You can't surf on the web, you can only buy books on it from Amazon's store.
Try the "experimental" menu, it has a web browser; it even has JavaScript to a limited extent, but works much better on pages meant for mobile usage of course. One of the reasons why I bought a Kindle was the free wireless, I can check on webmail and even/. (though I'm not reading/. via my Kindle right now:) ) without an expensive wireless plan or hopeing on an open wifi connection being available wherever I am.
nature to books that somehow is part of the reading. Even being able to dog ear a page or write in the margins of certain kinds of books is a very good way to use them effectively. Not to mention...convenient.
For what it's worth, you can fold the corner of pages to mark places and take notes and make clippings of particular pages on a Kindle. You've never used one, apparently.:-)
The 1280x800 screen is also pretty nifty.
I envision a bunch of these getting back-fitted with XP, and once done I am guessing they will run pretty nicely. Vista on this thing - well I've heard stupider things, but not today.
Another comment says the chipset can only run Vista. Dell must really have a sweetheart deal with Microsoft on this thing.:-)
It can't be upgraded to 2GB RAM, unlike the mini 9, yet at the same time runs the more demanding Windows Vista OS rather than XP or Linux. It also comes with by default a 1.3GHz processor rather than 1.6GHz, though this is supposed to help with battery life, which is shortened by the bigger screen. The only real advantage I see is that it has a real keyboard.
Have they given up on the perfectly round mouse yet? That was wonderful. Knowing which way was up was such a drag.
The mighty mouse, what they sell today, is somewhat flat but not circular, your information about Apple mice is about 10 years out of date.:-) They suck too though, the trackball that replaces the scroll wheel on most mice wears out quick.
If it does constitute Godwin's law, and I think it does, all discussions on this topic must stop... Though since this is slashdot, that is unlikely to happen.;-)
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." -- Godwin
There's nothing about stopping or any need for slashbaiting.
ISTR an extension of Godwin's law in "New Hacker's Dictionary" and the "Jargon File" that did say that:
Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any _intentional_ triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
Though, as I pointed out, there is no such rule here.
does this constitute an occurrence of Godwin's law?
If it does constitute Godwin's law, and I think it does, all discussions on this topic must stop... Though since this is slashdot, that is unlikely to happen.;-)
I find quite interesting that the coool features are finding their way into FreeBSD but not linux. Makes you think which users really have more freedom.
Linux's kernel uses the GPL, and CDDL is GPL-incompatible. (But BSD and Apple's OS X open-source license (whatever it's called) compatible.) As a result, BSD and OS X have DTrace, and ZFS is in BSD and is coming to OS X. However, it's not really the fault of the Linux developers that it doesn't have it in the kernel, Sun made yet another open-source license that's incompatible with GPL. (It's pretty hard to make a license incompatible with BSD, the only conditions are, "here's some code, don't sue us".)
Note that the GP said "open-sourcing binge" (meaning the source was closed and now is not) vs. your "has so much open source" (which indicates origin, not current state). Apple did not have to reopen the source that got closed when NeXT took it. Had they wanted to, they could have left everything closed, but the chose to open some of it back up.
NeXT didn't close any of the BSD source. They may have not offered it for download like Apple did (as if anyone did at the time, since this was before people were on the Internet backbone who weren't defense contractors - even GNU did most of their source distribution at the time via paid-for magtape) but, in complience with the BSD and CMU Mach licenses, everything they didn't add as closed was open - just as it is now. In fact, NeXT even made OpenStep an open multivendor spec as well.
It is strange to talk as if NeXT and Apple had substantially different corporate policies, both were headed by Steve Jobs - I don't imagine that they had different orientations towards open source or any other aspect of corporate policy since Apple is really just NeXT 2.0 post-second-coming-of-Jobs
Parallels sold me their desktop software when I bought an Intel Mac. After repeated crashes (OS X kernel panics, not just application panics), they finally admitted that it was their fault and they hadn't read the documentation about how inter-processor interrupts were meant to work, so their kernel module crashed regularly on any Core 2 Duo machine. Their suggested fix? Buy the new version. Those pirates deserve to go out of business.
VMWare doesn't charge for new versions of VMWare Fusion to existing licensees. Well, they haven't promised to do this indefinitely, but all minor version upgrades have been free and they've promised to make 2.0 a free upgrade as well for owners of 1.x as thanks to them for being "early adopters". It's not often that computer "pioneers" get appreciation rather than arrows in their back.:-) Plus I've never had a kernel panic from VMWare. Virtualbox does look promising though, it will be nice to see full featured virtual machine clients come to open source.
For example, we know the main reason why Apple went on an open-sourcing binge when OS X was released, to keep Apple relevant, but Sun never really had a down time like Apple did around the OS 9 era.
The main reason why OS X has so much open source has nothing to do with "an attempt to keep Apple relevant", it was because when NeXTStep (OS X's ancestor, why do you think most of the API still begins with NS?) was made, Unixes that were based on BSD Unix were the de-facto standard, and the Mach microkernel was considered state of the art.
There were a *lot* of Unixes that were partially open source (though this predates the open source movement) and partially proprietary at the time. OS X simply has heritage from a codebase that was state of the art Unix circa the late 80s. (Predating Linux by several years.)
I dunno... Sounds like this guy aggrandizing Firefox a little *too* much..... Apple would have been blazing along with Safari regardless of the existence of Firefox.
Consider:
* WebKit's gotta lean mean and stable to provide a great experience, not only on desktops, but especially on their ultra-portable hardware (iPhone, iPod Touch, etc).
* Apple are moving into web services in a big way (Mobile Me), and need great standards support, as well as great developer tools.
A rock-solid, fast, and efficient browser is something they *sorely* rely on. Did Firefox provide some friendly competition?- I think that's fair.
Yes, that's fair. I was not saying that Firefox doesn't provide any friendly competition, it's not so black-and-white. I was saying that Firefox is not the only innovating browser, or the only browser at the leading edge, or the only thing driving WebKit development. (Now, it may very well be the only thing driving IE development!)
I don't think he implies at all that Firefox is leading Safari in that case, just that the competition is forcing both to improve, which is a good thing. I think if you asked Gecko or WebKit developers they would admit there is competition happening that is making them work harder.
Although this is true, a big part of WebKit and Safari's improvements are a result of where Apple is going in the browser sphere. Namely the JavaScript-heavy SproutCore sites, and the iPhone and other embedded users of WebKit which need lower RAM usage. If anything, Firefox 3's lower RAM usage and the alpha (beta?) version of Mobile Firefox out now are responses to actions done by the open source community and Apple developers who were working on Mobile Safari. (Before someone snubs their nose at WebKit for having a corporate sponsor, Firefox, and Mozilla, originally had Netscape / Time Warner-AOL as a corporate sponsor; and still have corporate participation.)
I suggest taking a look at the commit history of both Gecko and Webkit in the last year or so where JS perf is concerned.
You'll find that they've basically been pushing each other, in almost perfect alternation: one checks in a patch that makes it faster, the other responds with changes that make it faster, etc.
Seriously, go read the checkin logs.
The current Firefox nightlies are significantly slower at JavaScript, and have less standards compliance, than WebKit nightlies. That's what I'm going by. I don't need to read checkin logs to see that Squirelfish is fast and gets good benchmarks according to both partial and impartial tests.
Firefox's main advantages as it now stands are security, and the plug-in ecosystem; though it's performance and standards compliance are nothing to sneeze at; and are liable to improve, not because it is the engine that drives all browser innovation, but because it is engaged in a friendly competition with WebKit. If you have benchmarks that say otherwise, please post them. Considering that I like Firefox enough to have it as my main browser in three operating systems, rather than Safari or Konqueror, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.:-)
Yes, but Squirelfish was developed first. Hence proving my point, Firefox is not the only leader in innovation; as this "evangelist" seems to be implying.
Tamarin is the engine behind AS in Flash and has been targeted for integration with SpiderMonkey for more than a year now. So I don't see how exactly you can consider SquirelFish to be first or even innovative since it's just performance improvements.
Tamarin has been in the pipeline, like you said, for more than a year now; without even an alpha test or nightly including it. The article is about the browser scene as it stands now, and the fact is, that Firefox is not the "engine that drives (all) innovation" but in fact, along with WebKit (which powers Konqueror and Safari), and perhaps some other projects, is one of more than one browser that are improving web standards compliance and browser performance.
If it weren't for Safari's lousy security record on the Mac, I'd actually consider using it, along with the latest WebKit, rather than Firefox - the latest WebKit's speed and standards compliance are better, not worse, than Firefox. Plus it supports nice features that native Cocoa apps provide.
Now, Internet Explorer, on the other hand, I don't see how it's innovating at all. It truly is playing a game of catch-up at best.
Firefox will eventually use tamarin, which should be on par with Squirelfish.
Yes, but Squirelfish was developed first. Hence proving my point, Firefox is not the only leader in innovation; as this "evangelist" seems to be implying.
Safari is not trailing Firefox as it is being developed in all ways, especially JavaScript performance. I actually prefer to use Firefox 3 on the Mac (much better array of plug-ins, and better security), but the latest WebKit nightlies, on http://www.webkit.org/ since the implementation of Squirelfish (see blog there) are quite a bit faster in JavaScript performance than Firefox. If anything, Firefox is going to have some catching up to do in that department.
I always found ME to boot much faster than 98/98SE, but that was the only improvement... Oh and defrag was quicker, it would usually finish before something crashed or locked up.
It had better boot faster, it needed to reboot even more often!
Ok. I HAVE to bite this one in the butt. After trying ALL of the recent "light weight" distros on my fathers Pentium II 300 w/256 MB of ram, DSL, Xubuntu, etc ALL FAILED miserably on it. 5 minute boot times, sluggish response, you name it. It wasn't usable. Oddly enough, I threw Slackware 4.0 on it and it ran great, while Slackware 12 did not. Maybe it is the 2.6 kernel... I haven't a clue. But there isn't an up to date distro that will run sufficiently as a desktop on such hardware. Period.
You could run Linux kernel 0.95 on a 386-16 with 4 megs of RAM quite fast, for example, and it booted in a reasonable time frame (not as fast as DOS of course, but DOS didn't have multitasking). Linux has bloated like everything else I guess. I remember seeing the first ad for Slackware on Usenet (RIP), noting how many disk images it needed (floppy disk images! There were no ISOs for it at the time) and thinking "that sure is bloated".
For example you could use OSX as your desktop operating system.
Fanboism at it's best, and I'm writing this on a OS X system. Safari on OS X is the largest (after Quicktime) attack vector on OS X. Security is a systemic Safari problem, on any OS, even though this one is Windows exploit. The problem is, in OS X, one can never truly delete Safari without breaking some parts of it and third party programs that use it, though they don't break as badly as Windows does if you delete IE DLLs, this makes it not an option for avoiding Safari bugs really.
(Well, you can drag the Safari icon to the garbage - but that just deletes the Safari front-end to WebKit, much as deleting IE?.EXE on Windows doesn't fix the overall problem; though to be fair the carpet-bombing bug is a Safari-specific bug, not one for the WebKit engine.)
If Apple would get off their duffs OS X has a lot of great security design and features that would make it a highly secure Unix if only if Apple would patch the thing. Even third-party programs such as Samba almost never get updated by Apple in their OS patches!
Slashdot Mirror
You can't surf on the web, you can only buy books on it from Amazon's store.
Try the "experimental" menu, it has a web browser; it even has JavaScript to a limited extent, but works much better on pages meant for mobile usage of course. One of the reasons why I bought a Kindle was the free wireless, I can check on webmail and even /. (though I'm not reading /. via my Kindle right now :) ) without an expensive wireless plan or hopeing on an open wifi connection being available wherever I am.
nature to books that somehow is part of the reading. Even being able to dog ear a page or write in the margins of certain kinds of books is a very good way to use them effectively. Not to mention...convenient.
For what it's worth, you can fold the corner of pages to mark places and take notes and make clippings of particular pages on a Kindle. You've never used one, apparently. :-)
I agree with your message, except one point. Law isn't easily outsourced, as laws are country-specific.
The 1280x800 screen is also pretty nifty. I envision a bunch of these getting back-fitted with XP, and once done I am guessing they will run pretty nicely. Vista on this thing - well I've heard stupider things, but not today.
Another comment says the chipset can only run Vista. Dell must really have a sweetheart deal with Microsoft on this thing. :-)
It can't be upgraded to 2GB RAM, unlike the mini 9, yet at the same time runs the more demanding Windows Vista OS rather than XP or Linux. It also comes with by default a 1.3GHz processor rather than 1.6GHz, though this is supposed to help with battery life, which is shortened by the bigger screen. The only real advantage I see is that it has a real keyboard.
Have they given up on the perfectly round mouse yet? That was wonderful. Knowing which way was up was such a drag.
The mighty mouse, what they sell today, is somewhat flat but not circular, your information about Apple mice is about 10 years out of date. :-) They suck too though, the trackball that replaces the scroll wheel on most mice wears out quick.
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." -- Godwin There's nothing about stopping or any need for slashbaiting.
ISTR an extension of Godwin's law in "New Hacker's Dictionary" and the "Jargon File" that did say that:
Though, as I pointed out, there is no such rule here.
does this constitute an occurrence of Godwin's law?
If it does constitute Godwin's law, and I think it does, all discussions on this topic must stop... Though since this is slashdot, that is unlikely to happen. ;-)
I find quite interesting that the coool features are finding their way into FreeBSD but not linux. Makes you think which users really have more freedom.
Linux's kernel uses the GPL, and CDDL is GPL-incompatible. (But BSD and Apple's OS X open-source license (whatever it's called) compatible.) As a result, BSD and OS X have DTrace, and ZFS is in BSD and is coming to OS X. However, it's not really the fault of the Linux developers that it doesn't have it in the kernel, Sun made yet another open-source license that's incompatible with GPL. (It's pretty hard to make a license incompatible with BSD, the only conditions are, "here's some code, don't sue us".)
Note that the GP said "open-sourcing binge" (meaning the source was closed and now is not) vs. your "has so much open source" (which indicates origin, not current state). Apple did not have to reopen the source that got closed when NeXT took it. Had they wanted to, they could have left everything closed, but the chose to open some of it back up.
NeXT didn't close any of the BSD source. They may have not offered it for download like Apple did (as if anyone did at the time, since this was before people were on the Internet backbone who weren't defense contractors - even GNU did most of their source distribution at the time via paid-for magtape) but, in complience with the BSD and CMU Mach licenses, everything they didn't add as closed was open - just as it is now. In fact, NeXT even made OpenStep an open multivendor spec as well.
It is strange to talk as if NeXT and Apple had substantially different corporate policies, both were headed by Steve Jobs - I don't imagine that they had different orientations towards open source or any other aspect of corporate policy since Apple is really just NeXT 2.0 post-second-coming-of-Jobs
Parallels sold me their desktop software when I bought an Intel Mac. After repeated crashes (OS X kernel panics, not just application panics), they finally admitted that it was their fault and they hadn't read the documentation about how inter-processor interrupts were meant to work, so their kernel module crashed regularly on any Core 2 Duo machine. Their suggested fix? Buy the new version. Those pirates deserve to go out of business.
VMWare doesn't charge for new versions of VMWare Fusion to existing licensees. Well, they haven't promised to do this indefinitely, but all minor version upgrades have been free and they've promised to make 2.0 a free upgrade as well for owners of 1.x as thanks to them for being "early adopters". It's not often that computer "pioneers" get appreciation rather than arrows in their back. :-) Plus I've never had a kernel panic from VMWare. Virtualbox does look promising though, it will be nice to see full featured virtual machine clients come to open source.
For example, we know the main reason why Apple went on an open-sourcing binge when OS X was released, to keep Apple relevant, but Sun never really had a down time like Apple did around the OS 9 era.
The main reason why OS X has so much open source has nothing to do with "an attempt to keep Apple relevant", it was because when NeXTStep (OS X's ancestor, why do you think most of the API still begins with NS?) was made, Unixes that were based on BSD Unix were the de-facto standard, and the Mach microkernel was considered state of the art. There were a *lot* of Unixes that were partially open source (though this predates the open source movement) and partially proprietary at the time. OS X simply has heritage from a codebase that was state of the art Unix circa the late 80s. (Predating Linux by several years.)
I dunno... Sounds like this guy aggrandizing Firefox a little *too* much..... Apple would have been blazing along with Safari regardless of the existence of Firefox.
Consider:
* WebKit's gotta lean mean and stable to provide a great experience, not only on desktops, but especially on their ultra-portable hardware (iPhone, iPod Touch, etc).
* Apple are moving into web services in a big way (Mobile Me), and need great standards support, as well as great developer tools.
A rock-solid, fast, and efficient browser is something they *sorely* rely on. Did Firefox provide some friendly competition?- I think that's fair.
Yes, that's fair. I was not saying that Firefox doesn't provide any friendly competition, it's not so black-and-white. I was saying that Firefox is not the only innovating browser, or the only browser at the leading edge, or the only thing driving WebKit development. (Now, it may very well be the only thing driving IE development!)
I don't think he implies at all that Firefox is leading Safari in that case, just that the competition is forcing both to improve, which is a good thing. I think if you asked Gecko or WebKit developers they would admit there is competition happening that is making them work harder.
Although this is true, a big part of WebKit and Safari's improvements are a result of where Apple is going in the browser sphere. Namely the JavaScript-heavy SproutCore sites, and the iPhone and other embedded users of WebKit which need lower RAM usage. If anything, Firefox 3's lower RAM usage and the alpha (beta?) version of Mobile Firefox out now are responses to actions done by the open source community and Apple developers who were working on Mobile Safari. (Before someone snubs their nose at WebKit for having a corporate sponsor, Firefox, and Mozilla, originally had Netscape / Time Warner-AOL as a corporate sponsor; and still have corporate participation.)
Safari doesn't look the same on Mac as on Windows, and Firefox looks a lot like Safari now on Macs.
I suggest taking a look at the commit history of both Gecko and Webkit in the last year or so where JS perf is concerned.
You'll find that they've basically been pushing each other, in almost perfect alternation: one checks in a patch that makes it faster, the other responds with changes that make it faster, etc.
Seriously, go read the checkin logs.
The current Firefox nightlies are significantly slower at JavaScript, and have less standards compliance, than WebKit nightlies. That's what I'm going by. I don't need to read checkin logs to see that Squirelfish is fast and gets good benchmarks according to both partial and impartial tests.
Firefox's main advantages as it now stands are security, and the plug-in ecosystem; though it's performance and standards compliance are nothing to sneeze at; and are liable to improve, not because it is the engine that drives all browser innovation, but because it is engaged in a friendly competition with WebKit. If you have benchmarks that say otherwise, please post them. Considering that I like Firefox enough to have it as my main browser in three operating systems, rather than Safari or Konqueror, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong. :-)
Yes, but Squirelfish was developed first. Hence proving my point, Firefox is not the only leader in innovation; as this "evangelist" seems to be implying.
Tamarin is the engine behind AS in Flash and has been targeted for integration with SpiderMonkey for more than a year now. So I don't see how exactly you can consider SquirelFish to be first or even innovative since it's just performance improvements.
Tamarin has been in the pipeline, like you said, for more than a year now; without even an alpha test or nightly including it. The article is about the browser scene as it stands now, and the fact is, that Firefox is not the "engine that drives (all) innovation" but in fact, along with WebKit (which powers Konqueror and Safari), and perhaps some other projects, is one of more than one browser that are improving web standards compliance and browser performance.
If it weren't for Safari's lousy security record on the Mac, I'd actually consider using it, along with the latest WebKit, rather than Firefox - the latest WebKit's speed and standards compliance are better, not worse, than Firefox. Plus it supports nice features that native Cocoa apps provide.
Now, Internet Explorer, on the other hand, I don't see how it's innovating at all. It truly is playing a game of catch-up at best.
Firefox will eventually use tamarin, which should be on par with Squirelfish.
Yes, but Squirelfish was developed first. Hence proving my point, Firefox is not the only leader in innovation; as this "evangelist" seems to be implying.
Safari is not trailing Firefox as it is being developed in all ways, especially JavaScript performance. I actually prefer to use Firefox 3 on the Mac (much better array of plug-ins, and better security), but the latest WebKit nightlies, on http://www.webkit.org/ since the implementation of Squirelfish (see blog there) are quite a bit faster in JavaScript performance than Firefox. If anything, Firefox is going to have some catching up to do in that department.
I always found ME to boot much faster than 98/98SE, but that was the only improvement... Oh and defrag was quicker, it would usually finish before something crashed or locked up.
It had better boot faster, it needed to reboot even more often!
Ok. I HAVE to bite this one in the butt. After trying ALL of the recent "light weight" distros on my fathers Pentium II 300 w/256 MB of ram, DSL, Xubuntu, etc ALL FAILED miserably on it. 5 minute boot times, sluggish response, you name it. It wasn't usable. Oddly enough, I threw Slackware 4.0 on it and it ran great, while Slackware 12 did not. Maybe it is the 2.6 kernel... I haven't a clue. But there isn't an up to date distro that will run sufficiently as a desktop on such hardware. Period.
You could run Linux kernel 0.95 on a 386-16 with 4 megs of RAM quite fast, for example, and it booted in a reasonable time frame (not as fast as DOS of course, but DOS didn't have multitasking). Linux has bloated like everything else I guess. I remember seeing the first ad for Slackware on Usenet (RIP), noting how many disk images it needed (floppy disk images! There were no ISOs for it at the time) and thinking "that sure is bloated".
Now get off my lawn!
Bitlocker has a back hole that Microsoft has revealed more than once to law enforcement.
The AC I was answering was stating that not using Windows will mean "all productivity will shut down" and quote:
"Year of the Linux Desktop" my ass. And I was answering to that.Besides, I use Opera on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.
Sorry. The new comment system makes one miss stuff like that occasionally.No web browser should be able to download files to your computer without your approval.
NONE.
There is no excuse for this retarded behavior of Safari. No web browser except Safari ever allowed this.
Except Internet Explorer, but it's not so kind as to leave evidence of its downloading on your desktop.For example you could use OSX as your desktop operating system.
Fanboism at it's best, and I'm writing this on a OS X system. Safari on OS X is the largest (after Quicktime) attack vector on OS X. Security is a systemic Safari problem, on any OS, even though this one is Windows exploit. The problem is, in OS X, one can never truly delete Safari without breaking some parts of it and third party programs that use it, though they don't break as badly as Windows does if you delete IE DLLs, this makes it not an option for avoiding Safari bugs really.(Well, you can drag the Safari icon to the garbage - but that just deletes the Safari front-end to WebKit, much as deleting IE?.EXE on Windows doesn't fix the overall problem; though to be fair the carpet-bombing bug is a Safari-specific bug, not one for the WebKit engine.)
If Apple would get off their duffs OS X has a lot of great security design and features that would make it a highly secure Unix if only if Apple would patch the thing. Even third-party programs such as Samba almost never get updated by Apple in their OS patches!