Hasta La Gadget!

AMD, the other chip company, is 40 years old today. It’s the scrappy underdog to the Intel juggernaut. Today, it’s not in great shape, but at one point, it was actually beating Intel on innovation.

• AMD tried to kill the megahertz myth before Intel. During the Pentium 4 days Intel kept pushing clock speeds higher and higher, before it hit a wall and abandoned the Prescott architecture. The message was clearly, “more megahertz is more better.” AMD’s competing Athlon XP chips, while clocked slower, often beat their Pentium 4 rivals. Ironically, AMD was the first to 1GHz, as some commenters have pointed out (don’t know how I forgot that). Obviously though, AMD’s performance lead didn’t last forever.

• AMD beat Intel to 64-bit in mainstream computers. And we’re not just talking about its Opteron and Athlon 64 processors. AMD actually designed the X86-64 specification, which Intel wound up adopting and licensing—so AMD’s spec is used Intel’s 64-bit processors to this day.

• AMD was first to consider energy efficiency in processor designs. Okay, this is kind of an extension of point number one, but during Intel’s Pentium 4 ‘roid rage period AMD’s processors consistently used less power than Intel’s. Intel’s performance per watt revelation didn’t really start until the Pentium M (which was actually a throwback to the P6 architecture), which set the tone for Intel’s new direction in its successor, the Core line of chips.

• AMD beat Intel to having an integrated memory controller. A tech feature AMD lorded over Intel for years: AMD’s processors started integrating the memory controller with its processors years ago, reducing memory latency. Intel’s first chip to use an integrated memory controller is the Core i7—before, the memory controller was separate from the processor. (Here’s why Intel says they held off.)

Athlon XP and Athlon 64—those were the good old days, AMD’s cutthroat competitive days. The days they were ahead of Intel. I miss them—at one point, every hand-built computer in my house ran AMD processors. I felt like a rebel—a rebel with faster, cheaper computers.

Unfortunately, I don’t run AMD chips anymore. Intel came back, and came back hard. But here’s hoping for another resurgence, and another 40 years, guys. Share your favorite AMD memories in the comments.

According to the CDC, the regular flu has killed 13,000 people since January—but the Swine Flu kills like 1% of that and everyone is freaking out. These gadgets can bring you peace of mind.

If there is one bright spot in this whole Swine Flu mess, it’s that bacon is not affected. Whew! And I thought I might have to curb my intake. Actually, I might eat more now out of spite.

Great news for skiiers, blue-collar workers and anyone who tends to drop their phone in the sink: Sonim’s XP3.20, the world’s toughest phone, is arriving in the US early this summer thanks to a group of rural mobile phone carriers. That means the phone is coming sooner than we heard in February.

The XP3.20 may also be available unlocked directly through some retailers for use on AT&T’s and T-Mobile’s networks, Sonim CEO Bob Plaschke said.

I got some hands-on time with the XP3.20 today, and Sonim CEO Bob Plaschke explained what makes it far more rugged than ‘semi-rugged’ phones like the Samsung Rugby.

For instance, the XP3.20 has a rubber ridge around the screen and a few extra millimeters of space between the screen glass and the actual LCD display. That makes the display much harder to crack.

The XP3 can survive 100 9-foot drops to concrete (or more than 20 G-forces) and is certified to the IP67 standard, which is tougher than the usual IP57 standard you hear about. It’s waterproof, dustproof, super-loud, and you can use it wearing gloves thanks to raised, ridged keys.

This article was written on April 17, 2007 by CyberNet.

Many Linux applications don’t have to be installed manually because most distributions have implemented a package management system to make it easier for you to install software. But that’s not always the case. Some programs only offer tarball packages for download, which have to be compiled from source. We’ll show you how to do that.

We’re going to compile and install Audacity (audio editing software) to show you how to install tarballs. Because I wrote this tutorial on an Ubuntu machine, it will be easier to follow if you’re using Ubuntu or a derivative. That, of course, doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to do it with a different distribution. Before we begin, make sure that Audacity is not installed on your computer. If it is, uninstall it using your package manager. This will prevent different versions of the application from being mixed up. You can always uninstall the tarball later.

You can click on any of the screenshots below to enlarge them.

1. Download the Audacity tarball by clicking here (6MB). It doesn’t matter where you save it.



2. Extract the contents of the package with a package extraction tool such as Ark or file-roller. You can also do it from a terminal by doing
   

   cd /folder/with/Audacity/tarball
   tar -xvf audacity-src-1.3.2.tar.gz

   Don’t forget to replace /folder/with/Audacity/tarball with the path to the folder where you saved the tarball.

3. Let’s have a look at the requirements. According to README.txt (included in the tarball), we will have to download and compile wxWidgets separately. If you scroll down, you’ll see that they ask you specifically to install version 2.6.x. Don’t neglect this kind of warnings, otherwise the compilation process will fail. Let’s install wxWidgets then, shall we?
   1. Install these packages using your package manager: build-essential, make, g++, gcc and libc6-dev. These are just some basic compiling tools that you have to install when compiling for the first time. Not all distributions use those names for these packages, so you might need to do some research on the Internet before you can proceed. On Ubuntu, you can do
      

      sudo apt-get install build-essential make g++ gcc libc6-dev

      to install everything required to start building.

   2. Download the wxWidgets tarball and extract it. (Note: this particular version of wxWidgets is called wxGTK, referring to the GTK toolkit. Developers often use this GNOME toolkit to develop applications for Linux.)
   3. Open a terminal and go to the newly created directory using the cd command.
   4. Look for a file named INSTALL.txt for install instructions. The file tells us that you have to execute these commands:
      

      mkdir buildgtk
      cd buildgtk
      ../configure –with-gtk=2
      make
      sudo make install
      sudo ldconfig (sometimes ’sudo /sbin/ldconfig’)

      If you get a “package/library not found”-like error message, install the necessary package and, when available, its -dev addition. Then re-execute ../configure –with-gtk=2. You might have to do this a couple of times. If you’re lucky, you won’t be bugged at all. Also keep in mind that the make command might take a while to complete depending on the speed of your computer.

4. Let’s take a look at the rest of the requirements. The readme file included in the Audacity tarball tells us that the packages libid3tag, libmad, libogg, libvorbis and Twolame are optional. Although you can go ahead and compile Audacity without them, you won’t be able to use everything that Audacity has to offer. You can install these packages if you want by searching for them using your package manager. If there’s also a package with the same name followed by -dev available, install that one too. For example: to enable Ogg Vorbis support, you’ll need to install both libogg0 and libogg-dev. These -dev packages are usually required if you’re compiling programs manually. Ubuntu users can do:
   

   sudo apt-get install libid3tag0 libid3tag0-dev libmad0 libogg0 libogg-dev libvorbis0a libvorbis-dev

   to install most requirements from the Ubuntu repositories. (Note: if you’re using Ubuntu 6.06, apt-get might not find all these packages.) If you can’t find everything, don’t worry. Again: these are optional packages. If it turns out that essential functionality is missing, you can always dig up the necessary packages/libraries using Google and compile/install them later.

5. Back to installing Audacity. Open a terminal and go to the folder where you extracted the contents of Audacity’s tarball using the cd command. Check if README.txt contains additional install instructions. The file tells us to execute these commands:
   

   ./configure
   make
   sudo make install (if a command is preceded by ’sudo’, it’ll be executed as root)

   If you get an error message saying it couldn’t find a certain package/library on your system, just install the missing package or library using your package manager. Then re-execute ./configure. You might have to do this several times. If you get an error saying something like “configure: error: *** Ogg Vorbis libraries not found or they are too old. (>= 1.0-rc3 required). Run configure –without-vorbis to disable it.“, it is most likely that you couldn’t find one of the optional packages. If you wish, you can build Audacity without this functionality by following the instructions. In this particular case, you can do:

   ./configure –without-vorbis

   to compile Audacity without support for Ogg Vorbis.

6. Everything is now installed! And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: testing our newly installed app. Cross your fingers and execute the command audacity. To be honest, it didn’t work for me because I got this error:
   

   audacity: error while loading shared libraries: libwx_gtk2_xrc-2.6.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

   When it seems like all your hard work was useless, don’t panic. Use the Internet to find a solution instead. I’ve found a fix for my particular case:

   sudo ln /usr/local/lib/libwx* /lib/
   sudo ldconfig (in some cases ’sudo /sbin/ldconfig’)

   Try starting audacity again. Everything should work fine now.

7. You can create a shortcut to Audacity in your start menu using alacarte (GNOME) or by launching KDE’s menu editor (right-click the K button).

Uninstalling
If you’re done playing with Audacity, open a terminal, cd into audacity-1.3.2-beta and execute:

sudo make uninstall

You can also uninstall wxWidgets if you don’t need it anymore. Open a terminal, go to wxGTK-2.6.4 and enter:

cd buildgtk
sudo make uninstall

Be careful though. If you uninstall wxWidgets, programs that require wxWidgets will stop working.

Note
Some programs such as Firefox come in .tar.gz packages but don’t have to be compiled. You can just extract the file anywhere and start using the program immediately. You can check whether a program will have to be compiled or not by searching for the following files: configure, autogen.sh, Makefile and Jamfile. If you don’t find any of these files, it probably doesn’t need to be compiled. Just search for the program executable (in the case of Firefox: ‘firefox’) to run the program.

Summary
In general, this is how you compile applications:

1. Download and extract the application’s tarball.
2. Open the extracted folder and look for a readme/install file. If there are additional requirements, install or compile them. Make sure that you download the correct version of the package.
3. Check the readme/install file for compilation instructions.
• If it contains compilation instructions, open a terminal, cd to the extracted folder and follow the instructions.
• If it doesn’t contain compilation instructions, open a terminal, cd to the extracted folder and do ./configure followed by make and sudo make install.
• If you get an error saying ./configure couldn’t be found, try ./autogen.sh instead.
• If ./autogen.sh or ./configure (with or without parameters) terminates because of a “package/library not found”-type error, install the required stuff and re-execute the command.

Having trouble compiling? Don’t worry, just do some research online. If you can’t fix the problem by yourself, go to one of the big Linux communities and ask for help. Remember: some programs also can be uninstalled using the make command. To uninstall the compiled program, go to the extracted folder and do:

sudo make uninstall

If it returns the message “make: *** No rule to make target `uninstall’. Stop.“, this uninstall method won’t work. Some applications such as wxWidgets store their Makefile (which contains the instructions for the make command) in a separate directory. In that case, cd into that directory and rerun sudo make uninstall.

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Pieter De Decker who is the developer of the free USBsyncer and iPodCALsync!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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We know you’ve been dying to get your hands all over the HTC Snap… oh, wait. You haven’t? Well, neither have we — but no matter, ‘cos Smartphone Daily has a review, and they’ve filled us in on the luscious deets. For the uninitiated, this is a 2.4-inch, Windows Mobile 6.1, touchscreen deficient candybar, and something of a BlackBerry doppelganger (if only in the looks department), featuring WiFi and a camera. Wild, huh? Overall, the reviewer found it to be “decent” — if you’re looking for a “business device,” that is. The Inner Circle feature was singled out for some praise: little more than an Inbox filter for your, erm, “inner circle,” you have to wonder why a manufacturer hadn’t thought of it before. On the downside, he did find the inclusion of a TAB key (where the A key belongs) to be particularly annoying. This bad boy will go on sale this summer in Europe, at which time the S522 (as it’s known ’round here) should hit the shops Stateside. One more pic after the break.

[Via Slash Gear]

Continue reading HTC Snap reviewed: QWERTY keyboard, Winmo 6.1, no great shakes

Filed under: Cellphones

HTC Snap reviewed: QWERTY keyboard, Winmo 6.1, no great shakes originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 May 2009 14:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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