Not sure if anyone brought this up, but Sharp changed the method of storing PIM data from XML to binary for the 5600, which promptly broke all current open-source methods of doing synchronization. For the record, TrollTech didn't seem too happy about the change, either.
Thus, if you want an open-source synch tool for Linux, you may be out of luck for a while.
Frankly, the whole thing was fundamentally flawed, because they screwed with the computer beforehand and put OO onto it.
If you want to review Lindows, configure it as minimally as possible to make the _hardware_ work, and then hand it off to mom. Don't go around cheating by installing non-default stuff with apt.
Certainly, it has not been my experience that Java is fading away - quite the opposite, my university is going to make "Intro to C" into "Intro to Java". Now, we have two anecdotal experiences contrasting each other - we must find an objective study which says one way or the other.
I'm willing to pay for one of these windows-emulation packages when they finally get some 3D going, which is why I _really_ want Windows at this point. What's stopping them from doing this?
I will now say something resembling a troll, but it's totally serious, and not intended as such.
GWB is an oil man. That is pretty much indisputable. There's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, either.
But, you have to understand: because of that, he sees oil as the nation's #1 resource to be watched. What does our economy rest on? To him, probably cheap oil. What's our greatest national defense need? Again, he'd probably say oil (and it ain't a bad guess, either).
If there is someone capable of getting gas prices to go lower, I'd put my money on GWB, sure as hell not any of the democrats running for 2004.
But, here's the thing: just doing stuff that benefits the oil industry doesn't mean he's out for personal enrichment. It could quite possibly be (once this "republican == evil" sentiment gets done with here on/.) that he views a strengthened oil supply to the US as a national priority. And, frankly, I can see why he might.
For a guy who's supposedly getting rich off the presidency, you'd think the US media would have broken some kind of verifiable story by now. If they can report on Bill Clinton (whom the press loved) getting oral sex, certainly they've got it in them to report a couple million bucks in corruption by GWB (who is not nearly as liked in some circles).
On Saturday night, I upgraded my computer from a Celeron 700 to an AthlonXP 2500+. I changed damn near everything - sound and video, too.
It took me about ten seconds to reconfigure my existing RH9 install for it, and maybe 15 minutes to get the nVidia drivers working for the mobo and graphics. Easy. I ran into a couple problems with USB2 and Firewire, but nothing horrible. RedHat 9 caught most of the hardware by itself.
I STILL can't get Windows98 to work. I reinstalled the whole freaking thing, and it still explodes on start-up. It's just the most horrid thing ever.
"However, the fact that you can only conceive of me living in a "state" - i.e the US, shows the limitations of your worldview, so i'll just leave it at that."
I'd say this shows your own ignorance. Countries are typically referred to as "states" in a serious academic environment. There is nothing US-specific about the term "state", and in fact, I'd argue the US uses it improperly (we really do have provinces these days, they're hardly the mini-countries of the late 1700s).
"unless military intelligence is expecting alien invaders to land in the near future, this hardware will in no practical way affect US military superiority"
I don't know about you, but I'd rather we were prepared for _ALL_ eventualities.
It's not quite done yet, and it'll never let you use Windows installers for programs, but it does help with synchronization, especially with Evolution using MultiSync.
The cops kicked down the door, thinking the guy inside the house was a serial killer they were looking for. No, it turns out he's not - but it also turns out he had slaughtered his 3 kids and wife.
I think we can still call the bust a success even if we didn't catch the exact guy we were looking for.
"Now try and play C&C Generals and Splinter Cell and then tell me your card is good enough."
It's funny you mention this, because I just got C&C: Generals today. So, I installed it, and what do you know? My system is under the _minimum_ requirements - it wants an 800mhz P3, I have a Celeron 700. My video card (AIW Radeon 7200) is not exactly on the cutting edge either.
So, I start the game. And, surprisingly, at the default settings, it's quite playable. There is some slowdown, but in an RTS, it's not so pronounced. Certainly, it's an enjoyable experience. Would it be more fun if it was speedier? Yes, but I'm willing to put up with it as is rather than kick in $500 to upgrade my whole system.
What I'm trying to get at is that these sites are benchmarking at rather crazy combinations of high resolution and anti-aliasing. If you're not afraid of jacking down the settings to 800x600x16, you can usually get acceptable performance even on newer games when using an older video card.
Now, however, I am extremely excited. Generics are exactly the kind of feature I've been looking for for a while. Hell, I just wrote a project that could have used them pretty effectively.
"One of the big things I appreciate about Java is that there is typically onyl one right way to do something; a big change from C++ for example"
This hasn't been my experience at all. There's rarely ever any one right way to do things in any language.
Let's take a simple one in C: int x needs to become one larger. You get a few options: 1. x++; 2. ++x; 3. x+=1; 4. x=x+1;
All of them are "the right way" of simply incrementing x. And, if the simple stuff is this varied, I have a hard time believing that more complex code won't have similar divergence from "the one path". Java is similar.
"It amazes me that a book such as this could be banned, yet car service manuals can be sold in most bookstores."
I'd argue this is more like a book about how to defeat car alarm systems. If it was "how to repair your X-Box", I don't think we'd see this controversy.
"Basically if programmers still gave a damn like they did when writting code for C64's we wouldn't have alot of these issues. Nowdays they would rather churn out crap so long as it's better than some of the other crap they've seen."
If you're trying to tell me we should go back to the days of non-portable assembly, I think I'm going to cry. Yes, people should write tighter code, but trying to make believe that we should write code just like in the "good old days" is ignoring years upon years of advancement in the field of computer science.
And, also, look at what they were doing back in the days of the C64, and look at what they're doing now. You really do need more code to do more. Trying to tell me that they had 6kb executables with the C64 and then telling me our 6mb ones are bloated is ludicrous.
Would you like to inform us what exactly makes you knowledgeable enough about the subject to lecture us all about the need to dismantle X?
And, even ignoring your lack of credentials, your criticisms don't even seem to make sense.
"Whos runs X apps over the network?" I do, and I've seen _many_ places where people should as well. Quick example: my girlfriend does finite element analysis using ANSYS. She has to trudge up to the Linux lab every so often. If she was running ANSYS using remote X, she wouldn't have to do that. How much time could be saved by not making people waste an hour of their day walking to labs on the other side of the building?
How about embedded apps? Wouldn't it be simpler to move processing to a server somewhere, and just run a simple X server on the device? It certainly seems more efficient and less expensive than trying to stuff ample hardware onboard each one of them. But, hey, let's ignore that obvious use for X, and claim "no one uses it anymore!"
XF86 _DOES_ have DirectX. We call this "DRI", and if you combine it with SDL, there you go, DirectX for Linux. DRI is a local interface. It has none of the supposed problems X has with regards to performance. Even casual benchmarking of games in Linux and Windows reveals that any impact X has is minimal. There's also nothing preventing you from doing a hardware-accelerated GUI - the architecture is all there.
In other words, I'm calling bullshit on you. Prove yourself. It's easy to talk smack about something you obviously don't understand.
Indeed - when IBM came to our school, all of them could not stop talking about how they were going to use Linux to kill Microsoft. The parent wasn't lying - it's hunting season at IBM, and they're now armed and dangerous.
Embedded devices are probably _the_ place where DirectFB makes the most sense. These don't have the same needs a desktop has, and lack the network interfaces (right now, I guess) to make the networking features of X useful.
However... I don't see any point in moving DirectFB to the desktop, or using it anywhere that has a network interface and the appropriate hardware to run X. There are many, many areas where X makes a lot of sense (even in embedded devices!), and DirectFB is not going to be performance panacea that some people make it out to be. It's going to be best as a "light" display system for embedded hardware, IMHO.
Abortion is illegal there now? Please, sir, do show us your sources.
Not that I think it's much of a big deal anyways - I doubt there were all that many even before. Serious question: does the Quran really let people have abortions? My gut feeling is no, but I'd be happy if someone would explain the issue.
Correct. I think that people love to believe that anyone who doesn't agree with them cannot see through the "biased media of the other side". Generally, this is followed up by calling the other person stupid.
Is it really so hard to admit that there were good reasons for going to war, and good reasons not to?
Another thing: stop blaming America for what European colonialism caused. 99% of the problems in that region can be directly traced back to the French and British just packing up and leaving without trying to set up proper democratic governments. If there had been a strong democratic tradition left by the colonial powers, would Iraq have been ruled by Saddam? Probably not. Would Syria have been ruled by the Assads? I think not.
The US might cause bad copyright law, but if you think that's in any way comparable to the Europeans just running off and leaving everyone a dictatorship, I disagree with you.
It _seems_ costly, until you start doing some math. I know the price shocked me, too.
That $600 is one time cost. There's no recurring fees on the phone, just maintenance of the VoIP network. While that might not be cheap, it's infrastructure, and infrastructure spending is easy to justify in a case like this, where you can show clear cost savings.
A good cellular plan runs at, what, $60 or so a month in the USA. This phone is not as flexible as a cell phone, in that you can't take it everywhere and use it. But at $720 a year, a cell phone costs way, way more than this one.
But, aha! The next year, you've saved all $720 on each phone, sans the support of the VoIP network. If you've got 1000 cell phones on your company account and replace them all with VoIP phones, you've saved nearly $720,000 - let's call it $500k with VoIP support costs. That's one hell of a lot of money.
Not everyone needs the flexibility of a cell phone. If all you want is a comfortable wireless phone to use at work, this is a good deal. In fact, it has a goodly amount of potential for telecommuters, too - imagine patching your home system to your employer's VoIP system via the internet. No more phone bills to justify, auditing, etc.
I'm not a huge proponent of the BSDs, but even I'd rather be running one of them rather than Windows. I've had the discussion with a BSD-zealot friend of mine whether Linux or BSD is better, and all we could come up with is that both are much better than Windows:).
This might be odd, but the AD&D books in 2nd edition were excellent resources. When my high school class was doing medieval history, I barely needed to read the textbook - the AD&D books had already covered quite a bit of what medieval life was like, along with some of the more famous players.
So let me get this straight: it's OK to kill people because you're jealous of them? "I'm poor, so you deserve to die" is a corrupt, immoral philosophy, to say the least. Screw "cultural differences" - I haven't seen a single religion that says it's OK to kill someone and take his stuff just because he's done better in life than you.
Also, why is it the US's responsibility to address the economic discrepancies? At the end of the day, the only person who can improve your lot in life is you. Certainly, it makes no sense to _reward_ countries which we consider our enemies with economic aid. It only amounts to simple blackmail. I also doubt that sending money to a corrupt regime would prove effective for anything except lining Swiss bank accounts.
Throwing money at a problem isn't the solution. Some of these countries are still trying to get a grip on the aftershocks of centuries of BRITISH and FRENCH colonialism. If anyone's fully responsible for cleaning up some of those places, it's those two former colonial powers. Don't underestimate cultural problems which arose with colonization, such as corruption and the like. But, of course, it's much simpler to blame the US, as any/.'er has seen.
This is not to say the US is blameless - indeed, every country makes mistakes, and the US certainly made more than its fair share of them. But thrusting full and total responsibility on the US for fixing broken former colonies is stupid. It is a problem which needs to be addressed by _EVERYONE_. The policy may or may not be ignorant, but your solution is certainly naive.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if anyone brought this up, but Sharp changed the method of storing PIM data from XML to binary for the 5600, which promptly broke all current open-source methods of doing synchronization. For the record, TrollTech didn't seem too happy about the change, either.
Thus, if you want an open-source synch tool for Linux, you may be out of luck for a while.
-Erwos
Frankly, the whole thing was fundamentally flawed, because they screwed with the computer beforehand and put OO onto it.
If you want to review Lindows, configure it as minimally as possible to make the _hardware_ work, and then hand it off to mom. Don't go around cheating by installing non-default stuff with apt.
-Erwos
Could you provide concrete proof of this?
Certainly, it has not been my experience that Java is fading away - quite the opposite, my university is going to make "Intro to C" into "Intro to Java". Now, we have two anecdotal experiences contrasting each other - we must find an objective study which says one way or the other.
-Erwos
I'm willing to pay for one of these windows-emulation packages when they finally get some 3D going, which is why I _really_ want Windows at this point. What's stopping them from doing this?
-Erwos
I will now say something resembling a troll, but it's totally serious, and not intended as such.
/.) that he views a strengthened oil supply to the US as a national priority. And, frankly, I can see why he might.
GWB is an oil man. That is pretty much indisputable. There's nothing wrong with that intrinsically, either.
But, you have to understand: because of that, he sees oil as the nation's #1 resource to be watched. What does our economy rest on? To him, probably cheap oil. What's our greatest national defense need? Again, he'd probably say oil (and it ain't a bad guess, either).
If there is someone capable of getting gas prices to go lower, I'd put my money on GWB, sure as hell not any of the democrats running for 2004.
But, here's the thing: just doing stuff that benefits the oil industry doesn't mean he's out for personal enrichment. It could quite possibly be (once this "republican == evil" sentiment gets done with here on
For a guy who's supposedly getting rich off the presidency, you'd think the US media would have broken some kind of verifiable story by now. If they can report on Bill Clinton (whom the press loved) getting oral sex, certainly they've got it in them to report a couple million bucks in corruption by GWB (who is not nearly as liked in some circles).
-Erwos
I disagree.
On Saturday night, I upgraded my computer from a Celeron 700 to an AthlonXP 2500+. I changed damn near everything - sound and video, too.
It took me about ten seconds to reconfigure my existing RH9 install for it, and maybe 15 minutes to get the nVidia drivers working for the mobo and graphics. Easy. I ran into a couple problems with USB2 and Firewire, but nothing horrible. RedHat 9 caught most of the hardware by itself.
I STILL can't get Windows98 to work. I reinstalled the whole freaking thing, and it still explodes on start-up. It's just the most horrid thing ever.
-Erwos
"However, the fact that you can only conceive of me living in a "state" - i.e the US, shows the limitations of your worldview, so i'll just leave it at that."
I'd say this shows your own ignorance. Countries are typically referred to as "states" in a serious academic environment. There is nothing US-specific about the term "state", and in fact, I'd argue the US uses it improperly (we really do have provinces these days, they're hardly the mini-countries of the late 1700s).
-Erwos
"unless military intelligence is expecting alien invaders to land in the near future, this hardware will in no practical way affect US military superiority"
I don't know about you, but I'd rather we were prepared for _ALL_ eventualities.
-Erwos
SynCE
It's not quite done yet, and it'll never let you use Windows installers for programs, but it does help with synchronization, especially with Evolution using MultiSync.
-Erwos
Here's what happened:
The cops kicked down the door, thinking the guy inside the house was a serial killer they were looking for. No, it turns out he's not - but it also turns out he had slaughtered his 3 kids and wife.
I think we can still call the bust a success even if we didn't catch the exact guy we were looking for.
-Erwos
"Now try and play C&C Generals and Splinter Cell and then tell me your card is good enough."
It's funny you mention this, because I just got C&C: Generals today. So, I installed it, and what do you know? My system is under the _minimum_ requirements - it wants an 800mhz P3, I have a Celeron 700. My video card (AIW Radeon 7200) is not exactly on the cutting edge either.
So, I start the game. And, surprisingly, at the default settings, it's quite playable. There is some slowdown, but in an RTS, it's not so pronounced. Certainly, it's an enjoyable experience. Would it be more fun if it was speedier? Yes, but I'm willing to put up with it as is rather than kick in $500 to upgrade my whole system.
What I'm trying to get at is that these sites are benchmarking at rather crazy combinations of high resolution and anti-aliasing. If you're not afraid of jacking down the settings to 800x600x16, you can usually get acceptable performance even on newer games when using an older video card.
-Erwos
I am chastened, thank you :).
Now, however, I am extremely excited. Generics are exactly the kind of feature I've been looking for for a while. Hell, I just wrote a project that could have used them pretty effectively.
-Erwos
I have this same problem, but I have no idea what "generics" are. Care to enlighten me?
-Erwos
"One of the big things I appreciate about Java is that there is typically onyl one right way to do something; a big change from C++ for example"
This hasn't been my experience at all. There's rarely ever any one right way to do things in any language.
Let's take a simple one in C: int x needs to become one larger. You get a few options:
1. x++;
2. ++x;
3. x+=1;
4. x=x+1;
All of them are "the right way" of simply incrementing x. And, if the simple stuff is this varied, I have a hard time believing that more complex code won't have similar divergence from "the one path". Java is similar.
-Erwos
"It amazes me that a book such as this could be banned, yet car service manuals can be sold in most bookstores."
I'd argue this is more like a book about how to defeat car alarm systems. If it was "how to repair your X-Box", I don't think we'd see this controversy.
-Erwos
"Basically if programmers still gave a damn like they did when writting code for C64's we wouldn't have alot of these issues. Nowdays they would rather churn out crap so long as it's better than some of the other crap they've seen."
If you're trying to tell me we should go back to the days of non-portable assembly, I think I'm going to cry. Yes, people should write tighter code, but trying to make believe that we should write code just like in the "good old days" is ignoring years upon years of advancement in the field of computer science.
And, also, look at what they were doing back in the days of the C64, and look at what they're doing now. You really do need more code to do more. Trying to tell me that they had 6kb executables with the C64 and then telling me our 6mb ones are bloated is ludicrous.
-Erwos
Would you like to inform us what exactly makes you knowledgeable enough about the subject to lecture us all about the need to dismantle X?
And, even ignoring your lack of credentials, your criticisms don't even seem to make sense.
"Whos runs X apps over the network?" I do, and I've seen _many_ places where people should as well. Quick example: my girlfriend does finite element analysis using ANSYS. She has to trudge up to the Linux lab every so often. If she was running ANSYS using remote X, she wouldn't have to do that. How much time could be saved by not making people waste an hour of their day walking to labs on the other side of the building?
How about embedded apps? Wouldn't it be simpler to move processing to a server somewhere, and just run a simple X server on the device? It certainly seems more efficient and less expensive than trying to stuff ample hardware onboard each one of them. But, hey, let's ignore that obvious use for X, and claim "no one uses it anymore!"
XF86 _DOES_ have DirectX. We call this "DRI", and if you combine it with SDL, there you go, DirectX for Linux. DRI is a local interface. It has none of the supposed problems X has with regards to performance. Even casual benchmarking of games in Linux and Windows reveals that any impact X has is minimal. There's also nothing preventing you from doing a hardware-accelerated GUI - the architecture is all there.
In other words, I'm calling bullshit on you. Prove yourself. It's easy to talk smack about something you obviously don't understand.
-Erwos
Indeed - when IBM came to our school, all of them could not stop talking about how they were going to use Linux to kill Microsoft. The parent wasn't lying - it's hunting season at IBM, and they're now armed and dangerous.
-Erwos
Embedded devices are probably _the_ place where DirectFB makes the most sense. These don't have the same needs a desktop has, and lack the network interfaces (right now, I guess) to make the networking features of X useful.
However... I don't see any point in moving DirectFB to the desktop, or using it anywhere that has a network interface and the appropriate hardware to run X. There are many, many areas where X makes a lot of sense (even in embedded devices!), and DirectFB is not going to be performance panacea that some people make it out to be. It's going to be best as a "light" display system for embedded hardware, IMHO.
-Erwos
Abortion is illegal there now? Please, sir, do show us your sources.
Not that I think it's much of a big deal anyways - I doubt there were all that many even before. Serious question: does the Quran really let people have abortions? My gut feeling is no, but I'd be happy if someone would explain the issue.
-Erwos
Correct. I think that people love to believe that anyone who doesn't agree with them cannot see through the "biased media of the other side". Generally, this is followed up by calling the other person stupid.
Is it really so hard to admit that there were good reasons for going to war, and good reasons not to?
Another thing: stop blaming America for what European colonialism caused. 99% of the problems in that region can be directly traced back to the French and British just packing up and leaving without trying to set up proper democratic governments. If there had been a strong democratic tradition left by the colonial powers, would Iraq have been ruled by Saddam? Probably not. Would Syria have been ruled by the Assads? I think not.
The US might cause bad copyright law, but if you think that's in any way comparable to the Europeans just running off and leaving everyone a dictatorship, I disagree with you.
-Erwos
It _seems_ costly, until you start doing some math. I know the price shocked me, too.
That $600 is one time cost. There's no recurring fees on the phone, just maintenance of the VoIP network. While that might not be cheap, it's infrastructure, and infrastructure spending is easy to justify in a case like this, where you can show clear cost savings.
A good cellular plan runs at, what, $60 or so a month in the USA. This phone is not as flexible as a cell phone, in that you can't take it everywhere and use it. But at $720 a year, a cell phone costs way, way more than this one.
But, aha! The next year, you've saved all $720 on each phone, sans the support of the VoIP network. If you've got 1000 cell phones on your company account and replace them all with VoIP phones, you've saved nearly $720,000 - let's call it $500k with VoIP support costs. That's one hell of a lot of money.
Not everyone needs the flexibility of a cell phone. If all you want is a comfortable wireless phone to use at work, this is a good deal. In fact, it has a goodly amount of potential for telecommuters, too - imagine patching your home system to your employer's VoIP system via the internet. No more phone bills to justify, auditing, etc.
-Erwos
Well said!
:).
I'm not a huge proponent of the BSDs, but even I'd rather be running one of them rather than Windows. I've had the discussion with a BSD-zealot friend of mine whether Linux or BSD is better, and all we could come up with is that both are much better than Windows
-Erwos
This might be odd, but the AD&D books in 2nd edition were excellent resources. When my high school class was doing medieval history, I barely needed to read the textbook - the AD&D books had already covered quite a bit of what medieval life was like, along with some of the more famous players.
-Erwos
So let me get this straight: it's OK to kill people because you're jealous of them? "I'm poor, so you deserve to die" is a corrupt, immoral philosophy, to say the least. Screw "cultural differences" - I haven't seen a single religion that says it's OK to kill someone and take his stuff just because he's done better in life than you.
/.'er has seen.
Also, why is it the US's responsibility to address the economic discrepancies? At the end of the day, the only person who can improve your lot in life is you. Certainly, it makes no sense to _reward_ countries which we consider our enemies with economic aid. It only amounts to simple blackmail. I also doubt that sending money to a corrupt regime would prove effective for anything except lining Swiss bank accounts.
Throwing money at a problem isn't the solution. Some of these countries are still trying to get a grip on the aftershocks of centuries of BRITISH and FRENCH colonialism. If anyone's fully responsible for cleaning up some of those places, it's those two former colonial powers. Don't underestimate cultural problems which arose with colonization, such as corruption and the like. But, of course, it's much simpler to blame the US, as any
This is not to say the US is blameless - indeed, every country makes mistakes, and the US certainly made more than its fair share of them. But thrusting full and total responsibility on the US for fixing broken former colonies is stupid. It is a problem which needs to be addressed by _EVERYONE_. The policy may or may not be ignorant, but your solution is certainly naive.
-Erwos