Meh, I could see them possibly doing this to strengthen Oracle's suit against Google's Dalvik VM in Android.
Or possibly Apple wants to introduce the straightjacket-in-a-walled-garden appstore approach to their desktop in addition to iOS, so they're starting to make moves to discourage the distribution of portable Java apps the same way they inhibit Flash on iOS.
Other than that, seems like a bunch of maneuverings between companies and technologies I don't really care all that much about. But at least hopefully it'll keep the fanbois who like chatting about soap opera politics preoccupied for a bit.
Good stuff! They seem to be doing a lot of this in Europe too... There's an entire hostel built into a retired 747 in Sweden:
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/02/11/reclaimed-jumbo-jet-hotel-in-stockholm/
Older article with links to other related projects:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/09/creative-recycling-jumbo-hostel.php