No, its about building technology to land on the moon safely and for as little cost as possible.
The contest was never about giving away a million dollars to anyone but the most petty of people. I'm really far too lazy to look, but its a safe bet everyone involved spent more than the million dollar prize just getting something they could consider testing.
You're too focused on yourself and your greed to focus on the bigger picture.
It is entirely about the universe, and forwarding our ability to explore it. Get some perspective. This is bigger than the companies involved in the contest.
What about when you do it on your laptop to share your 3G connection in the car like Verizon's mifi box?
Thats what I do with my Mac/iPhone. Its more than a little useful in some circumstances and only viewing it as something you would use in your own home is silly.
Sharing a the wifi you use over your existing wifi connection would be silly in almost ever case except maybe for instance hotels that charge $10/day per PC.
However it makes a lot of sense for people who don't have a WAP, but have a laptop and some alternate connection that can't be shared such as sharing a cell connection.
Its not real useful to most, but its nice to have something like this in a car with 3 or 4 people and only one machine that can connect.
Of course leaving out the fact that it requires a wifi adapter capable of acting as a WAP, which most cards don't support, means its in most cases, not useful and you get the same thing as ICS.
True, its not ICS, it is better, but in a rather limited set of circumstances for all those people who have cheapy wifi adapters.
Probably not as big a deal for slashdot users, but for the general public its another story.
The real point to the contest was to get the best possible design. Not sure that the extra day really helped that so much, but he did do better, which is more important than who won as far as I'm concerned.
Occasionally, but most of the time the link is to a blog, writing about another blog, who linked to a new article on some aggregator site like Engadget, that may link to the NASA article, but probably links to someone elses blog about the original article.
Rarely are the links to the actual content, without a bunch of opinions and misinterpretations thrown in for good measure.
Most of what they've listed is as the reasons its faster on X are entirely possible in Windows. Specifically, things like letting the GUI handling backing stores have been there since at least Win95, I don't know about before that, but I doubt Win 3.x or earlier had them. Sadly, it is not the default. Of course, X doesn't do it by default either.
At a low level, I found coding for X enjoyable, but requires more work for trivial tasks. But for writing any sort of complex app, just the dependency tree alone gets to be a headache compared to how lazy you can be in OSX and Windows and still get good performance and feature balance.
They are different environments, if you focus or code towards the style of one, the others are going to suffer. Its just as easy to code towards the Windows way of doing things and end up with some REALLY shitty X performance.
Windows does not have a bevy of toolkits to choose from out of the box.
Windows has, the Win32 API, GDI and the common controls. They come with EVERY install of Windows, it is a requirement. Pretty much everything else sits on top and is optional. You can draw buttons, checkboxes, ect, that work across all apps the same with nothing else. You can add a layer of abstraction with MFC and ATL if you want, but most developers who have been doing it for long enough will avoid those as they are more trouble then they are worth.
OS X has Cocoa, Quartz and some other APIs, same thing, included out of the box, required, and consistent.
Linux or more accurately, X11, doesn't. You need GTK, or QT or SOMETHING if you want a widget set rather than coding your own buttons and UI interfaces using the raw X11 API and a bunch of pixmaps. You HAVE to use GTK unless you want to design your own controls, and have no consistency with other applications. X11 does not include any common set of controls. And like it or not, GTK is crap. Qt is definitely a step up, but they hung themselves with their retarded licensing moves over the years, and GTK took over, sadly.
OS X has a standard audio interface.
Windows has a standard audio interface.
Linux does not, hence all the bitching and complaining done by more than just the Chromium people about audio in Linux. My recent looking into MythTV shows this.
No one wants their windows app to look like Qt. Mac users most certainly don't want Qt.
If it takes a bunch of work to 'retrofit' GTK 3 into apps, then once again, you have another reason why Linux app development is not worth the effort and something to bitch about. I have some non-trivial Windows apps that were built for Win95 that still run in Windows7. Outside of hello world, that is not true with GTK, hell, a Hello World app written for GTK won't even run any more on Linux since there have been several changes to things like vtables in the compiler.
I have the distinct impression that neither you, nor the people who modded you insightful have dealt with developing for a consistent OS before. You have, inadvertently I'm sure, just pointed out why most commercial software developers don't target Linux. Too many choices can be a bad thing. The changes to get most Windows or OSX apps to work on the next release are trivial, and you've usually known about them for the last 2 major revisions at least.
If they wanted the easy way out, they would have used wxWidgets, which at least feels native (by using the native toolkits) across Windows and Mac, and GTK on other Unixes. They did not. It probably wouldn't provide them with a low enough interface to do what they wanted to do, and now we're back to bitching about the lack of a standard toolkit on Linux. The two linux machines I have do not even have GTK installed. This of course is not Linux specific. My FreeBSD boxes are the same way. A few have GTK because they have some GTK apps installed. Some have Qt. Some have both, one has neither, no X at all, but thats a different story entirely and not really the point.
Files you can't limit in size, can't compress, can't optimise. Instead all you can do is to delete them and loose all your precious history information.
If you want a bunch of features to tweak, you shouldn't be using Chrome. Its not intended to be full of a bunch of crappy features that 3 people use and 1200 extensions to make it run like crap. Its meant to be lean and mean.
Chrome supports cleaning up the history with a few options, you can delete the last day, last week, last month, or entire thing. If you want more options, you're using the wrong browser. More features bring more bloat, which is why Firefox has become such a pig. Please don't try to make Chrome another Firefox, then we'll just have to start ANOTHER browser to get back to where it runs fast.
Use Firefox if you want feature rich and bloated. Use Chrome if you don't want a toolbox, an Application development environment, the kitchen sink, and more code than needed to power some small countries.
Explorer is a cross between your shell and your window manager, its like the Gnome or KDE window managers except most of the window manager functions are the responsibility of process itself in Windows, although they are provided by the standard libraries, which us things like the uxtheme.dll and company to provide a consistent interface until the app goes well out of its way to do otherwise. You can use cmd.exe in place of explorer and apps won't notice the difference unless they interact with explorer, such as things that put items in the notification area (systray to most). Apps do not talk to explorer to display windows any more than apps on Linux talk to Gnome or KDE, or Finder on OS X. None of them have to be installed or work in order for Windows to be displayed. You can kill all explorer.exe processes in windows and you just won't have a start menu or clickable desktop until it restarts. You can not kill the X11 client and do the same, all processes using it will be disconnected and exit or crash.
Quartz is a toolkit/API used within the 'window_server', like DirectX to some extent on Windows. It is not the generic low level API like GDI is on Windows.
'window_server' would be almost the direct equivalent of X11 on OS X in native applications, if you exclude X11 for OS X, which acts as a translator basically between X11 servers (applications) and your X11 client (the gui you see) and passes that along to the window_server process to display.
In reality, all three of these systems use a different mix of the way these components interact and at which layer things are done due to their different designs. There isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between any of the components.
I do not recall which process on Windows handles the GUI, but it is more or less untouchable, unlike in OS X and traditional UNIX where you can easily kill the gui portion, doing so in Windows traditionally would result in a blue screen, this is no longer strictly true in the Windows 6.x versions (Win2k8/Vista/Win7), but I don't recall what process owns that part of the system off the top of my head.
Really, show me a Mac with an Atom processor. I won't hold my breath.
Show me a Mac with an AMD processor.
The use a rather limited set of hardware and make good drivers for it. They don't waste time trying to create drivers for every crappy screwy combination of PCs out there.
Mac hardware IS higher quality, use one for a year, you'll see.
No one buys a Mac because its exclusive. Its not, they don't produce too few for market demand any more than Nintendo does.
The idea that people buy Apple software because its 'rare' is just silly, if that were the reason their market existed, then people wouldn't be trying to run OSX on generic hardware.
People LIKE OS X when they use it on a Mac. Having ran OS X on a PC, I stopped, why? Its not worth the effort. I have a job, I make money, I can just buy a Mac and have things work if I want to. Windows supports my Dell, OS X does not, its fine if you want to hack it up because you enjoy doing that, thats not what you're claiming.
Unfortunately, as I've said, what you are claiming is false. You can walk into BestBuy and buy pretty much any Mac you want, no scarcity. You can buy from multiple stores and multiple websites, including Apples own.
There may be some Apple arrogance with the 'haha you run Windows', that is true, but of course pretty much anyone you are referencing falls into that category. They aren't running it because they've got a trendy mac, they're running it because they prefer it over Windows.
They most certainly DO have the right. You have no right to tell them what they can and can't do with their own stuff.
You have the right to NOT BUY IT. They have the right to refuse you service. You can't legally buy OS X for something other than a Mac. It doesn't have to get to the EULA, its clearly stated on the outside of the box. It doesn't matter how ignorant you are. They don't even do the typical thing which is to put an EULA in the software that you can't read until you've opened the box and started the install process.
You don't get to tell them how to sell their product. They don't get to force you to buy it. You don't like their terms, tough shit. Stop your whining and pony up for a Mac or shut the fuck up. Run something you agree with.
Someone buying a copy of OS X for their PC is not an Apple customer as far as Apple is concerned, just like if you go to the grocery store and buy a gallon of milk, and steal a loaf of bread, they still have their rights. Buying one thing doesn't let you steal something else, regardless of what you think in your twisted little mind.
hey try to with EULAs, but it wouldn't hold up in court if they tried to sue over it.
Really? Then why is there a court case involving that very thing? Software licenses DO hold up on court, GPL has proven that. Get over it.
If Apples' license isn't valid, neither is GPL, and I can take any GPL app and distribute binaries with proprietary code without any source.
You don't get to pick and choose when copyright is valid. Its either valid for everyone or it isn't. You don't get special rules.
Don't like Apple, DON'T USE THEIR SOFTWARE. Its that freaking simple. People like you are so freaking disconnected from logic and reality its not funny. Stop whining like a little bitch and face reality, if you want them to share with you, you have to respect their rules. Running OS X is not a right.
Don't like it? Change the law, until then, shut the fuck up, we're tired of the broken record.
Apple isn't going to sell you a freaking license for your generic PC.
Stop saying 'When is it going to happen?!@#!$' or 'They should sell it for generic PCs'.
They don't want your business. They want people who are willing to pay, not people who want to shoe horn OSX on to some POS craptop. They don't want to even joke about supporting random generic hardware. And unlike the typical combination of (insert random PC maker) and Microsoft, you actually CAN get support from Apple rather than 'its not our problem, its someone elses'.
Its fine that you don't want to buy a Mac but thats your choice, either buy one and run OS X or don't buy one and stop complaining. A MacBook Air isn't a whole lot different then a large netbook, and it weighs less then some I've seen sold as netbooks.
You have options, you just aren't willing to invest in one. Thats fine, but please stop with the 'OMG GIMME OSX ON GENERIC HARDWARE'.
No this isn't flamebait, regardless of how you feel, I speak for many people who are just tired of the same old chorus line from people unwilling to pay for something they want, but expect to get it anyway.
I'm wondering how long its going to take for them to do something with ZFS that actually makes me slow down my overwhelming ZFS fanboyism.
I just love these guys.
My virtual machine NFS server is going to have to get this as soon as FBSD imports it, and I'll no longer have to worry about having backup software (like BackupPC, good stuff btw) that does this.
I don't use high end SANs but it would seem to me that they are rapidly losing any particular advantage to a Solaris or FBSD file server.
Why did you write your first 'first post' to say that you wrote 'two' first posts? You must have, or they wouldn't be duplicate blocks, and wouldn't have been deduplicated.
The important part is that WOFF restricts where the font can be linked to. While e.g. a truetype font can be referenced from anywhere with CSS, a WOFF font has to be stored on the same site as the web page/css.
Thats trivial to fix, add an option to not allow fonts that aren't on the site itself. I'm not sure why the browser can selectively do it for these fonts but not for CSS fonts. Any technical reason you come up with is going to be obviously bunk.
You argue that this is important for font foundries. Well, that in and of itself is the first problem, font foundries are ridiculous and have more retarded licensing than MS. Second, how long do you think its going to take for an extension to come out that works around it. You can't control this, the idea that the file format can is just silly when you're talking about implementing it in an OSS package.
You started off by saying its not really a new format, just an OT wrapper, and then you follow up with 'its a new format' so it doesn't take along the baggage. This is contridictor, either its based on opentype and brings the baggage or it isn't, pick one.
There is no copy protection in OSS software, if you have the code its trivial to change it and work around it. Are you saying that Mozilla is going to promote using a binary blob in their browser?
You haven't provided any reason that this font format is different than what we already have, and you're completely ignoring the SVG format which is actually a fully open standard, and is already supported if you properly support SVGs. Of course no one does at the moment, but thats another story. I find it hard to believe that a new format will be better supported when SVG support is in the state it is.
A new font technology is going to bring fonts with increased readability? WTF? I've yet to see anyone use a font better than the old reliables included in Windows and Mac OS. I've seen plenty of fonts that are about as far from readable as you can get and still read them because they were made by some random person with no clue about whats important in typography. How is a new format going to change any existing problem? Its not.
How the hell did you get modded informative while talking in circles, contridicting yourself multiple times along the way?
Seriously mozilla, I'm rapidly losing faith in you.
We already have SVG fonts. Why exactly do we need ANOTHER one?
Fix the abomination your browser has turned into and focus on the reason you exist. Its got to the point where IE is going to be less bloated than Firefox.
You've got PLENTY of bugs to fix already, and you can't even agree with anyone on existing compatibility issues.
We don't want more features, we want Firefox to stop running like Navigator did in the late 90s.
Are you trying to become another Novell? Once a respectable company with a good product, but now a has been with nothing of real value to offer? Stop fragmenting the web, we don't need another freaking font format.
FOCUS.
again
FOCUS
Before you become obsolete, of course, with Chrome, it may well be too late.
You can signup on their website to get the specs. You can't release the information to others, but then, GPL doesn't allow them to distribute GPL'd code the way they'd like to.
OSS can certain use the acceleration, it just requires binary distribution to fit their agenda. Just like GPL requires source distribution also to support its agenda.
They are two different sides of the same thing, restrictions on freedom.
All processors that I'm aware of do that, even those that run from flash.
The ATmega processors for instance include flash on them to store you code, they 'run' from this flash.
But not really, what they do is fetch an instruction or series of instructions from flash and copy it to the internal buffers in the CPU, where it then gets executed.
Just because the technical details are hidden from your view, doesn't mean its not happening. Processors don't run things directly, they run copies, regardless of where it comes from initially, IDE, MMC, NOR, or punch card, it all gets copied to temporary storage before execution.
I've been waiting for an excuse to ask slashdot this question.
What is a good resource for finding cheap, small, not overly feature rich hobbiest boards like this one?
I've done some work with ATmega microcontrollers. Went so far as to create my on little multitasking OS from the ground up based on some knowledge I gained from FreeRTOS. I enjoyed the process and it taught me a great deal about the difficulties associated with task switching. I quit when I realized that I REALLY wanted an MMU, or at least some memory protection.
I've written an MMC controller, a serial console for it, made my own little FS, none of it impressive to anyone with more than a slight clue about this stuff, but it reminds me of reading the notes from Linus about how Linux started out, and for me its a fun time and nice distraction from my day job of writing applications on top of a real OS.
I would prefer an x86 based board, anything 386 or better would be awesome, but it doesn't have to be. In fact since I've yet to see a good 386 simulator/debugger, or at least nothing that to me compares to the stuff that Atmel provides, I'm more than open to any other processor, I'm not tied to anything as I'm simply not that good to make a big difference.
What I would like to find: A complete board that I can plugin in and debug, relatively cheap would be great. Debugging ability and supporting software is most important, I use a MacBook so OS X support is ideal, but I've got VMs with Windows and FreeBSD, and installing Linux is more than acceptable for the purpose if need be. I really apprecate the simulator and debuggers the AVRStudio for Windows has, a copy of it for something more powerful would be ideal. The AVR32 is probably the closest I'll get to that, but it doesn't seem that I can really use AVR32s on my on hardware real easy. I can get a get a dev board for it, but throwing the chips onto something custom requires more effort than I would prefer to put into it. Processor doesn't really matter, x86 would be nice since its probably got the largest base of reference code, but pretty much anything capable of running Linux is fine since I can use that as a reference. Linux is not a requirement as I won't be running it, it just makes a good reference to have handy when the docs for the hardware aren't all that clear or I don't really understand a particular concept. Onboard IO is pretty much a must. Doesn't need VGA or anything, serial is plenty good enough for what I'll use it for, but some sort of digital output is a requirement so I can control stuff. I don't need a DAC as I can simulate one good enough to do audio as long as I have a digital pin of some sort to work with. An ADC would be nice. SPI would be really nice as I'm used to working with it and it makes MMC interfacing much easier. 64k would be more than enough ram, but more is certainly acceptable. I've been shoving 4 processes in to 2k of RAM, and if I have a MMU that supports virtual addressing I care even less, as thats really what I'd like to learn next. Speed isn't an issue, a 12mhz ATmega was plenty of my toying around so far, I'm not designing an end user OS, just playing. Onboard clock would be ideal, as I never have properly got an AVR to run on an external clock so thats obviously a concept I don't grasp properly and I'm lazy so figuring it out slows me down.
So fellow geeks, where do I look to find this sort of thing, or what do you guys have experience with that you would recommend me looking into? Something just slightly more powerful than the your typical 8bit Atmel or PIC microcontroller would be the target.
Hell, I don't even have to have a board, I just don't want to get a CPU that requires a bunch of external support circuitry, something microcontrollerish that I can just hookup some power to and start interfacing. I dont mind adding some minor stuff but I don't want to have to spend 3 days working up a board design, then debug the hardware just to get to where I can run some code, otherwise I'd throw an x86 processor on a board myself.
Once we started down this slippery slope, there's no way to go back up.
Tell that to our founders and the souls lost in the revolutionary and civil wars.
Its a hard slope to climb, and it is very costly, but its not impossible. They need us (the people) more than we need them. There is no them without us, and there will always be an us, with or without them.
The real problem is, regardless of the bitching, and moaning, and whining, its really not bad enough to warrent such actions at this point. The general population is rather content with the current state of things. Even with all of the 'OMG BAD ECONOMY' and 'OMG WARRENTLESS WIRETAPS' and other silly things like 'OMG DMCA/COPYRIGHT/RIAA/MPAA', its still really not that bad. At least, not bad enough to make enough people get off their asses and do something about.
Ethiopia is bad. Somalia is bad, Sri Lanka is bad. Afghanistan is bad. Iraq is bad. We're sitting pretty really. We may VERY QUICKLY end up as bad as one of those, but until Americans are actually suffering, we're not going to do shit about it. And by suffering I mean things like actually starving to death and other real issues. Not the 'I can't get a job doing what I want to do so I'm going to collect unemployement and ignore the help wanted signs at the retail stores and fast food chains' bad that we are currently calling a 'horrible situation'.
Slashdot Mirror
No, its about building technology to land on the moon safely and for as little cost as possible.
The contest was never about giving away a million dollars to anyone but the most petty of people. I'm really far too lazy to look, but its a safe bet everyone involved spent more than the million dollar prize just getting something they could consider testing.
You're too focused on yourself and your greed to focus on the bigger picture.
It is entirely about the universe, and forwarding our ability to explore it. Get some perspective. This is bigger than the companies involved in the contest.
Ope they have ECC ram to deal with cosmic rays :/
What about when you do it on your laptop to share your 3G connection in the car like Verizon's mifi box?
Thats what I do with my Mac/iPhone. Its more than a little useful in some circumstances and only viewing it as something you would use in your own home is silly.
Sharing a the wifi you use over your existing wifi connection would be silly in almost ever case except maybe for instance hotels that charge $10/day per PC.
However it makes a lot of sense for people who don't have a WAP, but have a laptop and some alternate connection that can't be shared such as sharing a cell connection.
Its not real useful to most, but its nice to have something like this in a car with 3 or 4 people and only one machine that can connect.
Of course leaving out the fact that it requires a wifi adapter capable of acting as a WAP, which most cards don't support, means its in most cases, not useful and you get the same thing as ICS.
True, its not ICS, it is better, but in a rather limited set of circumstances for all those people who have cheapy wifi adapters.
Probably not as big a deal for slashdot users, but for the general public its another story.
Whine whine, moan moan, bitch bitch.
The real point to the contest was to get the best possible design. Not sure that the extra day really helped that so much, but he did do better, which is more important than who won as far as I'm concerned.
Its not fair, but the universe doesn't have a concept of fair, just reality (or this dimensions version of reality away, thats open to debate)
Occasionally, but most of the time the link is to a blog, writing about another blog, who linked to a new article on some aggregator site like Engadget, that may link to the NASA article, but probably links to someone elses blog about the original article.
Rarely are the links to the actual content, without a bunch of opinions and misinterpretations thrown in for good measure.
You can do it in XP anyway, out of the box, turn on connection sharing.
Most of what they've listed is as the reasons its faster on X are entirely possible in Windows. Specifically, things like letting the GUI handling backing stores have been there since at least Win95, I don't know about before that, but I doubt Win 3.x or earlier had them. Sadly, it is not the default. Of course, X doesn't do it by default either.
At a low level, I found coding for X enjoyable, but requires more work for trivial tasks. But for writing any sort of complex app, just the dependency tree alone gets to be a headache compared to how lazy you can be in OSX and Windows and still get good performance and feature balance.
They are different environments, if you focus or code towards the style of one, the others are going to suffer. Its just as easy to code towards the Windows way of doing things and end up with some REALLY shitty X performance.
Windows does not have a bevy of toolkits to choose from out of the box.
Windows has, the Win32 API, GDI and the common controls. They come with EVERY install of Windows, it is a requirement. Pretty much everything else sits on top and is optional. You can draw buttons, checkboxes, ect, that work across all apps the same with nothing else. You can add a layer of abstraction with MFC and ATL if you want, but most developers who have been doing it for long enough will avoid those as they are more trouble then they are worth.
OS X has Cocoa, Quartz and some other APIs, same thing, included out of the box, required, and consistent.
Linux or more accurately, X11, doesn't. You need GTK, or QT or SOMETHING if you want a widget set rather than coding your own buttons and UI interfaces using the raw X11 API and a bunch of pixmaps. You HAVE to use GTK unless you want to design your own controls, and have no consistency with other applications. X11 does not include any common set of controls. And like it or not, GTK is crap. Qt is definitely a step up, but they hung themselves with their retarded licensing moves over the years, and GTK took over, sadly.
OS X has a standard audio interface.
Windows has a standard audio interface.
Linux does not, hence all the bitching and complaining done by more than just the Chromium people about audio in Linux. My recent looking into MythTV shows this.
No one wants their windows app to look like Qt. Mac users most certainly don't want Qt.
If it takes a bunch of work to 'retrofit' GTK 3 into apps, then once again, you have another reason why Linux app development is not worth the effort and something to bitch about. I have some non-trivial Windows apps that were built for Win95 that still run in Windows7. Outside of hello world, that is not true with GTK, hell, a Hello World app written for GTK won't even run any more on Linux since there have been several changes to things like vtables in the compiler.
I have the distinct impression that neither you, nor the people who modded you insightful have dealt with developing for a consistent OS before. You have, inadvertently I'm sure, just pointed out why most commercial software developers don't target Linux. Too many choices can be a bad thing. The changes to get most Windows or OSX apps to work on the next release are trivial, and you've usually known about them for the last 2 major revisions at least.
If they wanted the easy way out, they would have used wxWidgets, which at least feels native (by using the native toolkits) across Windows and Mac, and GTK on other Unixes. They did not. It probably wouldn't provide them with a low enough interface to do what they wanted to do, and now we're back to bitching about the lack of a standard toolkit on Linux. The two linux machines I have do not even have GTK installed. This of course is not Linux specific. My FreeBSD boxes are the same way. A few have GTK because they have some GTK apps installed. Some have Qt. Some have both, one has neither, no X at all, but thats a different story entirely and not really the point.
If you want a bunch of features to tweak, you shouldn't be using Chrome. Its not intended to be full of a bunch of crappy features that 3 people use and 1200 extensions to make it run like crap. Its meant to be lean and mean.
Chrome supports cleaning up the history with a few options, you can delete the last day, last week, last month, or entire thing. If you want more options, you're using the wrong browser. More features bring more bloat, which is why Firefox has become such a pig. Please don't try to make Chrome another Firefox, then we'll just have to start ANOTHER browser to get back to where it runs fast.
Use Firefox if you want feature rich and bloated. Use Chrome if you don't want a toolbox, an Application development environment, the kitchen sink, and more code than needed to power some small countries.
No.
Explorer is a cross between your shell and your window manager, its like the Gnome or KDE window managers except most of the window manager functions are the responsibility of process itself in Windows, although they are provided by the standard libraries, which us things like the uxtheme.dll and company to provide a consistent interface until the app goes well out of its way to do otherwise. You can use cmd.exe in place of explorer and apps won't notice the difference unless they interact with explorer, such as things that put items in the notification area (systray to most). Apps do not talk to explorer to display windows any more than apps on Linux talk to Gnome or KDE, or Finder on OS X. None of them have to be installed or work in order for Windows to be displayed. You can kill all explorer.exe processes in windows and you just won't have a start menu or clickable desktop until it restarts. You can not kill the X11 client and do the same, all processes using it will be disconnected and exit or crash.
Quartz is a toolkit/API used within the 'window_server', like DirectX to some extent on Windows. It is not the generic low level API like GDI is on Windows.
'window_server' would be almost the direct equivalent of X11 on OS X in native applications, if you exclude X11 for OS X, which acts as a translator basically between X11 servers (applications) and your X11 client (the gui you see) and passes that along to the window_server process to display.
In reality, all three of these systems use a different mix of the way these components interact and at which layer things are done due to their different designs. There isn't a 1 to 1 relationship between any of the components.
I do not recall which process on Windows handles the GUI, but it is more or less untouchable, unlike in OS X and traditional UNIX where you can easily kill the gui portion, doing so in Windows traditionally would result in a blue screen, this is no longer strictly true in the Windows 6.x versions (Win2k8/Vista/Win7), but I don't recall what process owns that part of the system off the top of my head.
Really, show me a Mac with an Atom processor. I won't hold my breath.
Show me a Mac with an AMD processor.
The use a rather limited set of hardware and make good drivers for it. They don't waste time trying to create drivers for every crappy screwy combination of PCs out there.
Mac hardware IS higher quality, use one for a year, you'll see.
No one buys a Mac because its exclusive. Its not, they don't produce too few for market demand any more than Nintendo does.
The idea that people buy Apple software because its 'rare' is just silly, if that were the reason their market existed, then people wouldn't be trying to run OSX on generic hardware.
People LIKE OS X when they use it on a Mac. Having ran OS X on a PC, I stopped, why? Its not worth the effort. I have a job, I make money, I can just buy a Mac and have things work if I want to. Windows supports my Dell, OS X does not, its fine if you want to hack it up because you enjoy doing that, thats not what you're claiming.
Unfortunately, as I've said, what you are claiming is false. You can walk into BestBuy and buy pretty much any Mac you want, no scarcity. You can buy from multiple stores and multiple websites, including Apples own.
There may be some Apple arrogance with the 'haha you run Windows', that is true, but of course pretty much anyone you are referencing falls into that category. They aren't running it because they've got a trendy mac, they're running it because they prefer it over Windows.
Get a dose of reality and a cluepon please.
They most certainly DO have the right. You have no right to tell them what they can and can't do with their own stuff.
You have the right to NOT BUY IT. They have the right to refuse you service. You can't legally buy OS X for something other than a Mac. It doesn't have to get to the EULA, its clearly stated on the outside of the box. It doesn't matter how ignorant you are. They don't even do the typical thing which is to put an EULA in the software that you can't read until you've opened the box and started the install process.
You don't get to tell them how to sell their product. They don't get to force you to buy it. You don't like their terms, tough shit. Stop your whining and pony up for a Mac or shut the fuck up. Run something you agree with.
Someone buying a copy of OS X for their PC is not an Apple customer as far as Apple is concerned, just like if you go to the grocery store and buy a gallon of milk, and steal a loaf of bread, they still have their rights. Buying one thing doesn't let you steal something else, regardless of what you think in your twisted little mind.
Really? Then why is there a court case involving that very thing? Software licenses DO hold up on court, GPL has proven that. Get over it.
If Apples' license isn't valid, neither is GPL, and I can take any GPL app and distribute binaries with proprietary code without any source.
You don't get to pick and choose when copyright is valid. Its either valid for everyone or it isn't. You don't get special rules.
Don't like Apple, DON'T USE THEIR SOFTWARE. Its that freaking simple. People like you are so freaking disconnected from logic and reality its not funny. Stop whining like a little bitch and face reality, if you want them to share with you, you have to respect their rules. Running OS X is not a right.
Don't like it? Change the law, until then, shut the fuck up, we're tired of the broken record.
Apple isn't going to sell you a freaking license for your generic PC.
Stop saying 'When is it going to happen?!@#!$' or 'They should sell it for generic PCs'.
They don't want your business. They want people who are willing to pay, not people who want to shoe horn OSX on to some POS craptop. They don't want to even joke about supporting random generic hardware. And unlike the typical combination of (insert random PC maker) and Microsoft, you actually CAN get support from Apple rather than 'its not our problem, its someone elses'.
Its fine that you don't want to buy a Mac but thats your choice, either buy one and run OS X or don't buy one and stop complaining. A MacBook Air isn't a whole lot different then a large netbook, and it weighs less then some I've seen sold as netbooks.
You have options, you just aren't willing to invest in one. Thats fine, but please stop with the 'OMG GIMME OSX ON GENERIC HARDWARE'.
No this isn't flamebait, regardless of how you feel, I speak for many people who are just tired of the same old chorus line from people unwilling to pay for something they want, but expect to get it anyway.
I'm wondering how long its going to take for them to do something with ZFS that actually makes me slow down my overwhelming ZFS fanboyism.
I just love these guys.
My virtual machine NFS server is going to have to get this as soon as FBSD imports it, and I'll no longer have to worry about having backup software (like BackupPC, good stuff btw) that does this.
I don't use high end SANs but it would seem to me that they are rapidly losing any particular advantage to a Solaris or FBSD file server.
Why did you write your first 'first post' to say that you wrote 'two' first posts? You must have, or they wouldn't be duplicate blocks, and wouldn't have been deduplicated.
How is that any different from what you can do with CSS downloaded fonts now?
Thats trivial to fix, add an option to not allow fonts that aren't on the site itself. I'm not sure why the browser can selectively do it for these fonts but not for CSS fonts. Any technical reason you come up with is going to be obviously bunk.
You argue that this is important for font foundries. Well, that in and of itself is the first problem, font foundries are ridiculous and have more retarded licensing than MS. Second, how long do you think its going to take for an extension to come out that works around it. You can't control this, the idea that the file format can is just silly when you're talking about implementing it in an OSS package.
You started off by saying its not really a new format, just an OT wrapper, and then you follow up with 'its a new format' so it doesn't take along the baggage. This is contridictor, either its based on opentype and brings the baggage or it isn't, pick one.
There is no copy protection in OSS software, if you have the code its trivial to change it and work around it. Are you saying that Mozilla is going to promote using a binary blob in their browser?
You haven't provided any reason that this font format is different than what we already have, and you're completely ignoring the SVG format which is actually a fully open standard, and is already supported if you properly support SVGs. Of course no one does at the moment, but thats another story. I find it hard to believe that a new format will be better supported when SVG support is in the state it is.
A new font technology is going to bring fonts with increased readability? WTF? I've yet to see anyone use a font better than the old reliables included in Windows and Mac OS. I've seen plenty of fonts that are about as far from readable as you can get and still read them because they were made by some random person with no clue about whats important in typography. How is a new format going to change any existing problem? Its not.
How the hell did you get modded informative while talking in circles, contridicting yourself multiple times along the way?
Seriously mozilla, I'm rapidly losing faith in you.
We already have SVG fonts. Why exactly do we need ANOTHER one?
Fix the abomination your browser has turned into and focus on the reason you exist. Its got to the point where IE is going to be less bloated than Firefox.
You've got PLENTY of bugs to fix already, and you can't even agree with anyone on existing compatibility issues.
We don't want more features, we want Firefox to stop running like Navigator did in the late 90s.
Are you trying to become another Novell? Once a respectable company with a good product, but now a has been with nothing of real value to offer? Stop fragmenting the web, we don't need another freaking font format.
FOCUS.
again
FOCUS
Before you become obsolete, of course, with Chrome, it may well be too late.
So?
You can signup on their website to get the specs. You can't release the information to others, but then, GPL doesn't allow them to distribute GPL'd code the way they'd like to.
OSS can certain use the acceleration, it just requires binary distribution to fit their agenda. Just like GPL requires source distribution also to support its agenda.
They are two different sides of the same thing, restrictions on freedom.
RAM is just a cache at that point.
All processors that I'm aware of do that, even those that run from flash.
The ATmega processors for instance include flash on them to store you code, they 'run' from this flash.
But not really, what they do is fetch an instruction or series of instructions from flash and copy it to the internal buffers in the CPU, where it then gets executed.
Just because the technical details are hidden from your view, doesn't mean its not happening. Processors don't run things directly, they run copies, regardless of where it comes from initially, IDE, MMC, NOR, or punch card, it all gets copied to temporary storage before execution.
mmap is just another layer in the process.
I've been waiting for an excuse to ask slashdot this question.
What is a good resource for finding cheap, small, not overly feature rich hobbiest boards like this one?
I've done some work with ATmega microcontrollers. Went so far as to create my on little multitasking OS from the ground up based on some knowledge I gained from FreeRTOS. I enjoyed the process and it taught me a great deal about the difficulties associated with task switching. I quit when I realized that I REALLY wanted an MMU, or at least some memory protection.
I've written an MMC controller, a serial console for it, made my own little FS, none of it impressive to anyone with more than a slight clue about this stuff, but it reminds me of reading the notes from Linus about how Linux started out, and for me its a fun time and nice distraction from my day job of writing applications on top of a real OS.
I would prefer an x86 based board, anything 386 or better would be awesome, but it doesn't have to be. In fact since I've yet to see a good 386 simulator/debugger, or at least nothing that to me compares to the stuff that Atmel provides, I'm more than open to any other processor, I'm not tied to anything as I'm simply not that good to make a big difference.
What I would like to find:
A complete board that I can plugin in and debug, relatively cheap would be great.
Debugging ability and supporting software is most important, I use a MacBook so OS X support is ideal, but I've got VMs with Windows and FreeBSD, and installing Linux is more than acceptable for the purpose if need be. I really apprecate the simulator and debuggers the AVRStudio for Windows has, a copy of it for something more powerful would be ideal. The AVR32 is probably the closest I'll get to that, but it doesn't seem that I can really use AVR32s on my on hardware real easy. I can get a get a dev board for it, but throwing the chips onto something custom requires more effort than I would prefer to put into it.
Processor doesn't really matter, x86 would be nice since its probably got the largest base of reference code, but pretty much anything capable of running Linux is fine since I can use that as a reference. Linux is not a requirement as I won't be running it, it just makes a good reference to have handy when the docs for the hardware aren't all that clear or I don't really understand a particular concept.
Onboard IO is pretty much a must. Doesn't need VGA or anything, serial is plenty good enough for what I'll use it for, but some sort of digital output is a requirement so I can control stuff. I don't need a DAC as I can simulate one good enough to do audio as long as I have a digital pin of some sort to work with.
An ADC would be nice.
SPI would be really nice as I'm used to working with it and it makes MMC interfacing much easier.
64k would be more than enough ram, but more is certainly acceptable. I've been shoving 4 processes in to 2k of RAM, and if I have a MMU that supports virtual addressing I care even less, as thats really what I'd like to learn next.
Speed isn't an issue, a 12mhz ATmega was plenty of my toying around so far, I'm not designing an end user OS, just playing.
Onboard clock would be ideal, as I never have properly got an AVR to run on an external clock so thats obviously a concept I don't grasp properly and I'm lazy so figuring it out slows me down.
So fellow geeks, where do I look to find this sort of thing, or what do you guys have experience with that you would recommend me looking into? Something just slightly more powerful than the your typical 8bit Atmel or PIC microcontroller would be the target.
Hell, I don't even have to have a board, I just don't want to get a CPU that requires a bunch of external support circuitry, something microcontrollerish that I can just hookup some power to and start interfacing. I dont mind adding some minor stuff but I don't want to have to spend 3 days working up a board design, then debug the hardware just to get to where I can run some code, otherwise I'd throw an x86 processor on a board myself.
Tell that to our founders and the souls lost in the revolutionary and civil wars.
Its a hard slope to climb, and it is very costly, but its not impossible. They need us (the people) more than we need them. There is no them without us, and there will always be an us, with or without them.
The real problem is, regardless of the bitching, and moaning, and whining, its really not bad enough to warrent such actions at this point. The general population is rather content with the current state of things. Even with all of the 'OMG BAD ECONOMY' and 'OMG WARRENTLESS WIRETAPS' and other silly things like 'OMG DMCA/COPYRIGHT/RIAA/MPAA', its still really not that bad. At least, not bad enough to make enough people get off their asses and do something about.
Ethiopia is bad. Somalia is bad, Sri Lanka is bad. Afghanistan is bad. Iraq is bad. We're sitting pretty really. We may VERY QUICKLY end up as bad as one of those, but until Americans are actually suffering, we're not going to do shit about it. And by suffering I mean things like actually starving to death and other real issues. Not the 'I can't get a job doing what I want to do so I'm going to collect unemployement and ignore the help wanted signs at the retail stores and fast food chains' bad that we are currently calling a 'horrible situation'.