Win3.1 didn't have long filenames
You may be confusing it with NT 3.1, which was the first Microsoft OS to have LFN support. Windows 3.1 did not - that feature didn't make it into their consumer operating systems until Windows '95.
123 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2006
Anycast works by abusing BGP to constantly modify Internet routing tables in order to provide a DNS that is network-latency-wise closest to the requester, a technique used by Akamai and the various root servers. It doesn't do anything as silly as using a requester's geographic location, but to use the actual latency of the Internet, and this requires absolutely no extensions to DNS or any potential privacy violations by anyone.
"But unlike netbooks and notebooks, ... NetTabs are lighter and cheaper."
vs.
"... consumers will likely “demand big upfront subsidies” because NetTabs will cost more than most smartphones, Deloitte added."
At least in the US, most smartphones cost around $1-200 (subsidized) or $4-600 (unsubsidized), while decent netbooks start at around $100 (subsidized) or $2-300 (unsubsidized). So this seems like there's probably some apples-to-oranges comparison going on here...
Better Keyboard is my Android keyboard of choice, and they're constantly adding new features, other peoples' patents be damned. Considering some of the stuff they've added (such as the Blackberry-esque two-letter-per-key mode) it should be pretty easy for them to tweak the skin to do this too.
it was a decent Symbian phone, although its J2ME really sucked for games (ironically), and it worked fine for me up until the day it bricked itself because it ran out of memory and got stuck in a perpetual reboot loop with no way to fix it aside from sending it in to Nokia with a check for $28 to flash the firmware. I opted not to.
This is not for the purpose of being able to play pirated games. This is so that people can run their homebrew apps on the calculators they own. What would they bootleg from the TI calculators by cracking them? The same crappy firmware that they want to get AWAY from?
It's also a bit rubbish to just say to "use an HP instead." What makes HPs so supposedly superior? Software that doesn't suck. This is so that people can install whatever software they want.
There's no need for Parallels (or VMWare) to run Ubuntu since, as Galus posted, VirtualBox works quite well for that. However, if you already have VMWare for some reason, Ubuntu runs just dandy under it.
As far as compiling Linux apps to run natively, it depends a lot on the app. Many of them work without a lot of trouble; you can use MacPorts or Fink to manage the UNIX-space libraries that most modern Linux apps rely on, and most terminal-based apps will just compile and work out of the box without any trouble. For GUI apps, however, you're generally better off finding an OSX-native alternative, as X11 is a bit of a mess under OSX (simply because OSX's windowing model is so fundamentally different than X11's).
Some apps like GIMP do have decently-supported ports (which still run under X11 but they hide the fiddlier bits of it - sadly, the various OSX-native GTK ports seem to always be in a perpetually stalled state), but there are so many better things than them on the Mac anyway (such as Pixelmator, which is pretty cheap and while it's no Photoshop it blows GIMP away).
I tried upgrading while at work yesterday, and iTunes got as far as installing the new firmware and then indicating there was an "unknown error," which put it in an endless cycle of trying to recover the firmware and continuing to fail.
When I got home and did the phone recovery from my usual sync point, though, it went through just fine. I did end up losing all my notes, though, and I haven't bothered to check my various games' saved data just yet.
In the end, the one feature I actually cared about (stereo bluetooth music) turns out to not even be available on the first-gen iPhone anyway, which means either I can keep on putting up with crappy "iPhone-compatible" headphones, or I can upgrade to a 3G just for that one feature (and the ability to use my normal damn headphones) which isn't worth the extra $15/month for data service.
After it installed OS 3.0, it gave me an "unknown error" error, and had to go into recovery mode. Recovery would only try reinstalling OS 3.0, which of course failed with the same error.
So now I'm without my shiny JesusPhone. Good thing I have some spare GSM phones rattling around, which frankly were better at a lot of things anyway. I might just switch back for a while.
it also doesn't require new 5-channel image formats. Oversimplifying (neglecting various weighting factors and gamma curves and the like), Y is min(R,G), C is min(G,B). If C+Y > G then they're both decremented by G-(Y+C). Then R'=R-Y, G'=G-Y-C, and B'=B-C, and you display the colors as R',Y,G',C,B.
The end result is that you get a yellow which doesn't also partially trigger blue receptors (which real-world yellows don't, as they are NOT red+green), and a cyan which doesn't also partially trigger red (same reason).
they really need to look into the "pigeonhole principle." If you are guaranteeing that any N-bit sequence can be losslessly compressed into an M-bit sequence, where M is less than N, then you're eventually going to run out of M-bit sequences when it comes time to encode the next N-bit sequence. Since any M-bit sequence can only be expanded into a single N-bit sequence, there is no way for everything to be losslessly compressed into a smaller sequence.
Granted, there are multiple compression schemes which do better or worse jobs with different sorts of data, and you can certainly improve average-case compression for certain classes of images, but there is absolutely no way to guarantee lossless compression *at all* for ALL images.
One of the screen savers in the xscreensaver collection (which sadly I can't seem to find ever since updating to Ubuntu 9.04) does a VERY convincing job of looking like an older dysfunctional CRT. When I first saw it running on my laptop I had to do a major double-take, because it was absolutely spot-on.
The first time I opened my G4 Mini (to upgrade the RAM) I used a putty knife as recommended, and found it to be difficult and fiddly. The second time (to replace a head hard drive) I found that simply using a nice stiff bench knife (also known as a dough knife, pastry scraper, and a bunch of other things - basically that large flat kitchen utensil used to lift up chopped ingredients) works exceptionally well.
I also found that standing it on the front of the case instead of the top helped immensely - that way I could use gravity to my advantage instead of having to fight against it.
What is it with computer peoples' fascination with thinking that TiB are the "true" units? Historically, the ONLY computer-related units which have been in the power-of-two magnitudes have been memory and hard drive space. Everything else (CPU speed, network bandwidth, display resolution, etc.) have always been in the proper scientific power-of-ten magnitudes. There are very solid technological reasons for memory to be based on power-of-two magnitudes, but there aren't for disk space, and fundamentally it's not like it really matters to the end-user to begin with. And yet, operating systems still report hard drive space in powers of two instead of powers of ten, which then leads to the ridiculous "formatted capacity less" weasel words which only serve to add to the confusion.
We should stop taking hard drive manufacturers to task, when the blame lies SOLELY in the hands of the OS vendors.
Now there are several excellent Javascript interpreters which support JIT, which means that it's actually quite possible to get quite good performance from it nowadays. Sure, it's not going to be as fast as C++ (or probably even as fast as JIT Java) but it'll still be pretty competitive.
Also, for network-bandwidth-heavy things like Jaiku (as mentioned in the article), it's not like the JS app has to individually process every byte of data - if they do something like implement a Socks server (like NetShare on the iPhone) there's very little heavy lifting that has to happen in the app itself. It'd just be passing large byte arrays around, for the most part.
I had a friend in college who was an avid MUDder. He decided to give it up when one morning he awoke to find that his computer was on, and when he connected to his favorite MUD he had a bunch of messages from people complimenting him on his excellent gaming the previous night (which he had no memory of).
I believe the newest wheel iPods (meaning Classic and Nano) have a VoiceOver-like interface in them, where it reads out the current selected item, which helps both blind users and people who don't want to take their eyes off the road while they fiddle with their song selections. And of course the physical interface itself is extremely touch-friendly.
I was having the trackpad issue before the trackpad update a few weeks ago, and haven't had any trackpad problems since then.
I also had the won't-stay-asleep problem and the freeze-on-wake, but they were so intermittent that it'll be a while before I know if the fix actually fixed them.
I haven't had the 'black screen of death' problem at all before or after the update (even during intense gaming sessions both using Crossover and BootCamp).