Ein paar Programmierer haben ein Herz für zurückgebliebene Besitzer alter klassischer Systeme von Apple. Die dürfen ab sofort ihre Tweets direkt absondern.

Die Twitter-App “Grackle68k” sieht nicht nur schön Old School aus, sie laufe angeblich auch noch auf System 6 und 7 wie auch unter OS 8 und 9. Wer noch einen antiquierten Mac herumstehen oder in Betrieb hat (so wie mein Designschätzchen Cube), erhält damit Zugang in die angesagteste globale Community. Warum? Weil Zeitgenossen, die jahrzehntealte Hardware  betreiben, womöglich interessant sind. Sie haben bestimmt skurrile Lebens- und Computergeschichten auf Lager, denken sich die Grackle-Macher. Ob die Erzählungen aber zum 160-Zeichen-Stakkato-Format von Twitter passen, wird sich zeigen. [Ralf]

[Retards]

11tech auf twitter

Gute Idee? Support für Windows 7 via Twitter

Ein neues Mobilgerät für Twitter – und nichts sonst

Tüm S60 3. Sürüm ve 5. Sürüm OS9lar ile uyumlu çalışabilen programı indirmek için:

Download SymTorrent

Ожидание,всегда немного приятно, особенно когда ждешь то что тебе захочется! Вот и я на днях получу свой заветный раритет! iMac G3 да-да тот самый разноцветный! А если получится то будет iBook тоже G3! Вот это кайф! Для любого маковода – старые компьютеры – дороже любых новых! Это наша память. Это возможность вспоминать такие ОС как OS9 или Mac OS X Public Beta. Помните 2000? Да. Мелкософт тогда упирался со своим миллениумом, а Apple вернула себе миллионы клиентов, и безусловно приобрела новых! Можно будет вспомнить все! А разве это не круто?

Hi guys,

I am writing this from the Boscastle (as seen on CNN) visitor centre. I have had a pretty eventful week. I had my birthday, I went to the Ripcurl Boardmasters Skate and Music Festival, where I got given 30 free samples of shampoo, 8 pot noodles, bought loads of random crap and developed my relationships with my family.

Right now I am exhausted. I have walked more than I usually would have done, although the lack of a pensioner in wheelchair is a definite plus.

I ate in Rick Stein’s restaurant, which was pretty much bog standard bar food, albeit with a pretentious twist.

In Boscastle, where I am staying, the only phone network available is Orange, thus rendering my phone, and the expensive five day mobile Internet pass I bought, redundant.

This week has gave me time to think about where I want to be in life, and what I want to do. I know I dicked about too much with my exams and schooling, and I expect to fail spectacularly when I get my results. This isn’t my natural pessimism. I just got fed up with my teachers and work, and just acted like a complete cockbag.

I have just had a bit too much difficulty adapting from GCSE to AS, and I got swamped with work, and I just decided to take the wise monkey approach to my schooling.

Either way, I will just resit it. Life is just like that. You either fail, or succeed, and if you fail, you work out how to get to where you want to be.

Anyway, I decided a few months ago that during my summer, I was going to learn C++. Now, I am aware that every previous attempt to learn to code ended up in epic fail. I have tried various languages, from Java to Python, and even modern variants of old-school BASIC, not to mention Ruby. I have spent so much money on books, and I feel this has been money wasted.

I don’t know what I want to do, or be. I feel pretty lost to be honest. Whenever I try to learn to code, which is my ambition, I just hit brick walls. I don’t know what to do.

I wonder, maybe I am a hardware guy. My uncle has promised to give me his old Powermac which I will use when I take my CISCO IT Essentials course next month, and I was tempted to actually build from scratch my own Gentoo based MP3 server for my house. I decided to forgo this to spend my cash on a ram upgrade for my macbook to bring it up to 4GB, and other social activities.

Anyway, my money for the computer is running out, so I better be off.

Regards,

Matt

I am the first to admit that when it comes to technology I am about as addicted as they come. When i am not plugged into my iPods I am tinkering with something and spending hours trying to get the most arcane little system preference just right. I am also typically human and I find that I sometimes get nostalgic for an old movie or, quite often, an older piece of technology. This explains my pleasure in getting Sybil ( the resuscitated dual processor Power Mac I am using to type this entry) to feel as loved and useful in the world of 2008 as she was in 2001 when she was born. She is running OS X Tiger at a speed that is not discernibly different to my G5 machine or my Powerbook ( both running Leopard) and though my benchmarks indicate she is lagging far behind both of them in a technical sense I cannot tell the difference in real world use. Having proven she can run PhotoShop and iWeb like a trooper I felt that twinge of nostalgia that led me think back to my many happy days in the original Mac OS before the advent of pretty  UNIX pretending to be a bona fide Mac operating system. 

Now I know that my handful of readers are most likely not computer ( much less Mac) inclined but I think there is a bigger picture here. Let me explain. Before the introduction of Apple’s current operating system ( the thing you see when you turn on your computer…not the desktop picture of your cat..the general thing with icons etc.) us Mac users were a blissfully happy lot plodding away on the old system called OS 9 in its last iteration. We did everything one would want to do on a computer, running all the usual programmes and wasting time on the internet, and we were quite fond of our unique machines which we touted ( as we still do) as the best computers on the planet. Sure we had some less than honest moments when we lied to our Windows friends that our systems never crashed – even though they froze more regularly than plumbing in Antarctica – but such  is the job of the evangelist. Then Moses ( aka Steve Jobs) came unto us and gave us OS X ( really OS 10 following on the heels of OS 9) which was based on UNIX which is a serious industrial operating system. It was prettied up ,had bouncy things,useful things like column view and even buttons that  Steve described as “lickable”. To most younger people and Mac owners after 2003 this new crash-proof and pretty thing is what constitutes a Mac. 

I have stubbornly refused to get one of the brand new Macs with Intel chips in them precisely because to me a true Macintosh is one that has a different processor namely a RISC processor ( we shall avoid that explanation this time around)  but in the back of my mind I missed our old operating system with all its quirks knowing that it was that OS along with the different internals that truly made using a Mac a unique experience. Now that I have this older machine that can still startup in OS 9 ( as well as OS X) I have spent many an hour getting her to run it perfectly. For the past few days i have been reveling in the joy of using my old OS and I am still amazed by how perfect it was in many ways. It takes up hardly any drive space and uses hardly any memory to the point where I have been unable to get the computer to use even 20% of the available memory when running 10 programmes simultaneously. To be sure she has frozen once in the last two days and OS X has only frozen once on me in 5 years but i found myself sighing in nostalgic joy watching her freeze.  Other than that I have been able to write, surf the net, send instant messages, check email, run Photoshop 6, listen to music and even watch movies. In short, I have not noticed any major difference in my computing life using an operating system that was introduced in 1999 which is an eternity in the technology world. In fact, I can say with 100% certainty that many of the older programmes that were designed to run on machines with far slower specs than mine are faster than their equivalent OS X versions running on my newer machines.

In our endless quest to get the latest and greatest technology we sometimes forget that there was nothing wrong with the old technology we were using. Sure the newer one may be prettier and glossier and even better in some ways but does it make it more useful? I am left to wonder with my latest experience. Were it not for the  fact that I cannot use iWeb to write my blog on the older system and that the older internet browsers have not kept pace with the requirements of modern browsing I don’t think I would have a problem going back to using OS 9 at all.

Perhaps there is a life lesson in my experiment that we should not dismiss the effectiveness of the tried and true or perhaps the true lesson is that you never forget your first love.

If you read the multitude of articles on the subject, you might think the only way to design a PROM-based system is to use a commercial embedded operating system or real-time kernel like PDOS, VRTX, or OS/9. But there is an alternative, one that’s quietly being used by a significant number of designers, and that is simply to write fully stand-alone software. Let’s compare the two approaches based on two criteria–ease of use and versatility.

In comparing ease of use, we’re faced with two options; unfortunately, each requires us to learn an interface. If we choose to write stand-alone software, we must learn the workings of various hardware components, among them serial, timer, and interrupt chips. These complicated chips often require extensive study before they can be accessed in a standalone environment. Buying a real-time kernel also challenges the designer to learn a fairly complicated interface and, in many cases, still requires the applications programmer to learn the details of the hardware components being accessed.

Besides the hardware issues, we must consider some purely software structures. The real-time kernel provides multitasking, a facility that would have to be created from scratch in a stand-alone environment. Here the real-time kernel seems to have the edge in ease of use, though there are (as we shall see) competitive alternatives in this area as well.

In a comparison of versatility, obviously nothing can beat the stand-alone environment. Real-time kernels are versatile enough for a wide range of applications, so the question is whether the versatility provided by the real-time kernel is sufficiently close to the absolute versatility of the stand-alone environment for your particular application. The commercially available real-time kernels are the result of many hours of development; an attempt to duplicate the functionality of one of these little gems would require a larger programming effort than would be justified by any single project. But programmers who write stand-alone software don’t duplicate that functionality, because they simply don’t need all of it.

Links: http://embedded.com/design/205918956

There’s just minutes to go, so i’d thought i’d get my totally “out of left field” prediction out there, since no one quite can put their finger on the Steve-Jobs-Keynote Pulse this year-I am predicting a mock funeral for PowerPC, much like the one held at the WWDC keynote in 20002 for Mac OS 9. Prepare for the coffin to rise from the floor-PowerPC is dead! Long Live MacIntel!

I’ve been putting off this post because it covers so many things I hardly know where to start.

December was a strange month for me because this blog somehow got me into the group of people developing the new Birmingham Post website (there will be an update on this soon – promise!).

After taking us back in from the cold, I think Trinity Mirror decided it better do something interesting with us… and quickly. I guess the planned move to Fort Dunlop made for the perfect opportunity.

Since then, things have got a little crazy around here.

The laptop is part of it. Apparently, when we all move over to our new site at Fort Dunlop, everyone will be swapping their antiquated Mac Classics for one of these Compaq 6710bs. I suspect the good battery life and the 3G connection are all part of the plan to make Post & Mail journalists more flexible and mobile. From what I’ve heard (although I don’t know for sure) this leapfrogs us over most other Trinity Mirror publications in the technology stakes.

The reason I have my laptop early is because tomorrow I start a new distance learning postgraduate course. It is a Trinity Mirror collaboration with the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) and is built around the university’s Journalism Leaders Programme.

It’s in its second term, but two people dropped out and it was decided that one person from The Post and another from The Mail should take up the places. As part of the recent madness, I got asked if I wanted to do it. Well…it was a bit of a no brainer really.

Seminars for the course happen online and that’s why I got the laptop early. I needed a machine that could cope with online conferences. The first seminar is tomorrow afternoon… and I’m nervous. It’s like the first day of school again.

The course looks at the transition of the newsroom as a result of converging technologies and investigates what is required to manage that change… or at least that’s how I’ve interpreted it.

It’s quite a big thing to take on, with at least eight to ten hours of study expected each week. We also have residential weeks every couple of months that seem fairly intense.

But of course I’m excited about it – three months ago I was utterly despairing at the backward technology we have here, now I’m being asked to go on a training course that not only deals with current developments, but also looks to the future. Who wouldn’t be excited?!

There are other things going on around here that suggest to me we’re rapidly time travelling from 1998 to 2008. A rather lovely shiny new Mac has appeared on a desk near to me and a few people are fresh back from video training.

I am under no illusions that fast-forwarding a decade is going to have its problems. You can’t expect people who have been working on Mac OS9 for at least the last seven years to suddenly switch to a completely new system (and continue producing a paper) without a few teething troubles.

But we are finally moving towards the sort of operation I’ve been longing to work for since I arrived and I can’t wait to see what happens next!