Is that google has become evil.... Apple has always been evil to one extent or another, but for the most part i trusted google... now if youtube only supports h.264 then basically they have a method for elimating firefox and opera as competitors. Yay google.
When the spec specifically says "you can have 2 video formats in the one video tag". Why not just support a crappy version in ogg (i.e. low res), low enough that its 25% of the size of the original h264 version. At least mozilla's legs wouldn't get cut off. It would also be a challenge for theora - i.e. google could say "a 1 meg h264 video is like this, make a 250k theora start to look good and maybe we'll balance those numbers a bit".
A 25% hit on storage for google would not be a killer and its a shame it couldn't see its way to doing just that.
Ultimately we can only assume google's motive is "Death to firefox and open standards"
No one gets usenet versus Usenet.com (nor I really). But it certainly has some interesting implications, for example, almost every ISP in Australia has a usenet feed and a full alt.binaries tree. That could make for some "fun times" and i cant only imagine what will happen if the RIAA equivalent in AU gets to mess with our little comunist firewall... err, i mean saviour of our childrens minds.
Given there are already cases against the ISP's in court already.
But, does it really matter? Yeah, usenet was good while it lasted and if this is about to spell it's final "for whom the bell tolls", then so be it. One of the big problems with usenet in the modern era was lack of knowledge of its existence. For example, in my day I sold and bought things on Aus.ads.forsale and now everyone uses ebay cause they know it exists.
But, some of that "social fabric" is changing as well (to more modern things I mean). Take twitter and facebook as a semi-evolutionary step, sure you probably cant easily share copywritten (?) work on them easily, but how long until the google wave becomes a simple, all-access protocol capable of doing the same?
The internet does route around the damage that people do to it, and techo's come up with better tech for avoiding rediculous litigation - but more importantly, they get better at quickly making things that are hard to blame on any one person or organisation while people like the RIAA are struggling to grapple with putting together a case based on incomplete evidence from yesterdays protocols.
Block Bittorrent in AU? go for it, we'll get something else (we had kazaa, napster, emule, etc etc already and we learnt from the various mistakes present in those protocols). In short, techno-people move quick, bit corp's move slow and we're always going to be ahead.
Personally when it comes to all these things all I know is that it puts me off watching movies or listening to music because if I happen to have an MP3 of a song from a CD that was later stolen, chances are I could be possibly in trouble. In alot of industries thats called shooting yourself in the foot.
Oh, and did anyone see that little news report in AU about how movie piracy was funding terrorism? I wonder how much the RIAA payed to have that little piece put on the air (in all fairness, it was physical media piracy as opposed to sharing on the internet, but still)...
Like many others, when i first read it i thought "you lazy cheap SOB". Then it was "wait, he wants to carry around his computer rather then his phone? HOW BIG IS THE F**KING PHONE?"....
But, it is an interesting techo question in the "can it be done" basket. I've tried "nohands" myself previously and wasnt overly excited by it, it would be nice to be able to walk in my home, stick my phone on charge, have it associate with the server at home which can then route my calls in through the ata and out to the pots phones i have (perhaps it could even do the skype ones too). It would be nice for it to figure out the mobiles plugged in and route out-going ones through there as well (given that work pays for my mobile).
I think alot of people missed the "if tiny a piece of hardware can be a handsfree kit, why cant a laptop" idea behind it all. In all fairness the geeks here on slashdot (i include myself) do alot of things because we can, not because we should and because its intriguing to the simple geekly instincts within us. This kind of question certainly qualifies
I agree with stewbacca on that one, there are plenty of games that can be played for hours and hours on end, 5 minutes at a time. Although if your going to quote "substantive" games that wouldn't work, think things like ghost recon or far cry.
Even a light-on mmo would work so long as the mechanics allowed that type of play (there are some games on facebook that could fall into that category - ok, yes, you can possibly play those in the browser on the ipod, but its more the concept we're talking about here, not specifics).
Not that i've ever played it, but i think pokemon could probably work. Turn-based strategy that dont require heaps of planning (metal gear spring to mind).
heh, this particulary "modding" of informative needs to be on the mod'er guidelines for what not to do.
"Informative!" seriously, someone did mod it "Funny" (as it should be) and it keeps going back to informative and if i understand the mod'ing methodology the guy who got the mod right with "Funny" is the one who'll suffer from all the mod'ers who didnt understand it was a joke.
It's not a case of "your spoiled for choice", the reality is you rarely get one. If you get a linux distro its going to give you ext2/3/4 (older distro's did allow you do use reiser, xfs, and so forth, but thats mostly gone the way of the dinosaur). The reality is that the linux community has made ext the "most appropriate FS to use" and so they all do use it (that wasnt by popular concensus, it was a case of sheer compatibility and crowd behaviour - i.e. "he's using it, i'll use it too").
Alot of the "extra" fs's in linux are there solely for the benefit of reading other people's file systems (such as UFS, Amiga FS, HPFS, NTFS, and they do take up a huge portion of the list). But thats brilliant right? How many kernels out there have the kind of functionality - none!
Those FS's that dont fall into the "legacy" or "compatability" stack are there for people who need them and know when they need them (i.e. they're for the specialist) and much like if i wanted to use (commercial) xfs on windows, im going to need to know why im doing it and how its going to be done.
Personally, i always get quite excited when i hear about a new fs in the linux kernel. everyone of them is unique and inventive and does serve a purpose. I always wanted to write a tag based file system (and ended up implementing one in fuse once i realised i didnt care about how the data actually got onto the disk), the idea was to get rid of directory structures as we know them (i personally think they are a crap way of storing data, but oh well). I never got it finished but it was going to work like file x.zip has the tags a, b and c. So its accessible a variety of ways (/a/x.zip,/b/x.zip,/a/b/c/x.zip or/b/c/a/x.zip), and you could just move it to change its tags (i.e. mv/a/b/c/x.zip/d/x.zip to remove the a, b and c tags and replace them with d, or cd/c; mv x.zip../d would remove the "c" tag and replace it with "d"). Back when i first thought of the notion i personally think it was quite unique, but its not without its drawbacks (think backup or any kind of filesystem scraping tool).
But lets put some things in perspective first. Sure windows has NTFS, but its not the only one (as has been pointed out numerous times) - i didnt see anyone list vxfs (veritas), but there are probably as many for windows fs's that aren't part of windows (xfs for eg is available for windows - commercially). The other thing is that its always been called NTFS but its gotten quite a few variants (much like solaris and UFS), so your layman only ever see's "NTFS" and "FAT".
So does it matter? the reality is that 99.999% of people only know ntfs and fat for windows, the same goes for linux really, 99.999% of people are using ext2/3 (now 4) plus FAT. In the windows world they would all have just been called "Ext" and you wouldn't have known that windows NT used ext2 while XP used ext3 and vista used ext4. Linux hasn't chosen to do it that way and for good reasons.
But you should also define "right". Show me a filesystem like ext3cow (essentially a compliance file system) for windows, they do exist, they're not NTFS, you've just never heard of them cause you dont need them, and you've probably not heard of ext3cow either for that matter. The truth is that 99% of people just need ext2/3/4 for hard disks, will use fat for flash and wont care which one they get so long as it stores files. Which again, is exactly like windows, 99% of people know only NTFS for hard disks, fat for removable storage and dont need (or want) to know about the rest - but they do exist and we haven't even mentioned things like win CE, XP embedded, etc.
You will get the occasional lunatic (i say that in a loving way) that'll do something like reiserfs or xfs, but thats your getting-a-bit-hardcore linux type.
One other thing worth pointing out is that part of the reason there are few FS's you've heard of for windows is cause its a nightmare to code them (or was, may not be true anymore). I tried to do one for around the time XP/2003 were available, and it had about 12 different ways of doing exactly the same thing in the driver that you had to implement (i.e. "get the list of files in this directory" had to be implemented 6 different ways for backward compatibility, that was painful). Probably a good reason why any third-party commercial FS's for windows costs a minor fortune.
If your the only IT guy there, then nothing puts the users in their place like "surprise vacation" or "surprise swine flu" or take up a dangerous hobby such as sky diving and pray for (only) a broken leg;)
Im not entirely joking. They want something done yesterday, well now they'll have to wait 4 weeks to get it done yesterday, OR they get a contractor in who takes twice as long and who is half as nice.
Is the wave really that complex? NO, quite the opposite actually, its fundamentally very simple.
Where it gets complex is the implementation, and much like how people coded for Internet explorer and mozilla, you'll be coding for "wave implementation x or y". By that I mean that what we've seen from google is their implementation of the wave. Which doesn't seem complex, depending on how your looking at it.
As a developer coding robots and gadgets (and so forth), it looks quite simple. But its the google implementation of how you will code such things. Obviously there will be wave implementations that are nothing like the google app engine and hence will have their own api's for coding robots and gadgets (and maybe their own form of extensions that arent robots or gadgets).
Secondly, if we're editing a document together (though it is/will be well specified in format) its up to the "client" to display things correctly, and that could be "interesting" (though with the protocol descriptions so far, that may not be a huge problem). Also, theres the idea of "client"... googles is a web one, but it doesnt have to be that way (i would LOVE to see open office or mozilla run with the idea of a "client" based in the binary space).
One thing I think the wave does that corp's have wanted to do for a long long time is move data to the IDC. This is probably the most common thing i've heard of.
As for live mesh, i've read about it, but being a linux boy i cant see anyway of participating. It talks about this that and the other and about being open, yet when Ray talks about it all he starts talking about exchange... is that an open protocol now (aside from what they released to the web a while ago with all those little "we own you clauses")? And what about OOXML doc format, isnt MS Office not even compliant with its own standard?
It sounds interesting (the mesh), but its hard to understand what its trying to achieve more than file syching, and thats nothing new (imho)...
One of the first phones I remember having a front-facing camera was the NEC e606 (http://www.gsmarena.com/nec_e606-481.php) which was released when Australia first went to 3g (late 2003). It was one of 3-5 phones available at the time, all with front-facing cameras..
Prior to that, Japan had a 2g/3g variant in about 2001 that also produced alot of front-facing camera phones.
Im in AU, so dont exactly know how the law is to be used. But assuming the law was applied in Australia I was thinking much the same way as other people "so if i've downloaded ubuntu, can they screw me".
At first I was thinking, so a "similarly priced retail product" would be Vista, XP or OSX and I was thinking "So is this a tool for Microsoft and other commercial people to take advantage of", i.e. push people even further away from OSS (or commercial alternatives). As such, Vista in AU costs about $500 for the full retail version, i.e. $50 tax. There is very little advantage in this for MS and RIAA (etc) because all that will happen is that you'll go to jail and rather then being a possible consumer of their products you'd become a non-consumer. MS could never see a cent because its government tax and I never pirated MS software.
The second thing was, "ok, lets assume the similarly priced retail version of ubuntu is a cd with ubuntu burned on it". Again, (at least in AU) there are places that sell these (for very reasonable prices, i.e. the cost of the media + case + shipping and no more than that). The point being that if you did download ubuntu and not pay tax to the govt then yes you would be committing tax evasion.
Im not sure if there are places in the US (there would have to be wouldn't there?) that do similar but there are several place in AU where you could buy many many popular OSS products burned and cased on CD for you (again, for very very fair prices, they're not doing it to make a dime out of selling "Free" software, they're doing for advocacy reasons).
People above are saying that the "price of open office for the similarly prices physical version is 0.00" (or whatever the wording was) but it is not $0.00 and hence is taxable and hence downloading it and not paying taxes would be a violation of the law.
However, it sounds like a tool of a draconian government that isnt interested in screwing average joe, he's interested in getting people the way they got Al Capone - i.e. we cant prove you broke the law by killing people, but you downloaded ubuntu and didn't pay the tax on it, off to jail you go.
Now the way this would work in AU would never be able to benefit MS, the RIAA or similar because they would take no part in the case. The RIAA might report you as a person who's not paying taxes, but they could never reap any rewards for it (ironically, if you did pay some extra tax just to cover yourself, you'd probably be safe). Once the State took on the case (if they had evidence) then the RIAA could never say "ok, pay us $5000 and the problem goes away" - this itself would also be illegal (not only for the RIAA but also the State).
MS might benefit from locking away some OSS advocates, but I doubt even MS would stoop quite that low. They're more interested in conversions and the bad publicity from such a move would probably not be worth it (especially if it was some high profile person like Linus Torvalds).
That said, why do you Linux guys seem to hate standards so much, hmmm? I'm not talking to you specifically fooslacker, but Linux in general. I mean y'all got, what? Three different sound systems now? Would it really be so hard for all the major players to sit down and choose a basic standard, one that will hopefully be rock solid stable with minimal changes and a focus on backwards compatibility, so that writing drivers and programs for the entire Linux ecosystem would be easy and thus attract more companies?
Its comments exactly like that one that make Zealots. The stupidity of such a comment is hard to quantify and universally obvious to anyone who understands what a standard is and what microsoft have done to them. First of all to mix linux, gnome (or any X desktop) and distributions up into one comment that states lack of standards is ridiculous.
But lets look at what MS have done. Starting with TCP/IP, microsoft's answer? "we dont like tcp, here's netbuei and netbios" (they weren't the only ones doing it, but thankfully it failed). Then (closed) smb came next (despite several already open standards for network file systems), and thus everyone else is forced to reverse engineer it (not once, but several times because MS just change it at a whim due to lack of standards). Next Java, do I really have to explain how MS tried to screw java by breaking the one thing it was supposed to be (i.e. cross platform?). Then document formats - finally sun come out with an open standard for a document format, and do MS do, they produce OOXML (and on top of that, their own office product doesnt support it properly). Then to make sure everyones screwed, they produce an ODF plugin for 2007 that breaks everyones implementation. Then theres.NET - supposedly a competitor to java yet lacks the one thing it needs, cross-platform support. Sure, they opened the c# spec, but thats useless without the API being open.
Thats only a couple of examples, HTML, HTTP, MAPI. Kerberos, Active directory, the list of standards MS has polluted (and tried to break) is endless
Who gets screwed in all this? The linux desktop and server OS's out there struggling to build on REAL standards that already exist, and they get angry (anyone who understands the fights would think rightly so) because people say things like "well linux doesn't follow a standard because this thing over here works on windows and doesn't on linux". Well the truth is that linux has fought very very hard to follow the standards, then it has to fight again to reverse engineer broken implementations of the standard that mainly come from MS themselves.
Ultimately "linux" as you put it wears the blame and still it doesn't give up, it continues to reverse engineer and make its products compatible.
Of course when i say linux here it means people like Sun who wrote java and open office (and are forced to reverse engineer the MS document format and code OO to the same lack of standard)
Now lets talk about the desktop, so which desktop standard are you referring to here? The Microsoft standard? Exactly what standard is that? As far as I know the only "Desktop" standards that actually exist (i.e. documented ones) are X + gnome or KDE/Qt - these are documented standards. As for audio, well there is none (unless you mean the undocumented and randomly changed direct sound API from MS). That has been a bad problem on linux in reality since it was born and part of that is inability to produce drivers, then 2 interfaces were born. Now we also have pulse audio (which isnt a linux interface by the way).
So we now have a "culture" of linux desktop environments (lets just look at fedora, redhat and ubuntu), in one corner you have redhat (RHEL) which uses older and more stable/developed interfaces which they stick to between major versions. 5.x has kernel 2.6.18 (and always will) along with a specific version of everything else (gnome, kde, qt, etc), they are all static in version 5.x of RHEL. Fedora is the exact
When i started coding there was no such thing as an idea, really. I think my first IDE was turbo c++ (a dos application).
The one constant in my life has been VI(m) and i've come to rely on it quite heavily.
When I got into visual studio, there was even a plugin back then to make vi work as the editor for visual studio.
But I've also used alot of IDE's, they are "handy" for a number of reasons. Most of it comes from hitting compile and getting links direct to the place in your code when your code failed to compile.
In my more recent time i've used (and not hated) the following IDE's.
Code::blocks KDE Kdevelop Visual Studio Eclipse Netbeans (v5 was good - version 6 felt like i was coding over vnc via a 14.4k modem it was sooo slow and laggy). PHPEdit (err, commercial now i think and only php) Anjuta - fairly simple but binary and fast Gleany - probably starting to stretch the meaning of "ide" a bit here Monodevelop and sharpdevelop.
Theres more in there worth mentioning - I just cant remember them all. The thing I really prized in an IDE thought was its ability not to tie me to it (eclipse is great for this, mostly). Like VS and Kdevelop have massive code writing bits that do alot of work for you and when you decide "ahh, i need to use a different IDE" you spend alot of work moving away from them - thats frustration personified.
Eclipse is a beast of a tool, anything you can ever want to do you can find a plugin for (or modify settings to do it for you - like getting it to ssh into another box to actually execute the compile). The sheer bredth of whats available for eclipse is what sets it apart from everything else.
Kdevelop was/is absolutely brilliant at handling coding for unix/qt (it has a "manager" for the automake process which is just awesome).
And the rest all work quite well.
However, my last word is simply this - nothing (imho) can replace a good editor (such as VI). The IDE can provide briliant little extended functionality but nothing is anywhere near as important as what the editor does, this is where you type your code and ultimately the most important part of the process. The generic editors in most IDE's (including visual studio) do have some functionality that can be quite broad, but when you get to know an editor as well as you can know VI there's really nothing that compares. (by the way, im a VI boy, but coders i know who use emacs can do anything i can just as efficiently - so choose emacs or VI you cant go wrong).
The problem is learning an editor like VI (or emacs) takes patience and often its not until someone shows you some little trick they did in VI without even taking their hand off the keyboard that makes people go "wow, thats some pretty useful functionality" and you start wanting to learn more. But being able to do almost anything from the : menu in VI with a few choice commands is something that truely becomes invaluable in terms of efficiency (i.e. not reaching for the mouse). No one really seems to appreciate that until they actually see it in use though.
The human direct-neural-interface a-lah the books by Peter F Thompson (either the newer void series or the nights dawn) - though he wasn't the first, just the most current IMHO.
Having worked in the arena of simulation during the early-to-late 90's and working with a company dedicated to 3d and simulation the tech had many flaws (HMD systems) and continues to.
Consider big-end flight sims such as those that CAE produces (http://www.cae.com/en/). If those huge systems could be replaced with hmd's (and it has been tried on many occasions) you cut the cost of many many things by massive factors. Those machines they produce are entire cockpits on hydraulic jacks and they work well - but are dedicated to a purpose.
Personally, i always wanted *Some* form of hmd myself, but more for informational purposes then a full-on augmented reality. i.e. Jump on my bike and show me the vital stats in the visual range - speed, direction, rpm, gear, etc (again, systems dedicated to this purpose exist, im aware of that), but i also want to be able to walk down the street and be told "turn left at this next intersection to get to some place" and "Joe Blogs has sent you an sms" and be able to read it without even moving my head.
I believe that chances are that aint going to happen in a realistic way until we do develop some kind of direct-into-the-brain link with an interface something like bluetooth that anything can connect to (i say bluetooth, but i actually mean an interface that WORKS). The scary part of that is when you combine something like this with MS's latest patent on extorting money from people you just have to be fearful;)
I do have an acer aspire one.. came with linpus, 8gb flash and 512mb of ram... day one I had ram lying around and stuck in an extra 1gb. So, fair's fair I have 1.5gb of ram. The reason I bought the aa1 by the way is that it was impossible to get anything else (still is pretty much except for the 7' eeepc's). I almost got a 900 eeepc when it was available, but the 901 came out so quick I thought I'd hang back. To this day, finding a 901 (or any of asus' newer models) is near impossible with linux (or anything other then acer actually - MSI, Dell, HP, none of them come with a linux distro down here in Australia).
After replacing linpus (i quite liked this OS by the way) with ubuntu 8.04 (or 8.10, i cant remember) just to try UNR I was quite impressed. I also tried windows xp, vista and MAC OS X on it. None of these were trivial to install at the time - which is not MS or apples fault in any way (mac os was slightly easier cause I could install it happily to an external HD). Vista was a nightmare, XP was OK but the speed of the acer aspire one's flash in the 8gb model is not fantastic (as people have noted in the past).
I recently changed to 9.04 ubuntu and WOW what a difference - they have a distro specifically for the netbooks now and it is much faster (in my experience) then 8 was and definitely faster then XP.
I've not tried windows 7 on it and im probably not going to, i've tried 7 on a few other machines with limited success. Its better than vista, worse then XP in some ways that just cant be quantified in a slashdot post (thats my general feeling).
Surfice it to say, win 7 on a machine where it works well is quite nice. But on a netbook I just dont really see the point when you compare it to ubuntu 9 (im a fedora guy by the way). With evolution or thunderbird and Open office 3 theres very little else that I need (on a netbook) that it cant provide and the UNR interface is quite well designed for it. Keep in mind the breadth of software IN the ubuntu repo's is quite substantial so if your looking for a game to play or an application targetting some facet of your life your likely to find it there somewhere, so from a "what software can I get for it" its pretty useful to the netbook and you dont have to go hunting that hard for software (it was even quite easy to get the citrix ica client working which my gf uses to connect to work - much to my supprise).
Hey, thats my humble opinion - and given the little article the other day about 2007's ODF support I feel much happier using open office!. By the way did anyone else find it strange that as soon as open office started to support OOXML (ooxml that works with office 2007 - not the ISO OOXML by the way) that MS do an about-face on ODF and produce a broken version?
The best thing about ubuntu 9 on the netbook though is that given the target hardware its quite impressive from a perspective of people who dont know what a command line is. It supported my gf's 3g usb dongle out of the box rather then needing drivers (which crashed her vista laptop). But in reality I never really hated vista that much - the 3g driver thing was the hardware manufactures fault. I DO very much hate microsoft for many very relevant reasons - not worth discussing here.
Seriously though, if you've not tried ubuntu 9 on a netbook, its very very worth a look into - for the tasks you could expect a netbook to perform.
I wonder what it really means for the sparc (hardware) platform? It was a nice platform and continues to be in some ways but always feels like its slowly dieing off due to lack of r&d. Its quite possible the the sparc platform will morph its way into the IBM RISC chipsets I guess? The whole backward binary compatibility thing would probably go out the window (which was quite a plus for solaris in someways). Hopefully though theres some engineer in IBM that has the brains to be able to create some "best of breed" cpu (though they've not managed to yet obviously) cause I love the (relatively new) cool-threads and sparc vi line.
I grew up as an admin on sunos then solaris and i loved them both, more then any other commercial unix offering practically. I dont see IBM getting rid of that really, and I dont see them rationalising the platforms either (they haven't really done so yet - they've pushed people to move from platforms they own to AIX and linux, but not to the n'th degree).
Java is an interesting one and I hope glassfish doesn't bite the bullet and that eclipse gets some of the "nice" bits from netbeans cause they're both fantastic products - of course, in the J2EE realm nothing beats websphere (IMHO, i've worked on J2EE as an integration type for many years, websphere, sun one, weblogic, oracle, tomcat, you name it and I probably know it intimately). Sun ONE j2ee certainly improved, but websphere was just such a brilliant product in many respects. But, while java certainly helped unix at the server, i personally think its done more harm then good at the desktop.
Then theres MySQL, obviously not going anywhere but I wonder what might happen license wise? IBM certainly have no problems doing the GPL thing, so in reality its probably going to be a good thing with some db2/mysql crossover coming down the track (yes, db2 does have some features that make it worth it).
As for storagetek, IBM have shark and they both kinda suck. The old (entrenched) storage vendors are really beginning to suffer at the hands of the newer people coming out (if you've worked in SAN's for the last couple of years, you know what I mean). Alot of new companies have gotten somewhere just because they took a new view to storage. Lets face it, EMC (stotek, hds, etc) have been doing almost the exact same thing with storage - management wise - for decades and its antique tech, sure they've added some minor bits of functionality (eg EMC got alua - woopdy doo), but look at some of the new companies and what they do with storage and you wonder. OF course, IBM have already seen this and bought XIV which is a much more modern way of dealing with "spinning rusty metal" that makes alot more sence these days, even if it only does sata. (Sorry, didn't mean to bash EMC I just know them the best in terms of hardware).
Of course, anything that does happen will take a number of years. IBM will be required to support what Sun currently has in the field and Sun have long service lives in software and hardware. I doubt very much IBM are going to start heading to customer sites going "rip out yon M4000 and replace with a pseries", it just wouldn't work.
Just on the (OT) "apple is unix" thing, yeah apple is unix and alot of unix people do feel at home in it. Personally I dont like apple, I fear them more then I fear microsoft because they want to own everything (hardware and software) while MS are hardware sluts. Im also not much of a fan of the interface, to me it seems clunky like gnome does (I live on a linux desktop just for the record and own an iPod) but the mac interface is much prettier but the one thing i've wanted is a more compact interface (compare nautalus to windows explorer side by side and look at the space-waste in gnome for example - same goes on the apple interface and its space-wastage). Oh, and no I dont mean that gnome and the apple interface have anything in common other then they both allow you to use a mouse and keyboard! The one thing I will thank Apple for (altho, probably just as fair to thank MS
Having used linux since prior to distributions existing, i love it on the desktop and at the server. My first was slackware, but redhat was very close behind that (simply for the package management). Not to sound like a sad baby, but to see someone that prominent in the linux "community" is depressing.
Every now and then i see things in linux that impress the hell out of me in the desktop (even after this many years), like recently using a scanner (haven't done that in years) and seeing how far xsane has come was quite amazing, and there are so many examples of that on linux.
Its depressing to see linux software thats suffered from being primarily targeted at windows (and has the pain of bad porting) such as firefox and to a lesser extend open office.
But all that aside, the thing that really REALLY pisses me off (pardon the language) is companies that rely on linux for life and then dont support it on the desktop. Take vmware esx and citrix xen server as an example - both unmanageable from a linux desktop. Theres too many example of that to list, specially in the hardware makers.
It's really quite frustrating to see posts like this. Posts that dont take into account what is needed and focus on what we are incapable of doing - even when they dont need to.
So lets look at reality for second. First, most modern OS's scale very very far past 4 cpu's (not sure what windows scales to, but linux certainly has no limitation based on current cpu reality). So the kernels are just dandy for multi-core cpu's, bring it on! 128 cores, we're ready for ya!.
The same is not true at the application level, and that is a fair comment. But dont confuse linux and windows with their apps for crying out loud! From an application point of view we are capable of parallel coding, but its non-trivial. Its also not something we need alot of the time.
For instance, we now buy servers (our cheapest models) with dual cpu's and quad cores and we're tending to virtualise it up into several machines with 1 or 2 cpu's each. Now whether you do this because you assume the OS will utilise one cpu and the apps will utilise another (as one person told me is irrelavent). Surfice it to say, having 2 cpu's is usually quite nice.
But what requires more then that in reality? well, your desktop might - after all theres alot of things going on at once right? In some point cases, thats true (there are quite a number of very heavy applications out there, and supprise supprise, they can multitask *GASP*).
Same at the server, not many things require that many CPU's and even at the application level, we've gotten good at spreading heavily loaded applications across multiple servers (we call it load balancing, was that too sarcastic?). Take mail (weather its exchange or postfix or sendmail or whatever), or web servers, etc. Those server applications that do require heavy grunt tend to already be coded with "parallel" in mind, even across multiple servers (think oracle RAC).
As for cache contention - well it sounds like the hardware makers are finally fess'ing up to the fact they have a problem, Houston!
Way back when the whole thing about fat being patented hit slashdot there were a few articles. One in particular was about nearly every camera manufacturer ponying up the dollars after the patent was uphelp... they all paid $250k to use fat (so no, this isnt new - and this was all on slashdot by the way).
Also, people keep missing the point of the patent (i.e. whats being licensed) keep an eye on whats being licensed here, its important. This is not "oh your flash card has a fat filesystem on it, you have to pay for it". Its "your device can read and write fat"... NOT THE STORAGE CARD! its the DEVICE that can read and write FAT (specifically long-file names capable FAT). Do we get what the license is for now?
Now what filesystem exactly would they switch to? joe blogs goes and downloads the update, plugs his flash card into his windows box and (formats the flash card if required - as fat or ntfs). Then plugs that into the tomtom device. Tomtom device doesnt read fat(32) and so it doesnt work...
i.e. tom tom are essentially forced to license a patent based the fact they are forced to implement fat in their device.
I personally hope tomtom fight it. from the words of (whats is possibly) the worlds most moronic OP "TomTom needs some serious explaining to do as to why they aren't licensing FAT.". You dont think Tom-tom already knew about it? you dont think they ever read the (very very public) news about it happening to the camera makers?
But in reality, it should read more like "the patent office have some serious explaining to do in order to justify why FAT was ever allowed to be patented". Those patents should never have been allowed - there is nothing remotely inventive about fat with long file names.
This "Norton" thing is a symbiont like the thing that chick in deep space 9 had (i.e. you take it away and it kills you?), but it was also hiding behind the grassy knoll some time near the early 1960's?
and big brother is trying to root our kit so we cant post about the aliens, err weather baloon, we weren't meant to see?
I love package management, but I think the main point of the article is that people want an easy way to install packages.
Think windows... double-click setup.exe or program.msi and an icon appears after a setup dialog.
That doesnt translate so well to the unix world, specially not with rpm and deb running around along side source distribution... coming from a solaris (pkg) environment I LOVED package management when i understood it (and rpm/deb were even kewler than pkg). But it is confusing for your average joe, no doubt about it.
I know i've seen one already (thought not quite exactly how it should work), but a package system that makes a executable "blob" that you double click and installs an rpm or a deb depending on your OS would benefit linux so very much.
Distro's dont like you stepping away from their repo's, but it can be hard not to.
if you'd ever been in japan for a while you'd realise how wrong you are... japan had email when we were moving to digital (from analog) and that gap has existed ever since. Its not about having a TV on the phone, its about many other factors. SMS (mms) was never all that used in japan because they already had superior tech (i.e. email).
Most of the factors are about tech thats a generation or two ahead of everyone else - because both the tech market (phone makers) and the comm's (mobile providers) can move very fast - its a small island with a big market, throwing up new towers is easy. Pushing out a new phone tech is also quiet easy - if you know how to market to the japanese.
If you want to talk about computing, then yeah, they are behind - but not when it comes to gadgetry (in fact, anything build in japan tends to be ahead, anything built elsewhere tends to be behind).
While I dont anymore, I used to live and work in japan (first went there around 2000), and im really not that supprised.
As someone else said, there is a certain amount of nationalism (buy Japanese!), but its really not as bad in the corporate work culture as people make out, they promote the best people for the job (gaijin or not), but its hard to be the best person for the job when your competing against the japanese who are willing to do 18hrs a day to get ahead.
Now the japanese are ahead of the rest of the world in electronic gadgets - true, but computing wise, they're quite a bit behind (because of nationalism mostly).
However, when it comes to mobile phones, the japanese were doing email and had data connections to their phones (in the hdspa range) when the rest of the world were doing WAP, SMS and that first data technology (GPRS?). For me when i first arrived it was techno-culture shock because they had these amazing gadgets we only dreamed of, while computers were slow and felt like antiques.
But the defining characteristic of any japanese phones is the ability to input text (japanese) well - not something i imagine the iphone does. They also are able to install anything they want on their phones - again, not something you can do on an iphone. But it doesn't end there. There are so many things about the iphone that make it useless to the japanese compared to the competition. Coming from a non-japanese manufacturer, you really have to be a step ahead in order to get any market share and the iphone just isn't, its also expensive (in an on-going sense).
Now the last 4 phones i've had have been the HTC TYNT II, the Dopod D810, the Sony Erricson 810 and a nokia (who's model i cant remember). The HTC has been one of the worst phones i've had, its slow and has many problems (my boss chooses to reboot his every morning just to make sure) so when the iphone 3g (we didnt get 2g in AU) came out (and i had an ipod touch), i was KEEN, the interface is fast (dont care intuitive or easy to use - these often hinder rather then help). My iPod can pull down all my email (3 different accounts, exchange, imap and google) while my htc has barely made a connection to the local exchange server (even when plugged up via usb to a machine on the network). But when apple started charging for firmware updates and locked out the ability to code my own apps (or download anyone else's) i was disgusted. "oh, but its not firmware update, its a software update" - believe this if you will but your an idiot if you do.
Surfice it to say, the iphone just wont stack up against the local japanese models in terms of what the japanese want and its too "locked out" for a tech-savy (almost all of them) Japanese - did apple really think they were going to get the japanese to pay for "apple tv" - shear stupidity.?
A Looong time ago, when htpc's were becoming something interesting in AU (not long before digital tv was broadcast on all stations in AU - around 2002). I bought an epia nehemiah m10k (there weren't many to choose from at the time, the m8k was the other one and the big diff between the two was one was passive cooled and the other active - i got the active one for the extra cpu grunt).
Anyways, a short time ago I noticed that intel were shipping mini-itx boards and I was initially interested in the conroe-capable (dual and quad core) mini-itx boards, but also happened to get a netbook (the original acer ones a110 i think?). What I wanted was a small box i could shove into the small space somewhere in our IDC for taking mail relay traffic and doing a small amount of web serving (php gallery).
So I installed fedora 10 onto the atom on an external 320gb usb hd. At some point I remembered the epia I had lying around (still had a 256m stick of ram in it - versus the atom's 1.5gb) and when it died originally I never bothered to figure out whether the power supply had bit the dust or the board itself.
Long story short, I plugged it into a new psu, and it managed to boot quite cleanly the exact same OS I had installed onto the ATOM.
So they were running an identical OS, the results were quite astounding. Running Super pi at 8m digits took 70s on the epia and 39s on the atom. I also ran a few others but they all came out roughly the same, the atom was about twice as quick.
Now remember the atom came out last year or late 2007 (cant remember) while the epia is from 2002.
So if the new nano is only twice as quick, i'd be surprised. But it is also somewhat more expensive (in AU at least). I'll probably still end up with atom 330 (dual-core) based itx board, just cause its easier to get my hands on.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that google has become evil.... Apple has always been evil to one extent or another, but for the most part i trusted google... now if youtube only supports h.264 then basically they have a method for elimating firefox and opera as competitors. Yay google.
When the spec specifically says "you can have 2 video formats in the one video tag". Why not just support a crappy version in ogg (i.e. low res), low enough that its 25% of the size of the original h264 version. At least mozilla's legs wouldn't get cut off. It would also be a challenge for theora - i.e. google could say "a 1 meg h264 video is like this, make a 250k theora start to look good and maybe we'll balance those numbers a bit".
A 25% hit on storage for google would not be a killer and its a shame it couldn't see its way to doing just that.
Ultimately we can only assume google's motive is "Death to firefox and open standards"
No one gets usenet versus Usenet.com (nor I really). But it certainly has some interesting implications, for example, almost every ISP in Australia has a usenet feed and a full alt.binaries tree. That could make for some "fun times" and i cant only imagine what will happen if the RIAA equivalent in AU gets to mess with our little comunist firewall... err, i mean saviour of our childrens minds.
Given there are already cases against the ISP's in court already.
But, does it really matter? Yeah, usenet was good while it lasted and if this is about to spell it's final "for whom the bell tolls", then so be it. One of the big problems with usenet in the modern era was lack of knowledge of its existence. For example, in my day I sold and bought things on Aus.ads.forsale and now everyone uses ebay cause they know it exists.
But, some of that "social fabric" is changing as well (to more modern things I mean). Take twitter and facebook as a semi-evolutionary step, sure you probably cant easily share copywritten (?) work on them easily, but how long until the google wave becomes a simple, all-access protocol capable of doing the same?
The internet does route around the damage that people do to it, and techo's come up with better tech for avoiding rediculous litigation - but more importantly, they get better at quickly making things that are hard to blame on any one person or organisation while people like the RIAA are struggling to grapple with putting together a case based on incomplete evidence from yesterdays protocols.
Block Bittorrent in AU? go for it, we'll get something else (we had kazaa, napster, emule, etc etc already and we learnt from the various mistakes present in those protocols). In short, techno-people move quick, bit corp's move slow and we're always going to be ahead.
Personally when it comes to all these things all I know is that it puts me off watching movies or listening to music because if I happen to have an MP3 of a song from a CD that was later stolen, chances are I could be possibly in trouble. In alot of industries thats called shooting yourself in the foot.
Oh, and did anyone see that little news report in AU about how movie piracy was funding terrorism? I wonder how much the RIAA payed to have that little piece put on the air (in all fairness, it was physical media piracy as opposed to sharing on the internet, but still)...
Like many others, when i first read it i thought "you lazy cheap SOB". Then it was "wait, he wants to carry around his computer rather then his phone? HOW BIG IS THE F**KING PHONE?"....
But, it is an interesting techo question in the "can it be done" basket. I've tried "nohands" myself previously and wasnt overly excited by it, it would be nice to be able to walk in my home, stick my phone on charge, have it associate with the server at home which can then route my calls in through the ata and out to the pots phones i have (perhaps it could even do the skype ones too). It would be nice for it to figure out the mobiles plugged in and route out-going ones through there as well (given that work pays for my mobile).
I think alot of people missed the "if tiny a piece of hardware can be a handsfree kit, why cant a laptop" idea behind it all. In all fairness the geeks here on slashdot (i include myself) do alot of things because we can, not because we should and because its intriguing to the simple geekly instincts within us. This kind of question certainly qualifies
just my $0.02
I agree with stewbacca on that one, there are plenty of games that can be played for hours and hours on end, 5 minutes at a time. Although if your going to quote "substantive" games that wouldn't work, think things like ghost recon or far cry.
Even a light-on mmo would work so long as the mechanics allowed that type of play (there are some games on facebook that could fall into that category - ok, yes, you can possibly play those in the browser on the ipod, but its more the concept we're talking about here, not specifics).
Not that i've ever played it, but i think pokemon could probably work. Turn-based strategy that dont require heaps of planning (metal gear spring to mind).
heh, this particulary "modding" of informative needs to be on the mod'er guidelines for what not to do.
"Informative!" seriously, someone did mod it "Funny" (as it should be) and it keeps going back to informative and if i understand the mod'ing methodology the guy who got the mod right with "Funny" is the one who'll suffer from all the mod'ers who didnt understand it was a joke.
Something else worth pointing out actually.
It's not a case of "your spoiled for choice", the reality is you rarely get one. If you get a linux distro its going to give you ext2/3/4 (older distro's did allow you do use reiser, xfs, and so forth, but thats mostly gone the way of the dinosaur). The reality is that the linux community has made ext the "most appropriate FS to use" and so they all do use it (that wasnt by popular concensus, it was a case of sheer compatibility and crowd behaviour - i.e. "he's using it, i'll use it too").
Alot of the "extra" fs's in linux are there solely for the benefit of reading other people's file systems (such as UFS, Amiga FS, HPFS, NTFS, and they do take up a huge portion of the list). But thats brilliant right? How many kernels out there have the kind of functionality - none!
Those FS's that dont fall into the "legacy" or "compatability" stack are there for people who need them and know when they need them (i.e. they're for the specialist) and much like if i wanted to use (commercial) xfs on windows, im going to need to know why im doing it and how its going to be done.
Personally, i always get quite excited when i hear about a new fs in the linux kernel. everyone of them is unique and inventive and does serve a purpose. I always wanted to write a tag based file system (and ended up implementing one in fuse once i realised i didnt care about how the data actually got onto the disk), the idea was to get rid of directory structures as we know them (i personally think they are a crap way of storing data, but oh well). I never got it finished but it was going to work like file x.zip has the tags a, b and c. So its accessible a variety of ways (/a/x.zip, /b/x.zip, /a/b/c/x.zip or /b/c/a/x.zip), and you could just move it to change its tags (i.e. mv /a/b/c/x.zip /d/x.zip to remove the a, b and c tags and replace them with d, or cd /c; mv x.zip ../d would remove the "c" tag and replace it with "d"). Back when i first thought of the notion i personally think it was quite unique, but its not without its drawbacks (think backup or any kind of filesystem scraping tool).
But lets put some things in perspective first. Sure windows has NTFS, but its not the only one (as has been pointed out numerous times) - i didnt see anyone list vxfs (veritas), but there are probably as many for windows fs's that aren't part of windows (xfs for eg is available for windows - commercially). The other thing is that its always been called NTFS but its gotten quite a few variants (much like solaris and UFS), so your layman only ever see's "NTFS" and "FAT".
So does it matter? the reality is that 99.999% of people only know ntfs and fat for windows, the same goes for linux really, 99.999% of people are using ext2/3 (now 4) plus FAT. In the windows world they would all have just been called "Ext" and you wouldn't have known that windows NT used ext2 while XP used ext3 and vista used ext4. Linux hasn't chosen to do it that way and for good reasons.
But you should also define "right". Show me a filesystem like ext3cow (essentially a compliance file system) for windows, they do exist, they're not NTFS, you've just never heard of them cause you dont need them, and you've probably not heard of ext3cow either for that matter. The truth is that 99% of people just need ext2/3/4 for hard disks, will use fat for flash and wont care which one they get so long as it stores files. Which again, is exactly like windows, 99% of people know only NTFS for hard disks, fat for removable storage and dont need (or want) to know about the rest - but they do exist and we haven't even mentioned things like win CE, XP embedded, etc.
You will get the occasional lunatic (i say that in a loving way) that'll do something like reiserfs or xfs, but thats your getting-a-bit-hardcore linux type.
One other thing worth pointing out is that part of the reason there are few FS's you've heard of for windows is cause its a nightmare to code them (or was, may not be true anymore). I tried to do one for around the time XP/2003 were available, and it had about 12 different ways of doing exactly the same thing in the driver that you had to implement (i.e. "get the list of files in this directory" had to be implemented 6 different ways for backward compatibility, that was painful). Probably a good reason why any third-party commercial FS's for windows costs a minor fortune.
If your the only IT guy there, then nothing puts the users in their place like "surprise vacation" or "surprise swine flu" or take up a dangerous hobby such as sky diving and pray for (only) a broken leg ;)
Im not entirely joking. They want something done yesterday, well now they'll have to wait 4 weeks to get it done yesterday, OR they get a contractor in who takes twice as long and who is half as nice.
Is the wave really that complex? NO, quite the opposite actually, its fundamentally very simple.
Where it gets complex is the implementation, and much like how people coded for Internet explorer and mozilla, you'll be coding for "wave implementation x or y". By that I mean that what we've seen from google is their implementation of the wave. Which doesn't seem complex, depending on how your looking at it.
As a developer coding robots and gadgets (and so forth), it looks quite simple. But its the google implementation of how you will code such things. Obviously there will be wave implementations that are nothing like the google app engine and hence will have their own api's for coding robots and gadgets (and maybe their own form of extensions that arent robots or gadgets).
Secondly, if we're editing a document together (though it is/will be well specified in format) its up to the "client" to display things correctly, and that could be "interesting" (though with the protocol descriptions so far, that may not be a huge problem). Also, theres the idea of "client"... googles is a web one, but it doesnt have to be that way (i would LOVE to see open office or mozilla run with the idea of a "client" based in the binary space).
One thing I think the wave does that corp's have wanted to do for a long long time is move data to the IDC. This is probably the most common thing i've heard of.
As for live mesh, i've read about it, but being a linux boy i cant see anyway of participating. It talks about this that and the other and about being open, yet when Ray talks about it all he starts talking about exchange... is that an open protocol now (aside from what they released to the web a while ago with all those little "we own you clauses")? And what about OOXML doc format, isnt MS Office not even compliant with its own standard?
It sounds interesting (the mesh), but its hard to understand what its trying to achieve more than file syching, and thats nothing new (imho)...
couldn't agree more.
Back when i first signed up on a 3g network (2003), we got 30 minutes of free video talk per month and this is still a part of my plan today...
I think i've used roughly 10 minutes (since 2003).
Its really not that fantastic.
Not sure if thats sarcasm or not.. but...
One of the first phones I remember having a front-facing camera was the NEC e606 (http://www.gsmarena.com/nec_e606-481.php) which was released when Australia first went to 3g (late 2003). It was one of 3-5 phones available at the time, all with front-facing cameras..
Prior to that, Japan had a 2g/3g variant in about 2001 that also produced alot of front-facing camera phones.
Im in AU, so dont exactly know how the law is to be used. But assuming the law was applied in Australia I was thinking much the same way as other people "so if i've downloaded ubuntu, can they screw me".
At first I was thinking, so a "similarly priced retail product" would be Vista, XP or OSX and I was thinking "So is this a tool for Microsoft and other commercial people to take advantage of", i.e. push people even further away from OSS (or commercial alternatives). As such, Vista in AU costs about $500 for the full retail version, i.e. $50 tax. There is very little advantage in this for MS and RIAA (etc) because all that will happen is that you'll go to jail and rather then being a possible consumer of their products you'd become a non-consumer. MS could never see a cent because its government tax and I never pirated MS software.
The second thing was, "ok, lets assume the similarly priced retail version of ubuntu is a cd with ubuntu burned on it". Again, (at least in AU) there are places that sell these (for very reasonable prices, i.e. the cost of the media + case + shipping and no more than that). The point being that if you did download ubuntu and not pay tax to the govt then yes you would be committing tax evasion.
Im not sure if there are places in the US (there would have to be wouldn't there?) that do similar but there are several place in AU where you could buy many many popular OSS products burned and cased on CD for you (again, for very very fair prices, they're not doing it to make a dime out of selling "Free" software, they're doing for advocacy reasons).
People above are saying that the "price of open office for the similarly prices physical version is 0.00" (or whatever the wording was) but it is not $0.00 and hence is taxable and hence downloading it and not paying taxes would be a violation of the law.
However, it sounds like a tool of a draconian government that isnt interested in screwing average joe, he's interested in getting people the way they got Al Capone - i.e. we cant prove you broke the law by killing people, but you downloaded ubuntu and didn't pay the tax on it, off to jail you go.
Now the way this would work in AU would never be able to benefit MS, the RIAA or similar because they would take no part in the case. The RIAA might report you as a person who's not paying taxes, but they could never reap any rewards for it (ironically, if you did pay some extra tax just to cover yourself, you'd probably be safe). Once the State took on the case (if they had evidence) then the RIAA could never say "ok, pay us $5000 and the problem goes away" - this itself would also be illegal (not only for the RIAA but also the State).
MS might benefit from locking away some OSS advocates, but I doubt even MS would stoop quite that low. They're more interested in conversions and the bad publicity from such a move would probably not be worth it (especially if it was some high profile person like Linus Torvalds).
That said, why do you Linux guys seem to hate standards so much, hmmm? I'm not talking to you specifically fooslacker, but Linux in general. I mean y'all got, what? Three different sound systems now? Would it really be so hard for all the major players to sit down and choose a basic standard, one that will hopefully be rock solid stable with minimal changes and a focus on backwards compatibility, so that writing drivers and programs for the entire Linux ecosystem would be easy and thus attract more companies?
Its comments exactly like that one that make Zealots. The stupidity of such a comment is hard to quantify and universally obvious to anyone who understands what a standard is and what microsoft have done to them. First of all to mix linux, gnome (or any X desktop) and distributions up into one comment that states lack of standards is ridiculous.
But lets look at what MS have done. Starting with TCP/IP, microsoft's answer? "we dont like tcp, here's netbuei and netbios" (they weren't the only ones doing it, but thankfully it failed). Then (closed) smb came next (despite several already open standards for network file systems), and thus everyone else is forced to reverse engineer it (not once, but several times because MS just change it at a whim due to lack of standards). Next Java, do I really have to explain how MS tried to screw java by breaking the one thing it was supposed to be (i.e. cross platform?). Then document formats - finally sun come out with an open standard for a document format, and do MS do, they produce OOXML (and on top of that, their own office product doesnt support it properly). Then to make sure everyones screwed, they produce an ODF plugin for 2007 that breaks everyones implementation. Then theres .NET - supposedly a competitor to java yet lacks the one thing it needs, cross-platform support. Sure, they opened the c# spec, but thats useless without the API being open.
Thats only a couple of examples, HTML, HTTP, MAPI. Kerberos, Active directory, the list of standards MS has polluted (and tried to break) is endless
Who gets screwed in all this? The linux desktop and server OS's out there struggling to build on REAL standards that already exist, and they get angry (anyone who understands the fights would think rightly so) because people say things like "well linux doesn't follow a standard because this thing over here works on windows and doesn't on linux". Well the truth is that linux has fought very very hard to follow the standards, then it has to fight again to reverse engineer broken implementations of the standard that mainly come from MS themselves.
Ultimately "linux" as you put it wears the blame and still it doesn't give up, it continues to reverse engineer and make its products compatible.
Of course when i say linux here it means people like Sun who wrote java and open office (and are forced to reverse engineer the MS document format and code OO to the same lack of standard)
Now lets talk about the desktop, so which desktop standard are you referring to here? The Microsoft standard? Exactly what standard is that? As far as I know the only "Desktop" standards that actually exist (i.e. documented ones) are X + gnome or KDE/Qt - these are documented standards. As for audio, well there is none (unless you mean the undocumented and randomly changed direct sound API from MS). That has been a bad problem on linux in reality since it was born and part of that is inability to produce drivers, then 2 interfaces were born. Now we also have pulse audio (which isnt a linux interface by the way).
So we now have a "culture" of linux desktop environments (lets just look at fedora, redhat and ubuntu), in one corner you have redhat (RHEL) which uses older and more stable/developed interfaces which they stick to between major versions. 5.x has kernel 2.6.18 (and always will) along with a specific version of everything else (gnome, kde, qt, etc), they are all static in version 5.x of RHEL. Fedora is the exact
When i started coding there was no such thing as an idea, really. I think my first IDE was turbo c++ (a dos application).
The one constant in my life has been VI(m) and i've come to rely on it quite heavily.
When I got into visual studio, there was even a plugin back then to make vi work as the editor for visual studio.
But I've also used alot of IDE's, they are "handy" for a number of reasons. Most of it comes from hitting compile and getting links direct to the place in your code when your code failed to compile.
In my more recent time i've used (and not hated) the following IDE's.
Code::blocks
KDE Kdevelop
Visual Studio
Eclipse
Netbeans (v5 was good - version 6 felt like i was coding over vnc via a 14.4k modem it was sooo slow and laggy).
PHPEdit (err, commercial now i think and only php)
Anjuta - fairly simple but binary and fast
Gleany - probably starting to stretch the meaning of "ide" a bit here
Monodevelop and sharpdevelop.
Theres more in there worth mentioning - I just cant remember them all. The thing I really prized in an IDE thought was its ability not to tie me to it (eclipse is great for this, mostly). Like VS and Kdevelop have massive code writing bits that do alot of work for you and when you decide "ahh, i need to use a different IDE" you spend alot of work moving away from them - thats frustration personified.
Eclipse is a beast of a tool, anything you can ever want to do you can find a plugin for (or modify settings to do it for you - like getting it to ssh into another box to actually execute the compile). The sheer bredth of whats available for eclipse is what sets it apart from everything else.
Kdevelop was/is absolutely brilliant at handling coding for unix/qt (it has a "manager" for the automake process which is just awesome).
And the rest all work quite well.
However, my last word is simply this - nothing (imho) can replace a good editor (such as VI). The IDE can provide briliant little extended functionality but nothing is anywhere near as important as what the editor does, this is where you type your code and ultimately the most important part of the process. The generic editors in most IDE's (including visual studio) do have some functionality that can be quite broad, but when you get to know an editor as well as you can know VI there's really nothing that compares. (by the way, im a VI boy, but coders i know who use emacs can do anything i can just as efficiently - so choose emacs or VI you cant go wrong).
The problem is learning an editor like VI (or emacs) takes patience and often its not until someone shows you some little trick they did in VI without even taking their hand off the keyboard that makes people go "wow, thats some pretty useful functionality" and you start wanting to learn more. But being able to do almost anything from the : menu in VI with a few choice commands is something that truely becomes invaluable in terms of efficiency (i.e. not reaching for the mouse). No one really seems to appreciate that until they actually see it in use though.
The human direct-neural-interface a-lah the books by Peter F Thompson (either the newer void series or the nights dawn) - though he wasn't the first, just the most current IMHO.
Having worked in the arena of simulation during the early-to-late 90's and working with a company dedicated to 3d and simulation the tech had many flaws (HMD systems) and continues to.
Consider big-end flight sims such as those that CAE produces (http://www.cae.com/en/). If those huge systems could be replaced with hmd's (and it has been tried on many occasions) you cut the cost of many many things by massive factors. Those machines they produce are entire cockpits on hydraulic jacks and they work well - but are dedicated to a purpose.
Personally, i always wanted *Some* form of hmd myself, but more for informational purposes then a full-on augmented reality. i.e. Jump on my bike and show me the vital stats in the visual range - speed, direction, rpm, gear, etc (again, systems dedicated to this purpose exist, im aware of that), but i also want to be able to walk down the street and be told "turn left at this next intersection to get to some place" and "Joe Blogs has sent you an sms" and be able to read it without even moving my head.
I believe that chances are that aint going to happen in a realistic way until we do develop some kind of direct-into-the-brain link with an interface something like bluetooth that anything can connect to (i say bluetooth, but i actually mean an interface that WORKS). The scary part of that is when you combine something like this with MS's latest patent on extorting money from people you just have to be fearful ;)
I do have an acer aspire one.. came with linpus, 8gb flash and 512mb of ram... day one I had ram lying around and stuck in an extra 1gb. So, fair's fair I have 1.5gb of ram. The reason I bought the aa1 by the way is that it was impossible to get anything else (still is pretty much except for the 7' eeepc's). I almost got a 900 eeepc when it was available, but the 901 came out so quick I thought I'd hang back. To this day, finding a 901 (or any of asus' newer models) is near impossible with linux (or anything other then acer actually - MSI, Dell, HP, none of them come with a linux distro down here in Australia).
After replacing linpus (i quite liked this OS by the way) with ubuntu 8.04 (or 8.10, i cant remember) just to try UNR I was quite impressed. I also tried windows xp, vista and MAC OS X on it. None of these were trivial to install at the time - which is not MS or apples fault in any way (mac os was slightly easier cause I could install it happily to an external HD). Vista was a nightmare, XP was OK but the speed of the acer aspire one's flash in the 8gb model is not fantastic (as people have noted in the past).
I recently changed to 9.04 ubuntu and WOW what a difference - they have a distro specifically for the netbooks now and it is much faster (in my experience) then 8 was and definitely faster then XP.
I've not tried windows 7 on it and im probably not going to, i've tried 7 on a few other machines with limited success. Its better than vista, worse then XP in some ways that just cant be quantified in a slashdot post (thats my general feeling).
Surfice it to say, win 7 on a machine where it works well is quite nice. But on a netbook I just dont really see the point when you compare it to ubuntu 9 (im a fedora guy by the way). With evolution or thunderbird and Open office 3 theres very little else that I need (on a netbook) that it cant provide and the UNR interface is quite well designed for it. Keep in mind the breadth of software IN the ubuntu repo's is quite substantial so if your looking for a game to play or an application targetting some facet of your life your likely to find it there somewhere, so from a "what software can I get for it" its pretty useful to the netbook and you dont have to go hunting that hard for software (it was even quite easy to get the citrix ica client working which my gf uses to connect to work - much to my supprise).
Hey, thats my humble opinion - and given the little article the other day about 2007's ODF support I feel much happier using open office!. By the way did anyone else find it strange that as soon as open office started to support OOXML (ooxml that works with office 2007 - not the ISO OOXML by the way) that MS do an about-face on ODF and produce a broken version?
The best thing about ubuntu 9 on the netbook though is that given the target hardware its quite impressive from a perspective of people who dont know what a command line is. It supported my gf's 3g usb dongle out of the box rather then needing drivers (which crashed her vista laptop). But in reality I never really hated vista that much - the 3g driver thing was the hardware manufactures fault. I DO very much hate microsoft for many very relevant reasons - not worth discussing here.
Seriously though, if you've not tried ubuntu 9 on a netbook, its very very worth a look into - for the tasks you could expect a netbook to perform.
I wonder what it really means for the sparc (hardware) platform? It was a nice platform and continues to be in some ways but always feels like its slowly dieing off due to lack of r&d. Its quite possible the the sparc platform will morph its way into the IBM RISC chipsets I guess? The whole backward binary compatibility thing would probably go out the window (which was quite a plus for solaris in someways). Hopefully though theres some engineer in IBM that has the brains to be able to create some "best of breed" cpu (though they've not managed to yet obviously) cause I love the (relatively new) cool-threads and sparc vi line.
I grew up as an admin on sunos then solaris and i loved them both, more then any other commercial unix offering practically. I dont see IBM getting rid of that really, and I dont see them rationalising the platforms either (they haven't really done so yet - they've pushed people to move from platforms they own to AIX and linux, but not to the n'th degree).
Java is an interesting one and I hope glassfish doesn't bite the bullet and that eclipse gets some of the "nice" bits from netbeans cause they're both fantastic products - of course, in the J2EE realm nothing beats websphere (IMHO, i've worked on J2EE as an integration type for many years, websphere, sun one, weblogic, oracle, tomcat, you name it and I probably know it intimately). Sun ONE j2ee certainly improved, but websphere was just such a brilliant product in many respects. But, while java certainly helped unix at the server, i personally think its done more harm then good at the desktop.
Then theres MySQL, obviously not going anywhere but I wonder what might happen license wise? IBM certainly have no problems doing the GPL thing, so in reality its probably going to be a good thing with some db2/mysql crossover coming down the track (yes, db2 does have some features that make it worth it).
As for storagetek, IBM have shark and they both kinda suck. The old (entrenched) storage vendors are really beginning to suffer at the hands of the newer people coming out (if you've worked in SAN's for the last couple of years, you know what I mean). Alot of new companies have gotten somewhere just because they took a new view to storage. Lets face it, EMC (stotek, hds, etc) have been doing almost the exact same thing with storage - management wise - for decades and its antique tech, sure they've added some minor bits of functionality (eg EMC got alua - woopdy doo), but look at some of the new companies and what they do with storage and you wonder. OF course, IBM have already seen this and bought XIV which is a much more modern way of dealing with "spinning rusty metal" that makes alot more sence these days, even if it only does sata. (Sorry, didn't mean to bash EMC I just know them the best in terms of hardware).
Of course, anything that does happen will take a number of years. IBM will be required to support what Sun currently has in the field and Sun have long service lives in software and hardware. I doubt very much IBM are going to start heading to customer sites going "rip out yon M4000 and replace with a pseries", it just wouldn't work.
Just on the (OT) "apple is unix" thing, yeah apple is unix and alot of unix people do feel at home in it. Personally I dont like apple, I fear them more then I fear microsoft because they want to own everything (hardware and software) while MS are hardware sluts. Im also not much of a fan of the interface, to me it seems clunky like gnome does (I live on a linux desktop just for the record and own an iPod) but the mac interface is much prettier but the one thing i've wanted is a more compact interface (compare nautalus to windows explorer side by side and look at the space-waste in gnome for example - same goes on the apple interface and its space-wastage). Oh, and no I dont mean that gnome and the apple interface have anything in common other then they both allow you to use a mouse and keyboard! The one thing I will thank Apple for (altho, probably just as fair to thank MS
Having used linux since prior to distributions existing, i love it on the desktop and at the server. My first was slackware, but redhat was very close behind that (simply for the package management). Not to sound like a sad baby, but to see someone that prominent in the linux "community" is depressing.
Every now and then i see things in linux that impress the hell out of me in the desktop (even after this many years), like recently using a scanner (haven't done that in years) and seeing how far xsane has come was quite amazing, and there are so many examples of that on linux.
Its depressing to see linux software thats suffered from being primarily targeted at windows (and has the pain of bad porting) such as firefox and to a lesser extend open office.
But all that aside, the thing that really REALLY pisses me off (pardon the language) is companies that rely on linux for life and then dont support it on the desktop. Take vmware esx and citrix xen server as an example - both unmanageable from a linux desktop. Theres too many example of that to list, specially in the hardware makers.
It's really quite frustrating to see posts like this. Posts that dont take into account what is needed and focus on what we are incapable of doing - even when they dont need to.
So lets look at reality for second. First, most modern OS's scale very very far past 4 cpu's (not sure what windows scales to, but linux certainly has no limitation based on current cpu reality). So the kernels are just dandy for multi-core cpu's, bring it on! 128 cores, we're ready for ya!.
The same is not true at the application level, and that is a fair comment. But dont confuse linux and windows with their apps for crying out loud! From an application point of view we are capable of parallel coding, but its non-trivial. Its also not something we need alot of the time.
For instance, we now buy servers (our cheapest models) with dual cpu's and quad cores and we're tending to virtualise it up into several machines with 1 or 2 cpu's each. Now whether you do this because you assume the OS will utilise one cpu and the apps will utilise another (as one person told me is irrelavent). Surfice it to say, having 2 cpu's is usually quite nice.
But what requires more then that in reality? well, your desktop might - after all theres alot of things going on at once right? In some point cases, thats true (there are quite a number of very heavy applications out there, and supprise supprise, they can multitask *GASP*).
Same at the server, not many things require that many CPU's and even at the application level, we've gotten good at spreading heavily loaded applications across multiple servers (we call it load balancing, was that too sarcastic?). Take mail (weather its exchange or postfix or sendmail or whatever), or web servers, etc. Those server applications that do require heavy grunt tend to already be coded with "parallel" in mind, even across multiple servers (think oracle RAC).
As for cache contention - well it sounds like the hardware makers are finally fess'ing up to the fact they have a problem, Houston!
Way back when the whole thing about fat being patented hit slashdot there were a few articles. One in particular was about nearly every camera manufacturer ponying up the dollars after the patent was uphelp... they all paid $250k to use fat (so no, this isnt new - and this was all on slashdot by the way).
Also, people keep missing the point of the patent (i.e. whats being licensed) keep an eye on whats being licensed here, its important. This is not "oh your flash card has a fat filesystem on it, you have to pay for it". Its "your device can read and write fat"... NOT THE STORAGE CARD! its the DEVICE that can read and write FAT (specifically long-file names capable FAT). Do we get what the license is for now?
Now what filesystem exactly would they switch to? joe blogs goes and downloads the update, plugs his flash card into his windows box and (formats the flash card if required - as fat or ntfs). Then plugs that into the tomtom device. Tomtom device doesnt read fat(32) and so it doesnt work...
i.e. tom tom are essentially forced to license a patent based the fact they are forced to implement fat in their device.
I personally hope tomtom fight it. from the words of (whats is possibly) the worlds most moronic OP "TomTom needs some serious explaining to do as to why they aren't licensing FAT.". You dont think Tom-tom already knew about it? you dont think they ever read the (very very public) news about it happening to the camera makers?
But in reality, it should read more like "the patent office have some serious explaining to do in order to justify why FAT was ever allowed to be patented". Those patents should never have been allowed - there is nothing remotely inventive about fat with long file names.
This "Norton" thing is a symbiont like the thing that chick in deep space 9 had (i.e. you take it away and it kills you?), but it was also hiding behind the grassy knoll some time near the early 1960's?
and big brother is trying to root our kit so we cant post about the aliens, err weather baloon, we weren't meant to see?
hmmmm.... glad i dont use that "windows" thing...
I love package management, but I think the main point of the article is that people want an easy way to install packages.
Think windows... double-click setup.exe or program.msi and an icon appears after a setup dialog.
That doesnt translate so well to the unix world, specially not with rpm and deb running around along side source distribution... coming from a solaris (pkg) environment I LOVED package management when i understood it (and rpm/deb were even kewler than pkg). But it is confusing for your average joe, no doubt about it.
I know i've seen one already (thought not quite exactly how it should work), but a package system that makes a executable "blob" that you double click and installs an rpm or a deb depending on your OS would benefit linux so very much.
Distro's dont like you stepping away from their repo's, but it can be hard not to.
if you'd ever been in japan for a while you'd realise how wrong you are... japan had email when we were moving to digital (from analog) and that gap has existed ever since. Its not about having a TV on the phone, its about many other factors. SMS (mms) was never all that used in japan because they already had superior tech (i.e. email).
Most of the factors are about tech thats a generation or two ahead of everyone else - because both the tech market (phone makers) and the comm's (mobile providers) can move very fast - its a small island with a big market, throwing up new towers is easy. Pushing out a new phone tech is also quiet easy - if you know how to market to the japanese.
If you want to talk about computing, then yeah, they are behind - but not when it comes to gadgetry (in fact, anything build in japan tends to be ahead, anything built elsewhere tends to be behind).
While I dont anymore, I used to live and work in japan (first went there around 2000), and im really not that supprised.
As someone else said, there is a certain amount of nationalism (buy Japanese!), but its really not as bad in the corporate work culture as people make out, they promote the best people for the job (gaijin or not), but its hard to be the best person for the job when your competing against the japanese who are willing to do 18hrs a day to get ahead.
Now the japanese are ahead of the rest of the world in electronic gadgets - true, but computing wise, they're quite a bit behind (because of nationalism mostly).
However, when it comes to mobile phones, the japanese were doing email and had data connections to their phones (in the hdspa range) when the rest of the world were doing WAP, SMS and that first data technology (GPRS?). For me when i first arrived it was techno-culture shock because they had these amazing gadgets we only dreamed of, while computers were slow and felt like antiques.
But the defining characteristic of any japanese phones is the ability to input text (japanese) well - not something i imagine the iphone does. They also are able to install anything they want on their phones - again, not something you can do on an iphone. But it doesn't end there. There are so many things about the iphone that make it useless to the japanese compared to the competition. Coming from a non-japanese manufacturer, you really have to be a step ahead in order to get any market share and the iphone just isn't, its also expensive (in an on-going sense).
Now the last 4 phones i've had have been the HTC TYNT II, the Dopod D810, the Sony Erricson 810 and a nokia (who's model i cant remember). The HTC has been one of the worst phones i've had, its slow and has many problems (my boss chooses to reboot his every morning just to make sure) so when the iphone 3g (we didnt get 2g in AU) came out (and i had an ipod touch), i was KEEN, the interface is fast (dont care intuitive or easy to use - these often hinder rather then help). My iPod can pull down all my email (3 different accounts, exchange, imap and google) while my htc has barely made a connection to the local exchange server (even when plugged up via usb to a machine on the network). But when apple started charging for firmware updates and locked out the ability to code my own apps (or download anyone else's) i was disgusted. "oh, but its not firmware update, its a software update" - believe this if you will but your an idiot if you do.
Surfice it to say, the iphone just wont stack up against the local japanese models in terms of what the japanese want and its too "locked out" for a tech-savy (almost all of them) Japanese - did apple really think they were going to get the japanese to pay for "apple tv" - shear stupidity.?
What surprises me is that its only twice as fast.
A Looong time ago, when htpc's were becoming something interesting in AU (not long before digital tv was broadcast on all stations in AU - around 2002). I bought an epia nehemiah m10k (there weren't many to choose from at the time, the m8k was the other one and the big diff between the two was one was passive cooled and the other active - i got the active one for the extra cpu grunt).
Anyways, a short time ago I noticed that intel were shipping mini-itx boards and I was initially interested in the conroe-capable (dual and quad core) mini-itx boards, but also happened to get a netbook (the original acer ones a110 i think?). What I wanted was a small box i could shove into the small space somewhere in our IDC for taking mail relay traffic and doing a small amount of web serving (php gallery).
So I installed fedora 10 onto the atom on an external 320gb usb hd. At some point I remembered the epia I had lying around (still had a 256m stick of ram in it - versus the atom's 1.5gb) and when it died originally I never bothered to figure out whether the power supply had bit the dust or the board itself.
Long story short, I plugged it into a new psu, and it managed to boot quite cleanly the exact same OS I had installed onto the ATOM.
So they were running an identical OS, the results were quite astounding. Running Super pi at 8m digits took 70s on the epia and 39s on the atom. I also ran a few others but they all came out roughly the same, the atom was about twice as quick.
Now remember the atom came out last year or late 2007 (cant remember) while the epia is from 2002.
So if the new nano is only twice as quick, i'd be surprised. But it is also somewhat more expensive (in AU at least). I'll probably still end up with atom 330 (dual-core) based itx board, just cause its easier to get my hands on.