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As a device manufacturer, they know the power of Qt on portable applications and the future. It is not like the "Nokia wants to kill Qt!" too. They see the actual future where there is no such thing like "Mobile OS", "Mobile Java (J2ME)".

It won't surprise me if they become the first vendor to implement actual desktop Java to devices. I was expecting such revolutionary moves from Apple but you have seen what they did.

I was giving Webkit example for a simple reason. AOL spent millions to Mozilla primarily the Gecko rendering engine. What happened? They had to take comical decisions like using MSHTML rendering in their flagship products. Why? Gecko didn't deliver what they need.

Why did Apple (and recently Nokia) chosen KHTML? It is clear from beginning.

http://news.cnet.com/Apple-snub-stings-Mozilla/2100-1023_3-980492.html

""Not only were they the basis of an excellent, modern and standards-compliant Web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open-source projects.""

Yes, but the Nokia E70 got a bad review. Was that review written by an iPhone owner, or is it true that the sound quality is poor? There are some of us who actually use our cellular phones to make phone calls. *grin*

Just think that with only a fraction of that, they could power the entire country with solar. According to this, we only need 8,500 square miles of solar to power the states.

"Retail sales of Office products from January through June [2007] were roughly double those of Office 2003 during its first six months on the market and up 59.6 percent from Office sales for the first six months of [2006]" - Source

Not exactly the failure you describe.

• "When it comes to the number of problems that appear, Apple's record wasn't as stellar. The company was ranked last in the number of defects that cropped up in its notebooks between 2003 and 2007, although the margin of error in that survey meant that all the surveyed manufacturers essentially tied with defects found in between 20 percent and 23 percent of their notebooks."

I was more interested in CNET's Review of the machine than in the news story. What struck me was how critical the reviewer was of the various properties (poor video quality, poor title availability, lack of surround sound, and poor on-screen controls), and yet... it still scored a 7.7 /10 - why, because he's giddy about the concept? I think the rating is far too kind and does little to encourage NetFlix to push for improvements in this thing.

Actually the most compelling thing about this to me is that NetFlix has secured licensing rights to stream movies from various movie studios. Even if it's not all the most recent, hot titles, it seems like a great starting point towards a future of on-demand cooperation from movie studios. I also think NetFlix stands to potentially improve their margins by completely switching over to streaming service - of course some overhead is transferred to networking/hosting/storage/delivery infrastructure, but if they play their cards right, once established it should cost less to operate than a mail room and physical inventory process.

Here are some links to show this is not just me BTW:

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6035_102-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=260482&messageID=2563323

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/638297.html

Why not? After all their current, obtrusive, all-seeing camera system works so good at stopping major crimes, errr, I mean, illegal dog poop.

Specifically, the Lifebook P-1120 or similar. These run a transmeta processor (and so won't be the fastest kids on the block), but they come with wireless and are easily powerful enough to browse the web, run Doom, etc. I used one of these as my main computer for a couple years.

Review of the P-1120:

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/fujitsu-lifebook-p1120-crusoe/4505-3121_7-7589509.html

You can get them on Ebay for under $200:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Fujitsu-Lifebook-P1120-w%2F-Spare-Battery_W0QQitemZ110253486087QQcmdZViewItem?IMSfp=TL0805171070a18304

The machine was pretty durable in my experience--it survived a lot of rough handling in a college student's backpack.

Nice troll, but...

http://www.cnet.com/8301-13846_1-9920202-62.html

Think about it. That does include things like Solaris, AIX, etc but Windows represents the bulk of that number. Also remember many businesses buy windows twice for every install. Once for their volume site license, and one OEM install that is required to come with every computer sold by the major manufacturers. Dell doesn't sell a computer without an OS very often, and large corporate need to be sure of the licensing so they wipe and reinstall after paying for the OEM install of windows.

Pixmas use CLI-8 inks that run about $14.25 per color for refills, while the PGI-5BK black tank for text lists at $16.25. Based on the claim of 300 pages per cartridge, we estimate a cost of about 19 cents per page of graphics, 30 cents per 4x6 photo, and 5 cents per page of text. An optical monitoring system tracks usage and offers a warning before each tank runs dry. From http://reviews.cnet.com/inkjet-printers/canon-pixma-ip4200/4505-3156_7-31457715.html

The other fun thing is that extJS 2.0.2 isn't actually LGPLed - in fact, it isn't even open-source at all (or indeed free software). It's licensed under the LGPL with additional restrictions, such as not being allowed to use it "if you plan to distribute Ext in a product that will be packaged or sold as a software development library, toolkit or plug-in-based framework". Now, the LGPL explicitly forbids this kind of extra restriction, but I'm not sure what the end result is. As I see it, either the additional restrictions are null and void, or you can't legally copy or distribute the code at all.

Personally, I wouldn't touch any version of it with a bargepole - they seem to be totally ignorant about software licensing, and that sort of ignorance is dangerous.

It's obvious who's behind it. The most insightful comment on the earlier story went something like this: If Apple is so hell bent on protecting its IP and enforcing its license terms, then why are they selling off-the-shelf copies to anyone who plunks down the cash?

Apple sells disks of Leopard for the same reason Microsoft sells Windows disk, so people can upgrade the OS.

Psystar. PsyOps. Nothing but Jobs looking to drum up more support for sales and mindshare. Mindshare is probably more important for Apple lest they lose their niche cult status and drop out of sight completely.

Buzz, 2008 calling. Macs are gaining in market share, and have been for more than a year. In early 2007 it was 5% now it's 8% (TFA linked to is dated 3 January 2008). In June 2007 laptops or notebooks market share was 17.6 (TFA is dated 21 August 2007).

Psystar. PsyOps. Nothing but Jobs looking to drum up more support for sales and mindshare. Mindshare is probably more important for Apple lest they lose their niche cult status and drop out of sight completely.

There's no need for Apple to drum up sales as they are growing quite well without this.

We have at least one card carrying programmer congressman right now, Bill Foster, representing the 14th district of Illinois.

MySQL may simply be doing what Red Hat did before it: Keeping its core 100% open while offering new services (e.g., Red Hat Network) as commercial, add-on services. I don't think MySQL has done a good job of telling this story, but I do think that's the story (or should be). Many didn't like Red Hat's split between Fedora and RHEL, but ultimately it has arguably been good for both Fedora and RHEL. MySQL just needs to better define what it's doing.

http://reviews.cnet.com/web-mail/msn-hotmail/4864-9236_7-30980702.html?messageID=2512903

If you google "hotmail reliability" you get lots of hits complaining that hotmail lacks reliability. If Microsoft replaces Yahoo's technology, there will probably be massive breakage.

If I were a Yahoo shareholder and Microsoft offered me a substantial premium, I would take it. Yahoo hasn't gone up over the last two years, it has gone down. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=YHOO&t=2y At best it could be called stagnant in a volatile kind of way. The price was around twenty bucks and going down until sometime around February when it shot nearly to thirty. To my untrained eye, it looks like the only thing keeping Yahoo's stock price from tanking is the Microsoft offer.

"In the face of widespread, escalating online piracy,..."

Why is the same hokum being gussied up and trotted out yet again to cover up the fact that the major labels all, each and every swingin' dick one of them, missed the boat on the internet business model and now are scrambling to save their wrinkled white asses from a just deserved demise?

In general, any tri or quad band cellphone with any (even very slow) data access and a real, simulated (touchscreen), or bluetooth keyboard or keyboard like device should be able to be used to fill out the form on the spot and then transmit the form back to a central server. Then, at the end of the day, the census taker reviews the forms they submitted and verifies their accuracy and the forms go into the system. (This step is to prevent fraud by someone attempting to hack the cellphone side of things.)

The whole system is modular, and after specifying the the data interchange format between phone and server, could be bid out separately and cheaply. There's really no need to design a durable device capable of harsh use with data input capabilities, that function is already available in commodity devices!

The system could even track times and gps locations of the data as it was entered, for cross-referencing to verify map locations.

Now some technical details: all modern flat panel displays are progressive scan. 1080i is interlaced, so somewhere, some device needs to resample the interlaced field to make a progressive scan image. Your 1080 TV can do it, some cable boxes can, and there are a variety of de-interlacing chips (google de-interlace 1080), some of which make a mess of it.

HOWEVER: the broadcasters' answer to this problem is to shoot at 24 frames/sec, then upsample to 60 fields interlaced using 3:2 pulldown. Your TV also generally has "cadence detection." Cadence detection detects the 3:2 pulldown and then does easy de-interlacing by combining adjacent fields. The result is perfect de-interlacing, but 24 frames/sec instead of 30 or 60. Since all cinema is shot at 24 frames, this is not generally a problem for movies.

According to a six month old CNET page, the HD versions of these channels are 720p:

ABC, Fox, ESPN, and National Geographic

CBS, NBC, PBS, CW, A&E, Animal, Discovery, Food, Golf, HBO, HDNet, Home+Garden, History, MHD, Mojo, Movie Channel, NBA, NFL, NHL, Showtime, Starz, Science, TLC, TNT, Univeral, Versus

Of the 720p channels, I only watch NatGeo regularly, and it looks really good. But Discovery and HBO can look even better. To repeat myself, Planet Earth was the convincer.

Funny, because I recall Steve Jobs making it clear in September that Apple would fight attempts to unlock the iPhone. He didn't say anything about protecting the timid. I think it went more like this. "It's a cat and mouse game" and "It's our job to keep them from breaking in." I guess I missed his "Protect the timid" speech.

Yeaaaaah... I'm sure you're right SuperKendal. Steve was just feeling generous. I don't imagine that billion dollar class action lawsuit regarding the intentional bricking had anything to do with it.

Connect the dots. It's very likely that Linux was dropped from retail stores because it was successful, not because it was a failure. Wal-Mart was one of the few companies to go on the record in favor of Microsoft's patent pact with Novell. Wal-Mart never goes on the record for IT purchases. There's clearly a very chummy relationship between Wal-Mart and Microsoft at the most senior levels. I'd say it was news of Linux's success that prompted Microsoft to pressure Wal-Mart on this issue, not Linux's failure to sell.

The Cnet one linked to above has a guy trying SO HARD to do a 'TV presenter's voice'... And noooow, liiiive from Hollywood coooomes some dick doing a TERRIBLE video review.

Urgh, stick to text.

If shutting down access to blogs isn't enough to create resentment, the Air Force is "developing data mining technology meant to root out disaffected insiders based on their e-mail activity--or lack thereof." With "Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing" a graph is constructed of social network interactions from an organization's e-mail traffic "If a worker suddenly stops socializing online, abruptly shifts alliances within the organization, or starts developing an unhealthy interest in "sensitive topics," the system detects it and alerts investigators."

The Garmin Nuvi Phone should be available in a few months:
    Here's a Review
    Garmin's Site

I'd like to get one a these, although I don't travel as much.

I have one of these and it's brilliant once you've loaded your chosen playlist. Adding/deleting individual songs is not so painful, but en masse, it is very horrible. Other than that, the noise cancelling works great and it's really cool how charging for 3-5 minutes gives you 3-5 hours of play at normal volume. Charge it for an hour and you've got 50 hours :)

I bought it off woot.com for $50 which was a great value.

http://reviews.cnet.com/mp3-players/sony-nw-s705f-noise/4505-6490_7-32111531.html

Cheers!
--
Vig

I am in sales but don't sell electronics, I'll leave you to your assumptions on that one.

So why would you lead us to believe otherwise:

So you basically have a complete lack of understanding of the sales process is what you're saying. It's ok, I hear this propagandist nonsense from customers of mine even as I'm trying to point them towards the product that fits their needs and budget rather than the more expensive product that makes no sense for their personal situation.

The reason I separated individual points of your posting was to point out how each of your assumptions was flawed.

It's easy to find flaws when you only post half of the thought. Though, you probably should have googled my points before assuming they were.

Each of your responses are also baseless, unsubstantiated nonsense. Where is your cite for your magical 40-50% acceptance rate for HD capable tuners, and even if the rate is 50% how does that become classified as "early adopter phase"?

You're right. I really wish I researched that number a little better. I forget where I heard/read it, but I was so wrong. Hopefully this month, with sales from the holidays, they'll break 20%. I don't know how they keep the shelves stocked.

The "down scaling" from 1080i to 720p was your reference, not mine, I was telling you it's not done and you responded that it's not done. What are you arguing? My television is 1080i as are virtually all HD units available at all major electronic retailers today and they do, in fact, display 1080i picture. You claimed these sets somehow "down scale" the image to 720p. I'm still waiting for clarification on that.

And it is a perfectly legitimate reference, though, may to not confuse you, I should have said down scalling 1920x1080 to 1366x768(I know, it's a hair better then 720p). 1080i draws a screen that is 1920x1080, albiet in 2 passes, but still requires 1920x1080 pixels to display all data. Call me crazy, but I'm not sure how we're going to jam those pixels into a fixed pixel 1366x768 device that is 1080i capable.
Google native resolution. Here is the second link from a wonderful FUDsite, since many have issues with the accuracy of the first link at Wikipedia.

Fixed-pixel displays follow a few basic rules:
No matter the resolution of the source material, whether VHS, DVD, or HDTV, a fixed-pixel display will always convert, or scale, it to fit its native resolution.
If the incoming source has more pixels than the display's native resolution, you will lose some visible detail and sharpness, though often what you're left with still looks great.
If the incoming source has fewer pixels than the native resolution, you're not getting any extra sharpness from the television's pixels.

While you could have a CRT that is 1800x1600, overdrive it and display the details, albiet it will have the details but may not be as sharp as a 1920x1080 native device. No matter how hard you try, you can't overdrive an LCD or Plasma. There are 1080i TVs capable of displaying a 1920x1080 picture, but considering the circuitry required to improve the bandwidth isn't nearly as pricey as the pixels, chances are, if it is an LCD or plasma that is 1080i capable, it will have a native resolution of 1366x768. The extra pixels above 720p are for overscan.

So if you loose detail, and when a DVD is upscaled, is the difference going to be that noticable? I have a co-worker who can see it, but says, for the price, it isn't worth it. I can see a huge difference, but I am sitting 8ft away from a 110" 1080p screen and have better then 20/20 vision, so I'm not a good candidate for an

Sony has a long history of behaving badly.

No, the truth of the matter is that Linux was originally developed because some kid in Finland wanted a better Unix clone on the 386 than Minix could provide. The "counter-culture" happened because he wasn't alone in that desire and so people joined in on Linux. Linux quickly gained popularity because at the time BSD was embroiled in a legal battle with AT&T and the FSF/GNU were completely unable to get their Hurd kernel out the door.

No one person in the open source community speaks for the entire community - most everyone speaks for themselves. There are a few people who can speak for individual projects (such as Linus and the Kernel) but no one can speak on behalf of everything. A few people have claimed that they speak for everyone, but they're just being deluded (and I say this on behalf of everyone in the open source community :-).

are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ? are you sure ?

Everyone seems to think that it will either be the best of times, or it will be the worst of times ... why can't it just be a different time?

Worst Of Times: http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1962
Best Of Times: http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9862772-16.html

Wow! Nice informative links, and well thought out arguments. I guess my real world experiences of not being able to play a turn based game without choppy and distorted graphics on a Toshiba P205-S6337 are completely imaginary.

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7813_102-0.html?forumID=133&threadID=237419&messageID=2424465

http://www.computing.net/gaming/wwwboard/forum/8832.html

http://forums.filefront.com/company-heroes-general-discussion/301188-why-game-slow-my-comp.html

Oh what the hell, just google games are slow on vista and see the 10+ pages of returns.

My current speed using Cnet's Test http://reviews.cnet.com/7004-7254_7-0.html: 2355.7 Kbps, though a couple of days ago, it was at 4.2Mbps. So, yes, generally, FIOS is faster than cable, if you define cable as T1 and bellow. I've been able to download multi-gigabyte files (mostly some OSS games/apps for my new pc)in half an hour. NOTE: This is FIOS routed through a wireless router not running in 'g' mode.

...pump'n'dump, but someone's bound to have gotten there before me. How much do you bet this whole thing was planned from the start?

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13526_1-9859255-27.html

There's someone pimping the stock in the comments there. Oddly enough, the site he links to is an analyst firm with a front page consisting entirely of... Qtrax pimpage http://www.positionmakers.com/

Mmm, smell the astroturf.

I don't know why you bother with Windows Vista SP1. Windows XP didn't work fairly well until SP2. Why not let the early adopters have the grief?

Sure, that's only my opinion, but I'm not the only one who thinks that way. For example, see Why all Vista users should upgrade to Windows XP.

A good indication of how Microsoft treats its customers is the fact that it has been more than 3 years since SP2 was released on 8/10/2004. Here is a quote from Paul Thurrott, who is over-the-top pro-Microsoft, and who often apologizes for Microsoft's abusiveness in a way that tries to make abusive behavior sound less destructive: ... the 100+ updates that Microsoft has shipped since SP2 can be a nightmare to deploy.

For those who use Linux, I will explain: Windows often becomes infected with malware. It sometimes becomes unstable on its own, too; Microsoft releases sloppy, unfinished software. So, it is often necessary to re-load Windows XP SP2. Once you have done that, it is at present necessary to re-load perhaps 100 Megabytes of bug fixes that have been released since SP2. That's why delaying Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has been so damaging to customers; customers have paid millions of dollars extra because of the tedious time-consuming task of loading the 100+ updates since SP2, one at a time.

Microsoft shut down Autopatcher, which was created by volunteers. Autopatcher was a method of making installing the patches semi-automatic. I think that shows the true situation: Volunteers have to do needed work. Microsoft, which could have delivered updates using the same method, avoided making it easier and cheaper to use Windows XP.

Why buy a new product from someone who has frequently abused you in the past?

This is the overall issue, in my opinion: Microsoft somehow established, during the DOS days, that it could charge the full product price for what are actually quite minor updates. (Many people are still using Windows 2000.) So the company makes a huge amount of money each time it brings out what is actually a new version of Windows 2000 with a new name. But things have changed. Users tend to be more technically knowledgeable now. They see no reason to change if what they have now is adequate, if somewhat annoying and expensive to maintain.

Windows 98 was an abuser's dream: It had an unstable file system, insuring that everyone would want to upgrade. Abusive company managers try to delay delivering a stable system, since most people don't want anything more from an operating system than stability.

It took Microsoft 3 years to make Windows XP stable and usable with less pain -- there were 3 years from the first release of XP until SP2 was released. Three years of pain, and since then only three years of relative stability? Is that acceptable, 50% pain? Why start the pain again, with Vista?

Microsoft needs the computer builders to advertise its new update of Windows 2000, called Windows Vista. Computer builders want to sell new computers. That's why Vista uses more resources. Vista is partly an attempt to make the present hardware obsolete.

However, people are beginning to understand better, and they are more difficult to manipulate now.

It seems sensible to me to wait to use Windows Vista until Vista SP2 or SP3 is released, and then a few months after that, to learn if the service pack works well.

Quote from Slashdot's story: "Microsoft also issued a new build of Windows XP SP3 this week, but it's getting next to no publicity out of Redmond..." Maybe so, but I can't find it. I found only an 12/10/2007 SP3, a release candidate, which is supposed to be an advanced beta version.

Ask, and ye shall receive:

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13509_1-9850999-20.html

The Sarbanes-Oxley connection is in having to re-state their past financial results if they give away the upgrade for products that aren't accounted for on a subscription basis.

p

Link to article: http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9853461-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9853693-16.html

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9853461-16.html?tag=nefd.only/

Article

http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9853461-16.html

They can sound better if you have a good turntable with a good cartridge, a good preamp and amp, and good speakers that are capable of resolving the differences between digital and analog audio.

The ones I laugh at are the ones who get a USB turntable because they don't like digital sound and want the analog experiance.

They get better sound simply because most vinyl isn't in the loudness war to kill the dynamic range. A CD with about 96 DB of dynamic range should sould better than the about 65 DB dynamic range of a turntable. Unfortunately the advantage of the CD format is often engineered out to sound louder.

The irony is a USB analog turntable outputs a digital signal on the USB cable. Often the sample rate is the same as a CD. Even more often they are sold to the clueless without even listing the sample rate or bits. Quick, can you tell me if this is an 8 bit, 16 bit, 24 bit, sample size at 16K, 44.1, 48, 96, 128 Ksamples/sec?
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/mp3/90a0/
They advertise it on a geek website without posting the important specs.. Guys, what's the wow & flutter and rumble levels?

For me, I'm sticking to my 1980's moving coil linear track turntable with a good reciever plugged into a quality mixer (to set levels) which is then fed into a pro USB a/d converter. I capture at 96KHZ 24bit and downconvert to CD quality to burn CD's. It works for me.

Here is another USB turntable with no specs listed.
http://www.amazon.com/Ion-iTTUSB-Turntable-USB-Record/dp/B000BUEMOO
and another;
http://www.amazon.com/Numark-TTUSB-Turntable-with-USB/dp/B000G3FNVM

Here is one that is reviewed and the A/D stats are known..
The sound quality was as good as can be expected from old, scratchy records. The built-in audio card records 16-bit at 44.1khz
http://reviews.cnet.com/turntables/stanton-t-90-usb/4505-7860_7-32417457.html
Wow, no better than CD quality...

Some of these turntables get poor marks for their conversion to digital quality.
"The TTUSB10 as a Turntable
After my disappointing experience with the TTUSB10 USB turntable's recorded sound quality, I plugged it into the phono input in my stereo, hoping for some sweeter sounds. This time around, the TTUSB10 did not let me down: smooth, rich audio came through the speakers and my test headphones without a trace of the harsh digital noise that plagued my test recordings. It would be a bit of a waste of money just to buy it as a standard turntable, but if nothing else, the TTUSB10 makes for an excellent unit for playing your vinyl music collection on your stereo system."
  http://www.everythingusb.com/ion_ttusb10_usb_turntable_13231.html

There's a deeper flaw, not to mention one which he'll very likely encounter in the case that he ever run into the situation from a legal standpoint. Quoting his blog:

And yes, if someone did commit a crime using my network the police might visit, but what better defense is there than the fact that I have an open wireless network? If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence.

Plausible deniability DOES NOT WORK IN COURT. Try the recent arrest of a German Tor server operator. That "I don't keep logs!" sure helped his case; he still was apprehended and taken down to the station, despite the police later letting him go. This will very likely keep happening over and over and over until finally the operator says "Is this really worth it? I spend 2 days a week at the police station, it's impacting my day job, tainting my resume, etc."

Another example is open relays and spammers. Back in 2002, Verio (ISP) shut off John Gilmore's internet access because he was *knowingly* running an open relay. Feigning innocence didn't help his defence any; and although I do respect what Gilmore was doing (in the sense that the Internet at one point had no concept of open/closed relay, because spam wasn't a problem) and I understand his logic, he still has to be held liable for what packets go out of his network.

The exact same logic applies here. Therefore, the instant someone does use Schneire's 802.11 network for deviant purposes and the cops show up, he *will* be going down to the station, he *will* need a lawyer, and he ABSOLUTELY will be held responsible for what goes out from his network. And although I hate 802.11's retarded security-through-absolute-annoyance implementation (WEP64, WEP128, WPA, WPA2, WUtterFuckingShitPack), and would much rather run an open wireless network myself *solely for the CONVENIENCE*, I can't -- and won't.