No chance unless they port Darwin to PC hardware. And we all know that's not gonna happen.
I believe I read that Darwin has already been ported to x86 a couple months or so back, but either way it doesn't matter, Darwin is just another Mach kernel, with a screwy license no less. The "aqua" gui is what they aren't going to port to x86 before hell freezes over. Which may well be a good thing. The use of NeXT technology and design is a good thing, but the UI seems to have some major problems, with some major design decisions appearing to have been made with more emphasis on eye candy than usability.
If you really want a mach kernel with a good UI, take a look at the The HURD and GNUstep - real Free Software projects that could use your help.
you mean like videotaping? but videotaping is legally considered "fair use", so you'd be wrong.
Now the crucial things to understand here are two. One, yes, that is well established fair use. Two, NO, it would not be legal under the DMCA. The DMCA attempts to circumvent fair use rights, by making it not the use which is illegal, but the act of bypassing any technological roadblock that's been thrown up to prevent the exercise of fair use rights. This is a direct result of the fact that rights belong to the general public, which is statistically ignorant and apathetic, while the privileges the DMCA seeks to exalt over our rights are cash cows for corporations with deep pockets and plenty of public officials already bought.
I agree completely. NeXT style scrollbars are on the left, where they should be, but since I can't get windows to behave like that I have to reverse when I use that...
Sadly, to get the 15um process you want would mean displacing chips with a much higher profit margin. No one is likely to do that, and if they did, they would certainly charge more for it, so that your price advantage largely goes away.
Beyond that, of course, the mass market is based on M$ products, and that means that you will need that power, next upgrade if not today. It's sad, but true. That's why all the Crusoe based books are running Crusoe 5ks, not 3ks, even though the 3ks are just as good at 32 bit instructions, for less money and less power.
At the same thickness it takes less absolute space vertically than horizontally. I can only make sense of your comment by assuming that you don't realise that you can resize it;^)
They are saying this gives ISPs the ability to do what Carnivore is supposed to do on their own, and thus eliminate any need to allow Carnivore to be installed to comply with an intercept order.
What's this about the Gnome project strong-arming the developers into switching from C++ to C? Leaving aside my religious beliefs in OOP, that doesn't seem in keeping with "open source ideals" at all.
They said the Gnome core developers wanted to be certain they would be able to take over if Eazel crapped out. Makes sense they would want it written in the language they prefer so they could maintain it.
A file manager is part of the core?
Well, yes. They are trying to make a warm-fuzzy-gui "desktop environment" to make all the hordes of windows and mac users feel at home, after all. This stuff is NOT being written for the hackers. Given their goals, it makes perfect sense that the file manager be considered part of the core. Gmc is certainly a central component of gnome now.
When I sit down at my friend's Linux machine it's a bit wierd. Nothing works exactly like it should and I don't know where to find anything:) then I sit down at a Solaris box and the same disorientation follows. I prefer this to being in a monotonous environment but I want to ask if Windows users experience this same mild disorientation when they use other boxes than the ones they are normally on (do other unix users or am I am freak)? I am pretty sure Mac users do (again due to it's high configurability).
They definately do. I use both Windows and Linux daily, and when I am using Windows it's usually on a common machine (i.e. in a lab or the like.) I always like to do a little customisation so I feel at ease - I set the taskbar vertical instead of horizontal, which takes half a second to do or undo, and makes my document windows look more like an actual document dimension-wise. It also looks more like my windowmaker setup of course:> but on the right side, whereas in windowmaker I put everything on the left - I want the taskbar/mini-windows/dock on the same side as the scrollbars. Anyhow... you wouldn't think that would be that big a deal, but you'd be amazed how many times I've been yelled at for that. I had a teacher (in a network administration class of all things) totally freak out over it, he sat down at the machine I was using and appeared completely lost, then yelled at me to make it normal again. Every so often I walk out to get a drink of water, and come back to find someone staring at my screen slack-jawed. It's really funny. What's less funny is the one time I forgot to switch the taskbar back to its normal position when I left, the next day I caught all hell. Apparently someone had sat down at the machine and freaked out and one of the techs had wasted half an hour trying to figure out how to make it "normal" for her.
I bet you're laughing, I know I was, but there is a serious side too - people want a certain amount (how much varies) of stability in their environment, whether you're talking about their computer or their car or whatever. That stability, that familiarity, is a big factor in what we call "comfort level." Even tiny, functionally insignificant changes can throw someone for a loop, and make them suddenly feel lost, adrift, unsafe. Particularly when that person wasn't particularly secure in their environment to begin with.
Excellent points. There is definately two sides to this, and I'm glad you made the points you did, saves me from repeating them.
That said, the implication others have posted that the main corporate interest here is in importing foreigners who are willing to work cheap by our standards has the ring of truth to me to. It's not my experience that there really is any shortage of qualified people here - the trouble is most of the qualified people want more pay, or more control over their contracts, free time, etc. than the PHBs like to give. So the corps invent a shortage for their own purposes. They call scarcity (a permanent situation, which can never be solved) "shortage" instead, and that is telling a falsehood.
The Indians in particular are great for this, many of them are *excellent* programmers, and the dollar is so strong in India that they can support extended families on what amounts to table scraps if they can get a work permit here. So they are usually highly motivated to stay here, and do whatever the PHB wants. Turning them away is unfair to them, but I can't say I don't have some reservations about the effects of letting them in either.
So he comes up with this notion that we have to beg forgiveness of our copyright holders or we will be in violation of the GPL forever.
Wrong. He never said anything about begging, he simply pointed out what the KDE team needs to do to be certain that the license problems are behind them. He even made a gesture analogous to unilateral disarmament, by publically forgiving (clearly using the term in a legal sense) any and all violations he had the legal right to forgive.
I've always been pretty neutral towards KDE, but this is too much. If this is the way the KDE team wants to reply to his gesture of goodwill, if they are really so blinded by hatred of Free Software that they would throw this in his face... you fill in the blanks. I'm a bit too pissed off right now to trust myself to be diplomatic.
Opera doesn't actually have its own JVM; however, the downloadable versions for Windows come with a JVM from Sun, in the same download and as part of the same install sequence.
I have never understood why people bitch about it not having Java "bundled." You could always get it if you wanted it. I don't, and I'm quite happy to not have to download crap I don't want.
Opera is missing a few features such as password management, etc, but its speed and ability to turn off images with one click is enough for me. I'll be registering the Linux version as soon as it gets out of alpha/beta, as it is stunningly fast on my AMD K6-2/350 as well.
Missing a lot of features? What "features?" It isn't missing anything I want. "Password management?" Oh, yeah, that stupid thing where IE and Netscape want to store all your passwords so you can forget them and be totally screwed when you need to work on a different computer. Or your little sister deletes a file... oops! Come on. I'm glad it doesn't have that so-called feature. You said "features" so you are thinking of more than one?
And yeah, the windows version is blisteringly fast. I start up with 4 pages and load them as fast as IE could do any one of them. K6/350 here too. When the Linux version is stable there won't be much reason left to boot windows except for games.
undoubtably, these StrongARM chips are Transmeta's biggest competition.
Umm... no. They aren't competition to the Crusoe 5000 series at all. They aren't x86 compatible, remember. The 5000 chips are, with not only 386+ compatibility, but also 16 bit compatibility, that's the whole point - they are trying to bring the qualities of the StrongARM to market in a form that will run a certain proprietary binary only OS and all of it's applications.
What would be interesting from my point of view would be a price/performance comparison between the Crusoe 3000 series and the StrongARMS, since the 3000 series runs Linux just as well as the 5000 series, at lower cost (no hardware to support the 16 bit legacy code windows still relies on.) Those could be considered competitors.
I seriously doubt that we could get along without the CISC, it would just cause to much incompatability, or the translation matrix would make the apparent speed increase gained from the CISC->RISC insignificant. This has no bearing on "us" the private users as I see it.
Obviously you must be defining private users as users of proprietary software. Private users of Free or Open source software have none of these worries. If StrongARM tech provides what we want, it's just a port away. BSD and Linux both run great on ARM processors, and have for quite awhile.
But the StrongARM fails in one of the most critical positions: compatibility with just about any processor. Granted, x86 is the only place they have their software solutions placed in, but it shouldn't be too difficult to translate the likes of SPARC and Power architecture into their VLIW instruction set either (and in some cases, easier than x86).
"Compatibility with just about any processor" would be a neat goal, but it's not necessary, and I've seen no sign Transmeta has even aimed at it in any practical way. The general concept of code morphing, and some of the techniques they developed for Crusoe, could be applied more broadly of course, but only if Crusoe is a success will any of that have a chance of coming about.
What is, sadly, needed is x86 compatibility, and this is what Crusoe is designed for. Don't expect to see SPARC or Power emulation at any acceptible speed on Crusoe, ever. It simply doesn't have enough registers to do that, and it was never intended to do that. If Crusoe is a success, however, they could easily produce another chip later with the necessary hardware to emulate those chips, and a version of code morphing to accomodate them, but none of this will happen if Crusoe isn't successful in penetrating the mass market, which requires one and only one sort of compatibility - x86.
Granted, 64bit processing may still be a problem for the Transmeta processors still. Anyone know the answer to this question, and not under a Transmeta NDA?
No inside knowledge here, but it doesn't take a genius to read what's been publically released and realise that the Crusoes are not set up to run 64 bit code. The 3000 series is optimised for 32bit 386+ code, and the 5000 series is the 3000 series with additional hardware to handle the 16bit x86 codes that windows still uses in a lot of areas. Neither should be expected to handle 64 bit code as they are now. If software requiring that becomes popular, then we'll see - just a guess but I think the basic architecture wouldn't require a lot of work to adapt to it, so a chip that could handle it could be produced fairly quickly, if and when the demand materialises.
That said, there is some truth to what you are saying, surely. But Transmeta is well known in the geek world because a lot of top geeks work there. Not just Torvalds, but also the likes of Robert Collins and Christian Ludloff and so on. There isn't a dummy on that team, it's a massive concentration of talent and experience, and it's hard to believe they can fail to have an impact.
The StrongARMs are a very neat architecture. The sad thing is that, for now, the mass market is dominated by Windows, meaning it's tied to x86 compatibility, meaning that StrongARM simply is not capable of selling in the quantities that would bring their economy of scale up to match the Intel/AMD designs. So, neat as they are, they remain specialty chips at relatively high prices for what they do.
Transmeta has the potential to change that, by offering chips that share most of the qualities of the StrongARM, but can still penetrate the mass market through x86 compatibility. Whether and to what degree that will happen remains to be seen, but the possibility surely has a lot to do with why so many of us (tinu) follow their every move. However things turn out, the potential is there for them to have some earthshattering impact on the computer world these next few years.
In this case the parachutes are for the vehicle itself. Airplanes are heavier, and also typically cigar shaped - making that option much less practical.
Ever wish there was a delete post command? Ever have a cat run across your keyboard and post for you? Ever wonder why the filter accepts a post with nothing in it?
Anyway...the flying cars are here. Technologically that is. Have been for quite awhile. The FAA is the holdup. Moller International has the technological end worked out.
Estimate price, if the FAA approved today, would be about $400k. Once the volume of production is ramped up, Moller believes they could bring the cost down very quickly, perhaps coming to rest in the $60k range within a few years.
Screwed up edit? It looks just like it always did to me, of course, it was always screwed up. Previous to 95 at least it was a basic app, and consumed HUGE amounts of memory, loading the whole qbasic thing to interpret it. I was PISSED when they took edlin out. Edlin was obviously nothing suited to handling large files, but for simple batch files (or debug scripts) nothing ever beat it.
Not only did they take it out, they rigged it so you couldn't even use your copy from a previous version and get it to run. That was soo unecessary. But they wanted everyone to get on their stinking GUI bandwagon *sigh* and thought nothing of crippling the tools their longtime users relied on to force them to do that.
I've dabbled with ash and zsh, and not seen any real advantage, at least in regards to what I see as the major drawback to bash.
If you give 4NT a try, you should quickly see a little of what I am talking about.
There is a huge ease of learning advantage. This is what is usually called "ease of use" but of course it's not - as in the case of the Windows GUI, which is in fact far harder to use than say a bash shell, but is definately easier to learn. The 4dos type prompt is perhaps not so easy to learn as any half decent GUI, that's what GUIs excell at, but it is definately the easiest to learn prompt around. The biggest single reason for this is the way 4dos includes and accesses help. It's a similar idea to the man pages, but more usable - first the information is written a little better, it's not "dumbed down" but it doesn't assume a lot of knowledge either... it combines the listing of flags and usage with longer text explanations that are much easier to grasp than the typical man page, and usually include plenty of examples - examples being extremely important helps for some learning styles, including my own.
The best part of this help system, though, is that it is hyperlinked and context sensitive. Considering the age of the system, that was truly innovative at the time, but considering how long it's been out, it is strange that it still doesn't seem to have been copied in unix. It's very handy, say you type a command and get an error message. Up arrow to get the command back at the prompt, hit F1 and you get the help page for that command. That page includes syntax and switches, and a short summary, if you need more detailed information there are hyperlinks to it. When you are done, ESC takes you back to the prompt, with the command still sitting there ready to be edited.
F1 on an empty line brings up a list of help categories, tutorials from the general to the specific and the like, again all hyperlinked.
The 4dos system is not only easy to use, it's far more powerful than the default dos/nt/os/2 command shells as well, although in that area I am sure *nix can probably keep up. I haven't found any way to do some things I used to rely on with 4dos, but I suspect that the problem is just that I haven't found them, not that they don't exist. But there is room for great improvement in providing ways for the user to find out how to do things.
One quick example, in 4dos there is a for command, extremely useful, allowing one to achieve results with a single line command that would have required constructing a detailed batch file with command.com (and reconstructing the file any time something changed.) A trivial example, the line "for %x in (c d e f) do free %d > prn" would send to the printer the current free space on the four drives cde and f. Or, "dir/b *.txt | for %w in (@con) do call text.bat %w" pipes the output from the dir command to for, which then uses it as a list of files to execute the given batch file on. It should be obvious what the advantages here are over a command.com system (in the second example you would perhaps dir *.txt>textcon.bat and then edit that by repeating a cut and paste operation once for every file in it, a real pain if there are many files, then run that batch file to call the other batch file over and over, if there are very many files and the operation is one you do on a regular basis this one command could save many man-hours) - but the other side is that it's not only powerful, it's easy to learn. Type for then hit F1, spend 10 minutes reading the detailed help file on the command which includes numerous examples illustrating how to use it in all sorts of situations, and anyone of average intelligence will be immediately able to figure out dozens of applications of the function. Even if you don't know there is a for command, just hitting F1 on a blank line and scanning the list of commands would disclose it, again, in a hyperlinked form that takes you to the same help text...
I have yet to find any similar function in bash for for-looping btw, I'm not saying there isn't one, but it's certainly not obvious where it is, and the man pages and apropos have been searched diligently... a task that took a lot more time than I used learning how to do this with 4dos. I believe you can do it in zsh, but I still find it hard to believe that there is no way to do it with bash, since it's the shell of choice of a lot of die-hard command line folks... what on earth would you use in the same situation? Surely no *nix hacker would be content to pipe ls to a file and then cut and paste for an hour to make a shell script? So there has to be some functional equivelent... it's just the documentation that's lacking.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe I read that Darwin has already been ported to x86 a couple months or so back, but either way it doesn't matter, Darwin is just another Mach kernel, with a screwy license no less. The "aqua" gui is what they aren't going to port to x86 before hell freezes over. Which may well be a good thing. The use of NeXT technology and design is a good thing, but the UI seems to have some major problems, with some major design decisions appearing to have been made with more emphasis on eye candy than usability.
If you really want a mach kernel with a good UI, take a look at the The HURD and GNUstep - real Free Software projects that could use your help.
Now the crucial things to understand here are two. One, yes, that is well established fair use. Two, NO, it would not be legal under the DMCA. The DMCA attempts to circumvent fair use rights, by making it not the use which is illegal, but the act of bypassing any technological roadblock that's been thrown up to prevent the exercise of fair use rights. This is a direct result of the fact that rights belong to the general public, which is statistically ignorant and apathetic, while the privileges the DMCA seeks to exalt over our rights are cash cows for corporations with deep pockets and plenty of public officials already bought.
Do you think this is an outrage? Do you want to do something about it?
I agree completely. NeXT style scrollbars are on the left, where they should be, but since I can't get windows to behave like that I have to reverse when I use that...
Sadly, to get the 15um process you want would mean displacing chips with a much higher profit margin. No one is likely to do that, and if they did, they would certainly charge more for it, so that your price advantage largely goes away.
Beyond that, of course, the mass market is based on M$ products, and that means that you will need that power, next upgrade if not today. It's sad, but true. That's why all the Crusoe based books are running Crusoe 5ks, not 3ks, even though the 3ks are just as good at 32 bit instructions, for less money and less power.
At the same thickness it takes less absolute space vertically than horizontally. I can only make sense of your comment by assuming that you don't realise that you can resize it ;^)
Network ICE Releases Open-source Carnivore
They are saying this gives ISPs the ability to do what Carnivore is supposed to do on their own, and thus eliminate any need to allow Carnivore to be installed to comply with an intercept order.
The Altivore Page
Newsalert coverage.
They said the Gnome core developers wanted to be certain they would be able to take over if Eazel crapped out. Makes sense they would want it written in the language they prefer so they could maintain it.
Well, yes. They are trying to make a warm-fuzzy-gui "desktop environment" to make all the hordes of windows and mac users feel at home, after all. This stuff is NOT being written for the hackers. Given their goals, it makes perfect sense that the file manager be considered part of the core. Gmc is certainly a central component of gnome now.
They definately do. I use both Windows and Linux daily, and when I am using Windows it's usually on a common machine (i.e. in a lab or the like.) I always like to do a little customisation so I feel at ease - I set the taskbar vertical instead of horizontal, which takes half a second to do or undo, and makes my document windows look more like an actual document dimension-wise. It also looks more like my windowmaker setup of course :> but on the right side, whereas in windowmaker I put everything on the left - I want the taskbar/mini-windows/dock on the same side as the scrollbars. Anyhow... you wouldn't think that would be that big a deal, but you'd be amazed how many times I've been yelled at for that. I had a teacher (in a network administration class of all things) totally freak out over it, he sat down at the machine I was using and appeared completely lost, then yelled at me to make it normal again. Every so often I walk out to get a drink of water, and come back to find someone staring at my screen slack-jawed. It's really funny. What's less funny is the one time I forgot to switch the taskbar back to its normal position when I left, the next day I caught all hell. Apparently someone had sat down at the machine and freaked out and one of the techs had wasted half an hour trying to figure out how to make it "normal" for her.
I bet you're laughing, I know I was, but there is a serious side too - people want a certain amount (how much varies) of stability in their environment, whether you're talking about their computer or their car or whatever. That stability, that familiarity, is a big factor in what we call "comfort level." Even tiny, functionally insignificant changes can throw someone for a loop, and make them suddenly feel lost, adrift, unsafe. Particularly when that person wasn't particularly secure in their environment to begin with.
Excellent points. There is definately two sides to this, and I'm glad you made the points you did, saves me from repeating them.
That said, the implication others have posted that the main corporate interest here is in importing foreigners who are willing to work cheap by our standards has the ring of truth to me to. It's not my experience that there really is any shortage of qualified people here - the trouble is most of the qualified people want more pay, or more control over their contracts, free time, etc. than the PHBs like to give. So the corps invent a shortage for their own purposes. They call scarcity (a permanent situation, which can never be solved) "shortage" instead, and that is telling a falsehood.
The Indians in particular are great for this, many of them are *excellent* programmers, and the dollar is so strong in India that they can support extended families on what amounts to table scraps if they can get a work permit here. So they are usually highly motivated to stay here, and do whatever the PHB wants. Turning them away is unfair to them, but I can't say I don't have some reservations about the effects of letting them in either.
Wrong. He never said anything about begging, he simply pointed out what the KDE team needs to do to be certain that the license problems are behind them. He even made a gesture analogous to unilateral disarmament, by publically forgiving (clearly using the term in a legal sense) any and all violations he had the legal right to forgive.
I've always been pretty neutral towards KDE, but this is too much. If this is the way the KDE team wants to reply to his gesture of goodwill, if they are really so blinded by hatred of Free Software that they would throw this in his face... you fill in the blanks. I'm a bit too pissed off right now to trust myself to be diplomatic.
Funny that you claim tarball packaging can't work. It works just great on my slackware system - I am FAR happier with it than I was with .rpm.
The BSD ports collection does look very nice though, and I would love to see something like that on slack.
I have never understood why people bitch about it not having Java "bundled." You could always get it if you wanted it. I don't, and I'm quite happy to not have to download crap I don't want.
Missing a lot of features? What "features?" It isn't missing anything I want. "Password management?" Oh, yeah, that stupid thing where IE and Netscape want to store all your passwords so you can forget them and be totally screwed when you need to work on a different computer. Or your little sister deletes a file... oops! Come on. I'm glad it doesn't have that so-called feature. You said "features" so you are thinking of more than one?
And yeah, the windows version is blisteringly fast. I start up with 4 pages and load them as fast as IE could do any one of them. K6/350 here too. When the Linux version is stable there won't be much reason left to boot windows except for games.
Of course. But it's not an intel design.
As to being here now - well, the first laptops are scheduled to ship in what, September?
P.S.
Netwinder is FAR from dead.
Right here.
Umm... no. They aren't competition to the Crusoe 5000 series at all. They aren't x86 compatible, remember. The 5000 chips are, with not only 386+ compatibility, but also 16 bit compatibility, that's the whole point - they are trying to bring the qualities of the StrongARM to market in a form that will run a certain proprietary binary only OS and all of it's applications.
What would be interesting from my point of view would be a price/performance comparison between the Crusoe 3000 series and the StrongARMS, since the 3000 series runs Linux just as well as the 5000 series, at lower cost (no hardware to support the 16 bit legacy code windows still relies on.) Those could be considered competitors.
Obviously you must be defining private users as users of proprietary software. Private users of Free or Open source software have none of these worries. If StrongARM tech provides what we want, it's just a port away. BSD and Linux both run great on ARM processors, and have for quite awhile.
Ever seen a NetWinder?
Umm no. Toshiba said TM chips don't help them much, because their displays suck (power.) Nothing TM can do will disprove that.
"Compatibility with just about any processor" would be a neat goal, but it's not necessary, and I've seen no sign Transmeta has even aimed at it in any practical way. The general concept of code morphing, and some of the techniques they developed for Crusoe, could be applied more broadly of course, but only if Crusoe is a success will any of that have a chance of coming about.
What is, sadly, needed is x86 compatibility, and this is what Crusoe is designed for. Don't expect to see SPARC or Power emulation at any acceptible speed on Crusoe, ever. It simply doesn't have enough registers to do that, and it was never intended to do that. If Crusoe is a success, however, they could easily produce another chip later with the necessary hardware to emulate those chips, and a version of code morphing to accomodate them, but none of this will happen if Crusoe isn't successful in penetrating the mass market, which requires one and only one sort of compatibility - x86.
No inside knowledge here, but it doesn't take a genius to read what's been publically released and realise that the Crusoes are not set up to run 64 bit code. The 3000 series is optimised for 32bit 386+ code, and the 5000 series is the 3000 series with additional hardware to handle the 16bit x86 codes that windows still uses in a lot of areas. Neither should be expected to handle 64 bit code as they are now. If software requiring that becomes popular, then we'll see - just a guess but I think the basic architecture wouldn't require a lot of work to adapt to it, so a chip that could handle it could be produced fairly quickly, if and when the demand materialises.
Tinw.
That said, there is some truth to what you are saying, surely. But Transmeta is well known in the geek world because a lot of top geeks work there. Not just Torvalds, but also the likes of Robert Collins and Christian Ludloff and so on. There isn't a dummy on that team, it's a massive concentration of talent and experience, and it's hard to believe they can fail to have an impact.
The StrongARMs are a very neat architecture. The sad thing is that, for now, the mass market is dominated by Windows, meaning it's tied to x86 compatibility, meaning that StrongARM simply is not capable of selling in the quantities that would bring their economy of scale up to match the Intel/AMD designs. So, neat as they are, they remain specialty chips at relatively high prices for what they do.
Transmeta has the potential to change that, by offering chips that share most of the qualities of the StrongARM, but can still penetrate the mass market through x86 compatibility. Whether and to what degree that will happen remains to be seen, but the possibility surely has a lot to do with why so many of us (tinu) follow their every move. However things turn out, the potential is there for them to have some earthshattering impact on the computer world these next few years.
In this case the parachutes are for the vehicle itself. Airplanes are heavier, and also typically cigar shaped - making that option much less practical.
Ever wish there was a delete post command? Ever have a cat run across your keyboard and post for you? Ever wonder why the filter accepts a post with nothing in it?
Anyway...the flying cars are here. Technologically that is. Have been for quite awhile. The FAA is the holdup. Moller International has the technological end worked out.
A recent wired story is here.
Specs on the M400:
Estimate price, if the FAA approved today, would be about $400k. Once the volume of production is ramped up, Moller believes they could bring the cost down very quickly, perhaps coming to rest in the $60k range within a few years.
Not delusional, just a memory lapse I suspect. ;^)
Screwed up edit? It looks just like it always did to me, of course, it was always screwed up. Previous to 95 at least it was a basic app, and consumed HUGE amounts of memory, loading the whole qbasic thing to interpret it. I was PISSED when they took edlin out. Edlin was obviously nothing suited to handling large files, but for simple batch files (or debug scripts) nothing ever beat it.
Not only did they take it out, they rigged it so you couldn't even use your copy from a previous version and get it to run. That was soo unecessary. But they wanted everyone to get on their stinking GUI bandwagon *sigh* and thought nothing of crippling the tools their longtime users relied on to force them to do that.
I've dabbled with ash and zsh, and not seen any real advantage, at least in regards to what I see as the major drawback to bash.
If you give 4NT a try, you should quickly see a little of what I am talking about.
There is a huge ease of learning advantage. This is what is usually called "ease of use" but of course it's not - as in the case of the Windows GUI, which is in fact far harder to use than say a bash shell, but is definately easier to learn. The 4dos type prompt is perhaps not so easy to learn as any half decent GUI, that's what GUIs excell at, but it is definately the easiest to learn prompt around. The biggest single reason for this is the way 4dos includes and accesses help. It's a similar idea to the man pages, but more usable - first the information is written a little better, it's not "dumbed down" but it doesn't assume a lot of knowledge either... it combines the listing of flags and usage with longer text explanations that are much easier to grasp than the typical man page, and usually include plenty of examples - examples being extremely important helps for some learning styles, including my own.
The best part of this help system, though, is that it is hyperlinked and context sensitive. Considering the age of the system, that was truly innovative at the time, but considering how long it's been out, it is strange that it still doesn't seem to have been copied in unix. It's very handy, say you type a command and get an error message. Up arrow to get the command back at the prompt, hit F1 and you get the help page for that command. That page includes syntax and switches, and a short summary, if you need more detailed information there are hyperlinks to it. When you are done, ESC takes you back to the prompt, with the command still sitting there ready to be edited.
F1 on an empty line brings up a list of help categories, tutorials from the general to the specific and the like, again all hyperlinked.
The 4dos system is not only easy to use, it's far more powerful than the default dos/nt/os/2 command shells as well, although in that area I am sure *nix can probably keep up. I haven't found any way to do some things I used to rely on with 4dos, but I suspect that the problem is just that I haven't found them, not that they don't exist. But there is room for great improvement in providing ways for the user to find out how to do things.
One quick example, in 4dos there is a for command, extremely useful, allowing one to achieve results with a single line command that would have required constructing a detailed batch file with command.com (and reconstructing the file any time something changed.) A trivial example, the line "for %x in (c d e f) do free %d > prn" would send to the printer the current free space on the four drives cde and f. Or, "dir /b *.txt | for %w in (@con) do call text.bat %w" pipes the output from the dir command to for, which then uses it as a list of files to execute the given batch file on. It should be obvious what the advantages here are over a command.com system (in the second example you would perhaps dir *.txt>textcon.bat and then edit that by repeating a cut and paste operation once for every file in it, a real pain if there are many files, then run that batch file to call the other batch file over and over, if there are very many files and the operation is one you do on a regular basis this one command could save many man-hours) - but the other side is that it's not only powerful, it's easy to learn. Type for then hit F1, spend 10 minutes reading the detailed help file on the command which includes numerous examples illustrating how to use it in all sorts of situations, and anyone of average intelligence will be immediately able to figure out dozens of applications of the function. Even if you don't know there is a for command, just hitting F1 on a blank line and scanning the list of commands would disclose it, again, in a hyperlinked form that takes you to the same help text...
I have yet to find any similar function in bash for for-looping btw, I'm not saying there isn't one, but it's certainly not obvious where it is, and the man pages and apropos have been searched diligently... a task that took a lot more time than I used learning how to do this with 4dos. I believe you can do it in zsh, but I still find it hard to believe that there is no way to do it with bash, since it's the shell of choice of a lot of die-hard command line folks... what on earth would you use in the same situation? Surely no *nix hacker would be content to pipe ls to a file and then cut and paste for an hour to make a shell script? So there has to be some functional equivelent... it's just the documentation that's lacking.