I have MacOS 9 installed on my iPod and use it as an emergency repair drive.
Someone mentioned concerns about not being able to copy stuff off it - the music is stored in an invisible folder that would be trivial to access for anyone on Slashdot and in all other respects, it functions as a hard drive.
Firewire isn't just great for the frist big upload batch either. Being able to stick a new album on in a matter of seconds, rather than waiting several minutes with USB is handy if you're in a hurry, or if you're using the iPod for file transfer. By itself, it wouldn't be worth the extra cost, but it's something you greatly come to appreciate. The idea of booting a computer off a USB device isn't too appealing either. Well, apart from USB 2.
Aside from that, I think the only other things that haven't been mentioned by other people already are that it doubles up as a hnady mirror, with that slick metal back or a torch, with that incredible backlight. I'm a relatively impoverished student, but still saw a great deal of value in one as oppossed to an Archos.
Actually a cursory glance at his post shows that he did mention uControl and stated it was available for MacOS X. His problem, however, seems to be that there is no solution for some of the other Unix varieties which he uses.
You have to agree to receive publicity material from Apple, IIRC. You're getting spam, but at least it's shiny happy Apple spam in a choice of 5 fruity flavours.
Not strange in the slightest. It's weaning them off MS, making them more inclined to use any other Office type tools Apple wheels out, or the next version of Keynote a bit further down the line. And if teachers start using it, they might start teaching it to students, so the scool might buy copies or the students will think "Gee, this is cool, I wonder what the rest of Apple's stuff is like."
Besides, they're not 'making' teachers pay. They're offering them a heavily discounted product. That's giving them options, not forcing something on them. If I could get Keynote that cheap I would.
Natural? Do you use your walkman to take photos with? No. That would add unnecessary expense and detract from the iPod's selling points: * small size * good battery life * elegantly simple functionality
I wouldn't want to carry a camcorder around just so I can listen to MP3s. By all means, built a HDD into a camcorder, but don't change the iPod. That's the kind o feature creep that makes Ms Office icky and Mozilla slow (compared with Phoenix/Chimera).
The iPod is small, but the drives are expensive and not intended for continuous use. They also get quite warm if they are used continually. Which is great in winter, but probably not too good for them. Or batery life. Take an iPod and keep skipping through tracks so it can't use the cache and see how long the battery lasts. It won't be very long.
Steve Jobs stood on stage at the latest MacWorld and said that open source was a good thing.As has bene pointed out, open sourcing everything they do would be bad for business. They seem quite happy to work with OSS on the heart of a program as long as they can put a nice skin over the top, which allows them to make money to develop new apps which take open source, improve on it, release it back, and so on. Apple making money off of open source is a great thing because it means that they'll keep coming back, improving on code and releasing it to the OSS community to use.
The Adopt a KDE Geek program exists because developers of open source don't have a lot of resources. Apple does. They're doing way more than their fair share of RnD in the computing industry and everyone can benefit from that if it is turned towards developing even a small part of open source code.
Students are not to my knowledge forced to buy/pirate those. There are plenty of programs compatible to the level required of school work that are free or cheap. Unless you're having to run Access
There's still the problem of schools getting the hardware in the first place. Free software is all well and good, but if you have nothing to run it on, then it's not much use. That said, it's good to hear that education software is being developed. As long as you take share away from Microsoft and not Apple:^)
Given that quite a lot of developers seem to be after newer faster machines, so complies are quicker, what happens to their old computers if they get a new one? If their old ones were passed on to schools then I see both groups benefitting. Doing and mentionning that could encourage more people to donate to you. I'd certainly approve of the scheme in that case. Keep everybody happy.
There's no difference. An operating system being UNIX is determined by how POSIX compliant it is.
I avoid Windows where possible, so I could be wrong about this, but don't you have to install extra software to run most Unix stuff? Cygwin or something like that? And it doesn't come with the basic Unix tools built in. Windows has some POSIX compatability, but OS X has FreeBSD running underneath it, ships with a proper Terminal program, has a free X11 implementation available from Apple which will no doubt soon be included as an install option with the OS, gives you nice free deveeloper tools and Apple plays nice with the OSS community. They encourage the use of Unix and advertise themselves as one, promoting the ability to run Unix software. Microsoft's attitude is the exact opposite. If you don't see the difference here, then I'm not sure how to explain it to you.
Huh? KHTML was written by the open source community, that's not Apple writing software for us, exactly the opposite. In the same way, Darwin was mostly FreeBSD, which was already open source. They've released practically no code they've written that wasn't simply modifications to something that was already open source.
Which is one of the big selling points of open source. You don't have to build code from scratch - you can take somebody else's, modify it, distribute it and let everyone share in the fun. That's what a heck of a lot of open source developers do. f everyone had to write code from scratch in order for it to be defined as open, what would be the point?
Apple took KHTML, fixed a lot of bugs, built Safari and released the rendering code with enhancements back. I fail to see how this sin't open source development on their part.
Not true at all. Java maybe. Cocoa is not a cross platform set of APIs, nowhere near. Where is the reference implementation? Where is the implementation for Windows, or for Linux? GNUstep only implements the OpenStep APIs, not any of Apples own extensions.
I guess I should have ben more specific and said the Java parts. Sorry.
Apple are constantly pushing up the system requirements for new OS releases. Once there is a significantly faster machine out from them, expect to see even more cycle-eating eye candy in MacOS. MacOS X is hardly usable on old iMacs, I've tried it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if in a few years the G4s were considered too old to run the latest versions of MacOS.
That's not true in my experience. Each elease has made the system faster. hat's what's amde the updates to eagerly awaited - getitng usable speed. 10.0.x was useless. Did nothing and did i slowly. 10.1 was usable, but not ready to full time replace 9.x. 10.1.5 was where it became woth using full time and 10.2.x flies. It feels just as fast on an iMac 400 as 9.x, is more stable and looks better. It even performs satisfactorily on my iBook.
Perhaps Quartz Extreme is confusing you - it is a benefit for machines with a good video card, but that doesn't mean that it causes older machines to slow down. It isn't a zero sum equation. The existence of Quartz Extreme has not impacted my iBook in the slightest. So far, the OS has bene getting faster and the software is being written better. If anything, I expect speedups over the next year as people get used to coding for X.
Well I've already started the maths and understand it fine thanks, thanks and as I said, it's way too tedious. Wouldn't want either of us to go through it. I misunderstood what you were doing earlier - probably wasn't reading your psots closely enough. You're giving an upper limit to what the psoitions could be, whereas I've been trying to do it exactly, thinking you were doing something different. I think we're actually ina greement about what needs to be done, but I just misread you earlier, leading to the confusion.
Incidentally, I was taking into account that kingside rook on H1 and queenside on A1 is the same as queenside rook on H1 and kingside on A1. That's what the division factorials were for and why I was talking about 32 pieces - if you have 8 pawns on the board, then you simpy divide the total possible ways of placing them all on the board, assuming they're different pieces (64!/56!) by the number of ways you can arrange the pawns by simply swapping them (8!) so if we're just considering the pawns, that would be 64!/(56!*8!) or 4*10^9. Your method of estimating (2 piece types - pawn or blank square, 64 squares avilable) would give 2*10^19 - a wild overestimate. But that just reinforces your claim that go is a fair bit harder to force than chess.
There's a difference between Mac OS X running nix stuff and Windows running it. OS X is a version of Unix in its own right. Apple is encouraging the open source community, writing software for them (Safari rendering engine, Darwin) and giving people a much wider range of software to work with. Write a program in Cocoa and it can be moved a lot quicker to another platform than most programs.
As for bugfixes requiring hardware, that doesn't really happen. Your 9-X analogy is flawed as 9 was a continuation of 7 and 8 i.e. a series of OSes that spanned a lot of years. It will be a good many years before an operating system requires radically different hardware to run. And as long as current programs run on older OSes, everything is fine. We don't have a 9-X situation every couple of years; ee have it once a decade which is not unreasonablle.
Re:Better place sto donate
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Excuse me, but how was I accosting anyone? There are two groups in need in here - the unemployed programmers and the school children. I personally think that if you're giving away an old computer, it would be better off going to a school. You disagree. Fine. Maybe you're right, maybe not, but why do you see me having a different opinion to you as a threat?
I never advocated coming along and taking your PC away from you or forcing you to give money to some people and not to others. You're free to do with it as you will. People have the right to spend money on developing open source software. I never said otherwise.
Neither did I say you had to give away every dollar/pound/euro/whatever you own. If you read the article, you will see that this is about old PCs you have and are no longer using. My post was in the context of someone who is already giving something way. I was not debating how much to give, but rather where was in most need. Surely that's an important question to ask when donating to people? And keeping a single computer for my own personal use is not hypocrisy.
I guess a programmer is going to see it from the point of view of the Geek and a student will see it from the point of view of the schools:^)
I'm not sure how giving computers to out-of work programmers is going to help schools maintain computers which they don't already have. Sure, if every school had computers, then getting resource-light programs to run on them would be worthwhile, but if some schools don't have computers, surely we're better off giving the school one, rather than giving it to someone to write programs for the computer they don't have?
And how many KDE programmers are there working on educational software for schools? I'm sure there are quite a few working on stuff useful at university level, but what about below that? A fully MS compatible version of KOffice would be nice for students/business, but not a 10 year old kid.
I'm going to look really stupid if all Dorling Kindersley software turns out to be written by people running KDE.
Actually, I accounted for the multiple piece thing in my first section with the factorials. 32 is no worse than 13 because your formula is compeltely messed up anyway. Though quicker to work out than mine
Basically, 13 is competely wrong because you don't allow for the fact that there are 2 sides and multiple copies of all the pieces. This is way you have to start multiplying and dividing factorials. combinational and permutational stats.
If you realy wanted to look at how any ways you could set 32 pieces on the board, look at my first result - 32!/2*8!*3*2!. Actually, come to think of it, thet probably isn't even right.
32!/(8!*3*2!)^2 is what it should be. Assuming that the pawns haven't been queened. Allowing for that gives you several orders of magnitude more - each pawn can have 5 states so that's... erm... I'm not sure how many combinations. Gets tricky because some look the same as each other. Suffice to say, it would be on the order of thousands of cominations to be factored in.
Better place sto donate
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
It's a nice idea, but aren't there better places to donate, like poorly funded school? The Geeks in question already have some skills and computers available, so how abotu we try and do the same for those who have neither?
Safari may not be opensource, but the rendering engine, i.e. the bit they used from Konqueror, is. People are quite free to take it and use it in their own browsers. A few months and we'll see it as a framework in OS X, so people won't need to bother with the source code.
Apple are doing exactly what they're suppossed to with open source and coming out and saying to the world that it is A Good Thing.
Mmmm.... how so? MacOS apps will only work on MacOS. It's not like you can just install Aqua and a Quartz server on Linux and display these apps, like you can with X11/GTK is it?
But Apple do provide X11 for you to run and you can compile a lot of Unix stuff for the Mac, so in that sense it is cross-platform.
Possibly, but it'd have to be a pretty dumb sysadmin to blow their IT budget year on year replacing PCs with Macs, only to find that model has been obsoleted by Apple a few years down the line. Plus of course repurchasing all their software as well. And IT budgets aren't getting bigger quicker like they used to.
Just because Apple builds a better computer a few months later doesn't mean the one you bought won't still do the job you bought it for. There's no law I'm awar eof requiring you to upgrade computers continuously. It's been noted quite a few times that the TCO for Macs is significantly lower than for Windows machines, in part due to not having to replace/repair/upgrade them as often.
I for example am using an iBook 500 which the better part of 2 years old now. Newer iBooks for lower prices run rings around it. It still does everything I need it to perfectly well. It runs Jaguar, gets me on the Internet, runs Maple and Appleworks/Office, plays the occassional game, manages my photos and mp3s and allows me to dabble in movie-creation. In short, it is far from being functioanlly obsolete.
I've never played Go, so I'm not sure about it's rules, but for Chess you have 32 pieces on the board, each of which can be assigned to a square. We start with 64 available, then 63, then 62, then 62 and so. Basicially you get that for 32 pieces on the board, 64!/(32!*2*8!*2*3*2!) = 5*10^47, allowing for the fact that several pieces are identical. But there could be 31 peices on the board. And there are 2*15!/(8!*3*2!) possible combinations of that, or roughly 10^7. Even at this very early stage, it becomes quite edious to work out the possible combinations of setting up 31 pieces on the board. I certainly wouldn't want to go all the way to working out the ways of setting up 3 pieces. And none of this takes into account rules about where pieces could be or possible places they could reach during gameplay. Or conversion of pawns to other peices. That gets messy.
In short, it's nowhere near as simple as the formula you were proposing and I'd be willing to bet it wouldn't be 102 orders of magnitude off either. Yes, Go would be insanely difficult to brute force, but Chess isn't particularly easy either.
To do this properly you'd actually have to look at all the possible starting moves, multiply by possible replies, then replies to that etc. to get the correct numbers and I couldn't do those calculations sitting here.
Incidentally, using your methodology and substituting in32 instead of 13, we would get 32^64 ~ (3^3)^64 = 3^192. This compares with 3^(19^2) = 3^381. That's a factor of 3^189 ~ 10^63 difference, i.e. 63 orders of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
I have MacOS 9 installed on my iPod and use it as an emergency repair drive.
Someone mentioned concerns about not being able to copy stuff off it - the music is stored in an invisible folder that would be trivial to access for anyone on Slashdot and in all other respects, it functions as a hard drive.
Firewire isn't just great for the frist big upload batch either. Being able to stick a new album on in a matter of seconds, rather than waiting several minutes with USB is handy if you're in a hurry, or if you're using the iPod for file transfer. By itself, it wouldn't be worth the extra cost, but it's something you greatly come to appreciate. The idea of booting a computer off a USB device isn't too appealing either. Well, apart from USB 2.
Aside from that, I think the only other things that haven't been mentioned by other people already are that it doubles up as a hnady mirror, with that slick metal back or a torch, with that incredible backlight. I'm a relatively impoverished student, but still saw a great deal of value in one as oppossed to an Archos.
Actually a cursory glance at his post shows that he did mention uControl and stated it was available for MacOS X. His problem, however, seems to be that there is no solution for some of the other Unix varieties which he uses.
You have to agree to receive publicity material from Apple, IIRC. You're getting spam, but at least it's shiny happy Apple spam in a choice of 5 fruity flavours.
Not strange in the slightest. It's weaning them off MS, making them more inclined to use any other Office type tools Apple wheels out, or the next version of Keynote a bit further down the line. And if teachers start using it, they might start teaching it to students, so the scool might buy copies or the students will think "Gee, this is cool, I wonder what the rest of Apple's stuff is like."
Besides, they're not 'making' teachers pay. They're offering them a heavily discounted product. That's giving them options, not forcing something on them. If I could get Keynote that cheap I would.
Perhaps you should be paying attention to which year it is. The stock was sold ages ago for a nice profit and Apple are doing quite well.
Natural? Do you use your walkman to take photos with? No. That would add unnecessary expense and detract from the iPod's selling points:
* small size
* good battery life
* elegantly simple functionality
I wouldn't want to carry a camcorder around just so I can listen to MP3s. By all means, built a HDD into a camcorder, but don't change the iPod. That's the kind o feature creep that makes Ms Office icky and Mozilla slow (compared with Phoenix/Chimera).
The iPod is small, but the drives are expensive and not intended for continuous use. They also get quite warm if they are used continually. Which is great in winter, but probably not too good for them. Or batery life. Take an iPod and keep skipping through tracks so it can't use the cache and see how long the battery lasts. It won't be very long.
Steve Jobs stood on stage at the latest MacWorld and said that open source was a good thing.As has bene pointed out, open sourcing everything they do would be bad for business. They seem quite happy to work with OSS on the heart of a program as long as they can put a nice skin over the top, which allows them to make money to develop new apps which take open source, improve on it, release it back, and so on. Apple making money off of open source is a great thing because it means that they'll keep coming back, improving on code and releasing it to the OSS community to use.
The Adopt a KDE Geek program exists because developers of open source don't have a lot of resources. Apple does. They're doing way more than their fair share of RnD in the computing industry and everyone can benefit from that if it is turned towards developing even a small part of open source code.
Students are not to my knowledge forced to buy/pirate those. There are plenty of programs compatible to the level required of school work that are free or cheap. Unless you're having to run Access
There's still the problem of schools getting the hardware in the first place. Free software is all well and good, but if you have nothing to run it on, then it's not much use. That said, it's good to hear that education software is being developed. As long as you take share away from Microsoft and not Apple :^)
Given that quite a lot of developers seem to be after newer faster machines, so complies are quicker, what happens to their old computers if they get a new one? If their old ones were passed on to schools then I see both groups benefitting. Doing and mentionning that could encourage more people to donate to you. I'd certainly approve of the scheme in that case. Keep everybody happy.
Which is one of the big selling points of open source. You don't have to build code from scratch - you can take somebody else's, modify it, distribute it and let everyone share in the fun. That's what a heck of a lot of open source developers do. f everyone had to write code from scratch in order for it to be defined as open, what would be the point?
Apple took KHTML, fixed a lot of bugs, built Safari and released the rendering code with enhancements back. I fail to see how this sin't open source development on their part.
I guess I should have ben more specific and said the Java parts. Sorry.That's not true in my experience. Each elease has made the system faster. hat's what's amde the updates to eagerly awaited - getitng usable speed. 10.0.x was useless. Did nothing and did i slowly. 10.1 was usable, but not ready to full time replace 9.x. 10.1.5 was where it became woth using full time and 10.2.x flies. It feels just as fast on an iMac 400 as 9.x, is more stable and looks better. It even performs satisfactorily on my iBook.
Perhaps Quartz Extreme is confusing you - it is a benefit for machines with a good video card, but that doesn't mean that it causes older machines to slow down. It isn't a zero sum equation. The existence of Quartz Extreme has not impacted my iBook in the slightest. So far, the OS has bene getting faster and the software is being written better. If anything, I expect speedups over the next year as people get used to coding for X.
Well I've already started the maths and understand it fine thanks, thanks and as I said, it's way too tedious. Wouldn't want either of us to go through it. I misunderstood what you were doing earlier - probably wasn't reading your psots closely enough. You're giving an upper limit to what the psoitions could be, whereas I've been trying to do it exactly, thinking you were doing something different. I think we're actually ina greement about what needs to be done, but I just misread you earlier, leading to the confusion.
Incidentally, I was taking into account that kingside rook on H1 and queenside on A1 is the same as queenside rook on H1 and kingside on A1. That's what the division factorials were for and why I was talking about 32 pieces - if you have 8 pawns on the board, then you simpy divide the total possible ways of placing them all on the board, assuming they're different pieces (64!/56!) by the number of ways you can arrange the pawns by simply swapping them (8!) so if we're just considering the pawns, that would be 64!/(56!*8!) or 4*10^9. Your method of estimating (2 piece types - pawn or blank square, 64 squares avilable) would give 2*10^19 - a wild overestimate. But that just reinforces your claim that go is a fair bit harder to force than chess.
There's a difference between Mac OS X running nix stuff and Windows running it. OS X is a version of Unix in its own right. Apple is encouraging the open source community, writing software for them (Safari rendering engine, Darwin) and giving people a much wider range of software to work with. Write a program in Cocoa and it can be moved a lot quicker to another platform than most programs.
As for bugfixes requiring hardware, that doesn't really happen. Your 9-X analogy is flawed as 9 was a continuation of 7 and 8 i.e. a series of OSes that spanned a lot of years. It will be a good many years before an operating system requires radically different hardware to run. And as long as current programs run on older OSes, everything is fine. We don't have a 9-X situation every couple of years; ee have it once a decade which is not unreasonablle.
Excuse me, but how was I accosting anyone? There are two groups in need in here - the unemployed programmers and the school children. I personally think that if you're giving away an old computer, it would be better off going to a school. You disagree. Fine. Maybe you're right, maybe not, but why do you see me having a different opinion to you as a threat?
I never advocated coming along and taking your PC away from you or forcing you to give money to some people and not to others. You're free to do with it as you will. People have the right to spend money on developing open source software. I never said otherwise.
Neither did I say you had to give away every dollar/pound/euro/whatever you own. If you read the article, you will see that this is about old PCs you have and are no longer using. My post was in the context of someone who is already giving something way. I was not debating how much to give, but rather where was in most need. Surely that's an important question to ask when donating to people? And keeping a single computer for my own personal use is not hypocrisy.
I guess a programmer is going to see it from the point of view of the Geek and a student will see it from the point of view of the schools :^)
I'm not sure how giving computers to out-of work programmers is going to help schools maintain computers which they don't already have. Sure, if every school had computers, then getting resource-light programs to run on them would be worthwhile, but if some schools don't have computers, surely we're better off giving the school one, rather than giving it to someone to write programs for the computer they don't have?
And how many KDE programmers are there working on educational software for schools? I'm sure there are quite a few working on stuff useful at university level, but what about below that? A fully MS compatible version of KOffice would be nice for students/business, but not a 10 year old kid.
I'm going to look really stupid if all Dorling Kindersley software turns out to be written by people running KDE.
Actually, I accounted for the multiple piece thing in my first section with the factorials. 32 is no worse than 13 because your formula is compeltely messed up anyway. Though quicker to work out than mine
Basically, 13 is competely wrong because you don't allow for the fact that there are 2 sides and multiple copies of all the pieces. This is way you have to start multiplying and dividing factorials. combinational and permutational stats.
If you realy wanted to look at how any ways you could set 32 pieces on the board, look at my first result - 32!/2*8!*3*2!. Actually, come to think of it, thet probably isn't even right.
32!/(8!*3*2!)^2 is what it should be. Assuming that the pawns haven't been queened. Allowing for that gives you several orders of magnitude more - each pawn can have 5 states so that's... erm... I'm not sure how many combinations. Gets tricky because some look the same as each other. Suffice to say, it would be on the order of thousands of cominations to be factored in.
It's a nice idea, but aren't there better places to donate, like poorly funded school? The Geeks in question already have some skills and computers available, so how abotu we try and do the same for those who have neither?
Safari may not be opensource, but the rendering engine, i.e. the bit they used from Konqueror, is. People are quite free to take it and use it in their own browsers. A few months and we'll see it as a framework in OS X, so people won't need to bother with the source code.
Apple are doing exactly what they're suppossed to with open source and coming out and saying to the world that it is A Good Thing.
But Apple do provide X11 for you to run and you can compile a lot of Unix stuff for the Mac, so in that sense it is cross-platform.
Just because Apple builds a better computer a few months later doesn't mean the one you bought won't still do the job you bought it for. There's no law I'm awar eof requiring you to upgrade computers continuously. It's been noted quite a few times that the TCO for Macs is significantly lower than for Windows machines, in part due to not having to replace/repair/upgrade them as often.
I for example am using an iBook 500 which the better part of 2 years old now. Newer iBooks for lower prices run rings around it. It still does everything I need it to perfectly well. It runs Jaguar, gets me on the Internet, runs Maple and Appleworks/Office, plays the occassional game, manages my photos and mp3s and allows me to dabble in movie-creation. In short, it is far from being functioanlly obsolete.
The problem is Apple has to pay a royalty on copies of iDVD, IIRC and are onl licensed themselves to use it with their DVD writers.
I've never played Go, so I'm not sure about it's rules, but for Chess you have 32 pieces on the board, each of which can be assigned to a square. We start with 64 available, then 63, then 62, then 62 and so. Basicially you get that for 32 pieces on the board, 64!/(32!*2*8!*2*3*2!) = 5*10^47, allowing for the fact that several pieces are identical. But there could be 31 peices on the board. And there are 2*15!/(8!*3*2!) possible combinations of that, or roughly 10^7. Even at this very early stage, it becomes quite edious to work out the possible combinations of setting up 31 pieces on the board. I certainly wouldn't want to go all the way to working out the ways of setting up 3 pieces. And none of this takes into account rules about where pieces could be or possible places they could reach during gameplay. Or conversion of pawns to other peices. That gets messy.
In short, it's nowhere near as simple as the formula you were proposing and I'd be willing to bet it wouldn't be 102 orders of magnitude off either. Yes, Go would be insanely difficult to brute force, but Chess isn't particularly easy either.
To do this properly you'd actually have to look at all the possible starting moves, multiply by possible replies, then replies to that etc. to get the correct numbers and I couldn't do those calculations sitting here.
Incidentally, using your methodology and substituting in32 instead of 13, we would get 32^64 ~ (3^3)^64 = 3^192. This compares with 3^(19^2) = 3^381. That's a factor of 3^189 ~ 10^63 difference, i.e. 63 orders of magnitude.
You can set the date format in your personal preferences to include the year, switch order etc.