If you could install the graphics drivers things wouldn't be so bad, anything 3D through the VMWare vesa driver is pointless - instead of giving $200,000 away for the most innovative vitual appliance they should give the money to the first person that can get nVidia/ATI drivers working inside a VM.
Hmmmm did you rtfa? Or even the blurb? The appliance must run on only freely distributable software. I know there are plenty of copies of windows on p2p networks - but that's still not freely distributable!
Actually they aren't giving them away, they're letting you trial them for 60 days. Some customers who create a comparative report (to another os or chipset server) might get to keep their server - most will have to buy or return it, from sun.com:
"Thank you for your interest in our Try and Buy Offer. For a limited time, Sun is offering qualified customers a free 60-day trial of the world's first eco-responsible server, the Sun Fire T2000 server. And, it's easy...Your complete responses allow us to instantly determine your qualification and get your trial system to you within a couple of weeks! It will only take about 3-4 minutes to determine your qualification. After the evaluation period, you may choose to purchase the server or return it to us."
Although they do look like nice servers - I wouldn't want to reutrn it;P
"requiring (as in 'you can use financial aid to pay for it') each new student to buy a laptop that meets our specs (Apple or Dell, depending on major)."
I would be very annoyed if my school said "you must by a Dell" - hey it's a laptop peeps! Why can't I buy a Toshiba if I want to? If you're requiring them to spend 'their' money they should have the choice... I would prefer to be told what software you'll be using and you need a laptop that will run it - and for the non-techies offer some suggestions which include various manufacturers.
As we're on the subject of Software - how will this this funded? Will the school only be using OSS & free software? Imagine starting a new course and being told you need to go out and buy an Apple laptop and Photoshop, Maya etc - OUCH! There goes the money I was saving for the 6 pack of baked beans to last the year!
Also have you considered how the students are going to access their e-mail? I assume via a wireless network? How on earth are you going to keep that number of laptops secure to keep the network secure? A network is only as strong as it's weakest point, are you going to be servicing the students laptops to hopefully keep them secure? Surely that's a bigger task financially than having the labs??
While the fact you can now program in OO that hasn't really swayed my decision to move to 5 at all - what, am I going to rewrite all of my existing pages? Or rewrite functions I have ready to copy & paste when I next need them? Probably not.
The main reason I upgraded some of my sites to 5 was the addition of the imagefilter() function. I can now insert text using a ttf font in gray, use imagefilter() to gaussian blur the text a little and then add the new bit of text 'above' it to create nice drop shadowed text images on the fly - useful for dynamic sites.
"OSS (and by that you mean Linux) has targeted the traditional Unix market and done very little to compete with Microsoft's installed base."
Why assume the parent meant "Linux"? Just because MS's largest product is an OS doesn't mean we should only focus on OS's. OSS has some very good projects other than OS's, and some of which are significantly eating in to MS's market share, for example Firefox eating IE market share, OOo slowly eating a tiny bit (but should increase when it's improved a little more).
Wow, looks like you're right! That makes the ad at the top of the mirrordot pages kinda funny:
"Deru Internet - Bandwidth, Colocation, and Hosting Services
Deru provides all of the bandwidth and colocation for MirrorDot. Deru's network can easily handle all of MirrorDot's mojo, so they can certainly handle your needs too! "
"I guess that depends on what you mean by malicious."
Actually it's the word intent that's important - Sony used third party software that they believed would stop people copying their music, I doubt if Sony got in to too much technical details about how it worked. Managers don't want to know the gory details, they want to know if it works, how much it'll cost and how much profit it will make. All that was on Sony's mind was copy protection, even if the third party software had formatted your HDD Sony may have been incompetent but they would have had no malicious intent.
Small enough to fit in a cell phone?? Did you see the image from tfa? It may be small but it's about the size of a small cell phone - where's the actual phone electronics gonna go???
It might be a cool as a PDA sled though so that you don't have to have the bulk all of the time.
Symbian was sold on 10.9 million handsets in the last quarter - making it an attractive target for developers such as myself. I am not denying Palm's product could be awesome but it seems to have a hell of a long way to catch up.
I totally disagree. While Symbian may have sold 10.9 million handsets, how many of these are bought by people that don't even know what Symbian means? I'm sure most of those handsets are used by people that have never installed a Symbian app and only use it as a standard phone. (My technophobic parents for example)
People who buy Palm based phones (I have a T650 myself) tend to use palm apps - that's why they went for a Palm based phone in the first place. Just because x million handsets supporting y have been sold doesn't mean that there are x million users of y!
If I was going to decide to develop for profit for either though I would go with Symbian though - how many Palm apps are there already? 10s of thousands? 100s of thousands? When comparing that to Symbian you're much more likely to find a product that hasn't been made already for Symbian. However, if I wanted to develop for my own personal use or as a hobby I'd stick to Palm - at least I could use what I created.
And in Europe... I know plenty of people (including myself) that own either Treo's or some other palm PDA... actually... I know only 2 people who have had a Win Mobile phone/PDA's here, one of those got rid of it in exchange for a palm as quick as possible.
I use a Treo 650 which has a qwerty keyboard, the SMS application already places each text in a chat thread so you can see what you have sent and received from the person you are "chatting" to... however at Xp per message it's quite expensive and of course you can't chat with the IM clients on peoples computers.
Alternatively there are already IM clients for Palm OS allowing the use of AIM, Yahoo!, jabber etc on the Treo... personally I don't use them, but then again I don't use IM on my computer either.
I can't really see what the news is here, apart from some phones will be providing functionality other phones have had for ages.
PPARC still posts the scientists e-mail addresses in tfa? I can think of many spam e-mails that contain 'dark matter' but not of the kind they're looking for!
I have a T650 which I use iTunes with and a 1GB SD card. Using a SD card reader solves the speed for transferring music problem. I also have a pair of Seido headphones which I've taken apart and replaced the earpieces for more powerful ones - I have no problems listening to music on it.
Well we all know what a farce the Rokr was - a limited music playing phone to avoid eating in to iPods profits.
If Apple buy Palm what will they do with phones like the Treo which can play MP3's? Will they remove the headset jack??
Slashdot Mirror
"Gaming performance sucks inside VMWare..."
If you could install the graphics drivers things wouldn't be so bad, anything 3D through the VMWare vesa driver is pointless - instead of giving $200,000 away for the most innovative vitual appliance they should give the money to the first person that can get nVidia/ATI drivers working inside a VM.
Haydn.
Hmmmm did you rtfa? Or even the blurb? The appliance must run on only freely distributable software. I know there are plenty of copies of windows on p2p networks - but that's still not freely distributable!
"I'd love to be in the room when they cover that.
I wouldn't! Although it would only take a page of A4, they'll probably make it 1000 pages long to try and hide the real strategy in it.
Actually they aren't giving them away, they're letting you trial them for 60 days. Some customers who create a comparative report (to another os or chipset server) might get to keep their server - most will have to buy or return it, from sun.com:
;P
"Thank you for your interest in our Try and Buy Offer. For a limited time, Sun is offering qualified customers a free 60-day trial of the world's first eco-responsible server, the Sun Fire T2000 server. And, it's easy...Your complete responses allow us to instantly determine your qualification and get your trial system to you within a couple of weeks! It will only take about 3-4 minutes to determine your qualification. After the evaluation period, you may choose to purchase the server or return it to us."
Although they do look like nice servers - I wouldn't want to reutrn it
Don't be suprised by my uber security which I call "The Mirror"® =P
At least I can safely say I own 127.0.0.1! Oh wait...
"requiring (as in 'you can use financial aid to pay for it') each new student to buy a laptop that meets our specs (Apple or Dell, depending on major)."
I would be very annoyed if my school said "you must by a Dell" - hey it's a laptop peeps! Why can't I buy a Toshiba if I want to? If you're requiring them to spend 'their' money they should have the choice... I would prefer to be told what software you'll be using and you need a laptop that will run it - and for the non-techies offer some suggestions which include various manufacturers.
As we're on the subject of Software - how will this this funded? Will the school only be using OSS & free software? Imagine starting a new course and being told you need to go out and buy an Apple laptop and Photoshop, Maya etc - OUCH! There goes the money I was saving for the 6 pack of baked beans to last the year!
Also have you considered how the students are going to access their e-mail? I assume via a wireless network? How on earth are you going to keep that number of laptops secure to keep the network secure? A network is only as strong as it's weakest point, are you going to be servicing the students laptops to hopefully keep them secure? Surely that's a bigger task financially than having the labs??
Haydn.
I listen to ogg, nice to meet you
While the fact you can now program in OO that hasn't really swayed my decision to move to 5 at all - what, am I going to rewrite all of my existing pages? Or rewrite functions I have ready to copy & paste when I next need them? Probably not.
The main reason I upgraded some of my sites to 5 was the addition of the imagefilter() function. I can now insert text using a ttf font in gray, use imagefilter() to gaussian blur the text a little and then add the new bit of text 'above' it to create nice drop shadowed text images on the fly - useful for dynamic sites.
Errrr, check your post times! It loaded fine 4 hours after it was having problems?? WOW wish I could fix things that quick =P
"OSS (and by that you mean Linux) has targeted the traditional Unix market and done very little to compete with Microsoft's installed base."
Why assume the parent meant "Linux"? Just because MS's largest product is an OS doesn't mean we should only focus on OS's. OSS has some very good projects other than OS's, and some of which are significantly eating in to MS's market share, for example Firefox eating IE market share, OOo slowly eating a tiny bit (but should increase when it's improved a little more).
Wow, looks like you're right! That makes the ad at the top of the mirrordot pages kinda funny:
"Deru Internet - Bandwidth, Colocation, and Hosting Services
Deru provides all of the bandwidth and colocation for MirrorDot. Deru's network can easily handle all of MirrorDot's mojo, so they can certainly handle your needs too! "
use mirrordot!
"I guess that depends on what you mean by malicious."
Actually it's the word intent that's important - Sony used third party software that they believed would stop people copying their music, I doubt if Sony got in to too much technical details about how it worked. Managers don't want to know the gory details, they want to know if it works, how much it'll cost and how much profit it will make. All that was on Sony's mind was copy protection, even if the third party software had formatted your HDD Sony may have been incompetent but they would have had no malicious intent.
There will always bee PostgreSQL (Thank you Sun!!)
Small enough to fit in a cell phone?? Did you see the image from tfa? It may be small but it's about the size of a small cell phone - where's the actual phone electronics gonna go???
It might be a cool as a PDA sled though so that you don't have to have the bulk all of the time.
Symbian was sold on 10.9 million handsets in the last quarter - making it an attractive target for developers such as myself. I am not denying Palm's product could be awesome but it seems to have a hell of a long way to catch up.
I totally disagree. While Symbian may have sold 10.9 million handsets, how many of these are bought by people that don't even know what Symbian means? I'm sure most of those handsets are used by people that have never installed a Symbian app and only use it as a standard phone. (My technophobic parents for example)
People who buy Palm based phones (I have a T650 myself) tend to use palm apps - that's why they went for a Palm based phone in the first place. Just because x million handsets supporting y have been sold doesn't mean that there are x million users of y!
If I was going to decide to develop for profit for either though I would go with Symbian though - how many Palm apps are there already? 10s of thousands? 100s of thousands? When comparing that to Symbian you're much more likely to find a product that hasn't been made already for Symbian. However, if I wanted to develop for my own personal use or as a hobby I'd stick to Palm - at least I could use what I created.
Haydn.
And in Europe... I know plenty of people (including myself) that own either Treo's or some other palm PDA... actually... I know only 2 people who have had a Win Mobile phone/PDA's here, one of those got rid of it in exchange for a palm as quick as possible.
"For the first time researchers have created a working prototype of a radical new chip design..."
I thought this had already happened when they moved from straight cut to crinkle cut??
You don't know any deaf people do you? This would actually be very handy!
Hearing person: Speak in to phone
Deaf person: Read comment, type response
Hearing person: Listen to response...
I use a Treo 650 which has a qwerty keyboard, the SMS application already places each text in a chat thread so you can see what you have sent and received from the person you are "chatting" to... however at Xp per message it's quite expensive and of course you can't chat with the IM clients on peoples computers.
Alternatively there are already IM clients for Palm OS allowing the use of AIM, Yahoo!, jabber etc on the Treo... personally I don't use them, but then again I don't use IM on my computer either.
I can't really see what the news is here, apart from some phones will be providing functionality other phones have had for ages.
Haydn.
PPARC still posts the scientists e-mail addresses in tfa? I can think of many spam e-mails that contain 'dark matter' but not of the kind they're looking for!
I have a T650 which I use iTunes with and a 1GB SD card. Using a SD card reader solves the speed for transferring music problem. I also have a pair of Seido headphones which I've taken apart and replaced the earpieces for more powerful ones - I have no problems listening to music on it.
Well we all know what a farce the Rokr was - a limited music playing phone to avoid eating in to iPods profits. If Apple buy Palm what will they do with phones like the Treo which can play MP3's? Will they remove the headset jack??
Errr how can a comment pointing out the previous two articles on /. for reference be offtopic? or were you moding it in anticipation of this post?