Announcement: After months of speculations, the new name has finally been decided. Phoenix will be called Phallus.
That and the fact that the page information says "Modified: 04/01/03" kind of leads me to believe that the new name "Phallus" might just be some sort of April fool's joke! =)
I bought an iBook2 a couple of months ago and installed Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 on
it without too many problems.
On the whole I'm very impressed with it. The battery life is excellent, the
12.1" 1024x768 display is really sharp, it's whisper-quiet, and it doesn't get
more than slightly warm (you can have it on your lap without burning your
legs). And being made by Apple it looks really stylish. Apparently these's even
going to be a driver for its Conexant winmodem ("softmodem") real soon now.
The two things that have caused me to regret buying it are:
Powering it up.
Press the start button, and an immensely cheesey chord blasts out of the
twin speakers. You too could really wish you could sink
through the floor as the entire office stops dead and snaps their heads around
to stare at you.
The keyboard.
The keycaps are a decent size, and it feels reasonably nice. About half a
dozen keys now sport tiny little squares of stickynote with alternative
legends written on them, but the Yellow Dog default keymaps already had those
keys remapped that way. You don't get an insert key or a delete key even as Fn
combinations, though.
The reason I titled this comment "VI[M] users only" has to do with the Ctrl
key. It's not the key is the bottom-lefthand corner (that's the Fn key), but the
key to the right of that. This causes me to fold my little finger underneath my
other fingers to get Ctrl combinations. As an [X]Emacs user, that begins to hurt
after a while...
Remapping the nice big caps-lock key to the left of the 'A' key doesn't help
either. That's because Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to make the
hardware only generate key-down and key-up events on alternate presses for that
key. So now you have an oh-so-useful ctrl-lock key.:-/
VI[M] users may find it to be a perfect companion, however.
Powerplay V versus Vtech Helio
on
Linux PDA Part Deux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This looks very similar to the Vtech Helio in terms of memory (2MB flash, 8MB SDRAM) and display (160x160 greyscale). The Helio lacks IRDA, but makes up for it with a 75MHz RISC processor with proper MMU as opposed to the Powerplay's 16MHz DragonBall. The Helio can also run Linux, but comes preloaded with Vtechs own VT-OS.
The Helio is also keenly priced. Brits can pick them up for £49.99 from the Carphone Warehouse, whilst you chaps across the pond can get them from a number of sources (often for less than $50, apparently).
Blake's 7 had much better tech than any of the Star Treks:
Much better weapons, as you say. Especially the hand weapons.
Really cool computers with distinct personalities that didn't play a damn jingle before and after saying everything.
Proper autorepair systems (at least on the Liberator). This eliminates the need to have a large crew dressed in funny tracksuits crawling around tubes waving little flickering, warbling gizmos at things that need repairing.
Yes, I am actually a programmer. A professional programmer, too. I'll try and write using simpler language:
Ruby is so easy to use that you can spend most of your time thinking about the problem you're solving and very little thinking about the language you're writing in. You end up with good code and you don't overheat your melon in the process.
The major advantage of Ruby that everyone seems to be overlooking is that it is built around the principle of least surprise, and had a very simple and intuitive syntax. It is also a dynamically-typed language. There is no need to consult reference manuals, or sit thinking about the correct sequence of brackets, braces, parentheses, asterisks and arrows to express the ideas in your head. Code just flows from your fingertips.
Because Ruby code costs the programmer so little effort to write, experimentation becomes easy and fun. If a simpler and more elegant solution presents itself, it is easy to rip up code and start again because there are no memories of hours of blood, sweat and tears getting that code to work. The result is clean and robust code that, looking back, was a joy to write.
I think having a precursor to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is exciting enough, but I can think of a much better use for this stuff.
Imagine how wonderful it would be if you could edit your code on a huge drawing board, like the mechanical engineers of a few decades ago used to use. Think how much better that would be than scrolling it through a few small windows on your monitor. It wouldn't matter if it took a few seconds to redraw; once that was done you could navigate through it effortlessly just by moving your eyes.
Extend that further. Remember the room in Isaac Asimov's novel Foundation, where two members of the Second Foundation inspect the Plan? The walls were covered with a diagram of the Plan, and they were able to zoom in and examine specific areas, or zoom out to get a broad overview. As a professional programmer, you could afford to wallpaper a small room with this stuff, or at least a corner or your cube...
Weird... I did loads of testing for Vojtech Pavlik to ensure that the Xterminator *is* supported under the new 2.4 input devices architecture. This was last May, so I'd be surprised if it didn't make it in.
Could this thing be used as a generalised systolic-array-on-a-chip, to implement other signal processing algorithms, or is it only suitable for neural networks?
The demo that I downloaded this morning uses Glide. It ran really smoothly at 800x600 on my Voodoo2 board under Linux. Very nice...
Hope they sign with a publisher soon. I need to buy this.
What is RMS working on nowadays, then?
on
Wired on RMS
·
· Score: 1
What is RMS working on these days? I hear that he takes a notebook with him everywhere, and that he can be seen frantically hacking code in every spare moment he has, but not what he's working on.
Slashdot Mirror
That and the fact that the page information says "Modified: 04/01/03" kind of leads me to believe that the new name "Phallus" might just be some sort of April fool's joke! =)
I bought an iBook2 a couple of months ago and installed Yellow Dog Linux 2.2 on it without too many problems.
On the whole I'm very impressed with it. The battery life is excellent, the 12.1" 1024x768 display is really sharp, it's whisper-quiet, and it doesn't get more than slightly warm (you can have it on your lap without burning your legs). And being made by Apple it looks really stylish. Apparently these's even going to be a driver for its Conexant winmodem ("softmodem") real soon now.
The two things that have caused me to regret buying it are:
Press the start button, and an immensely cheesey chord blasts out of the twin speakers. You too could really wish you could sink through the floor as the entire office stops dead and snaps their heads around to stare at you.
The keycaps are a decent size, and it feels reasonably nice. About half a dozen keys now sport tiny little squares of stickynote with alternative legends written on them, but the Yellow Dog default keymaps already had those keys remapped that way. You don't get an insert key or a delete key even as Fn combinations, though.
The reason I titled this comment "VI[M] users only" has to do with the Ctrl key. It's not the key is the bottom-lefthand corner (that's the Fn key), but the key to the right of that. This causes me to fold my little finger underneath my other fingers to get Ctrl combinations. As an [X]Emacs user, that begins to hurt after a while...
Remapping the nice big caps-lock key to the left of the 'A' key doesn't help either. That's because Apple, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to make the hardware only generate key-down and key-up events on alternate presses for that key. So now you have an oh-so-useful ctrl-lock key. :-/
VI[M] users may find it to be a perfect companion, however.
This looks very similar to the Vtech Helio in terms of memory (2MB flash, 8MB SDRAM) and display (160x160 greyscale). The Helio lacks IRDA, but makes up for it with a 75MHz RISC processor with proper MMU as opposed to the Powerplay's 16MHz DragonBall. The Helio can also run Linux, but comes preloaded with Vtechs own VT-OS.
The Helio is also keenly priced. Brits can pick them up for £49.99 from the Carphone Warehouse, whilst you chaps across the pond can get them from a number of sources (often for less than $50, apparently).
Yopp-ee? Yoh-pee? What?
Blake's 7 had much better tech than any of the Star Treks:
Cool Orac-alike case!
Probably a lot less irritating and a lot more useful than the original, too...
Yes, I am actually a programmer. A professional programmer, too. I'll try and write using simpler language:
Ruby is so easy to use that you can spend most of your time thinking about the problem you're solving and very little thinking about the language you're writing in. You end up with good code and you don't overheat your melon in the process.
Better? =)
The major advantage of Ruby that everyone seems to be overlooking is that it is built around the principle of least surprise, and had a very simple and intuitive syntax. It is also a dynamically-typed language. There is no need to consult reference manuals, or sit thinking about the correct sequence of brackets, braces, parentheses, asterisks and arrows to express the ideas in your head. Code just flows from your fingertips.
Because Ruby code costs the programmer so little effort to write, experimentation becomes easy and fun. If a simpler and more elegant solution presents itself, it is easy to rip up code and start again because there are no memories of hours of blood, sweat and tears getting that code to work. The result is clean and robust code that, looking back, was a joy to write.
I think having a precursor to the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is exciting enough, but I can think of a much better use for this stuff.
Imagine how wonderful it would be if you could edit your code on a huge drawing board, like the mechanical engineers of a few decades ago used to use. Think how much better that would be than scrolling it through a few small windows on your monitor. It wouldn't matter if it took a few seconds to redraw; once that was done you could navigate through it effortlessly just by moving your eyes.
Extend that further. Remember the room in Isaac Asimov's novel Foundation, where two members of the Second Foundation inspect the Plan? The walls were covered with a diagram of the Plan, and they were able to zoom in and examine specific areas, or zoom out to get a broad overview. As a professional programmer, you could afford to wallpaper a small room with this stuff, or at least a corner or your cube...
Weird... I did loads of testing for Vojtech Pavlik to ensure that the Xterminator *is* supported under the new 2.4 input devices architecture. This was last May, so I'd be surprised if it didn't make it in.
Do you have a URL for that? I'm always keen to test pilot new Emacsen.
This is an excellent piece of ear *and* eye candy. Simply enter the following into a term:
xsynaesthesia cd &
And chill...
Could this thing be used as a generalised systolic-array-on-a-chip, to implement other signal processing algorithms, or is it only suitable for neural networks?
Okay, you don't use (X)Emacs, and you don't use Vi. So just what is the mystery editor that's used to craft all that code?
The demo that I downloaded this morning uses Glide. It ran really smoothly at 800x600 on my Voodoo2 board under Linux. Very nice...
Hope they sign with a publisher soon. I need to buy this.
What is RMS working on these days? I hear that he takes a notebook with him everywhere, and that he can be seen frantically hacking code in every spare moment he has, but not what he's working on.