Their "IMAP support" means logging on into the server once in 15 minutes to check mail. And even that is buggy. Sorry, but IMAP without IDLE is about as useless as a server with greylisting. And to even connect I have to stunnel it through, as I'm not suicidal enough to send everything in plain text.
About SSL: it's not a certificate issue, as the server logs don't even show a connection attempt.
Multitasking: of course n900 does it, duh. The GP said that it's "impossible to run out of memory", my response was about a single program routinely running into swap, and running multiple ones making things even worse.
Are you sure a small laptop wouldn't be better for your requirements?
You can't put a laptop into a pocket, and unless it's a little dingy netbook even a bag would have little space left. N900 fits into a pocket.
I do agree that a bit more memory wouldn't hurt. Then again, the current amount is probably enough for almost all users...
I'd say that if every single newer smartphone has 512MB or more (Milestone 2, Nokia N9, iPhone 4), this suggests at least all producers say it's not enough.
Just asked a coworker about how much memory he has free on his N900. He had 80MB free.
Uhm, freshly rebooted, PR1.3, a few daemons disabled but not browserd (yet), the only extra daemon is batterygraph, titan's kernel -- 54MB free. Of course, it goes up and down as things get swapped away, but sadly, there's a daemon that ensures all of preloaded stuff stays in memory rather than swap -- they will get briefly swapped out then quickly loaded again.
Have you fucking read my reply? No you just repeat inane statements, shouting around. And insult people.
Just think: what do you use your computer for? Not fart "apps" and stuff like "torchlight" which sets the display to all-white.
Even the basics like a WWW browser or an usable e-mail program don't really fit in the 60MB left. Nokia's microb is a bad joke -- unusably slow, no tabbed browsing, controls that make you weep. Their e-mail client, "modest", can't even do SSL (wtf?) and has no working IMAP support.
You can install Firefox which, especially with Fennec 4, is pretty good and fast, but will often swap even if you don't have anything else running.
And running only one program at once -- is that a freaking iPhone? The last single-tasking system I used was MS-DOS and I don't want to go there ever again.
Maemo isn't a really sane system, so for anything more complex you need to install Debian, at least in a chroot. And this means there are two sets of all libraries and basics like bash in memory -- which leads to swapping right at the start. Now what about decompressing something? A modern compressor like xz takes ~90MB to unpack things -- and note that even before the second set of libraries we had 60MB.
The keyboard is not that hot but it's only a bit worse than laptops -- and look at how many people use laptops exclusively. Have you ever been away from home and had to quickly fix some bug? Around here, pings over the air start at 400-600ms, making interactive ssh a bad joke. I compiled and tested stuff right on the phone on a couple occasions, quite comfortably except for the massive swappeathon during link -- c++ code takes gobs of memory then. A bit more memory would make that fine.
Not everyone is a developer, but more common tasks are hurt as well -- like, the very video editing you mentioned. A device with _two_ video cameras naturally can be expected to be able to edit the output, what's wrong with that? And, haven't you read/. articles about face recognition projects using n900 as the platform -- since it has decent video input, a good CPU, 32GB disk and doesn't go out of its way to prevent people from running custom code. And for face recognition you obviously need some memory.
Uhm... are you really doing nothing more than running "apps"? If so, you could as well buy a dumbed down toy like iPhone.
Unlike a phone with a few fart "apps", n900 can run any Linux program you want. It is a full-blown portable computer. Too bad, there's little you can do with only 60MB left after Nokia's crap without a massive swappeathon.
Also, the idea of persistent programs has been thought before. Heck, I once came up with it myself when I was studying (>12 years ago), and talked about it with a professor (Janina Mincer). She immediately pointed a number of flaws: * you'll lose all your data the moment your program crashes. Trying to continue from a badly inconsistent state just ensures further corruption. COWing it from a snapshot is not a solution since you don't know if the original snapshot didn't already have some hidden corruption. * there is no way to make an upgrade -- even for a trivial bugfix * config files are human-editable in sane systems for a reason, having the setup only in internal variables would destroy that
n900 may be a nice device otherwise but only 256MB is totally crippling. Most recent smartphones come with 512MB these days. So even for just RAM, having merely "plans" about migrating to 64 bit today is not overkill, it's long overdue.
About your idea of just mmapping everything: the speed difference between memory and disk/flash is so big that the current split is pretty vital to a non-toy OS. I'd limit mmap to specific tasks, for which it is indeed underused.
Oif. My stupid native language has double negatives meaning the same as a single negative, it's my fault reading too carelessly made me misparse this in English. Sorry.
Sheer numbers don't say anything about your quality. Being read by a small part of general public, while bigger in absolute numbers, means you are less relevant than something read by a significant portion of sysadmins/programmers/etc.
Or, are you going to say the likes of People or Cosmo are suddenly of higher quality than any of the above?
Yes, he's the most deserving candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in a decade or two. Certainly more deserving than mr. ok-well-promise-we-will-send-a-few-less-suicide-bombers-but-don't-really-count-on-it or mr. let's-try-to-unseat-Bush-from-the-title-of-worst-US-president-ever.
But even though even Pentagon itself grudgingly admitted that Assange is right, Swedes apparently lack the balls.
Agree, this is not legible, especially when enlarged. And, here's my font from a good while ago which is not only slightly smaller (or would be if it was variable pitch) but also a good deal more readable. Can be enlarged without loss, too.
Uhm, no. You can't force a client to use IPv6, just like you can't force them to upgrade from Win98.
This is about a few bastards with broken routers blocking the upgrade for the rest of us. ISPs don't want to add IPv6 support because those few people with broken routers would cause an outcry that "this ISP sucks, their Internet is broken".
To move forward, there is no need to force IPv6 onto everyone -- those routers don't need to be upgraded to support IPv6, merely to not break down in the presence of IPv6.
Then they'll just use IPv4. We're not talking about single-stack IPv6 for now, and not for many years from now as well.
There were several criminally broken models of home routers that blackholed AAAA DNS requests causing long timeouts, but they are basically the only technical obstacle to giving customers native dual stack, at least where the last mile is concerned. And those can get their firmware upgraded.
Not to mention portraits of the prophets everywhere, worship rituals, religious processions (with mandatory attendance), holy scripture and a priest class.
The last part is even funnier if you consider that the primary claimed benefit of communism was a "class-less society".
Uhm, a filename clash gets you a RC bug in no time, just as appropriate scripts get run. This doesn't cause an outright rejection only because there are special cases when clashes are dealt with some other way -- but with Conflicts:, Breaks:, Replaces: fields and alternatives/diverts, I can't even think of any case when that's actually needed, so introducing such a clash being not rejected on upload is probably just a historical thing. Unless you run unstable, you're not going to ever run into such an issue.
I guess that the RPM world may be different -- but with Debian and derivatives, about all legally distributable software that is of any use is present in official repositories.
I have yet to see an unofficial repository done that badly, too. The worst I've seen is Mozilla's inability to properly produce Release files for their fennec builds.
Uhm, but using the packaging system already present can do the same with less waste, better support for distribution and with existing tools. File-based dependencies like in RPM may be slightly deficient here, but with package-based dependencies like in.DEB you have full control over what you want.
There were multiple such systems for working against the packaging system already like autopackage, and they turned out to be a disaster. I fail to see how this one is any different.
You are assuming that WP8 will magically be a success, with, as you say, "25% of the market". What are the reasons to think that? It's not like WP7 is the first or second of Microsoft's forays into phones -- just look at the aptly named WinCE or the recent Microsoft Kin flop.
Anti-bacterial agents are only a very minor part of the toothpaste. It's mostly about detergents helping mechanically removing bacteria and rotting organic matter.
There's little evolution can do to let a bacteria resist getting physically yanked off the surface of teeth if it wants to be able to feed on the remnants of your meals. With merely killing germs, survivors can not only reproduce again but they even have some food readily available.
Slashdot Mirror
Their "IMAP support" means logging on into the server once in 15 minutes to check mail. And even that is buggy. Sorry, but IMAP without IDLE is about as useless as a server with greylisting. And to even connect I have to stunnel it through, as I'm not suicidal enough to send everything in plain text.
About SSL: it's not a certificate issue, as the server logs don't even show a connection attempt.
Multitasking: of course n900 does it, duh. The GP said that it's "impossible to run out of memory", my response was about a single program routinely running into swap, and running multiple ones making things even worse.
Are you sure a small laptop wouldn't be better for your requirements?
You can't put a laptop into a pocket, and unless it's a little dingy netbook even a bag would have little space left. N900 fits into a pocket.
I do agree that a bit more memory wouldn't hurt. Then again, the current amount is probably enough for almost all users...
I'd say that if every single newer smartphone has 512MB or more (Milestone 2, Nokia N9, iPhone 4), this suggests at least all producers say it's not enough.
Just asked a coworker about how much memory he has free on his N900. He had 80MB free.
Uhm, freshly rebooted, PR1.3, a few daemons disabled but not browserd (yet), the only extra daemon is batterygraph, titan's kernel -- 54MB free. Of course, it goes up and down as things get swapped away, but sadly, there's a daemon that ensures all of preloaded stuff stays in memory rather than swap -- they will get briefly swapped out then quickly loaded again.
Have you fucking read my reply? No you just repeat inane statements, shouting around. And insult people.
Just think: what do you use your computer for? Not fart "apps" and stuff like "torchlight" which sets the display to all-white.
Even the basics like a WWW browser or an usable e-mail program don't really fit in the 60MB left. Nokia's microb is a bad joke -- unusably slow, no tabbed browsing, controls that make you weep. Their e-mail client, "modest", can't even do SSL (wtf?) and has no working IMAP support.
You can install Firefox which, especially with Fennec 4, is pretty good and fast, but will often swap even if you don't have anything else running.
And running only one program at once -- is that a freaking iPhone? The last single-tasking system I used was MS-DOS and I don't want to go there ever again.
Maemo isn't a really sane system, so for anything more complex you need to install Debian, at least in a chroot. And this means there are two sets of all libraries and basics like bash in memory -- which leads to swapping right at the start. Now what about decompressing something? A modern compressor like xz takes ~90MB to unpack things -- and note that even before the second set of libraries we had 60MB.
The keyboard is not that hot but it's only a bit worse than laptops -- and look at how many people use laptops exclusively. Have you ever been away from home and had to quickly fix some bug? Around here, pings over the air start at 400-600ms, making interactive ssh a bad joke. I compiled and tested stuff right on the phone on a couple occasions, quite comfortably except for the massive swappeathon during link -- c++ code takes gobs of memory then. A bit more memory would make that fine.
Not everyone is a developer, but more common tasks are hurt as well -- like, the very video editing you mentioned. A device with _two_ video cameras naturally can be expected to be able to edit the output, what's wrong with that? And, haven't you read /. articles about face recognition projects using n900 as the platform -- since it has decent video input, a good CPU, 32GB disk and doesn't go out of its way to prevent people from running custom code. And for face recognition you obviously need some memory.
Uhm... are you really doing nothing more than running "apps"? If so, you could as well buy a dumbed down toy like iPhone.
Unlike a phone with a few fart "apps", n900 can run any Linux program you want. It is a full-blown portable computer. Too bad, there's little you can do with only 60MB left after Nokia's crap without a massive swappeathon.
I've since switched back to Altavista.
Except that Altavista is long gone. And Yahoo is beyond useless, worse than even Bing with which it's going to merge.
Also, the idea of persistent programs has been thought before. Heck, I once came up with it myself when I was studying (>12 years ago), and talked about it with a professor (Janina Mincer). She immediately pointed a number of flaws:
* you'll lose all your data the moment your program crashes. Trying to continue from a badly inconsistent state just ensures further corruption. COWing it from a snapshot is not a solution since you don't know if the original snapshot didn't already have some hidden corruption.
* there is no way to make an upgrade -- even for a trivial bugfix
* config files are human-editable in sane systems for a reason, having the setup only in internal variables would destroy that
n900 may be a nice device otherwise but only 256MB is totally crippling. Most recent smartphones come with 512MB these days. So even for just RAM, having merely "plans" about migrating to 64 bit today is not overkill, it's long overdue.
About your idea of just mmapping everything: the speed difference between memory and disk/flash is so big that the current split is pretty vital to a non-toy OS. I'd limit mmap to specific tasks, for which it is indeed underused.
Oif. My stupid native language has double negatives meaning the same as a single negative, it's my fault reading too carelessly made me misparse this in English. Sorry.
Sheer numbers don't say anything about your quality. Being read by a small part of general public, while bigger in absolute numbers, means you are less relevant than something read by a significant portion of sysadmins/programmers/etc.
Or, are you going to say the likes of People or Cosmo are suddenly of higher quality than any of the above?
but that doesn't mean people who buy lottery tickets aren't morons
Actually, they are. Buying a lottery ticket with monetary gains in mind means you fail basic math.
Yes, he's the most deserving candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in a decade or two. Certainly more deserving than mr. ok-well-promise-we-will-send-a-few-less-suicide-bombers-but-don't-really-count-on-it or mr. let's-try-to-unseat-Bush-from-the-title-of-worst-US-president-ever.
But even though even Pentagon itself grudgingly admitted that Assange is right, Swedes apparently lack the balls.
Angband not as in the game but as in 2nd fortress of Melkor in Tolkien's books. But when speaking of roguelikes, I happen to be a DCSS dev.
Neither freetype nor Windows have any means to use pre-antialiased fonts. Your program would have to draw text by itself like mine did.
Whoops, sorry, it's .html not .pl. 301ed it.
That's why my font doesn't use a traditional 'a' but a reduced version of uppercase 'A'. This may seem weird but fixes the problem you mention.
Agree, this is not legible, especially when enlarged. And, here's my font from a good while ago which is not only slightly smaller (or would be if it was variable pitch) but also a good deal more readable. Can be enlarged without loss, too.
What you linked to is even worse, in some embedded plugin I'm hell not going to download.
They have exactly as many static as dynamic IPs. It used to be different in the days of dial-up, but these days about all connections are 24/7.
Ask your ISP. Since static IPs cost them less than dynamic ones, this is entirely a way for them to double-dip for more money.
Uhm, no. You can't force a client to use IPv6, just like you can't force them to upgrade from Win98.
This is about a few bastards with broken routers blocking the upgrade for the rest of us. ISPs don't want to add IPv6 support because those few people with broken routers would cause an outcry that "this ISP sucks, their Internet is broken".
To move forward, there is no need to force IPv6 onto everyone -- those routers don't need to be upgraded to support IPv6, merely to not break down in the presence of IPv6.
Then they'll just use IPv4. We're not talking about single-stack IPv6 for now, and not for many years from now as well.
There were several criminally broken models of home routers that blackholed AAAA DNS requests causing long timeouts, but they are basically the only technical obstacle to giving customers native dual stack, at least where the last mile is concerned. And those can get their firmware upgraded.
Not to mention portraits of the prophets everywhere, worship rituals, religious processions (with mandatory attendance), holy scripture and a priest class.
The last part is even funnier if you consider that the primary claimed benefit of communism was a "class-less society".
Uhm, a filename clash gets you a RC bug in no time, just as appropriate scripts get run. This doesn't cause an outright rejection only because there are special cases when clashes are dealt with some other way -- but with Conflicts:, Breaks:, Replaces: fields and alternatives/diverts, I can't even think of any case when that's actually needed, so introducing such a clash being not rejected on upload is probably just a historical thing. Unless you run unstable, you're not going to ever run into such an issue.
I guess that the RPM world may be different -- but with Debian and derivatives, about all legally distributable software that is of any use is present in official repositories.
I have yet to see an unofficial repository done that badly, too. The worst I've seen is Mozilla's inability to properly produce Release files for their fennec builds.
Uhm, but using the packaging system already present can do the same with less waste, better support for distribution and with existing tools. File-based dependencies like in RPM may be slightly deficient here, but with package-based dependencies like in .DEB you have full control over what you want.
There were multiple such systems for working against the packaging system already like autopackage, and they turned out to be a disaster. I fail to see how this one is any different.
You are assuming that WP8 will magically be a success, with, as you say, "25% of the market". What are the reasons to think that? It's not like WP7 is the first or second of Microsoft's forays into phones -- just look at the aptly named WinCE or the recent Microsoft Kin flop.
Super-plaque bacteria, here we come.
Anti-bacterial agents are only a very minor part of the toothpaste. It's mostly about detergents helping mechanically removing bacteria and rotting organic matter.
There's little evolution can do to let a bacteria resist getting physically yanked off the surface of teeth if it wants to be able to feed on the remnants of your meals. With merely killing germs, survivors can not only reproduce again but they even have some food readily available.