[TAG] Nokia tablet article

[Faber J. Fedor]

On 26/10/06 10:11 -0700, Mike Orr wrote:
> [For the Mailbag, regarding my Aug 9 letter about a Nokia tablet article.]
> 
> The more I looked into the Nokia Internet Tablet 770, the more I
> became concerned about its speed, capacity, and cost of add-ons I
> considered essential.  I finally ended up going to the dark side and
> getting a Macintosh laptop.  

Welcome to the Not-So-Dark Side.  I picked up a Macbook a few months
ago; I needed a new laptop and it was either a Macbook or Ubuntu on a
Thinkpad and I can install Ubuntu on anything, including the Macbook.

We in the FOSS world would do well to steal a few ideas from OS X. I
know some KDE people have already ripped off^W^Wemulated Quicksilver[1].
I love the idea of an application being self-contained [2] and I am very
impressed with how quickly Spotlight updates its search database[3].

The OS X GUI ain't bad but it's not as great and wonderful as I've heard.

[1] Quicksilver is a free third-party app that is like a "GUI command
line" but is much more.  KDE has an app called Katapult which is
similar, IIUC.

[2] Most OS X packages I've come across are just file system images.
You double-click them and they are mounted (presumably via the loopback
device).  You can then click and drag the "application" to your
Application folder.  The "application" is actually a directory structure
containing all of the executables, libraries and other files necessary
to run the app, similar to what Firefox does.

[3] Think of Spotlight as a GUI-ized 'locate' and 'fgrep', i.e. if I untar a 
file from the command line, Spotlight has already stored the contents of
the files in its database.  I'm thinking it's done at the kernel level.

-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber Fedor
President
Linux New Jersey, Inc.
908-320-0357
800-706-0701

http://www.linuxnj.com