Maybe we all need to compare PalmOS to Windows 3.11 more often and more loudly, to shame them into putting in the extra square millimeter of doped silicon into the surface mount plastic case...
I don't think you need to worry about people mistaking Palm"OS" for a decent operating system. There's no reason to improve it, though. It works fine for running a datebook and memo-pad. For more heft, see linux and WinCE, also running on similarly-sized devices.
I am not so sure that intellectualism is the right tool for the job of politics. I think a great politican is good at communicating, understanding people, organizing, and motivating. (Granted, these skills can be used cynically, giving rise to all our negative politician stereotypes.)
Some have pointed out that Carter was quite intellectual. I think he's a good example of how being smart isn't enough to guarantee great leadership.
I disagree. I think people use accounts on single-user linux systems mostly just because they're there.
On a system with many users, limiting the damage caused to a single user to himself is a necessity. On a system with one user/administrator, it's meaningless.
Besides, can you really think of any single click that can render the system unusable? In any case, if the user is persuaded to enter a command or install a trojan, forcing them to type the root password first makes no difference.
Having users and accounts also doesn't help Internet security much. Email worms aren't affected at all, and many important servers (like sshd) have to run as root anyways. And a server running as a lesser user can still cause just as much harm to the Internet, for instance by participating in a denial of service attack, or relaying spam.
This highly depends on the application. A single SCSI drive against a single IDE drive performing a single task may show the same performance. However, when you add multiple tasks and a lot of disk access , SCSI beats IDE hands down.
Disks have no idea of "tasks." The kernel schedules the ordering of requests from different tasks before the on-disk scheduler ever sees them.
Now, add RAID into the equation, especially looking a the huge caching controllers available for SCSI with no IDE counterpart and you see that SCSI is certainly the way to go.
Caching controllers are a bad idea. The OS already has access to main memory for caching, which is much larger, faster access, and cheaper, and the OS has more information about processes to make caching decisions.
(Exceptions include benchmarks that bypass the virtual file system, and networked disk arrays that are accessed directly by several different systems without any intervening OS).
You'd think Palm's price for including, say, 8 megs instead of 2 would only be a few pennies, so yeah it's strange.
On the other hand, I have 4 years' worth of appointments in my palm and it only takes up 211 K. I have over a hundred addresses and phone numbers, and it's only 12K. I have the game "Pocket Chess" on there and somehow it's only 29K. So if you just want to use your personal organizer as a personal organizer, 2 Megs is really not that bad.
I just replaced my 3 1/2 year old Palm V with a Palm M515, and you know what? It's not that much different.
The extra RAM is nice, but 16 megs of RAM is really nothing to brag about - a 16 Meg MMC card is only $30.
The color screen isn't very vibrant, gobbles the battery, and worst of all has thin vertical black lines separating every column of pixels.
My new palm is actually a bit THICKER and HEAVIER than the old one - oops.
Worst of all, memos are still limited to 4096 bytes. Unbelievable. I don't like having to shell out for a third party product to rectify such a ridiculous limitation.
I appreciate the snappier performance of the new palm's cpu, but it isn't enough difference to enable any different, new applications.
All in all, I like my new Palm somewhat more than the old one (thanks to the extra RAM and CPU speed). But I wouldn't have upgraded if the boss hadn't been buying, because the M515 is just an incremental upgrade from the V I had before. It makes me wonder what Palm has been doing the last 4 years.
iPods are still pretty new, of course the drives aren't failing yet. But every bump and vibration makes those ball-bearings just a bit less round...
True, I don't need to take my whole music collection jogging, in fact I'd rather arrange things on the PC before I leave and rarely touch the player's controls while I'm listening. At home and at work, I listen on the computer. I guess what's "best" all depends on the intended usage.
Forget that, the last thing I want is a hard drive grinding itself to pieces in there, and they're too big and heavy. The model with almost 200 megs of solid-state memory is much more appealing.
This is capitalism as Marx said it would be: genius, inspiration, and even hard work count for nothing, because those with capital take the fruit of *everyone's* effort and keep it for themselves.
The inventor is left with the 'choice' of doing nothing with his life, or coming up with something brilliant, only to make somebody else wealthy. Meanwhile the rich and talentless stay ahead by doing what they do best: paying people to manage and invest all the money they inherited.
The fact that it's all perfectly legal (and therefore "right") only makes matters worse.
The libraries are provided FREE of charge by the government. Therefore why shouldn't they be able to get the information on what books you have read.
1) "Goverment" is not a person with rights. It is a tool made by people for their own benefit. It we (collectively) don't want to pay people to snoop on us, we don't have to.
2) Govt. services are not free. In fact, you pay for them even if you don't want them, and even if you're ineligible for them.
Sure, there's money to be made manipulating the flow of information to influence buying decisions. Just don't expect consumers to thank you for it afterwards.
I can't see that working out either. There's so much development effort (compilers) needed to get Itanium working well, yet nobody is adopting it. They can't sell such a huge chip cheaply (as you say, "production costs.")
So maybe Itanium will be a massive abortion. Oh, well. They made a ton of money back when they had no competition and charged whatever they wanted.
Wow, version 2.0 after just a few months. Debian only just made it to 3.0 after, what, 5 years? So I predict Debian will soon be rendered obsolete by Lindows:)
Certainly "no change" would be failure. But with any luck at all, the outcome would be more like Afghanistan - the new govt. is better than the old, and the region is of less danger to the US.
Whether it's worth it depends on how the "new Iraq" turns out, and whether you believe the "old Iraq" is a real threat. In other words nobody knows for sure.
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Some have pointed out that Carter was quite intellectual. I think he's a good example of how being smart isn't enough to guarantee great leadership.
Good grief, for $132 I'd rather just buy a new motherboard with firewire and USB 2.0 built in!
(And by "their" I hope you didn't mean Apple, because they're selling these things, not lending them out).
To me this machine sounds very much like a back-hoe, except that it makes motions smaller and more precise instead of larger and more powerful.
On a system with many users, limiting the damage caused to a single user to himself is a necessity. On a system with one user/administrator, it's meaningless.
Besides, can you really think of any single click that can render the system unusable? In any case, if the user is persuaded to enter a command or install a trojan, forcing them to type the root password first makes no difference.
Having users and accounts also doesn't help Internet security much. Email worms aren't affected at all, and many important servers (like sshd) have to run as root anyways. And a server running as a lesser user can still cause just as much harm to the Internet, for instance by participating in a denial of service attack, or relaying spam.
Go for it
(Exceptions include benchmarks that bypass the virtual file system, and networked disk arrays that are accessed directly by several different systems without any intervening OS).
On the other hand, I have 4 years' worth of appointments in my palm and it only takes up 211 K. I have over a hundred addresses and phone numbers, and it's only 12K. I have the game "Pocket Chess" on there and somehow it's only 29K. So if you just want to use your personal organizer as a personal organizer, 2 Megs is really not that bad.
I just replaced my 3 1/2 year old Palm V with a Palm M515, and you know what? It's not that much different.
The extra RAM is nice, but 16 megs of RAM is really nothing to brag about - a 16 Meg MMC card is only $30.
The color screen isn't very vibrant, gobbles the battery, and worst of all has thin vertical black lines separating every column of pixels.
My new palm is actually a bit THICKER and HEAVIER than the old one - oops.
Worst of all, memos are still limited to 4096 bytes. Unbelievable. I don't like having to shell out for a third party product to rectify such a ridiculous limitation.
I appreciate the snappier performance of the new palm's cpu, but it isn't enough difference to enable any different, new applications.
All in all, I like my new Palm somewhat more than the old one (thanks to the extra RAM and CPU speed). But I wouldn't have upgraded if the boss hadn't been buying, because the M515 is just an incremental upgrade from the V I had before. It makes me wonder what Palm has been doing the last 4 years.
True, I don't need to take my whole music collection jogging, in fact I'd rather arrange things on the PC before I leave and rarely touch the player's controls while I'm listening. At home and at work, I listen on the computer. I guess what's "best" all depends on the intended usage.
Forget that, the last thing I want is a hard drive grinding itself to pieces in there, and they're too big and heavy. The model with almost 200 megs of solid-state memory is much more appealing.
The inventor is left with the 'choice' of doing nothing with his life, or coming up with something brilliant, only to make somebody else wealthy. Meanwhile the rich and talentless stay ahead by doing what they do best: paying people to manage and invest all the money they inherited.
The fact that it's all perfectly legal (and therefore "right") only makes matters worse.
And for that matter, to investors? After they get their 10-15% annual return, they've been justly compensated and surely couldn't ask for more?
Yes, the long term remains to be seen... the message is lound and clear: "Don't Bother."
OK, cool, I'm bulding mine from solid styrofoam.
2) Govt. services are not free. In fact, you pay for them even if you don't want them, and even if you're ineligible for them.
Sure, there's money to be made manipulating the flow of information to influence buying decisions. Just don't expect consumers to thank you for it afterwards.
So maybe Itanium will be a massive abortion. Oh, well. They made a ton of money back when they had no competition and charged whatever they wanted.
Wow, version 2.0 after just a few months. Debian only just made it to 3.0 after, what, 5 years? So I predict Debian will soon be rendered obsolete by Lindows :)
Whether it's worth it depends on how the "new Iraq" turns out, and whether you believe the "old Iraq" is a real threat. In other words nobody knows for sure.
I don't see how battery-powered cars help anything, if we're just going to build more coal plants to charge the batteries.
Well, since we're assuming the indefinite continuation of current trends, Russa's population will be negative by then.