This is a cool toy and I like their "server" aspect to this thing as well. Since a bunch of people get cable and cable modems from the same provider, this can then replace the cable modem + DHCP server to share the connection around the house.
I hope this thing is expandable, it would be cool then to have it be the wireless hub as well, serving out connections to laptops, etc around the house.
It will be interesting to see if they're as liberal is TiVo with the hacks though.
I am faced with a similiar situation, the size of my team has been drasically reduced and now I am carrying out the reposiblilies of two former co-workers, plus my own work load.
While the added work load can be overwhelming at times, I find it rewarding to have a broader responsibility for other areas of the company that I would not otherwise have had the opportunity to be involved with.
If you are in a similiar situation, I have some recommendations for coping with the challenges of handling your increased work load.
Prioritize! I can't stress this enough. I used to priortize my tasks by most interesting project or most nagging co-working needing a task completed, or "what the boss says to do." If you're overworked it's likely that your boss is overwhelmed as well, trying her/his best to get you the tasks that need to be done. However, their increased burden means that they cannot necessarily manage your time as efficiently as they once could.
Make a to-do list. Seriously! Order that list everyday by top priorities. Keep the list around for the week so that you can check off what you've accomplished. When overworked, it's too easy to feel like you're not getting anything done b/c your plate is always full. If you keep a list, you can sit down and see what you've actaully accomplished and you'll realize that it was a hell of a lot too! This keeps you motivated.
Take a day off. If you feel overwhelmed, step away for a day. Clear your head. You'll come back the next day and get more done than you would have without the break.
Stay focused on one task. I really hate the phone calls when everyone is asking "do this for me", "do that", "i need this...", yada yada yada. Tell them you'll get too it soon. Add it to your to-do list, priorize it, and check it off when you finish!
The scariest thought about this is that big companies who can't be trusted (read: Microsoft) could be doing this type of thing to 0wn your Windoze box and any other applications you might want to compile via MSVC++, VB, or.Nut.
It's nice to see Oracle contributing patches, reference implementations, and useful sample code back to the open source community.
Oracle has jumped 100% on the Linux bandwagon and is pushing it as the OS of choice for RAC (real application clusters) and claimed to switch all their internal production servers to Linux in the near future.
To see them giving code and "lessons learned" information back to the open source community is awesome. This is the type of business and open source relationship that proiveds a win, win for both the commercial party and the open source parties involved. Oracle benefits from a free and stable platform while contributing back to that community code that can help make the product (Linux is this case) better for everyone else.
Thanks Oracle, nice to see you doing a good thing for open source.
Re:Mac OS X is fast, the GUI may be a bit slow(er)
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 2
800 Mhz Powerbook and 700 Mhz iMac (G4).
Mac OS X is fast, the GUI may be a bit slow(er)
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As far as the underlying OS is concerned, OS X is fast. It stacks up well against Linux running on the same hardware (see previous Slashdot story).
Their Java implementation rocks. Cocoa applications are fast. The Aqua UI is snappy, epecially considering what it's doing.
Consider this: Aqua renders everything in PDF. It make perfect use of anti aliasing, shadows, fading, zooming and window effects. It does what KDE, Gnome and Windows users only dream of being able to do. And at what price? In general, the UI is as snappy as MS Windows or X-Windows. Acutally, in some senses it's faster and it is stable. In my experience, this GUI is just as fast as Windows and KDE and Gnome, while doing a hell of a lot more than any of these other interfaces do to paint a pretty picture.
OS X isn't slow. Aqua isn't slow. PPC chips aren't slow. This OS and GUI kick ass.
If you are a Mac OS X user and feel the GUI is slow, I have to two recommendations:
Buy more RAM.
Move the swap file to a swap partition.
Both of these help immensely with any speed issues you may be having. RAM definitely makes the biggest improvements.
To say that operating systems are irrelevant is a terribly narrowminded statement.
Operating systems will be irrelevant the day that I can take any file, any application and simply use it, read it, execute it on every platform out there.
They will be irrelevant they day that most inferior ones are indistingishable from the superior ones for every task.
This is so over simplified that is is amazing. Operating systems follow the same simple rules as all other tools. The right OS for the right job.
Would you run an incredibly large enterprise data warehouse on Windows or Mac OS 9? Would you give your kid a AIX or OS/390 box to play games on? Hell no. Would you put a non-realtime OS in a medical device? Hell no.
This article is either FUD or was posted here just to stir up controversy. This guy has to be kidding.
One of the more interesting, non-technical observations made by the author is that IBM most likely has some real consumer products in mind for this chip, not just helping Apple replace it's G4's.
"The PowerPC 970 has other potential customers as well, though, not the least of which is IBM itself who, with its large investments in Linux, would love to see a high-performance, 970-based 4-way or 8-way SMP Linux desktop workstation..."
This chip could be the start of something big in the Linux space as well. Think about it, we are now at a point where a few companies other than Intel are now poised to take the center stage in the next gen workstation, most notably AMD, Apple, and now IBM themselves.
While Linux has run on PPC chips for a long time, it is difficult to come upon a G4 chip without paying the "Apple Tax" for the hardware. If IBM steps up to the plate with this chip, which can then run OS X, Mach, Linux, *BSD, (insert other OS'es here), and can be purchased directly or in a package from IBM, we may see a good set of Windows challengers for the desktop and server room. Obviously OS X will still only run on Apple derivatives.
These chips will be big, I guarantee it, and not just for Apple. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft ports Win XP to these chips.
Here lies the differentiation between free software and commercial software. Free software isn't release or production quality until the software developers feel that it is 100% stable. Commercial software is production quanity when the big boss says it's time to make more money with another release.
For example, Win2K was released with 100,000 known bugs. Apache Software Foundation was running their website w/Apache 2.0 beta for over a year before the code went "gold". This is the fundamental difference. Just b/c Microsoft calls it SQL Server 2000 doesn't mean it's gold code.
I've been super impressed by OS X having used it as my primary laptop for the last couple weeks.
Wow Taco, I thought OS X was cool, but seeing that you've actually figured out a way to use an OS as a laptop, you've definitely uncoverd a cool hidden feature on OS X that no else knows about. Maybe that's why Jaguar costs $120 USD, you don't even need a computer to use it!!!
I'm sorry, mod me down now, but it had to be said.:P
As another person just getting into the OS X programming game, I was wondering the same thing. After looking around Apple's web site, and playing around with the different frameworks, it became apparent to me the Cocoa + Obj-C was the way to go.
Objective C is easy to learn and can be intermixed in the same source files with C++ (and obviously C). It's one of those "use the right tools for the right job" things. The GUI is most easily programmed with Cocoa using Objective-C, but if there's a nice library you want to utilize that's written in C++, there's nothing stopping you from using it.
Once you get comfortable with Objective-C, you realize that it is almost as easy to use as Java.
Now for the alternatives:
Java Swing on OS X: I have a database tool that I am creating as a cross platform app that is written entirely in Java using Swing. It runs beautifully on OS X and looks (almost out-of-the-box) like a native application. However, it is still slower than a native app. Users who expect a snappy GUI will be disappointed with a Java Swing app on OS X. While it performs admirably better on OS X than Windows or Linux, I'd stay away from Java Swing if cross-platform binary compatability is not a major requirement.
Carbon: From what I could understand from Apple's web site, Carbon exits for one reason: to give developers a migration path from OS 9 to OS X. Carbon is a gateway API since Cocoa simply is unsupported on OS 9. It is obvious that Apple's go-forward plans are for Cocoa and Objective-C.
Java and Interface Builder: I serisouly recommend not using this combination. You are going to force your Mac OS X only application to run in a Java VM without the cross-platform benefits of Java. This approach only seems logical if your backend is written Java and you want to create native GUIs on all platforms. I would stay away from this for an OS X only application.
In both the open source Unix (FreeBSD, Linux, etc.) and the Microsoft worlds, there is a lot of talk right now about making the file system more like a database and vice versa.
Microsoft's approach is to tune the database (SQL Server) to act as a file system, scheduled replace NTFS in 2006. The open source community, however, is taking the opposite approach and aiming to make the file system more database-like.
One of the most promising ideas right now for Linux seems to be coming from Hans Reiser, soon to be implemented in a future version of Reiser FS. Reiser FS will store many attributes about a file in other files, basically expanding the capabilites of the file system into a database.
Which do you see as the more promising approah? What do you think the impact of such hybrid filesystem/databases will be on DBMS such as Oracle, Sybase, and DB2?
Currently, OS X's SMP abilities scale only to two processors. If they want to employ a 4-way chip, the OS is going to need some work. Is this a limitation imposed by Mach or BSD? Does BSD scale up to more than 2 chips?
Yes the settlement is not final yet, however, Microsoft claims that SP1 & SP3 comply with the terms of the proposed settlement. Therefore, it is important to point out MS is lying.
Hopefully this will make the DOJ wise up to the fact that MS will find a way around anything.
The idea the MS will make proprietary extensions is exactly what concerns me. Besides, Apple is not a monopoly and Apple does not control 95% of the OS market. If Microsoft wants to cripple 802.11 by adding proprietary extensions, it can and it will.
If Apple cripples 802.11 in Air Port, they cripple their devices and you simply buy another vendor's product. However, MS will put the other vendors out of business.
Well, this is just more bad news as far as the non-M$ lovinig crowd is concerned. If Microsoft starts controlling the hardware as well as the OS, than it makes things that much easier for them to break (um, i mean, improve) currernt standards like 802.11.
Isn't this company a monopoly? Shouldn't someone be raising the red flag to this? Oh, right, I forgot, M$ is in bed with the justice department. Gotta love our free market capitalistic society that just doesn't work when it's being run by corrupt cronies.
Everyone from Gnome and KDE who are complaining about Red Hat's excellent decision to unify the desktops for end user experiece really just wants to have their cake and eat it too.
The real reason everyone likes to have multiple desktop environments is for choice. The choice to develop applications with the toolkit of your choice. This is great because, as everyone loves to say around here, "this is what makes Linux great, choice and freedom."
But as with all choices to diverge, rather than unify, someone suffers. Up unitl now that has been the end user -- the person all this software was written for in the first place, or is it? KDE and Gnome are great, but they offer two different window kits, two different looks and feels, and two different user experiences. This is bad for the end user. If I am KDE die hard and want to use a Gnome application, I can, the only problem is that it's going to look and feel like a Gnome app on my KDE desktop. And if I was a Gnome user the above situation would be reversed, you get the idea.
The point here is that Red Hat has done a great service to the KDE and Gnome teams. They have taken two incompatible, entirely different desktops, and unified them for the benefit of the end user.
Let's not forget that Linux is about freedom not only for the developer, but for the end user. Well written applications are designed with the user in mind. If the KDE and Gnome teams want to contribute to the Linux/*nix community in a truly free and open maner, they will see this move for what it is: a change to allow developers to continue to innovate in the way they see fit, using the right tools for the job at hand, all while improving user experience. That's what it's all about. Right?
Apple really wants to ditch OS 9. They have made this abundantly clear and they have dead-ended it. Right now Apple has to get people off Mac OS 9 so that developers will start targeting OS X. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Apple is in a position now where most of their major third party application providers (Photoshop, et al) are running on X. But these companies still support OS 9 and this is what has to be stopped. How do you stop it? Force users to jump to OS X. Now there's no reason to develop for OS 9 and Apple can declare it truly dead.
But as another poster pointed out, forcing people to ditch their current OS doesn't make you many friends. So would Apple intentionally cripple their hardware to make sure it won't boot OS 9? I doubt it. But if you read between the lines on this one it may be implying something bigger - I'm thinking a processor change here.
OS X affords Apple the opportunity to run on many platforms and ditching PPC is not an option if you have to support OS 9. So you have to ditch 9 to move forward.
We all know that OS 9 runs emulated under OS X and Apple will keep this support. This most likely doesn't require platform support. I don't know for sure, but Apple is most likely emulating for OS 9 - and if it's not it will in future releases when they ditch Motorola.
All the signs are pointing this way. Motorola's PPC development has stagnated. Apple needs more horsepower to make OS X shine. Apple needs to find a new processor and OS 9 simply doesn't fit into the picture. I'm willing to bet that this move is being made to clear the way for a new chip, maybe even to introduce it at Mac World 2003.
What is most impressive about this to me is that they did it using Linux over IRIX. Why? Because this has provent to be Linux's weakest point: scalability. Most of the changes in 2.5 are concentrating on scalability, could this be reaping those benefits?
Linux running at 120 GB/s with 64 processors is impressive for an OS that has been criticized as inefficient when running on more than 8.
I would be very interested to know what version of the kernel they are using.
Slashdot Mirror
<xml>
<document type="ms-word">
<data>aksljdflkaj31948lksadjfmn232.....</data>
</document>
</xml>
Ahh, open standards at work over in Redmond.
I hope this thing is expandable, it would be cool then to have it be the wireless hub as well, serving out connections to laptops, etc around the house.
It will be interesting to see if they're as liberal is TiVo with the hacks though.
While the added work load can be overwhelming at times, I find it rewarding to have a broader responsibility for other areas of the company that I would not otherwise have had the opportunity to be involved with.
If you are in a similiar situation, I have some recommendations for coping with the challenges of handling your increased work load.
Good luck!
Scary, very scary.
Oracle has jumped 100% on the Linux bandwagon and is pushing it as the OS of choice for RAC (real application clusters) and claimed to switch all their internal production servers to Linux in the near future.
To see them giving code and "lessons learned" information back to the open source community is awesome. This is the type of business and open source relationship that proiveds a win, win for both the commercial party and the open source parties involved. Oracle benefits from a free and stable platform while contributing back to that community code that can help make the product (Linux is this case) better for everyone else.
Thanks Oracle, nice to see you doing a good thing for open source.
800 Mhz Powerbook and 700 Mhz iMac (G4).
Their Java implementation rocks. Cocoa applications are fast. The Aqua UI is snappy, epecially considering what it's doing.
Consider this: Aqua renders everything in PDF. It make perfect use of anti aliasing, shadows, fading, zooming and window effects. It does what KDE, Gnome and Windows users only dream of being able to do. And at what price? In general, the UI is as snappy as MS Windows or X-Windows. Acutally, in some senses it's faster and it is stable. In my experience, this GUI is just as fast as Windows and KDE and Gnome, while doing a hell of a lot more than any of these other interfaces do to paint a pretty picture.
OS X isn't slow. Aqua isn't slow. PPC chips aren't slow. This OS and GUI kick ass.
If you are a Mac OS X user and feel the GUI is slow, I have to two recommendations:
Both of these help immensely with any speed issues you may be having. RAM definitely makes the biggest improvements.
Operating systems will be irrelevant the day that I can take any file, any application and simply use it, read it, execute it on every platform out there.
They will be irrelevant they day that most inferior ones are indistingishable from the superior ones for every task.
This is so over simplified that is is amazing. Operating systems follow the same simple rules as all other tools. The right OS for the right job.
Would you run an incredibly large enterprise data warehouse on Windows or Mac OS 9? Would you give your kid a AIX or OS/390 box to play games on? Hell no. Would you put a non-realtime OS in a medical device? Hell no.
This article is either FUD or was posted here just to stir up controversy. This guy has to be kidding.
If you can't figure out how to manually move your files, you shouldn't be using Linux.
This chip could be the start of something big in the Linux space as well. Think about it, we are now at a point where a few companies other than Intel are now poised to take the center stage in the next gen workstation, most notably AMD, Apple, and now IBM themselves.
While Linux has run on PPC chips for a long time, it is difficult to come upon a G4 chip without paying the "Apple Tax" for the hardware. If IBM steps up to the plate with this chip, which can then run OS X, Mach, Linux, *BSD, (insert other OS'es here), and can be purchased directly or in a package from IBM, we may see a good set of Windows challengers for the desktop and server room. Obviously OS X will still only run on Apple derivatives.
These chips will be big, I guarantee it, and not just for Apple. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft ports Win XP to these chips.
For example, Win2K was released with 100,000 known bugs. Apache Software Foundation was running their website w/Apache 2.0 beta for over a year before the code went "gold". This is the fundamental difference. Just b/c Microsoft calls it SQL Server 2000 doesn't mean it's gold code.
Sorry I don't see how a laptop and an OS are closely associated. A "laptop" and a "notebook" are; a laptop and software are not.
Wow Taco, I thought OS X was cool, but seeing that you've actually figured out a way to use an OS as a laptop, you've definitely uncoverd a cool hidden feature on OS X that no else knows about. Maybe that's why Jaguar costs $120 USD, you don't even need a computer to use it!!!
I'm sorry, mod me down now, but it had to be said. :P
Objective C is easy to learn and can be intermixed in the same source files with C++ (and obviously C). It's one of those "use the right tools for the right job" things. The GUI is most easily programmed with Cocoa using Objective-C, but if there's a nice library you want to utilize that's written in C++, there's nothing stopping you from using it.
Once you get comfortable with Objective-C, you realize that it is almost as easy to use as Java.
Now for the alternatives:
Microsoft's approach is to tune the database (SQL Server) to act as a file system, scheduled replace NTFS in 2006. The open source community, however, is taking the opposite approach and aiming to make the file system more database-like.
One of the most promising ideas right now for Linux seems to be coming from Hans Reiser, soon to be implemented in a future version of Reiser FS. Reiser FS will store many attributes about a file in other files, basically expanding the capabilites of the file system into a database.
Which do you see as the more promising approah? What do you think the impact of such hybrid filesystem/databases will be on DBMS such as Oracle, Sybase, and DB2?
Ah, so the limit is in the chip, not the OS. Cool, that's good to know. Thanks!
Currently, OS X's SMP abilities scale only to two processors. If they want to employ a 4-way chip, the OS is going to need some work. Is this a limitation imposed by Mach or BSD? Does BSD scale up to more than 2 chips?
Hopefully this will make the DOJ wise up to the fact that MS will find a way around anything.
If Apple cripples 802.11 in Air Port, they cripple their devices and you simply buy another vendor's product. However, MS will put the other vendors out of business.
Isn't this company a monopoly? Shouldn't someone be raising the red flag to this? Oh, right, I forgot, M$ is in bed with the justice department. Gotta love our free market capitalistic society that just doesn't work when it's being run by corrupt cronies.
The real reason everyone likes to have multiple desktop environments is for choice. The choice to develop applications with the toolkit of your choice. This is great because, as everyone loves to say around here, "this is what makes Linux great, choice and freedom."
But as with all choices to diverge, rather than unify, someone suffers. Up unitl now that has been the end user -- the person all this software was written for in the first place, or is it? KDE and Gnome are great, but they offer two different window kits, two different looks and feels, and two different user experiences. This is bad for the end user. If I am KDE die hard and want to use a Gnome application, I can, the only problem is that it's going to look and feel like a Gnome app on my KDE desktop. And if I was a Gnome user the above situation would be reversed, you get the idea.
The point here is that Red Hat has done a great service to the KDE and Gnome teams. They have taken two incompatible, entirely different desktops, and unified them for the benefit of the end user.
Let's not forget that Linux is about freedom not only for the developer, but for the end user. Well written applications are designed with the user in mind. If the KDE and Gnome teams want to contribute to the Linux/*nix community in a truly free and open maner, they will see this move for what it is: a change to allow developers to continue to innovate in the way they see fit, using the right tools for the job at hand, all while improving user experience. That's what it's all about. Right?
Apple really wants to ditch OS 9. They have made this abundantly clear and they have dead-ended it. Right now Apple has to get people off Mac OS 9 so that developers will start targeting OS X. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Apple is in a position now where most of their major third party application providers (Photoshop, et al) are running on X. But these companies still support OS 9 and this is what has to be stopped. How do you stop it? Force users to jump to OS X. Now there's no reason to develop for OS 9 and Apple can declare it truly dead.
But as another poster pointed out, forcing people to ditch their current OS doesn't make you many friends. So would Apple intentionally cripple their hardware to make sure it won't boot OS 9? I doubt it. But if you read between the lines on this one it may be implying something bigger - I'm thinking a processor change here.
OS X affords Apple the opportunity to run on many platforms and ditching PPC is not an option if you have to support OS 9. So you have to ditch 9 to move forward.
We all know that OS 9 runs emulated under OS X and Apple will keep this support. This most likely doesn't require platform support. I don't know for sure, but Apple is most likely emulating for OS 9 - and if it's not it will in future releases when they ditch Motorola.
All the signs are pointing this way. Motorola's PPC development has stagnated. Apple needs more horsepower to make OS X shine. Apple needs to find a new processor and OS 9 simply doesn't fit into the picture. I'm willing to bet that this move is being made to clear the way for a new chip, maybe even to introduce it at Mac World 2003.
Linux running at 120 GB/s with 64 processors is impressive for an OS that has been criticized as inefficient when running on more than 8.
I would be very interested to know what version of the kernel they are using.
I am a dumbass. I read this to mean terminal, not dock. Sorry! I even wrote dock on the subject, hehe.
defaults write com.apple.Terminal TerminalOpaqueness 0.0
When you open a new terminal it will be 100% transparent. any value between 0.0 and 1.0 (0% to 100%) will change the opaqueness.