I've not had a problem with stability, as far as the Linux base goes. However, the handhelds.org Linux distro uses a 2.4-test kernel, which has some issues at present. No surprise there, as it's not a released kernel.
QPE looks good. The QPE demo for the iPaq is, of course, a demo and not polished software. But it's pretty good. I don't think X is appropriate for a handheld. However, if you really have to have remote display, QPE includes support for VNC.
Perhaps a system that mimicks the RFC process should be created and a 'reference standard' implementation of the 'core' operating system should be defined.
Or, perhaps the way that the BSDs do it -- unified kernel + userland development. The ongoing struggle between the glibc people and the kernel people doesn't happen in the BSD world. Look at the way that threads aren't supported fully under Linux because Linus refuses to provide anything more than clone(), regardless of the glibc people's need for more support. Linus doesn't care about userspace and is unwilling to help its development. It's unfortunate.
If it's suspected that there might be a rift in the Linux community, then let's investigate right now. An ounce of prevention...
<bitter>
No, there's no disenfranchisement at all! People are totally happy with the slow, planless, buggy, bigoted, inner-circle-only development methodology that Linus&Co follow. And thre rest of us are looking forward to reading Linus' autobiography! I mean, Linux really is open. Everyone, from the big vendors down to individual developers, feel free to speak their mind and submit patches, knowing that Alan Cox, Alexander Viro, Linus, etc. et al, will ignore them. Nope. No rift here. Everything's just great!
</bitter>
An ounce of prevention won't get you much at this point. We need a pound or more of cure, and then several ounces, at least, of prevention. The Linux development methodology is broken. There's quite obviously an inner core of developers who do whatever they want, and then there's the public list, which is largely a decoy. Decisions are made off-list and then maybe reported after the fact on the list. Major changes are made without planning, foresight, announcement, documentation, or debate (check out Viro and the VFS). Rather than use any kind of intelligent source control (like CVS), Linus, etc, use their Accidental Patch Control System, which allows them to add things like brand new journaling filesystems "by accident" (according to Cox). Cox's idea to remedy the obviously broken release cycle (look how long it's taken 2.4 to get to 2.4.0-test-X-pre-Y-ac-Z-pooch-screw and how many problems it has) by suggesting a hokey-pokey skip-a-number, backport, and then jump ahead a number scheme. Rather than, say, doing planning to define specific attainable goals ahead of a release and avoiding feature creep during the development of that release, and doing only bug fixes during the pre-release testing of the kernel. No, that's stupid. Can't do that. And god forbid that the kernel support a debugger. That just makes programmers stupid. According to Linus "please buy my book" Torvalds.
The problem isn't the use of MS tools, it's the teaching of the Windows API rather than algorithms that bothers people, including me. Buy that poor school some Knuth books and they'd be better off.
How will this be different from Google's back-end query interface? I ask, because I can't imagine someone making a "screen-scraping" search engine that returns bits of data and not just a link. They will probably get sued by the owners of the purloined content. Plus, parsing HTML to extract one little field of data is tricky, and highly dependant on the layout of the page. I've written a number of things to do just that, from Amazon, IMDB, Borders, finance.Yahoo.com, etc., for my own purposes. I wrote them in both C and Perl. It's a job keeping the filters updated to accomodate the changes in page layout style, regardless of language. Good luck to them and all, but until we have an XML + XSL web, with standard DTDs for the XML, forget it.
Until, of course, they sell "developer" versions of Windows, and the regular version run only signed programs. This would kill the shareware market for Windows, though, not to mention free software for Windows.
It's great! Unexpectedly! After using the various Mozilla builds on Linux, and having the NS6 installer crash/hang/etc, I wasn't expecting much. But it's actually really fast. And themes available are not too shabby.
Ah, but you see, the PC2001 specification will include a credit-card reader! The box will actually say "INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE" and will have a progress meter* counting down the seconds. You see, Bill actually wants to return us all to they heyday of computing he grew up in. That's right. The video arcade..NET is actually "MS Return of Arcade," without pacman.
LOL! A browser-based word processor written in XML. Bloat-O-vision! I imagine Intel came up with that scheme to sell more processors. Want MozillaWord to run as fast as Word 5.1 ran on a Macintosh Centris? Get the new Pentium 7, now available at 18GHz with 40MB L1 cache!
All righty then, Mr. Smarty Pants, why is it good? What extra service does the "rent" (vs. own) get you? What is it that would make me "buy" this rather than a version that doesn't auto-destruct? MS claims this is "an exciting new opportunity" -- for who? Their bankers?
There's exactly one reason this will be accespted in the market, if it is at all:
This new model will enable home and small-business customers to acquire the latest version of Office at a lower initial cost while receiving product upgrades released during their subscription at no additional expense.
So, I get it cheaper, but I gotta pay next year. I suppose this is actually Microsoft trying to compete with the Warez market. They ship "works" with a lot of prefab PCs these days. So what happens then? I'll wager that, a lot of the time, people bring home Office CDs from work and/or get them from friends. For free. With no subscription fee. So, if they can go legal and get upgrades automatically for less than paying retail for the thing, then they might. Plus, I can see the MS playing out this way: "Computers are hard to keep working right! Upgrades, patches, work, work, work! Pay us and they'll always work right. Friendly MS agents will visit your computer through your spiffy DSL line and make sure you always have the latest, greatest, bug-free stuff." They'll turn "Windows Update" into a revenue stream.
I wonder what the per-seat issues will be for business and/or homes? Renewal is annual, not one number-of-documents, as far as I can tell. So, if I install in on my wife's laptop and my desktop, so I subscribe twice? I don't subscribe twice to cable, or the newspaper.
Open source advocates are always talking about the virtue of choice, but when MS offers choice, they cry foul.
Oh, puhlease. MS is offering the same software in either case, merely with two different payment options. One, the traditional "costs too much" payment option, and two, the "ransom" option. The whole idea of software as a service is sort of ludicrous.
Sounds like you should like your CDROM drive instead. I think that difference is far too big to be explained by processor differences alone
On the contrary. Each ATAPI CDROM reads the tracks at somewhere between 0.8x and 2.4x, depending on the amoung of error correction cdparanoia has to do. GoGo then encodes at 4x and 12x, for PII and Athlon, respectively. Encoding nearly always finishes faster than ripping on both machines.
I have a P-II 500 at work, and a Athlon-600 at home. I use Grip and GoGo to rip mp3s. GoGo is essentially LAME with MMX optimization by some nice Japanese folks. At work, I get 4x rate on the mp3 creation, and at home I get 12x. All the time. That's a 300% difference for 20% clock speed difference. Foo! I like my Athlon.
Linux needs a good forking. Seriously. Competition is good.
Woohoo! Advanced Linux Kernel Project! I'd like an integrated, supported kernel debugger, modularity, and the various "big system" vendor patches to be integrated. And a better VFS (not the current "virtual ext2 interface"). I'd also like to see more capability on the small end -- i.e., the ability to leave stuff out without triggering stupid dependancy bugs. This would come along, in large part, with better modularity. Oh, and much better planning, cummunication and forethought. And development done with CVS, not patches from the current broken system just checked into cvs. It would be cool for the big players -- IBM, SGI, HP, perhaps others -- to get together and form and operate an Advanced Linux Kernel Project.
The cabal -- [...] the Powers That Be sometimes suffer from severe Not Invented Here syndrome, and sometimes they use their bully pulpit to shout down perfectly good ideas that conflict with their own biases
Also, "posixitis." Refer back to the discussion about supporting named streams ("NTFS streams") to see a sever case of "it's not posix, so it sucks." Even Linus was arguing that we need it for interoperability, and so what if Posix doesn't say anything about it. Alan Cox was actually making the bizzare claim that the HFS way of representing streams in a posix-acceptable way was good. So, gee, we have a free OS designed by the government, but only partially implemented. Yay, Posix.
Linus and the others deserve our gratitude, and our respect, but not worship or unquestioning obedience.
Ah, but not much else. X + GTK or whatever is fat. Embedded QT is as big as the X server alone on the handhelds.org stuff (which I'm currently running).
Slashdot Mirror
I've not had a problem with stability, as far as the Linux base goes. However, the handhelds.org Linux distro uses a 2.4-test kernel, which has some issues at present. No surprise there, as it's not a released kernel.
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QPE looks good. The QPE demo for the iPaq is, of course, a demo and not polished software. But it's pretty good. I don't think X is appropriate for a handheld. However, if you really have to have remote display, QPE includes support for VNC.
________________________________________
QT/Embedded already supports anti-aliasing and alpha compositing. Look pretty sweet on my iPaq. (mirror of QPE)
I wonder if the QT/X that KDE uses already includes support. If not, I don't imagine it would be too hard to move it over from QT/E.
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Yes: http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/
________________________________________
It's even in the FAQ as to why they do not mirror things. But if you want a mirror, look at http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/
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Try here: http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.kde.c om/pub/dot/img/
________________________________________
I would really like for Embedded QT to take off in the handheld/linux space -- it's much better than using a toolkit on top of X windows...
________________________________________
Wow! Someone posted some constructive criticism of Linux, and didn't get modded into oblivion!
Well, actually, I did:
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Total=3.
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Don't say anything negative about teh Holy OS!
Moderation Totals:Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Total=3.
________________________________________
Perhaps a system that mimicks the RFC process should be created and a 'reference standard' implementation of the 'core' operating system should be defined.
Or, perhaps the way that the BSDs do it -- unified kernel + userland development. The ongoing struggle between the glibc people and the kernel people doesn't happen in the BSD world. Look at the way that threads aren't supported fully under Linux because Linus refuses to provide anything more than clone(), regardless of the glibc people's need for more support. Linus doesn't care about userspace and is unwilling to help its development. It's unfortunate.
________________________________________
If it's suspected that there might be a rift in the Linux community, then let's investigate right now. An ounce of prevention...
<bitter>
No, there's no disenfranchisement at all! People are totally happy with the slow, planless, buggy, bigoted, inner-circle-only development methodology that Linus&Co follow. And thre rest of us are looking forward to reading Linus' autobiography! I mean, Linux really is open. Everyone, from the big vendors down to individual developers, feel free to speak their mind and submit patches, knowing that Alan Cox, Alexander Viro, Linus, etc. et al, will ignore them. Nope. No rift here. Everything's just great!
</bitter>
An ounce of prevention won't get you much at this point. We need a pound or more of cure, and then several ounces, at least, of prevention. The Linux development methodology is broken. There's quite obviously an inner core of developers who do whatever they want, and then there's the public list, which is largely a decoy. Decisions are made off-list and then maybe reported after the fact on the list. Major changes are made without planning, foresight, announcement, documentation, or debate (check out Viro and the VFS). Rather than use any kind of intelligent source control (like CVS), Linus, etc, use their Accidental Patch Control System, which allows them to add things like brand new journaling filesystems "by accident" (according to Cox). Cox's idea to remedy the obviously broken release cycle (look how long it's taken 2.4 to get to 2.4.0-test-X-pre-Y-ac-Z-pooch-screw and how many problems it has) by suggesting a hokey-pokey skip-a-number, backport, and then jump ahead a number scheme. Rather than, say, doing planning to define specific attainable goals ahead of a release and avoiding feature creep during the development of that release, and doing only bug fixes during the pre-release testing of the kernel. No, that's stupid. Can't do that. And god forbid that the kernel support a debugger. That just makes programmers stupid. According to Linus "please buy my book" Torvalds.
________________________________________
Well, I've got a PDF version... 87k vs 273k for the postscript version...
________________________________________
The problem isn't the use of MS tools, it's the teaching of the Windows API rather than algorithms that bothers people, including me. Buy that poor school some Knuth books and they'd be better off.
________________________________________
How will this be different from Google's back-end query interface? I ask, because I can't imagine someone making a "screen-scraping" search engine that returns bits of data and not just a link. They will probably get sued by the owners of the purloined content. Plus, parsing HTML to extract one little field of data is tricky, and highly dependant on the layout of the page. I've written a number of things to do just that, from Amazon, IMDB, Borders, finance.Yahoo.com, etc., for my own purposes. I wrote them in both C and Perl. It's a job keeping the filters updated to accomodate the changes in page layout style, regardless of language. Good luck to them and all, but until we have an XML + XSL web, with standard DTDs for the XML, forget it.
________________________________________
Until, of course, they sell "developer" versions of Windows, and the regular version run only signed programs. This would kill the shareware market for Windows, though, not to mention free software for Windows.
________________________________________
It's great! Unexpectedly! After using the various Mozilla builds on Linux, and having the NS6 installer crash/hang/etc, I wasn't expecting much. But it's actually really fast. And themes available are not too shabby.
... "newaol" ... hmmm ...
And that guy's URL was perhaps too specific. All platforms are at ftp://ftpnscp.newaol.com/pub/ net scape6/english/6.0
________________________________________
Ah, but you see, the PC2001 specification will include a credit-card reader! The box will actually say "INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE" and will have a progress meter* counting down the seconds. You see, Bill actually wants to return us all to they heyday of computing he grew up in. That's right. The video arcade. .NET is actually "MS Return of Arcade," without pacman.
*counts backwards in years
________________________________________
LOL! A browser-based word processor written in XML. Bloat-O-vision! I imagine Intel came up with that scheme to sell more processors. Want MozillaWord to run as fast as Word 5.1 ran on a Macintosh Centris? Get the new Pentium 7, now available at 18GHz with 40MB L1 cache!
________________________________________
All righty then, Mr. Smarty Pants, why is it good? What extra service does the "rent" (vs. own) get you? What is it that would make me "buy" this rather than a version that doesn't auto-destruct? MS claims this is "an exciting new opportunity" -- for who? Their bankers?
There's exactly one reason this will be accespted in the market, if it is at all:
So, I get it cheaper, but I gotta pay next year. I suppose this is actually Microsoft trying to compete with the Warez market. They ship "works" with a lot of prefab PCs these days. So what happens then? I'll wager that, a lot of the time, people bring home Office CDs from work and/or get them from friends. For free. With no subscription fee. So, if they can go legal and get upgrades automatically for less than paying retail for the thing, then they might. Plus, I can see the MS playing out this way: "Computers are hard to keep working right! Upgrades, patches, work, work, work! Pay us and they'll always work right. Friendly MS agents will visit your computer through your spiffy DSL line and make sure you always have the latest, greatest, bug-free stuff." They'll turn "Windows Update" into a revenue stream.
I wonder what the per-seat issues will be for business and/or homes? Renewal is annual, not one number-of-documents, as far as I can tell. So, if I install in on my wife's laptop and my desktop, so I subscribe twice? I don't subscribe twice to cable, or the newspaper.
Open source advocates are always talking about the virtue of choice, but when MS offers choice, they cry foul.
Oh, puhlease. MS is offering the same software in either case, merely with two different payment options. One, the traditional "costs too much" payment option, and two, the "ransom" option. The whole idea of software as a service is sort of ludicrous.
________________________________________
Sounds like you should like your CDROM drive instead. I think that difference is far too big to be explained by processor differences alone
On the contrary. Each ATAPI CDROM reads the tracks at somewhere between 0.8x and 2.4x, depending on the amoung of error correction cdparanoia has to do. GoGo then encodes at 4x and 12x, for PII and Athlon, respectively. Encoding nearly always finishes faster than ripping on both machines.
________________________________________
Ah! That makes sense. Well, 3DNow! beats the pants off MMX, then. Still like my Athlon! :)
________________________________________
I have a P-II 500 at work, and a Athlon-600 at home. I use Grip and GoGo to rip mp3s. GoGo is essentially LAME with MMX optimization by some nice Japanese folks. At work, I get 4x rate on the mp3 creation, and at home I get 12x. All the time. That's a 300% difference for 20% clock speed difference. Foo! I like my Athlon.
________________________________________
Linux needs a good forking. Seriously. Competition is good.
Woohoo! Advanced Linux Kernel Project! I'd like an integrated, supported kernel debugger, modularity, and the various "big system" vendor patches to be integrated. And a better VFS (not the current "virtual ext2 interface"). I'd also like to see more capability on the small end -- i.e., the ability to leave stuff out without triggering stupid dependancy bugs. This would come along, in large part, with better modularity. Oh, and much better planning, cummunication and forethought. And development done with CVS, not patches from the current broken system just checked into cvs. It would be cool for the big players -- IBM, SGI, HP, perhaps others -- to get together and form and operate an Advanced Linux Kernel Project.
The cabal -- [...] the Powers That Be sometimes suffer from severe Not Invented Here syndrome, and sometimes they use their bully pulpit to shout down perfectly good ideas that conflict with their own biases
Also, "posixitis." Refer back to the discussion about supporting named streams ("NTFS streams") to see a sever case of "it's not posix, so it sucks." Even Linus was arguing that we need it for interoperability, and so what if Posix doesn't say anything about it. Alan Cox was actually making the bizzare claim that the HFS way of representing streams in a posix-acceptable way was good. So, gee, we have a free OS designed by the government, but only partially implemented. Yay, Posix.
Linus and the others deserve our gratitude, and our respect, but not worship or unquestioning obedience.
The Emporer Has No Clothes.
Thanks for the good post!
________________________________________
Does anyone know if any PDA people are involved with this?
l tech.com/qt/embedded/
Does KDE have any plans for the QT Embedded environment?
Mirror of QT Embedded is here:
http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.trol
________________________________________
Ah, but not much else. X + GTK or whatever is fat. Embedded QT is as big as the X server alone on the handhelds.org stuff (which I'm currently running).
l tech.com/qt/embedded/palmtop/
If you want to try the QT stuff, it's home page, with downloads is here:
http://www.trolltech.com/pro ducts/qt/embedded/qpe.html
Mirror is here:
http://www.flyingbuttmonkeys.com/mirrors/ftp.trol
________________________________________