Presuming that Cisco use their own products, this is just about the first link to a video on/. that isn't going to be/.'d within 5 minutes of the article being posted.
Is this a case of English vs American English slang?
A "biro" is what most people call ballpoint pens here in the UK (the same most people say "hoover" instead of "vacuum cleaner").
Tipex is an obnoxious white semi-liquid substance than comes in a small pot or a pen or a tape form than you can "paint" over the top of text you've written with most kinds of pens to erase it.
Try keeping a diary when you have a large number of repeating events every week/month. Entering those in time and time again gets rather tedious, especially if your schedule is changeable (and with a paper-based diary it's quite difficult to drag and drop an event to one hour earlier without judicious use of tipex and biro). PDAs are a lifesaver for students and business people with lots of regular meetings and deadlines.
I believe that OpenPDA/Qtopia is good enough that the average user should never have to touch the terminal for any reason whatsoever. It's about as close as Linux gets to "it just works" and your average "man on the street" might not even realise it's running Linux, since Qtopia doesn't look like your average Linux X desktop (if there is such a thing, KDE and/or GNOME).
A really amazing feature of this PDA is that it can act as USB host (since the Linux kernel includes excellent support for USB). This means, presumably, that we can plug pretty much any Linux-supported USB device into it. A USB hard disk, CD-ROM drive, networking adapter, printer? That sounds nice!
Another completely different question - as mentioned in the article, the PDA uses a combination of Flash and SDRAM to mirror the secondary/primary disk/memory model that you see with most normal computers running Linux. This is different to Windows CE, which uses the same memory for both running programs and storing them and their data, although I believe this memory is dynamically divided between memory and storage and programs are still copied across the divide when they're actually run; different again is PalmOS, which as far as I'm aware simply runs a program "in place" since programs are both stored and run in the Flash RAM on a device.
Is there anything that can make Linux work like this? I can imagine a hack involving boot-time RAM disks and loop mounting, but it doesn't sound like an terribly optimal solution.
So how does AdSense actually work? The adverts that are displayed are relevant to the page the user is currently viewing. Doesn't this imply that somewhere in the chain, the URL of the page that the user is viewing (or at least keywords that appear on it) are being sent to a third party? Do you really trust the third party advertiser to respect the privacy policies Opera lays down and not mine the fuck out of the reams of valuable data that must be coming in every day? I don't think I would. This is, after all, how Gator works. I'm sure they have a privacy policy too.
No, I'm bashing the fact that in order to do AdSense, Opera sends the URL of the page you're viewing to Google, and then displays a page of relevant advertising. This is exactly how Gator works when installed alongside Internet Explorer.
Is this going to be applied to the existing kernel sources or just new submissions? I think it'd be quite a job to track down all the people who still have their names at the top of kernel files after all these years. Especially those who have died (there must be at least one) or companies that no-longer exist (quite a few).
Regardless, I wonder whether this will slow down kernel contributions? Here's hoping it won't. People will still be able to create unofficial patch sets (like mm, ck and love sources) to test their ideas before actually contributing modifications to the authoritative source.
Will this $12 million mean Opera can get rid of the spyware that seems to be incorperated into the free version of their browser and move to a more sensible business model?
Sure, there are x86 clusters. But there are also an awful lot of IBM supercomputers using Power chips, HP supercomputers using PA-RISC, heck even Apple clusters using PowerPC, SGI machines, Sun supercomputer nodes, and so on. There are a large number of strange and mysterious chips built explicitly for supercomputing that would never be seen in any other kind of use. There are also a large number o different interconnect technologies.
Since Windows is a closed source operating system, are Microsoft volunteering to port Windows HPC to whatever architecture you happen to come up with? What about the bugs that occur when they write this port? How long is it going to take to get Windows stable on an unusual architecture if only Microsoft can change the source but only you can do the testing?
At least with a custom kernel or Linux you can work on the system yourself until it's up and running, and if you're in the business of installing and running clusters/supercomputer, you can probably afford to pay programmers to write an operating system for nodes in that cluster/supercomputer.
Last I heard, the Windows NT 5.x kernel (2000, XP, 2003) was not even endian-clean any more, let alone portable to RISC or VLIW architectures. Why do you think it's has taken Microsoft so long to port to x86-64 and Itanium?
Or are Microsoft going to "mandate" that we use x86 processors for all our cluster needs in the future?
You've obviously never programmed a powerful database application in something like J2EE/JDBC (which has the same problems with differing SQL syntax as PHP, just a unified set of classes and methods). I certainly find I need complex joins to do any kind of data access, LEFT JOIN being extremely useful and not universal. The table creation syntax and data types also differ which can make a difference when trying to optimise storage efficiency.
Are you sure it's French? I would have just pronounced it "In-Gress" unless told otherwise. For the record, PostgreSQL is pronounced Post-Gress-Queue-El.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, now "Ingres". I guess it's better than having none, but it's becoming a pain to support the perculiarities of each of these products in, for example, a PHP script intended for general use, which you want to make work with as many different database systems as possible. It's a pity each of them aren't more compliant with the now 12 year old SQL-92 standard or the now 5 year old SQL-99 standard.
...and patenting those methods and licensing them in a way that is incompatible with the GPL is another way Microsoft wants to enhance computer users' experience: by making them move to Windows + Outlook!
Actually the parent wasn't me posting anonymously, so I don't see why you've gone and put me on your foe list. That post occured in the middle of the night over here, when I was fast asleep.
I think it's the power of "word of mouth" in action. Let's face it, Windows still has 95% of the desktop market. It's just when your next door neighbour gets his shiney new G5 and invites his friends around to show them how cool Mac OS X is, they all go and buy Macintoshes, then their friends go and buy Macintoshes, and so on. You get islands of Linux users and Macintosh users in small communities all over the place. Unfortunately they're not very representitive of the industry as a whole.
1. Take a web address (e.g. http://www.slashdot.org/)
2. Look up the IP address (e.g. 66.35.250.151)
3. Convert to Hex (42.23.FA.97)
4. Concatenate (4223FA97)
5. Convert resultant integer to decimal (1109654167)
6. Go to http://1109654167/ in Mozilla
Voila. This only works if virtual hosting isn't being used, and doesn't work in IE. Google is on http://3639556963/, useful if your DNS servers go down.
I know the parent was trying to be funny, but if people are interested, just take a look at the grid on the bottom of the chip in the article:
31 rows * 31 cols = 961
Pins missing at the four corners total 13 (3 at each corner plus an extra keying pin at the bottom right). There are 4 'gaps' of 2 pins missing within the grid itself. This means:
I won't deny this is a great idea for graphics, but surely with a little more work, adding internal connectors for communications and audio, this could be turned into a generalised standard that would finally replace those horrendous semi-proprietary mini-PCI cards you find inside laptops?
Imagine the possible combinations of devices you could fit into a laptop with two of these slots accessible externally so they could specify their own connectors, or alternatively wired up on the motherboard to USB, FireWire, RJ-45, RJ-12, a few Jack plugs and the video ports on the outside of the macine, all available through a 250-pin connector?
Slashdot Mirror
Presuming that Cisco use their own products, this is just about the first link to a video on /. that isn't going to be /.'d within 5 minutes of the article being posted.
Oh, and it seems it's spelt "Tipp-Ex", not tipex. Here's the official site.
Is this a case of English vs American English slang?
A "biro" is what most people call ballpoint pens here in the UK (the same most people say "hoover" instead of "vacuum cleaner").
Tipex is an obnoxious white semi-liquid substance than comes in a small pot or a pen or a tape form than you can "paint" over the top of text you've written with most kinds of pens to erase it.
Try keeping a diary when you have a large number of repeating events every week/month. Entering those in time and time again gets rather tedious, especially if your schedule is changeable (and with a paper-based diary it's quite difficult to drag and drop an event to one hour earlier without judicious use of tipex and biro). PDAs are a lifesaver for students and business people with lots of regular meetings and deadlines.
I believe that OpenPDA/Qtopia is good enough that the average user should never have to touch the terminal for any reason whatsoever. It's about as close as Linux gets to "it just works" and your average "man on the street" might not even realise it's running Linux, since Qtopia doesn't look like your average Linux X desktop (if there is such a thing, KDE and/or GNOME).
A really amazing feature of this PDA is that it can act as USB host (since the Linux kernel includes excellent support for USB). This means, presumably, that we can plug pretty much any Linux-supported USB device into it. A USB hard disk, CD-ROM drive, networking adapter, printer? That sounds nice!
Another completely different question - as mentioned in the article, the PDA uses a combination of Flash and SDRAM to mirror the secondary/primary disk/memory model that you see with most normal computers running Linux. This is different to Windows CE, which uses the same memory for both running programs and storing them and their data, although I believe this memory is dynamically divided between memory and storage and programs are still copied across the divide when they're actually run; different again is PalmOS, which as far as I'm aware simply runs a program "in place" since programs are both stored and run in the Flash RAM on a device.
Is there anything that can make Linux work like this? I can imagine a hack involving boot-time RAM disks and loop mounting, but it doesn't sound like an terribly optimal solution.
I don't honestly see that it's worth it when you compare Opera to near-as-competent free software browsers like Firefox or Konqueror.
So how does AdSense actually work? The adverts that are displayed are relevant to the page the user is currently viewing. Doesn't this imply that somewhere in the chain, the URL of the page that the user is viewing (or at least keywords that appear on it) are being sent to a third party? Do you really trust the third party advertiser to respect the privacy policies Opera lays down and not mine the fuck out of the reams of valuable data that must be coming in every day? I don't think I would. This is, after all, how Gator works. I'm sure they have a privacy policy too.
No, I'm bashing the fact that in order to do AdSense, Opera sends the URL of the page you're viewing to Google, and then displays a page of relevant advertising. This is exactly how Gator works when installed alongside Internet Explorer.
Is this going to be applied to the existing kernel sources or just new submissions? I think it'd be quite a job to track down all the people who still have their names at the top of kernel files after all these years. Especially those who have died (there must be at least one) or companies that no-longer exist (quite a few).
Regardless, I wonder whether this will slow down kernel contributions? Here's hoping it won't. People will still be able to create unofficial patch sets (like mm, ck and love sources) to test their ideas before actually contributing modifications to the authoritative source.
Will this $12 million mean Opera can get rid of the spyware that seems to be incorperated into the free version of their browser and move to a more sensible business model?
Sure, there are x86 clusters. But there are also an awful lot of IBM supercomputers using Power chips, HP supercomputers using PA-RISC, heck even Apple clusters using PowerPC, SGI machines, Sun supercomputer nodes, and so on. There are a large number of strange and mysterious chips built explicitly for supercomputing that would never be seen in any other kind of use. There are also a large number o different interconnect technologies.
Since Windows is a closed source operating system, are Microsoft volunteering to port Windows HPC to whatever architecture you happen to come up with? What about the bugs that occur when they write this port? How long is it going to take to get Windows stable on an unusual architecture if only Microsoft can change the source but only you can do the testing?
At least with a custom kernel or Linux you can work on the system yourself until it's up and running, and if you're in the business of installing and running clusters/supercomputer, you can probably afford to pay programmers to write an operating system for nodes in that cluster/supercomputer.
Last I heard, the Windows NT 5.x kernel (2000, XP, 2003) was not even endian-clean any more, let alone portable to RISC or VLIW architectures. Why do you think it's has taken Microsoft so long to port to x86-64 and Itanium?
Or are Microsoft going to "mandate" that we use x86 processors for all our cluster needs in the future?
You've obviously never programmed a powerful database application in something like J2EE/JDBC (which has the same problems with differing SQL syntax as PHP, just a unified set of classes and methods). I certainly find I need complex joins to do any kind of data access, LEFT JOIN being extremely useful and not universal. The table creation syntax and data types also differ which can make a difference when trying to optimise storage efficiency.
Are you sure it's French? I would have just pronounced it "In-Gress" unless told otherwise. For the record, PostgreSQL is pronounced Post-Gress-Queue-El.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, now "Ingres". I guess it's better than having none, but it's becoming a pain to support the perculiarities of each of these products in, for example, a PHP script intended for general use, which you want to make work with as many different database systems as possible. It's a pity each of them aren't more compliant with the now 12 year old SQL-92 standard or the now 5 year old SQL-99 standard.
...and patenting those methods and licensing them in a way that is incompatible with the GPL is another way Microsoft wants to enhance computer users' experience: by making them move to Windows + Outlook!
Actually the parent wasn't me posting anonymously, so I don't see why you've gone and put me on your foe list. That post occured in the middle of the night over here, when I was fast asleep.
I think it's the power of "word of mouth" in action. Let's face it, Windows still has 95% of the desktop market. It's just when your next door neighbour gets his shiney new G5 and invites his friends around to show them how cool Mac OS X is, they all go and buy Macintoshes, then their friends go and buy Macintoshes, and so on. You get islands of Linux users and Macintosh users in small communities all over the place. Unfortunately they're not very representitive of the industry as a whole.
1. Take a web address (e.g. http://www.slashdot.org/)
2. Look up the IP address (e.g. 66.35.250.151)
3. Convert to Hex (42.23.FA.97)
4. Concatenate (4223FA97)
5. Convert resultant integer to decimal (1109654167)
6. Go to http://1109654167/ in Mozilla
Voila. This only works if virtual hosting isn't being used, and doesn't work in IE. Google is on http://3639556963/, useful if your DNS servers go down.
That's not a real domain name, it's mostly used for reverse DNS lookups.
I know the parent was trying to be funny, but if people are interested, just take a look at the grid on the bottom of the chip in the article:
31 rows * 31 cols = 961
Pins missing at the four corners total 13 (3 at each corner plus an extra keying pin at the bottom right). There are 4 'gaps' of 2 pins missing within the grid itself. This means:
961 - 13 - 8 = 940 pins
I'm pretty sure a scanner is an input device ;)
I won't deny this is a great idea for graphics, but surely with a little more work, adding internal connectors for communications and audio, this could be turned into a generalised standard that would finally replace those horrendous semi-proprietary mini-PCI cards you find inside laptops?
Imagine the possible combinations of devices you could fit into a laptop with two of these slots accessible externally so they could specify their own connectors, or alternatively wired up on the motherboard to USB, FireWire, RJ-45, RJ-12, a few Jack plugs and the video ports on the outside of the macine, all available through a 250-pin connector?
In Soviet Poland, INDIANA JONES WATCHES YOU! Okay, mod me down. Someone had to do it.
I wonder what the best way to get these small doses might be. Perhaps snorting a line of coffee granules every few hours?