Let me qualify my above note with the statement that if all you need is a machine that you can do development for Solaris on the SPARC architecture (as opposed to running Solaris/x86 on a cheap-o Intel clone box) or if you need to run proprietary software for which you only have Solaris/SPARC binaries, these are nice little machines. Just don't expect to get a lot of horsepower out of them and don't expect to ever be able to upgrade it for any reasonable price.
I have one of the older SPARC-based Ultra5's already. When Sun first released this line of "new, commodity-based hardware" we all though, "Great! Now we won't get gouged having to buy components from Sun! We can buy off-the-shelf memory and CDROM drives and hard drives and it's got a standard PCI bus so we can buy PCI cards as long as Solaris will use them! No more expensive vendor-only hardware to upgrade it!"
Well guess what? If I want to upgrade anything, I still have to buy components from Sun. The memory is somehow... "weird" so that standard SIMM don't work in it. Hard drives and CDROM drives need to have a Sun firmware/BIOS on them or the machine won't recognize them. Even though it's a "standard" PCI bus, you still have to buy expansion cards from Sun -- they sell pretty much off-the-shelf brand-name SCSI and Network cards if you want to add them, but again they have Sun firmware/BIOS that is required before the machine will recognize them. Of course the components from Sun are all between 4x and 10x the normal going street price for identical components.
If I hadn't been able to get the machine very cheap (we had them on lease to another company who nearly paid off the purchase price before the lease went off) I wouldn't have bought it at all.
With the press release saying these new machines will run "Windows NT, Windows 95, DOS" I wonder if they've even given up putting a SPARC chip in these things and gone Intel-based clone. If they have, I'll bet you'll still need to get components from Sun. I suspect it's just a braino from the people who did up the press release, though.
Also, the statement that this is "the first Unix workstation to be listed under $2,000" will probably upset the VA Research and Penguin Computing guys.:)
Funny, I didn't know Lotus was a driving force behind the Internet.
OOOooohhhh, wait, that's right! They make Domino, which powers nearly 10 entire websites.
But seriously, what does Lotus have to do with Internet business and censorship? I think if anyone wanted to know what "the Industry" really thought about this crapola they'd talk to companies like AOL, Microsoft, AT&T, MCI or whichever carriers/ISPs that service Oz and who stand to lose big dollars when the ISPs who buy services from them have to shut down from being unable to cope with the new requirements. (Not to mention if any of those megacompanies offer networking services in Australia directly and will be forced to implement continent-wide filtering software for all those services.)
No need to talk to the local ISPs themselves -- I imagine it's probably pretty unanimous as to which body part is being inserted into which orifice when some boneheaded Minister decides to pass along the expense of forced censorship for the entire country onto them.
Anyway, this is Australia, can't you guys just feed the fool to a croc? Isn't there was some sort of "Bleeding idiot" clause in whatever's your equivalent of the U.S.' constitution of have you guys actually started to succumb to this "P.C. behaviour" disease?
Let me preface this by saying I'm neither a GNOME nor a KDE hacker, however, I've used both GTK and Qt to bang together some silly little programs for myself.
The question doesn't seem to be adequate to an accurate answer. If you mean "If I use Qt, can I run my apps with GNOME and if I use GTK, can I run my apps with KDE?" the answer is, "Of course."
If you mean, "If I use gnomelib routines, will my applications run under KDE and if I use kdelib routines will my applications run under GNOME?" the answer is, "Of course."
If you mean, "How do I write an application that will work equally well with KDE and GNOME, including things like docking and interapplication communications and all the fancy stuff that make GNOME and KDE more than just fancy window managers?" I'm pretty sure the answer is "You can't yet."
GNOME is already pretty much "CORBA-ized" and KDE is at least partially from what I understand, with an effort to make it "fully CORBA-ized" by the next major release. (2.0) I know there is a lot of communication between the two camps to have a lot of their features interworkable. But then the question is, "What are the features of each desktop manager that you want to work with each other? Drag-n-drop? Docking? Do you want to be able to embed GNOME 'objects' in your KDE application? WHAT DO YOU WANT, MAN?!"
You're really probably better off joining the GNOME and KDE development mailing lists and asking the question there. You will probably get a flood of useful answers since it's been my experience from lurking in the lists that the developers of the two toolsets seem to be much less prone to the "[not my brand of desktop manager toolset] sux rox!" mentality and more of the "Well, obviously we like [x] because we're programming it, but if you want [x] to Play Nicely with [y] apps, here is what works and what doesn't work yet..."
Wasn't it in a RAH story that someone had the idea of sending up a multi-warheaded rocket that would near-impact the moon but at the last minute blast out a bunch of small rockets that would spray some sort of colored or reflective material along predetermined paths that would scrawl out the logo of whatever company paid for it?
Or was a for-real idea?
Stuff like Pizza Hut wanting to laser their logo onto the moon just muddles my brain into not knowing which of these hairbrained ideas are real and which aren't...
In any case, I think if *any* company went so far as to actually use the moon as a big billboard, the public backlash would be so horrendous that no company never do it again. Or at least, I would hope so.
What the heck are you talking about? Do you mean his "sex" comment? Don't you have sex? I do. I don't think there's anything inherently offensive about sex and I don't think he said anything like "I like to have sex with Linux users in public while speaking about Linux at Comdex." (And if he did, that would just be weird.) I don't see how a flippant answer to a silly question should be offensive.
I am, though, highly offended by the questioner's mention of... well, the "chee-" word. I think anyone with the gall to talk about such a subject in a public forum should be forever banned from that forum. It's intolerable and unconscionable.
Take some technologies like WebDAV for dynamic publication of web content, defini a DTD for a "Web Rating" for use with XML content, and then figure out some method of scripting that would allow a person browsing a web page to simply click the "Rate this page" button which would send a new "Rating" to the WebDAV engine, which could then parse it and update whatever the particular XML content of "Current Rating" to average the new rating in.
Of course, this is really really not thought through at all, but I think it's at least possible, if not exactly feasable. It would require that all websites supported something like WebDAV and scripting and the proper XML stuff online for one thing. But you get the idea.
I guess Japan has to wait until next year for its IgNobel prize in physics for attempting to see what adding seven times the normal amount of Uranium to a purification process would do.
You could make this exact same argument for any of the linux distros if you wanted to. Other people do the work, and they sell it.
I need a better argument than that to be convinced that the SCL license is any worse than the GPL.
Ok, how about Linux Mandrake then? That was based on a straight RedHat+KDE and they turned it into a commercial product and sold it.
Try getting a copy of the Solaris code under Sun's SCSL and try selling your own boxed set of Solaris. You'll be sued to Mars and back by Sun's lawyers.
Free Software as defined by RMS is Open Source as defined by the OSD, but the reverse is not true. You *can* have Open Source that isn't *free* source. Things like Apple's license, Mozilla's, the QPL, etc, are "Open" but not "Free".
Mmm, I wasn't implying that the average girl hacker wouldn't know how to set up a twit filter, I was implying that the average female hacker is probably going to get really sick and damn tired of pathetic sex-crazed geeks treating her as a female object instead of a female hacker and just quit the scene rather than deal with it.
Hell, I often feel like giving up on computers and becoming a farmer after trodding through hundreds of junk EMail some days.
I didn't mean anything derogatory at all. Apologies if it came out like that.
This question seems to come up with surprising regularity. You'd think someone would just put up a "why aren't there more women in computing?" webste.
There are probably many factors involved, including but not limited to:
1) Cultural -- the US is a major factor in computing and the US is still a society that for the most part expects boys to play with screwdrivers and footballs and automobile engines (and therefore become engineers of some sort) and girls to play with dolls and play kitchen sets and games like "Let's go to the Mall" (and therefore become homemakers and housewives.)
2) Environmental -- CompSci is a science/engineering discipline. Engineering and science are still dramatically male-dominated. Anyone who wants to believe otherwise, fine, but try to find a female professor in any science/engineering dscipline, or better yet, try to become a female professor. Females certainly aren't encouraged to become CompSci majors, and are probably discouraged in many cases.
3) Situational -- I'm sure plenty of women are scared away from computers the first time they show up at a user's group meeting or similar get-together, log into IRC and start chatting, send EMail, post on/. or any other method of socializing whereby it becomes known that they are female. They will, in the vast majority of situations, then become blidingly aware of the huge population of sexually frustrated, poorly socialzed computer geeks out there who will then proceed to come on to, try to "Hot chat", send gross EMail, and so on and so forth. (Yes, I know, you don't do that, but lots of computer geek guys do.) Unlike men, who, since they are the vast majority can have opportunities for big group-bonding geek-outs, it's not as easy for a group of hacker girls to get together in large groups because there really aren't large groups of them. IMHO, being a computer geek is in some part the social fabric of which you become part and if you can't neatly fit into that social fabric, you're not going to be as likely to stick around.
Yadda yadda yadda. Isn't there a FAQ with this info someplace yet?
And, semi-off-topic, I really get annoyed with women who call themselves "grrls" or something similar like that. I find it just as annoying as 31337 5p33k.
Whatever Visual C++ implements, we shall call that "enough," because I really don't think that we can ignore Windows as a target market. If nothing else, we need the checklist item-works on Windows.
Great. So now development of Perl is driven by least-common-denominator capabilities just so they can say "It works on Windows!" I thought the whole thing behind open source projects like this was that decisions could be made on technical merit rather than what some marketroid decided the software needed to be able to do. Or is that turning out to be just a myth?
Chip could have at least phrased that statement a little different to say something like, "We just want to make sure it works with Visual C++ so we can support Windows" rather than the "We're basing it on Visual C++ because we think supporting Windows is much more important than using a compiler where bugs really get fixed on a stable platform the developers really use" implications of the way he stated it.
Do you also object to AT&T (or whoever your LD carrier is) tracking to whom you place phone calls? What about your credit card company tracking who you purchase from?
Yes and yes. Don't you? That's why I use EMail over long distance whenever possible and only own a credit card for emergencies and use cash otherwise.
Of course, that all just means I'm a privacy wacko because I don't want Globalmegacorp, Inc. building a profile of me on to whom I talk on the phone and when, what I buy and at what stores I shop, what size shoes I wear, who I'm dating at the moment, where I live, how much money I make, what I'm doing at 6:30pm tomorrow night and so on, because "normal people" don't worry that they have highly detailed profiles built on them by huge corporations who will only take advantage of every bbit of data they can gather on you to make more money from you and deny you any little bit of privacy in your actions they can as long as they can make money from it.
Am I the only one annoyed that the NYT website requires a login to access stories and requires cookies to track you through??
So I'm a "privacy wacko" -- I haven't read any of the stories on the NYT website mentioned for months and months for precisely those reasons. They have no business keeping track of my progress through their site like that.
And Friendly Neighborhood Geek with wearable has a Quickcam hacked onto it and a cellular modem so he can read his email/web/news from anywhere and when Friendly Neighborhood Mugger walks up to him and says "Give me your money and your computer," FNG says, "I've just taken your picture and faxed it, along with our location and a note saying you're trying to mug me to the local police department. In fact, this whole conversation is being videoed and saved as a movie file onto my website. Still want to mug me?"
Granted, FNM could then stick a knife into FNG and take his stuff, but I think if confronted with this sort of "instant" notoriety, the average street thug is going to be freaked out and spooked off rather than encouraged.
The only thing keeping me from cyborging is the cost. HUD-style displays are expensive, tiny motherboards are too, and trying to find a way to power the whole thing is generally too much roll-your-own for my taste. (Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an electrical engineer!) I don't even want to think about input devices; as cool as The Twiddler is, it's expensive. Add it all up together, and you're in the same range as the cheaper pre-built wearables which are STILL expensive.
$2500 for a complete system, however, is starting to sound good. It's about the price of a nice laptop, and I think the market has indicated that it's about the price people are willing to pay for a nice laptop. I doubt they'll sell lots of them, and the ones they do sell will be to very niche markets (Mobile techs and maintenaince people, companies like Boeing who want to have their workers able to do stuff like pull up schematics while waist-deep in the wing of a 777, geeks who want wearables, etc.) but at that price, I'm sure they will sell some.
Also, with IBM's recent commitments to Linux and open-source in general, I'll bet they'll make sure it will run either Windows or Linux. They do have their ViaVoice speech API available for Linux, at least in beta form, so I can see them easily building a special distro that includes their ViaVoice for Linux for these things.
Now if they'll stick a wireless ethernet on it, I'll pull out the checkbook and pre-order today!
Why do I have the feeling that the only thing this will accomplish is to have the politicians put a clause in stating that any persons currently holding law enforcement and/or political offices are exempt from prosecution because of this law...
Does the UK have anything akin to the U.S. "Freedom of Information Act?" I wonder if an entire Gov't agency could get into trouble for having information that's encrypted that the public should have access to but won't give up the decryption key?
I agree -- as of right now, a nice piece of 8.5x10 paper and a pen are the best way for me to mark up code, write comments, and so on. I haven't seen a word process with an "annotate" function that doesn't suck. It's hard to add notations to code in Emacs except by adding comments and that just gets tedious.
I think the biggest reason people are still printing stuff out is because the Windows-dominated desktop forces a Windows-like workflow on everything anyone does.
With an OS that operates in the way NewtonOS does, or PalmOS, where the OS doesn't get in the way and the device doesn't try to do everything for the user - just does what it's supposed to do well - people wouldn't have these problems. By trying to make your computers work like a Windows box instead of like a digital notepad or a digital organizer, and by making it difficult for them to operate that way, you force people to back up into older modes of operation with which they are comfortable.
My ideal device for this sort of thing is a Newton Messagepad (I [heart] my Newton Messagepad 2100 and still use it as much as possible.) with an 8.5x10 screen, or something like the Cyrix WebPad mentioned here a while ago with a pen interface than can handle the combination of textual data and "gestural" scribbles the way Newton's OS does.
Newton really should have been the PDA of the future, and in many ways it still is. It's just too bad it was a Scully-originated project and Jobs wanted to kill it out of sheer hatred for Scully once he took over the helm.
If you took a legal pad-sized Newton and added something like Apple's new AirPort wireless networking, you'd have an ideal base for building the "Newspad" a-la Arthur C. Clarke and 2001. Keep everything NewtonOS can already do and add a better EMail client, a better web browser, and come up with a good wireless combination of Palm's docking capabilities and Newton's IR "Beaming" and you would have an ideal portable digital notepad that people could use to share information easily.
You're arguing with the guy who originally created PHP/FI. I think you're going to be on the losing end since I'm pretty sure Rasmus knows what he's talking about re: misc PHP issues.
Is there a reason why you want to use PHP on an NT/IIS platform for any reason other than "it's just too damn cool"? I've used PHP on Linux with Apache and have had lots of luck with it, but that's because it's designed to work on UNIX-y boxes with Apache, for the most part. Trying to wedge it into an NT/IIS situation is, IMHO, Not A Good Idea. If you're using Cold Fusion and comfortable with it, keep using it. Don't switch for any "Cool Factor."
If you wanted to switch, I would highly recommend switching over full-scale and rebuild those NT boxes as Linux boxes, use Apache and PHP or mod_perl or what have you.
You might also look into doing servlet programming with Java. JDBC offers an excellent interface to databases and the advantage of going Java is that, at least with JDK 1.1, you really can move your code from the NT box to a Linux box when NT buckles under the load, and from there to a huge 64-processor Solaris box when the Linux box can't take it any more and it will all work essentially unchanged. (Write-once-run-anywhere works for the most part as long as you stick with straight JDK1.1 stuff and don't use too many third-party add-ins, or at least stick to add-on libraries that are 100% java.) IBM's JDK for Linux is quite high-performance and remarkably stable for what they call an "Alpha" version. (You can find it at www.alphaworks.ibm.com)
A warning about Java servlet programming -- Java is a highly structured language and if you're into the kind of "quick kluge" that languages like Perl seem to be designed to handle, or the "quick one-off" that PHP excels at, you're going to have some problems moving to Java servlets which requires a lot more thought and "engineering" to get a good design. The advantage is, at least in my experience, going the Java route winds up with much more maintainable and extensible codebase.
This is not intended as a poke at PHP or Perl, just that those two languages are really designed to do stuff "quick-and-dirty" and therefore are very easy to write nasty code -- lots easier than it is with Java. (although you can still write nasty code in Java.) I'm speaking from experience as I've written nasty code in PHP and had to try to clean it up into some sort of maintainable form without a lot of luck once the codebase gets to a certain size, and I've had to deal with nasty CGI Perl code written by other people that I was barely able to read, much less figure out how to change without breaking the whole thing.
All these undercover FBI people online huting down "perverts" makes me think of one of those "News of the Weird" columns where they related an event with undercover Miami Police arresting a bunch of undercover FBI agents who sold them drugs while the FBI guys come busting in the door to arrest the undercover Miami Police for buying them.
One wonders how many things like this happen online:
bigweenie: Hey baby, come on over to my place. imjust14: ok i'll be right over and we can have sex bigweenie: Yowza! I'll see you soon imjust14: you're under arrest for soliciting from a minor! bigweenie: under arrest??? I'm undercover FBI lookie for kiddie pornographers! imjust14: oops! ha ha! bigweenie: boy is MY face red! ha ha! imjust14: let's not tell anyone about this...
One also wonders what all those FBI agents who run around acting like 13 year-olds online and the ones hunting down kiddie porn all day long do in their spare time....
Slashdot Mirror
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Well guess what? If I want to upgrade anything, I still have to buy components from Sun. The memory is somehow
If I hadn't been able to get the machine very cheap (we had them on lease to another company who nearly paid off the purchase price before the lease went off) I wouldn't have bought it at all.
With the press release saying these new machines will run "Windows NT, Windows 95, DOS" I wonder if they've even given up putting a SPARC chip in these things and gone Intel-based clone. If they have, I'll bet you'll still need to get components from Sun. I suspect it's just a braino from the people who did up the press release, though.
Also, the statement that this is "the first Unix workstation to be listed under $2,000" will probably upset the VA Research and Penguin Computing guys.
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OOOooohhhh, wait, that's right! They make Domino, which powers nearly 10 entire websites.
But seriously, what does Lotus have to do with Internet business and censorship? I think if anyone wanted to know what "the Industry" really thought about this crapola they'd talk to companies like AOL, Microsoft, AT&T, MCI or whichever carriers/ISPs that service Oz and who stand to lose big dollars when the ISPs who buy services from them have to shut down from being unable to cope with the new requirements. (Not to mention if any of those megacompanies offer networking services in Australia directly and will be forced to implement continent-wide filtering software for all those services.)
No need to talk to the local ISPs themselves -- I imagine it's probably pretty unanimous as to which body part is being inserted into which orifice when some boneheaded Minister decides to pass along the expense of forced censorship for the entire country onto them.
Anyway, this is Australia, can't you guys just feed the fool to a croc? Isn't there was some sort of "Bleeding idiot" clause in whatever's your equivalent of the U.S.' constitution of have you guys actually started to succumb to this "P.C. behaviour" disease?
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The question doesn't seem to be adequate to an accurate answer. If you mean "If I use Qt, can I run my apps with GNOME and if I use GTK, can I run my apps with KDE?" the answer is, "Of course."
If you mean, "If I use gnomelib routines, will my applications run under KDE and if I use kdelib routines will my applications run under GNOME?" the answer is, "Of course."
If you mean, "How do I write an application that will work equally well with KDE and GNOME, including things like docking and interapplication communications and all the fancy stuff that make GNOME and KDE more than just fancy window managers?" I'm pretty sure the answer is "You can't yet."
GNOME is already pretty much "CORBA-ized" and KDE is at least partially from what I understand, with an effort to make it "fully CORBA-ized" by the next major release. (2.0) I know there is a lot of communication between the two camps to have a lot of their features interworkable. But then the question is, "What are the features of each desktop manager that you want to work with each other? Drag-n-drop? Docking? Do you want to be able to embed GNOME 'objects' in your KDE application? WHAT DO YOU WANT, MAN?!"
You're really probably better off joining the GNOME and KDE development mailing lists and asking the question there. You will probably get a flood of useful answers since it's been my experience from lurking in the lists that the developers of the two toolsets seem to be much less prone to the "[not my brand of desktop manager toolset] sux rox!" mentality and more of the "Well, obviously we like [x] because we're programming it, but if you want [x] to Play Nicely with [y] apps, here is what works and what doesn't work yet..."
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Or was a for-real idea?
Stuff like Pizza Hut wanting to laser their logo onto the moon just muddles my brain into not knowing which of these hairbrained ideas are real and which aren't...
In any case, I think if *any* company went so far as to actually use the moon as a big billboard, the public backlash would be so horrendous that no company never do it again. Or at least, I would hope so.
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I am, though, highly offended by the questioner's mention of... well, the "chee-" word. I think anyone with the gall to talk about such a subject in a public forum should be forever banned from that forum. It's intolerable and unconscionable.
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Take some technologies like WebDAV for dynamic publication of web content, defini a DTD for a "Web Rating" for use with XML content, and then figure out some method of scripting that would allow a person browsing a web page to simply click the "Rate this page" button which would send a new "Rating" to the WebDAV engine, which could then parse it and update whatever the particular XML content of "Current Rating" to average the new rating in.
Of course, this is really really not thought through at all, but I think it's at least possible, if not exactly feasable. It would require that all websites supported something like WebDAV and scripting and the proper XML stuff online for one thing. But you get the idea.
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WHY: The Igs are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and spur people's interest in science.
So you see, it doesn't mean they think it's stupid. Just something incredibly weird.
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I need a better argument than that to be convinced that the SCL license is any worse than the GPL.
Ok, how about Linux Mandrake then? That was based on a straight RedHat+KDE and they turned it into a commercial product and sold it.
Try getting a copy of the Solaris code under Sun's SCSL and try selling your own boxed set of Solaris. You'll be sued to Mars and back by Sun's lawyers.
If you still don't get it, you just won't get it.
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Not good. Especially with Japan being such a densely populated country.
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Hell, I often feel like giving up on computers and becoming a farmer after trodding through hundreds of junk EMail some days.
I didn't mean anything derogatory at all. Apologies if it came out like that.
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There are probably many factors involved, including but not limited to:
1) Cultural -- the US is a major factor in computing and the US is still a society that for the most part expects boys to play with screwdrivers and footballs and automobile engines (and therefore become engineers of some sort) and girls to play with dolls and play kitchen sets and games like "Let's go to the Mall" (and therefore become homemakers and housewives.)
2) Environmental -- CompSci is a science/engineering discipline. Engineering and science are still dramatically male-dominated. Anyone who wants to believe otherwise, fine, but try to find a female professor in any science/engineering dscipline, or better yet, try to become a female professor. Females certainly aren't encouraged to become CompSci majors, and are probably discouraged in many cases.
3) Situational -- I'm sure plenty of women are scared away from computers the first time they show up at a user's group meeting or similar get-together, log into IRC and start chatting, send EMail, post on
Yadda yadda yadda. Isn't there a FAQ with this info someplace yet?
And, semi-off-topic, I really get annoyed with women who call themselves "grrls" or something similar like that. I find it just as annoying as 31337 5p33k.
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Great. So now development of Perl is driven by least-common-denominator capabilities just so they can say "It works on Windows!" I thought the whole thing behind open source projects like this was that decisions could be made on technical merit rather than what some marketroid decided the software needed to be able to do. Or is that turning out to be just a myth?
Chip could have at least phrased that statement a little different to say something like, "We just want to make sure it works with Visual C++ so we can support Windows" rather than the "We're basing it on Visual C++ because we think supporting Windows is much more important than using a compiler where bugs really get fixed on a stable platform the developers really use" implications of the way he stated it.
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Yes and yes. Don't you? That's why I use EMail over long distance whenever possible and only own a credit card for emergencies and use cash otherwise.
Of course, that all just means I'm a privacy wacko because I don't want Globalmegacorp, Inc. building a profile of me on to whom I talk on the phone and when, what I buy and at what stores I shop, what size shoes I wear, who I'm dating at the moment, where I live, how much money I make, what I'm doing at 6:30pm tomorrow night and so on, because "normal people" don't worry that they have highly detailed profiles built on them by huge corporations who will only take advantage of every bbit of data they can gather on you to make more money from you and deny you any little bit of privacy in your actions they can as long as they can make money from it.
This is getting seriously offtopic now.
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So I'm a "privacy wacko" -- I haven't read any of the stories on the NYT website mentioned for months and months for precisely those reasons. They have no business keeping track of my progress through their site like that.
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Granted, FNM could then stick a knife into FNG and take his stuff, but I think if confronted with this sort of "instant" notoriety, the average street thug is going to be freaked out and spooked off rather than encouraged.
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$2500 for a complete system, however, is starting to sound good. It's about the price of a nice laptop, and I think the market has indicated that it's about the price people are willing to pay for a nice laptop. I doubt they'll sell lots of them, and the ones they do sell will be to very niche markets (Mobile techs and maintenaince people, companies like Boeing who want to have their workers able to do stuff like pull up schematics while waist-deep in the wing of a 777, geeks who want wearables, etc.) but at that price, I'm sure they will sell some.
Also, with IBM's recent commitments to Linux and open-source in general, I'll bet they'll make sure it will run either Windows or Linux. They do have their ViaVoice speech API available for Linux, at least in beta form, so I can see them easily building a special distro that includes their ViaVoice for Linux for these things.
Now if they'll stick a wireless ethernet on it, I'll pull out the checkbook and pre-order today!
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Does the UK have anything akin to the U.S. "Freedom of Information Act?" I wonder if an entire Gov't agency could get into trouble for having information that's encrypted that the public should have access to but won't give up the decryption key?
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I agree -- as of right now, a nice piece of 8.5x10 paper and a pen are the best way for me to mark up code, write comments, and so on. I haven't seen a word process with an "annotate" function that doesn't suck. It's hard to add notations to code in Emacs except by adding comments and that just gets tedious.
I think the biggest reason people are still printing stuff out is because the Windows-dominated desktop forces a Windows-like workflow on everything anyone does.
With an OS that operates in the way NewtonOS does, or PalmOS, where the OS doesn't get in the way and the device doesn't try to do everything for the user - just does what it's supposed to do well - people wouldn't have these problems. By trying to make your computers work like a Windows box instead of like a digital notepad or a digital organizer, and by making it difficult for them to operate that way, you force people to back up into older modes of operation with which they are comfortable.
My ideal device for this sort of thing is a Newton Messagepad (I [heart] my Newton Messagepad 2100 and still use it as much as possible.) with an 8.5x10 screen, or something like the Cyrix WebPad mentioned here a while ago with a pen interface than can handle the combination of textual data and "gestural" scribbles the way Newton's OS does.
Newton really should have been the PDA of the future, and in many ways it still is. It's just too bad it was a Scully-originated project and Jobs wanted to kill it out of sheer hatred for Scully once he took over the helm.
If you took a legal pad-sized Newton and added something like Apple's new AirPort wireless networking, you'd have an ideal base for building the "Newspad" a-la Arthur C. Clarke and 2001. Keep everything NewtonOS can already do and add a better EMail client, a better web browser, and come up with a good wireless combination of Palm's docking capabilities and Newton's IR "Beaming" and you would have an ideal portable digital notepad that people could use to share information easily.
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"[Madam], please forgive me if I get an erection, and please forgive me if I do not."
Anyone know anything more about this?
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If you wanted to switch, I would highly recommend switching over full-scale and rebuild those NT boxes as Linux boxes, use Apache and PHP or mod_perl or what have you.
You might also look into doing servlet programming with Java. JDBC offers an excellent interface to databases and the advantage of going Java is that, at least with JDK 1.1, you really can move your code from the NT box to a Linux box when NT buckles under the load, and from there to a huge 64-processor Solaris box when the Linux box can't take it any more and it will all work essentially unchanged. (Write-once-run-anywhere works for the most part as long as you stick with straight JDK1.1 stuff and don't use too many third-party add-ins, or at least stick to add-on libraries that are 100% java.) IBM's JDK for Linux is quite high-performance and remarkably stable for what they call an "Alpha" version. (You can find it at www.alphaworks.ibm.com)
A warning about Java servlet programming -- Java is a highly structured language and if you're into the kind of "quick kluge" that languages like Perl seem to be designed to handle, or the "quick one-off" that PHP excels at, you're going to have some problems moving to Java servlets which requires a lot more thought and "engineering" to get a good design. The advantage is, at least in my experience, going the Java route winds up with much more maintainable and extensible codebase.
This is not intended as a poke at PHP or Perl, just that those two languages are really designed to do stuff "quick-and-dirty" and therefore are very easy to write nasty code -- lots easier than it is with Java. (although you can still write nasty code in Java.) I'm speaking from experience as I've written nasty code in PHP and had to try to clean it up into some sort of maintainable form without a lot of luck once the codebase gets to a certain size, and I've had to deal with nasty CGI Perl code written by other people that I was barely able to read, much less figure out how to change without breaking the whole thing.
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One wonders how many things like this happen online:
bigweenie: Hey baby, come on over to my place.
imjust14: ok i'll be right over and we can have sex
bigweenie: Yowza! I'll see you soon
imjust14: you're under arrest for soliciting from a minor!
bigweenie: under arrest??? I'm undercover FBI lookie for kiddie pornographers!
imjust14: oops! ha ha!
bigweenie: boy is MY face red! ha ha!
imjust14: let's not tell anyone about this...
One also wonders what all those FBI agents who run around acting like 13 year-olds online and the ones hunting down kiddie porn all day long do in their spare time....
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