Why would you want wireless where travelling with your laptop can involve snowshoes and other winter paraphenalia?
The weather here is less likely to quarantine me to my computer(s) at home, making wireless seem more sensible in a climate like mine;-)
(I live in Phoenix, AZ, the Sun City)
Sun was optimistic. So were we(the OSS supporters)
on
No GNOME For Solaris 9
·
· Score: 1
Sun made the decision to use Gnome during the happy times of "dot com". Those exuberant days are over.
I find it rather amusing the the classic wars are so easily restarted. Neither Gnome *NOR* KDE, IMHO, are ready for Solaris and other environments.
KDE and Gnome both feel too disjointed to really make the Unix desktop feel like a computer that non-technically minded people would use.
I happen to use Gnome, and have grown quite accustomed to it, but I still keep many terminals around to get things done. When I used CDE on Solaris in the past, I did the same thing, probably to a greater degree.
I tried to use KDE 2.2.x this past week, and I couldn't get accustomed to it. Perhaps I'm not European enough;-), but I feel that there are design decisions that make the environment difficult to use - enough that I was screaming for my Gnome desktop back.
Either way, though, the Unix desktop doesn't have a prayer. Sun was just commerical support that could substantiated Gnome as a major desktop force.
Ultimately, the Unix desktop feels too disjoint - which doesn't matter to people like me to want to poke around with the system, but matters to anyone new to Unix. The one advantage the Windows desktop has is how tightly integrated the GUI feels to the OS itself. You need to at least create that illusion in the Unix world - and so far it still seems like something that we aren't even close to acheiving.
On a final note, a consistent widget set across applications gives users a much more cohesive-feeling experience. It may seem silly to a lot of us, but the fact that Windows/Mac apps all "look the same" makes things feel "normal" for a lot of users.
That is besides the point. The fact is that the premise of "emulating" or re-implementing libraries from another OS to be compatible has a very low probability of substantially increasing market share for that OS.
For there to be a reason for people to use Linux (or any other alternative OS) there really has to be a compelling reason. You have to have things that other OSes don't have.
In a similar situation with gaming consoles, situation, his is (IMHO) how Microsoft plans to make XBox popular, with "XBox-only" titles and making the XBox into an internet appliance. Nintendo GameCube is strictly a gaming machine, but M$ wants XBox to be much more. Will anyone bite?
My guess is that XBox will still have a hard time beating out Nintendo and Sony's market share, but we'll have to wait and see.
Beef up your Grifitti skills!
on
Talking Palm
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, it looks to me like you aren't
fast with the Palm's handwriting recognition.
I can write as fast on a palm as I do "by hand" on paper. I've met people are surprised to see how fast I write on my device.
Note that StrongARM also does not have a floating point unit - this will cause a significant performance hit in some apps.
As a sidenote, I've also noticed that floating point (on Linux and QNX, at least) seems to operate in big-endian, while other math ops are done little-endian. Test it for yourself, I verified it with a very small C program.
> TV screens are cheaper than monitors.
TVs may be cheaper than monitors, but monitor prices have come down drastically - and there's little disputing that the visuals on a monitor are generally better than that of a TV, particularly for web browsing and other duties than involve reading text from a screen. $99 will generally buy you a pretty crappy TV, but it can get you a low-end 15" monitor that has better clarity, even if it isn't as big as the TV.
As it is, Fox News Channel is blocked in many parts of New York City/New Jersey Suburbs b/c Warner does cable service here and isn't a fan of Rupert Murdoch(sp). This is really annoying, being that I wanted the other side of the news coverage (not MSNBC and CNN's extra bias)
2. Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this.
This is still lousy behavior. Why not REVERSE that behavior, requiring a META tag for "Smart tags" to be turned on? Otherwise this imposes (not that M$ has ever done that before;-)
Secondly, Radio Quality sucks. Much worse than MP3s. I can hear the difference between a mastered CD and MP3s on my JBLs, but the average person doesn't care because it sounds better than FM. The average person will hook up some RadioShack surround sound system and think it sounds great. Its gets the job done and unless I'm working on someone elses music, I don't care, but I don't pretend its really that good
Note that part of the reason that radio sounds so crappy (besides the fact that the transmission medium is subject to loss through environmental factors) is that is it compressed (limited, actually) before it is transmitted in order to maximize the signal strength. For those less familiar with the terminology, compression for audio sets a threshold for loudness attempts to keep the audio signal at a consistent level - you can hear this when someone speaks over music in the middle of a song - it sounds like the volume is being changed but in actually it's an effect of the compression. Limiting is the name for the extreme form of compression used by radio stations.
Now if radio was digital instead, maybe we could actually have jazz recordings on radio that didn't lose those great dynamic qualities . . .
This is just great until somebody decides to play a trick and modify the controller with a very large capacitor, just like those great friend I had as a child that would take a camera flash and hand it to me the evil-contacts-towards-me way, so that I suddenly became a happy GND for the capacitor in it.
I worked for an ISP a few years ago where we were testing DSL equipment (back in 1997) and we were doing it over fiber - this cut back on maximum bandwidth a bit, though. This was also in the Chicago area, which was one of the hottest ISP markets in the US at the time.
Unfortunately, DSL in the hands of phone companies is almost as bad as Cable Modems in the hands of cable companies, but you end up having to deal with a lot of people who just don't really know what they are doing. Additionally, it costs them a lot to set all this up as well as paying qualified people to do it. My advice for DSL is to avoid it like you would ISDN - too many problems with the technology have made it's rollout less than spectacular. I would recommend cable. . .
I've had two personal experiences with Cable companies hooking up cable modems for me, once in Northern New Jersey area, and once in Phoenix, AZ. The quality of service in Phoenix seems to be 100x better than what I've seen in NJ - getting my folks cable modem setup in NJ has been an absolute nightmare.
It's all about the people behind the local service.
This is something that's been done for a while by gov't orgs. If your one of the primary objectives is security , something like this is developed "in-house" because they were creating a unique security measures. They can afford a boatload of IPs.
This is not to be confused with security through obfuscation - the specifications of how this has being done has been kept secret since it is something intended for internal use. If everybody knows how this is handled (special routing, etc.) then it makes it easier to poke holes in the open protocol. This is one of the occasions where I would support a closed specification (I'm usually in favor of open standards).
3 years ago acquiring Sun Workstations may have seemed like an interesting prospect, but now there seem to be much more attractive choices available that cost a lot less and run faster.
Supporting an old Sparc 5 is still doable, but it's value diminishes very quickly because of the kind of machine that can be had for very little money these days. In addition, most people I have come into contact with who are purchasing new Suns intend to run Solaris on them.
IMHO, I think Sun may lose it's edge in this market, given the kind of power that can be had on x86 and PPC for a lot less money. Since Sun produces an OS and supports their own specific hardware with it, Solaris seems the obvious choice on new Sun hardware, since supporting their devices is a lot of work. Sun may still hold a strong position the in high-end and mid-level server market, mainly for multi-processor Solaris boxes and Enterprise 10Ks, etc., but it's getting harder to justify getting Sun workstations, particularly for running Linux, when Linux runs better on other hardware.
And an even bigger disaster is trying to get x86 hardware that runs well with Solaris x86. If you want to run Unix on x86, *BSD or Linux seems to be the obvious choice.
While there are many cases where Calculus is not used, when working in Graphics and Sound, I've found that all that math comes in REAL handy. I know that math isn't something everyone finds second-nature, but it's really worth it, and I wish I had done better in some of my calc classes, looking back.
If you never expect to write your own graphics or sound library, it may not be as useful:-)
As a simple example, vector calculus is quite useful in 3D graphics programming
I was under the impression that the OSI model was 7 layers - Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Datalink, and Physical,
while the TCP/IP model has 4 layers: Application, Transport, IP Layer(Network), Datalink/Physical.
The latter model is usually more useful, unless you are working outseide the realm of IP (I've only ever done Net programming for TCP/IP).
1. For the sake of purity, Java is NOT purely OO, because it has primitive types (among other things). For a truly OO experience, try Smalltalk:-)
2. Not every student wants to be a high-level programmer. Teaching OO is fine, but the best students I know are those who have a good understanding of what's happening under the hood, e.g., what's going on inside a Java VM, for example. Some kids just want to hack C, not Java.
3. It's not just the issue of OO itself, but actual Software Engineering. The problem here is good Software Engineers tend to want to enter industry, but a lot of professors that I know are more interested in students going for grad school to do research. The head of the department at my university, for example, is planning to REMOVE Software Engineering courses from the curriculum, and I think his motivation is to keep as many people from entering the industry. ACM's recommended curriculum focuses quite a bit on Software Engineering, though.
I'm a final-semester college student who was searching for a job in networking or OS programming, and I was offered (on the phone) a job from Sun working on Solaris networking code.
The offer was supposed to be made "official" and I was to get it in the mail soon after, but within a few days of that phone conversation, a hiring freeze occured. I've been waiting since January now, and I'll probably take a different job (fortunately I have a good offer from another company). Had I interviewed a little sooner, I could have had this offer on paper.
The REAL nice jobs are much harder to get right now.
Re:Embedded Linux - Does it *need* mods?
on
Linux Powered Dodge
·
· Score: 1
They aren't hacking the car's CPU at all.
Linux is running on it's own SuperH board (four of them in this vehicle), and these embedded systems are (likely) just the Infotronic system. The computers that handle RPM/Speed-limit and another other functions related to the operation of the vehicle are part of much more critical real-time systems!
This is a definately a separate entity that doesn't have anything to do with a car "crashing," either.
Many people mentioned IBM's VisualAge for Java and their 1.3 JVM for Linux - these are great products.
For embedded space, don't forget about their VisualAge Micro Edition as well -
you can try it at http://www.embedded.oti.com This is developed by the Object Technology Inc. subsidiary of IBM. They have a VM available something like 20 platforms including Palm.
There's even a version of the VisualAge Micro Edition IDE for Linux as well, which runs very fast, especially when you take into account that it is running on top of the JVM itself.
Taking class to a global level
on
Disconnected
·
· Score: 2
Having read "Disconnected" for a class in college,
I'd say it basically makes obvious the rift that
exists between the rich, technically inclined, and
"fortunate" people who live in the "information age". The author uses wonderfully horrible cyber-cliches and tries to say that in the third world, peoples lives aren't so fancy.
Most of it didn't really hit home with me. It's obvious that a large portion of the world remains unconnected and lives a simpler life, and that many of them may not be aware that a network like the internet even exists.
The book basically takes the division of classes to the next level, going beyond the advantage those with technical knowledge have above the less-educated, and taking it to a global area with comparisons to villages in Africa. There are more cars in the state of New Jersey than all of Africa.
Don't differences like this make it obvious enough? For the geek reader, this book gets a 4/10
I find it amusing that I saw ">Download this document in MS Word format" on that page. I mean, there's a security risk right there!
More amusing is that I often see electronic resume requests for that "universal" document format, known as MS Word ".doc", rather than something not subjectable to macro virii, like PDF, Postscript, or good old PLainText.
Basically a bunch of us were at LinuxWorld and talked to him at the Linux International Booth, and told him what we were about. He offered to come and visit us, and we set up a date and time on the spot. If you can fit in his schedule (he does a LOT of travelling) then you could have something. He particularly likes it if you pay for all the beer, too.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you want wireless where travelling with your laptop can involve snowshoes and other winter paraphenalia? ;-)
The weather here is less likely to quarantine me to my computer(s) at home, making wireless seem more sensible in a climate like mine
(I live in Phoenix, AZ, the Sun City)
Sun made the decision to use Gnome during the happy times of "dot com". Those exuberant days are over. I find it rather amusing the the classic wars are so easily restarted. Neither Gnome *NOR* KDE, IMHO, are ready for Solaris and other environments. KDE and Gnome both feel too disjointed to really make the Unix desktop feel like a computer that non-technically minded people would use.
;-), but I feel that there are design decisions that make the environment difficult to use - enough that I was screaming for my Gnome desktop back.
I happen to use Gnome, and have grown quite accustomed to it, but I still keep many terminals around to get things done. When I used CDE on Solaris in the past, I did the same thing, probably to a greater degree.
I tried to use KDE 2.2.x this past week, and I couldn't get accustomed to it. Perhaps I'm not European enough
Either way, though, the Unix desktop doesn't have a prayer. Sun was just commerical support that could substantiated Gnome as a major desktop force.
Ultimately, the Unix desktop feels too disjoint - which doesn't matter to people like me to want to poke around with the system, but matters to anyone new to Unix. The one advantage the Windows desktop has is how tightly integrated the GUI feels to the OS itself. You need to at least create that illusion in the Unix world - and so far it still seems like something that we aren't even close to acheiving.
On a final note, a consistent widget set across applications gives users a much more cohesive-feeling experience. It may seem silly to a lot of us, but the fact that Windows/Mac apps all "look the same" makes things feel "normal" for a lot of users.
That is besides the point. The fact is that the premise of "emulating" or re-implementing libraries from another OS to be compatible has a very low probability of substantially increasing market share for that OS.
For there to be a reason for people to use Linux (or any other alternative OS) there really has to be a compelling reason. You have to have things that other OSes don't have.
In a similar situation with gaming consoles, situation, his is (IMHO) how Microsoft plans to make XBox popular, with "XBox-only" titles and making the XBox into an internet appliance. Nintendo GameCube is strictly a gaming machine, but M$ wants XBox to be much more. Will anyone bite?
My guess is that XBox will still have a hard time beating out Nintendo and Sony's market share, but we'll have to wait and see.
Hmm, it looks to me like you aren't
fast with the Palm's handwriting recognition.
I can write as fast on a palm as I do "by hand" on paper. I've met people are surprised to see how fast I write on my device.
Note that StrongARM also does not have a floating point unit - this will cause a significant performance hit in some apps.
As a sidenote, I've also noticed that floating point (on Linux and QNX, at least) seems to operate in big-endian, while other math ops are done little-endian. Test it for yourself, I verified it with a very small C program.
> TV screens are cheaper than monitors. TVs may be cheaper than monitors, but monitor prices have come down drastically - and there's little disputing that the visuals on a monitor are generally better than that of a TV, particularly for web browsing and other duties than involve reading text from a screen. $99 will generally buy you a pretty crappy TV, but it can get you a low-end 15" monitor that has better clarity, even if it isn't as big as the TV.
As it is, Fox News Channel is blocked in many parts of New York City/New Jersey Suburbs b/c Warner does cable service here and isn't a fan of Rupert Murdoch(sp). This is really annoying, being that I wanted the other side of the news coverage (not MSNBC and CNN's extra bias)
2. Smart tags can be easily turned off by a page author. There is a META tag that does this.
;-)
This is still lousy behavior. Why not REVERSE that behavior, requiring a META tag for "Smart tags" to be turned on? Otherwise this imposes (not that M$ has ever done that before
Secondly, Radio Quality sucks. Much worse than MP3s. I can hear the difference between a mastered CD and MP3s on my JBLs, but the average person doesn't care because it sounds better than FM. The average person will hook up some RadioShack surround sound system and think it sounds great. Its gets the job done and unless I'm working on someone elses music, I don't care, but I don't pretend its really that good
Note that part of the reason that radio sounds so crappy (besides the fact that the transmission medium is subject to loss through environmental factors) is that is it compressed (limited, actually) before it is transmitted in order to maximize the signal strength. For those less familiar with the terminology, compression for audio sets a threshold for loudness attempts to keep the audio signal at a consistent level - you can hear this when someone speaks over music in the middle of a song - it sounds like the volume is being changed but in actually it's an effect of the compression. Limiting is the name for the extreme form of compression used by radio stations.
Now if radio was digital instead, maybe we could actually have jazz recordings on radio that didn't lose those great dynamic qualities . . .
This is just great until somebody decides to play a trick and modify the controller with a very large capacitor, just like those great friend I had as a child that would take a camera flash and hand it to me the evil-contacts-towards-me way, so that I suddenly became a happy GND for the capacitor in it.
Ahh, the joy of childhood practical jokes.
I worked for an ISP a few years ago where we were testing DSL equipment (back in 1997) and we were doing it over fiber - this cut back on maximum bandwidth a bit, though. This was also in the Chicago area, which was one of the hottest ISP markets in the US at the time. Unfortunately, DSL in the hands of phone companies is almost as bad as Cable Modems in the hands of cable companies, but you end up having to deal with a lot of people who just don't really know what they are doing. Additionally, it costs them a lot to set all this up as well as paying qualified people to do it. My advice for DSL is to avoid it like you would ISDN - too many problems with the technology have made it's rollout less than spectacular. I would recommend cable. . .
I've had two personal experiences with Cable companies hooking up cable modems for me, once in Northern New Jersey area, and once in Phoenix, AZ. The quality of service in Phoenix seems to be 100x better than what I've seen in NJ - getting my folks cable modem setup in NJ has been an absolute nightmare.
It's all about the people behind the local service.
ahh, another failure of mine to proofread, excuse the poor grammar:
the specifications of how this has being done
should be
the specifications for how this has been done
It's tough writing comments on the run!
This is something that's been done for a while by gov't orgs. If your one of the primary objectives is security , something like this is developed "in-house" because they were creating a unique security measures. They can afford a boatload of IPs. This is not to be confused with security through obfuscation - the specifications of how this has being done has been kept secret since it is something intended for internal use. If everybody knows how this is handled (special routing, etc.) then it makes it easier to poke holes in the open protocol. This is one of the occasions where I would support a closed specification (I'm usually in favor of open standards).
I mean, sure, it's geeky and all, and it uses a piece of old hardware, but I think this is a lot cooler
Empeg, as it started out in a homebrew fashion, is far more interesting device. Seems that Diamond has purchased that though, as it's now the RioCar.
3 years ago acquiring Sun Workstations may have seemed like an interesting prospect, but now there seem to be much more attractive choices available that cost a lot less and run faster.
;-)
Supporting an old Sparc 5 is still doable, but it's value diminishes very quickly because of the kind of machine that can be had for very little money these days. In addition, most people I have come into contact with who are purchasing new Suns intend to run Solaris on them.
IMHO, I think Sun may lose it's edge in this market, given the kind of power that can be had on x86 and PPC for a lot less money. Since Sun produces an OS and supports their own specific hardware with it, Solaris seems the obvious choice on new Sun hardware, since supporting their devices is a lot of work. Sun may still hold a strong position the in high-end and mid-level server market, mainly for multi-processor Solaris boxes and Enterprise 10Ks, etc., but it's getting harder to justify getting Sun workstations, particularly for running Linux, when Linux runs better on other hardware.
And an even bigger disaster is trying to get x86 hardware that runs well with Solaris x86. If you want to run Unix on x86, *BSD or Linux seems to be the obvious choice.
Is Sun going the way of SGI?
While there are many cases where Calculus is not used, when working in Graphics and Sound, I've found that all that math comes in REAL handy. I know that math isn't something everyone finds second-nature, but it's really worth it, and I wish I had done better in some of my calc classes, looking back.
:-)
If you never expect to write your own graphics or sound library, it may not be as useful
As a simple example, vector calculus is quite useful in 3D graphics programming
I was under the impression that the OSI model was 7 layers - Application, Presentation, Session, Transport, Network, Datalink, and Physical, while the TCP/IP model has 4 layers: Application, Transport, IP Layer(Network), Datalink/Physical.
The latter model is usually more useful, unless you are working outseide the realm of IP (I've only ever done Net programming for TCP/IP).
There are a few problems with this approach.
:-)
1. For the sake of purity, Java is NOT purely OO, because it has primitive types (among other things). For a truly OO experience, try Smalltalk
2. Not every student wants to be a high-level programmer. Teaching OO is fine, but the best students I know are those who have a good understanding of what's happening under the hood, e.g., what's going on inside a Java VM, for example. Some kids just want to hack C, not Java.
3. It's not just the issue of OO itself, but actual Software Engineering. The problem here is good Software Engineers tend to want to enter industry, but a lot of professors that I know are more interested in students going for grad school to do research. The head of the department at my university, for example, is planning to REMOVE Software Engineering courses from the curriculum, and I think his motivation is to keep as many people from entering the industry. ACM's recommended curriculum focuses quite a bit on Software Engineering, though.
I'm a final-semester college student who was searching for a job in networking or OS programming, and I was offered (on the phone) a job from Sun working on Solaris networking code.
The offer was supposed to be made "official" and I was to get it in the mail soon after, but within a few days of that phone conversation, a hiring freeze occured. I've been waiting since January now, and I'll probably take a different job (fortunately I have a good offer from another company). Had I interviewed a little sooner, I could have had this offer on paper.
The REAL nice jobs are much harder to get right now.
They aren't hacking the car's CPU at all.
Linux is running on it's own SuperH board (four of them in this vehicle), and these embedded systems are (likely) just the Infotronic system. The computers that handle RPM/Speed-limit and another other functions related to the operation of the vehicle are part of much more critical real-time systems!
This is a definately a separate entity that doesn't have anything to do with a car "crashing," either.
Many people mentioned IBM's VisualAge for Java and their 1.3 JVM for Linux - these are great products.
For embedded space, don't forget about their VisualAge Micro Edition as well - you can try it at http://www.embedded.oti.com This is developed by the Object Technology Inc. subsidiary of IBM. They have a VM available something like 20 platforms including Palm.
There's even a version of the VisualAge Micro Edition IDE for Linux as well, which runs very fast, especially when you take into account that it is running on top of the JVM itself.
Having read "Disconnected" for a class in college, I'd say it basically makes obvious the rift that exists between the rich, technically inclined, and "fortunate" people who live in the "information age". The author uses wonderfully horrible cyber-cliches and tries to say that in the third world, peoples lives aren't so fancy.
Most of it didn't really hit home with me. It's obvious that a large portion of the world remains unconnected and lives a simpler life, and that many of them may not be aware that a network like the internet even exists.
The book basically takes the division of classes to the next level, going beyond the advantage those with technical knowledge have above the less-educated, and taking it to a global area with comparisons to villages in Africa. There are more cars in the state of New Jersey than all of Africa.
Don't differences like this make it obvious enough? For the geek reader, this book gets a 4/10
I've actually had the oppurtunity to work with Greg Haerr, president of Century Software, on a porting project, and his work is very impressive.
This is very promising, and I have a lot of faith in the future of this, having worked with the MicroWindows architecture on several platforms.
I find it amusing that I saw ">Download this document in MS Word format" on that page. I mean, there's a security risk right there!
More amusing is that I often see electronic resume requests for that "universal" document format, known as MS Word ".doc", rather than something not subjectable to macro virii, like PDF, Postscript, or good old PLainText.
Basically a bunch of us were at LinuxWorld and talked to him at the Linux International Booth, and told him what we were about. He offered to come and visit us, and we set up a date and time on the spot. If you can fit in his schedule (he does a LOT of travelling) then you could have something. He particularly likes it if you pay for all the beer, too. :-)