But since you are on that track it is more like the original MacOS was like a cheap pot metal single shot derringer with imitation pearl handles. Put together with rivets. No spare parts available. If it breaks just buy a new one. Cute but not very useful.
Windows (of any flavor)... an expensive zip gun. As much danger to the user as any target.
Linux... an Enterprise class aircraft carrier complete with full manufacturing facilities and all plans and blue prints. Complex but powerful.
*BSD... same as above.
MacOS-X chrome plated five shot Gyrojet rocket pistol with imitation pearl handles. Only shoots ammo made by Gyrojet. Neat idea... cool looking... used a lot in movies... weak in the short range and innacurate. Comes with a box of tools they found on an aircraft carrier. Remains to be seen how useful it will be. If anything on the Gyrojet part breaks you have to wait for Gyrojet to ship you new parts.
I thnk there is a far better analogy comparing OSes with airlines somewhere....
here: http://pub76.ezboard.com/fcyberdudefrm7.showMessag e?topicID=67.topic
The better ones usually have an active community of developers AND users that provide feedback and improvements.
What... and Apple doesn't?
Well I am sure you read the boards and remember how much people complained about features in OS-X... like "Where are the spring loaded folders?" People have been whining about that feature for over a year and it still has not appeared. Apple is paid by its customers to respond to their needs and the customers get silence. Occasionally SJ tosses them a bone like a pretty new machine... it does not make their productivity or the "user experience" much better does it?
I have heard arguments for the single button mouse (even the no-button mouse)... but why are there keys on the keyboard that don't do anything or not what the user might expect? The Home and End key for example. Heck they even work in my bash shell.
I think that the new iMac is elegant in design but it is nothing new... there have been all-in-one flatscreen PCs out for several years already. I even liked the Cube... the guts were very well designed (except for the buggy power switch). But all that elegance quickly turns ugly as soon as you add a few obligatory peripherals and your nice clean desktop becomes a snarled mass of USB/Firewire/network/power cables.
Apple barely has any documentation... their MacOS-X comes with a silly little booklet on how to get the thing installed... all the rest you have to figure out or read the forums. I got the new iTunes2 update the other day and thought I would try it out. I took me a while to figure out that I had to drag-n-drop the MP3s I wanted to play on to the app. Perhaps that is allways obvious to a mac user but for me it isn't. I can drop CDs all day long on my CD player... but it won't play them until I open the drive door (play list) and put a CD in it.
I have since replaced the very poor quality mice that came with the iMacs and G4s I use with Logitech Optical wheelmice. Translucent M&M or transparent be damned, I need something that works.
I know that many of the Apple faithful feel that nothing can replace their UI and that it is the best designed in the world but there are a lot of us that don't particularly care for it. I find it kludgy like an over simplified toy. I don't think Apple will ever have a problem selling their stuff to Apple fans... especially if they keep making lickable hardware and interfaces. I think it just won't do all that much to expand their current market.
I suppose I am just sore at Apple about their lack of support for their products... I am forced to use them in my work... it is not by choice.
Yes, I can appreciate design as form and function. Ever taken a close look at a Mauser 98K rifle or a Browning High Power 9mm pistol... absolutely beautiful designs... as are many of the tools we have for killing each other. When you run out of ammo the bolt or slide lock open... insert a loaded magazine or clip and relase the catch or close the bolt... ready. No voice saying "It's not my fault..." no cryptic message "The Finder has quit due to an error of type -47"
It is unfair to compare the perceived quality of projects on Sourceforge by people that had an itch to scratch... with paid professionals at some computer manufacturer. Yet Apple could learn a thing or two from some of the projects on Sourceforge. The better ones usually have an active community of developers AND users that provide feedback and improvements. Certainly the projects don't have the resources to pass all their documentation, if any, past a sleepless English major before publishing.
That would be nice if it were true for OS-X. Sadly, even though OS-X is limited to a relatively small pool of hardware (as compared to the Wintel world) it is even limited to a subset of Apple hardware. Thing Just Work(TM) IF AND ONLY IF the Thing is from a limited subset of hardware... otherwise it is more like Thing Just Won't(TM).
OS-X is in the place Linux was about 4-5 years ago where it was a crapshoot if Linux would work with your existing hardware. The difference is that as Linux grew popular we got the modules and drivers we needed for just about everything. With OS-X we have to hope that Apple will bless us with new drivers for existing and future hardware.
If you go over to http://www.ntsb.gov and look at a few reports (as I did)... you may notice that there were some 42,000 fatal traffic accidents in 1999. There were 12 fatal air travel accidents in 1999, 1 in 1998 and a high point of 526 fatalities in 1985.
Doing the math (sorry punch in your own numbers) and even if you narrow the window to, say, 7AM EST to 11AM EST on September 11, 2001... it was still far safer to travel by air than to travel by car. Remember to correct for miles covered in trip.
has anyone tried to purchase one of these units? I would like to build a nice little firewall box or something... so where can I get one of these little gems? Of the ones that DO have any sort of place you can buy them they are waaay overpriced. I mean the darn PPC bRIQ (or whatever it is called) is $2,500!! I can get an iBook for almost half that complete with CD, monitor and keyboard.
It is all very well that these devices seem to be available but if they aren't easy to get or are priced prohibitively... what is the point?
I can install RedHat-6.2 (all GUI)... yes I can even do it without touching the keyboard...except for root password and adding a user name etc.. but no command line. Choose Gnome AND KDE (nice to have a choice)... choose a bunch of apps... all click, click, click.
Go and get a bite to eat (a quick one) and come back... click one or two more times... system reboots. I may never have to reboot again unless I change OS/kernel.
To use... just click on stuff. To administer... just click on Linuxconf... click, click, click. To install new software... click on GnoRPM. To configure menus... click on Gmenu.
The point is... I can do everything I know of via the GUI. Only touch the keyboard to enter names of things and passwords.
Can you think of something I can't do using the GUI?
The Gentus distribution is basically RedHat with a few tweaks and utils thrown in. So if you have, or can get RedHat-6.1 you have the gentus source code. The other utils are also available.... From the Gentus Linux homepage tech support FAQs:
http://www.gentus.com/faq_a06.html
They do not have available for download a separate iso image for a source CD. That is because ALL the source is available elsewhere. I don't think this violates GPL. While they do not specifically supply all of the source for everything on their distro... they DO tell you where you can get it for next to nothing. All the tweaks they do to commonly available source is in/usr/src/linux/.
Say the MS-Office suite is split off as a separate entity from the operating system. All of a sudden there is no particular advantage to NOT port Office to other OSes. They can still port to Apple/MacOS AND they can now port to Solaris, *BSD, BeOS, Linux... whatever. It would be a distinct advantage for the Office "baby bill" to do so. (More ports == more sales).
There will NOT be any advantage for the Windows (operating system) "baby bill" to try and pull any "incompatibility" shennanigans with other application makers including the other "baby bills".
I think there will be an ongoing struggle as to how much they can call it "innovating". Say, something like, "innovating" Office in to IE.
The real stranglehold MS has on the software world is not their OS, nor IE... it is Office. Office is NOT all that an incredible an application suite... there are others with equivalent functionality. The key to Office is its proprietary file formats. People and businesses that prefer other office suites feel they have to get MS-Office because all their clients and other businesses use Office. None of the file translators works perfectly between systems. Eventually something gets munged (Office will do that to its own files!!). I don't think they should open up the file formats for office suites... I think an open file standard should be established for ALL office suites.
Well... for one thing the quasar would have to be travelling at the speed of light to be 26 billion light years away. Quasars are fast but nowhere near c. So, if this quasar still exists, it is 13 billion light years away + some amount of distance it has been travelling in the intervening 13 billion years.
But the second part of your question.... hmmm. If this object, that we see now was 13 billion light years away when it emitted the light we see now. Then.... umm.. the Universe was at least 13 billion light years across and is at least 13 billion years old. But I see a (your) problem... if everything started out much closer together then it must have taken quite a bit more time than 13 billion years for an object that is now 13 billion light years away to get there. Ummm... I'm sleepy. Good morning.
On the same idea: with your figures, the robot has a density of 52 kg/m3, so I don't think it would even sink in water (density 1000 kg/m3), if it is waterproof.
I think you are basing the above calculation on the assumption that the net volume of the Nomad is (2.4m)^3 == 13.84 m^3. But this is the "bounding box" volume... or the volume of a box that could just fit the robot when fully extended. In a deep puddle that robot would probably sink like a rock.
Hmmm... plough is not bad. I would have picked: the ramp, the lever, and rope as the first three. The wheel is nothing more than a continuous rolling ramp... put an axle on it and it is a continuous lever. The plough is also a form of lever. The threads on a screw are just a ramp wrapped round.
Dunno where this misconception came from... I have VMware running on a system that is all SCSI. Works just fine. NT "thinks" that the SCSI drive is an IDE... because that is what VMware shows it to NT as. No problem that it is really a SCSI drive. (U2W too). Works fine and works fast.
I suppose if I wanted all the raw power of U2W AND NT running on it I would make this dual boot or NT only.
What makes you think that the more vocal (that is someone who bothers to post) readers of slashdot are representative of the Linux/OSS community as a whole? I would cede that the people that post comments on slashdot are representative of the people that post comments on slashdot.... it does not follow that they are representative of the community. I doubt they represent even a tiny fraction of the community. Can you claim otherwise? I think slashdot commenters are more like a special interest group.
I see your point but.... What is he supposed to do? Write a post to/. asking "Hey what do you think of this...?" then wait 24hours (or whatever) until he has read a bazillion/.ers howl over the issue? And from this he is supposed to get an idea of what the "community" wants? How is he going to "hear" from people? Which people?
I just don't get what this is good for. Most of the chips listed are already supported. Why would you want to move graphics functions off of the video card? Isn't that where they would be handled fastest?
Mebbe I am missing something... but for US$39.95 it does not seem to offer anything I don't have already with XFree86.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't really meant as an analogy.
g e?topicID=67.topic
But since you are on that track it is more like the original MacOS was like a cheap pot metal single shot derringer with imitation pearl handles. Put together with rivets. No spare parts available. If it breaks just buy a new one. Cute but not very useful.
Windows (of any flavor)... an expensive zip gun. As much danger to the user as any target.
Linux... an Enterprise class aircraft carrier complete with full manufacturing facilities and all plans and blue prints. Complex but powerful.
*BSD... same as above.
MacOS-X chrome plated five shot Gyrojet rocket pistol with imitation pearl handles. Only shoots ammo made by Gyrojet. Neat idea... cool looking... used a lot in movies... weak in the short range and innacurate. Comes with a box of tools they found on an aircraft carrier. Remains to be seen how useful it will be. If anything on the Gyrojet part breaks you have to wait for Gyrojet to ship you new parts.
I thnk there is a far better analogy comparing OSes with airlines somewhere....
here: http://pub76.ezboard.com/fcyberdudefrm7.showMessa
-DU-...etc...
Oh geez...
man -k itunes
itunes: Nothing appropriate
man -k finder
finder: Nothing appropriate
If yer gonna be a smartass at least try a little harder.
The better ones usually have an active community of developers AND users that provide feedback and improvements.
What... and Apple doesn't?
Well I am sure you read the boards and remember how much people complained about features in OS-X... like "Where are the spring loaded folders?" People have been whining about that feature for over a year and it still has not appeared. Apple is paid by its customers to respond to their needs and the customers get silence. Occasionally SJ tosses them a bone like a pretty new machine... it does not make their productivity or the "user experience" much better does it?
I have heard arguments for the single button mouse (even the no-button mouse)... but why are there keys on the keyboard that don't do anything or not what the user might expect? The Home and End key for example. Heck they even work in my bash shell.
I think that the new iMac is elegant in design but it is nothing new... there have been all-in-one flatscreen PCs out for several years already. I even liked the Cube... the guts were very well designed (except for the buggy power switch). But all that elegance quickly turns ugly as soon as you add a few obligatory peripherals and your nice clean desktop becomes a snarled mass of USB/Firewire/network/power cables.
Apple barely has any documentation... their MacOS-X comes with a silly little booklet on how to get the thing installed... all the rest you have to figure out or read the forums. I got the new iTunes2 update the other day and thought I would try it out. I took me a while to figure out that I had to drag-n-drop the MP3s I wanted to play on to the app. Perhaps that is allways obvious to a mac user but for me it isn't. I can drop CDs all day long on my CD player... but it won't play them until I open the drive door (play list) and put a CD in it.
I have since replaced the very poor quality mice that came with the iMacs and G4s I use with Logitech Optical wheelmice. Translucent M&M or transparent be damned, I need something that works.
I know that many of the Apple faithful feel that nothing can replace their UI and that it is the best designed in the world but there are a lot of us that don't particularly care for it. I find it kludgy like an over simplified toy. I don't think Apple will ever have a problem selling their stuff to Apple fans... especially if they keep making lickable hardware and interfaces. I think it just won't do all that much to expand their current market.
I suppose I am just sore at Apple about their lack of support for their products... I am forced to use them in my work... it is not by choice.
-DU-...etc...
What stultifyingly smug bullshit!
Yes, I can appreciate design as form and function. Ever taken a close look at a Mauser 98K rifle or a Browning High Power 9mm pistol... absolutely beautiful designs... as are many of the tools we have for killing each other. When you run out of ammo the bolt or slide lock open... insert a loaded magazine or clip and relase the catch or close the bolt... ready. No voice saying "It's not my fault..." no cryptic message "The Finder has quit due to an error of type -47"
It is unfair to compare the perceived quality of projects on Sourceforge by people that had an itch to scratch... with paid professionals at some computer manufacturer. Yet Apple could learn a thing or two from some of the projects on Sourceforge. The better ones usually have an active community of developers AND users that provide feedback and improvements. Certainly the projects don't have the resources to pass all their documentation, if any, past a sleepless English major before publishing.
Lawless are they that make their will their law.
-DU-...etc...
That would be nice if it were true for OS-X. Sadly, even though OS-X is limited to a relatively small pool of hardware (as compared to the Wintel world) it is even limited to a subset of Apple hardware. Thing Just Work(TM) IF AND ONLY IF the Thing is from a limited subset of hardware... otherwise it is more like Thing Just Won't(TM).
OS-X is in the place Linux was about 4-5 years ago where it was a crapshoot if Linux would work with your existing hardware. The difference is that as Linux grew popular we got the modules and drivers we needed for just about everything. With OS-X we have to hope that Apple will bless us with new drivers for existing and future hardware.
-DU-...etc...
If you go over to http://www.ntsb.gov and look at a few reports (as I did)... you may notice that there were some 42,000 fatal traffic accidents in 1999. There were 12 fatal air travel accidents in 1999, 1 in 1998 and a high point of 526 fatalities in 1985.
Doing the math (sorry punch in your own numbers) and even if you narrow the window to, say, 7AM EST to 11AM EST on September 11, 2001... it was still far safer to travel by air than to travel by car. Remember to correct for miles covered in trip.
Heard it on the radio coming to work. The Pentagon in VA has been hit also. I heard that it happened 48 minutes after the first two at the WTC.
My work (a college near NYC) will probably close today.
It makes me wonder... What are these people so pissed off about? What would make them do such a thing?
-DU-...etc...
2K will put you on a DHCP TCP/IP network with nothing but an 'ok' click.
So will RedHat-7.1... "Use DHCP?... Check... Done"
And so it goes.
has anyone tried to purchase one of these units? I would like to build a nice little firewall box or something... so where can I get one of these little gems? Of the ones that DO have any sort of place you can buy them they are waaay overpriced. I mean the darn PPC bRIQ (or whatever it is called) is $2,500!! I can get an iBook for almost half that complete with CD, monitor and keyboard.
It is all very well that these devices seem to be available but if they aren't easy to get or are priced prohibitively... what is the point?
Umm.... sure you can.
I can install RedHat-6.2 (all GUI)... yes I can even do it without touching the keyboard...except for root password and adding a user name etc.. but no command line. Choose Gnome AND KDE (nice to have a choice)... choose a bunch of apps... all click, click, click.
Go and get a bite to eat (a quick one) and come back... click one or two more times... system reboots. I may never have to reboot again unless I change OS/kernel.
To use... just click on stuff. To administer... just click on Linuxconf... click, click, click. To install new software... click on GnoRPM. To configure menus... click on Gmenu.
The point is... I can do everything I know of via the GUI. Only touch the keyboard to enter names of things and passwords.
Can you think of something I can't do using the GUI?
The Gentus distribution is basically RedHat with a few tweaks and utils thrown in. So if you have, or can get RedHat-6.1 you have the gentus source code. The other utils are also available....
/usr/src/linux/.
From the Gentus Linux homepage tech support FAQs:
http://www.gentus.com/faq_a06.html
They do not have available for download a separate iso image for a source CD. That is because ALL the source is available elsewhere. I don't think this violates GPL. While they do not specifically supply all of the source for everything on their distro... they DO tell you where you can get it for next to nothing. All the tweaks they do to commonly available source is in
Say the MS-Office suite is split off as a separate entity from the operating system. All of a sudden there is no particular advantage to NOT port Office to other OSes. They can still port to Apple/MacOS AND they can now port to Solaris, *BSD, BeOS, Linux... whatever. It would be a distinct advantage for the Office "baby bill" to do so. (More ports == more sales).
There will NOT be any advantage for the Windows (operating system) "baby bill" to try and pull any "incompatibility" shennanigans with other application makers including the other "baby bills".
I think there will be an ongoing struggle as to how much they can call it "innovating". Say, something like, "innovating" Office in to IE.
The real stranglehold MS has on the software world is not their OS, nor IE... it is Office. Office is NOT all that an incredible an application suite... there are others with equivalent functionality. The key to Office is its proprietary file formats. People and businesses that prefer other office suites feel they have to get MS-Office because all their clients and other businesses use Office. None of the file translators works perfectly between systems. Eventually something gets munged (Office will do that to its own files!!). I don't think they should open up the file formats for office suites... I think an open file standard should be established for ALL office suites.
But the second part of your question.... hmmm. If this object, that we see now was 13 billion light years away when it emitted the light we see now. Then.... umm.. the Universe was at least 13 billion light years across and is at least 13 billion years old. But I see a (your) problem... if everything started out much closer together then it must have taken quite a bit more time than 13 billion years for an object that is now 13 billion light years away to get there. Ummm... I'm sleepy. Good morning.
On the same idea: with your figures, the robot has a density of 52 kg/m3, so I don't think it would even sink in water (density 1000 kg/m3), if it is waterproof.
I think you are basing the above calculation on the assumption that the net volume of the Nomad is (2.4m)^3 == 13.84 m^3. But this is the "bounding box" volume... or the volume of a box that could just fit the robot when fully extended. In a deep puddle that robot would probably sink like a rock.
Hmmm... plough is not bad. I would have picked: the ramp, the lever, and rope as the first three. The wheel is nothing more than a continuous rolling ramp... put an axle on it and it is a continuous lever. The plough is also a form of lever. The threads on a screw are just a ramp wrapped round.
Dunno where this misconception came from... I have VMware running on a system that is all SCSI. Works just fine. NT "thinks" that the SCSI drive is an IDE... because that is what VMware shows it to NT as. No problem that it is really a SCSI drive. (U2W too). Works fine and works fast.
I suppose if I wanted all the raw power of U2W AND NT running on it I would make this dual boot or NT only.
YMMV
Ah... spoken like a true Anonymous Coward.
Did you feel as though you had done the Linux/GNU/OSS community a service after writing that email?
What makes you think that the more vocal (that is someone who bothers to post) readers of slashdot are representative of the Linux/OSS community as a whole? I would cede that the people that post comments on slashdot are representative of the people that post comments on slashdot.... it does not follow that they are representative of the community. I doubt they represent even a tiny fraction of the community. Can you claim otherwise? I think slashdot commenters are more like a special interest group.
I see your point but.... What is he supposed to do? Write a post to /. asking "Hey what do you think of this...?" then wait 24hours (or whatever) until he has read a bazillion /.ers howl over the issue? And from this he is supposed to get an idea of what the "community" wants? How is he going to "hear" from people? Which people?
-David Utidjian-
utidjian@remarque.org
I just don't get what this is good for. Most of the chips listed are already supported. Why would you want to move graphics functions off of the video card? Isn't that where they would be handled fastest?
Mebbe I am missing something... but for US$39.95 it does not seem to offer anything I don't have already with XFree86.
Hey I think this is a "first comment"!
-Davoid-
utidjian@remarque.org