I have done this and it is a nightmare. The software that supports the CrystalHD card is buggy as hell, the XBMC support for it is still not great, and the performance is still spotty (running the latest XBMC SVN builds and the latest CrystalHD code from svn). I can't get it to stream The Dark Knight without dropping frames, pausing/resuming causes all sorts of problems, and exiting out of a movie crashes XBMC half the time for me.
ION hardware is absolutely the way to go, no question about it.
Nah, NVIDIA gutted their QA department about a year and a half ago and the people they still had afterwards have been overworked. It's not like the Linux driver team was the only group that completely failed to catch the fan control problem, so it doesn't make any kind of sense that this decision would be tied to that fiasco. The more disturbing part (to me) is, this isn't even the first time that fan control regressions have made it into shipping drivers. But this time the regression caused the fans *not* to spin up properly, as opposed to spinning up too much.
Realistically speaking? Nobody cares about SPARC, least of all NVIDIA. They've got enough shit to worry about, with Intel squeezing them out of the northbridge chipset market (No, you can't have a DMI license!) and ATI/AMD kicking their ass in the general enthusiast market (have you seen the Radeon 5xxx series?).
It's a damn good thing for them they had the foresight to get involved in the ARM business, because that may be the thing that keeps them alive for the next few years.
The only thing that I found surprising about this announcement is how long it took for them to finally decide to kill it. The 'nv' driver wasn't doing them any good in the first place.
Why would they even release it if their ground-up rewrite is so pathetic? Were they worried that BIND might be losing its rich reputation as the worst piece of widely-used network software ever made? If so, bravo, guys.
Make sure you get either an Intel X25-M (though the biggest one they offer is 160GB) or something with an Indilinx controller (OCZ Vertex, for example, up to 256GB). Stay away from anything with a JMicron controller - those drives might be cheaper for bigger sizes, but the performance is crap.
If you'd ever used an iPhone or iPod touch, you would know that the iPod app keeps playing in the background when you switch away. So yes, you CAN browse the web while listening to music. Unless you meant "you can't browse the web while streaming Pandora", which is true. But that's not what you said.:)
So unless Apple has broken this functionality without stating that they have, your first complaint is completely invalid. The screen is higher resolution than DVD, and DVD-quality video is clearly the most popular option in the US right now, so the screen is capable of showing better-than-DVD-quality video... so, no, it's not 720p, or 1080p, but it's still going to look pretty damn good.
Of the issues you raised, the only really valid one is that you can't use a USB thumb drive with it, but that's hardly a dealbreaker.
That said, Slashdot approval has been pretty much inversely related to Apple product success in the past, so it looks like the iPad will do extremely well based on the comments here...
Actually Chrome (well, Chromium) has been rock-solid for me on Linux. It replaced Firefox for me about a month ago. The only major feature that I'm missing at the moment is printing support, which they're working on, but it's not like I print things that often anyway.
It's so much better than Firefox on Linux that it almost makes me feel bad for the Mozilla devs, except that they don't really care that much about Linux users.
If any Google employee ever attempted to look up personal data in the fashions you just described, they would be fired so fast they wouldn't even know what happened. From my understanding, it is currently impossible to look up user data in these manners without setting off a whole ton of red flags, and all of those red flags mean "immediate termination."
I was playing around with the latest msysgit (1.6, 12/27) and it didn't seem to be much slower than the Linux git for the things I was doing. (I cloned the xserver repo from freedesktop.org, made a couple of branches from arbitrary points in history, used 'git blame', etc.)
msysgit was definitely slightly slower - it took 47 seconds compared to 27 seconds to clone the repo, for example - but nothing that I'd consider to be "extremely slow". And the xserver git repo is much larger than most typical projects, so I'm wondering what it is that I'm missing.
Re:There is only one true keyboard...
on
Review of Das Keyboard
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The Unicomp keyboard is kind of flimsy compared to an original Model M; however, PS2 to USB adapters are very hit-or-miss so it's a pain to use a Model M with a modern computer.
I think it's safe to say that I'm more obsessed with the Model M than pretty much anyone else I know - I have a dozen of them (both classic Model M #1391401s and several of the Space Saver editions sans numpad on the right), but I was getting really tired of needing the special cable (on the ones that have a detachable cable) and a PS2/USB adapter for each one to use it. I have more computers without PS2 ports these days than with, so USB is kind of necessary.
So... with a friend's help, I learned how to design electrical circuits so I could manufacture a new brain for the M.
They force you to sign up for a $20/month 'iPhone data' package for whatever plan you sign up for, and this package includes unlimited data access on the EDGE network. (Not unlimited SMS messages, mind you.)
But you can browse Google's Maps and YouTube all day long on it and never have to worry about how many kilobytes you've used up.
Actually, it does sync with your Outlook contacts. And your Outlook calendar. It doesn't do proper Exchange integration via ActiveSync or ActivePush or whatever Microsoft's bullshit is called, but it does work with IMAP pretty well. The syncing goes through iTunes, which is retarded, but it does properly sync to Outlook data stores (on PCs, anyway. On the Mac, it syncs with the systemwide addressbook, iCal, etc)
Then he hits the guy with the bandages in the head. Why? Because he's smart, He knows the guy with the bandages around his ass is goin' nowhere. He's goin' fuckin' nowhere.
Oh, duh. Another obvious feature that I completely forgot about (you can see this one on http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spaces.html, too) - you can re-order your virtual desktops by drag and drop. That's such an obvious feature that I can't believe nobody on Linux has done it, but I haven't seen it done before.
It *does* look awfully nice, nicer than most X11 WM implementations of virtual desktops so far that I've seen.
By look you mean aesthetics or what? And the *features* (I really care for them - not the look).
The aesthetics, sure - the zooms are all smooth, there are little animations everywhere, there's an arrow in the translucent pager that pops up when you switch desktops that indicates to you where you went and where you came from, etc.
Having live previews of your applications (movies that continue playing, etc) is a great feature, and you can move them between desktops while they're updating live.
Exactly as I am now doing in Linux with Xgl. Maybe that is why I find the phrase "quantum leap" as a bit extragerating. Have a peak:
I've played with Xgl and AIGLX and Compiz and the Metacity compositor support and they're all really fun and very neat, but they don't work everywhere and they're not on by default yet. (The alt-tab live previews in Compiz are really sweet, too.)
Also, the system will automatically switch you to the relevant desktop when you click on an app that isn't running on the current one.
You mean clicking on app icon that isn't running on current desktop or what (since you can't click an app that is on different desktop)? Well you can do this on X11 WMs also.
Sorry, I should have been more specific. So, say you're on Desktop 1, and you launch Safari. Then you shift to Desktop 2, and you launch Mail. If you click on the Safari icon on the Dock, it animates the switch back to Desktop 1 where Safari is running. It's not revolutionary, but it is kind of obvious; most Linux desktops don't have a concept of an 'Application' - they know about windows, specifically, and some WMs will switch properly to another desktop if you select a window on it, but there's no animation, and (at least in Metacity) often the window you clicked on doesn't actually get the focus.
X can definitely do live previews, *if* you have Composite and a decent compmgr (like compiz) and something like Xgl or AIGLX.
I have it.:)
So do I. They're neat, and they're a lot of fun, but it can be kind of difficult to get it set up if you're not very experienced.
However, these technologies are still in their infancy and far from ready for mass consumption,
Oh and Leopard is in mass consumption really. Where to buy it?
Now, I never said that. But I do have Leopard right now, or at least a Developer Preview of it, so it's not exactly vaporware, either. Plus, Apple seems pretty good about shipping things when they say they're going to, unlike certain other OS companies, like, say, Microsoft...
and many of the video cards lack the proper support for accelerating all the nifty 3D goodness that the new toys require.
My quite old nvidia does it perfectly. Geez it is only some 2D effects and very few real 3D.
Heh, I should have been more specific - there are *tons* of cards which are capable, of course, even cards that are five or six years old - but on X, most of them don't have drivers that support these capabilities yet. NVidia's cards only work with their binary drivers; some of ATI's cards work with the open drivers, some only work with their binary drivers, and some don't work at all; the Intel driver is notably pretty good but the cards are fairly unimpressive; and the drivers for other cards are in lots of different states of completeness.
As usual, Apple is doing a good job, with some (in hindsight) obvious improvements.
Which are? You've named live previews (yup we have it) and switching t
Maybe the guy is here at WWDC with the other 4000 Mac developers and happened to see it live at the Keynote, like me.
It *does* look awfully nice, nicer than most X11 WM implementations of virtual desktops so far that I've seen.
Having live previews of your applications (movies that continue playing, etc) is a great feature, and you can move them between desktops while they're updating live. Also, the system will automatically switch you to the relevant desktop when you click on an app that isn't running on the current one.
X can definitely do live previews, *if* you have Composite and a decent compmgr (like compiz) and something like Xgl or AIGLX. However, these technologies are still in their infancy and far from ready for mass consumption, and many of the video cards lack the proper support for accelerating all the nifty 3D goodness that the new toys require.
As usual, Apple is doing a good job, with some (in hindsight) obvious improvements. It'll be fun to see how soon we have the same features implemented on Linux, in X.
I consider myself a member, yeah. I don't contribute nearly as much as folks like ajax, but I have a few (small) patches in this release and I did the buildsystem work to bring EXA to the modular server tree.
The calls for testing went out to the X.org mailing list; if your company has an operating system that relies on having X.org work and you don't have anyone subscribed, well, that's a serious problem and I don't really know what to tell you. We've had four Release Candidates, with enough time between them for anyone on a given OS to tell us whether or not something is broken.
We don't expect end-users of AIX to make sure that X continues to work for them; hell, if I remember right, IBM maintains its own X server and its own set of drivers for their own X implementation on AIX, and I doubt that anyone uses X.org on it (since we don't have drivers for the cards that ship on most AIX-capable machines).
Nobody expects the end-users to contribute to all "fifteen million" projects out there. And the X.org attitude is "We need more developers!" and nothing else; maybe it's holding Open Source back but I think it's better than the XFree86 "Go away, we know better than you" attitude.
Except that that's bullshit. Those platforms may already work; nobody who cares about them bothered to step forward and verify that they do, though, so we don't claim to support them.
As soon as someone verifies either that it works or that it's busted, we'll list it as working or fix it and then list it.
Slashdot Mirror
I have done this and it is a nightmare. The software that supports the CrystalHD card is buggy as hell, the XBMC support for it is still not great, and the performance is still spotty (running the latest XBMC SVN builds and the latest CrystalHD code from svn). I can't get it to stream The Dark Knight without dropping frames, pausing/resuming causes all sorts of problems, and exiting out of a movie crashes XBMC half the time for me.
ION hardware is absolutely the way to go, no question about it.
Maybe while they're at it, they can add in actually-useful error messages. See http://blog.llvm.org/2010/04/amazing-feats-of-clang-error-recovery.html for some examples. It's shocking how user-hostile GCC is in comparison.
You jumped right on the LLVM part, but apparently don't know what clang is. You should read about clang. http://clang.llvm.org/
Nah, NVIDIA gutted their QA department about a year and a half ago and the people they still had afterwards have been overworked. It's not like the Linux driver team was the only group that completely failed to catch the fan control problem, so it doesn't make any kind of sense that this decision would be tied to that fiasco. The more disturbing part (to me) is, this isn't even the first time that fan control regressions have made it into shipping drivers. But this time the regression caused the fans *not* to spin up properly, as opposed to spinning up too much.
Realistically speaking? Nobody cares about SPARC, least of all NVIDIA. They've got enough shit to worry about, with Intel squeezing them out of the northbridge chipset market (No, you can't have a DMI license!) and ATI/AMD kicking their ass in the general enthusiast market (have you seen the Radeon 5xxx series?).
It's a damn good thing for them they had the foresight to get involved in the ARM business, because that may be the thing that keeps them alive for the next few years.
The only thing that I found surprising about this announcement is how long it took for them to finally decide to kill it. The 'nv' driver wasn't doing them any good in the first place.
A fair point, but aren't there are a larger percentage of mailservers running !sendmail than there are DNS servers running !BIND at this point?
I hope I'm wrong.
Why would they even release it if their ground-up rewrite is so pathetic? Were they worried that BIND might be losing its rich reputation as the worst piece of widely-used network software ever made? If so, bravo, guys.
Make sure you get either an Intel X25-M (though the biggest one they offer is 160GB) or something with an Indilinx controller (OCZ Vertex, for example, up to 256GB). Stay away from anything with a JMicron controller - those drives might be cheaper for bigger sizes, but the performance is crap.
If you'd ever used an iPhone or iPod touch, you would know that the iPod app keeps playing in the background when you switch away. So yes, you CAN browse the web while listening to music. Unless you meant "you can't browse the web while streaming Pandora", which is true. But that's not what you said. :)
So unless Apple has broken this functionality without stating that they have, your first complaint is completely invalid. The screen is higher resolution than DVD, and DVD-quality video is clearly the most popular option in the US right now, so the screen is capable of showing better-than-DVD-quality video... so, no, it's not 720p, or 1080p, but it's still going to look pretty damn good.
Of the issues you raised, the only really valid one is that you can't use a USB thumb drive with it, but that's hardly a dealbreaker.
That said, Slashdot approval has been pretty much inversely related to Apple product success in the past, so it looks like the iPad will do extremely well based on the comments here...
Oh really?
Joystiq and Kotaku seem to disagree with you.
I don't know about the having-to-be-online-to-play thing. I'm usually online. But there has in fact already been a PC patch.
Actually Chrome (well, Chromium) has been rock-solid for me on Linux. It replaced Firefox for me about a month ago. The only major feature that I'm missing at the moment is printing support, which they're working on, but it's not like I print things that often anyway.
It's so much better than Firefox on Linux that it almost makes me feel bad for the Mozilla devs, except that they don't really care that much about Linux users.
If any Google employee ever attempted to look up personal data in the fashions you just described, they would be fired so fast they wouldn't even know what happened. From my understanding, it is currently impossible to look up user data in these manners without setting off a whole ton of red flags, and all of those red flags mean "immediate termination."
What are those cases, exactly?
I was playing around with the latest msysgit (1.6, 12/27) and it didn't seem to be much slower than the Linux git for the things I was doing. (I cloned the xserver repo from freedesktop.org, made a couple of branches from arbitrary points in history, used 'git blame', etc.)
msysgit was definitely slightly slower - it took 47 seconds compared to 27 seconds to clone the repo, for example - but nothing that I'd consider to be "extremely slow". And the xserver git repo is much larger than most typical projects, so I'm wondering what it is that I'm missing.
I love 30 Rock.
(You can see the scene that quote is from at http://www.mediawithabrain.com/2008/04/25/30-rock-tackles-uncanny-valley-with-worlds-first-porn-video-game if you watch the second video.)
The Unicomp keyboard is kind of flimsy compared to an original Model M; however, PS2 to USB adapters are very hit-or-miss so it's a pain to use a Model M with a modern computer.
I think it's safe to say that I'm more obsessed with the Model M than pretty much anyone else I know - I have a dozen of them (both classic Model M #1391401s and several of the Space Saver editions sans numpad on the right), but I was getting really tired of needing the special cable (on the ones that have a detachable cable) and a PS2/USB adapter for each one to use it. I have more computers without PS2 ports these days than with, so USB is kind of necessary.
So... with a friend's help, I learned how to design electrical circuits so I could manufacture a new brain for the M.
http://c133.org/ibm-keyboard-pcb.png is the PCB layout, and http://github.com/clee/rump/tree/master is the source code for the firmware that runs on the microcontroller.
I'm actually typing this comment on a Model M I bought on eBay, but it's running my firmware on my board, talking USB natively.
Hey, Richard Stallman needs love too. ... but he's gotta pay!
Actually, they dropped the price to $399 (USD).
They force you to sign up for a $20/month 'iPhone data' package for whatever plan you sign up for, and this package includes unlimited data access on the EDGE network. (Not unlimited SMS messages, mind you.)
But you can browse Google's Maps and YouTube all day long on it and never have to worry about how many kilobytes you've used up.
Actually, it does sync with your Outlook contacts. And your Outlook calendar. It doesn't do proper Exchange integration via ActiveSync or ActivePush or whatever Microsoft's bullshit is called, but it does work with IMAP pretty well. The syncing goes through iTunes, which is retarded, but it does properly sync to Outlook data stores (on PCs, anyway. On the Mac, it syncs with the systemwide addressbook, iCal, etc)
Then he hits the guy with the bandages in the head. Why? Because he's smart, He knows the guy with the bandages around his ass is goin' nowhere. He's goin' fuckin' nowhere.
Where you goin'? NOWHERE.
Oh, duh. Another obvious feature that I completely forgot about (you can see this one on http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spaces.html, too) - you can re-order your virtual desktops by drag and drop. That's such an obvious feature that I can't believe nobody on Linux has done it, but I haven't seen it done before.
The aesthetics, sure - the zooms are all smooth, there are little animations everywhere, there's an arrow in the translucent pager that pops up when you switch desktops that indicates to you where you went and where you came from, etc.
I've played with Xgl and AIGLX and Compiz and the Metacity compositor support and they're all really fun and very neat, but they don't work everywhere and they're not on by default yet. (The alt-tab live previews in Compiz are really sweet, too.)
Sorry, I should have been more specific. So, say you're on Desktop 1, and you launch Safari. Then you shift to Desktop 2, and you launch Mail. If you click on the Safari icon on the Dock, it animates the switch back to Desktop 1 where Safari is running. It's not revolutionary, but it is kind of obvious; most Linux desktops don't have a concept of an 'Application' - they know about windows, specifically, and some WMs will switch properly to another desktop if you select a window on it, but there's no animation, and (at least in Metacity) often the window you clicked on doesn't actually get the focus.
So do I. They're neat, and they're a lot of fun, but it can be kind of difficult to get it set up if you're not very experienced.
Now, I never said that. But I do have Leopard right now, or at least a Developer Preview of it, so it's not exactly vaporware, either. Plus, Apple seems pretty good about shipping things when they say they're going to, unlike certain other OS companies, like, say, Microsoft...
Heh, I should have been more specific - there are *tons* of cards which are capable, of course, even cards that are five or six years old - but on X, most of them don't have drivers that support these capabilities yet. NVidia's cards only work with their binary drivers; some of ATI's cards work with the open drivers, some only work with their binary drivers, and some don't work at all; the Intel driver is notably pretty good but the cards are fairly unimpressive; and the drivers for other cards are in lots of different states of completeness.
Jeez, who pissed in your cornflakes?
Maybe the guy is here at WWDC with the other 4000 Mac developers and happened to see it live at the Keynote, like me.
It *does* look awfully nice, nicer than most X11 WM implementations of virtual desktops so far that I've seen.
Having live previews of your applications (movies that continue playing, etc) is a great feature, and you can move them between desktops while they're updating live. Also, the system will automatically switch you to the relevant desktop when you click on an app that isn't running on the current one.
X can definitely do live previews, *if* you have Composite and a decent compmgr (like compiz) and something like Xgl or AIGLX. However, these technologies are still in their infancy and far from ready for mass consumption, and many of the video cards lack the proper support for accelerating all the nifty 3D goodness that the new toys require.
As usual, Apple is doing a good job, with some (in hindsight) obvious improvements. It'll be fun to see how soon we have the same features implemented on Linux, in X.
I consider myself a member, yeah. I don't contribute nearly as much as folks like ajax, but I have a few (small) patches in this release and I did the buildsystem work to bring EXA to the modular server tree.
The calls for testing went out to the X.org mailing list; if your company has an operating system that relies on having X.org work and you don't have anyone subscribed, well, that's a serious problem and I don't really know what to tell you. We've had four Release Candidates, with enough time between them for anyone on a given OS to tell us whether or not something is broken.
We don't expect end-users of AIX to make sure that X continues to work for them; hell, if I remember right, IBM maintains its own X server and its own set of drivers for their own X implementation on AIX, and I doubt that anyone uses X.org on it (since we don't have drivers for the cards that ship on most AIX-capable machines).
Nobody expects the end-users to contribute to all "fifteen million" projects out there. And the X.org attitude is "We need more developers!" and nothing else; maybe it's holding Open Source back but I think it's better than the XFree86 "Go away, we know better than you" attitude.
Except that that's bullshit. Those platforms may already work; nobody who cares about them bothered to step forward and verify that they do, though, so we don't claim to support them.
As soon as someone verifies either that it works or that it's busted, we'll list it as working or fix it and then list it.