This was inevitable, given Apple's move to Unix. It was just a matter of time before they ported smbmount to Darwin--or recreated it--and tied it into their network volume mounting UI.
Which means likely death to Thursby, makers of DAVE, the most popular SMB/CIFS client for MacOS. Maybe their Mac OS X port--now in open beta--will ship with some features or performance advantages that will keep it in some niche. Say, Active Directory integration or much better filetype mapping. Not likely though. I'm surprised they didn't see this coming. I guess nobody at Thursby has used a Unix-family OS that can run smbmount. If they had, they might have cashed out the company and gone into EOL support mode while they found something else to do.
I hope you don't think the card slot on your camcorder is for recording video. Unless you're getting a new camcorder Sony hasn't announced yet, those Memory Stick and PC Card slots are both for storing still images. Lousy, low-res ones.
Even the $2500 Sony camcorders max out at 640x480 for stills, which look nice on a computer screen or a TV, but they won't make for anything bigger than a so-so 3"x5" print640x480 digital still cameas sell for $70 these days. And on a 128MB card or Memory Stick, you can fit about 1300 images at that resolution. Isn't that enough?
There are camcorders now out there that can do 1280x960 still images, but I don't think Sony makes one, and in any case, that's still bottom-of-the-line by digital still-camera standards these days. Remember: digital video cameras are terrible still cameras, and digital still cameras are terrible video cameras.
If you could dump video to the PC Card slot in the camcorder the 5GB drive would be nice for that. But you can't.
On the other hand, if you have one of those new Nikon D-1x or Kodak 760 3000x2000 resolution still cameras ($4000 or $7000, respectively, without a lens, flash or AC adaptor), something like this is good indeed, since the raw, lossless images take up about 18MB each. A 5GB card would hold a couple hundred such images, or a couple thousand minimal-loss JPEGs. That's pretty nice. A 5GB device would even be good for the "3 megapixel" 2000x1500 class of cameras, with plenty of room for a month or more of heavy shooting. But for the 640x480 images camcorders put out?
Funny, but I came to the LP game later, in 1983 or so. And at that point, most albums were $$8 with, yes, the premium titles with gatefold sleeves and booklets and holograms and crap at $9. Double albums were $11.
Were were you buying records? Sam Goody? Mall chains? (Where, incidentally, most CDs sell for $17 in-store today, not $15. They're $15 online, where the difference is mde up in handling fees.)
By my calculations, an album that ran $8 in 1983 is $14 and change in today's dollars. Which is about right at most of the places I shop--independent record stores.
However, inflation has just gotten us there. By my reckoning using the same calculator, CDs should have been selling for $10-$12 ten years ago if they were priced to mirror vinyl pricing. And since the early '90s, CDs have been much cheaper to produce and distribute than LPs, and are less vulnerable to heat and water damage or breakage while in transit.
Since phone service in and out of Afghanistan is even worse these days than that in Pakistan (and that's saying something!), there shouldn't be too much concern about any but the wealthiest and most powerful people dialing out to AOL successfully via Afghani phone lines. And most of those people who are still in Afghanistan at all are considered enemies of the regime and under watch anyway.
For another thing, the Taliban is pretty good at using severe punishments as a deterrent. Beatings, reeducation camps and death at the hands of the morals police have brought Afghanistan's heroin-smuggling routes to a halt. Not a trickle, but a halt.
It's hard to imagine anyone risking internet access. You might see a trickle of UUCP-relayed e-mail continue below the radar via 2400-baud modem connections, but that's about it.
Make all the jokes you want from the comfort of your developed country re: how they'll monitor this, but in a country with only a few hundred outbound phone lines in working order, if that--prehistoric analog ones switched by hand--it doesn't take much to eavesdrop on all of them at once and listen for carrier tones.
Some folks seem to confuse the way Netwinders were first used (as development desktops for the eventual product) with what they really were: appliance servers.
I saw their latest model a couple of weeks ago at PC Expo. It was a nice iteration of the Cobalt Qube/Whistler InterJet concept: a small-office smail/print/gateway/firewall/file/web server. It had a nice interface and a bit more flexibility in the web GUI than a Qube. The RISC processor was traded in for a Transmeta chip, and the OS was a 2.4.x kernel and a lot of recent package revs on top of a stable RedHat 6.2 base.
But the Qube isn't what made Cobalt the big success it is. Cobalt made (and makes) its money from selling the RaQ series: turnkey virtual-hosting servers to web hosting providers. Same hardware, different enclosure, but a different software mix and a different customer. The Qube sells, and they continue to make them because it's cheap to do as long as the hardware is taken care of by the RaQ R+D. But it's not their core business.
Rebel also had products closer to the RaQ model, but where they arguably had a nicer Qube than the Qube, their other products were inferior to the competition on the software side. You can do batch configuration of dozens or hundreds of RaQs out of the box. Corel and Rebel didn't get that far.
On another note, Rebel was an outgrowth of HCC, a Canadian VAR. They had a sales team that was no doubt good at doing direct sales to Canadian companies and government agencies, but probably not as good at getting things into the mainstream corporate sales channels: the catalog vendors. Rebel machines, like Cobalts,a are appliances. They generally get installed and configured by the customer, not by a consultant from a VAR.
Ever seen CDW or Insight or PC Mall selling Rebels? They sure as heck sell Cobalts, and keep them on hand. Anyone know if Rebel machines are available through Ingram? Were they widely available from any major disttributors in the US and Europe? Were the distributors and large corporate resellers educated on it and get the collateral and training necessary to sell it effectively? Call some web hosting providers and see if they had a Rebel rep calling them to sell them on their RaQ-ish machines. Bet they didn't.
My guess is HCC misjudged the product when they bought it from Corel and didn't know how to sell it properly. And that they also lacked the marketing and sales skills in the markets it belonged in, which were different from HCC's core.
Hey, the Abiword developers' hearts are in the right place, but the thing is still nothing more than a richtext notepad with rudimentary column support. Wake me up when it's caught up to a word processor from 10 years ago.
KOffice is much farther along feature-wise, maybe because they have a real roadmap and they're people who don't have contempt for office suites. You get the feeling the Abiword people prefer TeX and Emacs and don't understand why anyone would want to use a word processor for something with a glossary, footnotes and embedded images.
OpenOffice may be a slow, lumbering beast, but it's a full-featured slow, lumbering beast. Its only intractable weakness is the same one that dooms SmartSuite and Corel Office and the rest. It's not 100% compatible with MS Office. And it can't be. Endgame.
Flash is not Shockwave. Flash is one of several Macromedia technologies under the Shockwave brand. However, when developers and designers refer to Shockwave, they almost always mean Director Shockwave, for which there most certainly isn't Linux or Unix support of any kind. Nor would I expect it soon unless AOL pays Macromedia to develop it for the appliance market. Director is complex stuff.
The Mozilla steering committee may never support proprietary technologies (other than, say, Java), but you can bet your sweet patootie that AOL has no such reservations when it comes to official Netscape browser releases.
If a decent sandboxing solution comes along and the most popular public ActiveX controls without native Linux equivalents work well under it, I'd expect ActiveX to turn up in the Linux appliance version of the Netscape browser in short order... unless their lawyers determine that Microsoft's restrictions that prohibit use of any of their DLLs bundled with an ActiveX control on non-Windows OSes opens them to risk. Whether the Mozilla CVS maintainers choose to merge it into their trunk is another story, but the Mozilla team clearly doesn't care whether or not anyone wants to use their browser. They're happy to treat it like an academic project. How else can XUL be explained? Any developer that cares about user experience would have wrapped Mozilla/Netscape 6 in native UI frontends a long time ago, as the Galeon folks and others have, and let XUL wait for hardware to catch up with its processing needs.
And plugins are utterly nasty to install under Unixes, and not much better under Windows and MacOS, what with no systemwide plugin directory. It's high time AOL hired a goddamn tech evangelist to make the rounds to Macromedia, Real, Adobe and other major plugin providers to help them package their plugins as XPI autoinstallers like first-party Mozilla/Netscape 6 components already are, so that installation can be made as easy and fluid as ActiveX.
Nothing wrong with tinkering and getting more hardware supported, but is it a good idea to recommend that anyone choose a new iBook as a machine to run Linux on?
Let's see. Out of the box you get a pretty laptop that comes preloaded with OS X, which is an open source BSD variant down low, with a lot of polished sophisticated commercial goodies up top like display PDF, the most seamless GUI/command-line config synchronization ever done on a Unix, and, well, the elegance that is the Mac UI. And you can run any legacy Mac software at near full-speed simultaneously.
And if ease of use and closed-source software give you hives regardless of how good they are, you can load up XFree86 and a swiftly growing number of your favorite "Linux" apps while you're at it. You've already got Perl, gcc, Emacs, vi and their friends ready to run. Don't like tcsh? Load up bash. Don't like their terminal-window app? Load up another. Want to recompile their (well-configured) Apache? Go ahead. And you have solid Firewire support and the most hassle-free USB plug-and-play support around, bar none.
But then you load up Linux and drop the sound support, the decent video playback, the easy CD burning and video editing, the display PDF, the Mac application support, the polished configuration tools, the decent web browsers, any hope of running a usable office suite any time this year or next (since you're not on an x86).. and the only UI that works well with the one-button trackpad you've got. There are dozens--maybe hundreds--of x86-based laptops out there in all shapes and sizes that are better-suited for running Linux than an iBook.
This is a nice hobbyist project, and certainly getting the new hardware supported by Linux is a good thing. But it's a lousy use for a new iBook.
Since Americans weigh more than everyone else except maybe some Pacific Islanders (of which very few are Debian developers), this study should have taken that into account, especially in light of the significant number of Scandinavians and Finns in the European contingent.
I suspect that if this were taken into account, the conference would best be held a couple hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland.
The Cube didn't have cracks. It did have mold seams. The one legit hardware problem was the touch sensor's sensitivity to RFI, which was fixable through the addition of a gasket. Anyone who sent their early Cube in got the gasket put in.
No, what did the Cube in was its narrow audience. It was too expensive to end up in many homes, given that the 30% slower iMac cost many hundreds less. And it was slightly more expensive than the low-end G4 tower.
Expandability wasn't much of an issue except for the minority of users who want to drive multiple video devices. Intel PC users seldom realize how little PCI slots get used in Macs. Nowadays, practically all the Mac peripherals that get purchased are 1394 and USB, even extra hard drives (including RAID arrays!). Save for old-timers bringing over a chain of SCSI devices from their old Macs, about the only use PCI slots get lately is those extra video cards.
Ultimately, despite making anyone who used one drool, it was too expensive (and high-end) for the home and reception-desk market, and lacked a quantifiable advantage over the modestly cheaper towers in the business market.
Since Napster is taking the big leap, shedding a huge number of users by forcing all of them to download a new client, I'd hope for their sake that they made this the last download its users ever need.
Does this new version have a self-updating feature like Windows RealPlayer and AIM do? As it is, by not putting in such functionality much sooner, they've diminished the value of their one real asset: the size of their user base. If they don't have it this time, they're just pathetic.
StarOffice 5.2 is being deployed, not OpenOffice. And when they upgrade, it will be to StarOffice 6, not a DoD-maintained fork of OpenOffice.
It's being rolled out as a replacement for the creaky Applixware they run on their Unix machines, since StarOffice has better (but not perfect) MS file import/export, an easier interface to cross-train people on, and more mainstream macro languages in the form of Java and a clone of the VBA language (albeit with a different document object model) instead of Applix's own language.
This is not part of a big switch to Linux. This is not part of a big switch to Unix. It is just a change in office suites for existing Unix-based groups in the DoD. Since the DoD doesn't run a lot of Linux on desktops, it's probably going to be deployed mostly on Solaris.
This is not indicative of any kind of migration away from Windows and MS Office within the DoD or any other part of the US government. It is, however, something other government IT groups will be watching to see if they should do the same for their Unix-based departments. And it does leave the door open for Windows-based groups to start evaluating a move to StarOffice themselves, thanks to the feature parity and identical interfaces across platforms. It will also make it easy and painless for whatever small pockets of Linux desktop users there are within the DoD to install StarOffice, since no purchase will be required, unlike Applixware.
I haven't seen your work, but maybe the local critics just didn't like your stuff. Or maybe they're a little behind the curve in Little Rock (and in the student ghettos of northern Michigan). Art created with computers and even art "generated" by computers has been accepted just fine for decades now.. as long as it's good art.
For instance: Wolfgang Tillmans won the recent Turner Prize, and some of his work was digitally processed. He's an artist, I'd think. More to the point, about a month ago I saw a solo show by a guy named Dan Torop. On the walls were a mix of digitally-enhanced landscape photos (trees and water, mostly) and computer-generated landscapes )(again, of trees and water). Those were half decent, but what I really liked were a couple of computer installation pieces in the middle of the main gallery. One was a navigable VR model of the show itself, including the pictures on the walls... and the computers in the midddle of the room. The other, best of all, was a Racter-like "random poetry generator" that slowly poked out line after line of random pseudotext poetry seeded heavily with David Bowie lyrics and read aloud by an old-school speech synthesizer. It was art. No doubt about it. I didn't see or hear anyone arguing that it wasn't.
Maybe you need to move to a more receptive community. Or maybe you need to ask yourself if the work you were showing meant anything and could move anyone (to laughter, tears, rage, deep thought, lust or whatever). Are your programs that generate images designed to generate images that provoke people to feel something in any of these ways? Did they succeed? That's how I figure out if something's art. Don't know about you.
Just because you've never looked to see what software Caldera has released to the community doesn't mean there isn't any. The first thing that comes to mind is a whole lot of Netware support stuff. Then there was DR DOS, which they forked to create the commercial OpenDOS. They're also serious about the LSB, have contributed code to Samba, and that's what's off the top of my head.
Heaven forbid they create some admin and install tools, or maybe a really nice network browser they want to keep to themselves in order to be able to sell a polished product? They're not withholding kernel modifications or enhancements to, say, KDE itself. They can't. Those are GPLed.
Where is it written (besides some new Microsoft EULAs) that GPL'ed tools can only be used to create GPL'ed software?
Stallman's a swell guy and all, but some people program to make money. We can't all teach and give lectures for a living.
Mac OS X, bless its BSD heart, includes an ssh implementation. When you turn on the telnet daemon, it also turns on sshd. It was one of many pleasant surprises.
It would have been helpful if the poster of the original item had mentioned wht kind of VPN they wanted to set up. ssh? PPTP? Something else entirely?
"Right. Now lis'sen, it's 9 AM I want'cha ta do the 5 Verizon jobs and then meet us at the bar on 10th and 2nd by 11. Hey we're fucking union what're they gonna do; fire us?"
Um. Verizon's broadband engineering staff isn't unionized, unless it just happened. It's one of the things that led to the strike during the BA-GTE merger last year. BA was mostly a union shop except in broadband. GTE's operations, being largely in the midwest, are mostly nonunion and GTE had a nasty history of swooping down on would-be unionizers and downsizing their departments. One result of the strike settlement is that the broadband people get to vote on unionizing and Verizon doesn't ship too many of the operations to GTE facilities in the midwest.
No, Verizon's DSL operation is many things: disorganized, inept, overworked, oversubscribed and unresponsive. But it wasn't a union shop during the period covered in the class-action suit against them.
Now back to you. Are you so nastily antiunion because you sit on a lot of corporate boards and own a lot of stock in companies that stand to lose cheap labor to union drives? Or are you (A) privileged enough to never have to worry about living paycheck to paycheck, or (B) a self-loathing workaholic who likes carrying a beeper 24/7 and never going on vacation?
Instead of deciding to "go with Linux" and then find software to run on it, how about you decide on what your company needs to function well and then pick the appropriate tools and packages, and then the OS. You might end up with Linux and you might not.
There are some very good web-based HR/payroll ASPs out there that tie into major payroll, insurance and benefits companies' systems. If not having the software in-house is okay with you, you may want to take a peek at Employease for a start.
What else? Accounting? On the low end ($500 or less for the whole thing) there isn't anything really comparable to Peachtree or Quickbooks Pro out there, though you might find some console-mode packages from some of the Unix vendors in the under-$2000 price range. In some cases, SCO apps of this sort will run okay under x86 Linux through iBCS. On the higher end ($10,000-$100,000) of small- to mid-size business accounting, there are probably a few more choices, also from old-line Unix software companies.
But what are you switching out? Just servers, or the desktops, too? Will you really be saving money if your employees can't open 20% of the word processor and spreadsheet files that have been e-mailed to them from outside? (Maybe, depends on the company and whether you're only doing this for a few departments.) How many people are running litle Access/Foxpro/whatever desktop databases vital to their work that will need to be redone from scratch?
Calendaring? Well, it's not free, but Lotus Domino sure runs nicely on Linux, and the web interface certainly cuts desktop support costs. StarOffice also has calendaring and is cheaper (the calendatr server isn't free if I recall correctly). But will it save you money over what you've already invested in?
Hate to break this to you, but Microsoft did not abandon or scale back the "Passport" centralized login service. It's still around, but the reason it hasn't been heavily marketed to third-part content providers is that it's been retooled with an XML-transport protocol and is now being tested under the name "Hailstorm".
As for XP subscriptions, they've put it off for single-user shrinkwrap versions of Office XP, but they're proceeding full steam ahead on the business licensing side. The newly retooled Open Licensing contract terms now require biannual renewals. Skip one or miss a payment, and you pay a penalty amounting to the price of a full, new version of the product plus the biannual "Software Assurance" fee. Just because they don't call it a subscription doesn't mean it isn't one.
Anyone actually played with this yet, or is this idle blather?
As a technology, it's a nifty one that's been done before, but this would be the first time it would get wide distribution. And it seems like a nice enough new developer feature for Office/VBA apps. However, the way it's being rolled out in IE, with Microsoft-selected kerword/link databases, is a nasty bit of hijacking.
Besides siphoning users away from everyone's sites and effectively placing text ads on everyone's pages without payment, there are privacy issues to be addressed. Do smart-tag clickthroughs send a referer request header? If so, MS or its marketing partner(s) will be able to collect traffic and even some user data that can be used to extrapolate usage patterns on other organizations' sites just as an ad agency could, only, again, without any kind of contract or compensation.
I'm not crazy about viruses spread via Outlook and the rest of MS office either, but between desktop antivirus software with forced updates and antivirus software on the mail servers and, heck, the school's net gateways would trap damn near everything. The little that makes it in via, say, encrypted e-mail on CompSci students' machines, wouldn't get too far as long as students and staff didn't tamper with their desktops' software.
As for "cross-platform", what's missing? The antivirus scanners on the net gateways would trap any worms targeting your Linux box, as long as you aren't receiving it via an encrypted protocol. Windows antivirus software--especially the server stuff--carries pattern files covering not just the zillions of Windows viruses and such, but also the far fewer Mac ones and the dozen or so Unix/Linux ones. And the two targeting PalmOS.
If you don't want your school invading, uh, your "privacy", then don't use your equipment on their network. Do transfers with floppies and Zip disks. It's not your network, and you have no "rights" with regard to it.
Python and Object Pascal are nice languages, and the former, like Perl, can come in very handy for the same sort of quick prototyping VB lets you do. If yu're learning Perl or Python, start with a plain text editor and the command line. They are first and foremost console-based scripting languages, and that's how you should orient yourself to them. Once you've got your bearings, then bring in the IDE.
But as others have said, if VB is all you know, C++ or Java are much more useful (read: employment-getting) languages to get down first, and they both give you syntax fundamentals that will seem very familiar if you proceed from, say, C++ to PHP or from Java to Smalltalk or Python. This is not to say Python isn't idely used, but rather that an organization will feel more comfortable bringing on a Java programmer and asking her to learn Python than the other way around.
What IDE you use is more a matter of personal preference. Unlike VB and Kylix/Delphi, the C-langauges and Java exist outside the context of a dominant IDE. A damn fine (and widely used) IDE you'll feel right at home with for C/C++ is KDevelop--with a form painter, event wizards, code completion, properties inspectors and all. It's also free, and better in many regards than some of the commercial IDEs out there in the Unix world. For Java, there are too many IDEs to mention, with the base editions either free or in that under-$300 price range you seem to be targeting.
Focus on languages and APIs, not tools. If you can write C++ in KDevelop, it'll take you a few hours to get up to full speed writing C++ with CodeWarrior, the Cygnus tools, Code Crusader or for that matter a plain text editor and command-line build tools (which is a very useful foundational skill, by the way, and one you should acquire if you're serious about moving to the Unix/Linux world).
As for APIs, picking up either GTK/GNOME or Qt/KDE for graphical applications is a decent idea if you're staying on the traditional desktop or client-server side of things. On the (web-)server side, having something lean like PHP or server-side Perl (not so much CGI as mod_perl and its cousins) in your arsenal is more or less comparable to knowing VBScript ASP. For heavier lifting, J2EE is the dominant way to go these days, and yes, there are free JSP/servlet engines and even complete J2EE application servers. Apart from a smattering of bundled SDKs and different tools, writing apps for the free JBoss is the same as writing apps for Weblogic, Websphere, iPlanet's appserver, Oracle's appserver, Sybase's, and so on. And J2EE code deployed on Linux doesn't change on Solaris, AIX or Windows 2000, or on an AS/400 or on a System/390.
I remember this being one of the experiments you could do in the 1970s with one of those $30 children's 200-in-One electronics project kits. You'd use an incandescent bulb, if I recall, to transmit input from a microphone, and you'd receive it through a photocell, convert it back to audio and pass it to the earphone.
I think it was one of the Israeli kits with the pinholes for sticking wires in, rather than one of the spring-connector Radio Shack kits. In the end, it's the same process as AM radio, but using visible light as the carrier instead of waves in the radio and microwave parts of the spectrum.
Not everything electronic came about in the post-microprocessor era.
This is nice, but Dmoz seemed pretty safe under its longstanding copyright and license terms. Even if Netscape/AOL wanted to change the terms of whatever sits at "dmoz.org" on Netscape-owned servers, the content up to that point would remain fully, irrevocably open AFAIK, free to fork. This move may make things easier for the community of editors to retain control wiith minimal disruption when AOL/Time Warner decides it no longer wants to fund the project at some point in the future.
CDDB was always free of charge, but never offered under any sort of community copyright. It was always clearly, unambiguously under threat of becoming a pay-for-play closed database.
I hope you don't think your book and record reviews on Amazon belong to you. Don't be surprised if a tome similar to the All Music Guides suddenly materializes, made up of the best customer reviews from Amazon. And they won't owe you a penny.
H-h-hey! There aren't any good browsers for my TRS-80 Model III! I was thinking of migrating to a Sinclair Spectrum or maybe a Commodore 128. Are there any standards-compliant browsers for the Spectrum? And I don't mean Netscrape or Internet Exploder! Is Opera doing a Commodore port? If not, anyone want to start a petition? Maaaaan! The NeXT was *so* far ahead of its time that I bet a 33 MHz 68030 with NeXTSTEP would run Java *great*!!!!!
Also, can anyone recommend an open-source Apple II+ browser written in Applesoft BASIC that will run on my Coleco Adam?
Openstep for x86 hardware superseded the last OS for NeXT hardware years ago. The current "upgrade" of NeXTSTEP is Mac OS X on Apple G4 hardware.
Surely after using a NeXT box for what, 12 years? it might be time to think about getting a new computer. I hear you can get Pentium 166s that run Openstep 4.0 really well for about $30.
Those cheap external drives, the ones that are $160 for 10GB and $400 for 60GB, are the size of a Dreamcast and weigh about five pounds.
The removable drives Iomega is putting inside a convenient cartridge? They're a less than a quarter the size and weight. Standalone USB/Firewire drives in that class run about $350 for 10GB and $450 for 20GB. If you have computers equipped to handle them at home and at work, those carts start to look like a darn good deal.
Hey, if you want to carry around big drives that weigh more than your laptop to "save money", that's your business. But the graphic artists who have sworn by Zip drives since they came out will like these a whole lot. And as the guy who does purchasing for a 40-person design staff, I'd sure rather buy a few Firewire Peerless docks and get $200 carts for the staff that need them rather then buy all of them $450 pocket firewire drives. The heavy ones aren't an option. Try telling people carrying a laptop bag to carry one of those big "bargain" portable hard drives. Would you want to carry one yourself every day? And take it on trips?
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This was inevitable, given Apple's move to Unix. It was just a matter of time before they ported smbmount to Darwin--or recreated it--and tied it into their network volume mounting UI.
Which means likely death to Thursby, makers of DAVE, the most popular SMB/CIFS client for MacOS. Maybe their Mac OS X port--now in open beta--will ship with some features or performance advantages that will keep it in some niche. Say, Active Directory integration or much better filetype mapping. Not likely though. I'm surprised they didn't see this coming. I guess nobody at Thursby has used a Unix-family OS that can run smbmount. If they had, they might have cashed out the company and gone into EOL support mode while they found something else to do.
I hope you don't think the card slot on your camcorder is for recording video. Unless you're getting a new camcorder Sony hasn't announced yet, those Memory Stick and PC Card slots are both for storing still images. Lousy, low-res ones.
Even the $2500 Sony camcorders max out at 640x480 for stills, which look nice on a computer screen or a TV, but they won't make for anything bigger than a so-so 3"x5" print640x480 digital still cameas sell for $70 these days. And on a 128MB card or Memory Stick, you can fit about 1300 images at that resolution. Isn't that enough?
There are camcorders now out there that can do 1280x960 still images, but I don't think Sony makes one, and in any case, that's still bottom-of-the-line by digital still-camera standards these days. Remember: digital video cameras are terrible still cameras, and digital still cameras are terrible video cameras.
If you could dump video to the PC Card slot in the camcorder the 5GB drive would be nice for that. But you can't.
On the other hand, if you have one of those new Nikon D-1x or Kodak 760 3000x2000 resolution still cameras ($4000 or $7000, respectively, without a lens, flash or AC adaptor), something like this is good indeed, since the raw, lossless images take up about 18MB each. A 5GB card would hold a couple hundred such images, or a couple thousand minimal-loss JPEGs. That's pretty nice. A 5GB device would even be good for the "3 megapixel" 2000x1500 class of cameras, with plenty of room for a month or more of heavy shooting. But for the 640x480 images camcorders put out?
Funny, but I came to the LP game later, in 1983 or so. And at that point, most albums were $$8 with, yes, the premium titles with gatefold sleeves and booklets and holograms and crap at $9. Double albums were $11.
Were were you buying records? Sam Goody? Mall chains? (Where, incidentally, most CDs sell for $17 in-store today, not $15. They're $15 online, where the difference is mde up in handling fees.)
By my calculations, an album that ran $8 in 1983 is $14 and change in today's dollars. Which is about right at most of the places I shop--independent record stores.
However, inflation has just gotten us there. By my reckoning using the same calculator, CDs should have been selling for $10-$12 ten years ago if they were priced to mirror vinyl pricing. And since the early '90s, CDs have been much cheaper to produce and distribute than LPs, and are less vulnerable to heat and water damage or breakage while in transit.
Since phone service in and out of Afghanistan is even worse these days than that in Pakistan (and that's saying something!), there shouldn't be too much concern about any but the wealthiest and most powerful people dialing out to AOL successfully via Afghani phone lines. And most of those people who are still in Afghanistan at all are considered enemies of the regime and under watch anyway.
For another thing, the Taliban is pretty good at using severe punishments as a deterrent. Beatings, reeducation camps and death at the hands of the morals police have brought Afghanistan's heroin-smuggling routes to a halt. Not a trickle, but a halt.
It's hard to imagine anyone risking internet access. You might see a trickle of UUCP-relayed e-mail continue below the radar via 2400-baud modem connections, but that's about it.
Make all the jokes you want from the comfort of your developed country re: how they'll monitor this, but in a country with only a few hundred outbound phone lines in working order, if that--prehistoric analog ones switched by hand--it doesn't take much to eavesdrop on all of them at once and listen for carrier tones.
Some folks seem to confuse the way Netwinders were first used (as development desktops for the eventual product) with what they really were: appliance servers.
I saw their latest model a couple of weeks ago at PC Expo. It was a nice iteration of the Cobalt Qube/Whistler InterJet concept: a small-office smail/print/gateway/firewall/file/web server. It had a nice interface and a bit more flexibility in the web GUI than a Qube. The RISC processor was traded in for a Transmeta chip, and the OS was a 2.4.x kernel and a lot of recent package revs on top of a stable RedHat 6.2 base.
But the Qube isn't what made Cobalt the big success it is. Cobalt made (and makes) its money from selling the RaQ series: turnkey virtual-hosting servers to web hosting providers. Same hardware, different enclosure, but a different software mix and a different customer. The Qube sells, and they continue to make them because it's cheap to do as long as the hardware is taken care of by the RaQ R+D. But it's not their core business.
Rebel also had products closer to the RaQ model, but where they arguably had a nicer Qube than the Qube, their other products were inferior to the competition on the software side. You can do batch configuration of dozens or hundreds of RaQs out of the box. Corel and Rebel didn't get that far.
On another note, Rebel was an outgrowth of HCC, a Canadian VAR. They had a sales team that was no doubt good at doing direct sales to Canadian companies and government agencies, but probably not as good at getting things into the mainstream corporate sales channels: the catalog vendors. Rebel machines, like Cobalts,a are appliances. They generally get installed and configured by the customer, not by a consultant from a VAR.
Ever seen CDW or Insight or PC Mall selling Rebels? They sure as heck sell Cobalts, and keep them on hand. Anyone know if Rebel machines are available through Ingram? Were they widely available from any major disttributors in the US and Europe? Were the distributors and large corporate resellers educated on it and get the collateral and training necessary to sell it effectively? Call some web hosting providers and see if they had a Rebel rep calling them to sell them on their RaQ-ish machines. Bet they didn't.
My guess is HCC misjudged the product when they bought it from Corel and didn't know how to sell it properly. And that they also lacked the marketing and sales skills in the markets it belonged in, which were different from HCC's core.
Hey, the Abiword developers' hearts are in the right place, but the thing is still nothing more than a richtext notepad with rudimentary column support. Wake me up when it's caught up to a word processor from 10 years ago.
KOffice is much farther along feature-wise, maybe because they have a real roadmap and they're people who don't have contempt for office suites. You get the feeling the Abiword people prefer TeX and Emacs and don't understand why anyone would want to use a word processor for something with a glossary, footnotes and embedded images.
OpenOffice may be a slow, lumbering beast, but it's a full-featured slow, lumbering beast. Its only intractable weakness is the same one that dooms SmartSuite and Corel Office and the rest. It's not 100% compatible with MS Office. And it can't be. Endgame.
Flash is not Shockwave. Flash is one of several Macromedia technologies under the Shockwave brand. However, when developers and designers refer to Shockwave, they almost always mean Director Shockwave, for which there most certainly isn't Linux or Unix support of any kind. Nor would I expect it soon unless AOL pays Macromedia to develop it for the appliance market. Director is complex stuff.
The Mozilla steering committee may never support proprietary technologies (other than, say, Java), but you can bet your sweet patootie that AOL has no such reservations when it comes to official Netscape browser releases.
If a decent sandboxing solution comes along and the most popular public ActiveX controls without native Linux equivalents work well under it, I'd expect ActiveX to turn up in the Linux appliance version of the Netscape browser in short order... unless their lawyers determine that Microsoft's restrictions that prohibit use of any of their DLLs bundled with an ActiveX control on non-Windows OSes opens them to risk. Whether the Mozilla CVS maintainers choose to merge it into their trunk is another story, but the Mozilla team clearly doesn't care whether or not anyone wants to use their browser. They're happy to treat it like an academic project. How else can XUL be explained? Any developer that cares about user experience would have wrapped Mozilla/Netscape 6 in native UI frontends a long time ago, as the Galeon folks and others have, and let XUL wait for hardware to catch up with its processing needs.
And plugins are utterly nasty to install under Unixes, and not much better under Windows and MacOS, what with no systemwide plugin directory. It's high time AOL hired a goddamn tech evangelist to make the rounds to Macromedia, Real, Adobe and other major plugin providers to help them package their plugins as XPI autoinstallers like first-party Mozilla/Netscape 6 components already are, so that installation can be made as easy and fluid as ActiveX.
Nothing wrong with tinkering and getting more hardware supported, but is it a good idea to recommend that anyone choose a new iBook as a machine to run Linux on?
Let's see. Out of the box you get a pretty laptop that comes preloaded with OS X, which is an open source BSD variant down low, with a lot of polished sophisticated commercial goodies up top like display PDF, the most seamless GUI/command-line config synchronization ever done on a Unix, and, well, the elegance that is the Mac UI. And you can run any legacy Mac software at near full-speed simultaneously.
And if ease of use and closed-source software give you hives regardless of how good they are, you can load up XFree86 and a swiftly growing number of your favorite "Linux" apps while you're at it. You've already got Perl, gcc, Emacs, vi and their friends ready to run. Don't like tcsh? Load up bash. Don't like their terminal-window app? Load up another. Want to recompile their (well-configured) Apache? Go ahead. And you have solid Firewire support and the most hassle-free USB plug-and-play support around, bar none.
But then you load up Linux and drop the sound support, the decent video playback, the easy CD burning and video editing, the display PDF, the Mac application support, the polished configuration tools, the decent web browsers, any hope of running a usable office suite any time this year or next (since you're not on an x86).. and the only UI that works well with the one-button trackpad you've got. There are dozens--maybe hundreds--of x86-based laptops out there in all shapes and sizes that are better-suited for running Linux than an iBook.
This is a nice hobbyist project, and certainly getting the new hardware supported by Linux is a good thing. But it's a lousy use for a new iBook.
Since Americans weigh more than everyone else except maybe some Pacific Islanders (of which very few are Debian developers), this study should have taken that into account, especially in light of the significant number of Scandinavians and Finns in the European contingent.
I suspect that if this were taken into account, the conference would best be held a couple hundred miles northeast of Newfoundland.
The Cube didn't have cracks. It did have mold seams. The one legit hardware problem was the touch sensor's sensitivity to RFI, which was fixable through the addition of a gasket. Anyone who sent their early Cube in got the gasket put in.
No, what did the Cube in was its narrow audience. It was too expensive to end up in many homes, given that the 30% slower iMac cost many hundreds less. And it was slightly more expensive than the low-end G4 tower.
Expandability wasn't much of an issue except for the minority of users who want to drive multiple video devices. Intel PC users seldom realize how little PCI slots get used in Macs. Nowadays, practically all the Mac peripherals that get purchased are 1394 and USB, even extra hard drives (including RAID arrays!). Save for old-timers bringing over a chain of SCSI devices from their old Macs, about the only use PCI slots get lately is those extra video cards.
Ultimately, despite making anyone who used one drool, it was too expensive (and high-end) for the home and reception-desk market, and lacked a quantifiable advantage over the modestly cheaper towers in the business market.
Since Napster is taking the big leap, shedding a huge number of users by forcing all of them to download a new client, I'd hope for their sake that they made this the last download its users ever need.
Does this new version have a self-updating feature like Windows RealPlayer and AIM do? As it is, by not putting in such functionality much sooner, they've diminished the value of their one real asset: the size of their user base. If they don't have it this time, they're just pathetic.
I haven't seen your work, but maybe the local critics just didn't like your stuff. Or maybe they're a little behind the curve in Little Rock (and in the student ghettos of northern Michigan). Art created with computers and even art "generated" by computers has been accepted just fine for decades now.. as long as it's good art.
For instance: Wolfgang Tillmans won the recent Turner Prize, and some of his work was digitally processed. He's an artist, I'd think. More to the point, about a month ago I saw a solo show by a guy named Dan Torop. On the walls were a mix of digitally-enhanced landscape photos (trees and water, mostly) and computer-generated landscapes )(again, of trees and water). Those were half decent, but what I really liked were a couple of computer installation pieces in the middle of the main gallery. One was a navigable VR model of the show itself, including the pictures on the walls... and the computers in the midddle of the room. The other, best of all, was a Racter-like "random poetry generator" that slowly poked out line after line of random pseudotext poetry seeded heavily with David Bowie lyrics and read aloud by an old-school speech synthesizer. It was art. No doubt about it. I didn't see or hear anyone arguing that it wasn't.
Maybe you need to move to a more receptive community. Or maybe you need to ask yourself if the work you were showing meant anything and could move anyone (to laughter, tears, rage, deep thought, lust or whatever). Are your programs that generate images designed to generate images that provoke people to feel something in any of these ways? Did they succeed? That's how I figure out if something's art. Don't know about you.
Just because you've never looked to see what software Caldera has released to the community doesn't mean there isn't any. The first thing that comes to mind is a whole lot of Netware support stuff. Then there was DR DOS, which they forked to create the commercial OpenDOS. They're also serious about the LSB, have contributed code to Samba, and that's what's off the top of my head.
Heaven forbid they create some admin and install tools, or maybe a really nice network browser they want to keep to themselves in order to be able to sell a polished product? They're not withholding kernel modifications or enhancements to, say, KDE itself. They can't. Those are GPLed.
Where is it written (besides some new Microsoft EULAs) that GPL'ed tools can only be used to create GPL'ed software?
Stallman's a swell guy and all, but some people program to make money. We can't all teach and give lectures for a living.
Mac OS X, bless its BSD heart, includes an ssh implementation. When you turn on the telnet daemon, it also turns on sshd. It was one of many pleasant surprises.
It would have been helpful if the poster of the original item had mentioned wht kind of VPN they wanted to set up. ssh? PPTP? Something else entirely?
"Right. Now lis'sen, it's 9 AM I want'cha ta do the 5 Verizon jobs and then meet us at the bar on 10th and 2nd by 11. Hey we're fucking union what're they gonna do; fire us?"
Um. Verizon's broadband engineering staff isn't unionized, unless it just happened. It's one of the things that led to the strike during the BA-GTE merger last year. BA was mostly a union shop except in broadband. GTE's operations, being largely in the midwest, are mostly nonunion and GTE had a nasty history of swooping down on would-be unionizers and downsizing their departments. One result of the strike settlement is that the broadband people get to vote on unionizing and Verizon doesn't ship too many of the operations to GTE facilities in the midwest.
No, Verizon's DSL operation is many things: disorganized, inept, overworked, oversubscribed and unresponsive. But it wasn't a union shop during the period covered in the class-action suit against them.
Now back to you. Are you so nastily antiunion because you sit on a lot of corporate boards and own a lot of stock in companies that stand to lose cheap labor to union drives? Or are you (A) privileged enough to never have to worry about living paycheck to paycheck, or (B) a self-loathing workaholic who likes carrying a beeper 24/7 and never going on vacation?
Instead of deciding to "go with Linux" and then find software to run on it, how about you decide on what your company needs to function well and then pick the appropriate tools and packages, and then the OS. You might end up with Linux and you might not.
There are some very good web-based HR/payroll ASPs out there that tie into major payroll, insurance and benefits companies' systems. If not having the software in-house is okay with you, you may want to take a peek at Employease for a start.
What else? Accounting? On the low end ($500 or less for the whole thing) there isn't anything really comparable to Peachtree or Quickbooks Pro out there, though you might find some console-mode packages from some of the Unix vendors in the under-$2000 price range. In some cases, SCO apps of this sort will run okay under x86 Linux through iBCS. On the higher end ($10,000-$100,000) of small- to mid-size business accounting, there are probably a few more choices, also from old-line Unix software companies.
But what are you switching out? Just servers, or the desktops, too? Will you really be saving money if your employees can't open 20% of the word processor and spreadsheet files that have been e-mailed to them from outside? (Maybe, depends on the company and whether you're only doing this for a few departments.) How many people are running litle Access/Foxpro/whatever desktop databases vital to their work that will need to be redone from scratch?
Calendaring? Well, it's not free, but Lotus Domino sure runs nicely on Linux, and the web interface certainly cuts desktop support costs. StarOffice also has calendaring and is cheaper (the calendatr server isn't free if I recall correctly). But will it save you money over what you've already invested in?
Hate to break this to you, but Microsoft did not abandon or scale back the "Passport" centralized login service. It's still around, but the reason it hasn't been heavily marketed to third-part content providers is that it's been retooled with an XML-transport protocol and is now being tested under the name "Hailstorm".
As for XP subscriptions, they've put it off for single-user shrinkwrap versions of Office XP, but they're proceeding full steam ahead on the business licensing side. The newly retooled Open Licensing contract terms now require biannual renewals. Skip one or miss a payment, and you pay a penalty amounting to the price of a full, new version of the product plus the biannual "Software Assurance" fee. Just because they don't call it a subscription doesn't mean it isn't one.
Anyone actually played with this yet, or is this idle blather?
As a technology, it's a nifty one that's been done before, but this would be the first time it would get wide distribution. And it seems like a nice enough new developer feature for Office/VBA apps. However, the way it's being rolled out in IE, with Microsoft-selected kerword/link databases, is a nasty bit of hijacking.
Besides siphoning users away from everyone's sites and effectively placing text ads on everyone's pages without payment, there are privacy issues to be addressed. Do smart-tag clickthroughs send a referer request header? If so, MS or its marketing partner(s) will be able to collect traffic and even some user data that can be used to extrapolate usage patterns on other organizations' sites just as an ad agency could, only, again, without any kind of contract or compensation.
Boo, hiss.
I'm not crazy about viruses spread via Outlook and the rest of MS office either, but between desktop antivirus software with forced updates and antivirus software on the mail servers and, heck, the school's net gateways would trap damn near everything. The little that makes it in via, say, encrypted e-mail on CompSci students' machines, wouldn't get too far as long as students and staff didn't tamper with their desktops' software.
As for "cross-platform", what's missing? The antivirus scanners on the net gateways would trap any worms targeting your Linux box, as long as you aren't receiving it via an encrypted protocol. Windows antivirus software--especially the server stuff--carries pattern files covering not just the zillions of Windows viruses and such, but also the far fewer Mac ones and the dozen or so Unix/Linux ones. And the two targeting PalmOS.
If you don't want your school invading, uh, your "privacy", then don't use your equipment on their network. Do transfers with floppies and Zip disks. It's not your network, and you have no "rights" with regard to it.
Python and Object Pascal are nice languages, and the former, like Perl, can come in very handy for the same sort of quick prototyping VB lets you do. If yu're learning Perl or Python, start with a plain text editor and the command line. They are first and foremost console-based scripting languages, and that's how you should orient yourself to them. Once you've got your bearings, then bring in the IDE.
But as others have said, if VB is all you know, C++ or Java are much more useful (read: employment-getting) languages to get down first, and they both give you syntax fundamentals that will seem very familiar if you proceed from, say, C++ to PHP or from Java to Smalltalk or Python. This is not to say Python isn't idely used, but rather that an organization will feel more comfortable bringing on a Java programmer and asking her to learn Python than the other way around.
What IDE you use is more a matter of personal preference. Unlike VB and Kylix/Delphi, the C-langauges and Java exist outside the context of a dominant IDE. A damn fine (and widely used) IDE you'll feel right at home with for C/C++ is KDevelop--with a form painter, event wizards, code completion, properties inspectors and all. It's also free, and better in many regards than some of the commercial IDEs out there in the Unix world. For Java, there are too many IDEs to mention, with the base editions either free or in that under-$300 price range you seem to be targeting.
Focus on languages and APIs, not tools. If you can write C++ in KDevelop, it'll take you a few hours to get up to full speed writing C++ with CodeWarrior, the Cygnus tools, Code Crusader or for that matter a plain text editor and command-line build tools (which is a very useful foundational skill, by the way, and one you should acquire if you're serious about moving to the Unix/Linux world).
As for APIs, picking up either GTK/GNOME or Qt/KDE for graphical applications is a decent idea if you're staying on the traditional desktop or client-server side of things. On the (web-)server side, having something lean like PHP or server-side Perl (not so much CGI as mod_perl and its cousins) in your arsenal is more or less comparable to knowing VBScript ASP. For heavier lifting, J2EE is the dominant way to go these days, and yes, there are free JSP/servlet engines and even complete J2EE application servers. Apart from a smattering of bundled SDKs and different tools, writing apps for the free JBoss is the same as writing apps for Weblogic, Websphere, iPlanet's appserver, Oracle's appserver, Sybase's, and so on. And J2EE code deployed on Linux doesn't change on Solaris, AIX or Windows 2000, or on an AS/400 or on a System/390.
I remember this being one of the experiments you could do in the 1970s with one of those $30 children's 200-in-One electronics project kits. You'd use an incandescent bulb, if I recall, to transmit input from a microphone, and you'd receive it through a photocell, convert it back to audio and pass it to the earphone.
I think it was one of the Israeli kits with the pinholes for sticking wires in, rather than one of the spring-connector Radio Shack kits. In the end, it's the same process as AM radio, but using visible light as the carrier instead of waves in the radio and microwave parts of the spectrum.
Not everything electronic came about in the post-microprocessor era.
This is nice, but Dmoz seemed pretty safe under its longstanding copyright and license terms. Even if Netscape/AOL wanted to change the terms of whatever sits at "dmoz.org" on Netscape-owned servers, the content up to that point would remain fully, irrevocably open AFAIK, free to fork. This move may make things easier for the community of editors to retain control wiith minimal disruption when AOL/Time Warner decides it no longer wants to fund the project at some point in the future.
CDDB was always free of charge, but never offered under any sort of community copyright. It was always clearly, unambiguously under threat of becoming a pay-for-play closed database.
I hope you don't think your book and record reviews on Amazon belong to you. Don't be surprised if a tome similar to the All Music Guides suddenly materializes, made up of the best customer reviews from Amazon. And they won't owe you a penny.
H-h-hey! There aren't any good browsers for my TRS-80 Model III! I was thinking of migrating to a Sinclair Spectrum or maybe a Commodore 128. Are there any standards-compliant browsers for the Spectrum? And I don't mean Netscrape or Internet Exploder! Is Opera doing a Commodore port? If not, anyone want to start a petition? Maaaaan! The NeXT was *so* far ahead of its time that I bet a 33 MHz 68030 with NeXTSTEP would run Java *great*!!!!!
Also, can anyone recommend an open-source Apple II+ browser written in Applesoft BASIC that will run on my Coleco Adam?
Openstep for x86 hardware superseded the last OS for NeXT hardware years ago. The current "upgrade" of NeXTSTEP is Mac OS X on Apple G4 hardware.
Surely after using a NeXT box for what, 12 years? it might be time to think about getting a new computer. I hear you can get Pentium 166s that run Openstep 4.0 really well for about $30.
Those cheap external drives, the ones that are $160 for 10GB and $400 for 60GB, are the size of a Dreamcast and weigh about five pounds.
The removable drives Iomega is putting inside a convenient cartridge? They're a less than a quarter the size and weight. Standalone USB/Firewire drives in that class run about $350 for 10GB and $450 for 20GB. If you have computers equipped to handle them at home and at work, those carts start to look like a darn good deal.
Hey, if you want to carry around big drives that weigh more than your laptop to "save money", that's your business. But the graphic artists who have sworn by Zip drives since they came out will like these a whole lot. And as the guy who does purchasing for a 40-person design staff, I'd sure rather buy a few Firewire Peerless docks and get $200 carts for the staff that need them rather then buy all of them $450 pocket firewire drives. The heavy ones aren't an option. Try telling people carrying a laptop bag to carry one of those big "bargain" portable hard drives. Would you want to carry one yourself every day? And take it on trips?