Toshiba/IBM guys should get some commit access to ffmpeg/x264/VLC and start working on enhancing the tools for Cell CPU. ffmpeg or x264 aren't "nerd things" anymore, they are used by every kind of user embedded in easily used products.
Firefox became huge and everyone optimises for it or fix its code right? If I remember correct, the Download record was 10 million+... Look at VLC without any kind of record campaign, you will be amazed: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Do you actually have a PowerPC based machine? Except Debian and Gentoo there is a huge difference between "supported" and "designed for it".
I actually tried YDL on my Quad G5, it was no different then installing/running OS X Leopard. It was that smooth with everything working by default.
Ubuntu? Tell them to revert back to officially support PowerPC, the POWER family in fact and apologise us, PowerPC owners first. Someone should have reminded them IBM, Cell, POWER, Toshiba, Sony, the Power.org foundation. You don't drop architecture support because "maccies switched to Intel", that is completely against the philosophy of Linux and its entire history.
They should concentrate on Bluetooth camera support. E.g. my Nokia 9300 (Symbian S80) doesn't have camera but has some excellent bluetooth camera support so you can use an actual bt enabled camera when you need.
Wonder why they didn't provide Camera as optional add on. (Sony) Ericsson T68 had that kind of wonder. You plug add on camera if you want to take photos, remove and leave it at home if you don't need. Best of both Worlds.
Symbian S60 does take 30-45 sec to boot up. I don't know the Apple iPhone but I am totally sure it doesn't instantly boot up. I was just about to say if iPhone turns on instantly, remove the battery and watch it but... you know, battery can't be removed:)
You don't reboot smart phones, you set them offline. At least I do it. Mobile operating systems are designed to run for weeks or months, My Nokia 9300 record is 3 months, it doesn't even have capability to turn off without removing battery. As it is actually running Linux, I don't think any kind of reboot should be necessary at all.
If you want a instant booting phone, choice is clear. Buy non smart (they got good J2ME) Nokia S40 or Sony Ericsson phones.
I remember that time when OS X was 10.4.x level and we were getting some sort of clues about future of PPC on OS X. I thought I better try the most close distro to OS X and ended up with Ubuntu. Listening fans blow full speed (all 9 of them), I even did my best to report a kernel crash issue to an application developer. I also figured that time why Debian has become a legend since that Debian guy actually _cared_ for that bug report on such a weird machine (Quad G5) running unsupported Ubuntu (didn't know then) and actually fixed the issue even while I state "I can't run any kind of linux in this period to test". I checked Ubuntu pages for support and saw that statement saying they drop official support because my vendor dropped PPC production. I had to buy a commercial partition manager just to get rid of Ubuntu distro because having a video edit workstation, I really can't handle the downtime and amazing price of getting a liquid cooling system replaced by Apple service center. I am not saying anything about PS3, I don't own a PS3 but that is what Ubuntu guys made me to lose my belief to Linux. Getting ignored at some PPC linux channels have also made situation worse. I ended up buying a Family license for Leopard and if Apple _really_ become a total asshole to their powerpc customers, I will buy Yellow Dog Linux. Yes, buy it. I can't trust to Ubuntu after reading that page. I explained all details to you including fans, getting ignored, buying a partition manager just because it could be easier to understand my stance against them.
Well, I actually measured it on friends Windows XP which I stupidly forgot to enable built in firewall after Windows installation. It was a 56K Modem connected machine, it took 1 minute to get "This system is scheduled to shutdown in 1 minute" blaster thing. Modem connected machines are in bigger danger since there is no firewall in modem.
There is kind of a sense that MS have seen the fact and shaving off features (!) on Windows 7. Well, if they don't after Vista disaster which even their friends like Intel refuses to upgrade, there won't be Microsoft in 5 years. Serious.
Funny is people actually thought IBM can't deliver 3 Ghz or cold running G5. No, they just chose not to deliver it to Apple. Their focus is enterprise, servers, massive scientific computing. The early warning came when they sold their superbly prestigious and brand advertising Laptop division to Lenovo.
Just imagine they cancel this CPU to deliver 3 Ghz G5 to Apple. For what? Apple fans turned x86 fanatics almost overnight happily buying parallels to run Windows applications on OS X and buying overpriced Windows games which are masked as OS X applications.
At least IBM and Apple took away the "endian" excuse in hands of developers and GPU vendors. They still, shamelessly sell 20-30% more expensive graphics cards to Mac users, running Intel, on standard PCI-X mainboard! New excuse is... EFI!
I got Quad G5 and I am _just_ beginning to see that they are actually used in Mac OS X Leopard (threaded spotlight, diskutil bz2) and Adobe Flash (Version 10 beta uses all). As a video guy, parallel processing is a life saver but it all depends on the developer. Even sometimes some real stupid decisions. E.g. OS X Quicktime encoder will use only 2 CPUs/Cores while encoding H264 while open source solutions or freeware can go up to 4 CPUs (I bet 8 on opto-xeon). Note that I am speaking from video perspective which is relatively simple to parallel process (divide it to number of CPUs and process)
I was watching the Computer Chronicles, a very old episode and they were talking about our issue in 1980s. It was a super computer programming problem, how to make programs actually using the massive parallelism, new development concepts, how to "teach" developers to use multiple CPUs.
That is from 1984! It is amazing that we actually get impressed when Adobe Flash 10 beta uses 400% CPU (in a good sense) in 2008. So the problem is not solved at all:)
Non mainstream instruction set? The Power instruction set? Of course it will have lots and lots more and specialised commands but it is still a POWER CPU. I bet it will run gcc too.
Look how MS solved the XBox 360 early developer access issue: They ordered thousands of its distant cousin, PowerMac G5
Lets not forget 1 fact, Ubuntu guys dropped official PPC support all by themselves stating Apple's switch to Intel. There is no "Evil Sony" intervention there. Zero. You drop a fairly modern architecture which is supported by the vendor of OS X, the "evil" Apple in Leopard all by your choice.
It can't get more developers or even more users because of that simple fact: There is no Ubuntu official support for PPC. FUD will end once the decision makers say they made a MISTAKE on that very same page and apologise PowerPC users like me.
I was not very interested in Linux as a Quad G5 OS X user but I remember the lack of logic in that decision made me nuts and smile same time.
Yellow Dog Linux on Cell really works fine, fine enough that people can even run Java applets inside their browser or run some sort of Flash (Gnash).
I don't think actual POWER users are remotely interested in Ubuntu like distros but Ubuntu people should see that the PowerPC is not only Apple. People saying "Altivec optimisation is pointless, look Apple dropped PPC" should also remember even that monster POWER processor will have Altivec.
E.g. I am OS X only user with 3 macs at my home, 3 macs downloaded some 50 MB or something iTunes update and installed (my choice) because it was a critical update. As a Symbian S60/J2ME user who has ZERO interest in iPhone, I got the 150+ MB download. I got used to it as a downloader of all iPod firmware updates earlier times:)
OS X, kernel, device drivers, frameworks can get "patched" but iTunes can't. As you know, iTunes is a way more critical software (!) than OS X:) At least, after iPhone shipped.
There won't be any changes , it is the device. If people line up for _that_ iPhone with _those_ applications, Apple is not really stupid to give actual smartphone experience to their users.
J2ME, Symbian, WinCE, all have SSH solutions both commercial and open source.
I am particularly against the idea of hacking a device to get secure shell support.
Well, the reality is MS won't do it. They are trying to kill Flash even while they know they look funny. Do you think MS will include Flash in Windows 7?
It is like suggesting Video element but relying to Ogg/Theora to embed it, Theora is freaking VP3 , an abandoned codec. People choose between VP7 and H264 now. Also again, why was h264 the "evil" format too? Nobody knows.
Petabytes of lossy compressed data at Youtube will be transcoded to -3 major version behind compression codec because VP7 and H264 is evil closed formats. Yea, right.
Some has really lost connection with reality. They think everyone is getting hosted for free, they don't have to get advertisers, they don't have to get wages and every single person on planet has blocked the ads.
Does SVG have a auto triggering installer for IE which will install just easy like Flash for IE? Does SVG provide every single thing Flash provides to commercial web developer with some great additional features which will generate more income for them?
Advertisers and people sick of "qt_task.exe" "realmessenger.exe", "you need to have windows media player which doesn't exist for your platform" kind of things (Video publishers) made Flash de-facto standard because it is 1 click install, doesn't ask for mail address in age of 2008, it is 1.2 MB total download.
I have chosen RapidWeaver for OS X for making sites because it is Unicode, uses OS X technologies and also outputs W3C standard code.
It has massive amount of plugins, themes available and theme authors tend to produce w3c compliant sites by default. I noticed the output of "ie7.css" when using a professional coded theme. I asked what that file is (site validates) and they replied "It is a custom CSS to work around IE 7 quirks".
It was amazing for me that time. The need to code a custom CSS just for a browser. I started to stop blaming sites for not being w3c compliant because they can't be... it seems...
You code a perfect working ActiveX for SVG, get it signed , put a convenient "This will install SVG support for your browser, press OK to continue" like thing with a binary NOT exceeding 1 megabyte.
You also supply whatever package that is native to that OS, e.g. MSI for Windows.
What will MS do to stop you? Did Adobe get any kind of support/feedback when they shipped perfectly working (for that time) SVG plugins?
Remember the GIF patent was real and PNG, thanks to excellent libraries even made into Microsoft products like DirectX. As they were nerds, they skipped the "animation" part of GIF and they didn't implement it to PNG. What happened? Everyone needing a light weight animation in an image continued to use GIF 256 colour thing. They still keep on using it. If they need 16M colours? They use Flash!
If W3C is run by same kind of philosophy it is no wonder people continue to keep using Flash (silverlight is a joke compared to it) and they will get blamed for being ignorant site makers.
For example as we know, most of w3c breaking code in popular sites are advertisers embedded stuff. Why do they need to break it? There must be a reason. Why not sit with major advertisers and ask for the stuff they need?
The issue with reviewing KDE 4 betas while you are on Linux is you don't see the big picture. For Linux, it is just a new, high tech looking, bulky KDE. For the other OS'es beyond Linux, it is a game changer for software and desktop.
There are people on OS X waiting for Amarok 2, Digikam , KDE PIM to get stable and they will move to them (I trust Digikam more than iPhoto 08), I have never seen anything eagerly waited as Amarok 2 for Windows stable and so on.
KDE 4 deserves some understanding just like Firefox 3 early betas. Firefox moved to Cairo to work a bit natively (only the GFX), KDE4/Qt4 speaks about using Quicktime on OS X and Windows Media Framework on Windows in future.
There are scanners which got feeder unit or there are some pro companies who can do such a thing with a price.
Software is important for such a project. For such a job, I recommend Hamrick's Vuescan, it has executables for Windows, OS X and Linux. Thing is, it will make things automatically.
As I am perfectly happy with my el-cheapo Canoscan Lide 25 (upgraded from Lide 20 which had some accident), I went to Canon USA site to recommend such a scanner but it seems they have some mad invention there which they really failed to advertise.
It installs to a Canon printer (which looks cheap) like a inkjet ink and printer becomes auto feed scanner. As I assume you got a scanner already, that solution could be a better thing. I am not sure about the quality though. I also don't know if Hamrick Vuescan or even Sane would ever support such a thing too. It is really worth looking into, perhaps see some demo or review from a trustable source.
Other solution is Xerox or HP multiple document scanners (with feeder). I would go with Xerox, I keep reading about HP driver horror stories.
Slashdot Mirror
Toshiba/IBM guys should get some commit access to ffmpeg/x264/VLC and start working on enhancing the tools for Cell CPU. ffmpeg or x264 aren't "nerd things" anymore, they are used by every kind of user embedded in easily used products.
Firefox became huge and everyone optimises for it or fix its code right? If I remember correct, the Download record was 10 million+... Look at VLC without any kind of record campaign, you will be amazed: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
It is 92 million right now and counting.
Do you actually have a PowerPC based machine? Except Debian and Gentoo there is a huge difference between "supported" and "designed for it".
I actually tried YDL on my Quad G5, it was no different then installing/running OS X Leopard. It was that smooth with everything working by default.
Ubuntu? Tell them to revert back to officially support PowerPC, the POWER family in fact and apologise us, PowerPC owners first. Someone should have reminded them IBM, Cell, POWER, Toshiba, Sony, the Power.org foundation. You don't drop architecture support because "maccies switched to Intel", that is completely against the philosophy of Linux and its entire history.
They should concentrate on Bluetooth camera support. E.g. my Nokia 9300 (Symbian S80) doesn't have camera but has some excellent bluetooth camera support so you can use an actual bt enabled camera when you need.
Wonder why they didn't provide Camera as optional add on. (Sony) Ericsson T68 had that kind of wonder. You plug add on camera if you want to take photos, remove and leave it at home if you don't need. Best of both Worlds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_T68i
Symbian S60 does take 30-45 sec to boot up. I don't know the Apple iPhone but I am totally sure it doesn't instantly boot up. I was just about to say if iPhone turns on instantly, remove the battery and watch it but... you know, battery can't be removed :)
You don't reboot smart phones, you set them offline. At least I do it. Mobile operating systems are designed to run for weeks or months, My Nokia 9300 record is 3 months, it doesn't even have capability to turn off without removing battery. As it is actually running Linux, I don't think any kind of reboot should be necessary at all.
If you want a instant booting phone, choice is clear. Buy non smart (they got good J2ME) Nokia S40 or Sony Ericsson phones.
I remember that time when OS X was 10.4.x level and we were getting some sort of clues about future of PPC on OS X. I thought I better try the most close distro to OS X and ended up with Ubuntu. Listening fans blow full speed (all 9 of them), I even did my best to report a kernel crash issue to an application developer. I also figured that time why Debian has become a legend since that Debian guy actually _cared_ for that bug report on such a weird machine (Quad G5) running unsupported Ubuntu (didn't know then) and actually fixed the issue even while I state "I can't run any kind of linux in this period to test".
I checked Ubuntu pages for support and saw that statement saying they drop official support because my vendor dropped PPC production.
I had to buy a commercial partition manager just to get rid of Ubuntu distro because having a video edit workstation, I really can't handle the downtime and amazing price of getting a liquid cooling system replaced by Apple service center.
I am not saying anything about PS3, I don't own a PS3 but that is what Ubuntu guys made me to lose my belief to Linux. Getting ignored at some PPC linux channels have also made situation worse. I ended up buying a Family license for Leopard and if Apple _really_ become a total asshole to their powerpc customers, I will buy Yellow Dog Linux. Yes, buy it.
I can't trust to Ubuntu after reading that page. I explained all details to you including fans, getting ignored, buying a partition manager just because it could be easier to understand my stance against them.
Toshiba does it. Cell is a secondary processor.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=laptops&articleId=9102518&taxonomyId=66&intsrc=kc_top
Well, I actually measured it on friends Windows XP which I stupidly forgot to enable built in firewall after Windows installation. It was a 56K Modem connected machine, it took 1 minute to get "This system is scheduled to shutdown in 1 minute" blaster thing.
Modem connected machines are in bigger danger since there is no firewall in modem.
There is kind of a sense that MS have seen the fact and shaving off features (!) on Windows 7. Well, if they don't after Vista disaster which even their friends like Intel refuses to upgrade, there won't be Microsoft in 5 years. Serious.
They actually let you reboot a POWER6 server to try things? No wonder you post as AC :)
Funny is people actually thought IBM can't deliver 3 Ghz or cold running G5. No, they just chose not to deliver it to Apple. Their focus is enterprise, servers, massive scientific computing. The early warning came when they sold their superbly prestigious and brand advertising Laptop division to Lenovo.
Just imagine they cancel this CPU to deliver 3 Ghz G5 to Apple. For what? Apple fans turned x86 fanatics almost overnight happily buying parallels to run Windows applications on OS X and buying overpriced Windows games which are masked as OS X applications.
At least IBM and Apple took away the "endian" excuse in hands of developers and GPU vendors. They still, shamelessly sell 20-30% more expensive graphics cards to Mac users, running Intel, on standard PCI-X mainboard! New excuse is... EFI!
I got Quad G5 and I am _just_ beginning to see that they are actually used in Mac OS X Leopard (threaded spotlight, diskutil bz2) and Adobe Flash (Version 10 beta uses all). As a video guy, parallel processing is a life saver but it all depends on the developer. Even sometimes some real stupid decisions. E.g. OS X Quicktime encoder will use only 2 CPUs/Cores while encoding H264 while open source solutions or freeware can go up to 4 CPUs (I bet 8 on opto-xeon). Note that I am speaking from video perspective which is relatively simple to parallel process (divide it to number of CPUs and process)
I was watching the Computer Chronicles, a very old episode and they were talking about our issue in 1980s. It was a super computer programming problem, how to make programs actually using the massive parallelism, new development concepts, how to "teach" developers to use multiple CPUs.
http://www.archive.org/details/CC126_supercomputers
That is from 1984! It is amazing that we actually get impressed when Adobe Flash 10 beta uses 400% CPU (in a good sense) in 2008. So the problem is not solved at all :)
Non mainstream instruction set? The Power instruction set? Of course it will have lots and lots more and specialised commands but it is still a POWER CPU. I bet it will run gcc too.
Look how MS solved the XBox 360 early developer access issue: They ordered thousands of its distant cousin, PowerMac G5
Lets not forget 1 fact, Ubuntu guys dropped official PPC support all by themselves stating Apple's switch to Intel. There is no "Evil Sony" intervention there. Zero. You drop a fairly modern architecture which is supported by the vendor of OS X, the "evil" Apple in Leopard all by your choice.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCReview
It can't get more developers or even more users because of that simple fact: There is no Ubuntu official support for PPC. FUD will end once the decision makers say they made a MISTAKE on that very same page and apologise PowerPC users like me.
I was not very interested in Linux as a Quad G5 OS X user but I remember the lack of logic in that decision made me nuts and smile same time.
Yellow Dog Linux on Cell really works fine, fine enough that people can even run Java applets inside their browser or run some sort of Flash (Gnash).
I don't think actual POWER users are remotely interested in Ubuntu like distros but Ubuntu people should see that the PowerPC is not only Apple. People saying "Altivec optimisation is pointless, look Apple dropped PPC" should also remember even that monster POWER processor will have Altivec.
iTunes got updated for that App store.
E.g. I am OS X only user with 3 macs at my home, 3 macs downloaded some 50 MB or something iTunes update and installed (my choice) because it was a critical update. As a Symbian S60/J2ME user who has ZERO interest in iPhone, I got the 150+ MB download. I got used to it as a downloader of all iPod firmware updates earlier times :)
OS X, kernel, device drivers, frameworks can get "patched" but iTunes can't. As you know, iTunes is a way more critical software (!) than OS X :) At least, after iPhone shipped.
There won't be any changes , it is the device. If people line up for _that_ iPhone with _those_ applications, Apple is not really stupid to give actual smartphone experience to their users.
J2ME, Symbian, WinCE, all have SSH solutions both commercial and open source.
I am particularly against the idea of hacking a device to get secure shell support.
I can bet the Agile 1 Password is in the works. They already provide function with javascript and prepare an actual application.
Watch http://www.1password.com/ or their blog http://agilewebsolutions.com/blog/
Well if Apple SDK disallows magnificent apps like Fring...
I am completely against buying an iPhone to jailbreak it but if you are interested, here is Fring page
http://www.fring.com/download/iphone/
Note, they don't even provide jailbreaking details since it is officially illegal and unsupported.
I gave up trying to educate iPhone owners and potential iPhone buyers myself.
Well, the reality is MS won't do it. They are trying to kill Flash even while they know they look funny. Do you think MS will include Flash in Windows 7?
It is like suggesting Video element but relying to Ogg/Theora to embed it, Theora is freaking VP3 , an abandoned codec. People choose between VP7 and H264 now. Also again, why was h264 the "evil" format too? Nobody knows.
Petabytes of lossy compressed data at Youtube will be transcoded to -3 major version behind compression codec because VP7 and H264 is evil closed formats. Yea, right.
Some has really lost connection with reality. They think everyone is getting hosted for free, they don't have to get advertisers, they don't have to get wages and every single person on planet has blocked the ads.
Does SVG have a auto triggering installer for IE which will install just easy like Flash for IE? Does SVG provide every single thing Flash provides to commercial web developer with some great additional features which will generate more income for them?
Advertisers and people sick of "qt_task.exe" "realmessenger.exe", "you need to have windows media player which doesn't exist for your platform" kind of things (Video publishers) made Flash de-facto standard because it is 1 click install, doesn't ask for mail address in age of 2008, it is 1.2 MB total download.
I have chosen RapidWeaver for OS X for making sites because it is Unicode, uses OS X technologies and also outputs W3C standard code.
It has massive amount of plugins, themes available and theme authors tend to produce w3c compliant sites by default. I noticed the output of "ie7.css" when using a professional coded theme. I asked what that file is (site validates) and they replied "It is a custom CSS to work around IE 7 quirks".
It was amazing for me that time. The need to code a custom CSS just for a browser. I started to stop blaming sites for not being w3c compliant because they can't be... it seems...
You code a perfect working ActiveX for SVG, get it signed , put a convenient "This will install SVG support for your browser, press OK to continue" like thing with a binary NOT exceeding 1 megabyte.
You also supply whatever package that is native to that OS, e.g. MSI for Windows.
What will MS do to stop you? Did Adobe get any kind of support/feedback when they shipped perfectly working (for that time) SVG plugins?
Remember the GIF patent was real and PNG, thanks to excellent libraries even made into Microsoft products like DirectX. As they were nerds, they skipped the "animation" part of GIF and they didn't implement it to PNG. What happened? Everyone needing a light weight animation in an image continued to use GIF 256 colour thing. They still keep on using it. If they need 16M colours? They use Flash!
If W3C is run by same kind of philosophy it is no wonder people continue to keep using Flash (silverlight is a joke compared to it) and they will get blamed for being ignorant site makers.
For example as we know, most of w3c breaking code in popular sites are advertisers embedded stuff. Why do they need to break it? There must be a reason. Why not sit with major advertisers and ask for the stuff they need?
The issue with reviewing KDE 4 betas while you are on Linux is you don't see the big picture. For Linux, it is just a new, high tech looking, bulky KDE. For the other OS'es beyond Linux, it is a game changer for software and desktop.
I am speaking about these:
http://mac.kde.org/
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE4+Windows+Port
There are people on OS X waiting for Amarok 2, Digikam , KDE PIM to get stable and they will move to them (I trust Digikam more than iPhoto 08), I have never seen anything eagerly waited as Amarok 2 for Windows stable and so on.
KDE 4 deserves some understanding just like Firefox 3 early betas. Firefox moved to Cairo to work a bit natively (only the GFX), KDE4/Qt4 speaks about using Quicktime on OS X and Windows Media Framework on Windows in future.
There are scanners which got feeder unit or there are some pro companies who can do such a thing with a price.
Software is important for such a project. For such a job, I recommend Hamrick's Vuescan, it has executables for Windows, OS X and Linux. Thing is, it will make things automatically.
http://hamrick.com/
As I am perfectly happy with my el-cheapo Canoscan Lide 25 (upgraded from Lide 20 which had some accident), I went to Canon USA site to recommend such a scanner but it seems they have some mad invention there which they really failed to advertise.
http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=122&modelid=9888
It installs to a Canon printer (which looks cheap) like a inkjet ink and printer becomes auto feed scanner. As I assume you got a scanner already, that solution could be a better thing. I am not sure about the quality though. I also don't know if Hamrick Vuescan or even Sane would ever support such a thing too. It is really worth looking into, perhaps see some demo or review from a trustable source.
Other solution is Xerox or HP multiple document scanners (with feeder). I would go with Xerox, I keep reading about HP driver horror stories.