actually, the Precision 650 also has gigabit ethernet. my old Precision doesn't but according to the Dell site they do now.
If the software isn't a consideration, i'd say the Apple product is very resonably priced. If you were buying the Dell to run Windows or the Mac to run OS X, i'd say the Dell is overpriced.:)
the Mac has slower processors, but you can count on a 1.8GHz G5 being faster than a 1.8GHz Xeon. Is it faster than a 2.4GHz Xeon? probably not, but i would say the difference is far less than you might imagine.
The G5 is a 64-bit processor. Doesn't figure much into things right now, but will when the software catches up.
the graphics card in the Dell is better than the GeForce 5200, i think.
having seen these two flat panels side-by-side, there's no doubt that the Cinema Display by Apple is a much sweeter monitor.
Same with the cases. the G5 looks better.
I don't have access to a dual processor G5, but the single processor version is VERY quiet. the Precision is quiet, too, but those i've only seen in a dual-processor configuration, and they're louder than my uniprocessor G5, which i expect.
While they both have FireWire 400, the Mac has the new FireWire800 port.
The parent was speaking of the hardware, not software, so let's assume both machines will be running Linux, throwing away XP Pro and Mac OS X Panther. But, if you were going to choose an OS, that's a plus for the Mac.
So what's the point of all this? The point is that these machines are pretty even in performance, the Dell will be faster, but marginally. Enough to justify the extra thirty bucks? Yeah, probably, it's only $30. The machines are not even, however, when it comes to aesthetics. the Mac is much easier to look at, and the screen is an absolute joy. The real point here is not to say which one's better. I'm agnostic; get the Dell if that's what you're after. But can we PLEASE stop saying that the hardware is not "reasonably priced?" It's actually quite competitive. Yes, you will pay a premium for a Mac. You pay a premium because you get a premium.
I would think that a Newton would be an awesome right-hand-man for the collegiate. A 2100 can be picked up from eBay for less than many PDAs, You have the option of a detachable keyboard and awesome HWR for note-taking, and (imo) there hasn't been a PIM written that can compare to MoreInfo.
While web and email can be a bit of a kludge, it works well, particularly for off-line reading. The device is a bit large by today's PDA standards, but i've always felt cramped by the shirtpocket PDAs.
As i understand it, that's the gist of Chester's hack: ignoring (most) hints. (Hints are embedded into scalable fonts (TrueType/OpenType and PS Type 1) that tell the renderer which portions of the letterform can be 'skipped' when outputting on low resolution devices like screens) The thinking is that with higher resolution displays and antialiasing, the display is high enough quality, sort of virtual dots-per-inch, that the hinting is no longer needed. Therefore, we can have real letterforms that are more like what would be output on something with high (300dpi+) resolution.
It seems you already know all this, but i digress here for the good of the community that might not be as informed.
i'm about two feet from my 19" monitor, and i can honestly say i don't even notice the blurred edges. if i move up close, yep, they're there and they would bother me. they're also much more noticable on my lappity-top than they are here on my desktop display. small grey dots this far away don't bother me. and reading long passages of text is a joy; everything looks so good.
of course, i have horrible eyes anyway, so perhaps what you see as problems i don't even see at all.:) i've worn glasses most all my life, and, while i'm sure looking at a screen all day doesn't help, it wasn't / isn't the cause of my vision problems. it is extremely subjective. what i've found works quite well for me and i'm very happy. I like what OS X does on my iMac but i think that X looks better with the libfreetype hack.
stock freetype has a long way to go, but if you replace your libfreetype.so with the one on this page, i think you'll find that X/Linux can be even better than the Mac.
I did a comparison of my kde desktop a while back with that hack (withoutwith) versus stock xft/freetype and the difference is (ahem) clear. The "smooth" hinting he's doing now is even better than the "slight" hinting in those screenshots.
IMO the order is:
(best) Xft/Freetype with David Chester's hack
Mac OS X
Windows XP's cleartype
Stock Xft/Freetype
(worst) Windows 2000 and older
of course, there's few things as subjective as AA and fonts.
after reading the article a couple days ago, i thought i'd give these ideas a try. I'm a longtime screen user, and it's really changed the way i administrate and use *nix boxes. it's wonderful.
Once i got ratpoison going, i needed some other things to make it truly useful and comfortable:
This guy's patch for adding dockapps to ratpoison. very nice. patched ratpoison-1.1.1 just fine.
keylaunch, which allows arbitrary keystrokes to perform arbitrary commands (arbitrarily:)
ratmenu, which i haven't put into use yet, but allows keyboard-navigable menus on the screen, created dynamically.
this setup definately has some advantages: i'm not obsessing over the right KDE theme and color, there's no clutter at all on the screen, and, as a screen junkie, it just feels right.
there's a lot of bashing these ideas going on (at least right now) in this discussion, but i'd advise you to try it out for a while, particularly if you're a screen-keyboardy kind of person.
I don't know if i'll keep this setup or not. next step for me is to stop using mozilla and play around with phoenix instead. but, with today's earlier story of the cool new stuff coming in KDE3.1 this experiment, though useful, might be short-lived.
For the sake of continuity (and gratuitous attempt at scoring a few karmasnacks), here's my setup:
(i have a Microsoft Internet Keyboard, which has a bunch of extra keys). Right now i'm not remapping very many of these keys, i've only been playing around for two days. but you get the idea. A cool thing about ratpoison is that a command-line can control the wm (all that ratpoison -c stuff), so i get the flexibility and speed and power without the wm having so many "features."
What i have right now feels like gnu screen for X, which is a marvelous thing, right now, for me. My opinion will most likely change in the future, as i have yet to find the setup that's perfect. At least with X i have a choice. But so far, i'm optimistic. Not bad. Not bad at all.
KDE is coming along nicely. Congratulations to all that have contributed to the project. I run both KDE and GNOME, and, though GNOME is still my first choice, KDE is definitely improving, and will replace GNOME as my desktop of choice one day.
The main reason that day is not now is the customizability of Sawfish, the WM i use in GNOME. Sawfish lets me customize my interface considerably more than kwm can. Mainly, i use a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro (19 extra buttons across the top) and a Microsoft Trackball Explorer (yeah, MS software is pretty bad, but i love their hardware). Within Sawfish and GNOME i can create all sorts of custom bindings for the keyboard's keys and trackball's extra buttons (X sees the trackball as a seven button mouse). I have not found how to do this in KDE. there's a 'hotkeys' daemon that sort-a works for the keyboard, but it crashes on me. in Sawfish, i am able to bind to the XF86* keys directly (ie., XF86HomePage, XF86Standby). For the trackball, i can bind to Button6 and Button7. Sawfish also allows contexts for hotkeys, that is, a click on Button6 has a different meaning when i click on the titlebar of a window, as opposed to other places on the desktop.
Am i missing something, or is this something that could be added?
Any way we can get it to crash in Redmond? Our-Buddy-Jim's giving his latest speech to the troups on how the Anti-OpenSource legislature lobbying is going, with Our-Lord-And-Savior-Bill-Gates sitting there beaming his weasly little smile, then...
BAM!
Mir, in all it's firey glory, crashing through like a message from God. Bonus points if you can:
Have Tux riding on top of it, straddling it like a horse, waving a cowboy hat and screaming "Woo Hoo! Eat that, Windows-boy!"
Paint the Windows XP logo on the side, while a voice announces "Latest Windows Crash"
One of the following: Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or Scott McNealy on a video screen with an evil grin holding something that looks like a remote control.
there is another, perhaps better known (at least in the Visor community) Springboard MP3 player. The MiniJam from InnoGear uses removable MMC cards for storage. There is a user's review of it (with plenty of pix) here. That same site, VisorCentral also lists an announced-but-not-shipping Rio Springboard module from Diamond.
yeah. i think the proper filenames would be index.html.en, index.html.de, etc. Apache will read the appropriate HTTP 1.1 headers and serve the corresponding page. see the Apache documentation on Content Negotiation for more info.
i've been designing sites with WML for a year or so, now, and i can't believe how cool it is. basically, WML acts as a wrapper around several different tools to create 'compiled' web pages. things like multiple languages are handled by WML's notion of 'slices.' you can set up different sections of the source file with different language tags, then run them through WML, which will create the different language-specific files by extracting the appropriate slices.
I don't use it for multi-lingual sites, but i would think it'd be pretty simple to set up. as far as the graphics, WML can help out there, too, through its support of the gfont language, which can create GIF images on the fly, using TeX fonts. with graphics for multiple languages, though, it may be tough creating buttons and the like because the length of the text could change so dramatically. i've not played with gfont either.
WML (and some tutorial pages, one describing multi-lingual sites) is at http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/. give it a try. it has made my web-development life much richer.
Linux gets a bum rap for not scaling well. I see that as completely understandable, as no Linux kernel developer has the megabucks to buy that hardware to use and test. Corporations like MS and Sun have it (Sun builds the hardware; they don't even need the money). A great use for a large sum of cash would be to purchase (if not by yourself, find some other like-minded zillionares) some high-end, enterprise-level hardware and donate either the hardware itself or time on it to the kernel team. Let them develop enterprise-ready kernels by using an enterprise box for development and testing.
Yes, it was, although us old Commodore hackers remember them as Berkley Softworks. They released a version of GEOS for the PC about the time Microsoft released Windows 3.1. GEOS/PC (called Geoworks Ensemble) worked very well on a 386SX, and had cool things like scalable fonts and WYSIWYG (it used Bitstream's Speedo, iirc), off line printing, on-the-fly resolution changing... it was very cool. Alas, it wasn't from Microsoft, so it didn't become popular. it would make a cool wm for X, though (you know, we need some more, there aren't that many;)) GEOS/PC still exists as NewDeal; you can get details and trial versions at the NewDeal website.
it's neat to see these companies from the Old Days back in the news, although, in this case, the news may not be all that great. You may remember the old Commodore on-line service called Q-Link; the rest of the world knows it as AOL.
Slashdot Mirror
Sarcasm flies over the head of another innocent victim... sigh.
actually, the Precision 650 also has gigabit ethernet. my old Precision doesn't but according to the Dell site they do now.
If the software isn't a consideration, i'd say the Apple product is very resonably priced. If you were buying the Dell to run Windows or the Mac to run OS X, i'd say the Dell is overpriced. :)
So what's the point of all this? The point is that these machines are pretty even in performance, the Dell will be faster, but marginally. Enough to justify the extra thirty bucks? Yeah, probably, it's only $30. The machines are not even, however, when it comes to aesthetics. the Mac is much easier to look at, and the screen is an absolute joy. The real point here is not to say which one's better. I'm agnostic; get the Dell if that's what you're after. But can we PLEASE stop saying that the hardware is not "reasonably priced?" It's actually quite competitive. Yes, you will pay a premium for a Mac. You pay a premium because you get a premium.
Drupal.
No, honey, you go on ahead; this is PANTHER!!!
For another interesting study, see the United States government, particularly the past general election, and the one forthcoming.
I would think that a Newton would be an awesome right-hand-man for the collegiate. A 2100 can be picked up from eBay for less than many PDAs, You have the option of a detachable keyboard and awesome HWR for note-taking, and (imo) there hasn't been a PIM written that can compare to MoreInfo.
While web and email can be a bit of a kludge, it works well, particularly for off-line reading. The device is a bit large by today's PDA standards, but i've always felt cramped by the shirtpocket PDAs.As i understand it, that's the gist of Chester's hack: ignoring (most) hints. (Hints are embedded into scalable fonts (TrueType/OpenType and PS Type 1) that tell the renderer which portions of the letterform can be 'skipped' when outputting on low resolution devices like screens) The thinking is that with higher resolution displays and antialiasing, the display is high enough quality, sort of virtual dots-per-inch, that the hinting is no longer needed. Therefore, we can have real letterforms that are more like what would be output on something with high (300dpi+) resolution.
It seems you already know all this, but i digress here for the good of the community that might not be as informed.
i'm about two feet from my 19" monitor, and i can honestly say i don't even notice the blurred edges. if i move up close, yep, they're there and they would bother me. they're also much more noticable on my lappity-top than they are here on my desktop display. small grey dots this far away don't bother me. and reading long passages of text is a joy; everything looks so good.
of course, i have horrible eyes anyway, so perhaps what you see as problems i don't even see at all. :) i've worn glasses most all my life, and, while i'm sure looking at a screen all day doesn't help, it wasn't / isn't the cause of my vision problems. it is extremely subjective. what i've found works quite well for me and i'm very happy. I like what OS X does on my iMac but i think that X looks better with the libfreetype hack.
stock freetype has a long way to go, but if you replace your libfreetype.so with the one on this page, i think you'll find that X/Linux can be even better than the Mac.
I did a comparison of my kde desktop a while back with that hack (without with) versus stock xft/freetype and the difference is (ahem) clear. The "smooth" hinting he's doing now is even better than the "slight" hinting in those screenshots.
IMO the order is:
- (best) Xft/Freetype with David Chester's hack
- Mac OS X
- Windows XP's cleartype
- Stock Xft/Freetype
- (worst) Windows 2000 and older
of course, there's few things as subjective as AA and fonts.Stephen Toblowski(sp) cracks me up.
And you're right about Andie MacDowell; i'd follow her anywhere.
I loved Grosse Point Blank. Just recently caught High Fidelity on ComCent... also another goodie.
And a great commercial to go along with it: "There's no step three! There's no step three!"
One of my man-page faves:
"What could be simpler? (Rhetorical)."
-- XML::Simple man page
Wing Commander? SIMS? bah. Pinball Construction Set. Now there's a game.
after reading the article a couple days ago, i thought i'd give these ideas a try. I'm a longtime screen user, and it's really changed the way i administrate and use *nix boxes. it's wonderful.
Once i got ratpoison going, i needed some other things to make it truly useful and comfortable:
this setup definately has some advantages: i'm not obsessing over the right KDE theme and color, there's no clutter at all on the screen, and, as a screen junkie, it just feels right.
there's a lot of bashing these ideas going on (at least right now) in this discussion, but i'd advise you to try it out for a while, particularly if you're a screen-keyboardy kind of person.
I don't know if i'll keep this setup or not. next step for me is to stop using mozilla and play around with phoenix instead. but, with today's earlier story of the cool new stuff coming in KDE3.1 this experiment, though useful, might be short-lived.
For the sake of continuity (and gratuitous attempt at scoring a few karmasnacks), here's my setup:
My $HOME/.ratpoisonrc:
My $HOME/.keylaunchrc:
What i have right now feels like gnu screen for X, which is a marvelous thing, right now, for me. My opinion will most likely change in the future, as i have yet to find the setup that's perfect. At least with X i have a choice. But so far, i'm optimistic. Not bad. Not bad at all.
don't you hate that it's not called "Cerf-ing" the net?
KDE is coming along nicely. Congratulations to all that have contributed to the project. I run both KDE and GNOME, and, though GNOME is still my first choice, KDE is definitely improving, and will replace GNOME as my desktop of choice one day.
The main reason that day is not now is the customizability of Sawfish, the WM i use in GNOME. Sawfish lets me customize my interface considerably more than kwm can. Mainly, i use a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro (19 extra buttons across the top) and a Microsoft Trackball Explorer (yeah, MS software is pretty bad, but i love their hardware). Within Sawfish and GNOME i can create all sorts of custom bindings for the keyboard's keys and trackball's extra buttons (X sees the trackball as a seven button mouse). I have not found how to do this in KDE. there's a 'hotkeys' daemon that sort-a works for the keyboard, but it crashes on me. in Sawfish, i am able to bind to the XF86* keys directly (ie., XF86HomePage, XF86Standby). For the trackball, i can bind to Button6 and Button7. Sawfish also allows contexts for hotkeys, that is, a click on Button6 has a different meaning when i click on the titlebar of a window, as opposed to other places on the desktop.
Am i missing something, or is this something that could be added?
Any way we can get it to crash in Redmond? Our-Buddy-Jim's giving his latest speech to the troups on how the Anti-OpenSource legislature lobbying is going, with Our-Lord-And-Savior-Bill-Gates sitting there beaming his weasly little smile, then...
BAM!
Mir, in all it's firey glory, crashing through like a message from God. Bonus points if you can:
cheaper, yes, but then they couldn't take a Linux player out of the market, could they?
to paraphrase Luke Skywalker, "If you think Sun coming here (into Linux space) was a bad idea, i'm beginning to agree with you."
there is another, perhaps better known (at least in the Visor community) Springboard MP3 player. The MiniJam from InnoGear uses removable MMC cards for storage. There is a user's review of it (with plenty of pix) here. That same site, VisorCentral also lists an announced-but-not-shipping Rio Springboard module from Diamond.
yeah. i think the proper filenames would be index.html.en, index.html.de, etc. Apache will read the appropriate HTTP 1.1 headers and serve the corresponding page. see the Apache documentation on Content Negotiation for more info.
I don't use it for multi-lingual sites, but i would think it'd be pretty simple to set up. as far as the graphics, WML can help out there, too, through its support of the gfont language, which can create GIF images on the fly, using TeX fonts. with graphics for multiple languages, though, it may be tough creating buttons and the like because the length of the text could change so dramatically. i've not played with gfont either.
WML (and some tutorial pages, one describing multi-lingual sites) is at http://www.engelschall.com/sw/wml/. give it a try. it has made my web-development life much richer.
Linux gets a bum rap for not scaling well. I see that as completely understandable, as no Linux kernel developer has the megabucks to buy that hardware to use and test. Corporations like MS and Sun have it (Sun builds the hardware; they don't even need the money). A great use for a large sum of cash would be to purchase (if not by yourself, find some other like-minded zillionares) some high-end, enterprise-level hardware and donate either the hardware itself or time on it to the kernel team. Let them develop enterprise-ready kernels by using an enterprise box for development and testing.
it's neat to see these companies from the Old Days back in the news, although, in this case, the news may not be all that great. You may remember the old Commodore on-line service called Q-Link; the rest of the world knows it as AOL.