If one has at least KDE shared libs installed, kpdf could be a nice full feature open source replacement. I know there are lots of different alternatives exist but I was amazed by the performance and display quality of kpdf on OS X (installed via fink). We already have state of art quartz pdf renderer and it is hard to impress people on this platform.
As all companies in this economic disaster you will layoff people. I am sure you know which department to layoff and while on it, don't forget the OS X guys which manages to keep Debugger() symbols in World's most popular plugin, Flash.
Yes OS X people and especially Webkit/Browser developers, that mysterious ''Debugger() was called!'' in system.log comes from Flash 10 plugin because idiots forgot to remove debug symbols! That is a bug which wasn't fixed for months and even in recent security update release of Flash wasn't used to fix it.
We will end up with Silverlight and Document XPS or something from MS as result, that is what drives me nuts. We live same junk which almost made MS Wmedia standard in 1990s. History repeats itself.
As the new web which you can run office suites in web browsers still didn't enlighten people, people still thinks AOL paid billions to Netscape just for netscape.com start page.
Netscape was heading to a point that their founder was openly speaking about future OS paradigm which will be only necessary for drivers. That was back in 1990s, it is not ''Netbook'' talk of today, it is Windows 95 age. That was the point when MS shipped a real IE (3.x) along with all the stuff to make easy to embed into your own application.
If AOL could move fast and managed to ship a gecko.dll which they could use in their own apps, offered documentation and usage for all kinds of scenarios, things could be really different now. The state of Gecko at that time? Check Winamp 3 reviews:)
Once you understand the time period I talk about and AOL's purchase of Netscape for billions of dollars, you can understand how Windows makes developers link to IE system parts.
For the icons on Desktop? You PAID to MS for them and they included them just like once upon a time, a single Netscape bookmark costed companies $50K
I am speaking about a company, purchased Netscape for billions, had Gecko in hand (which THEY spent huge money) and had to link with mshtml.
Apache is also a very important licensing scheme alternative especially for large companies like Apple. Next time you blame someone for rambling, check the domain name you are on. When I use GPL and Apache in same context, I expect everyone knows what I talk about.
A guy with integrity and experience would see what customer actually wants and his profile. If guy is only interested in couple of devices having only windows support and basic (non 3d) gaming or office? Sun Virtualbox.
The Parallels and VMWare guys support way more advanced uses.
Well the software is free to try. I mean don't trust to ''It does 3d'' comments and remove your bootcamp partition like some did. It supports OpenGL only and the developers who were wise to code in OpenGL mostly have native OS X apps. For true 3d on Windows, you need at least dx 9 supporting hardware with at least 128MB RAM. Virtual or real, these are the real specs for Windows games.
I am not watching current Windows scene too closely but I remember AOL applications always linking to MSHTML, even their most popular applications of their time. Today, vendors don't even feel the need of writing ''MS IE required'' as they assume it must be already there.
Perhaps pushing MS to truly remove IE is unrealistic, pushing them to make it like Apple Webkit/Safari in terms of both being open and closed with their (MS) own open source terms is the way to go? I am not saying GPL or even Apache. Well, no court can push them that hard so it won't likely happen.
One can demo it and can see what you talk about. In fact, one can also understand where Flash and AIR is heading and the reason of Silverlight hurry of MS. Netscape had their death sentence right after showing off similar but early incarnations of such functionality.
That was what people were saying for ages. There is almost no way to remove mshtml (the real ie) from an up and running Windows OS.
It was possible, one Aussie teacher made a state of art.inf file and called it Win98 lite. It was even mentioned in court by judge. In fact, it could impress anyone since the speed of OS actually skyrocketed.
MS was unhappy of course and they built this massive IT conspiracy making sure it will never happen again and they would easily say ''Order us to remove? Well, see what happens when it is removed''. With lazy Windows developers and gecko.dll never stabilizing enough like todays Firefox or Apple Webkit, the plot worked fine.
If one installs Windows of any kind today, he should never pass any IE updates since it is there, working and massively linked even by Microsoft's most die-hard rivals.
I bet you don't fly with Boeing 737 planes because they are from 1967. It is not the case of course, the 737 is ages ahead of the original one. WoW like mega games always get updated to use newer technologies. The most obvious one is WoW since it was one of the first apps to get threaded OpenGL support. For the Mini and Games comment? For RTS etc., it would be fine as a real GPU is back. For very advanced FPS stuff? I'd choose a PS/3.
Funny is the apparent silence of ''Firewire is dead'' guys. Perhaps they are afraid to be asked about why it has one FW800 port while having 4 USB2 ports which already resulted in (unjustified) ''600 dollar USB hub'' jokes? Let me tell why. FW800 can use channels while each USB port shared will use share from 480mbit (theoretical!) bandwidth. If one chooses FW800/USB2 drive in state of this economy and compare the same hardware connected both in USB2 and Firewire, especially CPU (kernel_task) overhead, he will understand why firewire users went nuts when Apple removed the firewire from low end macs, especially portables. Never trust connection spec from a CPU vendor which would go chapter 11 if it can't sell CPU upgrades every year.
Qt is now Cocoa, that is how they added 64bit support. They already had plans for Cocoa but Apple's move as ''If you want 64bit GUI, you need Cocoa'' made them move faster. That is how Apple pushes developers I guess.
It is huge news for OS X, both Developers and Users. Imagine Cocoa Opera, Google Earth, Skype etc. and even the entire KDE 4.
While there was a lot of FUD against Carbon I don't agree, I guess a Cocoa based Qt will end a lot of bad feedback about Qt based apps on OS X, especially text rendering? I think Opera will be the obvious application we would see changes once they adopt it. Hopefully they will move as early as version 10 (which is in alpha now). I was blaming CmdrTaco upgraded to Web 2.0;) but it seems Opera spends a lot of CPU time in text rendering, not Javascript.
If a real developer enlightened us about what would change when Carbon to Cocoa transition happens, it would be better of course.
I got Fink (-project.org) for OS X installed so installing KDE 3 was really easy.
Konqueror and KHTML has their own powers especially as a system wide HTML rendering framework. The stability and maturity of KHTML is at amazing levels with comically low CPU usage. If I had chance to have Flash support, it would be my choice for browsing.
What I understand is, they pick the nice features Apple enhanced in Webkit without the cost of stability and implement it.
Safari's market share isn't all correct too if you look that way. Google chrome, Adobe Air, Nokia S60 browser are all Webkit browsers or have webkit in them.
Let me tell you what is sad in share numbers on this G4 Mini 1.42 Ghz which can browse the web on 720P HDTV easily. Opera. It is more obvious after press drooling for top sites feature which _is_ their invention and numerous other things.
If Apple doesn't make a huge mistake, that Grand Central thing and the integration of OpenCL will validate your point.
It will be just like the iPhone status which drove us, Symbian users mad. You know, hundreds of apps could be shipped on Symbian for all these years, some Symbian hardware are ages ahead of iPhone but what happens? They ship for iPhone. Why? Ease of programming with good tools.
I bet 1-2 years later, MS will plug their own multithreading stuff to DirectX and xBox 360 will benefit or get upgrade. Funny is, it will be same processor family, nobody would blame IBM for it.
I suspect Sony trusts a mainframe giant to provide tools for a gaming platform. That is a huge mistake, they should somehow plug into Visual Studio and XCode and even more importantly, gcc toolchain.
Well, it won't be like PowerPC situation at least, Cell already proved itself in other things like HPC, high end servers and even televisions.
The rules require W3C valid entries so if a browser doesn't work, it will be a browser bug.
If one uses standard W3C standard to increase usabiility like ''click here to show advanced options'', why not?
Quote from my router ''We suggest that you use Internet Explorer 5.5 or above at a minimum of 1024x768 resolution. ''
That is old good US Robotics for you which their analogue modems came with 130 page manual explaining every single detail. That is the shape of things in home router world now. I don't think they look for flashy content.
''As hard as Microsoft will make signing the driver. I think we all know such a driver will take years and thousands of dollars to move through MS' signing process.``
Lagging the process without a valid technical reason would be death certificate of Microsoft. The monopoly case.
As it is computer science it would be almost trivial to prove it.
That is awful but it is really the original software's genius developer to blame.
I wonder how he managed to do it since Acrobat is more like Quicktime in terms of way it is developed. You know, if a program is coded without massive hacks and depends on quicktime in 4.0 ages, you can update Quicktime to 7 and expect it to keep working as usual. I actually have couple of software even working with added performance in such situation.
I wish they did such a thing. Those companies having 80+ MB of ''PC Suite'' kind of application downloads and yet keeping that JUNK filesystem for convinience(!) in expense of risking their customers non reproducable private data would learn. Donating huge money to FSF and adopting a modern filesystem was too hard it seems. What space would something like ext2 vfs driver occupy for example?
Yes I speak about using FAT (and now exFAT) and even paying for it. Ask anyone who lost their hundreds of photos because of a basic mistake or hardware failure.
Too late now anyway so only thing we can do is whine about it or at least use iPhone coming with a filesystem ages ahead of FAT junk in terms of reliability and capabilities.
Easy. Think about business smart phone deployment. You have 1000 Symbian phones which must have same kind of software with same settings to manage. You update the virtual machine instead of all that OTA mess.
For slashdot community, everyone using Windows is either forced to use it or a plain idiot.
So, one should be saved in both cases. If you suggest Windows 7 over XP (which I agree), you are not saving him so as with new slashdot fashion, you were ''undugg'' by abuse of moderation.
Besides jokes, I did a mad test which surprised even MS employees on IRC. I installed Win 7 under emulated Intel hardware (On G5) with no MMX or SSE. Besides the ''no GPU'' issue, it performed faster than XP on same PC (!) with 512MB RAM. I guess Windows 7 will be a hit on netbooks.
For me? I would use the real netbook with optimized OS designed for it. Nokia E90 (of 9000 series) or N97. Symbian. It is now open source too. With uptimes of 4-5 weeks with zero memory/cpu leaks on my old Nokia 9300, I wouldn't think a second.
I understand the resistance to upgrade a major version (9) but if one, especially a company doesn't apply a free update to same major version, that system is not managed and should be taken off the internet.
As far as I know Adobe uses the ultra paranoid microsoft installer on Windows and it has excellent admin options like rollback and deployment.
Old computer isn't an excuse, they are being real lazy. I mean one should use advantages of the platform if they are stuck with it.
Funny is both Netscape 4 and IE 3 (or 4?) had font embedding feature and somehow nobody cared for it.
IE still supports the IE method of font embedding. Of course it was totally MS with.CAB files wondering around. Netscape`s own one (which wasn't standard too) didn't make to Mozilla (Firefox).
I don't think average webmaster who still can't get rid of damn Arial while both MS and Apple gives them some great fonts for usage will rush and learn HTML font embedding. There could also be licensing issues with pro fonts?
Slashdot Mirror
If one has at least KDE shared libs installed, kpdf could be a nice full feature open source replacement. I know there are lots of different alternatives exist but I was amazed by the performance and display quality of kpdf on OS X (installed via fink). We already have state of art quartz pdf renderer and it is hard to impress people on this platform.
As all companies in this economic disaster you will layoff people. I am sure you know which department to layoff and while on it, don't forget the OS X guys which manages to keep Debugger() symbols in World's most popular plugin, Flash.
Yes OS X people and especially Webkit/Browser developers, that mysterious ''Debugger() was called!'' in system.log comes from Flash 10 plugin because idiots forgot to remove debug symbols! That is a bug which wasn't fixed for months and even in recent security update release of Flash wasn't used to fix it.
Look to description: http://www.stinkbot.com/blog/archives/69
We will end up with Silverlight and Document XPS or something from MS as result, that is what drives me nuts. We live same junk which almost made MS Wmedia standard in 1990s. History repeats itself.
As the new web which you can run office suites in web browsers still didn't enlighten people, people still thinks AOL paid billions to Netscape just for netscape.com start page.
Netscape was heading to a point that their founder was openly speaking about future OS paradigm which will be only necessary for drivers. That was back in 1990s, it is not ''Netbook'' talk of today, it is Windows 95 age. That was the point when MS shipped a real IE (3.x) along with all the stuff to make easy to embed into your own application.
If AOL could move fast and managed to ship a gecko.dll which they could use in their own apps, offered documentation and usage for all kinds of scenarios, things could be really different now. The state of Gecko at that time? Check Winamp 3 reviews :)
Once you understand the time period I talk about and AOL's purchase of Netscape for billions of dollars, you can understand how Windows makes developers link to IE system parts.
For the icons on Desktop? You PAID to MS for them and they included them just like once upon a time, a single Netscape bookmark costed companies $50K
I am speaking about a company, purchased Netscape for billions, had Gecko in hand (which THEY spent huge money) and had to link with mshtml.
Apache is also a very important licensing scheme alternative especially for large companies like Apple. Next time you blame someone for rambling, check the domain name you are on. When I use GPL and Apache in same context, I expect everyone knows what I talk about.
A guy with integrity and experience would see what customer actually wants and his profile. If guy is only interested in couple of devices having only windows support and basic (non 3d) gaming or office? Sun Virtualbox.
The Parallels and VMWare guys support way more advanced uses.
Well the software is free to try. I mean don't trust to ''It does 3d'' comments and remove your bootcamp partition like some did. It supports OpenGL only and the developers who were wise to code in OpenGL mostly have native OS X apps.
For true 3d on Windows, you need at least dx 9 supporting hardware with at least 128MB RAM. Virtual or real, these are the real specs for Windows games.
I am not watching current Windows scene too closely but I remember AOL applications always linking to MSHTML, even their most popular applications of their time. Today, vendors don't even feel the need of writing ''MS IE required'' as they assume it must be already there.
Perhaps pushing MS to truly remove IE is unrealistic, pushing them to make it like Apple Webkit/Safari in terms of both being open and closed with their (MS) own open source terms is the way to go? I am not saying GPL or even Apache. Well, no court can push them that hard so it won't likely happen.
Interesting is that thing you mention (except not being windows or linux) is done for end users and runs under Flash (soon AIR)
http://g.ho.st/
One can demo it and can see what you talk about. In fact, one can also understand where Flash and AIR is heading and the reason of Silverlight hurry of MS. Netscape had their death sentence right after showing off similar but early incarnations of such functionality.
That was what people were saying for ages. There is almost no way to remove mshtml (the real ie) from an up and running Windows OS.
It was possible, one Aussie teacher made a state of art .inf file and called it Win98 lite. It was even mentioned in court by judge. In fact, it could impress anyone since the speed of OS actually skyrocketed.
MS was unhappy of course and they built this massive IT conspiracy making sure it will never happen again and they would easily say ''Order us to remove? Well, see what happens when it is removed''. With lazy Windows developers and gecko.dll never stabilizing enough like todays Firefox or Apple Webkit, the plot worked fine.
If one installs Windows of any kind today, he should never pass any IE updates since it is there, working and massively linked even by Microsoft's most die-hard rivals.
I bet you don't fly with Boeing 737 planes because they are from 1967. It is not the case of course, the 737 is ages ahead of the original one.
WoW like mega games always get updated to use newer technologies. The most obvious one is WoW since it was one of the first apps to get threaded OpenGL support.
For the Mini and Games comment? For RTS etc., it would be fine as a real GPU is back. For very advanced FPS stuff? I'd choose a PS/3.
Funny is the apparent silence of ''Firewire is dead'' guys. Perhaps they are afraid to be asked about why it has one FW800 port while having 4 USB2 ports which already resulted in (unjustified) ''600 dollar USB hub'' jokes?
Let me tell why. FW800 can use channels while each USB port shared will use share from 480mbit (theoretical!) bandwidth.
If one chooses FW800/USB2 drive in state of this economy and compare the same hardware connected both in USB2 and Firewire, especially CPU (kernel_task) overhead, he will understand why firewire users went nuts when Apple removed the firewire from low end macs, especially portables.
Never trust connection spec from a CPU vendor which would go chapter 11 if it can't sell CPU upgrades every year.
Qt is now Cocoa, that is how they added 64bit support. They already had plans for Cocoa but Apple's move as ''If you want 64bit GUI, you need Cocoa'' made them move faster. That is how Apple pushes developers I guess.
It is huge news for OS X, both Developers and Users. Imagine Cocoa Opera, Google Earth, Skype etc. and even the entire KDE 4.
While there was a lot of FUD against Carbon I don't agree, I guess a Cocoa based Qt will end a lot of bad feedback about Qt based apps on OS X, especially text rendering? I think Opera will be the obvious application we would see changes once they adopt it. Hopefully they will move as early as version 10 (which is in alpha now). I was blaming CmdrTaco upgraded to Web 2.0 ;) but it seems Opera spends a lot of CPU time in text rendering, not Javascript.
If a real developer enlightened us about what would change when Carbon to Cocoa transition happens, it would be better of course.
I got Fink (-project.org) for OS X installed so installing KDE 3 was really easy.
Konqueror and KHTML has their own powers especially as a system wide HTML rendering framework. The stability and maturity of KHTML is at amazing levels with comically low CPU usage. If I had chance to have Flash support, it would be my choice for browsing.
What I understand is, they pick the nice features Apple enhanced in Webkit without the cost of stability and implement it.
Safari's market share isn't all correct too if you look that way. Google chrome, Adobe Air, Nokia S60 browser are all Webkit browsers or have webkit in them.
Let me tell you what is sad in share numbers on this G4 Mini 1.42 Ghz which can browse the web on 720P HDTV easily. Opera. It is more obvious after press drooling for top sites feature which _is_ their invention and numerous other things.
It doesn't even appear in ''New Software'' section which was implemented after that scandal.
BTW I don't think that sneak in was a major conspiracy, it was just Apple confusing Windows with OS X and Windows userbase with OSX userbase.
I checked on bootcamp installed Macbook running XP and Apple SW update.
If Apple doesn't make a huge mistake, that Grand Central thing and the integration of OpenCL will validate your point.
It will be just like the iPhone status which drove us, Symbian users mad. You know, hundreds of apps could be shipped on Symbian for all these years, some Symbian hardware are ages ahead of iPhone but what happens? They ship for iPhone. Why? Ease of programming with good tools.
I bet 1-2 years later, MS will plug their own multithreading stuff to DirectX and xBox 360 will benefit or get upgrade. Funny is, it will be same processor family, nobody would blame IBM for it.
I suspect Sony trusts a mainframe giant to provide tools for a gaming platform. That is a huge mistake, they should somehow plug into Visual Studio and XCode and even more importantly, gcc toolchain.
Well, it won't be like PowerPC situation at least, Cell already proved itself in other things like HPC, high end servers and even televisions.
The rules require W3C valid entries so if a browser doesn't work, it will be a browser bug.
If one uses standard W3C standard to increase usabiility like ''click here to show advanced options'', why not?
Quote from my router ''We suggest that you use Internet Explorer 5.5 or above at a minimum of 1024x768 resolution. ''
That is old good US Robotics for you which their analogue modems came with 130 page manual explaining every single detail. That is the shape of things in home router world now. I don't think they look for flashy content.
''As hard as Microsoft will make signing the driver. I think we all know such a driver will take years and thousands of dollars to move through MS' signing process.``
Lagging the process without a valid technical reason would be death certificate of Microsoft. The monopoly case.
As it is computer science it would be almost trivial to prove it.
That is awful but it is really the original software's genius developer to blame.
I wonder how he managed to do it since Acrobat is more like Quicktime in terms of way it is developed. You know, if a program is coded without massive hacks and depends on quicktime in 4.0 ages, you can update Quicktime to 7 and expect it to keep working as usual. I actually have couple of software even working with added performance in such situation.
How hard is to make a signed ext2 driver for Windows and install it with the software which would occupy tens of times bigger space already?
Also Navigation could be a very critical task and FAT is known to break to unfixable levels very easily.
Lets hope companies start to learn.
I wish they did such a thing. Those companies having 80+ MB of ''PC Suite'' kind of application downloads and yet keeping that JUNK filesystem for convinience(!) in expense of risking their customers non reproducable private data would learn. Donating huge money to FSF and adopting a modern filesystem was too hard it seems. What space would something like ext2 vfs driver occupy for example?
Yes I speak about using FAT (and now exFAT) and even paying for it. Ask anyone who lost their hundreds of photos because of a basic mistake or hardware failure.
Too late now anyway so only thing we can do is whine about it or at least use iPhone coming with a filesystem ages ahead of FAT junk in terms of reliability and capabilities.
Read this story a couple of times and think about trusting the very same company for your future.
Easy. Think about business smart phone deployment. You have 1000 Symbian phones which must have same kind of software with same settings to manage.
You update the virtual machine instead of all that OTA mess.
For slashdot community, everyone using Windows is either forced to use it or a plain idiot.
So, one should be saved in both cases. If you suggest Windows 7 over XP (which I agree), you are not saving him so as with new slashdot fashion, you were ''undugg'' by abuse of moderation.
Besides jokes, I did a mad test which surprised even MS employees on IRC. I installed Win 7 under emulated Intel hardware (On G5) with no MMX or SSE. Besides the ''no GPU'' issue, it performed faster than XP on same PC (!) with 512MB RAM. I guess Windows 7 will be a hit on netbooks.
For me? I would use the real netbook with optimized OS designed for it. Nokia E90 (of 9000 series) or N97. Symbian. It is now open source too. With uptimes of 4-5 weeks with zero memory/cpu leaks on my old Nokia 9300, I wouldn't think a second.
I understand the resistance to upgrade a major version (9) but if one, especially a company doesn't apply a free update to same major version, that system is not managed and should be taken off the internet.
As far as I know Adobe uses the ultra paranoid microsoft installer on Windows and it has excellent admin options like rollback and deployment.
Old computer isn't an excuse, they are being real lazy. I mean one should use advantages of the platform if they are stuck with it.
Funny is both Netscape 4 and IE 3 (or 4?) had font embedding feature and somehow nobody cared for it.
IE still supports the IE method of font embedding. Of course it was totally MS with .CAB files wondering around. Netscape`s own one (which wasn't standard too) didn't make to Mozilla (Firefox).
Here is IE method:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/default.aspx
I don't think average webmaster who still can't get rid of damn Arial while both MS and Apple gives them some great fonts for usage will rush and learn HTML font embedding. There could also be licensing issues with pro fonts?