Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 24th Jul 2008 22:04 UTC
As someone who uses Windows Vista practically daily, I've always wondered where all the negativity in the media comes from. Sure, Vista isn't perfect (as if any operating system is), but I just don't see where all the complaints are coming from. It runs just fine on my old (6 years) machine, all my software and hardware is compatible, and it's stable as a rock. Microsoft has been wondering the same thing, and after a little test, they may have found out why people seem to dislike Vista so much.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."More News »
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2006-12-16
Hey - before you judge me, maybe you should actually find out why it took me so long?
), and say it's great, and if you like to fiddle, then it is. If you want a working system, quickly and easily, then for most people, Linux will NOT be your ticket to joy I'm afraid to say. True, not all of this is Linux' fault, but a lot is.
Firstly - issues with the Marvell Yukon network card. I'm still not sure why I have networking in Debian, no idea why, since the Yukon is *not* working and it's the only network card in the machine.
Try a Nvidia 8400GS with a Samsung 24" widescreen LCD monitor. Not even Ubuntu did it right. And that took several hours of research on my part to try and figure out how to get it working, since the Linux kernel src was not installed, and I could not find a package amongst Debian's myriad amounts of packages. The only reason why I ended up getting it working I suspect is because I installed some package that I'd never heard of before in all my years of using Linux, that supposedly auto installs (or helps to) driver packages (sorry, the name eludes me). I tried to install the nvidia drivers but they borked. For fun, I used this application to install ndiswrapper (even though I didn't need it) and voila - I had a Linux kernel src tree. From there, the rest was dead easy, the proprietary Nvidia drivers installed in a jiffy. Oh, and even when trying to install X as a 800*600 256 colour setup on this system, it still would NOT f--king load. Dropped to a terminal every *single* goddamn time. Hell, even Windows 95 shits on Linux in this respect. Why does Linux have it so goddamn hard to do this? I can tell you now, your average user would say "screw this piece of shit, it's back to Windows for me, Linux sucks".
Oh, and then there's the problem with KDE/XFCE (this happened on Ubuntu). I went to install the xfce4 package. No dependency issues mentioned by apt. What does it do, post install? f--king screws KDE royally, uninstall a shitload of packges. Now, no warning was made by apt about this. None. Nada. Niente. Niet. Keine. Get the drift? Well, that took a bit of time to sort out. I knew better to try that on Debian. All in all, probably 4-5 hours wasted on Ubuntu before I got it up and running, and probably closer to 10 hours on Debian of troubleshooting, installing packages, fiddling with things etc.
You can happily sit on your Linux tree (that's a pun, given your user name
Sure, I got Linux working eventially, the key word is eventually.
Don't get me wrong, Vista is incurring my wrath (well, not Vista, but Canon actually) - my rather expensive Canon EOS1D Mark IIn is not detected by the system at all, and Canon's technical help is about as much fun as having my balls pulled off square mm by square mm. Other than that though, My Vista system works with everything else, without *any* issue. I've had a few issues, but nothing major, nothing that didn't happen under any other o/s:
1. Explorer crashing (once in 5 weeks of usage, not bad) - i've seen X crash more often than that!
2. A game I've started playing (Oblivion) has a weird issue when exiting the game, saying that it did not close properly, and the mouse is dead. A quick ^ meta del (sounds much cooller doesn't it?) fixes that and regains mouse usage. I suspect that this is actually down to either the latest update for it, or the unofficial Oblivion patch (I installed both at the same time, so not sure which caused the issue to start happening).
3. I had the sidebar disappear on me once, but it came back by itself, not sure what happened there.
4. Winamp - even though I told Winamp to be associated with the right click drop down menu (i.e. play in Winamp), it didn't work. A subsequent update 2 weeks later to a newer version seemed to fix the issue. Weird.
5. I can't access the Vista partition from my XP partition - permission denied. I haven't investigated the issue, but this is different to pre Vista systems, so maybe it's some new security setup.
UAC has not been an issue - it does not come up frequently as some would argue, and it's easy to read, and easy to use. Big deal.
Oh, and my Creative Xen M 60gb MP3 player works! I didn't think it would, but Creative's software installers are retarded. After re-reading the installers help me file, I found out what I'd done wrong (basically, plug in MP3 player first, let Windows Vista find it, then leave it plugged in and install the Creative software, weird!).
Dave